distant period, and its architecture was rude in the extreme; for the pride of its possessors would not permit the smallest polish or improvement, considering its rudeness an honourable date of their own antiquity. Time, however, had been less sparing, and marked it in many places with visible decay; some of the windows were dismantled from the failure of the stone work, and many of its battlements had mouldered away: it stood upon an elevated lawn, sequestered in the bosom of an extensive wood, whose mighty shades appeared coeval with itself: on one side a narrow stream crept from a little shrubby hill with sluggish murmurs through the brushwood, expanding by degrees, till it formed a spacious lake, whose rising banks were covered with a profusion of fragrant and flowering shrubs; the myrtle, the laurestine, the flexile osier, and the weeping willow here intermingled their beauties, and fantastically fringed its margin; while on its bosom lay a few small islands of variegated verdure, the haunts of lonely and aquatic
