“The gardens are full of terraces, staircases, fountains, pleached walks, avenues, and leaden statues—beautiful exceedingly. There is a gallery of Mordaunt portraits in the house; in the old library at the top are no end of treasures, and out of it opens the Duchess of Norfolk’s boudoir, with old Japanese ornaments. Through a plank missing in the floor of an upper gallery you can look into quite a large room which no one has ever entered. Its windows are darkened by the overgrowth of the creepers outside, and the only object in it is a large box like a portmanteau. The Sackvilles have always lived here, yet not one of them has had the curiosity to descend into that room or to look into that portmanteau!
“I have been taken to see the curious old house of Lyveden—never finished—one of the three strange semi-religious erections of the Tresham of the Gunpowder Plot. This is supposed to be in honour of the Virgin, and is covered with the oddest devices, such as ‘the Seven Eyes of God,’ the money-bag of Judas, with the thirty pieces of silver round it, &c. The second of Tresham’s buildings is Rothwell townhall; the third a lodge at Rushton in honour of the Trinity, in which everything, down to the minutest ornament, is three-cornered.
“Then we have been to Boughton, the Duke of Buccleuch’s great desolate house, which contains two cartoons attributed, without any cause, to Raffaelle. The house was built by the Duke of Montagu, who was ambassador to Louis XIV., and the king lent him a French architect and gardener. He made it as like a French château as possible. Then he told his friends that he must plant an avenue to drive to London by, and when they remonstrated that an immense part of the way to London did not belong to him, he said, ‘Well, at any rate I will have an avenue of the same length,’ and he planted seventy-two miles of it in his park. These trees, hemming in the view in all directions, make the place indescribably dull. Just outside the park is the pretty village of Geddington, with a fine old church and bridge, and a beautiful Eleanor cross with slender detached columns. We went on thence to tea at Warkton with Mrs. Bridges, wife of the clergyman, a real patrician Venetian beauty, who has set all Northamptonshire quarrelling as to whether the glorious colour of her hair can be real; but it is. Half of the church her husband serves is a mausoleum of the Dukes of Buccleuch, who have four large and magnificent monuments in it.
“The old Duchess of Buccleuch, a homely-looking person, was very fond of joining people who came to see the place and talking to them. One day she walked by a visitor and said, ‘You know, all this belongs to the Duke of Buccleuch.’—‘And pray, whom did he marry?’—‘ME!’”
“Cromer, Sept. 22.—I came yesterday to stay with the Lockers, who have lately taken the additional name of Lampson, with a fortune from her father, Sir Curtis Lampson. They are exceedingly happy together. ‘My winsome marrow,’ Mr. Locker has just said to his wife, ‘you know I never can go anywhere without you.’ In the evening, Mr. Locker was very pleasant in describing Rogers and his stories. Apropos of the dictum that the postscript of a well-told story is often its best feature, he told of Rogers describing a duel between a Frenchman and an Englishman, which was to be fought in the dark. The Englishman was a very humane man, and when it came to his turn to fire, fired up the chimney, that he might do his adversary no harm, but brought down the Frenchman, who had taken refuge there. ‘But when I tell that story in Paris,’ added Rogers, ‘it is the Englishman who is up the chimney.’
“He told of a Mr. Egerton who was with his regiment in Canada. Coming into the messroom one morning, he seemed much depressed, and being asked the reason, said he was troubled by an oddly vivid dream, in which he had seen his own coffin on the deck of a vessel, and in the dream had been even able to read the plate upon the coffin, which bore his name and the date June 16. He was so full of it, that the Colonel, to humour him, wrote down the circumstances and the date. This was in April. Afterwards he went to Upper Canada, where he was killed by Indians on the 16th of June, and his coffin was brought down the river as he had seen it. Mr. Locker told this story to Lord Algernon St. Maur, who said, ‘I can corroborate that story, for I was in the messroom when what you describe occurred.’
“Mr. Locker described Dickens’s way of telling stories. He heard him tell that of Lincoln’s dream, and of his describing the oppressive feeling he had, how he was ‘drifting, drifting, drifting,’ and how at that moment the members of council came in and he said, ‘Now we must go to business.’ It was on leaving that council that he was shot, so no one heard the end of that dream, or whether there would seem to be any forewarning in it.