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"Ay, and miniver from my Lord Abbot's hood. I'd admonish you, my good brethren of Saint Grimbald, to be in no hurry for a visitation which might scarce stop where you would fain have it. Well, my sons, are ye bound for the Forest again? An ye be, we'll wend back together, and ye can lie at Silkstede to-night." "Alack, kind father, there's no more home for us in the Forest," said Ambrose.
The woods surrounding Abbot's Manor were by no means depressing, they were not dark silent vistas of solemn pine, leading into deeper and deeper gloom, but cheery and picturesque clumps of elm and beech and oak, at constant intervals with hazel-copse, hawthorn and eglantine, true English woods, suggestive of delicate romance and poesy, and made magical by the songs of birds, whose silver-throated melodies are never heard to sweeter advantage than under the leafy boughs of such unspoilt green lanes and dells as yet remain to make the charm and glamour of rural England.
"It was nothing human, Jasper; you know it as well as I. Oh, why did I bring you here to meet the warning phantom that haunts your house!" "Nay, if my time is near the spirit would have found me out wherever I might be. I have no faith in that absurd superstition I laugh at and defy it. Come down and drink my health in wine from the Abbot's own cellar."
Some prints of the Cambridge colleges, and other pictures indicating Byron's predilections at the time, and which he himself had hung there, were on the walls. This, the housekeeper told us, had been the Abbot's chamber, in the monastic time. Adjoining it is the haunted room, where the ghostly monk, whom Byron introduces into Don Juan, is said to have his lurking-place.
"In the fifth year of the reign of King Henry II. after the conquest of England by William, duke of Normandy, the Lord of Uglebardby, then called William de Bruce, and the Lord of Sneton, called Ralph de Perci, with a gentleman and a freeholder called Allatson, did on the 16th day of October appoint to meet and hunt the wild boar, in a certain wood or desert place belonging to the abbot of the monastery of Whitby; the place's name is Eskdale-side; the abbot's name was Sedman.
In his Johannisberg days, as we have seen, he had met the great historian-abbot, though in a humble capacity. His own Abbot shared with Trithemius the duty of making the triennial visitations of the Benedictine houses in that district; and Butzbach, as the Abbot's servant, often rode with them.
Yet, how it goes against the grain of manhood to realise that any 'lady' may be 'a hard one! But, alas! what a multitude of 'hard ones' there are! Harder than men, perhaps, if all the truth were known!" And there was a certain sternness and rooted aversion in him to that dim approaching presence of the unknown heiress of Abbot's Manor.
By the true eyes of God, if you manage badly, I will be upon you." In Walter Scott's novel, "The Abbot," there is an interesting contrast drawn between the ceremonies attending an abbot's installation, when the monasteries were in their glory, and the pitiable scenes in the days of their decline, when Mary Stuart was a prisoner in Lochleven.
The door by which they had entered was very small, and perhaps had led merely to the abbot's throne, as an irregularity for his own convenience, and only made manifest by the rending away of the rich wooden stall work, some fragments of which still clung to the walls.
As they afterwards discovered, this man, it may here be said, was a captain of the Abbot's guard. Moreover, it was he who had shot the arrow that killed Sir John Foterell some forty hours before, striking him through the throat, as it was fated that he himself should be struck. Thus, then, one of that good knight's murderers reaped his just reward.
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