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the kingdom, but of which, since they are types rather than grandiose
exceptions, it will for the moment be enough to describe a few, others
being reserved for mention in connection with particular circumstances.

Of castles other than the greatest, were I asked to name the most
romantic which has been known to me as a visitor, and the most agreeable
in the way of an ancestral dwelling, I should, I think, begin with
Powis, as it stands with its rose-red walls, an exhalation of the Middle
Ages, on a steep declivity among the mountainous woods of Wales--woods
full of deer and bracken. Much of its painted paneling had never been,
when I stayed there, touched or renovated since the time of the battle
of Worcester. In a bedroom which had once been occupied by Charles I
there was hardly a piece of furniture which was not coeval with himself.
The dining room, as I remember it, had been frescoed by a Dutch artist
in the reign of William and Mary.

In respect of mere romantic situation, the English house which I
remember as coming nearest to Powis is Glenthorne, the seat of the
Hallidays, which not so very long ago was thirty miles from a railway on
one side, and seventeen on another. It fronts the Bristol Channel on the
confines of Devon and Somerset. I have described it accurately in my
novel _The Heart of Life_. In its general aspect it resembles my own
early home, Denbury, but in some ways it is quite peculiar. In front of
it is an Italian garden, below which are breaking waves, and behind it
precipitous woods rise like a wall to an altitude of more than twelve
hundred feet. The only approach to the house is by a carriage drive
three miles long, which descends to it in zigzags from the upper world
of Exmoor.

Hardly less romantic is Ugbrooke, the seat of the Cliffords, about
twelve miles from Torquay, associated with the name of Dryden, who was a
frequent guest there, and haunted by the Catholicism of a long series of
generations. The chapel is approached through, and transmits its incense
to, a library which hardly contains a book more recent than the days of
the nonjurors, and I have often spent long mornings there examining the
files of journals belonging to the epoch of Queen Anne, of the first two
Georges, and of Pope. I have kindred recollections of Lulworth Castle in
Dorsetshire, where the old religious regime so casts its spell over
everything that I should hardly have been surprised if a keeper,
encountered in