such as abound throughout the district, and are, many of them, still wrapped in provoking mystery. The peculiar climate of all this part of Cornwall, the warmth, the soft misty air, affecting the sunlight as it rests and quivers along the hillsides, and, in sharp contrast, the fierce storms that occasionally sweep across from sea to sea, all add to the unusual impression. The actual coast, granite-bound, must be nearly the same as when the first Greek or Phoenician trader made his appearance among the astonished natives. It cannot have receded, like the soft sandstone shores of South Devon or the flat lands of the eastern coasts. There are indeed traditions, and even traces, of sunken forests, such as the wood which once, it is said, closed round the "hoar rock" of St. Michael; and the Scilly Islands, just visible in clear weather on the far horizon, are held to be surviving relies of that drowned land of Lyonesse, so famous in Arthuric legend. But geologists insist that the disappearance of such a tract is, under the circumstances, an impossibility; and such traditions serve but to carry us farther back into the realm of antique romance-that romance which has peopled every "porth" and "point," every rock and moor throughout the district with stories primitive enough in themselves, but owing much of their form and colouring to the country in which they have found a home. Where but on such a rock-piled, storm-swept coast, and on the misty heaths which rise from it, should we encounter an apparition like the spectre-ship of Porthcurno?-a black, square-rigged, single-masted vessel, seen, as they say, about nightfall, at certain seasons of the year, to pass steadily through the breakers of the shore, then to glide over the sands, to ascend the valley, and to steer away across the heath for an inland village, where it vanishes like smoke. No crew is ever seen, and no sound is heard. It is a craft of ill omen, and no one prospers who has once looked on it.

The country, and the associations of the country, are thus in complete harmony, notwithstanding the changes which modern invention and ease of travelling have brought upon Western Cornwall. It is by a sort of natural fitness that a district so peculiar, and so strongly characteristic, contains the birthplace and the home of the antiquary who first investigated the early history of his native county with anything like real scholarship and accuracy. This was William Borlase, who, although he may have clouded his researches with some Druidic fancies, has preserved for us many a valuable record of remains and of histories which have now in part disappeared, or have been altogether forgotten. He was born in 1698, in the parish of St. Just, on the north coast, at Pendeen, a house which may date from a period soon after the Restoration, when the Cornish gentlemen set themselves to much rebuilding. Pendeen has the low-arched door-ways, the square-headed and mullioned windows, and the picturesque chimney clusters which belong to so many an old Cornish manor-house, now sunk to the condition of a farm. The fields round it are treeless and desolate; the sea-winds sweep them bare; but the Borlases are of the rieille roche, Cornishmen for untold generations, and the roughness of his native shores had its own attraction for the rebuilder of Pendeen. William Borlase, however, did not remain for any considerable time at Pendeen. Whilst still very young he became the Rector of Ludgvan, a little north-west of Penzance, and afterwards of St. Just, his native parish. He held both livings at once, and throughout his life (he died in 1772) his habits of literary industry never deserted him. His " His "Antiquities of Cornwall," and his "Natural History of Cornwall," are still of high value. He supplied Pope with spars and crystals for his grotto; and the name of Borlase was inscribed in letters

of gold on the roof, as the poet himself described it, "in a shade, but shining." The expression illustrates not less fitly the life of Borlase at Ludgvan. Remote and "in a shade" as the place was, the antiquary shone in it, not only by the reputation of his learning, but by the example of his laborious life, and by his genial nature. He describes the "gentry in his neighbourhood as "of a free, frolicking disposition. In the summer-time we meet (some ten or a dozen) at a bowling-green. There we have built a little pleasure-house, and there we dine; after dinner play at bowls, and so by frequently meeting together we are as it were like so many brothers of one family, so united and so glad to see the one the other." This bowling-green was at Marazion, in front and in full view of the "Guarded Mount," the great and most remarkable feature of Western Cornwall.

