Leland tells how the house of Melbury Park was built in the sixteenth century by Sir Giles Strangways, but portions of the great T-shaped building have at later times been added, notably the wing built in the time of Queen Anne. The whole heterogeneous pile, dominated by a church-like, six-sided central tower, occupies a raised grassy site looking upon a lake on whose opposite shore is the little manorial church of Melbury Sampford, plentifully stored with monuments of Strangways and Fox-Strangways, and in especial notable for that to the courtly and equable husband of Betty Dornell. His epitaph, by the hand of his widow, describes him as the most desirable of husbands.

Near this stone is interred
Stephen, Earl of Ilchester,
who died at Melbury
Sept. 26, A.D. MDCCLXXVI., aged LXXII.
He was the eighth son of Sir Stephen Fox, knight.
He married Elizabeth, only daughter of Thomas Horner,
of Mells, in the county of Somerset, esquire,
heiress-general to the family of
Strangways of Melbury, in the county of Dorset,
by whom he had Henry Thomas, his eldest son,
now Earl of Ilchester
(who succeeds him in honours and estate)
and a numerous offspring.
As a small token of her great affection
to the best of husbands, fathers, friends,
his disconsolate widow inscribes this marble,

Sacred to his memory.

Hush’d be the voice of bards who heroes praise,
And high o’er glory’s sun their pæans raise;
And let an artless Muse a friend review,
Whose tranquil Life one blameless tenour knew,
By Nature form’d to please, of happiest mien,
Just, friendly, chearful, affable, serene;
Engaging Manners, cultivated Mind,
Adorn’d by Letters and in Courts refin’d,
His blooming honours long approv’d he bore,
And added lustre to that gem he wore;
Grac’d with all pow’rs to shine, he left parade,
And unambitious lov’d the sylvan shade;
The choice by Heav’n applauded stood confess’d
And all his Days with all its blessing bless’d;
Living belov’d, lamented in his end,
Unfading Bliss his mortal change attend.

At the other extremity of the park is the small and secluded village of Melbury Osmund, the “Little Hintock” of The Woodlanders, “one of those sequestered spots outside the gates of the world, where may usually be found more meditation than action, and more listlessness than meditation.” It lies among vast hills and profound hollows, whose huge convexities and corresponding concavities render this a district to be more comfortably ridden by the horseman than walked, and one to be explored by the cyclist only with great and exhausting labour.

By perspiring perseverance, however, Yeovil and Somerset, or, speaking by the card, “Ivell” and “Outer Wessex” may be reached at last, by way of the strangely-entitled village of Ryme Intrinsica, whose name, so spelled on the map, is, with considerable incertitude both as to spelling and meaning, said to be properly written “Entrenseca” or “Entrensicca.” Local theories, disregarding altogether the inexplicable “Ryme,” and expending themselves upon the preposterous Latinity of the second part of the name, have come to some sort of agreement that it denotes a dry place on a ridge placed between two watered vales; and those curious enough to look for it on a large-scale map will perceive readily enough that, whatever the comparative dryness of the ridge it does occupy, it is certainly so flanked by the low-lying lands in which flow two tributaries of the river Yeo.

Hutchins, the county historian, on the other hand, gives a wholly different explanation of the name. Spelling the “Intrinseca” with an “e,” instead of the final “i,” he says it is so called, Ryme Intrinseca, or “In Ryme,” in contradistinction to an outlying portion of the old manor, away down in the parish of Long Bredy, and styled Ryme Extrinsecus, or “Out Ryme.”

At any rate, Ryme Intrinsica looks scarcely the place to be dolled out in so classical a style. It is too Saxon, too rustic and homespun in all its circumstances of thatch, rickyards, dairies, and pigsties; and its little church is not in any way corroborative of this dignity.

Yeovil, whose name has so bucolic a sound that it would seem to be, above all other places, the home most suitable for yeomen, is the “Ivell” of the Wessex novels, but finds only scattered allusions in them, and touches far from intimate. Cope, the curate, who in the story For Conscience’ Sake married the conscience-smitten Millborne’s daughter when at last the father effaced himself, was curate at Ivell; and it was at the “Castle” inn of the same town that the brothers Halborough called for their drunken father, in the harrowing embarrassments of A Tragedy of two Ambitions, but those are the nearest approaches to be discovered.

CHAPTER XVII

SHERBORNE

Much remains in pleasant Sherborne to tell of that time when it was a cathedral city, and when, after it had lost that high dignity, it was of scarce less importance as the home of a powerful Abbey. It was the pleasing, well-watered and sheltered situation, in the vale where the little Yeo or Ivel runs—the stream which, passing through Yeovil, gives that town its name—that first attracted the religious in A.D. 705, the time of that now misty and vague monarch, King Ina. The Yeo had not yet obtained that name, and was merely spoken of in descriptive and admiratory phrase as the Seir burne, an Anglo-Saxon description for a bright and clear brook which has crystallised here and at several other places in the country, into a place-name. Even in the City of London there is a Sherborne Lane, where no stream now flows, the successor, however, of a pleasant lane, where in Anglo-Saxon times a tributary of the Wall Brook flowed.