Coming into Sidmouth, you see at once that you are arrived in a Superior Place, and, before you are perceived, make haste to brush the dust off your boots, put your headgear straight, and, in general making yourself look as respectable as may be possible to a rambler in the byways, step forth with a jaunty air; just as the postboys in the old days, driving my lord home, although their horses might be exhausted, always “kept a gallop for the avenue.” Sidmouth was the first of Devonshire seaside resorts, and had arrived at that condition long before Thackeray wrote of it as “Baymouth,” in _Pendennis_. Do you remember how “Pen flung stones into the sea, but it still kept coming on”? It seems hardly worth while to have said as much, but having been said, let it be put on record that it has lost none of its ancient courage in the meanwhile, and in spite of every intimidation, will still “come on” if you follow Pen’s example; unless, indeed, you choose the ebb, when, strange to say, it will retreat. It is believed that this odd phenomenon has been observed elsewhere. Before Torquay, Teignmouth, Exmouth, and other places had begun to develop, Sidmouth was a place of fashion, and the signs of that early favour are still abundantly evident in the town, which is largely a place of those prim-frontaged, white-faced houses we associate with the early years of the nineteenth century. It belongs, in fact, to the next period following that of Lyme Regis, and has just reached the point of being very quaint and old-world and interesting, as we and ours will have become in the course of another century. The stucco of Sidmouth is not as the plaster of Torquay, any more than that of Park Lane is like the plaster of Notting Hill. It is of the more suave, kid-glove texture we associate with Park Lane, is white-painted, and is only a distant cousin of the later plaster of Notting Hill and Torquay, which is grey, and painted in wholly immoral shades of drab and dun, green, pink, and red; in anything, indeed, but the virginal white of Sidmouth. And now, in this town which ought to be jealously preserved as a precious specimen of what the watering place of close upon a century ago was like, the restless evidences of our own time are becoming plentiful; older houses giving way to new, of the pretentious character so well suited to the age, and in red brick and terra-cotta; the inevitable architectural reach-me-downs that have obtained ever since Bedford Park set the vogue.