Borlase has described the principa relics of past ages throughout Cornwall; but the most important of these are gathered in his own district, which he knew best, and where he was able to investigate them at greatest leisure. This district is the hundred of Penwith, which lies west of the narrow neck of land between Mount's Bay and the Bay of St. Ives. Penwith seems to have been the old Cornish name of the extreme western promontory; and the Saxons, making their own addition to it, called the Land's End "Penwithsteort"-the "start" or "tail" of Penwith. The whole of this

country, and indeed the whole of Cornwall west of Redruth and Falmouth, differs widely from the eastern division of the county. It is true that a range of high barren heaths traverses Cornwall from Launceston to the Land's End; but even this wild country, and the wastes of the Bodmin Moors, have features of their own which distinguish them from the wild land of Penwith. The extreme west has no such long, winding valleys, filled with oaken coppice, as abound in the eastern country, where St. Neot fixed his cell, and no such deep, ferny, elmshadowed hollows as that in the midst of which rises the Convent of Lanherne. The rugged, towering north coast is broken by these leafy combes; the south coast has its far-stretching tidal inlets, and is altogether softer; but the coast of Penwith is rock-bound throughout its circuit, and is softened only by its stretches of yellow sand, and by the glow of furze and heather where the land slopes downward toward the granite barrier. There is evidence that East and West Cornwall, differing thus in their natural features, were inhabited, at the earliest period in which we make acquaintance with them, by races which may have been nearly related, but which were certainly exposed to very different influences, as we gather from the remains of their habitations, their order, and arrangement. Diodorus the Sicilian, writing at the beginning of the first century, tells us that the people who lived near the

British Bolerium were more hospitable and more courteous to strangers than their neighbours. They were, no doubt, more immediately connected with the foreign traders who sought here the tin of the stream-works; and who, whether they were Greeks from Marseilles, or Phoenicians from Carthage or from Tyre, must have been frequent visitors. It is tolerably certain that, although there may been other emporia along the coast, the principal was St. Michael's Mount, and that this huge mass of granite is in truth the "Iktis" of the old geographer. There can be no doubt that, during all historical ages at least, this rock must have been an object so conspicuous as at once to attract the attention

of those who sailed along the coast. It is, in effect, a granite tor, or "outcrop," which has resisted denudation, while the softer rock about it has entirely disappeared-a process which must have been nearly, if not quite, accomplished when the first Phoenician trader appeared in Britain. The Mount covers about twenty-five acres, and the height from the sands to the top of the church-tower which crowns it is 238 feet. No mere description, and hardly any drawing, can convey a full impression of St. Michael's Mount. The magic of Turner and the clear pencil of Stanfield have given us the scene more than once, but they can only stamp one of its phases, and not an hour passes without changes of light and of atmosphere, which reveal an entirely new picture. The vast shattered masses of the rock itself, the openings of turf that lie between them, the watch-turrets and later batteries that guard and break into the face of the rock at intervals, the seaplants niched into the recesses, and then the grey, lichen-tinted towers rising sheer with

the face of the rough, natural granite, all combine with the associations of the place, the far stretch of sea, and the strange inland view beyond Marazion, and away towards the Lizard, to form a scene which becomes at last almost bewildering in its interest and beauty.

If we are to believe Cornish tradition, the builder of the earliest fortress on the Mount was the Giant Cormoran, in whom we must perhaps recognise Corineus, the companion of Brutus of Troy: his fate is recorded in the veritable history of the Giant-killer.

The religious character of the place arose, it is said, from an apparition to certain hermits, on one of the crags, of the Archangel Michael. Hence the name given to the Mount; and hence the reference in Milton's "Lycidas: "

"Or whether thou, to our moist vows deny'd,

Sleep'st by the fable of Bellerus old,
Where the great vision of the Guarded Mount
Looks toward Namancos and Bayona's hold."

