Meanwhile, the grounds of the Court remain as beautiful as ever, ascending to a long and lofty ridge, heavily wooded. The Court itself, of which the interior is not generally shown, stands prominently facing the park wall and the road, only a few yards away, and is quite easily to be seen. It is a long, low mansion, a singular mass of Gothic gables, chimneys, and terraces, dating originally from the early years of the fourteenth century, when it was built by the De Clyvedons. Court and estates passed with an heiress by marriage to one Thomas Hogshaw, thence in the same manner to the Lovell family, and from them to the Wakes, whose arms and allusive motto, “Wake and Pray,” are to be found in parts of the house altered by them about 1570. The Wake family sold their possessions at Clevedon to Digby, Earl of Bristol; and finally the executors of the third Earl sold them to the Elton family in the time of Queen Anne. Great destruction was caused to the west front of the Court by the fire that broke out in November 1882, but the damage has been so skilfully repaired that, to any save the closest inspection, the building retains the aspect it had long presented. The chief feature of the principal front, of fourteenth-century date, is the entrance-porch, with portcullis, and room over. Here, midway along the irregular front, is a very large square window, filled with curiously diapered tracery. Thackeray, who often visited here, as a friend of the Rev. William H. Brookfield and his wife, Jane Octavia, sister of Sir Charles Elton, then owner of Clevedon Court, has left a somewhat striking pencil sketch of the building, viewed from this point. The house is the original of “Castlewood,” in his novel, “Esmond.” [Illustration: CLEVEDON COURT.] Clevedon Court was largely rearranged in the time of Queen Elizabeth, in accordance with the ideas of comfort then prevailing, considerably in advance of those that ruled when it was originally built, in the reign of Edward the Second. But it was left to the remarkable people who ruled when the nineteenth century was yet young to further modernise the ancient residence, and they perpetrated strange things: painting and graining interior stonework to resemble oak, and the like atrocities; the highest ambition of builders and decorators in that era of shame being to treat honest materials as though they were not to be shown for what they really were, and to make them masquerade as something else. No one ever was deceived by the plaster of that age, pretending to be stone; and stone that was given two coats of paint and tickled with a grainer’s comb, and then finished off with varnish, never yet made convincing oak, any more than “marbled” wall-papers looked or felt like real marble; but those were then conventional treatments, and were followed and honoured all over the land. At the same time, the ancient oak roof of the hall of Clevedon Court was hidden behind a plaster ceiling.