Preconceived ideas are, when not realised, apt to disturb one’s peace of mind, and so it happened that we, who had conjured up a mental picture of Exeter, had indeed imagined a vain thing: the reality came upon us with something of a rude shock. Used to the more familiar type of cathedral city, dreamy old places where the atmosphere of the Minster is all-pervading, and where the Bishop, the Dean and Chapter, and their doings hold the foremost rank in men’s minds and talk, we were not prepared to come upon so busy a place as Exeter, where the ecclesiastical element is only one among many and is not pre-eminent.

There is, indeed, no holy calm in the “Queen City of the West:” the tramway bell is familiar in its streets, and from end to end of the main thoroughfares tall telegraph poles lend an American air to the view.

But Exeter, although entirely different from one’s dreams, is extremely interesting and picturesque: its slums are the dirtiest, and their smells the vilest of any out of London, and the ancient rotten tenements the most tottering of any I have seen.

Yet there be those who like not mention of the place. These are evil-doers, for whose benefit the Assizes are holden at the picturesque fifteenth century Guildhall, so conspicuous an object in the busy High Street. There is a fine old highly coloured character in English history, Richard III. to wit (who, if history speaks truly, fully deserved a place amongst the malefactors of his age), who had, according to Shakespeare, no occasion to love Exeter. The incident may be read in Richard III., Act iv., Scene 2:—

No man who writes upon Exeter, even if he only writes as superficially as I do here, can be expected to forego this quotation—the expectation would be too much for endurance: indeed, there are virtues of omission in this book which might gain me the tolerance of that chivalric myth, the “gentle reader,” for this one small sin of hackneying the hackneyed once more. I take it, for instance, as a generous forbearance on my part, that I did not quote at Winchester that oft-quoted epitaph on Izaak Walton, although I hold it charming.

Among the first things we did at Exeter was to inquire (for we know our Shakespeare well) for Rougemont Castle. But, as the first passer-by whom we button-holed declared, with a glorious west-country confusion of pronouns, that he “had never heard of he,” so also did every other person at whom we directed our inquiries protest his or her ignorance of such a place, saving, indeed, one who directed us to what proved to be the Rougemont Hotel, “a large red building” indeed, but not the one we wished. Others had all the same tale to tell, ancient inhabitants equally with the “strangers in these parts,” so we wavered between a consciousness of absurdity and a feeling of indignation against the unlettered strata into which we had penetrated, until, by good fortune, we encountered a bookish “commercial,” to whom the place was known under its old-time name equally well with its modern appellation of Northernhay.

Northernhay is a public garden, set about with statues of local celebrities, and with one whose original was of imperial fame—Sir Stafford Northcote, Earl of Iddesleigh. It was the site of that stronghold, Rougemont Castle, whose poor remains are now enclosed in private grounds. The gardens stand on a considerable height, and overlook, through the trees, the Queen Street Station of the South-Western Railway. All day long, and all the night, the snorting of engines and their shrill whistles, the metallic crash of carriage buffers, and the thunderous impacts of railway trucks are heard. Behind the station the eye rests upon the county gaol and the military barracks. Exeter has all the appliances of civilisation, I promise you.

It is a relief to turn from here and from the thronging streets to the quietude of the Cathedral precincts, shadowed by tall trees and green with lawns.

Externally, the Cathedral is of the grimiest and sootiest aspect—black but comely. Not even the blackest corners of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London show a deeper hue than the west front of St. Peter’s at Exeter. The battered, time-worn army of effigies—kings, saints, crusaders, bishops—that range along the screen in mutilated array under the great west window of Bishop Grandison’s, are black too, and so are the obscene gargoyles that gibber and glare with stony eyes down upon you from the ridges and string-courses of the transepts, where they abide ever in an enduring crepuscule. The sonorous note of the Great Peter bell, sounding from the south transept tower, is in admirable keeping with the black-browed gravity of the close.

But within the Cathedral it is quite another matter. Few of our great minsters are so graceful, so airy and well lighted, as the interior of Exeter Cathedral. The great windows of the aisles shed a flood of light upon the clustered columns of warm-coloured stone that bear aloft the elaborately carved vaulting of the nave, and the clerestory windows, high up in the walls, illuminate the springing of the arches and the carven corbels of the vaulting shafts. Exeter Cathedral windows are the triumph of Geometrical Decorated work. North and south, those windows run the length of the building in pairs, each pair of different design.

One of the quaintest of Exeter’s many churches is that of Saint Mary Steps, by the site of the old West Gate, with its clock face and three ancient figures nodding the hours and striking the quarters upon bells. The central figure represents Henry VIII., but is traditionally known as Matty the Miller.