. 
 
 
 . -' 
 
 L ^ 
 
GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 
 AND CELEBRATED GARDENS 
 
 IN AND ROUND LONDON 
 
CELEBRATED GARDENS 
 
 IK AND AROUND LONDON 
 
 JESSIE MACGREGOR 
 
 6 
 
 LONDON HUTCHINSON & C9 
 PATERNOSTER ROW ^ ^ ^ ^ 
 

And if indeed in some old garden thou and I have wrought 
 And made fresh flowers bloom from hoarded seed, 
 And fragrance of old days and deeds have brought 
 Baek to folk weary, all was not for nought ; 
 No little part it was for me to play 
 The idle singer of an empty day." 
 
 WILLIAM MORRIS, 
 
 " The Earthly Paradite." 
 
 fto Q'>r 
 ) CO - 
 
TO THE MEMORY OF 
 MY SISTER AM Y 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAP. PAGE 
 
 I. INTRODUCTORY .......... 1 
 
 II. LAMBETH PALACE AND GARDENS . . . . . . . 29 
 
 III. FULHAM PALACE AND GARDENS ....... 62 
 
 IV. SIGN HOUSE AND GARDENS, ISLEWORTH ..... 94 
 
 V. THE CHELSEA " PHYSICKE GARDEN" . . . . . . 114 
 
 VI. MARLBOROUGH HOUSE AND GARDEN ...... 139 
 
 VII. CHISWICK HOUSE AND GARDENS . . . . . . .154 
 
 VIII. WALPOLE HOUSE, THE MALL, CHISWICK 188 
 
 IX. HOLLAND HOUSE AND GARDENS . . . . . . .198 
 
 X. HOGARTH HOUSE AND GARDEN, CHISWICK ..... 227 
 
 XI. No. 3, THE GROVE, HIGHGATE, AND SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 237 
 
 XII. CARLYLE HOUSE, CHELSEA ........ 255 
 
 XIII. KELMSCOTT HOUSE AND GARDEN, UPPER MALL, HAMMERSMITH, 
 
 AND WILLIAM MORRIS ........ 271 
 
 XIV. LEIGHTON HOUSE, KENSINGTON, AND LORD LEIGHTON . . 297 
 
 AFTERWORD . . . . . . . . . . 321 
 
PREFACE 
 
 FOR kind permission to make the drawings reproduced in the following 
 pages, and for the facilities so freely given me in doing so, my thanks are due 
 
 To Her Gracious Majesty Queen Alexandra. 
 
 His Grace the Lord Archbishop, of Canterbury. 
 
 His Grace the late Duke of Northumberland. 
 
 The Right Honourable Mary Countess of Ilchester. 
 
 The Right Reverend the Lord Bishop of London. 
 
 Major Goldman, M.P., of Walpole House, The Mall, Chiswick. 
 
 The late Dr. Tuke and Charles Tuke, Esq. 
 
 Charles Grant Church, Esq., of 3, The Grove, Highgate. 
 
 Warwick Draper, Esq., formerly of Kelmscott House, Upper Mall, 
 
 Hammersmith. 
 The Trustees of Hogarth House, Chiswick ; The " Physicke Garden," 
 
 Chelsea ; Carlyle House, Chelsea, and Leighton House, Kensington. 
 
 I also cordially acknowledge the valuable aid I have received, through 
 information not otherwise obtainable, from Mary Countess of Ilchester, The 
 Lady Frances Balfour, The Hon. Charlotte Knollys and Lady Thornycroft. 
 
 And there are two others to whom though I do not name them I am 
 deeply grateful, for without their sympathy and steady, kindly encourage- 
 ment I am inclined to think the book would never have been written or, 
 at least, completed. 
 
 With regard to the work itself, I should like to say in explanation of a 
 certain want of continuity that may be felt in its pages, the manner of 
 its genesis should be known. 
 
 Pictures in a picture gallery are regarded as distinct entities, but the 
 chapters of a book (unless it be frankly a collection of short stories) ought 
 to have some logical connection. I have dealt chronologically with the 
 various histories related in the following pages, as far as it has been possible 
 to do so. Also, if the Reader will look for it, there is a well-defined chain 
 of circumstance linking together many of the chapters in " Gardens of 
 Celebrities "but since its existence is accidental, and it is broken in places 
 the book, I fear, must plead guilty to a lack of cohesion. 
 
 This is largely because the illustrations earliest in point of time those of 
 Kelmscott House, Hogarth House and Holland House, which were executed 
 
PREFACE 
 
 as long ago as 1911 and 1912 were originally intended solely for an exhi- 
 bition of garden pictures. The exhibition was inevitably deferred, when it 
 was decided that they should first appear in book form, because the drawings 
 had to be held over for reproduction in colour. 
 
 In its first inception, the raison d'etre of the book was purely a pictorial 
 one, and the text accompanying the pictures would therefore have been 
 merely elucidatory and descriptive. The text, in short, was to have illus- 
 trated the drawings, not, as now, vice versa. 
 
 But alas ! in six months there followed the cosmic upheaval of the last 
 four years with the inevitable postponement or destruction of all human 
 plans and projects. In August, 1914, when I was in the full swing and 
 enjoyment of my outdoor work like a bolt from the blue the measureless 
 calamity of the Great War was upon us ! At the moment when all eyes were 
 turned to the stricken fields of France and Flanders, when, there, and else- 
 where in the wide area of strife, husbands, sons, brothers and nephews 
 heroes all, in their readiness and steadfastness, martyrs in their faith were, 
 voluntarily, paying so heavy a price for the ultimate freedom of mankind 
 none at home would have had heart or time to consider the beauty and the 
 peace of gardens and therefore the book itself was more than once post- 
 poned. 
 
 But my own small bit of work went on. The drawings themselves were 
 ready in 1915 and in working at the text I came unexpectedly upon a 
 mine so rich that, since the unhappy prolongation of the war allowed it 
 I seized the chance to treat my subject or rather subjects for thirteen 
 different ones are dealt with much more fully. To treat it exhaustively, 
 even without reference to many interesting or beautiful metropolitan gardens 
 existing, which I have not so much as mentioned would be impossible within 
 the limits of one volume. 
 
 And the book, even so far as it goes, is incomplete. I had purposed, as a 
 matter of course, to include a drawing of " Strawberry " the famous 
 garden of Horace Walpole, and to make more than a passing allusion to his 
 place in the history of gardening ; but much to my regret I was not permitted 
 to do so. And though facilities were kindly given me to draw in the gardens 
 of Gray's Inn, laid out, it is said, by Bacon himself, I found that they had 
 been so sorely cut up and worn by the perpetual drilling of thousands of 
 troops, that on aesthetic grounds I was compelled to leave them out. 
 
 JESSIE MACGREGOR. 
 Swallowfield, 
 
 October 15th, 1918. 
 
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 WATER COLOUR DRAWINGS 
 
 MARLBOROUGH HOUSE ...... 
 
 LAMBETH : 
 
 The Palace from the Gardens .... 
 
 The Tudor Gateway 
 
 FULHAM : 
 
 The Courtyard ....... 
 
 The Flower Walk in the Walled Garden 
 
 Gateway between Walled Garden and Grounds 
 SIGN : 
 
 Looking toward Parterres and Fountain 
 
 Looking toward the River Thames 
 PHYSICKE GARDEN, CHELSEA : 
 
 View of Garden ...... 
 
 CHISWICK HOUSE : 
 
 The Obelisk in the Pool 
 
 The Inigo Jones Gateway ..... 
 
 The Conservatory . . . 
 WALPOLE HOUSE, THE MALL, CHISWICK : 
 
 View of House and Garden .... 
 
 HOLLAND HOUSE : 
 
 The Dutch or West Garden .... 
 
 HOGARTH HOUSE : 
 
 View of House and Garden .... 
 
 No. 3, THE GROVE, HIGHGATE : 
 
 View of Garden and House .... 
 
