there and an
immense monument to his memory. The Tanfield monument, though somewhat
ugly and grotesque, is a wonderful example of alabaster work. The cost
of erecting it and the labour bestowed must have been immense. It was
this knight who built the great house of which the present ruins form
part, and the date would probably be about 1600. But in 1808 nearly half
the original building is supposed to have been pulled down, and what was
allowed to remain, with the exception of the chapel, has been very
much altered.

It was in the time of Lucius Carey's (second Lord Falkland) ownership of
this manor that the place was in the zenith of its fame. This
accomplished man, whose father had married Chief Justice Tanfield's
only daughter, succeeded his grandfather in the year 1625. He gathered
together, either here or at Great Tew, a few miles away, half the
literary celebrities of the day. Ben Jonson, Cowley, and Chillingworth
all visited Falkland from time to time. Lucius Carey afterwards became
the ill-fated King Charles's Secretary of State, an office which he
conscientiously filled until his untimely death.

Falkland left little literary work behind him of any mark, yet of no
other man of those times may it be said that so great a reputation for
ability and character has been handed down to us. Novelists and authors
delight in dwelling on his good qualities. Even in this jubilee year of
1897 the author of "Sir Kenelm Digby" has written a book about the
Falklands. Whyte Melville, too, made him the hero of one of his novels,
describing him as a man in whose outward appearance there were no
indications of the intellectual superiority he enjoyed over his fellow
men. Indeed, as with Arthur Hallam in our own times, so it was with
Falkland in the mediaeval age. Neither left behind them any work of
their own by which future generations could realise their abilities and
almost godlike charm, yet each has earned a kind of immortality through
being honoured and sung by the pens of the greatest writers of his
respective age.

That great, though somewhat bombastic, historian, Lord Clarendon, tells
us that Falkland was "a person of such prodigious parts of learning and
knowledge, of that inimitable sweetness and delight in conversation, of
so flowing and obliging a humanity and goodness to mankind, and of that
primitive simplicity and integrity of life, that if there were no other
brand upon this odious and accursed Civil War than t