COTHELE.—It is difficult to imagine a house continuing—and but little changed—to be inhabited by the same family, or, indeed, inhabited at all, during a period approaching three centuries; yet that is the case with Cothele, pride of the beautiful river Tamar, and one of the “gems” of Cornwall;[14] its gigantic oaks, and chestnuts are obviously so old; but it is requisite to examine the exterior, and especially the interior, to obtain conviction that the mansion dates from the reign of the seventh Henry; while its present lord is the lineal representative of the knight who built it—Sir Richard Edgcumbe—whose house it is we see, nearly as he left it:[15] but, also, we may examine the armour he wore, for it still hangs in this hall; the table at which he feasted (the worm of time only has touched it); the chairs on which he and his dame sat, the very bed on which they slept, while the tapestry, woven by fair hands that have been dust for three centuries, still cover the old walls. Charles I. certainly slept in one of these rooms, and it demands no great stretch of imagination to believe that the illustrious Sir Walter Raleigh was often its honoured guest. We may have been seated in the very chair in which the great knight recounted his adventurous exploits against the hated Spaniards under his cousin’s roof-tree. Memories haunt every room; every hole and corner, so to speak, has a tale to tell of the long past. The house is one of the finest remaining examples of the period to which it belongs, and, with Haddon Hall, in Derbyshire, which it closely resembles in general plan and in some of its details, is one of the best existing specimens of mediæval domestic architecture in England. Although, doubtless, the greater part of the building was erected by Sir Richard Edgcumbe, it is evident that the whole was not built by him, but that he added to, and enlarged the then family residence of the Cotheles, many portions of which exist at the present time.[16] The buildings surround two court-yards, or quadrangles, the entrance being surmounted by an embattled tower; the main buildings and large tower are also embattled. The banqueting-hall is a noble apartment, 42 feet long by 22 feet wide. It has a remarkably fine timber roof, with intersecting arches in its compartments. At the upper end, to the left, the lord’s table stood beneath the bayed window, and opposite to it a doorway leads to the principal staircase. At the bottom of the hall are three doorways, one of which led to the great kitchen, and the other two to the buttery and the cellar. On the walls are suits of armour, helmets, breastplates, warders’ horns, gauntlets, matchlocks, cross-bows, shields, battle-axes, halberts, pikes, swords, pistols, gisarmes, petronels, and two-handed swords and spears that may have been “Bathed in gore On the plains of Azincourt.”