For Mount Edgcumbe art has done little; but it was here unnecessary for art to do much: like some women, whose charms of expression and perfect “loveliness” do not seem to require beauty, this delicious peninsula has been so richly gifted by Nature, that, perhaps, efforts to enhance its attractions might have lessened instead of augmenting them. Hill and dell, heights and hollows, pasture slopes and rugged hillocks, succeed each other with a delicious harmony we have rarely seen elsewhere. On one side of the bay are the three busy towns, active with energetic life; on another are the cultivated hill-sides of productive Devon; on another is the open sea, with the two objects we have noted—the Breakwater and the marvellous Eddystone. Everywhere Nature has had its own sweet will; even the laurel hedges have risen thirty feet in height; the lime trees grow as if they had never been trimmed; while the slopes, from the hill-heights to the sea-rocks, appear as sheen as if the scythe had been perpetually smoothing them. Here and there, pretty and pleasant shelters have been provided for visitors who throng hither for health and relaxation;[12] “look out” seats are provided on many of the hill-tops; and the deer and the rabbits have free pasturage in the noble Park that occupies a space of many hundred acres between the harbour and the sea. Nor may we forget the “defences” of the peninsula: the battery that would here, as elsewhere, “keep the foreigner from fooling us,” and that battery called “the Salute,” in which the huge “Armstrongs” are hidden, but where may be seen, by all on-lookers, twenty-one mounted cannon—“prizes” from ships of “the enemy” taken during the war with France. [Illustration: _Mount Edgcumbe, from Stonehouse Pier._] All, therefore, is not left to Nature. Nor must we forget the gardens: prettily laid out; enriched by rare trees, with vases and statues judiciously intermixed; and, especially, a grove of orange trees, with several summer-houses in pleasant nooks, where cedars, magnolias, cork trees, and other trees, supply shade and shelter from rain and sun. Art has here been aiding Nature, but its influence is felt rather than seen; those to whom the “grounds” owe much seem to have been ever mindful that their profuse and natural luxuriance needed few checks of the pruner and trainer. The name of one of these benefactors is recorded—a votive urn contains a tablet to the memory of that countess “whose taste embellished these retreats, herself their brightest ornament”—Countess Sophia, who could not have found on earth a home more lovely than that which, in 1806, she was called to leave for one still more perfect and more beautiful.