There the poet could come and feel the presence of divinity in that noble scene, and hear sublime whispers in the trees, and create new heavens and new earths from the glorious charms of nature around him, and in one short hour live an empyrean of celestial life and love. There could come the very humblest children of the plebeian town, and feel a thrill of exquisite delight pervade their bosoms at the sight of the very flowers on the sod, and see heaven in the infinite blue above them. And poor Sir Roger, the holder, but not the possessor of all, walked only in a region of sterility, with no sublimer ideas than poachers and trespassers—no more rational enjoyment than the brute indulgence of hunting like a ferret, and seizing his fellow-men like a bulldog. He was a specimen of human nature degenerated; retrograded from the divine to the bestial, through the long-operating influences of false notions, and institutions continued beyond their time. He had only the soul of a keeper. Had he been only a keeper he had been a much happier man. CHAPTER II. THE FIRST OF A NEW LINE. In Great Castleborough there lived a race of paupers. From the year of the 42nd of Elizabeth, or 1601, down to the present generation, this race maintained an uninterrupted descent. Like that of many a more worldly-favoured race, theirs was a descent; it had nothing of an ascent in it. But that is the fate of ancestry. A man on some particular occasion ascends; makes himself a mark in his time; perhaps a name in the world’s annals, and from him his family _descends_. The expression is perfectly correct; as the heralds truly have it; it descends, fades out, and is gone. It has lived? no, continued, a thousand years perhaps; it has descended, and prided itself on descending. That was the case of the Rockvilles; and when we hear of families and persons illustriously or honourably descended, we hear an internal echo which says, “Yes—descended.” The truly great man _ascends_ from his ancestors.