It is worth remarking in this place that for all the boy's undoubted precocity, the beauty of the scenes in which the first decade of his life was set seem to have left little or no impression. Had Coleridge been a lover of the country for its own sake, he must have been at least as deeply impressed by the all-pervading charm of Ottery St. Mary as his friend Wordsworth was by Hawkshead. For Ottery has beauty and history in plenty with which to reward the visitor or resident; its romance travels far away into the first twilight of legendry. In later years, of which the historical record is safe, the Manor of Ottery was granted by King Edward the Confessor to the Cathedral Church of Rouen. The poet might have seen as a child the royal arms of England and France on the stone scutcheons above the church altar, with the armorial bearings of several distinguished Devon families to bear them company. In the reign of Edward III, the head of one of these families, John de Grandisson, Bishop of Exeter, bought the manor and advowson of Ottery and established there the college of Monks. This was dissolved by Henry VIII, who made the college over to a corporation of four governors, and established the "King's New Grammar School," a building whose irregular roof is still a feature of the landscape. Here the Rev. John Coleridge was master and his son pupil. At Hayes Farm, close by, Sir Walter Raleigh was born; the family pew is to be seen in the parish church of East Budleigh. When Coleridge was a young man, the house of Raleigh in Ottery St. Mary was still standing; it was burnt down in the year of Trafalgar. He does not mention it, he does not even tell us of the wonderful orchards in the valley of the Otter, perhaps the most outstanding feature of the country in which his earliest years were passed. They say that these orchards are the more remarkable because mistletoe will not grow round the trees, the Druids having laid all Devonshire under a ban! The Valley of the Otter is a district no country lover could forget. The river, swift, though narrow, runs sparkling over many-coloured soil--Coleridge recalls this single feature in his Sonnet on the Otter. It separates the chalk flint and red marls of Ottery East Hill from the heather-clad black earth of West Hill, and makes a clean division between the plant growths on one side of its banks and those on the other. The high peaks of Dartmoor can be seen from either hill. In the valleys, while summer lasts, the red Devon kine stand amid luxuriant grasses which rise to their dewlaps. We are told that the transceptal towers of St. Mary's Church at Ottery inspired Bishop Quivil when he planned Exeter Cathedral. St. Mary's dominates the little town and adds to the perennial air of peace and seclusion that breathes over it. Coleridge might have made Ottery St. Mary immortal, but he did little more than write his well-remembered sonnet and a short ode inspired by the