readily as she could dance at the Christmas festival; or one of high and solemn beauty, in whom devotion, deep, uninquiring and undoubting, was the great principle and passion of life; to whom the domestic chapel was a holy place; the chaplain her daily counsellor; and the distribution of alms her daily occupation. We saw before us the hearthstone of a race that lived in the full enjoyment of aristocratic ascendancy, when rank was old and undisputed; when neither mercantile wealth had pressed on their nobility on the one hand, nor popular knowledge and rights on the other; when the gentry lived only to be reverenced and obeyed, every one in the midst of his own forests and domains as a king, and led forth his tenants and serfs to the wars of his country, or to the chase of his own wide wilds; when field sports and jovial feastings, and love-making, were the life-employment of men and women, who took rank and power as an unquestioned heritage, and never troubled their brain with gathering knowledge: and all below them were supposed to be happy, because they were ignorant and submissive. This hall, which occupies the centre of the building, is nearly sixty feet long by thirty wide, supported by two elliptic arches and Ionic pillars. The middle of the room is now occupied by a billiard-table, which formerly stood in an upper room, called the terrace-room, of which we shall speak presently. The great door, entering from the porch, was secured by a massy bar of wood which had been rudely let into the walls at each end, at the time of the riots of the Reform Bill, when Nottingham Castle was burnt, and when the mob were expected here, who owed the proprietor a piece of retribution, and actually attempted to burn his house at Colwick; whence his wife, Mary Chaworth, only escaped by being carried from her bed, where illness had long confined her, and hidden for some hours in the shrubbery during excessive rain, and afterwards conveyed across the Trent in a boat. At the lower end of this hall an easy flight of steps leads to the upper apartments. Near the fire, at the upper end, a few steps lead into a beautiful little breakfast-room, which looks out into the garden, and forms one of the projections of the building, the staircase at the lower end forming the other: the three large, old-fashioned windows which light the hall, lying on this side, and looking out into a little parterre, fenced off with a trellis-fence, even with the two projections we have spoken of--such a parterre as one often meets with, belonging to old houses--a little favoured sanctuary of garden-ground, where choice flowers were trained, and which was the especial care of page and gardener, before ladies took to gardening themselves. This, which is now a perfect wilderness, almost overrun with shrubs and the tall tree-like laurels which encumber wall and window, and almost exclude daylight from the hall, to the great annoyance of our good old woman, was once, as was