The history of the town from that time onward, however, has been uneventful save for the visits of Royal personages of various nationalities (including the late Queen Victoria, who was at Torquay on several occasions during her long reign) and the usual events of a local character which go to make up the life of a fashionable seaside health and holiday resort. But in 1870 an event occurred which was to have a great and lasting influence upon the development of the town. In that year the harbour, which had been constructed by Sir Lawrence Palk, afterwards raised to the peerage as Lord Haldon, was opened, and this marked the beginning of Torquay’s rise as one of the favourite and most important yachting stations in the West Country. The cost of the harbour works was upwards of £70,000, and seventeen years later they were acquired by the local authorities, who have spent at various times a further sum of £100,000 upon them, and nowadays the harbour ranks as one of the best artificial havens of the south coast. Few seaside towns of the size of Torquay we imagine have been the temporary home of so many poets, or have been so “sung” of in what formerly was called “tuneful numbers.” One of the earliest to describe the town’s beauties in verse was probably the once well-known Dr Booker, who in the year of Waterloo published a poetic effusion entitled _Torquay_, which was of a flattering prophetic nature, if somewhat commonplace in expression. He was succeeded by the Rev. Joseph Reeve; Edmund Carrington, the author of a rhymed account of the small talk and scandal of the town in the early forties, which (probably because of the latter feature) had a marked success; Matthew Bridges, whose poetic work was of a considerably higher order than that we have already named; John A. Blackie, whose work gained the commendation of some distinguished critics; and of later poets mention must be made of F. B. Doveton, who has written many verses of local significance. Torquay has especial interest for admirers of Charles Kingsley, as it was here that he came in 1855 to live in a cottage at Livermead, overlooking the Bay. As the author of _Yeast_ and _Alton Locke_, he appears to have become anathema to the orthodox inhabitants of the then rising watering place, an attitude which was fostered and encouraged by the then Bishop of Exeter, who seems to have regarded Kingsley as a particularly dangerous and outrageous heretic. The local clergy followed the Bishop’s lead, with the result that not only were all the churches of the neighbourhood closed to Kingsley so far as his preaching or officiating in them was concerned, but he was completely boycotted. His biographer states that it was the magnificent view of Torbay which was spread out before him from his cottage windows that led him to meditate upon the historic scenes which had been enacted on the face of those ever-changing waters, and ultimately gave him the germ idea for his famous romance _Westward Ho!_