GUY'S CLIFF, 



WARWICK, . . 



THE SEAT OF ... 



LORD ALGERNON PERCY 



GARDENS 

 OLD'&NEW 



THE present writer retains a recollection of Guy's Cliff 

 and its gardens that will not be obliterated. It fell to 

 him to visit the place upon a rare evening of early 

 summer, when the hedges were white with the 

 blossom of the scented thorn, the primroses begem- 

 ming the banks, the bluebells beginning to brighten the shade, 

 and the trees still in their freshest green. Along that beautiful 

 road from Warwick he had journeyed, sometimes under the 

 deep shade of immemorial trees, anon looking oat over the 

 country, remembering how the jeering Gascon, Edward's 

 hated favourite, hastily condemned by angry barons in 

 Beauchamp's stronghold at Warwick, had been hurried, 

 accompanied by a hooting crowd, along the very same way, 

 to his beheading on Blacklow Hill. 



Neither did he forget the famous Guy, Earl of Warwick, 

 slaughterer of the Dun Cow, who retired to Guy's Cliff long 

 ago ; and, as he approached the scene, the silvery tinkling of 

 bells was heard. They were hanging to the necks of dun kine 



in the meadows, sleek and beautiful, and possessing none of 

 the terrors of the draconian creature mmstnun lnn\'nlii:n. 

 infonne, ingens that fell beneath the blows of heroic Guy. 

 Then there opened a prospect of Guy's Cliff itself, half 

 disclosed at the end of a grandly picturesque avenue of 

 gnarled and twisted old Scotch firs, its front flecked by the 

 evening sunshine. It was a foretaste of what was to come. 

 Down a narrow lane went the wayfarer in quest of the famous 

 mill by the Avon a place where many have ground their 

 grain ever since Saxon times picturesqueness, indeed, he said, 

 with that quaint gallery embodied in wood and stone ; and 

 beyond it the footbridge and the meadows, through which you 

 may fare forward to Leamington. 



But the mill looks out across a broad expanded sheet of 

 the famous Avon a lake in extent and character with water- 

 lilies upon its surface, willow and ash dipping their trembling 

 foliage in the water, and in the Jeep shadows of the bank green 

 grasses rising from the pools. The slanting sunlight fell athwart 



THE HOUSE FROM THE RIVER. 



"Country I.i.c" 



