The labyrinth between Luccombe and Bonchurch was not the only landslip in modern times; and though there is believed to be little fear of any further serious disturbance, occasional falls of rock are a warning how this gracious ruin of nature might be renewed. The Landslip here[3] makes to my mind the bouquet of the whole Undercliff, whose similar features, on an ampler scale, of older wrinkles, and usually more veiled by the work of man, stretch for miles westward along a rugged platform varying up to half a mile in width. Words but feebly paint the charms of a miniature Riviera, its broken land-waves foaming into groves, gardens, and tangles of shrubbery. Between the wall of downs and cliff-buttresses shutting it in to the north, and the sea dashing at its foot, the foliage runs as rank as in a giant’s greenhouse, beautifully

displayed by the accidents of the irregularly sloping ground.

This line of cliffs may indeed remind us of the Trossachs, with one side opened out to the sun and a richer vegetation at its base. Hawthorns, elders, and other bushes grow here to a huge height, dappling the green of the woods with their blossoms. Myrtle and other semi-tropical plants flourish hardily; everywhere there are flowers prodigal as weeds, notably the red Valerian flourishing on walls and broken edges. Huge boulders are half hidden in ivy, heaps of old ruins are buried in almost impassable thickets. It is hard to say when the huge bank of greenery is most beautiful—whether in spring with all its blossoms and tender buds; or in summer wearing its full glory of leafage; or again in autumn brilliant with changing tints and spangled by bright berries: even in winter there are evergreens enough to make us forget the cold winds banished from this cosy nook. The one blot on such a paradise seems the many notices to trespassers, warning that its most tempting nooks are “private,” or the still more ominous placards of “valuable building land to let on lease.”

The Bonchurch Landslip must be traversed on foot. On the other side of Ventnor, a good road winds up and down beneath the inland heights, from the edge of which one better sees how many houses and gardens are hidden away here in their own greenery. Other aspects are presented from a path rising and falling along the broken cliffs of the shore. The road, in fine weather, will be astir with coaches, brakes, and other wheels making for Blackgang Chine, that renowned goal of excursions from all over the Island. Beyond Steephill Castle, it leads through St Lawrence, the western, as Bonchurch is the eastern wing of Ventnor.

St Lawrence, known to guide-books that used to pass Ventnor Cove without a word, has another of the smallest churches in England, now replaced by a new one. The old church, till slightly enlarged by Lord Yarborough, measured twenty feet by twelve under a roof which must have obliged a tall knight to doff his helmet. Its saint, like St Boniface, gave his name to a well now enclosed under a Gothic arch. But the great institution of the parish, standing in a long terrace by the roadside, is the Hospital for Consumption, which Ventnor people insist on as being at St Lawrence, just as Woking pushes off the honour of the Brookwood Cemetery. There was a time when this model hospital made an advertisement for Ventnor; now new notions as to germ-infection tend to scare away more profitable guests than its patients, who might be expected to fall off under new theories of treatment for consumption, but the building has had a recent addition in memory of Prince Henry of Battenberg.

We are now among mansions and cottages of thick-set gentility, the nucleus of which was a villa built by Sir R. Worsley, who made the hardly successful experiment of planting a vineyard here. The oldest structure seems to be a little ivy-clad ruin at Woolverton on the shore, as to the character of which antiquaries for once have differed like doctors, while its antiquity, like that of the old church, offers hopeful promise for the permanence of modern buildings on these oft-torn slopes. But we must not stop to speak of every house on this road, nor of every private pleasance like that known to Swinburne—

On one hand, ascents like the “Cripple Path” would lead us to fine prospects from the cliff-brow, while below, we might seek out Puckaster Cove, or the Buddle Inn near a good stretch of sand, such as is rather exceptional hereabouts, where fragments of the destruction above are found trailing out into the sea to form dangerous reefs. One theory makes Puckaster the Roman tin-shipping port; and it certainly proved a haven of refuge for Charles II. in a storm, as recorded in a neighbouring parish-register. Along the broken slope, the high-road takes us as described by William Black, who has caught the characteristic features of so many English scenes.

