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Rh of arms. But Robert Dudley. Earl of Leicester, completed the transformation into a residential palace. He not only added the wing called the Leicester Buildings, but he renovated, extended, and embellished all the old portions of the huge pile. He erected an ante-castle, or a great gate house, which is a noble structure in itself. Never did a subject build, and rebuild, and embellish on such a scale as he did to receive his sovereign. Three times Elizabeth was his guest. Her last visit was in July, 1575, and lasted seventeen days. Of the festivities and princely entertainments he prepared for her on this occasion Sir Walter Scott has written with all that natural enthusiasm and predilection with which, perhaps above all other EnglishScottish [sic] novelists, he dilated upon such a subject. His graphic descriptions of these scenes are so familiar to the million, that I will not venture to go behind his brilliant fictions in search of actual, historical facts of duller interest. The day of such favourites has gone by, like the beauty and glory of this once gorgeous fabric. The sun of Christian morality and civilization has risen to a purer flood of light; and such broad-faced gallantries would now be looked out of countenance in high places.

On walking around these broken walls, some seven hundred years old, and others not three centuries, one must be struck with the weak