There are reasons all-sufficient why Teignmouth’s poetic associations should not be flaunted. Too great insistence upon Praed would advertise more fully the brutal vandalism permitted of late years at Bitton, when no finger was stirred to save that lovely wooded riverside park from being cut up and demolished, to build cheap houses upon. Bitton was one of the loveliest places upon the Teign. In the words of Praed himself: “There beamed upon the river side A shady dwelling-place Most beautiful! Upon that spot, Beside the echoing wave, A fairy might have built her grot, An anchorite his grave. The river with its constant fall Came close up to the garden wall, As if it longed, but thought it sin, To look into the charms within. Behind majestic mountains frowned And dark, rich groves were all around.” The “dark, rich groves,” were no mere poetic imagery. They were largely ilex, or “evergreen oak,” for which streets of the flimsiest houses in close-packed ranks are the sorriest exchange. Keats, of course, no self-respecting Devonian would mention. He came, himself consumptive, to Teignmouth in 1818, to cheer the last hours of his brother Tom, dying of that disease. Here, lodging at No. 35, Strand, he completed _Endymion_ and wrote _Isabella_; but it was winter and spring at the time of his sojourn, and although spring and winter in South Devon are preferable to those seasons elsewhere, he found the moist humours of the rainy West anything but pleasant: [Illustration: KINGSTEIGNTON.] “You may say what you will of Devonshire: the truth is, it is a splashy, rainy, misty, snowy, foggy, haily, floody, muddy, slipshod county. The hills are very beautiful, when you get a sight of ’em; the primroses are out, but you are in; the cliffs are of a fine deep colour, but then the clouds are continually vieing with them. … The flowers here wait as naturally for the rain twice a day as mussels do for the tide. This Devonshire is like Lydia Languish, very entertaining when it smiles, but cursedly subject to sympathetic moisture.” But occasionally the weather was kinder. It does not rain all day and every day in Devon, even in winter; and during these dry interludes Keats discovered some of those amazingly many villages that owe their name to the Teign: “There’s Bishop’s Teign, And King’s Teign, And Coombe at the clear Teignhead— Where close by the stream You may have your cream All spread upon barley bread. There is Newton Marsh, With its spear-grass harsh, A pleasant summer level Where the maidens sweet Of the Market Street Do meet in the dusk to revel.”