The goal of Black’s party was the Sandrock Hotel, prettily situated by the roadside at Undercliff Niton, which has a chalybeate spring, and near it some local worthy thought desirable to erect a small shrine to the memory of Shakespeare, anticipating the more pretentious monument by which he is now to be glorified in London. From this seaside outpost turns off the way to the inland village of Niton, lying behind in a break of the chalk heights. It has been distinguished from Knighton by the sobriquet of Crab Niton, “a distinction which the inhabitants do not much relish, and therefore it will be impolitic to employ it,” as a venerable guide-book very prudently suggests; and Knighton being nowadays little more than a name, strangers will find no inconvenience in taking that hint. The place boasts at least one sojourner of note, as we learn from the

tomb of Edward Edwards, leader of the Free Public Library movement that has now so many monuments all over the country.

The parish of Niton is a large one, containing the head springs of the Medina and of the eastern Yar, which the well-greaved adventurer might hence try to track across the Island to their not very distant mouths. More otiose travellers will find a road passing under St Catherine’s Down for Newport and the central parts. From the sturdy church tower with its low spire, a lane leads up to the top of the Down, whence we could take a wide view of our wanderings, backwards and forwards. And here, since we are almost at the end of the Undercliff, let us break off to survey the longer but less famed stretch of this coast, westwards, under its more comprehensive title.

THE BACK OF THE ISLAND

This broad and steep block of down is well provided with landmarks. On the inland side a tall pillar was erected by a Russian merchant, in honour of the Czar Alexander’s visit to England after the fall of Napoleon; which monument a later generation very inappropriately adorned with a memorial of our soldiers fallen in the Crimean War. On the top are the restored remains of a chapel, where in old days a hermit-priest made himself truly useful by keeping a light burning to warn mariners off this stormy coast, and chanting prayers for their safety. A less pious legend attributes the building of the old beacon here to a layman amerced in such a penalty for having stored his cellars with wine sold him by shipwrecked sailors, a class not very scrupulous as to owner’s rights—

Hard by is a later ruin to show how a lighthouse was designed in the eighteenth century, but a practical age gave up the attempt to rear a pharos on this cloudy height. Experience since then has gone to show that a lighthouse serves its end better at the water’s edge than on commanding cliffs like Beachy Head and Portland Point, from both of which the old beacons have lately been moved to a lower level.

St Catherine’s Lighthouse stands on the point of that ilk, the most southerly projection of the Island, where it has Lloyd’s signal station for neighbour. Its recently intensified electric light is said to be the most powerful in the world, every few seconds flashing over the sea a beam of concentrated glare equal to millions of candles. It is also equipped with a fog-horn, whose hoarse note of warning resounds for miles, not altogether to the satisfaction of neighbours safe on land. Yet they may take comfort to think how this screech is more fearsomely disquieting when heard at sea. I once had such a note ringing in my ears for two days together running through a chill fog off Newfoundland, with icebergs about us that could be felt but not seen. Our boat was one of the few that have crushed into an iceberg and crawled to land with the tale; then to keep us cheerful we had on board a survivor of that adventure, the perils whereof it pleased him to depict as looming through a somewhat befogged imagination.

Another of our fellow-passengers was an American gentleman, who in Europe had been qualifying himself to come out as an opera tenor. He was coy of giving us a specimen of his talent, till one night we persuaded him to begin Ah, che la morte! But at once the officer of the watch stepped up to silence him, explaining that his singing might drown the sound of fog-horns. The vocalist was much offended at his organ being coupled with a fog-horn; and I fear I gave him fresh offence by suggesting “Signor Fogorno” as a suitable nom de guerre, when he consulted me as to Italianising his rather commonplace patronymic. But that careful officer was right, if the story be true that a German liner ran ashore on the back of the Island because her own brass band deafened her to the warning note that surely should have drowned all sweeter sounds. And if our insulted tenor had known it, this artificial organ has a very old theatrical connection, for persona seems the earliest form of such a sounding contrivance, originally a megaphonic mouthpiece fitted to a mask which, as one of the classical stage properties, came to denote the personage thus represented; and in time the name gained respectability as the person or parson of a parish, who more or less loudly warned his convoy of souls from the rocks and shoals of ill-doing.

