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CHAPTER X.

MATLOCK TO MANCHESTER.

I KEPT on as far as "Wingfield Manor," a ruined castellated house of the powerful Earl of Shrewsbury, whose wife was the famous "Countess Bess." These ruins are in the highest degree picturesque, the more so because they are so utterly neglected, and so different in this respect from other English tenderly nursed and "well-preserved ruins." They stand on an eminence thickly wooded, in the centre of a circle of green and lovely hills which Mary Stuart looked out upon when kept here for nine years captive; though if we should believe all that the guide-books here and there say, the unfortunate queen must have lingered in captivity some half a century in England before her death. There is some rich carving still left about the windows and doors of the chapel, overgrown as it is with weeds and thistles; but trees of nearly a century's growth shoot up where Mary's apartments once were. Cows and sheep feed around the inclosure of the walls. The house was destroyed by the Parliamentary army, or, as they told me, by Cromwell, who, if he did personally all that he is said to have done, must have been not only a hundred-armed, but hundred-legged English "Seeva."

Our way lay led through the village of Crich, where there are extensive lead mines a bleak place seated on the very apex of the hills, the old black stone church keeping watch on its lofty height over a vast panorama. I saw in the distance "Hardwick Hall," one of the many domains of the Duke of Devonshire. Coming around over the desolate tract of Tansley Moor, we returned to the pleasant hotel and old lime-tree at Matlock Bath.

The little river Wye is said to be a capital trout stream; I should like to have whipped it a little by way of trial. It has not the volume and flow of its noble namesake in Monmouthshire, but it is a pretty amber-colored stream that stops and plays with every thing on its way,

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Our way lay along this lovely little river, through a valley of fertile meadow land with gentle hills on either side, where the cattle were quietly feeding, and though the rest of the world might be convulsed by war, here all was peace.

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The first sight of Haddon Hall, standing bold and high across the river, set off by its background of woods a sudden vision of the past, with nothing but simple Nature around, and nothing to recall those changes that have made it an object of peculjar mark—was impressive; but the impression was not deepened by a near acquaintance. Crossing a three-arched bridge, we drove up to the

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lodge, and were shown into the castle by an elfin, who opened the big oak door of the frowning gateway tower with a key almost as long as her bare This heavy tower of the time of Edward III., casting a broad shadow, is the most majestic part of the edifice; and at this portal the scene of Edwin Landseer's picture is laid. The house is now the property of the Duke of Rutland. Before the Manners family possessed it, it was the seat of the Vernon family; and in the days of Sir George Vernon, styled "King of the Peak," this place was in its greatest magnificence. The courtyard is not large. The chaplain's room is first shown, as well as the chapel, to illustrate the tight corner into which religion was pushed and kept locked up in those times. These apartments, and their very keeping and situation, go to verify Macaulay's picture of that rude and unlettered period. Passing over into the old dining-room, and kitchen with its huge iron spit, one sees plainly enough around what centre the whole house revolved. In the dining-hall there is the rough oak table, raised a step for the lord and his family; but he seems to have eaten with his retainers and people, who sat only "below the salt," with a kind of savage brotherhood even in those haughty days. When any one failed of drinking his share he was fastened up by his hands to an iron staple in the wall, and cold water was poured down his sleeve. Of course they would not think of pouring it down his throat. Haddon Hall is wonderfully preserved in all its

parts. The faded arras is hanging in the chambers. The little lead-soldered windows swing open to let in the spicy air from the cedar and fir trees, as in the old time. From these panneled rooms, and the great hall sprinkled with carved "boars' heads and peacocks," and the state bed-chamber, and the "Peveril Tower," and the terraced garden, and the yew-trees, and the grotesque gothic ornaments of the outer and inner courts, it would not be difficult to reconstruct a baronial residence of the 15th or 16th century. The long line of crenelated walls and towers, low but solid, form even now a perfect medieval picture. But though there are some striking points and views, most things are stiff, creaking, and dismal; and with the gloomy forest hanging around and above on a wild winter night, it must be a rare place for the imagination of a poet like Keats to play freaks in. Poor Keats! why should we always think of him as one who could have written such great things! He was a true English poet; and his Greece was laid in the heart of green England, in scenery not unlike this softly wild, rocky, verdurous, lonely Derbyshire.

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The Bakewell Church, which illustrates Haddon Hall as St. Mary's Church does Warwick Castle, is worth visiting on its own account. Some parts of it have been thought to be of Saxon origin, but Saxon architecture has, I believe, been pretty much given up by the learned as something that belongs, like "many-towered Camelot," to Tenny

son's poetry and the legendary age of England. It is supposed, however, that a church stood here before the Conquest. There is a very decided look about the present edifice, of a more modern church's having been built upon an extremely ancient one, which was plain and solid, without ornament. It is a quarry of antiquity for the ecclesiologist. There is a Runic cross in the churchyard, as well as at Eyam Church, not far distant. Many fragments of very curious tombstones, probably Saxon, have been discovered in digging under the church. But the later monuments in the Vernon and Manners chapel are the most singular. They are composed of colored lifesize stone or alabaster figures. A mother and her whole family of kneeling sons and daughters down to mere babies, in black dresses, all having an intensely strong family likeness, rise pyramidically upon one immense monument or tablet. The effigies of John Manners and Dorothy Vernon, his wife, whose romantic history enlivens the stones and shades of Haddon Hall, are upon the opposite monument. An elaborate alabaster recumbent statue of Sir Thomas Wendesley, representing him in full armor, is interesting as illustrating costume.

Chatsworth is a place so well known, that I cannot attempt to write much about it. Its situation in the queenly valley of the Derwent, framed in on one side with perpendicular hills fading away in the blue distance, and by an ancient park on the other, with broad rich meadows, an unlimited

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