Many little bays and creeks, gaunt or fantastically beautiful, rock-walled or tree-girded, indent the Western Peninsula of Cornwall. One of the best known of these bears the lovely name of Lamorna Cove. Like most of the other bays, it is approached from the road by a long ravine, but unlike the larger number of the others, this valley winds through ferny, primrosy woods, a clear stream singing its way through the thicket and turning more than one mossy old water-wheel. So beautiful is this vale of Lamorna that nature-lovers have chosen it for their homes. At the top of the valley runs the bus-road from Penzance to Lands End.

At the time of which I am writing, which was soon after the close of the first World-war, that is, about a quarter of a century ago, Lamorna was the home of small colony of artists and writers, among whom was Crosbie Garstin, with whom I then came in contact. He wrote poetry, contributed to Punch and other papers, and had brought out two or three novels, the best known of which bears the title of 'The Owl's House', This is an exciting romance of a previous generation, the scene of which is this very neighbourhood of Lamorna.

My wife had known Crosbie from the time he was a little boy, and she was an old friend and pupil of his father, Norman Garstin, a painter and teacher of painting, a kindly, broad-minded man if ever there was one. We went to stay for a week or so at Lamorna and met Crosbie who had recently gone there to live. He introduced us to some neighbours of his, including Mrs. Henry Sidgwick the novelist. Crosbie was a well-equipped raconteur and told us many racy stories.

When we had finished our holiday at Lamorna, and had returned to our Polruan home, I exchanged several letters with Garstin. This correspondence continued for a few years. On one occasion he sent me a Rondeau, asking me for my opinion of it. This old form of verse he used very rarely. Generally his poems were of the breezy sea-shantie style, or had for their theme his own wild adventures in strange corners of the Dark Continent. These verses seemed sometimes to reel and roll along in a rather rollicking and roysterous Kiplingesque way. In his letter he requested me to send him a Rondeau, if I happened to have written one. He told me he had just been visiting Austin Dobson in London, quite an old man then, and had discussed with that Provencal-verse-specialist the suitability of such measures for English ears and taste.. He got Dobson to copy out an old Rondeau of his, "which", wrote Garstin, "I shall prize as long as I live."

I will venture to transcribe here the three Rondeaux concerned in this incident, Garstin's, Dobson's and my own. First then I will copy out Crosbie's own poem, so different from his usual manner of writing, and so Cornish!

Next I will quote Austin Dobson's very characteristic Rondeau.

In the company of the above my own Rondeau must be termed an audacious attempt. Here it is, however!

How delightful the land of Provence, in the middle ages seemed then to me, ignorant, doubtless, as I was of its real characteristics, and looking longingly back through the distorting and obscuring mists of time! For more than five hundred years Troubadours and Jongleurs wandered gaily through that and other countries, singing their intricately constructed, but beautifully worded songs, often composed by themselves, sometimes avowedly in an impromptu way. I wanted to know more about these vagrant minstrels after our little Rondeau competition, and resolved to write to Austin Dobson for further news of that strange, far away and so beautiful country of Music and Poetry. I had for long heard rumours of its romantic melodies, and had, as I have already shown, attempted a few imitations of its seemingly fettered so straitly, but generally surpassingly beautiful minstrelsy.
Dobson apparently did not mind being questioned, and kindly wrote to me, in reply to my request, more than one letter upon this subject, on which he was, indeed, an authority. Among other things he wrote these words.
"I hardly dare open the door for you of the old Provencal Aviary of singing birds lest you be deafened by a veritable tempest of music and rush of escaping minstrel-wings, fairy-poets together expressing their ecstasy with the sweetest music that ever found utterance in Earth."
I remembered that Jean Ingelow had written about the singing of 'crowds of larks,' and it began to dawn upon me, while reading Dobson's letter, that she must have been thinking of similar Troubadour sonsters to those that Dobson told me so enthusiastically about. Moreover, he said that he whom he called, no 'Saint', but 'Little Brother' Francis of Assisi was in reality a member of that same joyous Brotherhood, and even often called himself "God's Jongleur".

How I then longed, and still long to be like Francis, free of "the land of the nightingale and the rose"! Well, I suppose there are no real barriers to that joy, no angels with flaming swords keeping the gates of that Paradise! It is open to all who have the will and the courage to go boldly up to the door, open it, and pass into the Land of Spiritual Provence.

I enquired of Dobson specially about the Rondeau, as it was our friendly rivalry in that form of verse that had re-awakened my interest in the whole subject of the Troubadour minstrelsy of Southern France hundreds of years ago. I told him, I remember, that I was ignorant of the differences between the Rondel and the Roundel, and the Rondeau. He told me, "They are one and the same. The three terms are forms of one word, though some moderns prefer to mark a subtle difference between them; but they have little ground for such an opinion."

The Rondeau is only one of many forms in which the gay Provencal spirit manifested itself. There are a number of varieties of Ballades, built up of all sorts of line lengths, but having an invariable arrangement of stanzas and the inevitable envoy at the close of each. Chants Royal, with intricate dance of Rhymes, and generally longer and many more lines than the Ballades, and a five-lined Envoy to finish with. Then there is the beautiful Sestina, with its graceful refrains and clever system of rhyming. The Villanelle, full of sweetness and simplicity, originally was a Shepherd's Song as he tended his sheep. Dobson informed me that a French authority had declared that the Villanelle is "the most ravishing jewel worn by the Muse Erato." A good one is very difficult to create, for its rules are very strict and complicated, and above all, it must, when finished, read easily and appear to have been sung spontaneously.

Many other forms of Provencal verse might be mentioned, but I must introduce to any possible reader that tiny Fairy of song, the Triolet, so strictly observing rules, but so sweetly simple, a very Daisy of melody. To the ignorant nothing seems easier to produce than this perfect flower, but like all things simple, it is hard, indeed, to make a Triolet.

But the forms in which that happy Spirit of Provence made itself heard and seen most frequently were the Rondel, Roundel and Rondeau, these three being only one, as Dobson told me. He gave me permission to use his own translation of a famous French Rondeau as a specimen embodying all the features of this delightful kind of verse.

Well enough of these exotic flowers! Perhaps one can spend too much time in the hot-house, inhaling the perfume of such metrical and verbal orchids.
To return to Garstin; He gave me good advice as to the publication of a story of mine, the same that Lauremce Housman wrote an Introduction to, and which was one of the causes which led to my own introduction to my then neighbour, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch.
Cosbie Garstin married, and after a few years met his death in a boating accident at Salcombe. He had kept his boyish, adventurous spirit to the end.