It is best to visit Netley when the crowd may reasonably be expected to have left. At such a time, shortly before sunset, the spot is most impressive. The jackdaws, who seem to have the right of domicile in all ruinated buildings, have gone, clamorous, to bed in the chinks of wall and airy gable, and one shares the smooth lawns only with the robins, whose pretty confidence in the harmlessness of human beings is the most touching thing in so-called "wild" nature. The first stanza of Barham's poem is excellently descriptive of the time and place, save that "roofless tower" is a poetic figure unwarranted by facts--Netley Abbey has no towers: I saw thee, Netley, as the sun Across the western wave Was sinking slow, And a golden glow To thy roofless tower he gave; And the ivy sheen, With its mantle of green That wrapt thy walls around, Shone lovelily bright, In that glorious light, And I felt 'twas holy ground. He then goes on to enlarge upon the legend of a refractory nun having been walled up alive in the abbey, and to meditate upon the justice of Heaven fallen upon Netley in the time of Henry VIII.: Ruthless Tudor's bloated form Rides on the blast and guides the storm.[A] The context gives the date of the ruin of the fabric as at that period; but we have already seen that this took place quite a hundred and sixty years later. The curious, too, might ask what the nun was doing in a Cistercian monastery. It is not a little singular to note that Barham has made no use, and indeed no mention, of the picturesque legend of Taylor's death. [A] _cf._ "Rides on the whirlwind and directs the storm." THE DEAD DRUMMER A LEGEND OF SALISBURY PLAIN Oh, Salisbury Plain is bleak and bare,-- At least so I've heard many people declare, For I fairly confess I never was there:-- Not a shrub, nor a tree, Nor a bush can you see, No hedges, no ditches, no gates, no stiles, Much less a house or a cottage for miles; --It's a very sad thing to be caught in the rain When night's coming on upon Salisbury Plain. Salisbury Plain is, as Ingoldsby rightly assures us, bleak and barren. It is remarkable to note that, although as he truly says in the legend itself he was never there, he catches exactly the spirit of that dreary Wiltshire table-land, and describes it with such insight, picturesqueness, and economy of words and space as never at any other time have been used to give a proper mental picture of that vast solitude. It is far removed from the Ingoldsby Country proper, and might easily have been more loosely described in those opening lines; but they are perfect, alike topographically and for the production of that mental picture required to start the tale of horror.