n holding his court, the four knights followed the Primate
to Canterbury, sternly bent on showing their lord that they were neither
'sluggish nor half-hearted.' Of the abbatial buildings which stood here
then few traces are left. But the handsome modern mansion built here by
Guizot rests, I believe, on the massive foundations, and certainly
incorporates some of the solid masonry above ground of the ancient
abbot's house. The drive to Val Richer from the singularly picturesque
old Norman town of Lisieux, within whose cathedral walls Henry of
England was married to Eleanor of Guienne, is beautifully shaded all the
way with noble trees, and bordered on either hand with parks and
gardens. No English county can show a more strikingly English
landscape--for this is the mother-country of Norman England, though now
one of the main pillars of the nationality of France. The Lady Chapel of
the Cathedral at Lisieux, indeed, was founded in the fifteenth century
by Cauchon, Bishop of Beauvais, in express expiation of the 'false
judgment on an innocent woman,' by which, as he lamentably confessed in
his deed of gift, he had sent the deliverer of France to the stake at
Rouen.

The park, like the mansion of Val Richer, is the creation of M. Guizot.
The monks of old had prepared the ground--for here, as everywhere, they
kept alive the traditions of Roman landscape art. The parks which the
Norman nobles made on both sides of the Channel were mainly devoted to
the chase, like the 'paradises' of the Persians; but the monasteries
possessed pleasure-grounds and gardens of all sorts. The beautifully
broken and undulating surface of the park of Val Richer attests, I
think, the fashioning hand of human art at more than one point; and M.
Guizot, by whom most of the fine trees which now adorn the place were
planted, took advantage, with the skill of a professional landscapist,
of all the opportunities it offered him.

I can well believe, with the most accomplished and appreciative of his
English biographers, that the years which he passed here after his
return from the exile into which he was driven by the unhappy
interference of M. Thiers at the most critical moment of the
disturbances of February 1848, were the happiest of his long and
well-filled life.

The halls and corridors of the mansion are tapestried with books. The
green secluded alleys, the gentle knolls, the glades, the spacious
meadows of the park, recall at every step the younger