a private chamber within, where she lay, her arms and style over the door; the arras hangs over all the doors; the gallery is sixty yards long, covered with bad tapestry, and wretched pictures of Mary herself, Elizabeth in a gown of sea-monsters, Lord Darnley, James the Fifth and his Queen, curious, and a whole history of Kings of England, not worth sixpence a-piece.  There is an original of old Bess of Hardwicke herself, who built the house.  Her estates were then reckoned at sixty thousand pounds a-year, and now let for two hundred thousand pounds.  Lord John Cavendish told me, that the tradition in the family is, that it had been prophesied to her that she should never die as long as she was building; and that at last she died in a hard frost, when the labourers could not work.  There is a fine bank of old oaks in the park over a lake; nothing else pleased me there.  However, I was so diverted with this old beldam and her magnificence, that I made this epitaph for her:—­

    Four times the nuptial bed she warm’d,
    And every time so well perform’d,
    That when death spoil’d each husband’s billing,
    He left the widow every shilling. 
    Fond was the dame, but not dejected;
    Five stately mansions she erected
    With more than royal pomp, to vary
    The prison of her captive Mary. 
    When Hardwicke’s towers shall bow their head,
    Nor mass be more in Worksop said;
    When Bolsover’s fair fame shall tend
    Like Olcotes, to its mouldering end;
    When Chatsworth tastes no Ca’ndish bounties,
    Let fame forget this costly countess.

[Footnote 1:  Scott alludes to Lord Brooke’s violation of St. Chad’s Cathedral in “Marmion,” whose tomb

    Was levelled when fanatic Brooke
    The fair cathedral stormed and took,
    But thanks to Heaven and good St. Chad
    A guerdon meet the spoiler had (c. vi. 36).

And the poet adds in a note that Lord Brooke himself, “who commanded the assailants, was shot with a musket-ball through the visor of his helmet; and the royalists remarked that he was killed by a shot fired from St. Chad’s Cathedral on St. Chad’s Day, and received his wound in the very eye with which, he had said, he hoped to see the ruin of all the cathedrals in England.”]

[Footnote 2:  “Disappointed with Chatsworth.” In a letter, however, to Lord Strafford three days afterwards he says:  “Chatsworth surpassed his expectations; there is such richness and variety of prospect.”]

[Footnote 3:  Hardwicke was one of what Home calls “the gentleman’s houses,” to which the unfortunate Queen was removed between the times of her detention at Tutbury and Fotheringay.  It is not mentioned by Burton.]