f
Hackton Green, and from which, for three miles, goes (or rather went) an
avenue of noble elms up to the towers of the old castle. I wished they
had been oak when I cut the trees down in '79, for they would have
fetched three times the money: I know nothing more culpable than the
carelessness of ancestors in planting their grounds with timber of small
value, when they might just as easily raise oak. Thus I have always said
that the Roundhead Lyndon of Hackton, who planted these elms in Charles
II.'s time, cheated me of ten thousand pounds.

For the first few days after our arrival, my time was agreeably spent
in receiving the visits of the nobility and gentry who came to pay their
respects to the noble new-married couple, and, like Bluebeard's wife
in the fairy tale, in inspecting the treasures, the furniture, and the
numerous chambers of the castle. It is a huge old place, built as far
back as Henry V.'s time, besieged and battered by the Cromwellians in
the Revolution, and altered and patched up, in an odious old-fashioned
taste, by the Roundhead Lyndon, who succeeded to the property at the
death of a brother whose principles were excellent and of the true
Cavalier sort, but who ruined himself chiefly by drinking, dicing, and
a dissolute life, and a little by supporting the King. The castle stands
in a fine chase, which was prettily speckled over with deer; and I can't
but own that my pleasure was considerable at first, as I sat in the oak
parlour of summer evenings, with the windows open, the gold and silver
plate shining in a hundred dazzling colours on the side-boards, a dozen
jolly companions round the table, and could look out over the wide green
park and the waving woods, and see the sun setting on the lake, and hear
the deer calling to one another.

The exterior was, when I first arrived, a quaint composition of all
sorts of architecture; of feudal towers, and gable-ends in Queen Bess's
style, and rough-patched walls built up to repair the ravages of the
Roundhead cannon: but I need not speak of this at large, having had the
place new-faced at a vast expense, under a fashionable architect, and
the facade laid out in the latest French-Greek and most classical style.
There had been moats, and drawbridges, and outer walls; these I had
shaved away into elegant terraces, and handsomely laid out in parterres
according to the plans of Monsieur Cornichon, the great Parisian
architect, who visited England for the purp