Round Hackton village the scene of welcome was particularly gay:  a band of music had been brought from Plymouth, and arches and flags had been raised, especially before the attorney’s and the doctor’s houses, who were both in the employ of the family.  There were many hundreds of stout people at the great lodge, which, with the park-wall, bounds one side of Hackton Green, and from which, for three miles, goes (or rather went) an avenue of noble elms up to the towers of the old castle.  I wished they had been oak when I cut the trees down in ’79, for they would have fetched three times the money:  I know nothing more culpable than the carelessness of ancestors in planting their grounds with timber of small value, when they might just as easily raise oak.  Thus I have always said that the Roundhead Lyndon of Hackton, who planted these elms in Charles II.’s time, cheated me of ten thousand pounds.

For the first few days after our arrival, my time was agreeably spent in receiving the visits of the nobility and gentry who came to pay their respects to the noble new-married couple, and, like Bluebeard’s wife in the fairy tale, in inspecting the treasures, the furniture, and the numerous chambers of the castle.  It is a huge old place, built as far back as Henry V.’s time, besieged and battered by the Cromwellians in the Revolution, and altered and patched up, in an odious old-fashioned taste, by the Roundhead Lyndon, who succeeded to the property at the death of a brother whose principles were excellent and of the true Cavalier sort, but who ruined himself chiefly by drinking, dicing, and a dissolute life, and a little by supporting the King.  The castle stands in a fine chase, which was prettily speckled over with deer; and I can’t but own that my pleasure was considerable at first, as I sat in the oak parlour of summer evenings, with the windows open, the gold and silver plate shining in a hundred dazzling colours on the side-boards, a dozen jolly companions round the table, and could look out over the wide green park and the waving woods, and see the sun setting on the lake, and hear the deer calling to one another.

The exterior was, when I first arrived, a quaint composition of all sorts of architecture; of feudal towers, and gable-ends in Queen Bess’s style, and rough-patched walls built up to repair the ravages of the Roundhead cannon:  but I need not speak of this at large, having had the place new-faced at a vast expense, under a fashionable architect, and the facade laid out in the latest French-Greek and most classical style.  There had been moats, and drawbridges, and outer walls; these I had shaved away into elegant terraces, and handsomely laid out in parterres according to the plans of Monsieur Cornichon, the great Parisian architect, who visited England for the purpose.