Page:The Cornwall coast.djvu/351

 TINTAGEL AND BOSCASTLE 345 rude simplicity, appears to bo Saxon, but many orders are represented here, from the late Norman chancel-arch to the Decorated south transept and Perpendicular screen. There is a rugged circular font, and what is supposed to be a Roman milestone. The vestry was formerly a Lady-chapel, possibly Saxon, with a thirteenth-century door and a curious mutilated altar. The south-transept window is to the memory of J. Douglas Cook, founder of the Saturday Review, who returned to his native Cornwall to die. In the churchyard are the graves of drowned seamen, British and foreign. It is a striking and solemnising little church, quite in harmony with a district of myth and sublimity. It is possible that some who come to Tintagel for the first time may be disappointed. If so, they have expected too much, or have expected the wrong thing. There is no gloss of false romance about the place ; the ruins have not the hollow pretentious grandeur of some Norman castles ; what we see is the unadorned, unveiled reality of a majestic coast, the low, stark walls of ruin on an immemorial site, the naked wind-beaten church on the heights, the sea breaking into gaunt caverns below. Sheep feed within the enclosure to which we scramble by a ragged path. Sentiment may resent the hotel and the golfers, but any jarring note can easily be ignored. Yet even Tennyson seems to have been disappointed at first ; afterwards, the spirit of the place sank into him and prevailed. Perhaps old Hawker has described it best, in few pregnant words : — Hark 1 stern Dundagel softens into song. They meet for solemn severance, knight and king, Where gate and bulwark darken o'er the sea."