Page:An Epistle to Posterity.djvu/167

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144
AN EPISTLE TO POSTERITY

beautiful long, low Elizabethan house, and some of the finest elms in England. We drove home by Stoneleigh Abbey, another charming specimen house, where are some interesting relics of Lord Byron, but we were not able to stop and see them. The owner, Mr. Leigh, however, permits his house and treasures to be seen at certain hours by the public.

Kenilworth, Warwick Castle, Guy's Cliff, afford another day's drive from Leamington; and I insisted ou going through the old town of Coventry, for the sake of Godiva and Peeping Tom, whose luckless effigy is carefully arranged at a window. But, alas! Coventry is a modern, prosperous manufacturing town; and had it not been for a wonderful old church we should have been wofully disappointed. At Warwick Castle, where are the two best Vandykes of Charles I., I saw the only relic of Oliver Cromwell which I could find in England. It was a cast of his face after death.

Kenilworth is a dreadful disappointment. It is too much of a ruin. You can scarcely, even with Sir Walter in your hand, reconstruct that famous banquet-hall, of which the floor and the roof are gone. I found Amy Robsart's staircase. She is the most real person connected with Kenilworth.

York Minster was one of my great joys. It is the only cathedral I have seen in England or on the Continent that can be seen. It has no ugly, unsightly, intrusive buildings between you and it. It stands majestically in its own green park, glorious, complete—a poem and a history in itself.

We could never become accustomed to the beauty of England—the finish, the perfection of the whole thing, all so agreeable to an eye used to our own incompleteness. We have not been touched up by time yet; and,