Now you arc fully master of Hurst Monceaux, I shall carry you on to Battel—­By the way, we bring you a thousand sketches, that you may show us what we have seen.  Battel Abbey stands at the end of the town, exactly as Warwick Castle does of Warwick; but the house of Webster have taken due care that it should not resemble it in any thing else.  A vast building, which they call the old refectory, but which I believe was the original church, is now barn, coach-house, etc.  The situation is noble, above the level of abbeys:  what does remain of gateways and towers is beautiful, particularly the flat side of a cloister, which is now the front of the mansion-house.  Miss of the family has clothed a fragment of a portico with cockle-shells!  The grounds, and what has been a park, lie in a vile condition.  In the church is the tomb of Sir Anthony Browne, master of the horse for life to Harry viii.:  from whose descendants the estate was purchased.  The head of John Hanimond, the last abbot, is still perfect in one of the windows.  Mr. Chute says, “What charming things we should have done if Battel Abbey had been to be sold at Mrs. Chenevix’s, as Strawberry was!” Good night!

Tunbridge, Friday.

We are returned hither, where we have established our head-quarters.  On our way, we had an opportunity of surveying that formidable mountain, Silver Hill, which we had floundered down in the dark:  it commands a whole horizon of the richest blue prospect you ever saw.  I take it to be the ]Individual spot to which the Duke of Newcastle carries the smugglers, and, showing them Sussex and Kent, says, “All this will I give you, if you will fall down and worship me.”  Indeed one of them, who exceeded the tempter’s warrant, hangs in chains on the very spot where they finished the life of that wretched customhouse officer whom they were two days in murdering.

This morning we have been to Penshurst-but, oh! how fallen!(341) The park seems to have never answered its character:  at present it is forlorn; and instead of Sacharissa’s(342) cipher carved on the beeches, I should sooner have expected to have found the milkwoman’s score.  Over the gate is an inscription, purporting the manor to have been a boon from Edward VI. to Sir William Sydney.  The apartments are the grandest I have seen in any of these old palaces, but furnished in tawdry modern taste.  There are loads of portraits; but most of them seem christened by chance, like children at a foundling hospital.  There is a portrait of Languet,(343) the friend of Sir Philip Sydney; and divers of himself and all his great kindred; particularly his sister-in-law, with a vast lute, and Sacharissa, charmingly handsome, But there are really four very great curiosities, I believe as old portraits as any extant in England:  they are, Fitzallen, Archbishop of Canterbury, Humphry Stafford, the first Duke of Buckingham; T. Wentworth, and John Foxle; all four with the dates of their commissions as constables of