Of the many other famous poets and authors who have been dwellers in the beautiful town may be mentioned Tennyson, who came in 1840; Lord Lytton, who took a villa on the hillside above Rock Walk in 1856, and spent every winter in it till his death in 1873; Elizabeth Barrett Browning, who before her marriage lived several years in the town; James Anthony Froude; Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield, who came here to visit an old widow lady (who eventually left him her fortune) many times in the fifties and early sixties; Robert Louis Stevenson; Henry James; John Ruskin, and many others. It is with real regret that most yachtsmen leave Torquay and the beautiful bay which lies between Hope’s Nose to the north and Berry Head to the south. A bay whose magnificent anchorage would have merited, one would think, the founding upon its shores of a city like Plymouth or Portsmouth, given over to naval construction and service of the State. But strangely enough, with the exception of the holiday resorts of Torquay and quaint Paignton, and the little fishing port of Brixham, it embraces no large town or port. This circumstance must be a matter for wonderment, as one either gazes out over the beautiful expanse of water from the heights of Warberry Hill, or crosses it when bound further westward. The reason, however, is not far to seek, when one considers the former conditions of life and property upon the coast. The ports, which far back in the centuries had sprung into gradual existence, had now to serve more than the purpose of affording a safe anchorage in “dirty” weather. Those were the days of that predatory naval warfare, which proved so great a scourge to commerce in the Channel, when the sister counties of Devon and Cornwall, and even that of Dorset to a less degree, were ever at issue with the Breton sea rovers. It was, therefore, essential that a great port should form a defence against the attacks of men as well as a protection from the elements. Thus it happened that whilst Falmouth, Dartmouth, Fowey, and Plymouth grew into flourishing shipping centres, Torbay (in which a fleet of battleships could ride secure in most winds), with its widely opened mouth, did not offer the double security that the troublous times demanded. Hither, in the early centuries of the Christian era, came, doubtless, Roman and Danish galleys, devastating the coast; and in later times the daring pirates and privateers out of St Malo, Morlaix, Brest, and other French ports, “who lay in wait like sea spiders under the safe anchorage of Berry head, for merchantmen bound up Channel, or making for Dartmouth.”