bican, and elsewhere. What an endless succession of towers and
turrets (some of them with distinctive names, Hotspur and Bloody Gap)
archways and corridors, walls and embrasures, and all the grim massive
paraphernalia of the past, apparently as doggedly determined as ever.
Perhaps, as one writer puts it, only a Percy could live quite at his
ease as master of Alnwick Castle. One cannot imagine the average man
making himself congenially at home here. But the inside comforts are an
overflowing compensation for a somewhat forbidding exterior. We are told
that even the towers at the angles of the encircling walls are museums
of British and Egyptian antiquities, and game trophies, collected by
members of the family. The fourth Duke has left much to show for the
quarter of a million he lavished upon the building--exquisite wood
carving, frescoes, marbles, and canvases. Mantovani, who restored the
Raphael frescoes in the Vatican, was not too great a man to be hired by
a Percy to adorn his Border castle. The walls of the grand staircase are
panelled with beautiful marbles. There are unique paintings: the
dining-room, a noble apartment, is pompous with Percys in fine frames,
bewigged, robed and plain; the first Duke and his wife, who helped him
to a dignity neither his money nor his courtly manners could have won
for him, hang suitably in the place of honour above the hearth. Vandyck,
Moroni, and Andrea del Sarto are worthily represented in the castle.
Giorgione, who did so well the comparatively little he had time for, is
here in his "Lady with the Lute." Raphael, Guido, and Titian are also
within these swarthy outer walls, Titian's landscape contribution being
specially notable, like Giovanni Bellini's "The Gods enjoying the Fruits
of the Earth." One looks from it to the fair Northumberland country
beyond the windows and then at the splendour and taste of the castle,
and fancies, inevitably, that the Percys themselves have in these later
days obtained quite their share of the privileges of Bellini's gods.
Nothing that makes for domestic pleasure is lacking at Alnwick Castle.
There is a stately library of some 15,000 books, with chairs for
dreaming and chairs for study; and, not to slight meaner comforts, there
is a kitchen that is a model of its baronial kind, about fifty yards
distant from the dining-hall, with which it communicates by an
underground passage. The first English possession acquired by the house
of Percy north of t