the phylacteries of the Hebrews.  Her feet and arms were bare, but her wrists and ankles were adorned with gold bracelets of uncommon size.  Amidst her long silky black hair she wore a crown or chaplet of artificial mistletoe, and bore in her hand a rod of ebony tipped with silver.  Two nymphs attended on her, dressed in the same antique and mystical guise.  The pageant was so well managed that the Lady of the Floating Island, having performed her voyage with much picturesque effect, landed at Mortimer’s Tower with her two attendants, just as Elizabeth presented herself before that outwork.  The stranger then in a well-penned speech announced herself as that famous Lady of the Lake renowned in the stories of King Arthur, who had nursed the youth of the redoubted Sir Lancelot, and whose beauty had proved too powerful both for the wisdom and the spells of the mighty Merlin.  Since that period she had remained possessed of her crystal dominions, she said, despite the various men of fame and might by whom Kenilworth had been successively tenanted.  The Saxons, the Danes, the Normans, the Saintlowes, the Clintons, the Montforts, the Mortimers, the Plantagenets, great though they were in arms and magnificence, had never, she said, caused her to raise her head from the waters which hid her crystal palace.  But a greater than all these great names had now appeared, and she came in homage and duty to welcome the peerless Elizabeth to all sport which the castle and its environs, which lake or land, could afford!  The queen received the address with great courtesy and the Lady of the Lake vanished, and Arion, who was amongst the maritime deities, appeared upon his dolphin in her place.  But amidst all this pageantry Sir Walter throws a side-light on Mervyn’s Tower, where we see a prisoner, a pale, attenuated, half dead, yet still lovely lady, Amy Robsart, the neglected wife of Leicester, incarcerated there while her husband is flirting with the queen in the gay rooms above.  Her features are worn with agony and suspense as she looks through the narrow window of her prison on the fireworks and coloured fires outside, wondering perhaps whether these were emblems of her own miserable life, “a single spark, which is instantaneously swallowed up by the surrounding darkness—­a precarious glow, which rises but for a brief space into the air, that its fall may be lower.”

[Illustration:  MERVYN’S TOWER, KENILWORTH CASTLE.]

Sir Walter Scott described Kenilworth as “a place to impress on the musing visitor the transitory value of human possessions, and the happiness of those who enjoy a humble lot in virtuous contentment,” and it was with some such thoughts as these in our own minds that we hurried away across fields and along lovely by-lanes towards Leamington, our object in going there by the way we did being to get a view of the great mansion of Stoneleigh, the residence of Lord Leigh, who was also a landowner in our native County of Chester.  It seemed a very fine place