ing but fall
off for the last forty years. You will listen, of course, with an air of
decent sympathy, but privately you will be saying to yourself how
difficult a place of sojourn London must have been in those days for a
stranger--how little cosmopolitan, how bound, in a thousand ways, with
narrowness of custom. What is true of the metropolis at that time is of
course doubly true of the provinces; and a genteel little city like the one
I am speaking of must have been a kind of focus of insular propriety. Even
then, however, the irritated alien would have had the magnificent ruins of
the castle to dream himself back into good-humor in. They would effectually
have transported him beyond all waning or waxing Philistinisms.

Ludlow Castle is an example of a great feudal fortress, as the little
castellated manor I spoke of a while since is an example of a small one.
The great courtyard at Ludlow is as large as the central square of a city,
but now it is all vacant and grassy, and the day I was there a lonely old
horse was tethered and browsing in the middle of it. The place is in
extreme dilapidation, but here and there some of its more striking features
have held well together, and you may get a very sufficient notion of the
immense scale upon which things were ordered in the day of its strength. It
must have been garrisoned with a small army, and the vast _enceinte_ must
have enclosed a stalwart little world. Such an impression of thickness and
duskiness as one still gets from fragments of partition and chamber--such a
sense of being well behind something, well out of the daylight and its
dangers--of the comfort of the time having been security, and security
incarceration! There are prisons within the prison--horrible unlighted
caverns of dismal depth, with holes in the roof through which Heaven knows
what odious refreshment was tossed down to the poor groping _detenu_. There
is nothing, surely, that paints one side of the Middle Ages more vividly
than this fact that fine people lived in the same house with their
prisoners, and kept the key in their pocket. Fancy the young ladies of the
family working tapestry in their "bower" with the knowledge that at the
bottom of the corkscrew staircase one of their papa's enemies was sitting
month after month in mouldy midnight! But Ludlow Castle has brighter
associations than these, the chief of which I should have mentioned at the
outset. It was for a long period the official reside