As I like to deck out pictures for my own entertainment, I
pleased myself with the idea that this very hall had been the
scene of the unlucky bard's examination on the morning after his
captivity in the lodge. I fancied to myself the rural potentate
surrounded by his body-guard of butler, pages, and blue-coated
serving-men with their badges, while the luckless culprit was
brought in, forlorn and chopfallen, in the custody of
gamekeepers, huntsmen,, and whippers-in, and followed by a rabble
rout of country clowns. I fancied bright faces of curious
housemaids peeping from the half-opened doors, while from the
gallery the fair daughters of the knight leaned gracefully
forward, eyeing the youthful prisoner with that pity "that dwells
in womanhood." Who would have thought that this poor varlet, thus
trembling before the brief authority of a country squire, and the
sport of rustic boors, was soon to become the delight of princes,
the theme of all tongues and ages, the dictator to the human mind
and was to confer immortality on his oppressor by a caricature
and a lampoon?
I was now invited by the butler to walk into the garden, and I
felt inclined to visit the orchard and harbor where the justice
treated Sir John Falstaff and Cousin Silence "to a last year's
pippin of his own grafting, with a dish of caraways;" but I bad
already spent so much of the day in my ramblings that I was
obliged to give up any further investigations.
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