which,
when the windows are put in, which is not yet fully done, will have few
superiors among the castellated mansions of England....

In the center of the inner court stands the old banqueting-hall, a tall
gabled building with high red roof, surmounted with the ruins of a cupola,
erected upon it by Mr. Perry, who married the heiress of the family, but
who does not seem to have brought much taste into it. On the point of each
gable is an old stone figure--the one a tortoise, the other a lion
couchant--and upon the back of each of these old figures, so completely
accordant with the building itself, which exhibits under its eaves and at
the corners of its windows numbers of those grotesque corbels which
distinguish our buildings of an early date, both domestic and
ecclesiastical, good Mr. Perry clapped a huge leaden vase which had
probably crowned aforetime the pillars of a gateway, or the roof of a
garden-house....

The south side of the house has all the irregularity of an old castle,
consisting of various towers, projections, buttresses, and gables. Some of
the windows show tracery of a superior order, and others have huge common
sashes, introduced by the tasteful Mr. Perry aforesaid. The court on this
side is surrounded by battlemented walls, and has a massy square gatehouse
leading into the old garden, or pleasaunce, which sloped away down toward
the Medway, but is now merely a grassy lawn, with the remains of one fine
terrace running along its western side....

The old banqueting-hall is a noble specimen of the baronial hall of the
reign of Edward III., when both house and table exhibited the rudeness of
a martial age, and both gentle and simple revelled together, parted only
by the salt. The floor is of brick. The raised platform, or dais, at the
west-end, advances sixteen feet into the room. The width of the hall is
about forty feet, and the length of it about fifty-four feet. On each side
are tall Gothic windows, much of the tracery of which has been some time
knocked out, and the openings plastered up. At the east end is a fine
large window, with two smaller ones above it; but the large window is, for
the most part, hidden by the front of the music gallery.

In the center of the floor an octagon space is marked out with a rim of
stone, and within this space stands a massy old dog, or brand-iron, about
a yard and a half wide, and the two upright ends three feet six inches
high, having on their outer sides, ne