on the night before the battle.  Right under our eyes, and half-enveloping the town with its high-shouldering wall, so that all the closely compacted streets seemed but a precinct of the estate, was the Earl of Warwick’s delightful park, a wide extent of sunny lawns, interspersed with broad contiguities of forest-shade.  Some of the cedars of Lebanon were there,—­a growth of trees in which the Warwick family take an hereditary pride.  The two highest towers of the castle heave themselves up out of a mass of foliage, and look down in a lordly manner upon the plebeian roofs of the town, a part of which are slate-covered, (these are the modern houses,) and a part are coated with old red tiles, denoting the more ancient edifices.  A hundred and sixty or seventy years ago, a great fire destroyed a considerable portion of the town, and doubtless annihilated many structures of a remote antiquity; at least, there was a possibility of very old houses in the long past of Warwick, which King Cymbeline is said to have founded in the year ONE of the Christian era!

And this historic fact or poetic fiction, whichever it may be, brings to mind a more indestructible reality than anything else that has occurred within the present field of our vision; though this includes the scene of Guy of Warwick’s legendary exploits, and some of those of the Round Table, to say nothing of the Battle of Edge Hill.  For perhaps it was in the landscape now under our eyes that Post-humus wandered with the King’s daughter, the sweet, chaste, faithful, and courageous Imogen, the tenderest and womanliest woman that Shakspeare ever made immortal in the world.  The silver Avon, which we see flowing so quietly by the gray castle, may have held their images in its bosom.

The day, though it began brightly, had long been overcast, and the clouds now spat down a few spiteful drops upon us, besides that the east-wind was very chill; so we descended the winding tower-stair, and went next into the garden, one side of which is shut in by almost the only remaining portion of the old city-wall.  A part of the garden-ground is devoted to grass and shrubbery, and permeated by gravel-walks, in the centre of one of which is a beautiful stone vase of Egyptian sculpture, having formerly stood on the top of a Nilometer, or graduated pillar for measuring the rise and fall of the River Nile.  On the pedestal is a Latin inscription by Dr. Parr, who (his vicarage of Hatton being so close at hand) was probably often the Master’s guest, and smoked his interminable pipe along these garden-walks.  Of the vegetable-garden, which lies adjacent, the lion’s share is appropriated to the Master, and twelve small, separate patches to the individual brethren, who cultivate them at their own judgment and by their own labor; and their beans and cauliflowers have a better flavor, I doubt not, than if they had received them directly from the dead hand of the Earl of Leicester, like the rest of their food.  In the farther part of the garden is an arbor for the old men’s pleasure and convenience, and I should like well to sit down among them there, and find out what is really the bitter and the sweet of such a sort of life.  As for the old gentlemen themselves, they put me queerly in mind of the Salem Custom-House, and the venerable personages whom I found so quietly at anchor there.