in England to form an idea of the tone, the habits, the aspect of English social life before its classic insularity had begun to wane, as all observers agree that it did, about thirty years ago.  It is true that the mental operation in this matter reduces itself to fancying some of the things which form what Mr. Matthew Arnold would call the peculiar “notes” of England infinitely exaggerated—­the rigidly aristocratic constitution of society, for instance; the unaesthetic temper of the people; the private character of most kinds of comfort and entertainment.  Let an old gentleman of conservative tastes, who can remember the century’s youth, talk to you at a club temporis acti—­tell you wherein it is that from his own point of view London, as a residence for a gentleman, has done nothing but fall off for the last forty years.  You will listen, of course, with an air of decent sympathy, but privately you will be saying to yourself how difficult a place of sojourn London must have been in those days for a stranger—­how little cosmopolitan, how bound, in a thousand ways, with narrowness of custom.  What is true of the metropolis at that time is of course doubly true of the provinces; and a genteel little city like the one I am speaking of must have been a kind of focus of insular propriety.  Even then, however, the irritated alien would have had the magnificent ruins of the castle to dream himself back into good-humor in.  They would effectually have transported him beyond all waning or waxing Philistinisms.

Ludlow Castle is an example of a great feudal fortress, as the little castellated manor I spoke of a while since is an example of a small one.  The great courtyard at Ludlow is as large as the central square of a city, but now it is all vacant and grassy, and the day I was there a lonely old horse was tethered and browsing in the middle of it.  The place is in extreme dilapidation, but here and there some of its more striking features have held well together, and you may get a very sufficient notion of the immense scale upon which things were ordered in the day of its strength.  It must have been garrisoned with a small army, and the vast enceinte must have enclosed a stalwart little world.  Such an impression of thickness and duskiness as one still gets from fragments of partition and chamber—­such a sense of being well behind something, well out of the daylight and its dangers—­of the comfort of the time having been security, and security incarceration!  There are prisons within the prison—­horrible unlighted caverns of dismal depth, with holes in the roof through which Heaven knows what odious refreshment was tossed down to the poor groping detenu.  There is nothing, surely, that paints one side of the Middle Ages more vividly than this fact that fine people lived in the same house with their prisoners, and kept the key in their pocket.  Fancy the young ladies of the family working tapestry in their “bower” with the knowledge that at the bottom of the corkscrew