There are great numbers of amiable, but characterless, people, who have so little individuality or so much exaggerated loyalty for Royal personages and reverent respect for the aristocracy, that the well-advertised fact of those bright and shining ones having visited this resort, that, and the other is sufficient to make the fortune of those places. Many years ago, the then Prince of Wales made holiday at Ilfracombe, and the local guide-books have never allowed visitors to forget the fact, even although it was when he was a boy. He went out riding a pony known afterwards to fame as “Bobby.” Alas! poor Bobby. As the guide-books have cleverly discovered, even “the fact of having carried a Royal personage did not render Bobby immortal, and his death deprived Ilfracombe of an attraction to its visitors, and a large income to its owner.” It was a sorry thing for Bobby that ever he carried a Prince of Wales, for, ever afterwards, he was condemned to the drudgery of long, long days carrying the children of the lower middle (and super-loyal) classes. To seat little Frankie or little Cissie upon that sanctified pony was, in some vague way, to come into touch with the Royal family; to give him a carrot was equivalent to (but less expensive than) presenting a purse to a Princess at a charity meeting. Bobby was transfigured, like the objects sung by the satirist: “A clod--a piece of orange-peel-- An end of a cigar-- Once trod on by a princely heel, How beautiful they are!” But the poor animal’s glory was hardly earned. Loyalty, expressed in terms of an unending burden of children, at last wore him out, and he died. For a loving list of the great who have visited the town, you must please to look in those guide-books for yourselves, but we learn that “no year passes without some distinguished personage treading the ground of beautiful Ilfracombe, and giving another start to a new chapter of the town’s progress as a fashionable resort.” That remains true; I, myself, was there last year. The old parish church has of late been little altered. It stands high at the west end of the principal street, midway between the deeps of the harbour and the alpine heights on which the railway terminus is placed, and its approach is by a steep flight of stone stairs. There is something of almost every architectural period in Ilfracombe church, but the workmanship was ever of so homely a character that the styles all blend into one rude mass. The tower ascends in a singular diminishing fashion. In the large and crowded churchyard you notice most distinctly, as you are indeed intended to do, a stone recording no fewer than nine centenarians who lived and died at Ilfracombe between 1784 and 1897. This by way of advertisement of the astonishing salubrity of the place; but an inhabitant of Brighton chancing this way would be amused. At Brighton there are generally to be found half a dozen hale and hearty centenarians.