spacious and magnificent apartments; audiences held in the great west chamber with its foot-pace; masques, revels, and music in the east chamber, were not to be realized in his time. But if ever any man had a grand conception of what such a house ought to be where royalty might defile in full panoply, through its various apartments, without crowd or confusion, not shorn of its dignity like a provincial magistrate, that conception was realized at Hatfield. Two great chambers, each 60 feet long and 27 wide, on the east and west sides respectively, connected with a gallery 160 feet long, occupying the whole of the southern front, offer far greater advantages for grand entertainments, and enable a house full of guests to pass more freely from one end to the other, descending to the hall or the chapel by either of the opposite staircases, than rooms ranged in the same straight line, frigidly reproducing the same proportions, like the joints of a telescope or a nest of square boxes. Bedrooms in those days were not so numerous as modern usage requires. The more graceful sex formed a minority at festal gatherings. My lady's lady and my gentleman's gentleman were left behind; or if the one attended her mistress and the other his master, the lady's maid generally slept with her mistress, and my lord's gentleman occupied a pallet by the side of his master. Where the accommodation was scanty, two men of rank made no scruple of sharing the same chamber. The personal attendants of the great in those days were gentle by birth, and not unfrequently noble. So far from the truth is Lord Macaulay's flirt at the English clergy, whom he mistakes for the Dominie Sampsons of the novelist, and their wives for the menial waiting-women of his own time. Even Locke, Whig and philosopher as he was, did not sit at the same table with his aristocratic and liberal patron. He ate with the chaplain, at the side table. But neither one nor the other thought themselves degraded, or were degraded in the estimation of their contemporaries, by this rigid distinction of rank.

Sir Robert Cecil was his own architect. Two workmen on his estate—a mason named Conn, and a carpenter named Lyminge —were his builders and surveyors, whilst his steward, Thomas Wilson, acted as general superintendent, paid the wages, and exercised a general supervision over the buildings and the gardens. The mansion, open to the south, occupies three sides of a hollow square, of which the north is 228 feet long, the two sides, east and west, 137 feet respectively, and the south front 133 feet 4 inches. Were it only for its architectural details Hatfield House is remarkable, more especially considering the means and instruments employed in its erection.

erection. In apartments so vast and so numerous no blunders were committed. No gigantic staircase-obtruding its vastness, like Behemoth, into a diminutive hall-thrusts the sleeping apartments out of windows; no long narrow passages, pierced with doors exactly of the same shape and dimensions, and at the same intervals, puzzle the sensitive guest with a superfluous feeling of responsibility. Even in that difficulty of all difficulties, for which neither Greece nor Rome, nor Gothic pinnacle, to the dismay of modern architects, affords any solution-we mean the modern chimney-stack—the Earl, with his uneducated workmen, has afforded lessons modern builders might do well to study if not to imitate. Boldly grouping his chimneys, slightly enriched with interlacement, he made them subservient to the general effect of the whole design. At every distance they stand out against the sky, adding variety and effect to the outline.

It is probable that the house was never entirely completed according to the Earl's intentions. We miss the full complement of the twenty gables, with their twenty lions, and their twenty vanes. We miss the grand quadrilateral esplanade, enclosing the house with its architectural enceinte, and cutting it off by a definite outline from the surrounding country. We miss the great gates at its northern and southern extremities, with their long level line of Purbeck marble, from end to end, flanked with myrtles or formal orange-trees. Time, also, has laid its hand here and there on turret and stone-work. The clock-tower has been shorn of its full proportions. Still, the marvel is how so grand a work could have been carried out with such hands, and in so short a space; how, to this moment, not an opening large enough to admit the blade of a penknife is to be found in the parquetry floor of its long gallery, nor a panel has started from the walls. These were the workmanship of obscure English hands before technical education was invented. Could they, we will not say be surpassed, but be equalled by English carpenters and masons now?

Of the books, pictures, and antiquities, we propose not to speak; we must turn to less familiar subjects. Whilst the Earl was thus occupied in building, a new era of gardening and picturesque horticulture had sprung up in England. The readers of Bacon will call to mind his essay on this subject; the readers of Milton will remember his association of study and contemplation with trim gardens.' By a policy fatal to his successor, James I. had sent the English gentry to reside on their estates in the country; there to study law, like Hampden, or divinity, like Falkland, or chemistry, like Digby. Country

houses

houses showed the result in their greater air of refinement, in their libraries, in their fountains and terrace walks. The Earl was not indiferent to these things, immersed, as he seemed to be, in politics, with his abstracted air, and his large lustrous eyes apparently gazing on vacancy. His grounds absorbed as much of his attention as his house. The garden on the west side belonged to the ancient palace. The garden on the east side, with its great flight of steps from the terrace, dates from the new bouse. It consisted of an upper and a lower level. It was to have been enriched with fountains, two in the quarters of the upper part and one in the midst of the lower part, each receiving their water from that next above it.' In addition to these was a pleasance, called in the papers of the times The Dell,' since better known as The Vineyard, occupying the two opposite banks of the Lee. Nothing can be more picturesque or more delightful on a bot summer's day. Its steep slope of the greenest tarf descending to the river, its primly-cut methodical yews, with their paralel alers carry the imagination back, without an eet to the days of Donne, Burton, and Herbert. Such poetry and such prose, so fresh, so scholarly, so contemplative, solem.n as these yews quaint and as fantastic as they, could never have been meditated except in retreats like this, and only in such retreats can they be fully appreciated. Delightful in itself, it is sil more delenial from the contrast of its geometrical primness win the maclipped limes and oaks growing in untamed strength and majesty in the dark avenue which abuts upon it. Went to see my Lord of Salisbury's palace at Hatfield, writes Evelyn. no bad jadge of houses and gardens, where the most considerabie ntity, besides the bruse, inferior to few then in England for its andisecture, were the garden and vineyard, rarely well watered and planted. They also showed us the picture of Secretary (ell in mosait work, very well done by some Italian Land." This retreat was designed by a Frenchman, as we learn from a lener of the Ear's farmorum addressed to the Earl Limself: and z bevis Evelyn, who prided himself on his yet dem, seems to Late possessed more of its original features than it a prese for he says it was rarely well watered." •A: the Ever See, the letter its mentioned, the Frenchman zeri so make a for a fering machine at the going on of the water in the hand, wilt by the current of the water shall drive by wier to the top of the bank abore the dell and s descent in Eiza For this purpose the bank on

