Page:A protest against the extension of railways in the Lake District - Somervell (1876).djvu/85

 conforming more nearly than he is aware to the habits of those who lived there three hundred years ago. Occasionally the landlord comes there for a week's shooting, and the best bedroom, with its wainscoted panels and carved cornice, its Jacobean chests and faded Turkey carpet, is preserved from being the apple or the onion chamber. In the garden the yew trees and the walnuts are in their full glory, and the red brick walls that enclose them have all the delightful depth of colour which belongs to their age. A colliery, however, is not a helpful neighbour to the gabled hall. The lane that leads to it is dirtier than the dirtiest of those that lead to the Porta Salara at Rome. The porch is blocked up with bricks, and an open drain trickles along the slope in front of the house. The wall has fallen down which once inclosed the neglected garden, and half buried in the soil lies the stone escutcheon which bears the arms of the family that owned the property in the seventeenth century. There, is no particular road anywhere; paths lie in every direction, for the collier is the typical crow that flies straight from point to point. In Lord John Manners's well-known poem, 'England's Trust,' the claims of our 'old nobility' are advocated in preference to those of wealth, commerce, learning, and laws. Had his sentiment been expended upon the Tudor and Elizabethan manor-houses of the country, we should have been more inclined to sympathize with him. There is very little old nobility, and that little is not easy to discover. In Yorkshire, and especially in the manufacturing parts of the county, property has changed owners very often. Two hundred years ago hardly a country house was in the hands of the ancestors of those who now hold it. The ordinary Yorkshire family dates back about two centuries, at which time it struggled out of some town to invest a little capital in land. The West Riding is very deficient in great houses built before the beginning of last century. Hardly a fragment is left of Howley, the old home of the Saviles; and Temple Newsam, the only Elizabethan palace