“For the creed of Zoroaster,” see Sir Walter Scott, Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft, 1830, pp. 87, 88. (See, too, Cain, act II sc. 2, line 404, Poetical Works, 1901, V 254, note 2.) —Editor ↩
“Arcades ambo.”
[Virgil, Bucol., Ecl. VII 4]
So travel the rich. —Editor ↩
—the noble host intends.
—[MS. erased]
“Judicious drank, and greatly-daring dined.”
Pope, Dunciad, IV 318
—Editor ↩
Byron’s description of the place of his inheritance, which was to know him no more, is sketched from memory, but it unites the charm of a picture with the accuracy of a ground-plan. Eight years had gone by since he had looked his last on “venerable arch” and “lucid lake” (see “Epistle to Augusta,” stanza VIII lines 7, 8), but he had not forgotten, he could not forget, that enchanted and enchanting scene.
Newstead Abbey or Priory was founded by Henry II, by way of deodand or expiation for the murder of Thomas Becket. Lands which bordered the valley of the Leen, and which had formed part of Sherwood Forest, were assigned for the use and endowment of a chapter of “black canons regular of the order of St. Augustine,” and on a site, by the riverside to the south of the forest uplands (stanza LV lines 5–8) the new stede, or place, or station, arose. It was a “Norman Abbey” (stanza LV line 1) which the Black Canons dedicated to Our Lady, and, here and there, in the cloisters, traces of Norman architecture remain, but the enlargement and completion of the monastery was carried out in successive stages and “transition periods,” in a style or styles which, perhaps, more by hap than by cunning, Byron rightly named “mixed Gothic” (stanza LV line 4). To work their mills, and perhaps to drain the marshy valley, the monks dammed the Leen and excavated a chain of lakes—the largest to the northwest, Byron’s “lucid lake;” a second to the south of the Abbey; and a third, now surrounded with woods, and overlooked by the “wicked lord’s” “ragged rock” below the Abbey, half a mile to the southeast. The “cascade,” which flows over and through a stonework sluice, and forms a rocky waterfall, issues from the upper lake, and is in full view of the west front of the Abbey. Almost at right angles to these lakes are three ponds: the Forest Pond to the north of the stone wall, which divides the garden from the forest; the square “Eagle” Pond in the Monks’ Garden; and the narrow stew-pond, bordered on either side with overhanging yews, which drains into the second or Garden Lake. Byron does not enlarge on this double chain of lakes and ponds, and, perhaps for the sake of pictorial unity, converts the second (if a second then existed) and third lakes into a river.
The Abbey, which, at the dissolution of monasteries in 1539, was handed over by Henry VIII to Sir John Byron, “steward and warden of the forest of Shirewood,” was converted, here and there, more or less, into a baronial “mansion” (stanza LXVI). It is, roughly speaking, a square block of buildings, flanking the sides of a grassy quadrangle. Surrounding the quadrangle are two-storied cloisters, and in the centre a “Gothic fountain” (stanza LXV line 1) of composite workmanship. The upper portion of the stonework is hexagonal, and is ornamented with a double row of gargoyles (all “monsters” and no “saints,” recalling, perhaps identical with, the “seven deadly sins” gargoyles, still in situ in the quadrangle of Magdalen College, Oxford); the lower half, which belongs to the seventeenth or eighteenth century, is hollowed into niches of a Roman or classical design. (In Byron’s time the fountain stood in a courtyard in front of the Abbey, but before he composed this canto it had been restored by Colonel Wildman to its original place within the quadrangle. Byron was acquainted with the change, and writes accordingly.) When the Byrons took possession of the Abbey the upper stories of the cloisters were converted, on three sides of the quadrangle, into galleries, and on the fourth, the north side, into a library. Abutting on the cloisters are the monastic buildings proper, in part transformed, but with “much of the monastic” preserved. On the west, the front of the Abbey, the ground floor consists of the entrance hall and Monks’ Parlour, and, above, the Guests’ Refectory or Banqueting-hall, and the Prior’s Parlour. On the south, the Xenodochium or Guesten Hall, and, above, the Monks’ Refectory, or Grand Drawing-room; on the south and east, on the ground floor, the Prior’s Lodgings, the Chapter House (“the exquisite small chapel,” stanza LXVI line 5), the “slype” or passage between church and Chapter House; and in the upper story, the state bedrooms, named after the kings, Edward III, Henry VII, etc., who, by the terms of the grant of land to the Prior and Canons, were entitled to free quarters in the Abbey. During Byron’s brief tenure of Newstead, and for long years before, these “huge halls, long galleries, and spacious chambers” (stanza LXXVII line 1) were half dismantled, and in a more or less ruinous condition. A few pictures remained on the walls of the Great Drawing-room, of the Prior’s Parlour, and in the apartments of the southeast wing or annexe, which dates from the seventeenth century (see the account of a visit to Newstead in 1812, in Beauties of England and Wales, 1813, XII 401–405). There are and were portraits, by Lely (stanza LXVIII line 7), of a Lady Byron, of Fanny Jennings, Duchess of Tyrconnel, “loveliness personified,” of Mrs. Hughes, and of Nell Gwynne; by Sir Godfrey Kneller, of William and Mary; by unnamed artists, of George I and George II;
