But the glory of our abbey had scarcely reached its height, before it faded suddenly and for ever. Anticipating the blow which shattered the larger monasteries in the spring of 1539, our abbot, John Peryn, not emulous of the fate of the abbots of Glastonbury, Woburn, and Fountains, assembled his twenty monks in the Chapter-house on March 20th, and then and there resigned all their claims into the hands of the King. For this ready surrender they were rewarded with their lives and various pensions. With his pension of £100 a year, the abbot withdrew to Stonepost, in West Street, and was probably the “Sir John Peryn” who, in 1543, was paid £6 as “Jesus’ Priest.” When William Browne was a lad, middle-aged men must have known the last Abbot of Tavistock; and old people could recall—the poorer sort with regretful sighs, the good old times, when the frequent services still sounded from the Abbey Church, and the monks distributed alms at the arched gateway, beneath the present library. Even Browne himself, a child of the Renaissance, who hated superstition and loved the Pagan mythology, could grudge the misuse of sacred buildings; and amongst other evils done by the Tavy in flood, he tells us how the stream— Here, as our wicked age doth sacriledge, Helpes downe an Abbey. But though he was fond of Chaucer and our older poets, and though he felt the influence of the stately ruins that surrounded his school-house, he loved nature more than art, and was too full of present life to care very much for the past. As a boy with boys, he would spend his holidays breaking away from An Orchard, whence by stealth he takes A churlish Farmer’s Plums, sweet Peares or Grapes; chasing the “nimble Squirrel” in “Blanchdown Woods”; or, with his rod, following his “native Tavy” in her “many mazes, intricate meanders.” But as thought came with years, he would be stealing away alone to cherish his “Spring of Poesie” with Sidney’s _Sonnets_ or Spenser’s _Faërie Queen_, as he wandered over the “Dazied Downes” that “sweetly environed” his home, or nestled beneath some shade in “Sweet Ina’s Combe,” half lulled to sleep by the Walla’s murmurings, or rousing himself to compose “the pleasing cadence of a line” in tune with those gentle murmurings. Nor, indeed, had all the honour of Tavistock departed with the overthrow of her abbey. The Russells, who succeeded to the property, did not neglect the duties connected with it. They began—as they have continued—to maintain the religious and educational endowments. They supplied the borough with statesmen for Members of Parliament, in the generous patriot, Lord William Russell, in Lord John, the leader of Reform, and in the thoughtful, far-sighted Lord Arthur. They improved the town with wide streets and public buildings, and, more recently, with a fine statue, the first in the country, of Francis Drake.