The terraced gardens, with their shades, and balusters, and steps, and walks, and portals, are in keeping with all the rest, and the tale of the Lady Dorothea Vernon, and of her mysterious elopement, is enough to fill them with the charm of romance. From one of the towers you look down upon the whole range of roofs and courts, and then gaze far away over a beautiful view of the vale of Haddon. Before you depart you are shown some ancient utensils belonging to the place, such as jack-boots, and match-locks, and doublets. These are kept in the apartment of my reverend brother, the domestic chaplain, whoever he may have been; but whether he had any use for such things I cannot bear testimony. The adjoining chapel in which he officiated is very small, and quite plain. The ancient piscina, beside the altar, tells its simple story of the rites which, according to the mediæval liturgy of England, hallowed it of yore. It conjured up before my fancy the midnight mass of Christmas, as described by Scott— “That night alone, of all the year, Saw the stoled priest the chalice rear.” It was, at any rate, no Tridentine Eucharist, though it was a mutilated one; and sad as were the scenes of debauchery with which those solemnities are associated, I could not but trust that, even here, Christ crucified had been truly worshipped, of old, on the solemn feast of his Nativity, and on many other occasions of Christian joy or penitence. Who would not cling to such communion with ancient piety? And yet this natural sympathy, when morbidly developed, has done more than all things else together, to bewitch the imaginative with Romanism, and to make them slavish captives to a Church which has retained nothing mediæval except that newfangled creed, to which the departed spirit of Mediæevalism has bequeathed none of its poetry, and which only exists as the inanimate slough of its superstition.