the whole concluding with the announcement that "The end of all things is at hand." Holding that opinion, it would seem to have been hardly worth while to erect the monument, but in the result it survives to show what a very gross mistake he made.

Two illustrations of the quiet annals of Cuckfield, widely different in point of time, are the old clock and the wall-plate memorial to one Frank Bleach of the Royal Sussex Volunteer Company, who died at Bloemfontein in 1901. The ancient hand-wrought clock, made in 1667 by Isaac Leney, probably of Cuckfield, finally stopped in 1867, and was taken down in 1873. After lying as lumber in the belfry for many years, it was in 1904 fixed on the interior wall of the tower.

XLIV

CUCKFIELD PLACE, acknowledged by Harrison Ainsworth to be the original of his "Rookwood," stands immediately outside the town, and is visible, in midst of the park, from the road. That romantic home of ghostly tradition is fittingly approached by a long and lofty avenue of limes, where stands the clock-tower entrance-gate, removed from Slaugham Place.

Beyond it the picturesquely broken surface of the park stretches, beautifully wooded and populated with herds of deer, the grey, manygabled mansion looking down upon the whole.

"Rookwood," the fantastic and gory tale that first gave Harrison Ainsworth a vogue, was commenced in 1831, but not completed until 1834. Ainsworth died at Reigate, January 3, 1882. Thus in his preface he acknowledges his model:

"The supernatural occurrence forming the groundwork of one of the ballads which I have

made the harbinger of doom to the house of Rookwood, is ascribed by popular superstition to a family resident in Sussex, upon whose estate the fatal tree (a gigantic lime, with mighty arms. and huge girth of trunk, as described in the song) is still carefully preserved. Cuckfield Place, to which this singular piece of timber is attached, is, I may state for the benefit of the curious, the real Rookwood Hall; for I have not drawn upon

The

imagination, but upon memory in describing the seat and domains of that fated family. general features of the venerable structure, several of its chambers, the old garden, and, in particular, the noble park, with its spreading prospects, its picturesque views of the hall, like bits of Mrs. Radcliffe' (as the poet Shelley once observed of the same scene), its deep glades, through which the deer come lightly tripping down, its uplands, slopes, brooks, brakes, coverts, and groves are carefully delineated."

"Like Mrs. Radcliffe!" That romance is indeed written in the peculiar convention which obtained with her, with Horace Walpole, with Maturin, and "Monk" Lewis; a convention of Gothic gloom and superstition, delighting in gore and apparitions, responsible for the "Mysteries of Udolpho," "The Italian," "The Monk," and other highly seasoned reading of the early years of the nineteenth century. Ainsworth deliberately modelled his manner upon Mrs. Radcliffe, changing the scenes of his desperate deeds from her favourite Italy to our own land. His pages abound in apparitions, death-watches, highwaymen, "pistols for two and breakfasts for one," daggers, poisonbowls, and burials alive, and, with a little literary ability added to his horribles, his would be a really hair-raising romance. But the blood he ladles out so plentifully is only coloured water; his spectres are only illuminated turnips on broomsticks; his verses so deplorable, his witticisms so hobnailed that even schoolboys refuse any longer