must not one sigh to reflect, that the most authentic record of so ancient a family should lie at the mercy of every boy that throws a stone? In this hall, in former days, have dined gartered knights and courtly dames, with ushers, sewers, and seneschals; and yet it was but the other night that an owl flew in hither, and mistook it for a barn.

This hall lets you up, (and down), over a very high threshold, into the parlour. It is furnished with historical tapestry, whose marginal fringes do confess the moisture of the air. The other contents of this room are a broken-bellied virginal, a couple of crippled velvet chairs, with two or three mildewed pictures of mouldy ancestors, who look as dismally as if they came fresh from hell with all their brimstone about them. These are carefully set at the further corner; for the windows being every where broken, make it so convenient a place to dry poppies and mustard-seed in, that the room is appropriated to that use.

Next this parlour lies (as I said before) the pigeon-house; by the side of which runs an entry that leads, on one hand and the other, into a bedchamber, a buttery, and a small hole called the chaplain's study. Then follow a brewhouse, a little green and gilt parlour, and the great stairs, under which is the dairy. A little further on the right, the servants' hall; and by the side of it, up six steps, the old lady's closet, which has a lattice into the said hall, that while she said her prayers,

she might cast an eye on the men and maids. There are upon this ground-floor in all twentyfour apartments, hard to be distinguished by particular names; among which I must not forget a chamber, that has in it a large antiquity of timber, which seems to have been either a bedstead or a cyder-press.

Our best room above is very long and low, of the exact proportion of a band-box: it has hangings of the finest work in the world, those, I mean, which Arachne spins out of her own bowels. indeed the roof is so decayed, that after a favourable shower of rain, we may (with God's blessing) expect a crop of mushrooms between the chinks of the floors.

All this upper story has for many years had no other inhabitants than certain rats, whose very age renders them worthy of this venerable mansion, for the very rats of this ancient seat are grey. Since these had not quitted it, we hope at least this house may stand during the small remainder of days these poor animals have to live, who are now too infirm to remove to another: they have still a small subsistence left them in the few remaining books of the library.

I had never seen half what I have described, but for an old starched grey-headed steward, who is as much an antiquity as any in the place, and looks like an old family picture walked out of its frame. He failed not, as we passed from room to room, to relate several memoirs of the family, but his ob

servations were particularly curious in the cellar : he shewed where stood the triple rows of buts of sack, and where were ranged the bottles of tent for toasts in the morning: he pointed to the stands that supported the iron-hooped hogheads of strong beer; then stepping to a corner, he lugged out the tattered fragment of an unframed picture: "This (says he, with tears in his eyes) was poor Sir Thomas, once master of the drink I told you of: he had two sons (poor young masters!) that never arrived to the age of this beer; they both fell ill in this very cellar, and never went out upon their own legs." He could not pass by a broken bottle, without taking it up to shew us the arms of the family on it. He then led me up the tower, by dark winding stone steps, which landed us into several little rooms, one above another; one of these was nailed up, and my guide whispered to me the occasion of it. It seems, the course of this noble blood was a little interrupted about two centuries ago, by a freak of the Lady Frances, who was here taken with a neighbouring prior; ever since which, the room has been made up, and branded with the name of the adultery-chamber. The ghost of Lady Frances is supposed to walk here; some prying maids of the family formerly reported that they saw a lady in a fardingale through the keyhole; but this matter was hushed up, and the servants forbid to talk of it.

I must needs have tired you with this long letter; but what engaged me in the description was

a generous principle to preserve the memory of a thing that must itself soon fall to ruin; nay, perhaps, some part of it before this reaches your hands. Indeed, I owe this old house the same gratitude that we do to an old friend, that harbours us in his declining condition, nay even in his last extremities. I have found this an excellent place for retirement and study, where no one who passes by can dream there is an inhabitant, and even any body that would visit me dares not venture under my roof. You will not wonder I have translated a great deal of Homer in this retreat; any one that sees it will own I could not have chosen a fitter or more likely place to converse with the dead. As soon as I return to the living, it shall be to converse with the best of them. I hope therefore very speedily to tell you in person how sincerely and unalterably I am, Madam,

Your, &c.*

I beg Mr. Wortley to believe me his most humble servant.

* It is remarkable, that this description of an old mansion is the very same with that he sent to the Duke of Buckingham, in answer to one the Duke had given him of Buckingham-house,

Warton.

We find from a preceding letter, p. 100, that Pope had just passed part of the summer of 1718, at an old romantic seat of Lord Harcourt's, which he lent him.-This mansion, situated in the parish of Stanton Harcourt, Oxfordshire, appears to have afforded the groundwork of the present description, and of that contained in the letter to the Duke of Buckingham, vol. viii. p. 273; which vary only in a few trifling particulars.

LETTER XXV.

TO LADY MARY WORTLEY MONTAGU.

MADAM,

Cirencester, Sept. 15, 1721.

I WRITE this purely to confess myself ingenuously what I am, a beast; first, for writing to you without gilt paper; and secondly, for what I said and did about your harpsichord. For which (and for many other natural reasons) I am justly turned as a beast to grass and parks. I deserve no better pillow than a mossy bank, for that head which could be guilty of so much thoughtlessness, as to promise what was not in my power, without considering first whether it was or not. But the truth is, I imagined you would take it merely as an excuse, had I told you I had the instrument under such conditions; and I likewise simply thought I could obtain leave to lend it; which failing on the trial, I suffer now, I find, in your opinion of my veracity, partly from my over-forward desire to have gratified you. The next thing I can do, is to entreat you, since you have not your harpsichord, that you would have that and the gallery together, for your concerts; which I sincerely wish you could make use of, and which I take to be mine to lend, unless my mother knows some conditions against it, to Mr. Vernon.

I very much envy you your musical company, which you have a sort of obligation to believe, in