e of the Cavaliers and the
fanaticism of the Roundheads; it would be the melancholy ruin of
cast-down castles and plundered shrines, that meet our eyes all over our
fair land, and nowhere in greater profusion than in this district, lying
as it does in the very midst of some of the most celebrated battles of
the Civil Wars. To say nothing of the siege of Reading, which more even
than the vandalism of the Reformation completed the destruction of that
noble abbey, the third in rank and size in England, with its magnificent
church, its cloisters, and its halls, covering thirty acres of
buildings,--and such buildings! within the outer courts;--to say nothing
of that most reckless barbarity just at our door--we in our little
village of Aberleigh lie between Basting-House to the south, whose
desperately defended walls offer little more now than a mere site,--and
Donnington to the west, where the ruined Gatehouse upon the hill alone
remains of that strong fortress, which overlooked the well-contested
field of Newbury,--and Chalgrove to the north, where the reaper, as he
binds his sheaf, still pauses to tell you the very place where Hampden
fell; every spot has a history! Look at a wooden spire, and your
companion shakes his head, and says that it has been so ever since the
Cavaliers were blown up in the church tower! Ask the history of a
crumbling wall, and the answer is pretty sure to be, Cromwell! That his
Highness the Lord Protector did leave what an accomplished friend of
mine calls "his peculiar impressions" upon a great many places in our
neighborhood is pretty certain; on so many, that there is no actual or
authentic catalogue of all; and in some cases there is nothing but
general tradition, and the nature of the "impressions" in question, to
vouch for the fact of their destruction at that period.

Amongst these, one of the edifices that must have been best worth
preserving, and is even now most interesting to see, is the grand old
castellated mansion, which in the reign of Elizabeth belonged to one of
her favorite courtiers, and was known as Master Comptroller's House, at
Grays.

The very road to it is singularly interesting. Passing through the town,
which increases in growth every day, until one wonders when and where it
will stop, and looking with ever fresh admiration at the beautiful
lacework window of the old Friary, which I long to see preserved in the
fitliest manner, by forming again the chief ornament of a ch