From a drawing by F. W. Hulme. Day & Son, Lithʳˢ. to The Queen.
CHARLECOTE, WARWICKSHIRE.
CHARLECOTE,
WARWICKSHIRE.
harlecote—famous in association with the early history of William Shakspere—has undergone little change since he who was “for all time” wandered along the thick-hedged lanes. So primitive is the “ancient neighbourhood,” that Fancy may, almost unbidden, call up the old glories of the place,—may hear the voice of Sir Thomas Lucy chiding his keepers for the loss of his fallow-deer, and the half-suppressed “chuckle” of an unnoticed bystander who, thereafter, was to fill the world with his fame. The Mansion seems quite unaltered; the village church precisely as it was at “the Reformation;” the humbler dwellings, of red brick, are only a little older the park palings merely made picturesque by overgrowing lichen; and the Park, as well as the “sweet Avon,” exactly as they were two centuries and a half ago; the one
“flowing gently;” the other supplying, as of yore, many—
“An oak, whose boughs are moss’d with age,
And high top bald with dry antiquity;”
while the same deer—“dappled fools”—only look more conscious than they did, of assured safety in