«6 THE NORTH STAFFORDSHIRE HOUNDS. 



natural regret at the retirement of Colonel Nugent was 

 tempered by the feeling of satisfaction that he was to 

 be succeeded by one so popular and so much esteemed 

 as the Marquis of Stafford. It was not forgotten, either, 

 that the ducal house of Trentham had not only liberally, 

 at their own cost, provided kennels for the pack and 

 homes for the Hunt servants ever since 1862, but had 

 also been munificent subscribers every year to the Hunt 

 funds. So everything combined to make the new arrange- 

 ment a most fitting and popular one, not only with the 

 members of the Hunt, but with the landowners and 

 farmers throughout the district. A short description of 

 Trentham and some of its most famous occupants may 

 not be out of place at this stage of our history. Lord 

 Beaconsfield, in his romance " Lothair," has left us a 

 striking, if somewhat imaginative, sketch of the place — 



"It would be difficult," he says, "to find a fairer scene than Trentham* 

 offered, especially in the lustrous effulgence of a glorious English summer. It 

 was an Italian palace of freestone ; vast, ornate, and in scrupulous condition, 

 its spacious and graceful chambers filled with treasures of art, and rising itself 

 from statued and stately terraces. At their foot spread a garden domain of 

 considerable extent, bright with flowers, dim with coverts of rare shrubs, and 

 musical with fountains. Its > limit reached a park with timber such as the Mid- 

 land counties alone can produce. The fallow deer trooped among its ferny 

 solitudes and gigantic oaks ; but beyond the waters of the broad and winding 

 lake the scene became more savage, and the eye caught the dark form of the 

 red deer on some jutting mount, shrinking with scorn from communion with his 

 gentler brethren." 



The " freestone " and the " red deer " are due to the 

 novelist's imagination, but in other respects the above 

 description is considered to be quite truthful and accurate. 

 There was an old house at Trentham figured in Plot's 

 *' History of Staffordshire," a handsome Elizabethan struc- 

 ture, built in the seventeenth century by Sir Richard 

 Leveson, and destroyed early in the eighteenth by some 

 unknown successor to the estate and title, whose work of 

 destruction does not appear to have earned the approval 

 of succeeding generations. The old residence was evi- 

 dently a delightful place, picturesque and quaint, with 



* Lord Beaconsfield disguises the identity slightly as " Brentham." 