A different kind of signal would be keenly watched for in days when the storm of Napoleon’s invasion was expected to burst upon our shores; and on all prominent points beacons were kept ready to spread the alarm of the enemy’s approach. The Isle of Wight was fully on the alert, remembering how often it had been a vulnerable point in mail-clad wars with France, though one would think that the bugbear, Boney, knew his business too well to seek a difficult landing in an island, beyond which he would be brought up by a dangerous channel, a strong arsenal, and a naval rendezvous. It is said that the signalman at St Catherine’s, probably having drunk the king’s health too freely in smuggled spirits, mistook some fishing-boats for a French fleet, and lighted his beacon to set men mustering in arms and women and children flying for refuge to Newport. Sir Walter Scott tells us how the same sort of blunder stirred a great part of Scotland. But on one side of the Island the scare did not spread far, since the watcher at Freshwater very sensibly reasoned that the wind then blowing would keep this coast clear of hostile ships, and forbore to pass on the alarm.

Before the building of St Catherine’s lighthouse in 1840, shipwrecks were terribly common on the Island. A famous one was that of the Clarendon West India-man, in 1836. Fourteen vessels in one night are said to have gone ashore on Chale Bay. This is no coast for amateur mariners. One is warned also against bathing as dangerous hereabouts, yet I, unconscious, have swum below Blackgang in my hot youth; while in cooler age I echo the caution. The hero of Maud, whose haunts we are now approaching, would sometimes have been all the better and wiser for a morning dip to cool his fevered brow; but he was not so much out of conceit with life as to venture a bathe—

—a sound which, Tennyson states, can sometimes be heard nine miles inland.

Chale Bay, in which is Blackgang Chine, opens on the west side of St Catherine’s Point, where, at Rocken End, the Undercliff seems tumbling into the sea in a chaos of blocks of chalk and sandstone stormed upon by the waves with freshly ruinous fury. Above, on the side of St Catherine’s Down, the scenery alters from nests of Riviera greenery to bare

slopes broken by huge boulders and scars, that expose the geological structure of the Downs to a spectacled eye. Here a slip of 100 acres happened at the end of the eighteenth century; and the masterful south-west blasts keep the ruin still somewhat raw, not skinned over as in more sheltered nooks. The road, passing out of shade, makes a Switzerlandish turn under the cliffs, as it descends to Blackgang Chine, the final goal of lion-hunters on this route.

Entrance to the so much sought sight is through a sort of museum or bazaar, where one must either buy something or frankly pay sixpence. This reminds me of a visit to Pompeii more than forty years ago—eheu!—when the soldier who conducted me seemed strangely officious in repeatedly declaring that he was not entitled to any tip; but, he added, “I have some photographs to sell.” There are those who hint darkly at illicit entrances by which the unprincipled or impecunious can smuggle themselves into Blackgang Chine without paying or buying anything; but considerate visitors will not grudge a toll for use of the walks and steps that open up the recesses of this great chasm, through which echoes the boom of waves breaking on the beach below. It differs from the Shanklin Chine in being not overgrown with greenery, but showing through its nakedness the various viscera of greenish-grey sand and dark ferruginous clay that charm the geologist. Description may not prove “up-to-date,” as the weather-worn sides crumble away from year to year; yet Sir Henry Englefield’s account is still to be quoted after more than a century.

Half a mile behind Blackgang Chine lies the village of Chale, whose grey church tower stands among the grass-grown graves of many a drowned mariner, that seem an imitation in miniature of the half-buried rocks and mounds of the Undercliff. Chale is a resort on its small scale, with some good old houses and fine scenes to attract visitors, not to speak of a chalybeate well on the strength of which the place once aspired to become a spa; and Dr Dabbs’ opinion is emphatic that its bracing air deserves a success Chale has not yet commanded in rivalry to Shanklin or Ventnor. Its patients may at least make sure of having their fill of the south-west wind, that gives such a leeward lurch to hardier trees now that they are out of shelter in the Undercliff’s sun-trap.

Westward, the shore has openings known as Walpen Chine, Ladder Chine, and Whale Chine, which are as notable as Blackgang in their way, but not so famous; and several others yawn more obscurely on the coast line to Freshwater. Some couple of miles beyond Chale, a name of grim notoriety is Atherfield Point, where many vessels have been lost on its dangerous ledge, like the German Lloyd Eider, in 1892, that grounded in a fog, all hands being saved, and the steamer remaining stuck fast for weeks, so as to give this neighbourhood the excitement without the horror of a great shipwreck. In bad old days the people of Chale had an evil name as wreckers, luring poor seamen to destruction by deceptive lights, and not sticking at murder as a prelude to robbery, since the law held the death of the survivors to extinguish their title in what goods might be salved.

