of history; carry us into almost every scene of English life, whether public or private, from the grand pageant of the Field of the Cloth of Gold, to the progresses of Elizabeth from house to house among her people; and present to us the first and grandest type of that strange and composite social system, which no other country has ever realised; in which every class and every individual has his necessary and appointed place in the great framework of society; which might well be likened to a splendid mosaic work, in which the rarest stones and the brightest colours are blended with the humbler ground-work, whose subdued tints give them increased beauty by their very contrast, but in which every stone is equally necessary, both to the safety and the completeness of the work. It is thus that from this memorable period every class of society, and every member of it from the highest to the lowest, have found 

their proper place, without rivalry and without disturbance. The sanguinary and ruinous campaigns in France, and the still more fatal and fratricidal civil war which depopulated England, had almost destroyed all the ancient nobility; whose memories are from time to time revived among us, in the titles called out of abeyance from among the descendants of their female heirs; and, out of the social fabric thus shattered and all but destroyed, the first of the Tudors had to build up a new aristocracy and new counsellors. It seems as though the Weald of Kent was destined to be almost the seed-plot of this new plantation. In the mansions that surround us, some still in existence though retaining the venerable features of antiquity, others in ruins, and others again rebuilt to represent a later age and its higher requirements, we recognise the homes of some of the most historic families of the Tudor