the office was held by James, Duke of York, afterwards James II. (who, by the way, was married at Dover Castle to Mary of Modena), it has been held by Lord Sydney, Prince George of Denmark, the Earl of Dorset, the Duke of Ormonde, Sydney Earl of Leicester, D’Arcy Earl of Holdernesse, Lord North, William Pitt, the Earl of Liverpool, the Duke of Wellington, and the Marquis of Dalhousie.
It does not appear from the existing records that any of the Lords Warden have been formally installed with a public solemnity since the Duke of Dorset, who was thus inaugurated, in 1765, at the “Bredenstone.” Even of this installation there is no authentic record in the public documents of the authorities of the Cinque Ports; and we understand that for the entire programme of the ceremonies performed at the admission of Lord Palmerston, recourse was had to an old newspaper of the day which had recorded the affair with the minuteness of a reporter of our own time. Even “Sylvanus Urban” has placed upon record no outline of the proceedings among his Domestic Occurrences in the “Gentleman’s Magazine.” As our readers are already familiar with the procession and its accompanying solemnities, we will only ask them to walk leisurely up the western heights of Dover to nearly the top of the “Drop Redoubt,” where they will see worked into the wall of the newly-constructed barracks part of the ancient “Bredenstone,” of which they have heard so much of late.
This “Bredenstone,” or “Kissingstone”—or “Devil’s Drop,” as it is vulgarly styled by tradition among the inhabitants of Dover—was certainly standing on the western heights in the middle of last century, as it is not only mentioned in his “History of Dover Castle” by Darell, chaplain to Queen Elizabeth (the original of which is in the Herald’s College in Doctors’ Commons), but a cut of it, as it appeared in 1760, is to be seen in the edition of Darell published at that date. As to the name, the story is, that the good people of Dover thought it was too big a mass to have been made by the hands of man, and therefore somewhat hastily concluded that it must have been the work of the Prince of Darkness.
The masonry of which it is composed is of hard reddish concrete, flint, Kentish rag, and Roman fluted tiles; it was laid upon a platform of flintwork of the same date, and, to judge from its site and from other points, it must have formed the lower portion of a second Roman Pharos, or lighthouse, corresponding to the well-known Pharos still standing within the walls of the castle on the opposite hill, which is nearly coeval with the Christian era. Such, at all events, is the opinion of a well-known local antiquary, Mr. Knocker, the present worthy town-clerk of Dover, who tells us, in a lecture which he delivered some three years ago, that there is a tradition that a third Pharos of a similar shape and material once stood on the heights above Boulogne. At all events, it is an authenticated fact that this Bredenstone for many centuries was the spot at which the Lords Wardens were installed into their office—the last instance of its use on record, we believe, being just ninety-six years ago. In the year 1808, when the present Drop redoubt was formed, the general in command of the engineers, being more of a soldier than a scholar, and there probably being at hand no local antiquary to rescue it from destruction, and the military authorities, unable to pick it to pieces with axes, tumbled it over on the ground and buried it in situ, where it was found a few weeks since. It now forms a portion of the barrack wall, and we hope that ere long a brass plate will be let into the solid masonry, to tell of its past history and of its present and future use—for we suppose that even Lords Warden have no patent of immortality; and, though we trust that it may be a distant day, yet the day must come in due course when the Bredenstone will witness a repetition of the solemnity of the 28th of August, 1861.
CADER IDRIS—THE CHAIR OF IDRIS.
I am an old bachelor now, the object of an interest—not, perhaps, wholly unselfish—to my nephews and nieces. Be it so. They will not have long to wait. The one bright thread in the darksome web of my life was snapped, rudely snapped, many a weary year ago, and I am only sorry when a new spring-time comes round and finds me still among the living.
In the autumn of 1829 I was staying in one of the wildest and most secluded districts of Wales, not, as now, a grey-haired, broken man, but young, happy, and rich in friends, in prospects, and, above all, in that elastic spirit of hopefulness that forms the best heritage of those who begin the world. Talglyn Hall, one of those moss-grown stone mansions whose weather-beaten masonry look old enough to be coeval with the eternal hills that overshadow them, was the place of my temporary abode. The Hall—the name of which I have slightly altered—was the ancestral residence of a Welsh gentleman whom I shall call Griffith. I was his friend and guest; indeed we were distantly related, and I was to have been the husband of his youngest daughter. Dear, lost Ellen! with what painful distinctness, after all these years, does her gentle image rise before me, in all the bloom of that youthful beauty on which the hand of Time was never to be laid. I often fancy that she stands beside me as I sit in my elbow-chair, brooding over the past, over the golden sands that ran out so early, and in a strain of faintly audible music, or in the sigh of the summer wind, I fondly dream that I hear the voice of Ellen. Forgive me, reader! I will wander from the point no more, but briefly tell how I won and lost her.
Rambling through Wales during the summer of the preceding year, sketching and fishing, and seeking all the benefit which the pure air and exercise could confer on a constitution somewhat impaired by study and hard work at the bar, a singular whim possessed me. This was no other than to seek out some remote connections of my mother’s, who were known to dwell peaceably on their hereditary acres somewhere in the Principality, but between whom and my immediate relatives no intercourse had taken place for at