From Chale, the seaboard opens out for a stretch of some ten miles along the Back of the Island, a part not so well known to strangers, unless as hurrying by on their way to Freshwater. But the path along the rough shore edge is full of points of interest, especially to the geologist, who, from exposures of the green-sand formation passes on to mottled earthy cliffs of the Wealden age, then again finds sand pressed down by masses of chalk. Behind, runs a silent military road made to link the Island defences, which is not altogether passable for wheels; indeed the Freshwater end of it has tumbled into the sea. The usual driving-road turns inland to pass through the villages below the Downs, which now draw back a mile or two from the beach. Let us, then, follow Edmund Peel, the poet of this Fair Isle.

Behind Chale, by the outlying Chale Green near the head of the Medina, is reached the tiny village of Kingston with its tiny and picturesquely perched Church, some half-dozen miles south of Newport. The road to Freshwater turns west, soon reaching Shorwell, in its setting of unusually rich woods, from which rises the spire of the Church, notable for very curious and striking features, as for its show of Leigh monuments, a once obliterated wall-painting, and other relics. Its vestry preserves the Gun Chamber,

in which several of these Island churches once kept a cannon for defence of the coast. This village is said to have won Queen Victoria’s special admiration, as well it might.

Two miles on, comes another pretty place, Brixton alias Brighstone, very unlike its metropolitan namesake, with a goodly Church that counts among former parsons Bishops Ken, Samuel Wilberforce, and Moberley. In the beautiful garden of the parsonage, Ken is said to have composed his far-sung Morning and Evening Hymns; and a tree is shown here under which Wilberforce wrote his Agathos. Hence one can descend to the shore by Grange Chine, which the military road crosses by a lofty viaduct; or over the Downs goes the road to Calbourne, the nearest station on the Freshwater line.

The next village on the road is Mottistone, from whose too much restored Church, a steep, shady lane leads up to the Mote Stone, or Long Stone, a block of ferruginous sandstone 13 feet high, with a smaller one fallen beside it, seeming to have both made part of an ancient cromlech; but this is said to have served as a mote or public meeting-place, while a natural legend sees here the stones of a diabolic and angelic putting-match on St Catherine’s Down. These high downs were a favourite prehistoric burying place; and several barrows hereabouts have been excavated by a generation whose tumuli have shrunk to the tees of golf. The Tudor manor-house, beside Mottistone Church, is one of the best of the picturesque old structures of that period, which in this corner of the Island have not been so much shouldered off by spick-and-span villas.

Leaving the road, beyond the hamlet of Hulverston one can pass down to the shore by Brook, which has a chine to show, and a fossil forest on the west side of Brook Point, explained by the geologist Mantell as having “originated in a raft composed of a prostrate pine-forest, transported from a distance by the river which flowed through the country whence the Wealden deposits were derived, and became submerged in the sand and mud of the delta, burying with it the bones of reptiles, mussel-shells, and other extraneous bodies it had gathered in its course.... Many of the stems are concealed and protected by the fuci, corallines, and zoophytes which here thrive luxuriantly, and occupy the place of the lichens and other parasitical plants with which the now petrified trees were doubtlessly invested when flourishing in their native forests, and affording shelter to the Iguanodon and other gigantic reptiles.” The beach yields pretty pebbles; and huge fossils have been found in the cliffs hereabouts.

Hence the military road skirts Compton Bay, upon which the Downs close in again with a steep slope of chalk that makes no safe play-place for children, especially when the turf is slippery after long drought, a caution enforced by the monument to a poor boy who fell here sixty years ago. Beyond Afton Down, at the west end of Compton Bay, the little esplanade of Freshwater marks a new division of the Island, which, indeed, but for this much strained isthmus, would have made two islands.

FRESHWATER AND THE NEEDLES

In Charles I’s. reign it was indeed proposed to insulate this corner artificially as a citadel of defence. Private owners and tenants, for their part, are inclined to plans for forming some kind of breakwater, where the tiny esplanade of Freshwater is battered by every gale. Local authorities have been calling on the Hercules aid of a Royal Commission; and as a beginning of defence, the Board of Trade has forbidden Freshwater Bay being used by reckless neighbours for a quarry of shingle.

