spread reputation for her fogs; but little do they
know how much a fog may add to natural scenery, who never witnessed its
magical effects, as it has caused a beautiful landscape to coquette with
the eye, in playful and capricious changes. Our opening scene is in one
of these much derided fogs; though, let it always be remembered, it was
a fog of June, and not of November. On a high head-land of the coast of
Devonshire, stood a little station-house, which had been erected with a
view to communicate by signals, with the shipping, that sometimes lay at
anchor in an adjacent roadstead. A little inland, was a village, or
hamlet, that it suits our purposes to call Wychecombe; and at no great
distance from the hamlet itself, surrounded by a small park, stood a
house of the age of Henry VII., which was the abode of Sir Wycherly
Wychecombe, a baronet of the creation of King James I., and the
possessor of an improveable estate of some three or four thousand a
year, which had been transmitted to him, through a line of ancestors,
that ascended as far back as the times of the Plantagenets. Neither
Wychecombe, nor the head-land, nor the anchorage, was a place of note;
for much larger and more favoured hamlets, villages, and towns, lay
scattered about that fine portion of England; much better roadsteads and
bays could generally be used by the coming or the parting vessel; and
far more important signal-stations were to be met with, all along that
coast. Nevertheless, the roadstead was entered when calms or adverse
winds rendered it expedient; the hamlet had its conveniences, and, like
most English hamlets, its beauties; and the hall and park were not
without their claims to state and rural magnificence. A century since,
whatever the table of precedency or Blackstone may say, an English
baronet, particularly one of the date of 1611, was a much greater
personage than he is to-day; and an estate of L4000 a year, more
especially if not rack-rented, was of an extent, and necessarily of a
local consequence, equal to one of near, or quite three times the same
amount, in our own day. Sir Wycherly, however, enjoyed an advantage that
was of still greater importance, and which was more common in 1745, than
at the present moment. He had no rival within fifteen miles of him, and
the nearest potentate was a nobleman of a rank and fortune that put all
competition out of the question; one who dwelt in courts, the favourite
of kings; leaving the baronet