Charles Kingsley
The most distinguished of the many Devonshire men of letters is Coleridge, poet and dreamer, philosopher and critic, who was born at Ottery St Mary in 1772. That, however, was his sole connection with the county. It was chiefly during his three years' residence at Nether Stowey, in Somerset, that the finest of his few masterpieces, especially the Ancient Mariner and part of Christabel, were written. Amongst other authors who were born in Devon may be named Gay, writer of plays, fables, and songs, among them the Beggars' Opera and Black-eyed Susan; Ford the dramatist; William Browne, the author of Britannia's Pastorals; Kitto, the deaf compiler of Biblical literature; Merivale the Roman historian; Rowe and Risdon, each of whom wrote books on the county; and Froude the historian, author of many books, and especially of the History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Defeat of the Spanish Armada.
Herrick was not Devonshire born, but it was while he was vicar of Dean Prior, between 1647 and 1674, that he wrote the Hesperides, among which are some of the best lyrics in the language. Dryden, again, was a frequent visitor at Lord Clifford's seat at Ugbrooke, and there is a tradition that he there finished his translation of Virgil. It was at Lynton that Shelley wrote part of Queen Mab. Keats finished Endymion at Teignmouth. Tennyson was often a guest of Froude at Salcombe, and it is said that he had Salcombe Bar in mind when he wrote his last verses, Crossing the Bar.
Distinguished in other ways may be mentioned Blundell, the Tiverton cloth-merchant, who, dying in 1601, left money for the establishment of Blundell's School; Bodley, born at Exeter in 1545, founder of the Bodleian Library at Oxford; John Baring, founder of the great banking-house of Baring Brothers; Babbage, the inventor of the calculating machine; Bidder, the "Calculating Boy," son of a stone-mason of Moreton Hampstead; Cookworthy, the originator of Plymouth china; and Newcomen, a Dartmouth ironmonger, whose improvement on the atmospheric steam-engine of Savery, also a Devonshire man, was used early in the eighteenth century for pumping water out of mines.
Blundell's School, Tiverton
Devonshire has been specially remarkable for its artists, of whom the most distinguished were Sir Joshua Reynolds, the great portrait-painter, born at Plympton in 1723; Cosway, who painted exquisite miniatures; Samuel Prout, the famous architectural painter, and Skinner Prout his nephew; Eastlake, the great painter of figures, and the author of books on art; and Hilliard the goldsmith of Queen Elizabeth.