Moated Houses (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated.1911 Excerpt: ... GROOMBRIDGE 1660 HE date of Charles the Second's accession to the throne is carved over the entrance to Groombridge, but the story of this moated house and some remains of its building are the heritage of an earlier foundation. The site is one of extreme and almost sylvan beauty. Undulating Park-lands, having much of the characteristics in them of a Chace, lie round it. Fine trees in summer cast an antique shade. The moat which encircles it, flows more freely than in some places of the kind, and wards from a noisy world not only the house itself but the pleasant expanses of an old-world garden and the smooth area of well-trimmed lawns. An atmosphere of poetry breathes from surroundings which have inspired at different periods of history two of the inhabitants of the house. Charles Duke of Orleans courted the Muse here in the days of Agincourt, and must have found the hours of imprisonment made lighter by the quiet and the serenity of the spot. The' lapse of one hundred and fifty years may have seen Edmund Waller the poet of the Parliament pacing garden and park-lands in one of those meditative rambles which gave birth to his lyrical outbursts. Groombridge may have given "Go lovely Rose" to a grateful world. The coming of the Muses to the place was nevertheless heralded, not by Apollo, "leading his choir the Nine," but by "Bellona lapp'd in proof." For in plain words the owner of Groombridge, who brought poetry into his house, found that richest gift of the Gods, not on the slopes of an imaginary Parnassus, but on a certain level and narrow tract of marsh-land which borders the course of the Somme. The chill evening of a rainy day found Richard Waller, then lord of Groombridge, searching among the bodies of eleven thousand dead Frenchmen on the field of Agin...