The stained glass windows give a mellow light to the admirable Torrigiano monument of a sixteenth century Master of the Rolls and the delicately carved alabaster tomb of Richard Alington and his wife Jane. Near by is the recumbent figure of another Master, with the little figures of his children kneeling below, one of them the little daughter born on Christmas Day and married when she was only twelve years old, “a pretty red-headed wench,” to William Cavendish, afterwards Earl of Devonshire, in the year of grace 1608. There are all sorts of other treasures in this mysterious room, that is open to all comers between the hours of two and four, any day in the week except, alas, Saturday or Sunday. You may look on the handwriting of “Jane the Quene,” in one of the very few documents signed by Lady Jane Grey during her nine days’ reign, or read the pathetic letter written by Mary Queen of Scots to Sir William Cecil, “Mester Cessilles,” she calls him in the queer Scottish-English sometimes used by “yowr richt asured good friend, Marie R.” For here are guarded poignant souvenirs of long-dead men and women, of whose sorrows and anguish of mind nothing is left but the yellowing paper covered with the almost illegible writing of their times. You will find the cry of Sir Philip Sidney to Jaen Wyer the Court surgeon of His Highness of Cleves, written when he lay dying from his wound at the battle of Zutphen: “Come, my Weier, come. I am in danger of my life and I want you here. Neither living or dead shall I be ungrateful. I can write no more, but I earnestly pray you to make haste. Farewell. At Arnem. Yours, Ph. Sidney.” And Sir Walter Raleigh’s letter to Queen Anne, the wife of James the First, where he says: “My extreme shortness of breath doth grow fast on me, with the dispayre of obtayning so mich grace to walke with my keeper up the hill within the Tower.” The letters are not all sorrowful, but they all have the power to breathe life into the dry bones of history. Not far from the heart-felt appeal of the great Cardinal Wolsey to Henry VIII., praying for “grace, mercy, remissyon and pardon,” and signed “Your Graces moste prostrat poor chapleyn, creature, and bedisman,” is a letter from ten-year-old William of Orange, quaint letters from Leicester and Essex to their fickle queen, and a dignified epistle, lamenting the outbreak of war between France and England, but renouncing his fealty and homage to Richard II., from a fourteenth century member of that noble Picardie family whose proud device was: Roy ne suis, ne prince ne duc, ne comte aussy: Je suis sire de Coucy. Old letters are not the only treasures in this corner belonging to another age. There are beautiful fourteenth-century chests, a bulla carved by Benvenuto Cellini, that prince of goldsmiths and autobiographers, and indeed the greatest treasure of all, that I have kept till the last.