bestow on her, in order to prove to the world the depth of his affection for her. But justice, or rather vengeance, followed the miscreants by whose hands the black deed was done.

The base wretch who strangled her was soon after imprisoned for a felony upon the borders of Wales, and desiring to unburden his conscience of the murder, he was made away with privately in his dungeon. Varney, according to authentic information, died soon afterwards in London, blaspheming God upon his death-bed, and declaring that he was ripped into fragments by devils from hell! and when Bald Butler's wife, who was related by marriage to the Earl of Leicester, approached her dying hour, she made a confession of the entire villany.

The death of the luckless Amy Robsart happened about two years after the accession of Elizabeth to the throne. Leicester then lost no time in marrying privately, not either of the royal fair ones, but the youthful widow of Lord Sheffield, formerly the Lady Douglas Howard, daughter of William Lord Howard, the Queen's uncle. This second lady he tried hard to get rid of by poison, but the potions or drugs that he administered were successful only so far as to make her an invalid for many months, and to rob her, it is said, of her luxuriant tresses and of the nails of her hands and feet. Leicester afterwards espoused, as a third wife, the Lady Essex, a marriage which was grievously offensive to his royal mistress. The story

goes-and one cannot help hoping that it may be true—that at length he was himself poisoned by a draught administered under a mistake by his wife at Cornbury Lodge, on the borders of Woodstock Forest, or, according to another account, at Kenilworth, in 1588.

Previous to the publication of 'Kenilworth,' Sir Walter Scott, happening to be at Oxford, paid a visit to Cumnor-where he was well remembered at the time when we last lunched at the 'Bear and Ragged Staff'—and, with his accustomed sagacity, obtained from the monuments in the church and churchyard the names of Tony Forster and Mike Lambourne.

'The fiction of the novel,' says the author we have already quoted, 'is most evident in the character of Forster, which is a pure invention, to say the best of it; and Amy, having deceased so early in the reign of Elizabeth, must be necessarily released from participation in those chapters of the book which refer to Kenilworth. It was Lady Sheffield he attempted to poison upon the Queen's visit to the Castle, because, as Miss Strickland observes, in a note to her "Lives. of the Queens of England"-" he had then fallen in love with Lettice Knollys, the cousin of the Queen, and then wife to Walter Devereux, the Earl of Essex, and mother of that Earl afterwards a minion of the Queen's." The two women were called his "old and new testaments," perhaps because he had sworn to both of them. This second wife was afterwards married to Sir Edward Stafford. Forster, who had been a cheerful, hospitable, open-hearted gentleman,

before he participated in this deadly crime, grew sickly, reserved, and melancholy, and very soon afterwards he dropped into the grave. About this time, and even until the destruction of the tenement, ghosts were frequent at Cumnor Place; and often, they say, the spectre of poor Amy, attired in courtly apparel, pearls and brocade, was seen to linger in faint beautiful coloured light upon the great stairs at nightfall. The place was abhorred, even until it was forsaken.'

It would make the stoutest-hearted of visitors sad, even at this distance of time, if we could hear all the grievous things that were whispered around, and from mouth to mouth, when the death-knell was tolled for 'Master Tony,' in the grey church tower, and his body was borne with plumes and staves, and men in sable array, from that small narrow arch which still is to be seen in the ivy-clad wall, and was consigned to its grave, deeply scooped in the chancel floor. Surely, we thought, however, as we wandered slowly down the village, his spirit will not wander here, either by the summer twilight or by the pale, cold moon of December, for purity and vice are kept at further distance beyond the grave than here; and therefore, as Amy Robsart is seen from time to time to haunt the grassy slopes which adjoin what once was her home, the peasants of Cumnor need have no fear or dread of nocturnal visits from either the principal, though lordly, villain, or his scarcely less villanous agent, Mr. Anthony Forster.

200

THE MOTE, IGHTHAM.

FROM the pretty town of Sevenoaks, a walk of some four miles or more, first through the classic park of Knowle, and under its spreading oaks and beeches, and then through copses of hazels, along an upland ridge, looking down upon the hop-gardens of the Weald of Kent, will suddenly bring the traveller or tourist in sight of a pleasant and imposing country seat, which, when it first breaks upon his view, at the bottom of a dell, among the surrounding trees, must make him fancy, if he has ever been at Oxford or Cambridge, that one of their mediæval colleges has been suddenly transported into Kent by fairy hands. There stands the central tower; there are the gables, and the long red roof, and the mullioned windows; and a nearer approach reveals to him the porter's lodge and a handsome quadrangle within. And if he is fortunate enough to come provided with an introduction to the owner, or with an educated eye for artistic effect, or a love of archæology, and carries