 CARLYLE HOUSE, CHELSEA : 
 
 View of Garden and House .... 
 
 KELMSCOTT HOUSE, UPPER MALL, HAMMERSMITH : 
 
 The Garden, looking from the River 
 
 View of House and Garden, looking riverwards 
 LEIGHTON HOUSE, KENSINGTON : 
 
 The Studio Balcony, from Garden . , , 
 
 Frontispiece 
 
 . Facing p. 32 
 46 
 
 98 
 110 
 
 134 
 
 166 
 170 
 182 
 
 194 
 218 
 232 
 250 
 260 
 
 270 
 
 292 
 
 296 
 
LAMBETH : 
 
 The Fig-tree, in Greater Courtyard 
 
 FULHAM : 
 
 The Entrance to the Palace 
 
 Sl N : 112 
 
 Ancient Cedar in Grounds . 
 
 PHYSICKE GARDEN : 
 
 The Gateway in Swan Walk .... 
 CHISWICK HOUSE : 
 
 Sketch of Temple in Grounds 
 
 South Front and Cedar Avenue . 
 
 xn 
 
GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES AND 
 CELEBRATED GARDENS 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 AFTER the Romans left Britain, about A.D. 300, the art 
 of landscape gardening, in which they had instructed 
 the islanders, died out, and under the Saxons the garden 
 was merely a yard; the word ' yard " etymologieally derived 
 from the Anglo-Saxon geard, i.e., hedges, enclosure signifying the 
 small, enclosed space in which those plants intended for domestic 
 use were sheltered. But though neglected in England, the art 
 had advanced in France ; and when, in 1066, the Normans came 
 over, they reintroduced it, bringing with them many plants and 
 fruits hitherto unknown in Britain, and an appreciation of flowers 
 for their own sake. The author of " Gardens Old and New " tells 
 an anecdote that attests this : Christina, Abbess of the famous 
 Abbey of Romney, in Hampshire, who was closely allied to the 
 former royal house of England, had under her care her young 
 niece, Matilda, afterwards Queen of Henry I. She must have 
 been considered beautiful, for William Rufus desired to see her, 
 and when (his reputation being dubious) the Abbess demurred, 
 lie pretended that he had only come to see the flowers in the 
 convent garden, reported to be worth a visit. 
 
 Henry of Huntingdon, an early authority, tells us that Henry II. 
 made a " Parke," or chase, at Woodstock, in Oxfordshire. In a 
 bower in its leafy groves, approached by a labyrinthine path, 
 accessible only to one who had the clew, the King concealed his 
 love, fair Rosamund Clifford. It was there his Queen discovered 
 her, and offered her the choice of death by the poison bowl or 
 the dagger. Tradition has it that she chose the former. 
 
 i 
 
GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 
 
 Speaking of Blenheim in his " Observations on Modern Gardens,'* 
 Wheatley says : " The sides are open lawn. On that farthest 
 from the house formerly stood the palace of Henry II., celebrated 
 in many an ancient ditty as ' Fair Rosamund's Bower.' ' A little 
 clear stream, which rises there, is by the country people still called 
 " Fair Rosamund's Well." Since at Blenheim the remains of a 
 Roman Villa were found, it is possible that the trees in Henry's 
 " Parke" were survivors of those that had been in the garden of 
 that Villa ; and if so, Blenheim may claim to be the most ancient, 
 as it is one of the finest examples of landscape gardening, in the 
 country. 
 
 The first English writer on Gardens was one Alexander Mark- 
 ham, foster-brother of Richard Coeur de Lion who became a 
 professor in the University of Paris, and towards the end of his 
 life, Abbot of the Augustinian convent of Cirencester. 
 
 In the library of Trinity College, Cambridge, there is a poem 
 entitled, " John the Gardener," composed in the fourteenth 
 century, that gives practical advice upon sowing and grafting ; 
 and a fifteenth century manuscript still extant, contains a treatise 
 bearing the wordy title : 
 
 ' For a man to know in which time of the year it is best for 
 a man to plant trees, also to make a tree bear all manner of fruit 
 of divers colours and odours, with many other things." The 
 reader is advised to give due attention to the signs of the Zodiac, 
 for in that age astrology the forerunner of astronomy con- 
 cerned with the supposed influence of the stars on terrestrial 
 affairs, determined the times to sow and to graft ; and the efforts 
 of the alchemist to transmute inferior metal into gold were 
 rivalled by the attempt of the horticulturist to produce hybrid 
 varieties of flowers and fruit peaches with the kernels of nuts, 
 stoneless cherries, pomegranates from peaches, and so forth. 
 
 Chaucer is a rich mine in which to dig for information on the 
 subject of medieval gardens. He took many of his plots from 
 Boccaccio. ' The Black Death," the most devastating of the 
 five visitations of the plague in the fourteenth century, of which 
 the Italian poet, in the introduction to the ** Decameron " gives a 
 vivid and terrible description, swept through Europe reaching 
 Florence, where sixty thousand persons are said to have died, in 
 1348, when Chaucer was eight years old. Boccaccio's lavish praises 
 
 2 
 
AND CELEBRATED GARDENS 
 
 of the garden wherein Fiametto and her companions took refuge, 
 and which he likened to a Paradise on earth have almost their 
 counterpart in Chaucer's " Romaunt of the Rose," in which he 
 describes : 
 
 A " garden fair to see," bounded by a high, embattled wall, 
 and entered only by " a wicked smal. ..." 
 
 " So fair it was, that trusteth wel 
 It seemed a place esperitual 
 For certes ! as at my devys 
 There is no place in Paradys 
 So good in for to dwelle or be 
 As in that garden thoughte me." 
 
 He describes the concert of the birds the nightingale, the 
 finch, the laverock (sky lark), the throstle, the mavis, and the 
 turtle, each one seeking to eclipse the other in the sweetness of 
 its song truly a chorus known to few foreign lands. He tells 
 us also of another garden : 
 
 " A garden saw I, full of bloomy bowes 
 Upon a river in a grene mede . . . 
 With flowers whyte, blew, yeloe and rede." 
 
 The poet of the " Canterbury Tales " died in 1400, and thirty- 
 seven years later another British singer, James I. of Scotland, fell 
 by the hands of assassins at Perth. His poetic genius was of no 
 mean order, but I fear Scotland may scarcely claim him exclusively, 
 since it was nurtured in England, where he was a captive for nineteen 
 years. From his prison at Windsor he beheld the fair young 
 daughter of the Earl of Sussex walking in the garden below, and 
 fell in love with her. She ultimately became his Queen. 
 
 In his beautiful poem, " The King's Quhair," he describes the 
 garden : 
 
 " So thick the boughis and the leavis greene 
 
 Beshaded all the alleys that there were, 
 
 And mids of every arbour might be seen 
 
 The sharp greene sweete juniper, 
 
 Growing so fair with branches here and there. 
 
 " And on the smalle greene twistie sat 
 The little nightingale and sung 
 So loud and clear, the hymis consecrat 
 Of lovis use, now soft, now loud, the wallis rung 
 Right of their song." 
 
 3 I* 
 
Then, walking beneath his tower, he espies the maiden and thus 
 apostrophizes her : 
 
 " Ah sweet ! are ye a worldly creature 
 Or heavenly thing in likeness of nature ? 
 
 " Or are ye God Cupides own princess 
 And coniin are to loose me out of band ? 
 Or are ye very Nature the goddess 
 That have depainted with yr heavenly hand 
 This garden full of flowers as they stand ? " 
 
 The mediaeval " arbour " here referred to, according to W. C. 
 Hazlitt, was not a summer-house as we understand it, but a 
 garden within a garden, sufficiently large to enclose great trees. 
 He quotes in support of this statement the ancient rhyme : 
 
 " And in the garden, as I wccne 
 Was an arbour fair and grecne ; 
 And in the arbour was a tree. 
 A fairer in the world might never be." 
 
