Note 32 — THE OLD ENGLISH HOUSE.

In the noble park of Cowdray, the home of the Montagues, Queen Elizabeth, in 1591, killed three or four deer with her cross-bow, while on a visit to Lord Montague. Three deaths in one family by drowning, and the almost total destruction of a fine mansion by fire, within the memory of living man, are enough to make one tread the beautiful grounds of Cowdray with feelings of awe, and to invest it with a superstitious melancholy. Three hundred years ago, however, there was no more festive house in England, when "three oxen and 120 geese" figured in its bill of fare for breakfast. The then proprietor was a strict disciplinarian, and the "Orders and Rules of Sir Anthony Browne" curiously illustrate the domestic economy of a great man's family in the sixteenth century, especially as regards its important departments of the "ewerye" and the "buttyre," and those pet officers, "my server" and "my carver."—Quarterly Review, 1861.