OLD ENGLISH HOUSES.  
Our country houses, and especially the older ones, are in themselves an inestimable national treasure. A thousand endearing associations gather about them. I cannot conceive a more deeply interesting work than a history of them which entered fully into the spirit of the times in which they were raised, and through which they have stood. Which should give us a view of the national changes which have passed over them; mighty revolutions, whether abrupt and violent, or slow and silent, in fortune, in manners, and in mind; and still more, which should, aided by family paintings, family documents and traditions, unfold their domestic annals. What an opening up of the human heart would be there! There is nothing more splendid, or surprising, or fearful, or pathetic, or happy and fanciful in romance, than would be there discovered. There is no success, no glory of life and action, no image of princely or baronial power, no strange freaks of fortune, none of the startling, or the moving incidents of humanity but have there enrolled themselves. What noble hearts; what great and pathetic spirits have dwelt at one time or other in those old places; and then what beautiful and bewitching creatures have cast through them the sunshine of their presence; have made them glad with their wit, and their gay fancies, and their strong affections; or have hallowed them with their sufferings[250] and their tears. O for the revelation of the fair forms; of the scenes of successful or sorrowful love; of the bridals and the burials; of the poetic dreams and pious aspirations, that have warmed or saddened these old halls through the flight of ages! Much of this is gone for ever; swept into the black and fathomless gulf of oblivion; but enough might be recovered to make us wonder at what has passed upon our ancestral soil, and to make us love it with a still deeper love. There is no portion of our national history, or point of our national character, but would be brought into the sweep of such narratives, and receive illustration from them. Our warriors, statesmen, philosophers, divines, poets, beauties and heroines more admirable than beauty could make them, would all figure there.[10] In the galleries of many of these houses, hang portraits to which traditions are attached that would freeze the blood, or make it dance with ardour and delight; that would chain up the listening spirit in breathless attention, in awe and curiosity. In the very writings by which the estates are secured, in old charters, wills, and other deeds, facts are traced and changes developed of the most singular character; and in the oral annals of the families exist correlative testimonies, which have been imprinted there by the intense interest of the circumstances themselves.
[10] This was written four years ago. Since then the author has published the first volume of such a work, under the title of “Visits to Remarkable Places, Old Halls, Battle Fields, etc.”
How delightful it is to go through those hereditary abodes of ancient and distinguished families, and to see, in the very construction of them, images of the past times, and their modes of existence. Here you pass through ample courts, amid rambling and extensive offices that once were necessary to the jolly establishment of the age,—for hounds, horses, hawks, and all their attendants and dependences. Here you come into vast kitchens, with fireplaces at which three or four oxen might be roasted at once, with mantelpieces wide as the arch of a bridge, and chimneys as large as the steeple of a country church. Then you advance into great halls, where scores of rude revellers have feasted in returning from battle, or the chase, in the days of feudal running and riding, of foraying and pilgrimages; of hard knocks and hard lying: ere tea and coffee had supplanted beef and ale at breakfast; ere books had[251] charmed away spears and targets, tennis-courts and tourneys, and political squabbles and parliamentary campaigning, the scouring of marches, and firing of neighbours’ castles. Then again, you advance into tapestried chambers, on whose walls mythological or scriptural histories wrought by the fingers of high-born dames, at once impress you with a sense of very still and leisurely and woodland times, when Crockford’s and Almack’s were not; nor the active spirit of civilization had raised up weavers, and spinners, and artificers of all kinds by thousands on thousands, by towns-full and cities-full. And now you come to the very closets and bowers of the ladies themselves—scenes of worn and faded splendour, but shewing enough of their original state to mark their wide difference from the silken boudoirs and luxurious dormitories of the fair dames of this age of swarming and busy artisans; of ample rents and city life; instead of hunting and fighting, of wars in the heart of France, or civil wars at home, to call out the heads of houses, or perhaps drive their families forth with fire and sword in their absence. Then there is the antique chapel, and the library; the one having, in most cases, been deserted by its ancient faith, the other still bearing testimony to the range of reading of our old squires and nobles, since reading became a part of their education, in a few grim folios,—a Bible, a Gwillim’s Heraldry, one or two of our Chroniclers, and a few Latin Classics or Fathers, for the enjoyment of the chaplain.
But the armoury and the great gallery—these are the places in which a flood of historic light pours in upon you, and the spirit of the past is made so palpable, that you forget your real existence in this utilitarian century; you forget reform in all its shapes—ballot, household suffrage, triennial parliaments; you forget the cry of the church and king; and the counter-cry from a million of eager voices, for liberty of hearth and faith; you forget that all around you, from the very walls that surround you to the distant sea, is nothing but fields cultivated like gardens, secured by gates and fences, and tenfold more costly and powerful parchment, to their particular owners; you forget that towns stand by hundreds, and villages by thousands, filled with a busy, an inquisitive, a reading, thinking, aspiring and irresistible population; and that all the institutions, the opinions, the loves and doings of[252] the times when these things before you were matters of familiar life, are gone, or are going, for ever: that,
Another race has been, and other palms are won.
Yes, mighty and impressive as these things are; deeply as they visit your daily thought and nightly dreams; woven as they are with the thread of your existence, and your hopes and belief of the future ages,—yes, potent as they are, they vanish for a time. Here are swords, helmets, coats of mail, and plate-armour standing up in its own massiveness; shells from which the active bodies which moved them, have long ago disappeared. Here are buff-coats, ponderous boots, and huge spurs; broad hats, with sweeping feathers, and chains of gold, crosses and amulets, which make the past for ever in time, the past for ever in spirit, come back again with a vivid and intoxicating effect. You gaze upon arms and relics which figured in all the battles and pilgrimages, the desperate strifes and extravagant pageants of our ancestors; you behold things which link your fancies to all the romantic ages of European history. You forget the present; and exist amid forests, the stern strength of castles and the venerable quiet of convents. You are ready to listen to the distant bell of the abbey; for news of the crusaders; you expect as you ride through the woods, to stumble upon the abode of the hermit. These arms and fragments before you, were in the battles of Cressy and Poictiers; in the wars of the Roses; in the Tourney of the Field of Cloth-of-Gold; that mail, on the back of some stout knight, climbed over the ramparts of Ascalon, or of Jerusalem itself; and those, bringing you down the stream of events, are the equipments of Cavaliers and of Puritan leaders, when the spirit of feudalism and that of progression came so rudely into strife as to shake the kingdom like an earthquake. You step into the gallery, and there are the very men whose iron habiliments you have been contemplating; there are the rude portraitures of the warriors of an earlier day; and there are the Sidneys, the Howards, the Essexes and Leicesters, the Warwicks and Wiltons, of an after one; the men that set up and pulled down kings, that waded through the blood of others, or that poured out their own, for honour and liberty. You have read of some handsome and gallant knight who wrought some chivalric[253] miracle, who perhaps died in its ............