“To-day we were taken by Lord Fitzwilliam to the two churches. One by Pearson is new and most magnificent; the other is old and very ugly, but has interesting monuments. That of Lord Strafford is mural, with his figure kneeling near the altar. The epitaph does not allude to the manner of his death, but, after setting forth his virtues, simply says ‘he died May 8th, 1641.’ The ghost of Lord Strafford is still said to walk down the oak staircase at Wentworth every Friday night, carrying his head. An old gateway with several fragments of the house of his time remain, and many of his books are preserved in the library. My bedroom is hung with white worked with red by his daughter Lady Rockingham.”
“_Dec. 4._--Lady Fitzwilliam has been showing us the house. It contains much of interest, especially in the pictures, and they are repeated so often that one learns to know the family faces--Lord Strafford and his three wives, his son and his two daughters by his second wife, and the second Lord Strafford with his wife, who was the daughter of James, Earl of Derby, and Charlotte de la Tremouille. His inscriptions in the Bibles of her father and mother, which are here, and the many memorials he raised to her, are so touching that it is quite a shock to find he married again after her death; but in his will he always speaks of the second as only his “wife,” the first as his “deare wife.” He restored the old church in her memory, and enjoined upon his descendants always to keep it up for her sake.
“Lady Albreda drove us about the park and to the ‘Mausoleum,’ a commemorative monument raised to the Minister Lord Rockingham by his son. It is copied from the Roman monument at S. Remy near Aries, and contains, in a kind of Pantheon, a statue by Nollekens of Lord Rockingham surrounded by his friends. The face is from a mask taken after death, and the figure is full of power and expression, with a deprecatory ‘Oh, pray don’t say such a thing as that.’”
“_Temple Newsam, Dec. 6._--This great house is four miles from Leeds, by a road passing through a squalid suburb of grimy houses and muddy lanes, with rotten palings and broken paving-stones, making blackened pools of stagnant water; then black fields succeed, with withered hedges, stag-headed trees, and here and there a mountain of coal refuse breaking the dismal distances. It was almost dark as I drove up the steep park to the house.