Brakelond had the impassive mouldering grandeur of a great house that has outlived the troubled hours of its glory, and settled into a lethargic contemplation of its past. From very far away its castellated mass could be seen dominating the country from the steep wooded hill on which it perched. On three sides the forest flowed down in ample splendid folds, a cloak of emerald in spring, and, in autumn, cloth of gold. And along the fourth side the crag dropped away sheer into the western sea. Seen from afar, the Castle on its pinnacle had a remote and fairy-like effect, as if, indeed, the scene had been of Camelot or Broceliaunde. Into the clear blue of the sky pricked the soft sapphire masses of the Castle, the looming great Drum Tower, and the smaller, indistinguishable turrets; while, below, fell smooth and swift the dim violet of the woodland, like a misty drapery of colour. Over the country ran other lesser ranges, clothed in younger, neater woodlands; but the great building on its eminence ruled supreme, and the forest round the skirts of its hill was the very fairy-haunted forest of old romance. Among those gnarled trunks, in those green eternal twilights of the thicket, might Merlin still lie sleeping, or King Mark, a-hunting, yet hap on Tristram of Lyonesse. And far overhead, the crown of the country, rose the mystic walls of a Castle that might have held the fair Iseult or Morgan the Sorceress, a great drowsy splendour of stone, willingly cut off from the rush and turmoil of to-day, dreaming for ever, in complacent calm, of that hot and glorious life that it had long ceased to live. As an old illustrious man or woman carries always the consciousness and the glamour of his achievement, no matter into what feebleness or decrepitude old age may have brought him, so buildings that are not of yesterday carry always the haunting sense of their past, and achieve a tranquil pride in desolation and the world’s oblivion, for ever beyond the reach of any smug, inglorious new country-house, all red-brick and sham Elizabethan gables. The country-house has telephones and electric light and all the latest devices of luxury; the old castle has matted corridors and inadequate lamps, and a general air of shabbiness. But that shabbiness is more beautiful and well-bred than all the clamorous elegancies of the other; the comparison is between some old and splendid lady, poor, dowdy, and forgotten in the clacking crowd of tongues, but serene in her impregnable charm, the incarnation of all that is finest in the traditions of a thousand years--and some scented, powdered woman of to-day, frilled, curled, decorated with all the lavish and assertive ornaments by which novelty seeks uneasily to impose its fancied supremacy over antiquity--a woman of loud tones, loud colours, loud movements, in her own person a great braying band of jingles from the latest edition of that comic opera which is such a creature’s London life.