During a great part of his lordship’s minority, the abbey was in the occupation of Lord Grey de Ruthen, his hounds, and divers colonies of jackdaws, swallows, and starlings. The internal traces of this Goth were swept away; but without, all appeared as rude and unreclaimed as he could have left it. I must confess, that if I was astonished at the heterogeneous mixture of splendour and ruin within, I was more so at the perfect uniformity of wildness without. I never had been able to conceive poetic genius in its domestic bower, without figuring it, diffusing the polish of its delicate taste on every thing about it. But here the spirit of beauty seemed to have dwelt, but not to have been caressed;--it was the spirit of the wilderness. The gardens were exactly as their late owner described them in his earliest poems:-- Through thy battlements, Newstead, the hollow winds whistle; Thou, the hall of my fathers, art gone to decay; In thy once smiling gardens the hemlock and thistle, Now choke up the rose, that late bloomed in the way. With the exception of the dog’s tomb--a conspicuous and elegant object, placed on an ascent of several steps, crowned with a lambent flame, and panelled with white marble tablets, of which that containing the celebrated epitaph was at that time removed, I do not recollect the slightest trace of culture or improvement. The late lord, a stern and desperate character, who is never mentioned by the neighbouring peasants without a significant shake of the head, might have returned and recognised every thing about him, except, perchance, an additional crop of weeds. There still gloomily slept the old pond, into which he is said to have hurled his lady in one of his fits of fury, whence she was rescued by the gardener; a courageous blade, who was the lord’s master, and chastised him for his barbarity. There still, at the end of the garden, in a grove of oak, two towering satyrs--he with his club, and Mrs. Satyr, with her chubby, cloven-footed brat, placed on pedestals, at the intersections of the narrow and gloomy pathways, struck for a moment, with their grim visages, and silent, shaggy forms, the fear into your bosoms, which is felt by the neighbouring peasantry at “_the old lord’s devils_.”