Nor was Raglan in those days cared for with the loving care now bestowed on it by the Duke of Somerset. I have heard people complain of the restrictions, and of the small entrance fee now demanded for admittance to the ruins, and regret the days when the traveller could, as in my time, wander over every part of it at will. All that was very charming, but the place was not as beautiful as it is now. The necessary expense for the due conservation of the ruins must be very considerable. And when one hears, as I did recently at Raglan, that steam and bank-holidays have brought as many as fifteen hundred (!) visitors to the spot in one day, it may be easily imagined what the condition of the place would shortly become if careful restrictions were not enforced. Of lovely--ever lovely--Tintern, the same remarks may be made. Certainly there was a charm in wandering there, as I did when a boy, almost justified by the solitude in feeling myself to be the discoverer of the spot. Now there is a fine hotel, with waiters in black-tailed coats, and dinners _à la carte_! And huge vans pouring in “tourists” by the thousand. Between four and five thousand persons, I was told, visited Tintern in one August day! Scott tells those who would “view fair Melrose aright” to “visit it by the pale moonlight.” But I fear me that no such precaution could secure solitude, though it might beauty, at Tintern in August. But the care bestowed upon it makes the place more beautiful than ever. The guardians by dint of locked gates prevent the lovely sward from being defiled by sandwich papers and empty bottles, as the neighbouring woods are. But he who would view fair Tintern aright, had better _not_ visit it on a bank holiday. A similarly striking change between the England of sixty years since and the England of to-day may be observed at beautiful Lynmouth and Lynton. The place was a solitude when my parents and I visited it in, I think, 1818. We had a narrow escape in driving down from Lynton to the mouth of the little stream. A low wall of unmortared stones alone protected the road from the edge of a very formidable precipice; and just at the worst point the horse my father was driving took fright at something, and becoming unmanageable, dashed at the low wall, and absolutely got his fore-feet over it! “George,” riding the other horse behind, was at an hundred yards or so distance. But my father, with one bound to the horse’s head, caught him by the bridle, and, by the sheer strength of his remarkably powerful frame, forced him back into the road. It was not a _mauvais quart d’heure_, but a very _mauvais quart de minute_--for it was, I take it, all over in that time. Now the road is excellent, and traversed daily in the summer season by some half dozen huge vans carrying “tourists” from Ilfracombe to Lynton.