Then with quaint music hymn the parting gleam By lonely Otter’s sleep-persuading stream. Or where his wave with loud unquiet song Dashed o’er the rocky channel froths along, Or where his silver waters smoothed to rest The tall tree’s shadow sleeps upon his breast. The last two lines describe with exquisite felicity the peaceful passages between the “stickles” of the bickering river. In the year 1789, he cut his initials, “S. T. C.,” on the rock just outside Pixie’s Parlour, a small cavern in the sandstone on the left bank half a mile down stream. Always keenly sensible to music, the cadence of the old church bells rang in his ears in later life when far away from home, for he sings:— Of my sweet birthplace, and the old Church Tower Whose bells, the poor man’s only music, rang From morn to evening, all the hot fair day. He spoke of them to Charles Lamb, his schoolfellow; for though Charles Lamb never came to Ottery St. Mary and never heard the bells, he makes his characters allude to them thus:— _Marg._: Hark the bells, John! _John_: Those are the Church bells of St. Mary Ottery— St. Mary Ottery, my native village, In the sweet shire of Devon, Those are the bells. A. W. Kinglake, the author of _Eothen_ and the _History of the Crimean War_, was educated here at Rock House, now Sandrock, under the Rev. Edward Coleridge, who kept a successful private school. In the year 1849, Thackeray published the novel _Pendennis_. He lived as a youth at Larkbeare House, and the scene of many of his incidents is laid in the neighbourhood. We read of the little river running off noisily westward, of the fair background of sunshiny hills that stretch towards the sea, of the pattens clacking through the empty streets, of the schoolboys making a good, cheerful noise, scuffling with their feet as they march into church and up the organ-loft stair, and blowing their noses a good deal during the sermon; of the factory, of the single pair of old posters that earned their scanty livelihood by transporting the gentry round to the county dinners; of the hollow tree in Escot Park (then a noble house built by Inigo Jones, since burnt down, and now replaced by a modern building, the seat of the Right Hon. Sir J. H. Kennaway), in which the young lovers deposited their letters; and above all of the great grey towers rising up in purple splendour, of which the sun illuminates the delicate carving, deepening the shadows of the huge buttresses and gilding the glittering windows.