Into the nook beyond, crossed each way in an hour’s walk, is packed some of the finest scenery of the Island—the finest of all, some will say, who find the rich charms of the Undercliff more cloying. On the south side the Downs raise their steep wall of chalk to drop into the sea at the Needles point, round which the inner coast shows a more varied line of cliff. Between lies a huddle of very pleasant rurality, bowery lanes, hedgerow paths, thatched cottages, and thick-set hamlets, that in the very breath of the sea recall the most characteristic aspects of the green heart of England. Even the new Church has a thatched roof. But this corner, while more out of the way and the taste of trippers, is a good deal given up to Mars, whose temples here are forts and public-houses. Also it is swept by a bombardment of golf balls, which has caused punsters to suggest that this end of the Island as well as the eastern deserves the name of Foreland.

Freshwater itself is a modestly diffused village, which copies modern military tactics in taking very open order against the assaults of time. The main body of the place stands loosely ranked some way back from the shore, to which it throws out an advanced work held against wind and waves by hotels and a picket of bathing-machines; then a chain of rearward outposts connects it with the railway station a mile or so inland. Here the rebuilt Church, with its trappings of antiquity, makes a rallying point for hamlets in the rear, bearing such by-names as School Green, Pound Green, Sheepwash Green and Norton, beyond which the forts on the north side, among their bivouacs of camp followers, are mixed up with lines of new building, in summer garrisoned by holiday-makers on the bathing beaches of Totland Bay and Colwell Bay.

The road from the station to the esplanade passes by a mansion hidden in “a carelessly ordered garden” among thick trees, “close to the ridge of a noble down,” where

The house is more closely sheltered by fine growths like the Wellingtonia planted by Garibaldi, the great cedar, “sighing for Lebanon,” and the grand ilex, also made evergreen by one who was a “lover of trees.” For this is Farringford, famous as the home of Tennyson for more than half his life, and the sojourn of so many contemporary celebrities, guests at his house or at his neighbour Mr Cameron’s, a retired Indian official, whose wife became so notable

by her influence over “Alfred,” by her unconventionally generous impulses, and by her skill in the then young art of photography. Later on the Camerons disappear from their renowned friend’s story, going to die in Ceylon; but all along flit across the page names of renown in both continents, Maurice, Jowett, Sir Henry Taylor, G. F. Watts, Browning, Longfellow, Lowell, O. W. Holmes, and others drawn by the same magnet to this shore.

The mellifluous poet, so dear to his intimates, failed to make himself universally popular in the Island, whose inhabitants were not all able to appreciate him. There is the amusing case of a fly-driver who could not understand the squire of Farringford’s greatness. “Why, they only keep one man, and he doesn’t sleep in the house!” But that some residents could value their illustrious neighbour is shown by another story of a visitor arriving when the house was in a confusion of unpacking, and being kept waiting in the hall till he was recognised as the Prince Consort.

It is pretty well understood that he who figures too much as an alabaster saint in his official biography, had an earthier side to his nature. His gloomy moods and sensitive shyness sometimes broke out in fits of ill-humour, such as caused Mrs Cameron to remonstrate with him on behalf of a friend of hers found trespassing on his domain, who had come expecting to “see a lion, not a bear.” While he shrank in almost morbid horror from peeping pilgrims, he pointed himself out to their gaze by a picturesque “get up,” as to which one of his favoured grandchildren is said to have bluntly asked him, “If you don’t like people to look at you, why do you wear that queer hat and cloak?” I have a story to tell which has not yet, I think, been in print, but was vouched for by one of those concerned. As the Poet-laureate, with his friends Palgrave and Woolner, the sculptor, were walking through a village, irreverent urchins, having no fear of he-or she-bears, ran after them with the cry “Old Jew!”—“Poor Palgrave’s nose!” Tennyson whispered to Woolner, while Palgrave, for his part, presently took the opportunity of an aside to their companion, “That’s what Tennyson gets by dressing himself up in such a way!”