 In the King's poem before quoted, however, the word " arbour " 
 is so used as to convey much of its present meaning a meaning 
 which it had indisputably acquired at the beginning of the 
 sixteenth century. 
 
 So early as the first century after Christ the English climate had 
 been eulogized by Tacitus as favourable to the cultivation of all 
 vegetables and fruits except the vine and the olive. Therefore, 
 it is not surprising to find that melons, cucumbers, and many of 
 the more expensive products of the kitchen garden were common 
 in England as early as the reign of Edward III. But the Wars 
 of the Roses interrupted agriculture, and these vegetables after- 
 wards were unknown, until the reign of Henry VIII., when the 
 art of gardening came to a new birth. 
 
 There was for some time a curious prejudice against hops, and 
 in the reign of Henry VI. Parliament was petitioned against the 
 " wicked weed." But in 1576 Reginald Scott published a pamphlet 
 entitled, " The Perfect Platform of a Hoppe Garden." 
 
 Potatoes were not in common use before the middle of the 
 seventeenth century. A writer in the " Topographical Antiquities 
 of Great Britain and Ireland " in 1753, though himself of opinion 
 that Sir Walter Raleigh brought them over, remarks that " the- 
 
 4 
 
AND CELEBRATED GARDENS 
 
 public is much obliged for the cultivation of them to the 
 anonymous author of ' England's Happiness increased, or a 
 Remedy against succeeding Dear Years, by a Plantation of 
 Potatoes'" (1664). And he further tells us that " sallads," 
 carrots, and turnips, and cabbages, were brought over from Holland, 
 And we read of pumpkins, garlic, onions and peas. 
 
 1 Rassiris " (raisins) are said to have formed part of the second 
 course of the institution feast of Archbishop Nevil in 1464 ; if 
 this be true, they must have come from abroad. Pippins were 
 introduced in 1514, and the " pale gooseberry " about the same 
 time ; and so well have we succeeded with the gooseberry, that 
 we have come almost to regard it as indigenous. On the other 
 hand, though both oranges and figs were certainly known in England 
 in the reign of Henry VIII., orange trees have never flourished here 
 in the open, nor have fig trees done much better. The two famous 
 fig trees mentioned in the account of Lambeth Palace, are descended 
 from those planted in the Archiepiscopal garden by Cardinal Pole, 
 and were then regarded as " trees of curiosity " and very carefully 
 nurtured. 
 
 It is said that the first mulberry trees were those in the Protector 
 Somerset's garden at Sion, Middlesex, and were doubtless planted 
 under the auspices of Dr. Turner, physician to Edward VI., of 
 whom I shall have more to say. However, according to others, 
 the mulberry was first planted in the gardens at Hatfield. 
 
 It seems to have been James I., and not Queen Elizabeth as 
 sometimes supposed, who, with a view to the establishment of 
 the silk industry in this country, caused the mulberry tree to be 
 planted freely in the South of England. 
 
 That strawberries were common in England in the sixteenth 
 century we have Shakespearean authority for stating, for Gloucester 
 says in Richard III. : "When I was last in Holborn I saw good 
 strawberries in your garden there. I do beseech you send for some 
 of them." But whether Shakespeare was guilty of an anachronism 
 in mentioning the fruit as having been grown in this country a 
 hundred years earlier, I do not pretend to know. We read of 
 peaches, and even citrons, and attempts were made to cultivate the 
 grape, but without success. 
 
 An essay on gardening by a certain Thomas Hills, which 
 appeared about 1560, shows a distinct advance both in the theory 
 
 5 
 
GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 
 
 and practice of horticulture. He recommends the planting of 
 hedges of briars and thorns, and dwells much on the maze, or 
 labyrinth, an example of which we see at Hampton Court. Indeed, 
 in Hills' time no self-respecting horticulturist would have laid 
 out a garden of any importance, without one of these curious 
 places in which to " sport at times." Such treatises, and the 
 various herbals, were written avowedly to advance the science 
 of horticulture ; but there are many accidental allusions to garden- 
 ing and flower-growing in the general literature of the age, which 
 throw valuable .. and illuminating sidelights on the history of 
 gardening in England in the Middle Ages. 
 
 In the chapter on Sion reference is made to Turner and his 
 herbal. Following his lead, in Elizabeth's reign, appeared a notable 
 work, the " Herbal or Historic of Plantes,"by John Gerarde, who, 
 as we shall find when we come to the Chelsea" Physicke Garden," 
 owned the first herb garden in this country. The earliest on' the 
 Continent was that established at Padua. Gerarde's garden was 
 attached to his house in Holborn, and must have been of con- 
 siderable size, since he was able to raise eleven hundred different 
 plants and trees. He was a citizen and surgeon-apothecary of 
 London, and head gardener to Lord Burleigh. 
 
 Nor were medicinal plants and herbs forgotten. They were 
 cultivated by the thrifty dames of the fifteenth and sixteenth 
 centuries in every farm-house, manor house, and baronial hall. 
 Dwelling for the most part, as they did, in country districts where 
 intercommunication between towns, and villages, and outlying 
 hamlets, was painfully slow and difficult, and in an age when the 
 science of medicine was in its infancy, in default of the presence 
 of well-equipped disciples of Esculapius, they were content, to a 
 great extent, to practise the healing art themselves ; and if many 
 of their nostrums, as we find from the herbal literature, were 
 extravagant and absurd, and calculated, according to modern ideas, 
 to do their patients more harm than good, they themselves brought 
 often to the service of humanity if not science and learning at any 
 rate, skill, initiative, and common sense, as well as the wisdom 
 which may be derived from practical experience, and handed 
 down from mother to daughter. But there can be but little doubt 
 that, up to the sixteenth century, we owe the preservation, if not 
 positively the new birth of the science, after the Wars of the Roses, 
 
 6 
 
AND CELEBRATED GARDENS 
 
 largely to the monks. They were able and industrious gardeners, 
 and often skilled in the application of the herbs and simples they 
 so assiduously cultivated ; and in remote neighbourhoods, in the 
 absence of the leech or apothecary, must frequently have been 
 called upon to undertake, not only the cure of souls, but the cure 
 of bodies also. We owe a good deal to the " monks of old " ; their 
 place knows them no more, though such names as " Grey Friars " 
 and " Covent "or Convent ' Garden " are suggestive of the old 
 Romish times. 
 
 It would seem from the illuminated manuscripts in the British 
 Museum and elsewhere, that the English mediaeval gardens were, 
 for the most part, square in shape, and had grass plots, sanded 
 walks, and little alleys and borders. Box played a great part in 
 the outlining of these borders, and there was generally in each 
 domain a " Privy Garden," or playing place. A little later there 
 was invariably a bowling-green. Among the characteristic features 
 of the Tudor garden may also be cited the " Mount," by means 
 of which in a flat country a view of the landscape could be 
 obtained. 
 
 It was ascended by a winding path, described by an old writer as 
 being " like a cockle-shell, to come to the top without paign." 
 Mounts did not go out of fashion until the boundary wall was 
 superseded in the eighteenth century by the sunk fence, or " Ha ha." 
 In large Tudor establishments there was often a gallery leading 
 from the great house to the pleasure-grounds, by which they 
 could be reached under cover ; and even in the time of Erasmus 
 these and other garden buildings were sometimes frescoed inside, 
 a fashion which came from Italy. Erasmus speaks of a garden 
 with such galleries, the doors painted in imitation of grass and 
 flowers, and the walls representing woods. At a later period 
 Evelyn describes one which he had seen at Rucil, (that he 
 has the bad taste to commend) in which " the arch of Constantine 
 was painted on a wall in oyle as large as the real one at Rome, 
 so well done that even a man skilled in painting may mistake it 
 for stone and sculpture ; " and so cleverly was the sky painted in 
 the opening of the arch, that birds dashed themselves against it, 
 thinking to fly through. 
 
