AUTHORITIES:--M. Paris.--Grafton.--Harding.--Holinshed.--Speed.--Camden.--Archæologia.--Newcome.--Clutterbuck.--Topography of Great Britain.--Guide to St. Albans Abbey.--St. Augustine.--Radcliffe’s St. Albans Abbey.--Holcroft’s Margaret of Anjou.--Memoir of Lord Bacon.--Blome’s Britannia.--Weever.--Willis.--Tyrrell.--Burnet.--Dugdale.--Visit to St. Albans, January 1842, MS. Notes by an Artist, MS. The Society of Antiquaries has published very splendid illustrative plans, elevations, and sections of the Abbey Church of St. Albans. [Illustration: HALL OF ELTHAM PALACE. A.D. 1365. LONDON. GEORGE VIRTUE.] [Illustration: INTERIOR OF ELTHAM HALL. MDCCCXLII.] ELTHAM PALACE, <g>Kent</g>. Qui, dans ces temps affreux de discorde et d’alarmes Vit les grands coups de lance et les nobles faits d’armes De nos preux chevaliers, des “Bayards,” des Henris; Aujourd’hui la moisson flotte sur ses débris! Ces débris, cette triste et mâle architecture Qu’environné une fraiche et riante verdure. The royal palace of Eltham is a subject which has often engaged the historian’s pen and the pencil of the artist; and, as intimately associated with many national events, it possesses an interest to which neither the lapse of time nor its own decay can ever render us indifferent. A visit to the “old Hall of Eltham,” forms one of those incidents in life to which we look back with as much pleasure as the pilgrim was wont to do after he had paid his devotions at the “shrine of our Lady of Walsingham.” Every feature in this primitive abode of kings, this favourite resort of our native princes, arrests attention, and carries us back into the days of chivalry and romance. While sauntering through its deserted, and, as we may truly say, its desecrated court, imagination delights to expatiate among those recorded scenes of court festivity, military fêtes, and national solemnities, of which it has so often been the scene. The very echoes which, if at all disturbed, now only reply to the thresher’s song or the lowing of cattle, were once roused into loud and long-continued reverberations by the plaudits of knights within, and popular acclamations from without. In the twilight, the dim figures of its long line of possessors seem to flit before our eyes; while the mind is busily occupied in filling up the picture, from the days of Edward the Confessor down to those of James the First: “Again, again, along the wizard’s glass, In waving plumes they reappear and pass.”