effect, which is
considered as betraying the first symptoms of Italian innovation.

The gardens extending in the rear of the house were still more
decidedly in the Italian taste, having clipped evergreens and avenues
of pyramidal yews, which, combined with the intervening statues,
imparted to them something of the air of a cemetery. There were
fountains, too, which, in the memory of man, had been never known to
play, the marble basins being, if possible, still greener than the
grim visages of the fauns and dryads standing forlorn on their
dilapidated pedestals amid the neglected alleys.

The first thing I can remember of Lexley Hall, was peeping as a child
through the stately iron gratings of the garden, that skirted a
by-road leading from my grandfather's farm. The desolateness of the
place overawed my young heart. In summer time the parterres were
overgrown into a wilderness. The plants threw up their straggling arms
so high, that the sunshine could hardly find its way to the quaint old
dial that stood there telling its tale of time, though no man
regarded; and the cordial fragrance of the strawberry-beds, mingling
with entangled masses of honeysuckle in their exuberance of midsummer
blossom, seemed to mock me, as I loitered in the dusk near the old
gateway, with the tantalizing illusions of a fairy-tale--the
Barmecide's feast, or Prince Desire surveying his princess through the
impermeable walls of her crystal palace.

But if the enjoyment of the melancholy old gardens of Lexley Hall were
withheld from _me_, no one else seemed to find pleasure or profit
therein. Sir Laurence Altham, the lord of the manor and manor-house,
was seldom resident in the country. Though a man of mature years, (I
speak of the close of the last century,) he was still a man of
pleasure--the ruined hulk of the gallant vessel which, early in the
reign of George III., had launched itself with unequalled brilliancy
on the sparkling current of London life.

At that time, I have heard my grandfather say there was not a mortgage
on the Lexley estate! The timber was notoriously the finest in the
county. A whole navy was comprised in one of its coppices; and the
arching avenues were imposing as the aisles of our Gothic minsters.
Alas! it needed the lapse of only half a dozen years to lay bare to
the eye of every casual traveller the ancient mansion, so long

"Bosom'd high in tufted trees,"

and only guessed at till you approached the confin