“Fair laughs the morn, and soft the zephyr blows, While proudly riding o’er the azure realm, In gallant trim the gilded vessel goes, Youth on the prow, and pleasure at the helm!” At length, leaping a slight fence, I made my way through a clovered field, and then through a pretty grove, to what was once Blacklow hill. Here is still a sort of cave, which I readily found among the hazels; and on the eminence above it, rises a strongly built and severe looking monument, surmounted by a cross of solid proportions, the whole singularly adapted to the place and purpose. It is a work of late years, and the happy thought of the proprietor of Guy’s Cliff. There was something stirring, too, in reading, in the loneliness of that morning hour, the following inscription on the face of the monument, viz:—“_In the hollow of this rock was beheaded, July 1, 1312, by barons lawless as himself, Piers Gaveson, Earl of Cornewall, the minion of a hateful king, and in life and death a memorable instance of misrule._” What a picture of the ferocious past was conjured up by that expression—“beheaded by barons as lawless as himself.” The sweet Avon was flowing through the meads below; there gleamed the feudal towers of Warwick, in the glowing sunrise; and just so it was, that July morning, five hundred years ago, when this rock rang with oaths and curses, the barkings of that fierce Guy de Beauchamp, whom Gaveson had called “the black hound of Arden.” That insult was here avenged in blood; but it only served to fire the thirst of the regicide. Those features upturned to heaven, in the choir of Gloucester, and those imploring hands of poor King Edward, came back, in thought, once more. Pictures have made my readers familiar with the scenery of Guy’s Cliff. There it stands, on the Avon—in unpretending beauty, ivied up to its chimnies, here an oriel, and there a turret, the very ideal of a fair lady’s bower, and one of the goodliest of “the merry homes of England.” There is a mill over against it, where I stood and admired its quiet romance, in the glory of that summer morning, as the gilding of the sunlight lay on the cold gray of its towers. At the mill, the farmer-lads were washing sheep, and as they plunged in the fleecy ewes, and soused them over and over again, in the sparkling waters of the Avon, I thought an artist would ask no fairer study, for his pencil, than the scene before me. I confess I could not safely look on it without repeating the _Tenth Commandment_, and I quite deposed my project of renting the Gate-house of Kenilworth, in thinking how much better I should like Guy’s Cliff for my habitation.