 The old game of bowls is comparatively little played nowadays, 
 except by rustics in remote country villages ; but at the time of 
 
 7 
 
GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 
 
 which I am writing a banked-up bowling-green was attached to 
 almost every considerable residence, and answered the same 
 purpose as the modern tennis-ground : or perhaps it would be 
 more correct to say of the golf links ; for though more limited 
 in area, it provided suitable recreation ground for men of mature 
 years ; and it is said that Drake was playing bowls when the Armada 
 was sighted. At any rate, it was the favourite pastime of the 
 sturdy squires and yeomen of England, just as the maypole dance 
 was that of her youths and maidens. 
 
 It was under the Tudors that English gardens first assumed a 
 national character. The Tudors were richer than the Plantagenets, 
 and more secure in possession, and had also the advantage of the 
 new learning of the Renaissance that, ere long reaching our shores 
 and providing a stimulus to every form of intellectual activity, 
 inspired fresh ideas and undertakings in horticulture, scarcely less 
 than in literature and art. Henry VIII. had done much to 
 encourage gardening and garden-planning, and justly celebrated 
 appear to have been the royal gardens of Nonsuch, near Ewcll, 
 in Surrey ; but these, together with the palace, have since been 
 entirely destroyed. Although greatly altered, some portions of 
 those at Hampton Court yet testify to the care which Henry VIII. 
 spent on their embellishment when the Palace and Grounds passed 
 into his hands. Not always commendable, however, were his 
 schemes, if it be true that " Beasts and the columns they stood 
 upon" were a prominent feature of the Hampton Court Gardens 
 during the period of his ownership. 
 
 At the time of Elizabeth's accession, English gardens had 
 probably arrived at their highest beauty, and since as yet they 
 were but little affected by French and Dutch notions of garden- 
 planning, they had acquired that peculiar, indefinable charm that 
 we have learnt to associate with the words, " an old English 
 garden." 
 
 In Elizabeth's reign a passion for travel and discovery awoke, 
 with large results ; one of which was the advance of horticulture as 
 a science. For a new impulse was given to its study when men of 
 the type of Cavendish and Raleigh, animated by a keen spirit of 
 adventure and a desire for wider horizons, set forth to navigate 
 summer seas in the far Indies, and, ere long, to explore the newly- 
 discovered continent of America. 
 
AND CELEBRATED GARDENS 
 
 These travellers brought back with them to this country the 
 seeds and roots of foreign plants and herbs, which quickly adapted 
 themselves to our climate : and as Elizabeth, who is said to 
 have loved flowers, like her father encouraged gardening, when 
 once the fame of Raleigh's collections had spread abroad it will 
 be seen when we come to the Chelsea " Physicke Garden" that 
 more than one distinguished botanist and horticulturalist was 
 attracted to this country from the Continent. 
 
 The orchard, in Elizabethan times, is frequently mentioned, and 
 would almost appear to be synonymous with the garden. In 
 Much Ado About Nothing, Hero, standing with Margaret in 
 Leonato's garden, in which the scene is laid, bids her go seek out 
 Beatrice, and 
 
 " Whisper her ear and tell her, I and Ursula 
 Walk in the orchard, and our whole discourse 
 Is all of her : say that thou overheard'st us 
 And bid her steal into the pleached bower, 
 Where honeysuckles, ripen'd by the sun, 
 
 Forbid the sun to enter . 
 
 . * there will she hide her, 
 
 To listen to our purpose." 
 
 The 'pleached" (i.e., the intertwined and interwoven bower) 
 the maze, and the bowling-green, were all indispensable adjuncts of 
 the pleasure-grounds attached to the abode of any person of 
 social importance. 
 
 The word " arbour," which, as previously remarked, had to us 
 a doubtful meaning as employed in Chaucer's time, had in Shake- 
 speare's day certainly come to be used more in our modern sense. 
 The arbour was then commonly constructed of timber. 
 Henry VIII., in the Privy Purse expenses in 1593, was charged 
 live shillings for the making of an arbour at " Baynardes Castell." 
 
 I think it is only in the same restricted sense that Shakespeare, 
 in the passage quoted above, put into Hero's mouth the word 
 ' bower." He means an arbour in the modern sense, but a rather 
 large one. Such a " bower " Horace Walpole had in mind when 
 planning his garden at Strawberry Hill more than one hundred 
 and fifty years later. He wrote : " My bower is determined, but 
 not at all what it should be. ... I had determined that the outside 
 should be of treillage (trellis). . . . Rosamond's bower, as you 
 
 9 
 
GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 
 
 and I, and Tom Hearne, know, was a labyrinth ; but as my 
 territory will admit of a very small clew, I lay aside all thoughts of 
 mazy habitation, though a bower is very different from an arbour, 
 and must have more chambers than one." Gardens probably 
 assumed the definite character to which I have referred, before 
 the reign of Elizabeth, and there was little or no variation 
 from this during that of her successor. The gardens of 
 Hatfield, where Elizabeth as Princess spent so much of her time, 
 are typical of the period. There is the pleached, or platted, alley 
 and the little " Privy Garden " enclosed by it. John Tradescent. 
 who succeeded his father as gardener to Queen Elizabeth, and 
 whose son founded the famous Ashmolean Museum at Oxford, 
 was gardener to the first Lord Salisbury, and ultimately to 
 Charles I. 
 
 English gardens in Tudor times were distinguished from foreign 
 ones by the evidence of the gardener's greater pleasure in their culti- 
 vation. We are told that to make up for the disadvantage of our 
 damp atmosphere, and a comparative lack of sunshine, the English 
 4 indulged in bright flower parterres rather than in the use of 
 coloured earth, sculpture, and vases," as abroad. The Tudors 
 introduced the " knot," or intricately designed, box-bordered 
 flower-bed, of which, later, we hear so much. They rejoiced also 
 in sweet-smelling herbs; " the comfortable smell of their rooms," 
 says Lavinius Leminius, a Dutchman, who paid a visit to England 
 in 1560, " cheered me up and entirely delighted my senses," and 
 this was owing to the English custom of strewing their houses 
 with fragrant herbs and decorating them with flowers. Mar- 
 joram, thyme, rosemary, etc., were largely cultivated, and in 
 many cases formed the borders of the above-mentioned " knots," 
 that, as it were, divided the parterre into compartments. In 
 many instances the centre of this flowery area was occupied by 
 a fountain, and sometimes open conduits conducted water to all 
 parts of the garden. A fountain-pool might also often be found 
 in the middle of the turfed, or stone-paved fore-court in front of 
 the mansion. The servants' offices, stables, etc., surrounding the 
 base, or " bass-court," usually lay at one side of this fore-court. 
 On the other were the pleasure gardens and parterres ; very 
 often a wide terrace overlooked the garden, so raised as to com- 
 mand a view of the parterre. 
 
 10 
 
AND CELEBRATED GARDENS 
 
 The garden thus overlooked would be very gay indeed, and 
 very sweet also. In the sixteenth century Spenser could write 
 of one wherein 
 
 ' Nature lavish, in her best attire 
 
 Puts forth sweet odours and alluring sight 
 And art with her contending doth aspire 
 T" excell the natural with made delight." 
 
 He further describes how all things " fair and pleasant " in this 
 garden abound " in riotous excess," which surely includes the 
 English singing-birds. William Lawson, in his " New Orchard," 
 published in 1618, remarks that " Blackbirds on a May morning 
 may gratify the senses," but he had rather want their company 
 than his fruit ; but " nightingales," he says, " are another matter ; 
 a brood of them is a chefe grace ; but they will clear you of cata- 
 pillars and noysome wormes, and the gentle Robin Redbreast, 
 and the silly wren will help in this." 
 
 The gardens that I have been chiefly describing were, of course, 
 those of the noble, or the squire, or, at any rate, of the substantial 
 yeoman and richer citizen. They were the pleasure places of 
 palaces and manor houses, and, in an earlier age, of the feudal 
 castle, when, unless they overflowed beyond the walls, they were 
 necessarily circumscribed. They appear always to have taken up 
 a considerable part of the demesne, and even in Plantagenet times 
 were used for pleasure and refreshment as well as for utility. 
 
