Shortly after emerging from the wood, and crossing the smooth greensward of the park where open to the sunshine, the house itself comes in view, a noble mansion, worthy alike of the domain and of the owner. That it is not the original Lathom House--the Lathom which belongs not more to the history of Lancashire than to the annals of English courage and to the biography of great-souled women, scarcely needs saying. The original,--the magnificent building honoured by the visit of Henry VII. and his queen, when the "singing women" walked in front,--which had no fewer than eighteen towers, in addition to the lofty "eagle," and a fosse of eight yards in width, received so much injury at the time of the siege that on the removal of the family, shortly afterwards, to Knowsley, it soon fell into a state of utter dilapidation. Passing into the hands of the Bootle family, restoration was found impracticable, and during the ten years following 1724 the present building superseded the historic one. Nothing in its style can be finer than the north front, one hundred and fifty-six feet long, rising from a massive rustic basement, with double flight of steps to the first story, the lateral portions supported by Ionic columns. The interior corresponds; the great hall being forty feet square, with a height of thirty feet; the saloon, of almost similar dimensions, and the library fifty feet by twenty. When given over to decay, the original hall was literally carried off stone by stone, the country people in the vicinity being permitted to take whatever they liked for private use, so that now, as has happened with many an ancient abbey and castle, the building may be said to be diffused over the whole district. In farmyard and cottage walls it is not difficult to identify now and then, on a very fair basis of conjecture, a fragment or two of the ancestral home of the Stanleys, every atom suggestive, as we contemplate it, of ancient dignity and heroism almost unique.