style, with a great court-yard, a noble hall and two spacious wings. Simeon is struck with the magnificence of the house. The boy is led with his grandmother to his own room, and is there solemnly dedicated by Simeon to the Lord. The establishment is arranged for a limited number of boys. Mr. Preston, already mentioned in the last preceding chapter at Little Shelford, has now taken a certain number of pupils at Aspeden, mostly sons of Simeon's friends. Among these are William, eldest son of William Wilberforce, Thomas Babington the son of Zachary Macaulay, young Vaughan who afterwards won renown as a preacher in Brighton, young Malden who became a well-known classical professor[1]. Macaulay's youthful letters, showing how his mind began to grasp the principles of literature and politics, are written from Aspeden Hall. The place was vacated when Mr. Preston obtained preferment to a living in 1825, and remained empty till 1852, when it was pulled down, and a pretty house in the Italian style was built on its site. But pictures of the former house are extant, and some of the oaken panellings of the old hall are attached to the new. The undulating grounds may be seen, where young James with his distinguished school-fellows once roamed; the Westminster pond, so called from being exactly of the same proportions as Westminster Hall, and overshadowed by lime trees — the grand groups of chestnuts — the steep, though round-shaped and grassy hillock, down which
- ↑ See Cussan's History of Hertfordshire, p. 96.
