To those times of unparalleled prosperity, which continued until well into the third quarter of the eighteenth century, belong many of those existing architectural remains of old Barnstaple that are becoming increasingly difficult to find in the rebuildings and other changes of our own times. Out of the abundance of his riches old Penrose in 1627 founded the almshouses that still remain very much as he left them; and in that era the quays and Castle Street were occupied, not only with the warehouses, but the residences also, of the merchants who traded with distant countries or levied private war upon the foreigner, with equal readiness. A complete change has, indeed, come upon that quarter, for the Barnstaple Town railway station, a brewery, and some entirely modern houses stand upon the spot where the merchants did not disdain to live over their counting-houses, looking upon the river, where the weather-beaten vessels, at last come home from alien seas, were warped to shore. Of that old time there is a very fine old doorway left in Castle Street; and in Cross Street, near by, over a tailor’s shop, there is the first-floor front room of a late sixteenth-century house with a most elaborate Renaissance plaster ceiling and frieze, probably executed for some enriched merchant, fully conscious of what was due, in the way of display, to his wealth. The design is curious, the workmanship rough, the feeling of it imbued with a religious cast; characteristics, all of them, common to much work of the kind executed at that period in North Somerset and North Devon, from Minehead to Bideford. The Renaissance had come very slowly down this way, on its long journey from Italy, and had lost on the way the fine touch of its native land. It had lost also much of the somewhat pagan character it exhibited there, and became greatly concerned in the more prominent narratives of the Old Testament. Vague legends tell of wandering Italian craftsmen executing the plaster ceilings and elaborate chimney-piece designs often found in old houses of the better class in these districts, but they were probably Englishmen, who had picked up something of the trick of the new style, without very much of foreign dexterity, but had imported their own thought into the work. At any rate the numerous examples met with have so striking a general likeness of treatment that the conclusion of their being the work of a distinct school becomes inevitable. [Illustration: AN OLD DOOR, BARNSTAPLE.]