let for two hundred thousand pounds. Lord John Cavendish told me, that
the tradition in the family is, that it had been prophesied to her that
she should never die as long as she was building; and that at last she
died in a hard frost, when the labourers could not work. There is a fine
bank of old oaks in the park over a lake; nothing else pleased me there.
However, I was so diverted with this old beldam and her magnificence,
that I made this epitaph for her:--

Four times the nuptial bed she warm'd,
And every time so well perform'd,
That when death spoil'd each husband's billing,
He left the widow every shilling.
Fond was the dame, but not dejected;
Five stately mansions she erected
With more than royal pomp, to vary
The prison of her captive Mary.
When Hardwicke's towers shall bow their head,
Nor mass be more in Worksop said;
When Bolsover's fair fame shall tend
Like Olcotes, to its mouldering end;
When Chatsworth tastes no Ca'ndish bounties,
Let fame forget this costly countess.

[Footnote 1: Scott alludes to Lord Brooke's violation of St. Chad's
Cathedral in "Marmion," whose tomb

Was levelled when fanatic Brooke
The fair cathedral stormed and took,
But thanks to Heaven and good St. Chad
A guerdon meet the spoiler had (c. vi. 36).

And the poet adds in a note that Lord Brooke himself, "who commanded the
assailants, was shot with a musket-ball through the visor of his helmet;
and the royalists remarked that he was killed by a shot fired from St.
Chad's Cathedral on St. Chad's Day, and received his wound in the very
eye with which, he had said, he hoped to see the ruin of all the
cathedrals in England."]

[Footnote 2: "_Disappointed with Chatsworth._" In a letter, however, to
Lord Strafford three days afterwards he says: "Chatsworth surpassed his
expectations; there is such richness and variety of prospect."]

[Footnote 3: Hardwicke was one of what Home calls "the gentleman's
houses," to which the unfortunate Queen was removed between the times of
her detention at Tutbury and Fotheringay. It is not mentioned by
Burton.]

As I returned, I saw Newstead[1] and Althorpe: I like both. The former
is the very abbey. The great east window of the church remains, and
connects with the house; the hall entire, the refectory entire, the
cloister untouched, with the ancient cistern of the convent, and their
arms on it; a private chapel quite per