Gone they all are,
Cymry and Roman, Saxon and Norman; and upon the ruins of their
accumulated labour we stand here. Each of them had his use,--planted
a few more trees or cleared a few more, tilled a fresh scrap of down,
organized a scrap more of chaos. Who dare wish the tide of
improvement, which has been flowing for nineteen centuries, swifter
and swifter still as it goes on, to stop, just because it is not
convenient to us just now to move on? It will not take another
nineteen hundred years, be sure, to make even this lovely nook as
superior to what it is now as it is now to the little knot of fishing
huts where naked Britons peeped out, trembling at the iron tramp of
each insolent legionary from the camp above. It will not take
another nineteen hundred years to develope the capabilities of this
place,--to make it the finest fishery in England, next to Torbay,--
the only safe harbour of refuge for West Indiamen, along sixty miles
of ruthless coast,--and a commercial centre for a vast tract of half-
tilled land within, which only requires means of conveyance to be as
fertile and valuable as nine-tenths of England.
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