"The supernatural occurrence forming the groundwork of one of the ballads which I have made the harbinger of doom to the house of Rookwood, is ascribed by popular superstition to a family resident in Sussex, upon whose estate the fatal tree (a gigantic lime, with mighty arms and huge girth of trunk, as described in the song) is still carefully preserved. Cuckfield Place, to which this singular piece of timber is attached, is, I may state for the benefit of the curious, the real Rookwood Hall; for I have not drawn upon imagination, but upon memory in describing the seat and domains of that fated family. The general features of the venerable structure, several of its chambers, the old garden, and, in particular, the noble park, with its spreading prospects, its picturesque views of the hall, 'like bits of Mrs. Radcliffe' (as the poet Shelley once observed of the same scene), its deep glades, through which the deer come lightly tripping down, its uplands, slopes, brooks, brakes, coverts, and groves are carefully delineated." [Illustration: CUCKFIELD PLACE.] "Like Mrs. Radcliffe!" That romance is indeed written in the peculiar convention which obtained with her, with Horace Walpole, with Maturin, and "Monk" Lewis; a convention of Gothic gloom and superstition, delighting in gore and apparitions, responsible for the "Mysteries of Udolpho," "The Italian," "The Monk," and other highly seasoned reading of the early years of the nineteenth century. Ainsworth deliberately modelled his manner upon Mrs. Radcliffe, changing the scenes of his desperate deeds from her favourite Italy to our own land. His pages abound in apparitions, death-watches, highwaymen, "pistols for two and breakfasts for one," daggers, poison-bowls, and burials alive, and, with a little literary ability added to his horribles, his would be a really hair-raising romance. But the blood he ladles out so plentifully is only coloured water; his spectres are only illuminated turnips on broomsticks; his verses so deplorable, his witticisms so hobnailed that even schoolboys refuse any longer to be thrilled. He "wants to make yer blood run cold," but he not infrequently raises a hearty laugh instead. It would be impossible to burlesque "Rookwood"; it burlesques itself, and shall be allowed to do so here, from the point where Alan Rookwood visits the family vault, to his tragic end: [Illustration: THE CLOCK-TOWER AND HAUNTED AVENUE, CUCKFIELD PLACE.] [Illustration: HARRISON AINSWORTH. _From the Fraser portrait._] "He then walked beneath the shadow of one of the yews, chanting an odd stanza or so of one of his wild staves, wrapped the while, it would seem, in affectionate contemplation of the subject-matter of his song: THE CHURCHYARD YEW. '----Metuendaque succo Taxus.'