if not of forgery, on Mr. W's part; and the last I heard of our kind entertainers on that day, was that they were outlawed, and living at Brussels." After reading this account, I was strongly drawn towards Clopton, and on my visit to Stratford, I hastened eagerly to see a spot so attractive by its history, and so graphically described. It was too late. A new lord was in possession. After passing through several hands from the period alluded to by my fair correspondent, and through many dismal stages of neglect and decay, Mr. Ward, the proprietor of Welcome, had purchased, and had had sixty workmen for at least six months employed upon it. Those old staircases were now painted and polished into new ones. Those old oak floors had given way to new deal ones. Wagon-loads of lumber, as the new proprietor called it, wainscot, carving, old chests and benches, and things of the past were carried away, and splendid stoves, and massy mantel-pieces of Italian marble, had succeeded the stern wide old-English fire-places. Modern furniture was standing about in confused heaps in the rooms; and fresh paintings of a higher character than the Cloptons ever knew, were in the act of ascending those walls where the grim Clopton portraits had hung so long; but which, such as still remained, were now consigned to a back gallery. "They are wretched affairs," said the young and gay lord of the house. "I am not at all related to the family; and I do not know what I could better do with them." Perhaps nothing more could be expected. They clearly belonged to an era and a race that were gone by. They were things which had outlasted their legitimate masters :— Another race had been, and other palms were won. But I looked them over. They did not exceed two dozen in number, and amongst them I looked in vain for Charlotte Clopton, with " her locks of paly gold," or for Margaret, with "her beautiful face, and dark, brown ringlets flowing on her shoulders." "Was there not such and such a tradition?" I asked. "And such and such a picture? Margaret as a child with her little dog in her arms, and again in the bloom of maiden beauty?" "There were such traditions," it was carelessly replied, and in a tone which shewed that there was no strong interest felt in such traditions. Youth, wealth, and fresh session, and the eager novelty of fitting up a new abode were not calculated to generate a sentimental mood; and yet methinks the fate and the pictures of the past race of such an abode would have excited in my mind an interest, not the most trivial, amongst those feelings which gave value to its possession. Well, but where were the pictures of Charlotte and Margaret Clopton? They were not there! In some of the many changes which had occurred, somebody had taken them away-somebody, it is to be hoped, who valued them. It was useless pressing further inquiries upon the new proprietor-but I saw some women collecting apples in the orchard, who were old enough to have known the house well in its former state. I asked them, and they knew the portraits familiarly, just as described by my fair correspondent, and they knew that they were there not very long ago. One of them also went and shewed me the spring in which Margaret was drowned. In a woody glade which runs up behind the house is a succession of fish-ponds, now half empty of water, and neglected; and beyond these, under the shade of large elms, is the spring in which Margaret drowned herself. It is a tank of perhaps three yards long, and two wide, and of a considerable depth, now arched over nearly level with the ground, and only open at one end. The water was so transparent that every part of the tank is seen to the bottom, and a fearful and gloomy place it is for any human creature to plunge into. What must have been the misery and despair which must have goaded Margaret's spirit in this old and solitary place, before she could venture to plunge in there! On a stone laid behind the spring, but which is said to have been laid at its mouth, are inscribed the initials S. I. C. 1686. No doubt those of Sir John Clopton, who died in 1692, and who most probably first enclosed this well. But who were Charlotte and Margaret Clopton? Whose daughters were they? At what period did they live? What more is known of the tragic death of Charlotte? What is known of the history, or the cause of the suicide of Margaret? These are questions that we ask of the local historian: but we ask in vain. The facts to which they relate are such as antiquaries, while hunting after genealogies, knights and warriors, and heads of families, have too much passed over, to the great loss of our domestic history. The dry outlines of family descent have been scrupulously preserved, but the most touching and characteristic passages in the home events of those families themselves have been passed over as not belonging to the province of the topographer. What would we not now give to recal them? What would we not give, as we pass through the galleries of our ancient houses, or stand by family tombs, and see the portraits or read the names of numbers of whom no special record is left, to be able to summon them before us, and hear what befel them in their day? Even Dugdale, who, unlike the general race of topographers, has rescued so many of these fleeting traditions in his beloved county of Warwick, has left no glimpse of the history of Charlotte or Margaret Clopton. Yet there is no doubt but that the popular traditions respecting them are founded in fact. To the portraits of these ladies, which were in the hall at the time of the visit of my fair correspondent, and were well known to the women with whom I conversed in Clopton orchard, these stories were always attached. In Mr. Reason's collection of Shakspeare relics, already mentioned, there is a painting of Charlotte in her Trance; a lovely young woman leaning back in a cushioned chair as in a profound sleep, which, no doubt, was one of the family-pieces of the hall. Everybody thereabout was familiar with just as much of Charlotte's history as is given above by my fair friend; and the women in the orchard said that Margaret had drowned herself in the well called after her, on account of the death of her lover in the civil wars. Who would not give up the catalogue of a score of bearded knights, grim Sir Johns and Sir Thomases, with all their dates of birth and death, for the simple history of these unfortunate damsels, which the historians of the time did not deem worthy of their notice! We may now inquire for them in vain. Clopton, independent of its family interest, has, in fact, little interest. It has no claims to fine architecture or to value from works of art; but it attracts our imagination as a specimen of those mansions of old families which once were of importance, but are now, like their ancient proprietors, gone to decay, or are, as it were, resuscitated by the wealth of a modern purchaser. The north and west sides of the house are said to have been built in Henry VII.'s time; the south and east part in that of Charles II. When Ireland visited it in 1792 or 1793, he found in it a bed given to Sir Hugh Clopton by Henry VII., and in which he is said to have frequently slept; the furniture being of fine cloth of a darkish brown, with a rich fringe of silk about six inches deep. In the attic story also was a chapel, with scriptural inscriptions in black letter, and religious paintings on the walls, as ancient as the house. In one place was a large fish, with a hand at a distance dragging it forward with a string; in others, scraps of poetry, such as these lines: Whether you rise pearlye, This chapel, which one of the Cloptons, a stanch Catholic, is said to have used after the Reformation, is exactly such a chapel as is still found in the roof of Compton-Winyates.* Mr. Ireland's See Visit to Compton-Winyates. |