 4 Wherein," asks Lawson, " do kings and the great most delight ? 
 And whither do they withdraw themselves from the troublous 
 affairs of State, being tyred with the hearing and judging of 
 litigious controversies ? choked (as it were) with the close Ayre 
 of their sumptuous buildings, their stomacks cloyed with a variety 
 of Banquets, their ears filled and overburdened with tedious dis- 
 coursings ? Whither but in their orchards ? made and prepared^ 
 dressed and destinated for that purpose, to renue and refresh 
 their sences, and to call home their over-wearied spirits, it is 
 (no doubt) a comfort to them to set open their casements into a 
 most delicate Garden and Orchard, whereby they may not only 
 see that wherein they are so much delighted, but also to give fresh 
 and sweet and pleasant Ayre to Galleries and Chambers." 
 
 W. C. Hazlitt is of opinion that the cottage garden cannot be 
 confidently referred to a date anterior to Worledge, whose 
 
 11 
 
GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 
 
 " Sy sterna Horticultural," published in 1677, was one of the 
 earliest manuals for the guidance of those laying out and culti- 
 vating a garden ; this is a rash statement, for we have only to 
 refer to Shakespeare again, to disprove it. 
 
 In The Winter's Tale, Perdita, in the Shepherd's Cottage, 
 bestows upon her foster-father's guests, flowers cottage-grown to 
 suit all ages : of " Carnations and streak'd gillyflowers," she says, 
 " our rustic garden's barren," but adds, " Here's flowers for you " 
 (addressing the Greybeards) : 
 
 " Hot lavender, mints, savory, marjoram, 
 The marigold that goes to bed wi' the sun 
 And with him rises weeping, these are flowers 
 Of middle summer, and I think they are given 
 To men of middle age 
 
 Then turning to Florizel (and others present), she says : 
 
 " I would I had some flowers o' the Spring that might 
 Become your time of day, and yours, and yours 
 
 Oh. Proserpina, 
 
 For the flowers now that frighted thou let'st fall 
 From Dis's waggon ! daffodils, 
 That come before the swallow dares, and take 
 The winds of March with beauty, violets dim. 
 But sweeter than the lids of Juno's eyes 
 Or Cytherea's breath ; pale primroses. 
 That die unmarried, ere they can behold 
 Bright Phoebus in his strength a inalady 
 Most incident to maids ; bold oxlips and 
 The crown imperial, lilies of all kinds, 
 The flower-de-luce being one ! " 
 
 It is clear that Perdita describes here flowers that in their 
 season must have been blowing in her cottage garden ready to 
 her hand ; and that Shakespeare loved such flowers well, because 
 they were of English growth, for he knew nothing of foreign flora, 
 there being no shadow of evidence that he ever crossed the Channel, 
 or even went nearer to it than Dover. There, as everybody knows, 
 is a cliff which bears his name, but since Edgar in King Lear 
 exaggerates its height in his description of it, it is questionable 
 whether Shakespeare ever actually beheld it, whether he is but 
 giving hearsay evidence. He was an islander, and moreover 
 a lowlander, and whether he placed his dramatis personce in 
 
 12 
 
AND CELEBRATED GARDENS 
 
 Italy, Denmark, or Bohemia, their environment, in his mental 
 picture of them, is always an English one. The action of The 
 Winter's Tale takes place ostensibly in Bohemia, but Perdita 
 is essentially an English maiden, and the plants she tended are 
 British ones. Therefore, in some of the loveliest lines in English 
 verse, spoken by Shakespeare's sweetest heroine, we find the fact 
 established, that sixty years before Worledge's Manual appeared, 
 if not earlier, the peasant's humble cot, and the yeoman's home- 
 stead, as well as the baron's castle and the royal demesne, had 
 each its own garden-plot. It is, however, pretty certain that up to 
 the fourteenth century, and perhaps even up to the sixteenth, the 
 English garden must everywhere have much resembled a modern 
 kitchen-garden, in which we frequently find the commoner kinds 
 of flowers growing side by side with vegetables. 
 
 The orchard and the garden, until after 1618, were one. The 
 smaller gardens would very much resemble what we now call a 
 ' cabbage patch," and all evidence goes to show that in earlier 
 times, in the ground attached even to lordly residences, herbs 
 designed for culinary uses were allowed to grow up together, side 
 by side with flowers and flowering shrubs. 
 
 From all the foregoing it is clear that long before the seventeenth 
 century the garden played a considerable part in the life of the 
 English people. It would naturally do so, for the houses of the 
 commonalty, especially in towns, were confined, gloomy, and 
 airless. They were badly lit by small, deeply-recessed, heavily- 
 leaded lattice windows, such as are still to be seen in old, thatched, 
 gabled, and half-timbered cottages in some parts of the country- 
 habitations that are deliciously picturesque, but insanitary. Even 
 the larger farm-houses, where the yeomanry dwelt, and the abodes 
 of substantial citizens in town, were dark by reason of their heavily- 
 mullioned windows and thick walls, and also because in cities 
 the streets were narrow, and the upper story of a dwelling com- 
 monly projected beyond the lower, and sometimes almost touched 
 its opposite neighbour, leaving only a narrow strip of sky visible 
 between. Such houses could not be good to live in. Yet the 
 English race has always been ruddy and healthy, the men stal- 
 wart, the women fresh and fair. From this we may infer that 
 not only the country gentry, always addicted to sport, and the 
 peasant who tilled the soil, but the citizen also, lived very much 
 
 13 
 
GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 
 
 in/ the open. Many of the most stirring episodes in English history 
 happened there in the green fields, or on the King's highway. 
 We picture Queen Elizabeth less in the council chamber, than in 
 her girlhood, in the old garden at Hatfield ; or at Greenwich stairs, 
 stepping from her barge on to the velvet cloak that the astute 
 Raleigh sacrified in order that the Royal stocking should not be 
 sullied by Thames mud, or haranguing her troops at Tilbury 
 when an invasion of England was threatened. I venture to 
 think that ballads, nursery rhymes, and lyrics innumerable, attest 
 the fact that the life of our forefathers was much more alfresco 
 than is ours. When " all the maids of Islington went forth to 
 sport and play," it is safe to assume that the maidens of other 
 towns and hamlets did so also. The lover woos his mistress with 
 the promise of country joys : 
 
 " Come, live with me and be my love 
 And we will all the pleasures prove 
 That hill and valley, dale and field 
 And all scraggy mountains yield." 
 
 Again : 
 
 " Ye little birds that sit and sing 
 
 Amidst the shady valleys, 
 And see how Phillis sweetly walks 
 
 Within her garden alleys, 
 Go, pretty birds, about her bower ; 
 Sing, pretty birds, she may not cower : 
 Ah me ! methinks I see her frown I 
 
 Ye pretty warblers, warble ! " 
 
 And Herrick, to Corinna gone a-maying sings : 
 
 " 'Tis sin, 
 
 Nay, profanation to keep in, 
 Whereas a thousand virgins on this day 
 Spring, sooner than the lark, to fetch in May." 
 
 Old songs tell the same story it is everywhere the outdoor call 
 that is strong. 
 
 " Come, lasses and lads, get leave of your dads 
 And away to the Maypole hie." 
 
