Original Size
Kenilworth old church and the castle at length are reached; the latter, a stately ruin. The visitor will duly note Cæsar’s Tower, the original keep, with its walls, in some parts, sixteen feet thick; then the remains of the magnificent banqueting hall, built by John of Gaunt, and, lastly, the dilapidated towers erected by Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, one part of which bears the name of poor Amy Robsart. No officious cicerone is likely to offer his services; a trifling gate-fee opens the place freely to all, either to rest on the greensward, or to climb the battered ramparts; to survey, at one view, the ancient moat, the castle garden, the tilt-yard, where knights met in mimic battle; the bed of the lake, where sea-fights were imitated for a monarch’s sport—in short, the impressive memorials of a fashion in life and act that have long since yielded to nobler things. “The massy ruins,” says Sir Walter Scott, “only serve to show what their splendour once was, and to impress on the musing visitor the transitory value of human possessions, and the happiness of those who enjoy a humble lot in industrious contentment.” There are other lessons, too, national, as well as individual; and we turn away from old Kenilworth with thankfulness that the ruins of the nineteenth century will at least tell to our descendants no tales of feudal tyranny, of royal murders, or of sanguinary civil strife.