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412 The Gate House is in excellent preservation, and is occupied by a tenant of the Earl of Clarendon. The towers are supported by old pear trees that clasp their long arms around the stone-work and hug it so tightly that you may see their impress in the wall. It is a pleasant sight, which a poet might make something of, to see them hanging their clusters of luscious fruit up and down, as if, like the idea expressed in Solomon's Song, they were staying the venerable building with apples and cheering delicacies. Indeed, for its historical associations as well as for the architectural character disclosed in its picturesque ruins. Kenilworth, perhaps, stands at the very head of all old English castles as an object of popular interest. If a self-registering apparatus could be put in operation at the gate opening to it, which would number and record the human feet, just as some instruments register the rain-drops that fall, doubtless no other castle in England would show such a census of visiters as this.

Warwick Castle! England and all who speak its language owe the successive inheritors of this great living pile of buildings more than they have ever acknowledged. For it is really the only baronial castle that has survived the destruction or decay of all the other monuments of the feudal ages of the same order. We should not know what they were in their day and generation