Those who love the picturesque will excuse our halting to sketch an episode from the history of the royal forest of Ashdown, in Sussex, once possessed by John of Gaunt, and hence called "Lancaster great Park." Upon the borders of the forest lies the manor of Brambertie of Domesday, and Brambletye of Horace Smith; the home of the Comptons, and in the tale of fiction, as in fact, dismantled by Parliament troopers, and within two centuries a ruin. Richard Lewknor is the first person described as of Brambletye. He most probably built in one of the forest glens the moated mansion known as "Old Brambletye House," which, with its gables and clustered chimneys, and its moat and drawbridge, long remained an interesting specimen of the fortified manor-house of the reign of Henry VII. We remember the old place, some sixty years since, but it has long been taken down. Towards the middle of the seventeenth century, Brambletye came into the possession of the Comptons, an ancient Roman Catholic family; and here Sir Henry Compton built himself, from an Italian design, another Brambletye House, of the white stone of the country. Over the principal entrance to the mansion were sculptured the coat-armour of Compton, with the arms of Spencer, in a shield, on the dexter side: and on the upper story was cut in stone, C. H. M. 1631. This fixes the period when the house was built; and when Sir Henry Compton, who had before inhabited the old moated house in the neighbourhood, abandoned it to take up his residence in this once elegant and substantial baronial mansion.