For

the other side of the Lee had to be levelled and the earth transported to the east garden. These water-works are explained by a rude sketch, with which we will not trouble our readers. this vineyard and his other grounds the Earl received from France, through the care of Madame La Boderie, wife of the French Ambassador, 20,000 vines at the cost of 507., and 10,000 more were expected. 'This evening came to me,' says the steward, the French queen's gardener, that hath brought over the fruit-trees for the King and your Lordship; 2,000 for the King, and above 500 for your Lordship... There are two other gardeners besides this man, sent over by the French queen, to see the setting and bestowing of these trees.' From Lady Tresham, at Lyndon, whose husband had bestowed great care on horticulture, he received the offer of fifty cherry-trees; vines and nectarines from Sir Edward Sulyard; liquorice, with explanations for its culture, from the Earl of Shrewsbury; and a Norfolk tumbler for his warren, from Sir Edward Coke. His two gardeners were Montague Jennings and John Tradescant, afterwards horticulturist to Charles I., and father of the still more celebrated John Tradescant, founder of the Tradescant Museum, now better known as the Ashmolean Museum, at Oxford.

But it is not for its bricks and mortar, or the skill exhibited by its architect, or its curious gardens, or even its ancient surroundings, that Hatfield House is famous. Its greatest treasure consists in its collection of original papers, from Edward III. to the House of Hanover, embracing the correspondence of Lord Burghley and his son, from the reign of Henry VIII. to the middle of the reign of James I. No period in our annals is more full of moving accidents;' in none certainly was the spirit of the nation more profoundly stirred, or the chief actors on the stage of its history cast in a mightier mould

'Sad, high, and working, full of state and wou.'

It embraces the two most fiery ordeals through which any nation can be doomed to pass. The conflict of opposite elements equally strong, their alternate preponderance, their eventual fusion, invest the whole of this epoch with a dramatic interest and grandeur never surpassed. Within its limits there is scarcely any event of moment, scarcely any personage that 'frets his hour' on the stage of history, that is not set in a clearer light, or brought more vividly home to the reader, by the Cecil manuscripts. Bequeathed by Lord Burghley to his son, Sir Robert, the first Earl of Salisbury, containing a more complete and voluminous collection of the papers of the son than even of the father, the correspondence preserves, as might be expected, im

portant

portant information for the life and ministry of both. The settlement of the kingdom on the accession of Elizabeth; her correspondence with Mary Queen of Scots; two of the celebrated Casket letters in French, numbered by Burghley's own handone a clumsy imitation of Mary's hand, and suspiciously manipulated; the various intrigues carried on by noble and ignoble agents on both sides; the hopes and disappointments of the Howards; the Anjou and Alençon marriage; the preparations for the Armada; the brilliant and impetuous career of Essex; the disputes, intrigues, and jealousies fomented by the succession and the reign of James I.; the Bye Plot, the Gunpowder Plot, the designs of Garnet, the divided counsels of the seminary priests and the Jesuits, the marriage and escape of Arabella Stuart: these, and many more, are presented in unbroken succession to the reader. With these guides he may thread his way securely through the dark shadows of the past. Theirs are the freshness and vivacity of contemporaneous narrative, the vividness of eye-witnesses and actors in the scene before him. Here are the letters traced by the hands of men like Wolsey, hurled from the height of greatness to dishonour; or of others like Essex, penning his last lines, as the moments fast ebbed away, the night before his execution. Here are the sighs and tears of despairing wives and relatives, watching intently for the least ray of mercy. The pangs, the hopes, the anxieties, the disappointments, the anguish of poor humanity, the intrigues of the great, the necessities of the fallen, are here consigned to minute and perpetual memory, the only living and tangible element that remains of those who have long since crumbled into dust. All else has perished. These poor sheets of paper, once warm beneath the hands of those who traced the characters inscribed upon them, of kings, queens, princes, statesmen, the prosperous and the miserable, the triumphant and the dying, the noble and the ignoble,-these form a visible and material bond, that brings the present, by undying sympathy, into close proximity with the past. Over these pages has passed the breath of other centuries. The eyes of distant generations have wandered over their contents. The spirit which once animated them is before us, not as in the imagination of the poet, or in the narrative of the historian, but in its native sincerity, unalloyed and undisguised.

The collection at Hatfield is enriched by the letters of Edward VI., Katharine Parr, Donna Maria, Elizabeth as Princess and Queen, Mary Queen of Scots, James I., Ann of Denmark, Francis II., Henry IV., Philip II. and Philip III., Catherine de' Medici, Arabella Stuart, Princess Elizabeth the daughter,

Henry