lls of the Abbot and twelve Canons, the structures
raised in the year 1134, by the great Robert Bossu, Earl of Leicester;
neither is there, as might have been hoped, one vestige of that noble
church, believed to have been built by Petronilla, the wife of his son
Robert Blanch-mains, and adorned with the pious donation of a braid of
her hair wrought into a rope, to suspend the lamp in the great choir; an
offering at which some of our modern females who sacrifice their tresses
with other views, may perhaps smile. Nor has the diligence of the
enquiring Antiquary been more successful in the discovery of any traces
of the tomb of Cardinal Wolsey, that great example of fallen ambition;
who, after a life of more than princely magnificence, stripped of his
honours, deprived of his eight hundred attendants, came here, sick,
almost solitary, and a prisoner, performing a wearisome journey on an
humble mule, to crave of the Abbot "_a little earth for charity_."

But, however barren this spot may seem to be of antient relicks, it is
not wholly destitute of objects calculated to revive in the thinking
mind, the events to which we have been alluding; for in the small garden
or court before the main front of the present ruins are still to be seen
the delapidated towers of that gate-way thro' which Wolsey entered in
melancholy degradation, and thro' which other great, more prosperous, and
often royal visitors were admitted with their stately trains.

Returning by the first entrance, and passing this interesting gate-way,
and the antient stone wall of the Abbey, overhung with profuse ivy, the
visitor will find himself well recompensed for the trouble of a traverse
along the Abbey meadow, from the Bleach-yard at the angle of the wall, to
the navigation bridge at the bottom of North-gate street.

On crossing the antient bed of the Soar, the eye will immediately take
its flight over a fine level plain containing at least five hundred acres
of perhaps the richest soil in the kingdom, for that may truly be said of
the _Abbey Meadow_. The right of this tract is vested partly in a number
of proprietors who claim the hay, and partly in the inhabitants of
Leicester, who possess the privilege of here pasturing their cows till a
certain period of the year.

This ample area was formerly used as a race ground, but that annual sport
is now removed to the South-side of the town, having been here frequently
incommoded by the floods from the Soar.