Another story of Tennyson’s manners reached me in two pieces, at a long interval, each dovetailing into each other. I knew a kind and gentle lady who venerated all genius, and especially his who was the flower of Victorian literature. Many years ago she told me, how being invited to see the University boat-race from George Macdonald’s house at Hammersmith, she found herself beside an unknown gentleman of her own mature age, to whom she remarked that it would be well if a window could be opened. He turned his back on her without a word and walked out of the room, which he would not enter again. To her dismay, my friend heard that this was the Poet-laureate, who did not like to be spoken to. She went to her grave hardly able to forgive herself for having unwittingly hurt such a man. Many years afterwards, on his coming to be buried at Westminster, another friend told me how in her girlhood, she was at George Macdonald’s boat-race party, when Tennyson was so offended at being spoken to by an old lady, that he shut himself up in a separate room, to which she was sent with some food for him, in the hope that a mere child might be a David to the mood of Saul; and that he spoke very crossly to her because she had forgotten to bring the mustard.

Why tell such tales? it may be asked by those who remember how Tennyson looked forward with horror to his weaknesses being exposed to the public eye. Because a great man’s life cannot be kept private; and no picture of him is of value with all the warts painted out. Those who knew the poet agree that he had rough ways and some coarse tastes singularly in contrast with the “saccharinity ineffable” which certain tart critics of another generation distaste in his verse. Those who knew him best are most emphatic as to the essential nobility of character that for them veiled all short-comings. The main interest of his life, as a human document, is that a man who had such faults should by force of genius have been able to transmute them into lessons of purity, courtesy, and charity, that will shine all the brighter as rays of a soul not “faultily faultless, icily regular, splendidly null.” And there will be an end to all fruitful biography, if the “good taste” so much admired by this generation is to overlay truth. Who would read the memoirs of a former age if they represented Samuel Johnson as a model of polite elegance, Goldsmith of practical common sense, and Wilkes of untarnished public spirit. So, without wanting in honest admiration for the greatest poet of my time, I protest against the conspiracy of silence by which he has been raised to a House of Lords among the immortals, his old cloak and hat forgotten in ermine and coronet, and his strong tobacco and full-bodied port glorified as nectar and ambrosia.

But if there were some to find the poet no more than a man, and others to regret that he let his world-wide fame be obfuscated in such a title as is sold to a prosperous brewer or money-broker, all tongues are at one in praise of the gentle lady still remembered as a devoted wife, as a friendly neighbour, and as an open-handed mistress of the manor. To William Allingham, Tennyson reported the character given of them by an ex-servant: “She is an angel—but he, why he’s only a public writer!” Many a tear was shed when, after long suffering, Lady Tennyson came to rest in the churchyard of Freshwater, her husband lying apart among our renowned dead. Within the Church are memorials of their second son Lionel, whose promising career was cut short by fever in the far East, and he found a hasty grave on a sun-blighted island of the Red Sea.

The bard whose “lucky rhymes to him were scrip and share” indeed, while more than one of his publishers dropped off “flaccid and drained,” was able later on to build himself a retreat on the Sussex wilds of Blackdown, in a sense even further “from noise and smoke of town.” But he still spent part of the year at Farringford; and much of his poetry is coloured by the Isle of Wight scenery, notably Maud, that “pet bantling” of his to which early critics were so unkind. Enoch Arden, too, might be thought to have hailed from this shore, but that hazel nuts do not flourish in the Island, unless in the half fossilized form of “Noah’s nuts” found in Compton Chine; also, on critical consideration, there appears no long street climbing out of Freshwater, whose “mouldered church,” moreover, has been quite masked by rebuilding—but these are poetical properties readily inserted into any picture, such as one that could be taken from a hundred villages on our coast—

Often from these downs, the poet must have watched—

From his own window, he could catch—

And often his steps were turned to that finest scene within an hour’s stroll—

On such points of vantage, he was inspired with loyalty and patriotism very different from the feelings of his predecessor in the laureateship, who “uttered nothing base,” but who was certainly disposed to frown, when, from the Island cliffs, he saw a British fleet sailing forth against the soon clouded dawn of liberty in France.

