It is very different now.  After showing us these two apartments of Byron and his servant, the housekeeper led us from one to another and another magnificent chamber, fitted up in antique style, with oak paneling, and heavily carved bedsteads, of Queen Elizabeth’s time, or of the Stuarts, hung with rich tapestry curtains of similar date, and with beautiful old cabinets of carved wood, sculptured in relief, or tortoise-shell and ivory.  The very pictures and realities, these rooms were, of stately comfort; and they were called by the names of kings—­King Edward’s, King Charles II.’s, King Henry VII.’s, chamber; and they were hung with beautiful pictures, many of them portraits of these kings.  The chimney-pieces were carved and emblazoned; and all, so far as I could judge, was in perfect keeping, so that if a prince or noble of three centuries ago were to come to lodge at Newstead Abbey, he would hardly know that he had strayed out of his own century.  And yet he might have known by some token, for there are volumes of poetry and light literature on the tables in these royal bed-chambers, and in that of Henry VII.  I saw “The House of the Seven Gables,” and “The Scarlet Letter,” in Routledge’s edition.

Certainly the house is admirably fitted up; and there must have been something very excellent and comprehensive in the domestic arrangements of the monks, since they adapt themselves so well to a state of society entirely different from that in which they originated.  The library is a very comfortable room, and provocative of studious ideas, tho lounging and luxurious.  It is long, and rather low, furnished with soft couches, and, on the whole, tho a man might dream of study, I think he would be most likely to read nothing but novels there.  I know not what the room was in monkish times, but it was waste and ruinous in Lord Byron’s.  Here, I think, the housekeeper unlocked a beautiful cabinet, and took out the famous skull which Lord Byron transformed into a drinking-goblet.  It has a silver rim and stand, but still the ugly skull is bare and evident, and the naked inner bone receives the wine.

There was much more to see in the house than I had any previous notion of; but except the two chambers already noticed, nothing remained the least as Byron left it.  Yes, another place there was—­his own small dining-room, with a table of moderate size, where, no doubt, the skull-goblet has often gone its rounds.  Colonel Wildman’s dining-room was once Byron’s shooting-gallery, and the original refectory of the monks.  It is now magnificently arranged, with a vaulted roof, a music-gallery at one end, suits of armor and weapons on the walls, and mailed arms extended, holding candelabras.