THE ISLE OF WIGHT. 525 



position, is almost the only English ground not interlaced by rail- 

 roads. For this season, the genuine stage-coacn, now comparatively 

 obsolete elsewhere, still flourishes here, and still carries a number of 

 passengers outside, quite at variance with all our ideas of safety 

 and speed. The guard, who accompanies these coaches, usually per- 

 forms an oUigato on the French horn or key bugle, just before the 

 coach starts and performs it too, with so much spirit and taste, 

 that it was not without some difficulty I could resist the temptation 

 to join his party. Progress, and the spirit of the times, though 

 they give us most substantial benefits, in the shape of railroads, etc., 

 certainly do not add to the poetry of life as I thought when I 

 compared the delicious air of Bellini, played by the coach guard, 

 with the horrible screams of the steam-whistle of the locomotive 

 now associated with the travel of all Christendom. 



It is but a mile from Newport to Carisbrook Castle one of the 

 most interesting old ruins in England. It crowns a fine hill, and 

 from the top of its ruined towers, you look over a lovely landscape 

 of hill and vale, picturesque villages, and green meadows. The 

 castle, itself, with its fortifications, covers perhaps half a dozen acres, 

 and is just in that state of ruin and decay, best calculated to excito 

 the imagination, and send one upon a voyage into dream-land. 

 You clamber over the parapets, and look out from amid the mould- 

 ering battlements, mantled with the richest masses of ivy, and see 

 wild trees growing in the very centre of what were once stately 

 apartments. Here is the very window from which Charles I. vainly 

 endeavored to make his escape, when he was a prisoner within 

 these walls, two hundred years ago (1647). I felt tempted to ques- 

 tion the stone walls around me, of the sad soliloquies which they 

 had heard uttered by that royal prisoner and his children, confined 

 here after him. But the stone looked silent and cold ; the ivy, 

 however, so full of mingled life and health and antiquity, seemed 

 full of the mysterious secrets of the place, and would, doubtless, 

 have unburdened itself to a willing ear, if any such would linger 

 here long enough to get into its confidence. I looked down into 

 the vast well, in the centre of the castle, three hundred feet deep, 

 and still in excellent order from which water is drawn by an ass, 

 walking his slow rounds inside a large windlass wheel. I clambered 