Tennyson naturally had a dread of new building about Freshwater; and some other landowners here seem to share the same exclusive spirit, which may account for the neighbourhood not being more “developed” as a resort, while its warmest admirers lament how much it has grown since the Laureate settled here. It has no want of attractions, not always accessible on the steep face of chalk, scarred and pitted by works of time like Freshwater Arch and Freshwater Cave near the little bay, beyond which come honeycombings known by such names as “Neptune’s Caves” and “Bar Cave”—“Frenchman’s Hole,” from an escaped prisoner said to have starved here—Lord Holmes’ “Parlour,” “Kitchen,” and “Cellar,” where that governor was in the way

of entertaining his friends—“Roe’s Hall”—“Preston’s Bower”—the “Wedge Rock,” a triangular mass wedged in between the cliff and an isolated pyramid some 50 feet high—the “Arched Cavern” in Scratchell’s Bay, and the “Needles Cave,” into which small boats can peep before rounding the jagged corner. It is said that Professor Tyndall used to keep himself in climbing practice by scrambling on these treacherous rocks; and if this be true, I so far question the wisdom of that pundit. The harrying of airy nests makes a better excuse for such riskful gymnastics. The fissured cliff line is tenanted by sea-fowl, which the report of a gun brings out in screaming and hovering crowds, conspicuous among them the black and white cormorants nicknamed “Isle of Wight parsons.”

These sights are to be visited by boat, if a stranger have stomach for the adventure. On foot one can mount the back of the cliff known at first as the Nodes, then as the Mainbench, or in general as the High Downs. At the highest point of the Nodes, nearly 500 feet, the old beacon has been replaced by an Iona Cross in memory of Tennyson, with whom this was a favourite walk in the wildest weather. A grand walk it is upon a crest of greensward so smooth that bicycles find a track here among the flying golf balls. In dry weather this smooth turf is slippery, as one might find too late on its treacherous edges. Further on, the straight way is barred by a fort, where, between Scratchell’s Bay and Alum Bay, the ridge narrows and drops to the spur pointed by those insular masses known as the “Needles,” that, seen at a hazy distance, rise out of the sea like three castles.

The name of this famous point has been connected with the German Nieder Fels; but there seems no need of going further than a homely simile that would come to mind and mouth of sailors who, in another language, have threaded the same suggestion on the southernmost rocks of Africa. Of the three sharp-backed islets that stand out here braving the winds and waves, the innermost is known to have risen 120 feet higher in a tall pillar called “Lot’s Wife,” which fell in 1784. Since Turner painted them, unless they loomed for him through a haze of imagination, the Needles have dwindled in size. Naturally of course they are worn away by every gale, like their kinsmen “Old Harry and his Wife” on the Dorset coast, one of which isolated masses has been washed down to a stump within the last few years, the same end as threatens the “Parson and Clerk” off the red sandstone cliffs of Devon; and in the far north the more robustly gigantic “Old Man of Hoy” has now but one leg to stand on.

Bitten at as they are by old Edax Rerum, the Needles have still a bulk which, dwarfed against the cliffs behind, might not be guessed till one’s eyes are fixed upon the lighthouse on the outermost rock, or upon human figures displayed against them, to give their due proportion. Thomas Webster, the geologist, saw them about a century ago under most picturesque conditions, when the fifty-gun frigate Pomone had stuck fast upon the outer edge, and lay captive there, to be broken up by the next gale, the waves already spouting through her ports and hatchways, while all around swarmed a fleet of smaller vessels engaged in salving the wreck, or bringing idle spectators to such a singular scene: he was surprised to find the frigate’s hull overtopped by more than three-fourths of the rock.

On the north side of the Needles opens Alum Bay, where German visitors will not fail to exclaim Wunderschön! and Americans to admire the works of nature as “elegant!” This famous geological transformation scene is formed by the Eocene strata turning up beside the chalk, as at the east end of the Island, but here with more striking effect, so as to be a spectacle for the most unlearned eye as well as a lesson of extraordinary value for those who can read it, through the manner in which the beds have been heaved, contorted and thrown into a vertical position of display. The chalk on one side with its tender tints is faced on the other by variegated bands of clay, marl, and sand, the hues of which, after heavy rain especially, are vivid far beyond our common experience of the “brown old earth,” in some lights presenting the rainbow of colour described by Englefield, to be so often quoted: “deep purplish-red, dusky blue, bright ochreous-yellow, grey approaching nearly to white, and absolute black, succeed each other, as sharply defined as the stripes in silk; and after rain the sun, which, from about noon till his setting in summer, illuminates them more and more, gives a brilliancy to some of these nearly as resplendent as the high lights on real silk.”

His geological ally Webster renders an almost as high-coloured account in more matter-of-fact style. The Alum Bay cliffs, he says,