The tower, shown in the engraving, bears the name of Pope's Tower from the circumstance that in the uppermost room in it he wrote the fifth volume of his translation of Homer; as he recorded on a pane of stained glass in the window. The pane of glass has been removed, and was long, and, perhaps, is now "preserved as a valuable relique at NunehamCourtney." The room is still called Pope's Study. The tower is in good repair, though the apartments are used only as storerooms. The lower room is the old family chapel; part of it has a flat wooden ceiling composed of squares, with red and yellow mouldings, and a blue ground, with gilt stars in the centre of each compartment. The tower is fifty-four feet high; the upper rooms are each thirteen feet square.

But the most curious portion of the old mansion now existing is the kitchen, shown in the opposite engraving. It is a large stone building of an earlier date than the rest of the mansion, and is the only edifice of the kind known. It bears some resemblance to the abbot's kitchen at Glastonbury, but it is larger and loftier, and has no chimney. Dr. Plot, in his curious History of Oxfordshire, says, "The kitchen of the right worshipful Sir Simon Harcourt, Knight, is so strangely unusual, that by way of riddle, one may truly call it, either a kitchen within a chimney, or a kitchen without one; for below it is nothing but a large square, and octangular above ascending like a tower, the fires being made against the walls, and the smoke climbing up them, without any tunnels or disturbance to the cooks; which being stopped by a large conical roof at the top, goes out at loopholes on every side according as the wind sits; the loop

holes at the side next the wind being shut with folding doors, and the adverse side opened." At one of the angles there is a turret in which is a winding staircase that leads to a passage round the battlements, in order to open and close the shutters according to the direction of the wind.

This building is still used as the kitchen of the adjoining house, and the cooks say that they experience no inconvenience from the lack of a chimney; and I saw substantial evidence, a few weeks ago, that its capabilities are sufficiently tested. There are two fire-places against the opposite walls, at either of which an ox might be roasted whole. Only one is used now.

Besides

the fire-places there are two large ovens, which are still employed. The interior has a singular appearance. It is a room about thirty feet square, capped by a conical roof, in itself twenty-five feet high, and from the floor to its apex about sixty feet. The inside of the roof is thickly coated with soot, and the walls above the fire-places are blackened densely in the centre, shading off gradually to the angles. In the large old fire-place a goodly wood fire is burning, which throws a rich warm glow on to the deep shade above, while three or four neat-handed Phillises busily engaged in the various culinary operations contrast strongly in their lightsome cleanly look with the murky walls of the strange old room. On the canvas of a Rembrandt it would make a striking picture.

The main portion of the mansion was erected in the reign of Henry VII.; the kitchen is supposed to be of the time of Henry IV. Pope in a letter to the Duke of Buckingham described the house as it was before its demolition; but according to the

Earl of Harcourt, "Although his description be Judicrous and witty, it is in almost every particular incorrect; the situation of the several buildings being exactly the reverse of that in which they stood, as is demonstrated by a still existing plan —it is not, therefore, worth while to quote any part of it.

The church, which stands contiguous to the site of the old mansion, is an unusually fine one, and merits careful regard; indeed it would not be easy for a student of ecclesiastical architecture to select a village church that it would be more instructive to study in detail. It is cruciform, and has a massive tower of handsome proportions springing from the intersection of the arms of the cross. The several parts are of very different dates, but their union does not appear incongruous-the modern deformities having been recently swept away. The nave is Norman, of the twelfth century, not greatly enriched, the two plain doorways on the north and south sides of it being the leading features. Through the principal door the men enter the church on Sundays, the female part of the congregation more meekly entering by another lesser door, at a little distance from it, according to "a custom established there time immemorial.' The wooden roof to the nave is believed to have been added in the fourteenth century. The chancel, the transepts, and the tower arches are of the thirteenth century; the upper part of the tower was, probably, added in the fifteenth century. The chancel is a very pure specimen of the early English style of architecture, and of large dimensions for so small a church; these dimensions being forty-four feet long by eighteen wide, the nave