As beautiful a summer’s morning as ever chased the stars from heaven, was dawning over that wide tract of waste and woodland, which still, though many a century has now mossed over the ancestral oaks which then were in their lusty prime, retains the name by which it was at that day styled appropriately--the “New Forest.” Few years had then elapsed since the first Norman lord of England had quenched the fires that burned in thirty hamlets; had desecrated God’s own altars, making the roofless aisles of many a parish church the haunt of the grim wolf or antlered red-deer; turning fair fields and cultured vales to barren and desolate wastes--to gratify his furious passion for that sport which has so justly been entitled the mimicry of warfare. Few years had then elapsed, yet not a symptom of their old fertility could now be traced in the wild plains waving with fern, and overrun with copsewood, broom, and brambles; unless it might be found in the profuse luxuriance with which this thriftless crop had overspread the champaign once smiling like a goodly garden with every meet production for the sustenance of man. It was, as has been said, as beautiful a summer’s morning as ever eye of man beheld. The sun, which had just raised the verge of his great orb above the low horizon, was checkering the mossy greensward with long, fantastic lines of light and shadow, and tinging the gnarled limbs of the huge oaks with ruddy gold; the dew, which lay abundantly on every blade of grass and every bending wild-flower, had not yet felt his power, nor raised a single mist-wreath to veil the brightness of the firmament; nor was the landscape, that lay there steeped in the lustre of the glowing skies, less lovely than the dawn that waked above it: long sylvan avenues sweeping for miles through every variation of the wildest forest-scenery--here traversing in easy curves wide undulations clothed with the purple heather; here sinking downward to the brink of sheets of limpid water; now running straight through lines of mighty trees, and now completely overbowered as they dived through brakes and dingles, where the birch and holly grew so thickly mingled with the prickly furze and creeping eglantine as to make twilight of the hottest noontide. Such were the leading features of the country which had most deeply felt, and has borne down to later days most evident memorials of, the Norman’s tyranny.