The Moor mr-4
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Insofar as I can determine, the bones of Ms. Russell's narrative would stand: The Reverend Sabine Baring-Gould was most emphatically a real person, a true and unexpected British eccentric: an academic romancer, a gullible skeptic, a man both cold and passionate. With more sides to his personality than the Kohinoor has facets, he went his brilliant and self-centered way, ruling his family and his Devonshire manor with an air of distracted authority, setting off whenever the fancy struck him out onto Dartmoor, up to London, or over to the Continent. His wife, Grace, must have been a saint of God—although to Baring-Gould's credit, it would appear that he was aware of it.
The mind-boggling scope of his ninety prolific years (150 books, fifty of them fiction) exists for the most part in the dustier reaches of library storage vaults throughout the world, from Were-Wolves and their Natural History to the relatively well known Songs of the West. For those interested in the life of this scion of a pair of illustrious stems, I would recommend, after his two volumes of memoirs (Early Reminiscences and Further Reminiscences, each of which covers thirty years of his life), either of two biographies: William Purcell's Onward Christian Soldier, or Sabine Baring-Gould, by Bickford Dickinson (who was Baring-Gould's grandson and himself rector of Lew Trenchard Church from 1961 to 1967). Further, there is a Sabine Baring-Gould Appreciation Society ( c/o the Hon. Sec. Dr. Roger Bristow, Davidsland, Brendon Hill, Copplestone, Devon EX17 5NX, England) where, for the princely sum of six pounds sterling per annum, one will receive three newsletters and the fellowship of a number of Right-Thinking people. And if the reader wishes to add a dimension to his or her appreciation of Baring-Gould by becoming an auditor, an audiotape comprising a sparkling selection of the Devonshire folk songs collected by Baring-Gould, along with excerpts from his writings and memoirs, may be found through The Wren Trust, 1 St. James Street, Okehampton, Devon, EX20 1DW, England.
As an additional curious note, when another of Sabine Baring-Gould's grandsons, the equally brilliant and multifaceted William Stuart Baring-Gould, came to write his famous biography of Mr. Sherlock Holmes (which he called Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street: A Life of the World's First Consulting Detective), he seems to have turned to his grandfather's Early Reminiscences as a source of raw material from which he might construct Holmes' early childhood (about which, admittedly, nothing whatsoever is actually known). W. S. Baring-Gould changed only the dates; the rest, from the father's injury that discharged him from the Indian Army and his subsequent passion for Continental travel that led to family life in a carriage, the boy's early archaeological passion and his sporadic education, and even the names of the ships on which the families Baring-Gould and Holmes sailed from England, bear a truly remarkable similarity.
***
The Reverend Sabine Baring-Gould died on January 2, 1924, twenty-six days short of his ninetieth birthday, bare weeks after the events described in this book. It pleases me to think that when he left his body, which lies beside Grace's at the feet of Lew Trenchard Church, he did so secure in the knowledge that his beloved moor was safe from the worst torments of the twentieth century. I like to think that he died happy. Most of all, I want to believe that, all rumor to the contrary notwithstanding, he breathed the air of his moor one last time before he died.
—Laurie R. King
Freedom, California
St. Swithin's Day 1997
I'm going, I reckon, full mellow
To lay in the churchyard my head;
So say, God be with you, old fellow,
The last of the singers is dead.
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Document creation date: 17.6.2012
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Laurie R. King
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