We met a servant, who replied civilly to our inquiries about the mode of gaining admittance, and bade us ring a bell at the corner of the principal porch.  We rang accordingly, and were forthwith admitted into a low, vaulted basement, ponderously wrought with intersecting arches, dark and rather chilly, just like what I remember to have seen at Battle Abbey; and, after waiting here a little while, a respectable elderly gentlewoman appeared, of whom we requested to be shown round the Abbey.  She courteously acceded, first presenting us to a book, in which to inscribe our names.

I suppose ten thousand people, three-fourths of them Americans, have written descriptions of Newstead Abbey; and none of them, so far as I have read, give any true idea of the place; neither will my description, if I write one.  In fact, I forget very much that I saw, and especially in what order the objects came.  In the basement was Byron’s bath—­a dark and cold and cellar-like hole, which it must have required good courage to plunge into; in this region, too, or near it, was the chapel, which Colonel Wildman has decorously fitted up, and where service is now regularly performed, but which was used as a dogs’ kennel in Byron’s time.

After seeing this, we were led to Byron’s own bed-chamber, which remains just as when he slept in it—­the furniture and all the other arrangements being religiously preserved.  It was in the plainest possible style, homely, indeed, and almost mean—­an ordinary paper-hanging, and everything so commonplace that it was only the deep embrasure of the window that made it look unlike a bed-chamber in a middling-class lodging-house.  It would have seemed difficult, beforehand, to fit up a room in that picturesque old edifice so that it should be utterly void of picturesqueness; but it was effected in this apartment, and I suppose it is a specimen of the way in which old mansions used to be robbed of their antique character, and adapted to modern tastes, before medieval antiquities came into fashion.  Some prints of the Cambridge colleges, and other pictures indicating Byron’s predilections at the time, and which he himself had hung there, were on the walls.  This, the housekeeper told us, had been the Abbot’s chamber, in the monastic time.  Adjoining it is the haunted room, where the ghostly monk whom Byron introduces into “Don Juan,” is said to have his lurking-place.  It is fitted up in the same style as Byron’s, and used to be occupied by his valet or page.  No doubt, in his lordship’s day, these were the only comfortable bedrooms in the Abbey; and by the housekeeper’s account of what Colonel Wildman has done, it is to be inferred that the place must have been in a most wild, shaggy, tumble-down condition, inside and out, when he bought it.