of the family became extinct.

[Illustration: Duty Point]

And this is positively all the history of Lynton, until, in the time of
the French Revolution, when the turbulent state of the Continent made it
inadvisable to spend a holiday abroad, its beauty was discovered by those
eager to find in England that enjoyment of the picturesque which before
they had looked for in Italy and Southern France. We use "picturesque"
now in a slightly derogatory sense, or we use it patronizingly, because
it is old-fashioned and belongs to the nineteenth century, and Ruskin and
Wordsworth, and even Horace Walpole and his "Gothic" ruin on Strawberry
Hill; and we are of the twentieth century, and have discovered the beauty
of docks and harbours and tall factory chimneys and railway stations,
under the guidance of Whistler and Brangwyn and such folk, and we do not
fret at laying a railway through Perthshire or the Lake District, because
railways are fast becoming almost as romantic and old-fashioned to us as
stage-coaches (in these days of aeroplanes and automobiles); but at least
let us remember that it is to the nineteenth century that we owe that
acute appreciation, not only of the visible beauty of the world, but of
the spirit that lies behind it, that personal and intimate character of
places which is one of our dear possessions. Mountains and woods, cliff
and cove, have become to us a truism of beauty, but let us at least be
grateful to the generation which first dared to see more in the boundless
Scotch hills and moors than "savage and disgusting country," or to
compare the pinnacles of the Alps to human handiwork--greatly to their
disadvantage. And the small absurdities, the "ruins" that they loved,
the "abbeys" they erected, were only part of that general half-conscious
striving to apprehend and express the spirit of romance with which we are
still moved in our own day, which Kipling expresses in his own fashion
and Conrad in his, down to the small-change of literature which struggles
for expression in our magazines and periodicals.

So when Shelley and Coleridge and Wordsworth came to Lynton, and found it
beautiful, and nearly decided to live there and be the poets of Devon
instead of the poets of the Lake District, it was because they found in
it that quality of beauty which they needed; and when, a little later,
Lynton was "discovered" by one or more people of wealth--notably by Mr.
Coutts, the banker, who built houses ther