do not give an appearance
of patchiness or incongruity, but rather a feeling as of the vitality
of the old building, and the continuity of life within it, that century
after century adapts and adds to the uses of the present the habitation
of their ancestors. The sun and rain mellow all, and the ivy makes all
green; stone urn and Roman column grow old and gracious beside steep
Elizabethan gables and fantastic chimneys, and the grey pointed arches
of the fifteenth-century gateway are as good to ride under to the meet
on crisp September mornings as a Renaissance doorway or an
eighteenth-century portico. Much of the charm of these old buildings
cannot be reproduced by brush or camera; it lies in their intimate
association with the scene around them, sunshine and cloud, summer and
winter, their hills and their streams; it is the sense of age which
they convey, of long-continued tradition and a certain mellow security.

It was in 1376 that the Luttrells bought the castle from the Mohuns;
and they hold it still; the old receipt for the purchase-money is still
preserved in the castle hall, with various ancient and yellowing
title-deeds, and a list of the "muniments" of the castle, made by
William Prynne, who was sent there as a prisoner by Cromwell in 1650,
after having suffered branding and the loss of his ears at Royalist
hands for his "seditious teachings," and who, firebrand and fanatic as
he was, beguiled his imprisonment with this curiously peaceable
occupation.

The village is as beautiful as the castle; in the long, irregular
street every house is three to four hundred years old. The projecting
upper stories are supported on great timber balks, often with the ends
grotesquely carved. Under the projecting eaves the swallows build, and
twitter about the diamond-paned windows which reflect so richly the
sunset light. In the steep roofs there are dormer-windows, and the old
tiles have mellowed to a deep rose-red, stained yellow with lichen, and
sink into irregular planes and angles of beautiful, varied colour.
There are tall brick chimneys and steep gables, and all manner of odd
delicious scraps and jags of architecture, where one building has
crowded upon its neighbour in its growth, like trees in a forest.
There are old gardens also, long sunny walls with old fruit-trees that
look like hoary serpents writhing up them, until the spring comes and
the delicate, exquisite forms of plum or peach blossom break out of th