Charlecote--famous in association with the early history of William Shakspere--has undergone little change since he who was “for all time” wandered along the thick-hedged lanes. So primitive is the “ancient neighbourhood,” that Fancy may, almost unbidden, call up the old glories of the place,--may hear the voice of Sir Thomas Lucy chiding his keepers for the loss of his fallow-deer, and the half-suppressed “chuckle” of an unnoticed bystander who, thereafter, was to fill the world with his fame. The Mansion seems quite unaltered; the village church precisely as it was at “the Reformation;” the humbler dwellings, of red brick, are only a little older the park palings merely made picturesque by overgrowing lichen; and the Park, as well as the “sweet Avon,” exactly as they were two centuries and a half ago; the one [Illustration] “flowing gently;” the other supplying, as of yore, many-- “An oak, whose boughs are moss’d with age, And high top bald with dry antiquity;” while the same deer--“dappled fools”--only look more conscious than they did, of assured safety in “their assigned and native dwelling place.” Art and Nature seem both to have stopped short of all “improvement;” there has been no need of the one to disturb the renown which the locality receives from the other; even the “stocks” that stand under a group of “Patrician trees” at Hampton Lucy, are suffered to die of natural decay; and it is as certain that the “bonny sweet Robin,” whose song we heard from the hawthorn in the churchyard is the progeny of him who sung there when Elizabeth was queen, as that the lord of the mansion is the descendant of that very Sir Thomas Lucy who sat in judgment upon the youth who “obscur’d his contemplation Under the veil of wildness.” This unity of character has been most carefully preserved in the new buildings erected on the estate, of which the annexed wood-cut will afford evidence. [Illustration] It is difficult to descend to simple facts while describing a neighbourhood so suggestive of thought--so redolent of fancy. The Lucys, who occupy to-day the manor in which they lived three hundred years ago--“good old English gentlemen” of the present, as of the olden time--have inherited, without break, from father to son; adding little to their hereditary property, and losing no part of it by carelessness, profusion, or vice; generally, they seem to have been peaceable and liberal manorial lords, studious to make their tenantry prosperous and their dependants comfortable; dwelling apart from the bustle of action, and the stir of contentious life, even rumours of “oppression and deceit” seem rarely to have reached them; “exempt from public haunt,” they passed their days happily and slept together--a long line of kindly, if not great, men--under the roof tree of the little church where monuments loftier than their own ambitions have been raised to perpetuate their names.[59]