ditto dining-room, king’s chamber, trunk gallery at the top of the house, handsome chapel, and seven or eight distinct apartments, besides closets and conveniences without end.  Then it is covered with portraits, crammed with old china, furnished richly, and not a rag in it under forty, fifty, or a thousand years old; but not a bed or chair that has lost a tooth, or got a gray hair, so well are they preserved.  I rummaged it from head to foot, examined every spangled bed, and enamelled pair of bellows, for such there are; in short, I do not believe the old mansion was ever better pleased with an inhabitant, since the days of Walter de Drayton, except when it has received its divine old mistress.(308) If one could honour her more than one did before, it would be to see with what religion she keeps up the old dwelling and customs, as well as old servants, who you may imagine do not love her less than other people do.  The garden is just as Sir John Germain brought it from Holland; pyramidal yews, treillages, and square cradle walks with windows clipped in them.  Nobody was there but Mr. Beauclerc(309) and Lady Catharine,(310) and two parsons:  the two first suffered us to ransack and do as we would, and the two last assisted us, informed us, and carried us to every tomb in the neighbourhood.  I have got every circumstance by heart, and was pleased beyond my expectation, both with the place and the comfortable way of seeing it.  We stayed here till after dinner to-day, and saw Fotheringhay in our way hither.  The castle is totally ruined.(311) The mount, on which the keep stood, two door-cases, and a piece of the moat, are all the remains.  Near it is a front and two projections of an ancient house, which, by the arms about it, I suppose was part of the palace of Richard and Cicely, Duke and Duchess of York.  There are two pretty tombs for them and their uncle Duke of York in the church, erected by order of Queen Elizabeth.  The church has been very fine, but is now intolerably shabby; yet many large saints remain in the windows, two entire, and all the heads well painted.  You may imagine we were civil enough to the Queen of Scots, to feel a feel of pity for her, while we stood on the very spot where she was put to death; my companion,(312) I believe, who is a better royalist than I am, felt a little more.  There, I have obeyed you.  To-morrow we see Burleigh and Peterborough, and lie @t Ely; on Monday I hope to be in town, and on Tuesday I hope much more to be in the gallery at Strawberry Hill, and to find the gilders laying on the last leaf of gold.  Good night!

(305) A seat of the Earl of Northampton.

(306) A seat of the Earl of Sussex.

(307) The seat of Lord Montagu.

(308) Lady Betty Germain.-E.

(309) Aubrey Beauclerk, Esq. member for Thetford.  He succeeded to the dukedom of St. Albans, as fifth Duke, in 1787, and died in 1802.-E.

(310) Lady Catharine Ponsonby, daughter of the Earl of Desborough.