The entrance to the awful sanctities of Hesketh Crescent is passed on the ascent from Meadfoot into Torquay; but the Crescent is not what it was, and boards, actually proclaiming houses to let, disfigure the proprieties of its threshold. As a matter of fact, the taste—or rather, the fashion—which obtained when Hesketh Crescent was built has wholly changed, and residents by the seaside are no longer content to live in a continuous row of houses. It is an unavoidable condition in great towns, but most undesirable for a place like Torquay, whose ideal is detachment, and whose chief feature, in the residential districts, away from the business centre, is the multitude of discreet villas, each enclosed in its grounds, behind masonry walls and shrubberies. If these villas were situated near the Regent’s Park district of London, the discretion of encompassing walls and screening shrubberies would be referred to motives not here to be discussed, but Torquay being what it is, these features are but marks of the strictly proper seclusion that is an essential feature of its existence; an emotionless existence punctuated by the visits of gibbering curates and the meetings of Dorcas Societies. Nothing is more remarkable in the later history of Torquay than the number of “literary landmarks” and associations it has gathered to itself; more particularly associations connected with the spinster lady authors of improving stories. Torquay, of course, is not merely the place for invalid visitors in the winter, but a place of residence for many delicate persons to whom its genial warmth is the very breath of life. It would seem that when contemplative persons of a certain fragility seek a permanent home, they come to Torquay and write stories like _Christy’s Old Organ_ and _Jessica’s First Prayer_. At any rate, the remarkable little shilling book, _Literary Landmarks of Torquay_, by Mr. W. J. Roberts, discovers an amazing number of literary associations, with Charles Kingsley, P. H. Gosse, W. E. Norris, and Eden Phillpotts at their head, and a regiment of ladies bringing up the rear.