We had landed, and laughed, and scrambled, eaten and drunk, seen all the sights of Lundy, and heard all the traditions. Are they not written in Mr. Bamfield’s Ilfracombe Guide? Why has not some one already written a fire-and-brimstone romance about them? ‘Moresco Castle; or, the Pirate Knight of the Atlantic Wave.’ What a title! Or again—‘The Seal Fiend; or, the Nemesis of the Scuttled West Indiaman.’—If I had paper and lubricité enough, and that delightful carelessness of any moral or purpose, except that of fine writing and money-making, which possesses some modern scribblers—I could tales unfold—But neither pirate legends, nor tales of cheated insurance offices, nor wrecks and murders, will make us understand Lundy—what it is ‘considered in its idea,’ as the new argot is. It may be defined as a lighthouse-bearing island. The whole three miles of granite table-land, seals, sea-birds, and human beings, are mere accidents and appendages—the pedestal and the ornaments of that great white tower in the centre, whose sleepless fiery eye blinks all night long over the night-mists of the Atlantic. If, as a wise man has said, the days will come when our degenerate posterity will fall down and worship rusty locomotives and fossil electric-telegraphs, the relics of their ancestors’ science, grown to them mythic and impossible, as the Easter-islanders bow before the colossal statues left by a nobler and extinct race, then surely there will be pilgrimages to Lundy, and prayers to that white granite tower, with its unglazed lantern and rusting machinery, to light itself up again, and help poor human beings! Really, my dear brothers, I am not in jest: you seem but too likely now-a-days to arrive at some such catastrophe—sentimental philosophy for the ‘enlightened’ few, and fetish-worship (of which nominally Christian forms are as possible as heathen ones) for the masses.—At that you may only too probably arrive—unless you repent, and ‘get back your souls.’ * * * * * We had shot along the cliffs a red-legged chough or two, and one of the real black English rat, exterminated on the mainland by the grey Hanoverian newcomer; and weary with sight-seeing and scrambling, we sat down to meditate on a slab of granite, which hung three hundred feet in air above the western main. ‘This is even more strange and new to me,’ said Claude, at length, ‘than anything I have yet seen in this lovely West. I now appreciate Ruskin’s advice to oil-painters to go and study the coasts of Devon and Cornwall, instead of lingering about the muddy seas and tame cliffs of the Channel and the German Ocean.’