Whenever I recollect that business of the fall of the Stuarts, two things stand out in my mind: so much pageantry and so much comic stuff. For, to my thinking, there is something comic in the financing of the expedition with Dutch money, secured upon taxes promised beforehand as sure to be levied from the English (specifically on their tobacco), should it succeed. This way of making the victim pay for his own execution without his knowing it, and without consulting him, is full of the spirit of comedy. There are a hundred other comic details. Churchill leaning his handsome, villainous face over the dinner table of the inn, and trying to persuade the unfortunate James to come out for a ride on that fine moonlight night; Churchill well knowing how, on that fine moonlight night, the scouts of the enemy were waiting to carry off the King. And, again, the picture of the subsequent dinner at Andover; James dining with his daughter’s husband, the Prince of Denmark, that great bagful of stupidity, repeating to everything that was said, “Est-il possible!” then he and his suite excusing themselves for a moment to attend to some business; James, the King, wondering when they would return to the room. They never returned. That business on which they had excused themselves was treason, and the woman in town and her husband at Andover had betrayed.
What a Calvary James had to climb! It is a pity that Anne should have done such a thing, for she seems to have been the best of all that gang—which is not saying much. I have always trusted Swift’s judgment, who wrote of her: “The only good woman I ever met in my life.” But there he exaggerated; for he certainly profoundly admired at least two others, and he would not have admired them if he had not thought them good in a very evil world.
From Torbay westward the bold man in the small boat makes direct for Portland Bill, cutting across the Bay, and looking for the bell buoy halfway, if it is too thick to see his direction. There is nothing to disturb him here, no strong current, very little inset, and he is pretty certain of making the Bill by his card, even in thick weather. He will do well to keep a little north of his course, so that he may have a choice of coming down the Bill on the strength of the flood, and of anchoring to wait for his tide, if that be necessary; though it is true that anchoring-ground has to be carefully picked in that corner by Chesil Cove.
But I am not bold; and when I leave Torbay, I run to Lyme Regis.
The mouth of the Exe puzzles me with an unanswered question, which recurs in one river-mouth after another all over the West. It is this: How were they used by antiquity?
The trade of the ancients and of the earlier Middle Ages (and sometimes the later trade), the pirate fleets, every form of seafaring, used these silted rivers from the Gold Coast to the Baltic. How did they do it? Some say that even Salisbury was reached from the sea, and Winchester. Certainly Exeter was; Arundel still can be by ships of some size. Bramber was so reached, and Rye, and, I suppose, in its day, Lewes. And the Stour formed a harbour, once at Canterbury, later at its mouth; and so on all along the coast east and west. The mouth of the Kus, in Morocco, at Larache, and that of the Sebu, at Rabat, tell the same story. All these places are today impossible or difficult.
The general answer given to this question is that rivers silt themselves up in the process of time, and that is the obvious, rational answer to give. These harbour-mouths were once deep, but the river kept on bringing down mud and sand, checked at the mouth by the sea, and forming a bar.
Like nearly all merely rational answers to distant questions on which we have no direct evidence, this answer breaks down. The rivers have been running for centuries incalculable. They have had half an eternity in which to silt up their mouths; and if this were the chief factor at work it must have reached its limits long before man sailed the sea. It cannot be the chief factor at work. I fancy the chief factor must be the heaving up and down of the earth. In places the level rises, and the river-mouths become very difficult, and the lagoon becomes dry land. In places the level sinks, and harbours of which you never hear the use in antiquity come into play. The truth is, we know nothing about these things, or so little as only to give food for speculation, and for guesswork, which is the breeding-ground of false dogma and of quarrel, and the true accelerator of the human mind. I find that things affirmed carry a curious kind of conviction—a disturbed, exasperated kind, when they repose upon an apparently sufficient process of reasoned proof; whereas things affirmed, but reposing upon no proof at all, are accepted most kindly, and the faith in them lasts much longer and is altogether better rooted: indeed, sometimes (when the thing affirmed without proof is true) it lasts from the moment of its first affirmation throughout the story of all human life. I suppose the reason of this is that things affirmed without proof repose upon general experience, and have, converging to support them from every side, a great body of
