Edward L. Pierce, Memoir and letters of Charles Sumner: volume 1

To George S. Hillard, Boston.

My dear Hillard,—Yours of June 26 and various dates greeted my arrival in this place after a most delightful ramble in the South and West of England,—first to Guilford, where I met Lord Denman and the Home Circuit, and dined with his Lordship and all the bar; then to Winchester and Salisbury, stopping to view those glories of England, the cathedrals. Old Sarum, and Stonehenge,—that mighty unintelligible relic of the savage Titans of whom history has said nothing; then to Exeter, and down even to Bodmin in Cornwall, where the Assizes of the Western Circuit were held. Serjeant Wilde and Sir William Follett were there, having gone down special, not being regularly of the circuit; and we three formed the guests of the bar. Our healths were drunk, and I was called upon to make a reply, which I did on the spur of the moment. From Bodmin, I went still farther in Cornwall to visit the high-sheriff, and his mines,—the largest that are there; his seat is the palace of the old Cornish kings,—you have doubtless seen pictures of it repeatedly; it is a perfect castle, and has a most romantic situation. I then travelled in the carriage of a friend,— Crowder,¹ one of the Queen's counsel,—through portions of Cornwall, and that most beautiful county, Devon, stopping at Plymouth; being received by the commander of the largest ship in port, a barge placed at my orders to visit any ship I wished, and an officer designated to show me over the dockyard. From Exeter I went up through the green fields of Devon and Somerset to the delicious parsonage of Sydney Smith,² Combe Florey, where I