The said hall stood in a secluded situation, deeply embowered. On three sides it was surrounded by a park, on the fourth by meadows, edged by the river. Close by, on one side of the house, was a thick grove of lofty trees, along the verge of which runs one of the principal avenues to it through the park. It is an irregular building of great antiquity, probably erected about the termination of feudal warfare, when defence became no longer to be an object in a country mansion. Many circumstances in the interior of the house, however, seemed appropriate to feudal times. The hall is very spacious, floored with stones and lighted by large transoms that are closed with casements. Its walls are hung with old military accoutrements, that have long been left a prey to the rust. At one end of the hall is a range of coats of mail and helmets, and there is on every side abundance of old-fashioned pistols and guns, many of them with matchlocks. Immediately below the cornice hangs a row of leathern jerkins, made in the form of a shirt, supposed to have been worn as armour by the vassals. A large oak table, reaching nearly from one end of the room to the other, might have feasted the whole neighbourhood, and an appendage to one end of it made it answer, at other times, for the old game of shuffle-board. The rest of the furniture is in a suitable style, particularly an aged chair of curious workmanship, an old carved chest, a grave-looking old ebony cabinet inlaid with precious stones, while the walls were hung with noble pieces of tapestry, representing the hunting of Diana, and other strange subjects of sylvan classicality. The entrance into the hall was by a lofty porch, but there was a winding stair at one side of it, that led from the front door to a quadrangle within. At the other it opened into a gloomy staircase, by which you ascended to the first-floor, and, passing the doors of some bed-chambers, entered a narrow gallery, which extends along the back part of the house from one end to the other, and looks upon an old garden, with high walls all round it, and having niches for medallions, in which the busts of the twelve Cæsars appear in all their naked-necked and unadorned beauty. The gallery is hung with portraits, chiefly in the Spanish dresses of the sixteenth century. In one of the bed-chambers, which you pass in going towards the gallery, is a bedstead hung with blue furniture, which time has now made dingy and thread-bare. The other bed-rooms sympathise with this, and the whole brought back to me the glory of former days.