Partly because of discord between him and the Venner family, partly because of the strong feeling which was aroused locally by the action of de Wichehalse, who had the body of a rebel who was shot in Bonham Wood quartered and hung on the paled gate opposite Lee, he left Lynton and went to live in London. The simple Devonshire estates could not support the expenses of living in London; bit after bit his property was mortgaged and frittered away, and when he died he possessed East Leymouth (now Lynmouth) only, which he left to his daughter Mary. She it was who became the heroine of all the stories of the "last of the de Wichehalses," which, indeed, she was. She met a sudden and unexplained death off Duty Point, and the White Lady of Castle Rock--a phenomenon caused by a small aperture, bearing a slight resemblance to a woman's figure, among the dark masses of the rock--is popularly supposed to be connected with her fate. Of her brothers, Charles, the younger, was killed at the Battle of Almanza in 1707, when the English, under Lord Galway, lost 18,000 men and all their transport, and the elder brother, John, died at Port Mahon, in Minorca, in 1721, while on garrison duty, and this branch of the family became extinct.
And this is positively all the history of Lynton, until, in the time of the French Revolution, when the turbulent state of the Continent made it inadvisable to spend a holiday abroad, its beauty was discovered by those eager to find in England that enjoyment of the picturesque which before they had looked for in Italy and Southern France. We use "picturesque" now in a slightly derogatory sense, or we use it patronizingly, because it is old-fashioned and belongs to the nineteenth century, and Ruskin and Wordsworth, and even Horace Walpole and his "Gothic" ruin on Strawberry Hill; and we are of the twentieth century, and have discovered the beauty of docks and harbours and tall factory chimneys and railway stations, under the guidance of Whistler and Brangwyn and such folk, and we do not fret at laying a railway through Perthshire or the Lake District, because railways are fast becoming almost as romantic and old-fashioned to us as stage-coaches (in these days of aeroplanes and automobiles); but at least let us remember that it is to the nineteenth century that we owe that acute appreciation, not only of the visible beauty of the world, but of the spirit that lies behind it, that personal and intimate character of places which is one of our dear possessions. Mountains and woods, cliff and cove, have become to us a truism of beauty, but let us at least be grateful to the generation which first dared to see more in the boundless Scotch hills and moors than "savage and disgusting country," or to compare the pinnacles of the Alps to human handiwork--greatly to their disadvantage. And the small absurdities, the "ruins" that they loved, the "abbeys" they erected, were only part of that general half-conscious striving to apprehend and express the spirit of romance with which we are still moved in our own day, which Kipling expresses in his own fashion and Conrad in his, down to the small-change of literature which struggles for expression in our magazines and periodicals.