HADDON HALL is, perhaps, the most interesting, and is certainly the most attractive, of all the ancient mansions of England: and none have been so fertile of material to Artists. Situate in one of the most picturesque, if not the most beautiful, of our English shires, absolutely perfect as an example of the Baronial Halls of our ancestors, and easily accessible by charming routes from populous towns, it is not surprising that it should be visited annually by tens of thousands; and that in America it is regarded as one of the places in the “Old Country,” which no visitors, even of a week, to the classic land of their History, should neglect to see, examine, and describe. HADDON HALL is distant fourteen miles from BUXTON; perhaps the most fashionable, as it certainly is one of the most cheerful, and, we believe, the most healthful of all the Baths of England. Its waters are as efficacious, in certain ailments, as are those of Southern Germany; while the surrounding district is so grand and beautiful, so happily mingling the sublime and the graceful, as to compete, and by no means unfavourably, with the hills and valleys that border the distant Rhine. The poet, the novelist, the traveller, the naturalist, the sportsman, and the antiquary have found appropriate themes in Derbyshire, in its massive rocks—“Tors”—and deep dells; its pasture-lands on mountain-slopes; its rapid, yet never broad, rivers—delights of the angler; its crags and caves; its rugged and ragged or wooded steeps; above all, its relics of the earlier days when Briton, Roman, Saxon, and Norman, held alternate sway over the rich lands and prolific mines of this lavishly endowed county; and of a later time, when shrewd monks planted themselves beside the clear streams and rich meadows, to which they bequeathed magnificent ruins to tell of intellectual and material power in the time of their vigorous and prosperous strength.