John!" I might add, that this seat has received, among other visiters,
Sir Samuel Romilly, Sir George Beaumont, Sir Humphry Davy--poets as well
as philosophers, Madame de Stael, Dugald Stewart, and Christopher North,
Esq.
Two lines on a small board on this root-house point the application:--
"Dost thou lament the dead, and mourn the loss
Of many friends, oh! think upon the cross!"
Over an old tomb-stone, through an arch, at a distance in light beyond,
there is a vista to a stone cross, which, in the seventeenth century,
would have been idolatrous!
To detail more of the garden would appear ostentatious, and I fear I may
be thought egotistical in detailing so much. I shall, however, take the
reader, before we part, through an arch, to an old yew, which has seen
the persecution of the loyal English clergy; has witnessed their return,
and many changes of ecclesiastical and national fortune. Under the
branches of that solitary but mute historian of the pensive plain, let
us now rest; it stands at the very extreme northern edge of that garden
which we have just perambulated. It fronts the tower, the churchyard,
and looks on to an old sun-dial, once a _cross_. The _cross_ was found
broken at its foot, probably by the country iconoclasts of the day.
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