 Or: 
 
 " Boys and girls, come out to play, 
 The moon doth shine as bright as day." 
 14 
 
AND CELEBRATED GARDENS 
 
 Then comes the reference to gardens : 
 
 " Mary, Mary, quite contrary, 
 How does your garden grow ? " 
 
 And many other examples. I have made no study of folk- 
 lore, but I cannot help thinking that though some of these rhymes 
 and songs may be comparatively modern, others bear the mark 
 of antiquity, and that the origin of the simplest of these may be 
 traced back to customs and observances that have fallen into 
 disuse ; to beliefs, traditions, and superstitions, themselves for- 
 gotten ; or to some incident, maybe, in the life of mediaeval 
 England, which, did we but know it, would invest the childish 
 rhymes and the bucolic songs with even greater charm, interest, 
 and significance, than on the surface they may seem to possess. 
 If the Rush-bearing still practised in some parts of the country, if 
 the festival of Harvest Home, if the ceremonies attendant on 
 bringing in the May, if the crowning of the fairest and most 
 virtuous maiden of the village annually, as Queen of the May, 
 if Milton's lovely " Hymn on May Morning " mean anything at 
 all, they point to an outdoor manner of existence practically 
 universal, and in which garden and meadow alike played an 
 important part ; and surely " Little Jack Horner who sat in the 
 corner " is the only evidence forthcoming on the other side that 
 the youth of " Merrie England " did not live out of doors even at 
 Christmas-time ! 
 
 I am indebted to W. C. Hazlitt for an amusing story, which 
 gives indirect support to the theory that the English always lived 
 much in plein air. 
 
 A man, whose demesne probably sloped to the water's edge, 
 having invited a friend to dinner, contrary to the wish of his wife, 
 insisted that the repast should be served on the river's bank. 
 The lady could not endure contradiction, and sat sulking, with 
 her back to the stream. The more he begged her to look pleasant, 
 the farther she pushed her chair from the table, till at last, backing 
 too near the edge of the river, she fell in. The husband, jumping 
 into a boat, insisted on going against the tide in search of her, 
 and when his friend remonstrated, urging him to look for her 
 down-stream, he refused, saying that, as his wife had been so 
 opposite all her life, he was sure her body would float against the 
 current. 
 
 15 
 
GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 
 
 There seems to have been but little change in the methods of 
 horticulture, or in the character of the gardens themselves, under 
 the Stuarts, until we arrive at the reign of Charles II. During 
 the Commonwealth little gardening was done, and the garden of 
 Evelyn's family mansion at Wotton was one of the few laid out 
 during the years of Cromwell's rule. Still, the taste for horticul- 
 ture was not altogether dormant, since even one of Cromwell's most 
 capable captains could indulge in it. General Lambert, second 
 only to Monk in distinction, who in 1656 was Lord of the Manor 
 of Wimbledon, when estranged for a time from Oliver, withdrew 
 from public life, and devoted himself to the care of his garden, of 
 which he was very fond. He was so successful in the cultivation 
 of tulips and gillyflowers, that in a satirical pack of cards published 
 during the Commonwealth, the eight of hearts bears a small full- 
 length portrait of him, carrying in his right hand a tulip, beneath 
 which is the legend, " Lambert Kt. of ye Golden Tulip." 
 
 But by this time foreign influences were beginning to work. 
 modifying the national character of the English garden as it had 
 been under the Tudors. These influences, though not without 
 trace of Dutch formality, were probably chiefly Italian and 
 French. Later on the Dutch fashions, under William III. and 
 Mary, were dominant. But, on the whole, during the reigns of 
 James I. and Charles I. there were but few changes in the manner 
 of laying out gardens. This was to be expected ; the same 
 gardeners or their sons were living. 
 
 ' Paradise Lost " gives us a hint of the style of garden most 
 approved of in Milton's time ; elsewhere the blind poet of t he- 
 Commonwealth speaks of those who " in trim gardens take their 
 pleasure," but in his great epic he describes that wondrous 
 garden wherein grew 
 
 " Flowers of all hue, and without thorn the rose." 
 
 Horace Walpole thinks he had some recollection of the famous 
 pleasure grounds of Nonsuch, and of Theobalds, Lord Burleigh's 
 garden, when he wrote : 
 
 " The crisped brooks 
 Ran nectar ! visiting each plant, and fed 
 Flowers worthy of Paradise ; which not nice art 
 In beds and curious knots, but nature boon 
 Poured forth profuse on hill, and dale, and plain/' 
 
 16 
 
AND CELEBRATED GARDENS 
 
 Obviously the reference is to a fashion prevalent at the time, 
 of planting in beds and plots, a fashion that was not set in the 
 Garden of Eden, and therefore not commendable. 
 
 Such, as far as I can gather, was " the happy garden state " 
 of our ancestors up to the eighteenth century. Old-world gardens, 
 in many respects unchanged, may yet be found " in and round 
 London," to one or two of which I shall later introduce you. 
 They are touched, it is true, by " decay's defacing finger," but 
 they are still flowery, shady, and sunshiny too. In them old- 
 fashioned flowers the cabbage rose, the sweet william, the stock, 
 the monkshood, the snapdragon, and the pansy flourish ; and in 
 spite of dividing walks of springy turf, and borders of ancient box, 
 elbow each other in their eagerness to invade the territory of the 
 turnip and the cabbage. There, in the "months of April, May and 
 June, the lilac and the hawthorn intermingle boughs and blossoms, 
 and, in August and September, peaches slowly ripen on sunny 
 walls, whilst apples grow rosy in other quarters. 
 
 In such a garden, reminiscent of the time when orchard and 
 garden were one, apple-trees, pear-trees, and plum-trees, hoary with 
 age, mossy with long inertia (in some sense an illustration of the 
 proverb that "rolling stones gather no moss"), mount guard over 
 the vegetable kingdom, dropping windfalls for the children to pick 
 up. They stretch gnarled and twisted arms benevolently over the 
 rosemary and southernwood, the lavender and the rose-bushes, as 
 though in mute benediction on the little ones playing, or on the 
 lovers seated, beneath. 
 
 The names of four distinguished Englishmen, who were experi- 
 mental and practical gardeners, stand out conspicuously in the 
 history of horticulture in this country during the years intervening 
 between the beginning of the seventeenth and the latter half of 
 the eighteenth century. They are Francis Bacon Lord St. Albans, 
 Sir William Temple, John Evelyn the diarist, and Horace Walpole. 
 
 The ideas of the aristocratic Bacon on the subject of pleasure- 
 grounds are on a grandiose scale. In his famous essay, " Of 
 Gardens," he says that the ideal garden should comprise not less 
 than thirty acres of ground, and he tells us that he is speaking only 
 of those that are " indeed Prince-like." 
 
 Dying in 1626, in the second year of the reign of the unhappy 
 Charles I., it is probable that, owing to the vast ness of his 
 
 17 2 
 
GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 
 
 ideas in horticulture, and the difficulties to be met with in 
 carrying them out, Bacon left the sciences of horticulture and 
 floriculture very much where he found them, and he himself 
 being under a cloud, his various schemes would be dis- 
 credited. 
 
 I do not propose to dwell upon his theories, which are well 
 known to all readers of his essays. ' God Almighty," he says, 
 " first Planted a Garden, and indeed it is the purest of Humaine 
 pleasures. It is the Greatest Refreshment to the Spirits of Man." 
 He does " not like Images Cut out in Juniper, or other Garden 
 Stuff e. They be for Children." He recommends Fountains as 
 " a great Beauty and Refreshment, but Pooles marre all and 
 make the Garden unwholesome, and full of Flies and Frogs." 
 He gives a long list of flowers and plants that flourished in his day, 
 among them, all those that are mentioned by Spenser and 
 Shakespeare. 
 
