All the sham Gothic alterations made at a huge outlay by the first Duke (with the exception of one room, which remains to show how atrocious his style was) were swept away by Algernon, the fourth Duke, about 1855, and at a still greater cost replaced internally with an interminable series of salons in the Italian style. Externally, the castle is a mediæval fortress; internally it is an Italian palace. These works cost over £300,000, and serve to show the measure of ducal folly. Make a man a duke and give him an income commensurate, and he goes mad and builds and rebuilds, burying himself in masonry like a maggot in a cheese. But it is good for trade; and perhaps that is why Providence allows a duke to be created now and then. This magnificence for a long time created its own Nemesis, and the Dukes of Northumberland, in their gigantic castle, were worse off in one respect than a clerk in London suburbs in a six-roomed, nine-inch walled, jerry-built “villa” at £30 a year. They could never get a hot dinner! The kitchen is large enough, and the fireplace so huge that the fire cannot be made up without shovelling on a ton of coals; but the dining-room is so far away, and the communication was so bad (involving going across courtyards open to the sky) that everything was cold before it reached table. This has been remedied, and my lords dukes now have their food sent to them along rails on trolleys—just as they feed the beasts at the Zoo. The Dukes of Northumberland are well titled. They are autocrats in that county, owning as they do 181,616 of its acres, and drawing a rental of £161,874. Some of them have been insufferably egotistical. The “Brislec” Tower, built on the neighbouring height of Brislaw by the first Duke, is evidence sufficient to prove that. It is a monument by himself to his own doings, and invites the pilgrim, in a long bombastical inscription, to “Look around, behold,” and marvel at the plantations with which he caused the bare hillsides to be covered. But the most prominent memorial in Alnwick is the well-named “Farmers’ Folly,” erected to the second Duke in 1816. Entering or leaving the town, it is a most striking object: a pillar 85 feet in height with the Percy lion on its summit. What did the second Duke do to deserve this? Did he serve his country in war? Was he a statesman? Was he benevolent to the tenants who erected it? Not at all. Here is the story.