I always dedicate my travels to you.  My present expedition has been very amusing, sights are thick sown in the counties of York and Nottingham; the former is more historic, and the great lords live at a prouder distance:  in Nottinghamshire there is a very heptarchy of little kingdoms elbowing one another, and the barons of them want nothing but small armies to make inroads into one another’s parks, murder deer, and massacre park-keepers.  But to come to particulars:  the great road as far as Stamford is superb; in any other country it would furnish medals, and immortalize any drowsy monarch in whose reign it was executed.  It is continued much farther, but is more rumbling.  I did not stop at Hatfield(707) and Burleigh(708) to seek the palaces of my great-uncle-ministers, having seen them before.

Budgen palace(709) surprises one prettily in a little village; and the remains of Newark castle, seated pleasantly, began to open a vein of historic memory.  I had only transient and distant views of Lord Tyrconnells at Belton, and of Belvoir.  The borders of Huntingdonshire have churches instead of milestones, but the richness and extent of Yorkshire quite charmed me.  Oh! what quarries for working in Gothic!  This place is one of the very few that I really like; the situation, woods, views, and the improvements are perfect in their kinds; nobody has a truer taste than Lord Strafford.  The house is a pompous front screening an old house; it was built by the last lord on a design of the Prussian architect Bott, who is mentioned in the King’s M`emoires de Brandenburg, and is not ugly:  the one pair of stairs is entirely engrossed by a gallery of 180 feet, on the plan of that in the Colonna palace at Rome:  it has nothing but four modern statues and some bad portraits, but, on my proposal, is going to have books at each end.  The hall is pretty, but low; the drawing-room handsome:  there wants a good eating-room and staircase:  but I have formed a design for both, and I believe they will be executed—­that my plans should be obeyed when yours are not!  I shall bring you a groundplot for a Gothic building, which I have proposed that you should draw for a little wood, but in the manner of an ancient market-cross.  Without doors all is pleasing:  there is a beautiful (artificial) river, with a fine semicircular wood overlooking it, and the temple of Tivoli placed happily on a rising towards the end.  There are obelisks, columns, and other buildings, and above all, a handsome castle in the true style, on a rude mountain, with a court -,and towers:  in the castle-yard, a statue of the late lord who built it.  Without the park is a lake on each side, buried in noble woods.  Now contrast all this, and you may have some idea of Lord Rockingham’s.  Imagine now a most extensive and most beautiful modern front erected before the great Lord Strafford’s old house, and this front almost blocked up with hills, and every thing unfinished around it, nay within it.  The