"Within the massy prison's mouldering courts, Fearless and free the ruddy children played, Weaving gay chaplets for their innocent brows With the green ivy and the red wall-flower, That mocks the dungeon's unavailing gloom; The ponderous chains and gratings of strong iron, There rusted amid heaps of broken stone That mingled slowly with their native earth. There the broad beam of day, which feebly once Lighted the cheek of lean captivity With a pale and sickly glare, then freely shone On the pure smiles of infant playfulness. No more the shuddering voice of hoarse despair Pealed through the echoing vaults, but soothing notes Of joy fingered winds and gladsome birds And merriment were resonant around." Such were our feelings as we wandered musing and admiring amid the stupendous ruins of this once magnificent fabric. "Now Time his dusky pennons o'er the scene, Closes in stedfast darkness." The pomp of its splendour has passed away, and the stern wardour disputing entrance to the belted knight is now succeeded by a lank cobbler, who watches for lounging strangers, and acts as "_Cicerone_," blending the most absurd and ridiculous stories in order to eke another sixpence from the purse of his auditor, and to add greater importance to himself; but he had a most amusing method of answering any startling questions as to date, by significantly observing in the purest Dorset dialect, "Why Lord love ye, zur, it wur avore the memory of ony maun in the parish!" Apropos to dates, the earliest mention of Corfe is A.D. 978, when the Saxon annals narrate the murder of Edward, King of the West Saxons, committed here by his mother-in-law, Elfrida. It was in the gloomy dungeons of this castle that King John starved to death twenty-two prisoners of war, many of whom were among the first nobility of Poictu, victims to the cruelty of a barbarous sceptered tyrant! Then again, we thought of the fate of Peter of Pontefract, the imprudent prophet, who, if he had turned over a page in the book of fate, should have folded down the leaf instead of incurring the monarch's vengeance by meddling with state affairs.