perished, did not touch Beaulieu, but Netley fell early in the
following year, and the monks were sent to Beaulieu. Many then looked
for the spoil of the great abbey, among them Lord Lisle who besought
Thomas Cromwell for it, but he was denied. Indeed there seems to have
been no idea of suppressing the house at that time. But the Abbot
Stevens was a traitor. In 1538 he eagerly signed the surrender demanded
by the infamous Layton and Petre, and the site was granted to Thomas
Wriothesley, afterwards Earl of Southampton, from whose family it came
in the time of William III. to Lord Montagu, and so to the Dukes of
Buccleuch, who still hold it.

Nothing can exceed the beauty of the remains of the house there by the
river, in perhaps the loveliest corner of southern England. The great
abbey church has gone, destroyed at the Suppression, but not a little
of the monastery remains. The great Gate House called the abbot's
lodging and now the Palace House, the seat of Lord Montagu of Beaulieu,
a fine Decorated building with a beautiful entrance hall, may sometimes
be seen. From this one passes across the grass to the old Refectory,
now fitted up as the parish church, a noble work of the Early English
style of the thirteenth century, as is the fine pulpit with its arcade
in the thickness of the wall. Here of old the monk read aloud while his
brethren took their meagre repast.

From the Refectory one comes into the ruined cloisters, lovely with all
manner of flowers, and so to the site of the old Chapter House, of the
sacristy and the monastic buildings. All that remains is in the early
Decorated style of the end of the thirteenth century. Here, too, upon
the north stood the great abbey church, three hundred and thirty-five
feet long, a cruciform building consisting of nave with two aisles,
central tower, transepts with aisles, chancel with circular apse and
chapels, now marked out in chalk upon the grass. All about are the
woods, meadows, fishponds and greens of the monks who are gone.

I do not know how this strikes another who shall see it to-day, in all
its useless beauty, in the midst of our restless and unhappy England;
but what I felt has already been expressed and by so good an Englishman
as William Cobbett.

"Now ... I daresay," he writes, "that you are a very good Protestant;
and I am a monstrous good Protestant too. We cannot bear the Pope, nor
"they there priests that makes men confess there sins and go down upon
t