 "I do hold," he prettily says, " in the Roy all ordering of 
 Gardens, there ought to be a garden for all the moneths of the 
 yeare ; in which severally, things of Beauty may be there in Season ; ' 
 and then he proceeds to unfold the wonderful pageant of the 
 procession of Flora, and under the heading of each month gives 
 a catalogue surprisingly long of her offspring, beginning with 
 things that are " Greene all Winter," and winding up with " These 
 Particulars are for the Climate of London." " Roses Damask and 
 Red" he says, " are fast flowers of their Smels " ; three hundred 
 years ago " damask " so often used by the poets in describing a 
 maiden's cheek meant pink, not dark crimson, as with us. When 
 I was a child I wondered why the delicately-fringed, sweetly-scented 
 little flower which I was taught to call a " pink " was so named, 
 since, unlike Burns' daisy, the common example was not even 
 ' crimson- tipped," but pure white. Bacon teaches us that the 
 modern name is etymologically incorrect. Pink would appear to 
 be a corruption of Pinct or pinked stabbed, pierced, decorated by 
 scallops as the petals of this flower certainly are. " Prime-Roses " 
 is a better word than primrose. " Dammasin " is prettier than 
 damson ; but one does not at once recognize in Bacon's " Lelacke 
 Tree," the lilac, the favourite of our April gardens, with its heavy 
 clusters of pale purple flowers to my mind the fairest and most 
 fragrant of all the flowering trees of our English spring. 
 
 18 
 
AND CELEBRATED GARDENS 
 
 Far less well known than Bacon's essay " Of Gardens," is his 
 ' Sylva Sylvarum" or " Natural Historic in Ten Centuries, "* 
 published after the illustrious author's death. His studies and 
 practical experiments in horticulture are recorded in detail in the- 
 fifth, sixth, and part of the seventh centuries, of this learned work. 
 Nothing was too large and nothing too small to attract and engage 
 the attention of this extraordinary man. Lord Chancellor of 
 England, and occupied with the highest affairs of state, he could 
 yet turn from them at any moment and bring the vast powers of 
 his intellect to the consideration of the method of raising straw- 
 berries, of bringing sun to ripen wall-fruit, of grafting, of water- 
 ing, and to the discussion of the causes of the degeneracy of plants, 
 and of the colours of fruit and flowers ; and, as one of his admirers 
 puts it, " he could descend from the Woolsack to investigate the 
 economy of manure beds." 
 
 As before stated, horticulture made no advance during the 
 Civil War and the Commonwealth, and not until the Restoration 
 was any change in the character of English gardens apparent. 
 Then a new interest was awakened. French gardening had made 
 progress, and Charles II. and his exiled courtiers, had had excep- 
 tional opportunities for studying its methods, and had imbibed 
 a preference for the French manner of laying out pleasure-grounds. 
 With Le Notre and other great gardeners of Louis XIV., spacious- 
 ness was the chief desideratum in gardens ; and these were laid out 
 with mathematical precision, but no great originality of design. 
 And, as Ruskin says, in a passage which, although referring to 
 another art, may with propriety be applied here : " Grandeur 
 depends on proportion and design, not, except in a quite secon- 
 dary degree, on magnitude. Mere size has, indeed, under all 
 disadvantages, some definite value, and so has mere splendour. 
 But even splendour may be purchased at too heavy a cost." Ere 
 long, much of the French character impressed itself upon English 
 gardens, so that before the end of Charles' reign all traces of the 
 mediae valism that had lingered round the gardens of Henry VIII. 
 had vanished. Size and elegance, or what passed for elegance, 
 usurped the place of the picturesqueness and privacy of the gardens 
 of the Tudors ; the galleries, the mount (that, according to Bacon, 
 should properly be thirty feet high, offering a view from its summit 
 over the high walls of the enclosure) had been swept away, and a 
 
 19 a* 
 
GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 
 
 flat effect was aimed at. " Knots and parterres," we are told, 
 " became so elaborate that the small tortured spaces between 
 the box patternings were less and less homes for plants, more and 
 more filled with coloured sand." Topiary work that is, clipping 
 and training trees and shrubs into fantastic shapes now came 
 into fashion, but as yet was not carried to excess, and the seven- 
 teenth-century garden, no doubt, had much beauty. J. D. Sped- 
 ding says : " There is about the Jacobean Garden an air of 
 scholarlism and courtliness, a flavour of dreamland and Arcadia 
 and Italy a touch of the Archaic and classical yet the thing is 
 saved from utter artificiality by our English love of outdoor 
 life " and also, I suggest, by that independence of restraint that 
 is innate in the British character. And ever we find the English 
 gardener, except when by force of circumstances he came very 
 much under foreign influences, indisposed towards formalism ; 
 though of coiirse the ideal garden holds the balance between nature 
 and art. 
 
 John Evelyn, author of the famous diary, did much more than 
 Bacon, with all his theories and experiments, to advance horti- 
 culture. Whilst Bacon schemed and talked, Evelyn was prac- 
 tical. He was born in 1620 at Dorking, of parents who occupied 
 a good position, and he was educated at Balliol. A devoted 
 Royalist, he yet seems to have placed prudence before patriotism, 
 as he understood it, for, lest he and his brother should be exposed 
 to ruin by their espousal of the King's cause without any com- 
 pensating advantage to His Majesty, he joined the King's army 
 only to leave it at the end of three days. After travelling on the 
 Continent for four years, he returned to England, and settled 
 in 1652, at Sayes Court, near Deptford, where he was able to indulge 
 his horticultural tastes. But Evelyn was a courtier as well as a 
 gardener, and after the Restoration we find him much at White- 
 hall, and occupying several official posts. And he was from the 
 beginning a prominent member of the newly-founded Royal 
 Society. 
 
 His diary not published until a hundred and twelve years after 
 his death, and of which Sir Walter Scott said he " had never seen so 
 rich a mine" is no less illuminating in the light it throws on 
 the history of his day, than that of his lively contemporary, Pepys. 
 From time to time in its pages pages that deal with the important 
 
 20 
 
AND CELEBRATED GARDENS 
 
 events of seventy years we glean something of his interest in 
 gardens and gardening. 
 
 In laying out his estate at Deptford he tells us that he first 
 began with the " oval garden." When he went there it was 
 merely a rough field of one hundred acres, " with scarcely a hedge 
 to it," but he covered it with groves, walks, and plantations. 
 When, in 1694, he went to live at Wotton, with his brother (to 
 whose property he succeeded five years later), he let Sayes 
 Court to Admiral Benbow, on condition that he kept it up, 
 which he failed to do. In 1698 Benbow sublet it to the Czar 
 Peter the Great, at that time visiting the dockyard at Deptford. 
 He proved " a right nasty tenant." So great was the injury done 
 to the property by him and his retinue, that Benbow, who was 
 responsible to Evelyn, called in Sir Christopher Wren with London, 
 the King's gardener, as his assistant to estimate the damage, 
 which was assessed at 350 9s. 6d. Irreparable injury was done 
 to trees and shrubs ; and no wonder, for one of Czar Peter's 
 refined amusements was to be wheeled in a barrow through the 
 garden hedges, and among the things specified in the inventory 
 as having been damaged, were three wheelbarrows ! 
 
 Evelyn translated a work called " The French Gardener," 
 which has much to do with pickling, preserving, and drying fruits ; 
 and Hazlitt says that " Jam, as an ingredient of our culinary 
 economy, does not date much farther back than the middle of 
 the seventeenth century," when Evelyn published his adaptation 
 from the French. 
 
 But Evelyn accomplished a greater feat than popularizing- 
 preserves. 
 
 In Tudor times it had been complained that men " were more 
 studious to cut down trees than to plant them," and in the reign 
 of Charles II. the scarcity of timber began to make itself severely 
 felt. What was to be done ? Wood was wanted for ships, and 
 none was forthcoming. 
 
 The Navy Board turned to the newly-founded Royal Society 
 
 for help ; and Evelyn, as the member most competent to advise 
 
 on the subject, took the matter up, and in 1664 published his 
 
 ' Sylva," by which, as the King afterwards told him, he had 
 
 induced many people to mend their broken estates, and the woods 
 
 ' which the greedy rebels had wasted and made havoc of." 
 
 21 
 
The result was that a century and a half later Isaac Disraeli 
 remarked : " Inquire at the Admiralty how the fleets of Nelson were 
 constructed, and they will tell you that it was with the oaks that 
 the genius of Evelyn planted." 
 
