(95) Afterwards Duchess of Portland.
(96) Anciently the seat of the Vernons. Sir George Vernon, in Queen Elizabeth's time, was styled King of the Peak," and the property came into the Manners family by his daughter marrying Thomas, son of the first Earl of Rutland.-E.
(97) She was daughter of John Hardwicke, of Hardwicke in Derbyshire. Her first husband was Robert Barley, Esq. who settled his large estate on her and hers. She married, secondly, Sir William Cavendish; her third husband was Sir William St. Lo; and her fourth was George Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury, whose daughter, Lady Grace, married her son by Sir William Cavendish.
(98) Evelyn, who visited Newstead in 1654, says of it:—"It is situated much like Fontainbleau, in France, capable of being made a noble seat, accommodated as it is with brave woods and streams; it has yet remaining the front of a glorious abbey church." Lord Byron thus beautifully describes the family seat, in the thirteenth canto of Don Juan:
"An old, old monastery once, and now
Still older mansion-of a rich and rare
Mix'd Gothic, much as artists all allow
Few specimens yet left us can compare.
"Before the mansion lay a lucid lake,
Broad as transparent, deep, and freshly fed
By a river, which its soften'd way did take
In currents through the calmer water spread
Around: the wildfowl nestled in the brake
And sedges, brooding in their liquid bed:
The woods sloped downwards to its brink, and stood
With their green faces fix'd upon the flood."-E.
(99) A mighty window, hollow in the centre,
Shorn of its glass of thousand colourings,
Through which the deepen'd glories once could enter,
Streaming from off the sun like seraph's wings,
Now yawns all desolate."-E.
(100) "——The cloisters still were stable,
The cells, too, and refectory, I ween:
An exquisite small chapel had been able
Still unimpaired to decorate the scene
The rest had been reform'd, replaced, or sunk,
And spoke more of the baron than the monk."-E.
(101) The seat of Earl Spencer.-E.
Letter 43 To The Earl Of Strafford.
Strawberry Hill, Sept. 4, 1760. (87)