Dover offered more opportunities for the artist in those far-away days when Hollar made his view of it from near the castle heights. At that time the river Dour flowed visibly into the sea, through a valley so sparsely settled that the ancient church of St. Mary, now almost hidden amid the clustered houses of the thronged town, stood out with a cathedral-like prominence. Hollar shows us the ships clustered at the river mouth, but at an earlier time they ascended far up the valley and anchored where the busiest streets are now found. Leland, somewhat earlier than Hollar, speaking of the Dour and the ancient inland haven, says, “The ground which lyeth up betwixt the hilles is yet, in digging, found wosye”--by which he meant “oozy”; and in modern times there have been discovered, in the course of excavations, relics of Roman occupation, when the inhabitants of the Dour Valley crossed the river and the marshes by boats and wooden causeways. [Illustration: DOVER CASTLE. _After W. Daniell, R.A._ ] No one who has not viewed Dover from the sea can have a full appreciation of the majesty of its site. But you must not merely glimpse it from the pier-heads or from a boat. Nothing less than the home-coming from continental travel, when the sentiment of “home” gives an added value to the impressive scene, will serve. The “white cliffs of Albion” have rightly been the subject of comment and description from the earliest times, for there is nothing in the rest of the whole wide world in the least resembling them. Except for a little of the same chalk formation on the other side of the Channel, at this narrow pass, we in England have a world-monopoly of chalk, and a brave show of bastioned chalky heights the Kentish coast makes. Nowhere else are they so stately as at Dover, for here military art has crowned and set a seal upon the defensible works of nature. But to see those white walls at their best, in whiteness and in rugged grandeur, you must see them from the Channel. Coming across from France, they do indeed gleam milk-white, and the Castle and the Roman pharos beside it seem to be neighbours almost with the clouds. But, examined close at hand, the cliffs of Dover have been plentifully smirched, and I think, from personal observation, that the chalk cliffs of the South Coast are actually at their natural whitest at Seaford, in Sussex. [Illustration: COLTON’S TOWER, DOVER CASTLE.]