sement, ponderously wrought with intersecting arches, dark
and rather chilly, just like what I remember to have seen at Battle Abbey;
and, after waiting here a little while, a respectable elderly gentlewoman
appeared, of whom we requested to be shown round the Abbey. She
courteously acceded, first presenting us to a book, in which to inscribe
our names.

I suppose ten thousand people, three-fourths of them Americans, have
written descriptions of Newstead Abbey; and none of them, so far as I have
read, give any true idea of the place; neither will my description, if I
write one. In fact, I forget very much that I saw, and especially in what
order the objects came. In the basement was Byron's bath--a dark and cold
and cellar-like hole, which it must have required good courage to plunge
into; in this region, too, or near it, was the chapel, which Colonel
Wildman has decorously fitted up, and where service is now regularly
performed, but which was used as a dogs' kennel in Byron's time.

After seeing this, we were led to Byron's own bed-chamber, which remains
just as when he slept in it--the furniture and all the other arrangements
being religiously preserved. It was in the plainest possible style,
homely, indeed, and almost mean--an ordinary paper-hanging, and everything
so commonplace that it was only the deep embrasure of the window that made
it look unlike a bed-chamber in a middling-class lodging-house. It would
have seemed difficult, beforehand, to fit up a room in that picturesque
old edifice so that it should be utterly void of picturesqueness; but it
was effected in this apartment, and I suppose it is a specimen of the way
in which old mansions used to be robbed of their antique character, and
adapted to modern tastes, before medieval antiquities came into fashion.
Some prints of the Cambridge colleges, and other pictures indicating
Byron's predilections at the time, and which he himself had hung there,
were on the walls. This, the housekeeper told us, had been the Abbot's
chamber, in the monastic time. Adjoining it is the haunted room, where the
ghostly monk whom Byron introduces into "Don Juan," is said to have his
lurking-place. It is fitted up in the same style as Byron's, and used to
be occupied by his valet or page. No doubt, in his lordship's day, these
were the only comfortable bedrooms in the Abbey; and by the housekeeper's
account of what Colonel Wildman has done, it is to be inferred that the
place must