So Bulwer Lytton has his own contest. Why is not Kingsley similarly mocked? Here's the opening of "Westward Ho!" Apparently there's a town in Devon named after the novel, complete with exclamation mark. Delicious scenery, o.k., you and I can swallow that. Tide-river? What on earth is this? What happened to "tidal"? And how come a tide-river is "paved" with sand? I bet it's an Italian meaning of the word, because all that subsequently happens sits beneath "a soft Italian sky." Nowadays, of course, they make do with soft Italian ice cream, from a van. Hand me the fern-fringed slate, there's a word I want to scrawl, and it almost rhymes.
All who have travelled through the delicious scenery of North Devon must needs know the little white town of Bideford, which slopes upwards from its broad tide-river paved with yellow sands, and many- arched old bridge where salmon wait for autumn floods, toward the pleasant upland on the west. Above the town the hills close in, cushioned with deep oak woods, through which juts here and there a crag of fern-fringed slate; below they lower, and open more and more in softly rounded knolls, and fertile squares of red and green, till they sink into the wide expanse of hazy flats, rich salt-marshes, and rolling sand-hills, where Torridge joins her sister Taw, and both together flow quietly toward the broad surges of the bar, and the everlasting thunder of the long Atlantic swell. Pleasantly the old town stands there, beneath its soft Italian sky, fanned day and night by the fresh ocean breeze, which forbids alike the keen winter frosts, and the fierce thunder heats of the midland; and pleasantly it has stood there for now, perhaps, eight hundred years since the first Grenville, cousin of the Conqueror, returning from the conquest of South Wales, drew round him trusty Saxon serfs, and free Norse rovers with their golden curls, and dark Silurian Britons from the Swansea shore, and all the mingled blood which still gives to the seaward folk of the next county their strength and intellect, and, even in these levelling days, their peculiar beauty of face and form.
David Ritchie, Portland, Oregon
