by reason of its profuse hospitalities; and sometimes “Liberty Hall,” on account of its license; otherwise it was never, called any thing but Crompton; never Crompton Hall, or Crompton Park—­but simply Crompton, just like Stowe or Blenheim.  And yet the park at Crompton was as splendid an appanage of glade and avenue, of copse and dell, as could be desired.  It was all laid out upon a certain plan—­somewhere in the old house was the very parchment on which the chase was ordered like a garden; a dozen drives here radiated from one another like the spokes of a wheel, and here four mighty avenues made a St. Andrew’s cross in the very centre—­but the area was so immense, and the stature of the trees so great, that nothing of this formality could be observed in the park itself.  Not only were the oaks and beeches of large, and often of giant proportions, but the very ferns grew so tall that whole herds of fallow deer were hidden in it, and could only be traced by their sounds.  There were red deer also, almost as numerous, with branching antlers, curiously mossed, as though they had acquired that vegetation by rubbing, as they often did, against the high wooden pale—­itself made picturesque by age—­which hedged them in their sylvan prison for miles.  Moreover, there were wild-cattle, as at Chartley (though not of the same breed), the repute of whose fierceness kept the few public paths that intersected this wild domain very unfrequented.  These animals, imported half a century ago, were of no use nor of particular beauty, and would have dwindled away, from the unfitness of the locality for their support, but that they were recruited periodically, and at a vast expense.  It was enough to cause their present owner to strain every nerve to retain them, because they were so universally objected to.  They had gored one man to death, and occasionally maimed others, but, as Carew, to do him justice, was by no means afraid of them himself, and ran the same risk, and far oftener than other people, he held he had a right to retain them.  Nobody was obliged to come into his park unless they liked, he said, and if they did, they must “chance a tossing.”  The same detractors, whose opinion we have already quoted, affirmed that the Squire kept these cattle for the very reason that was urged against their existence; the fear of these horned police kept the park free from strangers, and thereby saved him half a dozen keepers.

That his determination in the matter was pig-headed and brutal, there is no doubt; but the Squire’s nature was far from exclusive, and the idea of saving in any thing, it is certain, never entered into his head.  The time, indeed, was slowly but surely coming when the park should know no more not only its wild-cattle, but many a rich copse and shadowy glade.  Not a stately oak nor far-spreading beech but was doomed, sooner or later, to be cut down, to prop for a moment the falling fortunes of their spendthrift owner; but at the time of which we speak there was