AN "ANCIENT MARKET-TOWNE " 187 



portrait by Sir Joshua Reynolds was sold a few 

 years ago for the large sum of eleven thousand 

 guineas. 



The " righte statelie house," as we have said, is now 

 in ruins ; but the gate-house remains, and the other 

 parts of the mansion can quite easily be traced. Two 

 sundials still stand forth from the lofty turrets, as in 

 the days of Lord Chancellor Wriothesley. Across 

 several of the muUioned windows the old iron bars 

 remain, and afford resting-places to the multitude of 

 starlings and jackdaws which make the ruin their 

 home. The garden is still " circummured with brick," 

 as Shakespeare has it, but the paths and " alleys " 

 and " knots " are gone. It is no longer a ** curious- 

 knotted garden " ; not a single flower-bed remains. 

 But within those garden walls Edward VI. must have 

 walked, when at Place House he tried to recruit his 

 ruined health in the summer of 1552. Here, too, 

 Queen Elizabeth must have strolled when she visited 

 the second Earl in days before Henry Wriothesley 

 was born. Within these walls the children and 

 grandchildren of Romeo and Juliet played ; and 

 Shakespeare, it may be, wandered with his friend 

 through the " thick-pleached alleys," and watched 

 the woodpeckers at work in the rotten trees, and 

 noticed the " crowflowers, nettles, daisies, and long- 

 purples" blooming in the meadow beyond. Up and 

 down the garden Charles I. may have paced on that 

 fateful November day when he waited in an agony 

 of suspense for the return of Ashburnham from the 

 Isle of Wight. All is changed now; purple snap- 

 dragons are growing on the crumbling garden walls, 

 with yellow stonecrop, and here and there a tuft of 

 polypody fern ; while owls and kestrels lay their eggs 