The Mount was, however, always a defended place, and it gained its importance as a Benedictine monastery, at first as a cell of the greater St. Michael's, on the coast of

Normandy, which it so nearly resembles, and then as an independent house with a perpetual prior. The Mount was granted after the Conquest to Robert, Earl of Mortain, the Conqueror's half-brother, to whom fell the lion's share of Cornwall, and who bore the standard of St. Michael in the Norman host. There are many examples of a small monastie foundation within the walls of a great castle, but in this instance the monastery overshadowed the fortress, and was the principal feature of the Mount. But as a stronghold, guarding that Western Cornwall which Bacon calls "the back-door of rebellion," it was important. Of the many assaults and captures of the Mount, perhaps the most remarkable was that in the reign of Edward IV., when the Earl of Oxford and some others, having fled from the battle of Barnet, managed to obtain possession of it in the guise of pilgrims (it happened that there were at that time no men-at-arms on the place), and held it for some time against the Sheriff of Cornwall, Sir John Arundell, who was killed on the sands. Early in the present century the skeleton of a very tall man was found in a vault beneath the church. It is known that Sir John Arundell was of great stature, and the bones were believed to be his. They were reburied, still on the Mount, but outside the building.

The tower which crowns the Mount is that of the monastic church. It is perhaps Early Perpendicular; and on the battlement is the stone beacon known as St. Michael's Chair, and famous for the ascendency it bestows on the husband or wife who first succeeds in obtaining a seat in it. Southey's ballad records the fate of the adventurous Rebecca, who succeeded in reaching the chair, but just as she had installed herself

"Merrily, merrily rang the bells.

And out Rebecca was thrown."

The beacon, which anciently guided the fishermen to their port in the winter, projects, and it is not quite easy to approach or to return from it. The church has been restored; and, since 1876, a considerable addition has been made to the buildings of the Mount. A number of fine apartments have been gained; and while the construction is far more massive than anything that monk or soldier raised here in former times, the design in no way interferes with the character of the ancient outline. The architect is a member of the family of St. Aubyn, which has held St. Michael's Mount since the middle of the seventeenth century.

a

b

It was to this island, accessible only when the tide left the rough natural causeway bare, that the blocks of tin were conveyed, to be shipped thence by foreign traders. One of these blocks was dredged up from Falmouth Harbour, near St. Mawes, in 1823. It is now in the museum of the Royal Cornish Institution at Truro, and is unquestionably the most ancient example of smelted tin which is known to exist. It is in the shape of an "astragalus " or knuckle-bone, the form in which, according to Diodorus, the tin was cast for exportation. A fragment has been broken off (probably after discovery, since the section is smooth and the rest of the block is honeycombed and waterworn); but when perfect the weight was precisely two Attic talents of commerce-160 pounds. The shape adapted it for fitting into the bottom of a boat, or for carrying on horseback; and two blocks might easily be carried by one horse. Sir Henry James, who has carefully described this astragalus, suggests that a boat laden with tin, on its way to the opposite coast, was swamped in Falmouth Harbour; and insists that the discovery of the block is a strong additional proof that St. Michael's Mount is the true "Iktis."

TIN ASTRAGALUS. 1.-a. Fragment broken off; b. Small hollow, apparently repeating the general form. II. -Side-view.

In this region, which is so full of ancient relics and traditions, we can hardly help occupying ourselves with the life of periods which are elsewhere almost pre-historic. Here we can touch and handle remains which, rightly understood, may bring the past vividly before us. Who were the men, we may ask, who smelted the tin of the Cornish streamworks, and what was their manner of life? In answer, we may take our readers to the primitive village of Chysoister, high on a rough hill-side, a few miles inland from the Mount, and overlooking all the beautiful bay. The ground here is covered to the extent of many acres with the remains of the hut-town, half-buried in thick-growing furze and fern. Unlike the Dartmoor or the East Cornish huts, which are isolated, and must have been bee-hive structures, finished at the top either with flat stones or sods of turf, each of the hutclusters, as they have been properly called, which altogether made up the hut-town, consisted of an oval enclosure of some size, surrounded by a wall of considerable breadth, with chambers nestling in its thickness, all of which opened into a central court. In some cases the outer wall shows traces of a rampart, with a trackway round it, surmounted by a parapet. The courtyard was open to the sky. The chambers are of different forms, some being long-oval, some rudely square, some circular. One of these clusters has been fully excavated by Mr. William Copeland Borlase, a worthy representative of the elder antiquary. In one of the circular chambers he discovered the wood-ashes of the hearth, and near by, "a square block of stone, apparently the old accustomed seat beside the longextinguished embers." There was a much smaller chamber, the interior of which had