“Where slumber abbots, purple as their vines,”

We found the ruins of Bayham Abbey, which the Barrets and Hardings bid us visit.  There are small but pretty remains, and a neat little Gothic house built near them by their nephew Pratt.  They have found a tomb of an abbot, with a crosier, at length on the stone.

Here our woes increase.  The roads row bad beyond all badness, the night dark beyond all darkness, our guide frightened beyond all frightfulness.  However, without being at all killed, we got up, or down,—­I forget which, it was so dark,—­a famous precipice called Silver Hill, and about ten at night arrived at a wretched village called Rotherbridge.  We had still six miles hither, but determined to stop, as it would be a pity to break our necks before we had seen all we intended.  But alas! there was only one bed to be had:  all the rest were inhabited by smugglers, whom the people of the house called mountebanks; and with one of whom the lady of the den told Mr. Chute he might lie.  We did not at all take to this society, but, armed with links and ]anthems, set out again upon this impracticable journey.  At two o’clock in the morning we got hither to a still worse inn, and that crammed with excise officers, one of whom had just shot a smuggler.  However, as we were neutral powers, we have passed safely through both armies hitherto, and can give you a little farther history of our wandering through these mountains, where the young gentlemen are forced to drive their curricles with a pair of oxen. the only morsel of good road we have found, was what even the natives had assured us was totally impracticable:  these were eight miles to Hurst Monceaux.(338) It is seated at the end of a large vale, five miles in a direct line to the sea, with wings of blue hills covered with wood, one of which falls down to the in a sweep of a hundred acres.  The building, for the convenience of water to the moat, sees nothing at all; indeed it is entirely imagined on a plan of defence, with drawbridges actually in being, round towers, watch-towers mounted on them, and battlements pierced for the passage of arrows from long bows.  It was built in the time of Henry VI., and is as perfect as the first day.  It does not seem to have been ever quite finished, or at least that age was not arrived at the luxury of white-wash; for almost all the walls, except in the principal chambers, are in their native brickhood.  It is a square building, each side about two hundred feet in length; a porch and cloister, very like Eton College; and the -whole is much in the same taste, the kitchen extremely so, with three vast funnels to the chimneys going up on the inside.  There are two or three little courts for offices, but no magnificence of apartments.  It is scarcely furnished with a few necessary beds and chairs:  one side has been sashed, and a drawing-room and dining-room and two or three rooms wainscoted by the Earl of Sussex,