She courteously acceded, first presenting us to a
book in which to inscribe our names.
I suppose ten thousand people, three fourths of them Americans, have
written descriptions of Newstead Abbey; and none of them, so far as I
have read, give any true idea of the place; neither will my description,
if I write one. In fact, I forget very much that I saw, and especially
in what order the objects came. In the basement was Byron's bath,--a
dark and cold and cellarlike hole, which it must have required good
courage to plunge into; in this region, too, or near it, was the chapel,
which Colonel Wildman has decorously fitted up, and where service is now
regularly performed, but which was used as a dog's kennel in Byron's
time.
After seeing this, we were led to Byron's own bedchamber, which remains
just as when he slept in it,--the furniture and all the other
arrangements being religiously preserved. It was in the plainest
possible style, homely, indeed, and almost mean,--an ordinary
paper-hanging, and everything so commonplace that it was only the deep
embrasure of the window that made it look unlike a bedchamber in a
middling-class lodging-house. It would have seemed difficult,
beforehand, to fit up a room in that picturesque old edifice so that it
should be utterly void of picturesqueness; but it was effected in this
apartment, and I suppose it is a specimen of the way in which old
mansions used to be robbed of their antique character, and adapted to
modern tastes, before mediaeval antiquities came into fashion.
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