No one who travels through North Devon and Somerset can escape “Lorna Doone.” Nor, indeed, should they greatly wish to do so, for it is a stirring romance. Since 1871, when the story first became popularised, it has pervaded the whole countryside, much to the combined profit and astonishment of the natives, who accept the good gifts it has brought, chiefly in the shape of greatly increased numbers of tourists, but at the same time they do not profess to understand it all, and have not been generally at pains to inform themselves as to whom all these developments are due. “A Lunnon gennelman—I doan’t rightly knaw th’ name of ’en—wrote all about thesyer Doones there is so much tark of, an’ put’n into a book, yurs since. Read it? Not I, but my darter, she hev, an’ she do say that Lorna Doone was a proper fine gell; not that I b’lieve much on’t; although, mark you, it’s my idea that if so be them ‘Doone’ houses they do let on so much about wer’ tarned auver an’ dug up, ther’d be a deal o’ gold found there. There was some mighty queer folk lived up to Badgery in wold times.” Such are the somewhat contradictory opinions to be heard between Oare and Malmsmead. Richard Doddridge Blackmore, author of the novel, “Lorna Doone,” came of a North Devon and Exmoor ancestry, and so was, as it were, the predestined author for these regions. He was born in 1825 and educated largely at Blundell’s school, Tiverton, where Jan Ridd, hero of the novel, got his schooling. Blackmore afterwards went up to Oxford, and imbibed there a certain fondness for classical studies and a love of literature that never left him; although a great part of his life, from 1858, was devoted to the cultivation of choice fruit at his residence at Teddington, beside the Thames. The public, however, that knew of Blackmore the novelist never heard of Blackmore the grower of choice pears and plums for the London market, on his eleven Middlesex acres. His first book was “Poems by Melanter,” published in 1835 and heard of no more. In 1855 the Crimean War stirred him to authorship again, with “The Bugle on the Black Sea,” and 1864 saw his first novel, “Clara Vaughan,” published anonymously. It was not a success, nor was “Cradock Nowell,” in 1866, more fortunate. In March 1869 was published “Lorna Doone,” with the same dispiriting want of success. The first edition was still hanging on hand in 1871, and seemed likely to go the unhonoured way of all completely unsuccessful books, when a strange reversal of fortune befel it. In the preface to the twentieth edition, years afterwards, Blackmore tells us vividly of this. One clearly perceives, in the manner of apostrophe to a personified “Lorna” he adopts, that he was, at the time of writing this preface, still entirely amazed at the abounding success that had at last come, but in a wholly mistaken fashion. He says: