Sabine Baring-Gould

“Cornwall, peopled mainly by Celts, but with an infusion of English blood, stands and always has stood apart from the rest of England, much, but in a less degree, as has Wales.”

“I have wandered over Europe, have rambled to Iceland, climbed the Alps, been for some years lodged among the marshes of Essex - yet nothing that I have seen has quenched in me the longing after the fresh air, and love of the wild scenery, of Dartmoor.”

“A residence of many years in Yorkshire, and an inveterate habit of collecting all kinds of odd and out-of-the-way information concerning men and matters, furnished me, when I left Yorkshire in 1872, with a large amount of material, collected in that county, relating to its eccentric children.”

“Brittany can hardly claim the attention of the tourist as a superlatively beautiful country. The way in which trees are clipped and tortured out of shape disfigures the sylvan landscape; and of mountain scenery, there is none.”

“Black was not the universal hue of mourning in Europe. In Castile, white obtained on the death of its princes.”

“The whole of society is like a cabbage-stalk covered with caterpillars, and none is satisfied till it has crawled to the top.”

“Incontestably, the great centres of population in the primeval ages were the chalklands, and next to them those of limestone. The chalk first, for it furnished man with flints, and the limestone next when he had learned to barter.”

“In the beginning, before the creation of Heaven and Earth, God made the angels; free intelligences and free wills; out of His love He made them, that they might be eternally happy. And that their happiness might be complete, He gave them the perfection of a created nature; that is, He gave them freedom.”

“Man, double-faced by nature, is placed by Revelation under a sharp, precise external rule, controlling his actions and his thoughts.”

“In the depths of the moor, the peat may be seen riven like floes of ice, and the rifts are sometimes twelve to fourteen feet deep, cut through black vegetable matter, the product of decay of plants through countless generations.”

“The fold is that place where He keeps His flock shut behind the hurdles of the Ten Commandments. Every now and then, a sheep leaps one of these hurdles or pushes his way between them and runs away into forbidden pastures. Then the Good Shepherd goes after the erring sheep and brings it back.”

“I look back with the greatest pleasure to the kindness and hospitality I met with in Yorkshire, where I spent some of the happiest years of my life.”

“We are accustomed in England to chalk in rolling downs, except where bitten into by the sea, but elsewhere it is riven and presents cliffs, and these cliffs are not at all like that of Shakespeare at Dover but overhang, where hard beds alternate with others that are friable.”

“In France, successive waves of Gaul, Visigoth, and Frank have swept over the land and have dominated it. But the fair hair and blue eyes and the clear skin of the conquering races have been submerged by the rising and overflow of the dusky blood of the original population.”

“In art, S. Bridget is usually represented with her perpetual flame as a symbol, sometimes with a column of fire, said to have been seen above her head when she took the veil.”

“Connected with the fall of Satan is his lameness. The devil is represented in art and in legion as limping on one foot; this was occasioned by his having broken his leg in his fall.”

“On many accounts, Cornwall may be regarded as one of the most interesting counties of England, whether we regard it for its coast scenery, its products, or its antiquities.”

“The martyrologies are catalogues in which are to be found the names of the saints with the days and places of their deaths and, generally, with the distinctive character of their sanctity and with an historic summary of their lives.”

“English churchmen have long gazed with love on the primitive church as the ideal of Christian perfection, the Eden wherein the first fathers of their faith walked blameless before God and passionless towards each other.”

“No man need go blindly to destruction, for God has given him guidance and power of seeing whither he goes.”