The ball one night, the play the next, with private parties numerous; Prove Barnstaple people’s endless efforts, sir, to humour us; And endless, too, would be my song if I should now declare All the gaieties, and rarities, of Barnstaple Fair. Then loudly sing, God save the King, and long may Barum thrive, O! May we all live to see the Fair, and then be all alive, O! TIVERTON AS A POCKET BOROUGH. BY THE EDITOR. Towards the close of the year 1903 the Earl of Harrowby generously presented to the Mayor and Corporation of Tiverton a very complete collection of manuscripts carefully preserved by his ancestors and relating to the Parliamentary connection between themselves and the old Corporation of Tiverton, swept away by the municipal Reform Act of 1834–5. The general nature of the tie has long been known. It was a political nexus binding privileged burgesses to an influential family, and the sanction was interest. The motto might have been, on both sides, _do ut des_, for, while there were many professions of personal attachment, which may have been real, it was well understood that the cornerstone of the whole edifice was mutual advantage. As the connection, venal in origin, crystallized into permanence and respectability, it lost something of its sordid character. Sentiments of honour and loyalty, and even chivalric devotion, were spoken and cultivated, but these were the accidents, the trimmings. The substance remained what it had always been—reciprocal profit. All this was vaguely familiar to the present generation of townspeople, to whom traditions of the _ancien régime_ had descended from their forefathers, but the arrival of twenty-six stout files, crowded with an infinite variety of curious particulars, has made an evident change in the situation. We no longer behold through the dark windows of distorted memory. Now at last we see face to face; and for the authors of some of those “human documents” the Day of Doom would have already dawned, but for the screen of their own insignificance, which incriminating papers may remove, but the discretion of the censor at once re-erects. [Illustration _From a Lithograph_] [_by W. Spreat, Jun._ ST. PETER’S CHURCH, TIVERTON. ]