Page:Works of Thomas Carlyle - Volume 06.djvu/52

 sively in good style at Hinchinbrook near by. It was the Fether Sir Henry Cromwell, who from his sumptuosity was called the ‘Golden Knight’, that built, or that enlarged, remodelled and as good as built, the Mansion of Hinchinbrook; which had been a Nunnery while Nunneries still were: it was the son, Sir Oliver, likewise an expensive man, that sold it to the Montagues, since Earls of Sandwich, whose seat it still is. A stately pleasant House, among its shady lawns and expanses, on the left bank of the Ouse river, a short half mile west of Huntingdon;—still stands pretty much as Oliver Cromwell’s Grandfather left it; rather kept good and defended from the inroads of Time and Accident, than substantially altered. Several Portraits of the Cromwells, and other interesting portraits and memorials of the seventeenth and subsequent centuries, are still there. The Cromwell blazonry ‘on the great bay window,’ which Noble makes so much of, is now gone, destroyed by fire; has given place to Montague blazonry; and no dull man can bore us with that any more.

Huntingdon itself lies pleasantly along the left bank of the Ouse; sloping pleasantly upwards from Ouse Bridge, which connects it with the old village of Godmanchester; the Town itself consisting mainly of one fair street, which towards the north end of it opens into a kind of irregular market-place, and then contracting again soon terminates. The two churches of All-Saints and St. John’s, as you walk up northward from the Bridge, appear successively on your left; the churchyards flanked with shops or other houses. The Ouse, which is of very circular course in this quarter, ‘winding as if reluctant to enter the Fen-country,’ says one Topographer, has still a respectable drab-colour, gathered from the clays of Bedfordshire; has not yet the Stygian black which in a few miles farther it assumes for good. Huntingdon, as it were, looks over into the Fens; Godmanchester, just across the river, already stands on black bog. The country to the East is all Fen (mostly unreclaimed in Oliver’s time, and still of a very dropsical character); to the West it is hard green ground,