y of the
Hardens of Court House. Court House was older than Harmouth and the
Hardens were older than Court House. In early Tudor times, the
chronicler informed him, the house was the court of justice for east
Devon. Under Elizabeth it and the land for miles around it passed to
the Hardens as a reward for their services to the Crown. The first
thing they did was to pull down the gibbet on the north side and build
their kitchen offices there. Next they threw out a short gable-ended
wing to the east, and another to the west, enclosing a pleasant
courtyard on the south. The west wing was now thrown into one with the
long room that held the Harden Library.

Rickman searched carefully for information under this head. He learnt
that the Harden library was the work of ten generations of scholars
beginning with Sir Thomas, a Jacobean maker of madrigals, and ending
with Sir Joseph, the Victorian Master of Lazarus; that the founder's
date is carved on the oak chimney-piece at the north end, with the
Harden motto:

16 INVICTUS 20;

that the late Master of Lazarus bought books by the cartload, and was
obliged to break through the south wall and sacrifice the west wing
(his wife's boudoir) to make room for them. But where he looked for
some record of these treasures he found nothing but an elaborate
description of the Harden arms with all their quarterings. The
historian was not useful for Rickman's purposes. He was preoccupied
with the Hardens, their antiquity and splendour; he grovelled before
them; every event in their history gave him an opportunity of
observing that their motto was _Invictus_. He certainly seemed to have
found them so; for when he wrote of them his style took on the curious
contortions and prostrations of his spirit. The poor wretch, in the
pay of the local bookseller, had saturated himself with heraldry till
he saw gules.

To a vision thus inflamed book-collecting was simply a quaint
hereditary freak, and scholarship a distinction wholly superfluous in
a race that owned half the parish, and had its arms blazoned on the
east windows of a church and the sign-board of a public-house. And
with the last generation the hereditary passion had apparently
exhausted itself. "The present owner, Sir Frederick Harden," said the
chronicler, "has made no addition to the library of his ancestors."
What he had done was not recorded in the history of the Hardens. It
was silent also as to the ladies of that house, beyo