On the other side, between Lymington and Southampton Water, extends to the Solent a heathy projection of the New Forest, not so much known to strangers as it deserves. The centre of interest here is the ruined Beaulieu Abbey, from the materials of which Henry VIII. is said to have built Hurst Castle, while its foundation is the one good deed recorded of King John, and that wrung out of him with as much pain as was Magna Charta. The legend goes that this graceless king, bearing a grudge against the Cistercian Order, had persuaded or compelled its abbots to attend a parliament at Lincoln, where he threatened to fling them under the feet of wild horses. But at night he was terrified by a dream: brought to trial before a nameless judge, with the churchmen he had menaced for witnesses against him, he found himself condemned to a severe scourging at their hands, like his father’s chastisement for the death of Thomas à Becket. And lo! when he awoke, the lashes had left no visionary smart. So he saw wise to make expiation for the sacrilege he had meditated; then his repentance took the established form of building and endowing a Cistercian Abbey at Beaulieu. The remains still make a hoary show by the Beaulieu River, further down which Buckler’s Hard was once a building place of men-of-war; and at the mouth was an old ferry to the Island. There is not much traffic now about this muddy shore, near which, towards Lymington, Sowley Pond takes rank as the largest Hampshire lake. The Solent, here locked in by the Isle of Wight, has the aspect of a great lake in views that Cobbett took to bear out the title _Bellus locus_, vernacularly corrupted into _Bewley_. And, as I have given a catalogue of novels dealing with the Island, let me mention an excellent one, Mr A. Marshall’s _Exton Manor_, which clearly has for its scene this edge of the New Forest.