of Byrons; the vaulted roof remaining, but the windows have new dresses making for them by a Venetian tailor.(100) Althorpe(101) has several very fine pictures by the best Italian hands, and a gallery of all one’s acquaintance by Vandyke and Lely.  I wonder you never saw it; it is but six miles from Northampton.  Well, good night; I have writ you such a volume, that you see I am forced to page it.  The Duke has had a stroke of the palsy, but is quite recovered, except in some letters, which he cannot pronounce; and it is still visible in the contraction of one side of his mouth.  My compliments to your family.

(93) The patron saint Of the town.  The imagery and carved work on the front of the cathedral was much injured in 1641.  The cross upon the west window is said to have been frequently aimed at by Cromwell’s soldiery.-E.

(94) Daughter of John Hoskins, Esq. and widow of William the third Duke of Devonshire.

(95) Afterwards Duchess of Portland.

(96) Anciently the seat of the Vernons.  Sir George Vernon, in Queen Elizabeth’s time, was styled King of the Peak,” and the property came into the Manners family by his daughter marrying Thomas, son of the first Earl of Rutland.-E.

(97) She was daughter of John Hardwicke, of Hardwicke in Derbyshire.  Her first husband was Robert Barley, Esq. who settled his large estate on her and hers.  She married, secondly, Sir William Cavendish; her third husband was Sir William St. Lo; and her fourth was George Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury, whose daughter, Lady Grace, married her son by Sir William Cavendish.

(98) Evelyn, who visited Newstead in 1654, says of it:—­“It is situated much like Fontainbleau, in France, capable of being made a noble seat, accommodated as it is with brave woods and streams; it has yet remaining the front of a glorious abbey church.”  Lord Byron thus beautifully describes the family seat, in the thirteenth canto of Don Juan: 

“An old, old monastery once, and now
Still older mansion-of a rich and rare
Mix’d Gothic, much as artists all allow
Few specimens yet left us can compare.

“Before the mansion lay a lucid lake,
Broad as transparent, deep, and freshly fed
By a river, which its soften’d way did take
In currents through the calmer water spread
Around:  the wildfowl nestled in the brake
And sedges, brooding in their liquid bed: 
The woods sloped downwards to its brink, and stood
With their green faces fix’d upon the flood."-E.

(99) A mighty window, hollow in the centre,
Shorn of its glass of thousand colourings,
Through which the deepen’d glories once could enter,
Streaming from off the sun like seraph’s wings,
Now yawns all desolate."-E.

(100) “——­The cloisters still were stable,
The cells, too, and refectory, I ween: 
An exquisite small chapel had been able
Still unimpaired to decorate the scene
The rest had been reform’d, replaced, or sunk,
And spoke more of the baron than the monk."-E.