The first sight of Blickling Hall is one of the greatest surprises that can possibly befall the traveller in search of the picturesque. Every one, in these days of broadcast photographs, is in some sort familiar with the look of the Hall, and most people can tell you it looks like another, and a better, Hatfield House; but no one is prepared on coming downhill past the church into the village, to find the main front of this finest of Jacobean mansions, this dream of architectural beauty, actually looking upon the road, unobstructedly, from behind its velvet lawns. No theatrical manager, no scene-painter, cunning in all the artful accessories of the stage, could devise anything more dramatic, and you—Columbus of the roads, who steer into unwonted byways in search of the beautiful—cannot repress the involuntary tribute of an admiratory O! at sight of it. There it stands, like some proud conscious beauty, isolated. No meaner building shoulders it, and for all the stir you see or sound you hear, it might be some enchanted palace, not waked to life and love. It has, indeed, its modern tragedy, for its owner, the young Marquis of Lothian, is afflicted, and non-resident. There is something of a village, a little way removed; but only a few houses, themselves picturesque, are to be found, together with an inn, the “Buckinghamshire Arms,” displaying the heraldic achievement of the Earls of Buckinghamshire and their motto, _Auctor pretiosa fecit_ (“The giver makes them valuable”), one of those delightfully bumptious and self-sufficient phrases abounding in titled families. [Illustration: BLICKLING HALL.] Blickling is generally associated with the unhappy Anne Boleyn, but her birthplace is quite uncertain, and although her early years were passed at this place, it was not Blickling Hall, but the long-vanished Dagworth Manor, with which she was familiar. The present stately building was not commenced until 1619, eighty-three years after her death. Dagworth Manor stood nearly a mile distant from the present Hall, and was built towards the close of the fourteenth century by Sir Nicholas Dagworth, who was succeeded by that Sir Thomas de Erpingham who built the Erpingham Gate in the Cathedral Close at Norwich, together with the tower and the greater part of Erpingham church, and was that stout old warrior who in his old age fought at Agincourt, as we read in Shakespeare’s _Henry V._, where the King says:— Good morrow, old Sir Thomas Erpingham: A good soft pillow for that good white head Were better than a churlish turf of France. It was that brave old knight who led the onslaught with the war-cry to his men, “Nestroke” (“Now strike!”).