The situation of Dartmouth is eminently characteristic of the seaport towns of South Devon and Cornwall. It lies, like so many of them, at the mouth of a little river, which, running almost due south for an inconsiderable number of miles, widens at last into an estuary that gives on the sea through a narrow opening between tall cliffs. On the inner side of this strait and dangerous gut, the storm-tossed mariner, wearied of Channel waves, rides in a deep, land-locked harbour, at peace, and on the shores of this harbour there springs up a town to supply the wants of them that go down to the sea in ships. From Exmouth in the east to Falmouth in the west, the same conditions are seen. Sometimes the town stands on the western side of the estuary, sometimes on the eastern shore; but almost every one of them has in time developed its suburb over the water. Exmouth has its Starcross, Teignmouth its Shaldon. Opposite Dartmouth, on the eastern side of Dartmouth harbour, stands Kingswear, and over against Salcombe is Portlemouth. Torpoint, that stands on the western shore of the Hamoaze, is an essentially modern excrescence from Devonport. East and West Looe seem to be coeval one with the other--those jealous towns of Looe River; but Polruan is the dependency of Fowey, even as Flushing is of Falmouth. Dartmouth can hold its own among the best of these havens, even as Dartmouth town is easily first in picturesque beauty and hoary survivals of early seafaring days. I think a waft of more spacious times has come down to us, and lingers yet about the steep streets and strange stairways, the broad eaves and bowed and bent frontages of Dartmouth--an air in essence salty, and ringing with the strange oaths and stranger tales of the doughty hearts who adventured hence to unknown or unfrequented seas, or went forth to do battle with the Spaniard. Hence sailed crusaders, and Dartmouth came a splendid third to Fowey and Yarmouth in 1342, when the port sent as many as thirty-one sail for the investment of Calais. Followed then descents of the French upon these coasts, succeeded in turn by ravagements on the seaboard of France at the hands of Dartmouth and Plymouth men, when two score French ships were destroyed. Then came in 1404 the French admiral, Du Chastel, who landed at Blackpool Valley, three miles to the westward, with the object of taking Dartmouth from an unsuspected quarter. But this project failed of accomplishment; the storm-beaten tower of Stoke Fleming church looked down that day upon the secluded valley where, upon the sands of that curving shore, by the tree-grown banks of a rivulet that loses itself in diminutive swamps, the clang of battle echoed all day from the hillsides, and Dartmouth men gave so good an account of themselves that four hundred Frenchmen dead, and two hundred prisoners, with Du Chastel himself, completed the tale of that day’s doings.