These are the apartments, distinguished by having been the residence of so unhappy a personage. On the other side of the mansion, a grand gallery occupies the length of the whole front, which is 165 feet, and contains many portraits, now placed carelessly on chairs, or the floor; amongst them an head of Sir Thomas More, apparently very fine; heads of Henries the Fourth, Seventh and Eighth; a portrait of Lady Jane Gray, meek and fair, before a harpsichord, on which a psalm-book is opened; at the bottom of the gallery, Elizabeth, slyly proud and meanly violent; and, at the top, Mary, in black, taken a short time before her death, her countenance much faded, deeply marked by indignation and grief, and reduced as if to the spectre of herself, frowning with suspicion upon all who approached it; the black eyes looking out from their corners, thin lips, somewhat aquiline nose and beautiful chin.
What remains of the more antient building is a ruin, which, standing nearly on the brink of the glade, is a fine object from this. A few apartments, though approached with difficulty through the fragments of others, are still almost entire, and the dimensions of that called the Giant's Chamber are remarkable for the beauty of their proportion.
From Hardwick to within a few miles of Middleton, the beauty of the country declines, while the sublimity is not perfected; but, from the north-west brow of Brampton Moor, the vast hills of Derbyshire appear, in wild and ghastly succession. Middleton, hewn out of the grey rocks, that impend over it, and scarcely distinguishable from them, is worth notice for its very small and neat octagon church, built partly by brief and partly by a donation from the Duke of Devonshire. The valley, or rather chasm, at the entrance of which it stands, is called Middleton Dale, and runs, for two miles, between perpendicular walls of rock, which have more the appearance of having been torn asunder by some convulsive rent of the earth, than any we have elsewhere seen. The strata are horizontal, and the edges of each are often distinct and rounded; one of the characteristics of granite. Three grey rocks, resembling castles, project from these solid walls, and, now and then, a lime-kiln, round like a bastion, half involves in smoke a figure, who, standing on the summit, looks the Witch of the Dale, on an edge of her cauldron, watching the workings of incantation.
The chasm opened, at length, to a hill, whence wild moorish mountains were seen on all sides, some entirely covered with the dull purple of heath, others green, but without enclosures, except sometimes a stone wall, and the dark sides of others marked only by the blue smoke of weeds, driven in circles near the ground.
Towards sun-set, from a hill in Cheshire, we had a vast view over part of that county and nearly all Lancashire, a scene of fertile plains and gentle heights, till some broad and towering mountains, at an immense distance, were but uncertainly distinguished from the clouds. Soon after, the cheerful populousness of the rich towns and villages in Lancashire supplied objects for attention of a different character; Stockport first, crowded with buildings and people, as much so as some of the busiest quarters in London, with large blazing fires in every house, by the light of which women were frequently spinning, and manufacturers issuing from their workshops and filling the steep streets, which the chaise rolled down with; dangerous rapidity; then an almost continued street of villages to Manchester, some miles before which the road was busy with passengers and carriages, as well as bordered by handsome country houses; and, finally for this day, Manchester itself; a second London; enormous to those, who have not seen the first, almost tumultuous with business, and yet well proved to afford the necessary peacefulness to science, letters and taste. And not only for itself may Manchester be an object of admiration, but for the contrast of its useful profits to the wealth of a neighbouring place, immersed in the dreadful guilt of the Slave Trade, with the continuance of which to believe national prosperity compatible, is to hope, that the actions of nations pass unseen before the Almighty, or to suppose extenuation of crimes by increase of criminality, and that the eternal laws of right and truth, which smite the wickedness of individuals, are too weak to struggle with the accumulated and comprehensive guilt of a national participation in robbery, cruelty and murder.
From Manchester to Lancaster the road leads through a pleasant and populous country, which rises gradually as it approaches the huge hills we had noticed in the distance from the brow of Cheshire, and whose attitudes now resembled those of the Rheingau as seen from Mentz. From some moors on this side of Lancaster the prospects open very extensively over a rich tract fading into blue ridges; while, on the left, long lines of distant sea appear, every now and then, over the dark woods of the shore, with vessels sailing as if on their summits. But the view from a hill descending to Lancaster is pre-eminent for grandeur, and comprehends an extent of sea and land, and a union of the sublime in both, which we have never seen equalled. In the green vale of the Lune below lies the town, spreading up the side of a round hill overtopped by the old towers of the castle and the church. Beyond, over a ridge of gentle heights, which bind the west side of the vale, the noble inlet of the sea, that flows upon the Ulverston and Lancaster sands, is seen at the feet of an amphitheatre formed by nearly all the mountains of the Lakes; an exhibition of alpine grandeur, both in form and colouring, which, with the extent of water below, compose a scenery perhaps faintly rivalling that of the Lake of Geneva. To the south and west, the Irish Channel finishes the view.
The antient town and castle of Lancaster have been so often and so well described, that little remains to be said of them. To the latter considerable additions are building in the Gothic style, which, when time shall have shaded the stone, will harmonize well wish the venerable towers and gatehouse of the old structure. From a turret rising over the leads of the castle, called John o' Gaunt's Chair, the prospect is still finer than from the terrace of the church-yard below. Overlooking the Lune and its green slopes, the eye ranges to the bay of the sea beyond, and to the Cumberland and Lancashire mountains. On an island near the extremity of the peninsula of Low Furness, the double point of Peel Castle starts up from the sea, but is so distant that it resembles a forked rock. This peninsula, which separates the bay of Ulverston from the Irish Channel, swells gradually into a pointed mountain called Blackcomb, thirty miles from Lancaster, the first in the amphitheatre, that binds the bay. Hence a range of lower, but more broken and forked summits, extends northward to the fells of High Furness, rolled behind each other, huge, towering and dark; then, higher still, Langdale Pikes, with a confusion of other fells, that crown the head of Windermere and retire towards Keswick, whose gigantic mountains, Helvellyn and Saddleback, are, however, sunk in distance below the horizon of the nearer ones. The top of Skiddaw may be discerned when the air is clear, but it is too far off to appear with dignity. From Windermere-Fells the heights soften towards the Vale of Lonsdale, on the east side of which Ingleborough, a mountain in Craven, rears his rugged front, the loftiest and most majestic in the scene. The nearer country, from this point of the landscape, is intersected with cultivated hills, between which the Lune winds its bright but shallow stream, falling over a weir and passing under a very handsome stone bridge at the entrance of the town, in its progress towards the sea. A ridge of rocky eminences shelters Lancaster on the east, whence they decline into the low and uninteresting country, that stretches to the Channel.
The appearance of the northern Fells is ever changing with the weather and shifting lights. Sometimes they resemble those evening clouds on the horizon, that catch the last gleams of the sun; at others, wrapt in dark mist, they are only faintly traced, and seem like stormy vapours rising from the sea. But in a bright day their appearance is beautiful; then, their grand outlines are distinctly drawn upon the sky, a vision of Alps; the rugged sides are faintly marked with light and shadow, with wood and rock, and here and there a cluster of white cottages, or farms and hamlets, gleam at their feet along the water's edge. Over the whole landscape is then drawn a softening azure, or sometimes a purple hue, exquisitely lovely, while the sea below reflects a brighter tint of blue.