 Sir William Temple, had he no other claim to attention, would 
 command it as the patron of Swift, who for years was his secretary : 
 and also as the husband of Dorothy Osborne, whose charming 
 letters to him during a long courtship are universally admired. 
 
 My object in this book is primarily to write about the gardens 
 I have painted, but I desire also to interest the reader in the men 
 and women who made, or owned, and in many cases, loved them. 
 Therefore, I claim the right to be discursive at times, and occasion- 
 ally to dwell upon events apparently irrelevant, and if I should 
 linger longer than may seem necessary over the early history of 
 Sir William Temple and Dorothy Osborne, his wife, it is because, 
 as a horticulturist, he comes legitimately into my scheme, and 
 also because never was there a more chequered and prettier love- 
 story than theirs. In its very opening it is romantic ! Temple, 
 a youth of twenty, and described as a lively, agreeable young man 
 of fashion (fresh from Cambridge), son of Sir John Temple, Master 
 of the Rolls in Ireland, who was a follower rather than a keen 
 partisan of Cromwell, sets out upon his travels abroad, in the 
 year before King Charles was brought to the scaffold. 
 
 ' On his road to France," says Macaulay, in his fascinating 
 essay, " he fell in with the son and daughter of Sir Peter Osborne. 
 Sir Peter held Guernsey for the King, and the young people were, 
 like their father, warm for the Royalist cause. At an inn where 
 they stopped in the Isle of Wight, the brother amused himself 
 with inscribing on the windows his opinion of the ruling powers. 
 For this instance of ' malignancy ' the whole party were arrested 
 and brought before the governor. The sister, trusting to the 
 tenderness which even in those troublous times scarcely any 
 gentleman of any party failed to show where a woman was con- 
 cerned, took the crime on herself, and was impiediately set at 
 liberty with her fellow-companion." 
 
 The incident made a deep impression upon Temple. He 
 fell in .love with the charming Dorothy (who was accounted a 
 beauty), and whose vivacity and sweetness are shown in her 
 letters. Although she~ reciprocated his feeling and accepted his 
 
 22 
 
AND CELEBRATED GARDENS 
 
 addresses, the course of their true love never did run smooth 
 And little wonder, since " the father of the hero was sitting in the 
 Long Parliament ; the father of the heroine was commanding in 
 Guernsey for King Charles ; and even when the war was ended," 
 continues Macaulay, " and Sir Peter Osborne returned to his 
 seat at Chicksands, the prospects of the lovers were scarcely less 
 gloomy. Sir John Temple had a more advantageous alliance in 
 view for his son. Dorothy Osborne was in the meantime besieged 
 by as many suitors as were drawn to Belmont by the fame of 
 Portia." Among them was Henry Cromwell, son of the Lord- 
 General, afterwards the Protector. Dorothy's relatives were 
 bitterly opposed to her intended marriage with Temple, and she 
 had to defend her lover's character from all sorts of attacks. She 
 held firm, and when at last, after seven years, her constancy was 
 on the point of being rewarded, she fell ill of smallpox ; she 
 escaped with her life, but her beauty was gone. Temple, however, 
 was not lacking in chivalry, and the pair were married. Hereafter 
 we hear little of Dorothy. 
 
 Sir William Temple's fame as a statesman rests chiefly on the 
 celebrated league by which England, Sweden, and the Netherlands, 
 in 1668, united to curb the power of France under Louis XIV. 
 But the sympathies of Charles II. were thoroughly French, and 
 in 1670 he treacherously concluded another and secret treaty 
 with France, the Treaty of Dover, which rendered Temple's work 
 futile, and the great Triple Alliance, which Pepys, in his diary, 
 calls " the only good thing that hath been done since the King 
 came into England," inoperative. Temple thereupon retired to a 
 small estate which he had purchased at Sheen, near Richmond, 
 and threw himself with such ardour into horticulture that the 
 fame of his fruit trees spread far and wide. He did not return to 
 public life until the popular resentment against the French Alliance 
 and the Dutch war rose to clamorous heights, and compelled 
 Charles to send for him to negotiate a separate peace with Holland. 
 
 For, easy and pleasure-loving as Charles was, and though served 
 by unscrupulous ministers, he still had wit enough to seek to bind 
 to his interests a man whose political character was unblemished, 
 who was in high favour with the nation, and whose capacity might 
 even at that hour have restored England to the position she had 
 held abroad under Elizabeth and Cromwell. Over and over again 
 
 23 
 
GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 
 
 the King pressed upon Temple the office of Secretary of State ; 
 over and over again he refused it !* On more than one occasion, 
 as Macaulay tells us, when the country was in danger, " the Triple 
 Alliance was mentioned with reverence in every debate, and the 
 eyes of all men were turned to that quiet orchard, where the 
 author of that great league was amusing himself with reading and 
 gardening." He obeyed the royal command, it is true, and left 
 his garden and his books as Cincinnatus left his plough ; but, his 
 mission accomplished, -he returned to them, for his was not the 
 sustained patriotism which at all risks must wait to see the vessel 
 of the State floating smoothly in placid waters. 
 
 Macaulay charges Temple with shirking responsibility and fear- 
 ing to imperil a safe position by grasping at prizes which he might 
 not reach, even when the best interests of his country demanded 
 the risk. He " dreaded failure more than he desired success." 
 " Fain would I climb but that I fear to fall," would almost seem 
 to have been his motto, as it was that which Raleigh had engraved 
 upon a window in Queen Elizabeth's presence. I think it possible 
 that finer reasons may have influenced the man whom Dorothy 
 Osborne loved during seven faithful years, and in whose career 
 she was apparently content to merge her own strong individuality. 
 Such a woman as Lady Temple would have been out of place at 
 Whitehall, and Temple's firm rejection of place and power may have 
 been partly due to his recognition of this fact, and his high appre- 
 ciation of her. She seems to have been his companion in Ireland 
 and at The Hague, and she probably shared his passion for flowers. 
 
 Temple was an enthusiastic and very successful experimental 
 gardener, and though undoubtedly his chief abilities lay in diplo- 
 macy and politics, he loved to slip away from both to his " little 
 nest " at Sheen. Among his diplomatic successes may be reckoned 
 the part he took in bringing about a marriage between the Prince 
 of Orange and the niece of Charles, the Lady Mary that union 
 which, amid other and more important results, had ultimately so 
 much to do with spreading the taste, in this country, for Dutch 
 gardening and garden-planning. 
 
 In 1699 Temple, who had been in Holland, returned to England 
 at an urgent summons from Charles, and found the country 
 in a fearful state. Eighteen years of misrule had wrought 
 dire consequences. He patiently organized new schemes for 
 
 24 
 
AND CELEBRATED GARDENS 
 
 Government ; was elected to the new Parliament for Cambridge ; 
 had a seat in the Cabinet that Council within a Council the new 
 Privy Council of thirty, which was his own panacea for the evil 
 he found. But at any moment of difficulty, at a crisis when violent 
 passions were called forth, '* when the whole nation was con- 
 vulsed by party spirit, he told his constituents that he should not 
 again apply for their suffrages, and set off for Sheen, resolving 
 never again to meddle with public affairs." 
 
 Did Lady Temple applaud this conduct ? I wonder ! . Any- 
 way, he held to his resolution, and says Macaulay : " The troubles 
 which agitated the whole country did not reach the quiet orangery 
 in which Temple loitered away several years without once seeing 
 the smoke of London." 
 
 The revolution came, and he remained neutral; but soon he 
 transferred the loyalty which Macaulay stigmatizes as " lukewarm " 
 to the new sovereign, who would only too gladly have made him 
 his Secretary of State, would he have accepted office. " He paid 
 court to William at Windsor, and William dined with him at 
 Sheen." His eldest son died under distressing circumstances, and 
 the family retired from Sheen to Moor Park, at a greater distance 
 from London. There Temple passed the remainder of his life. 
 4 The air agreed with him, the soil was fruitful and well suited 
 to an experimental farmer and gardener. The grounds were laid 
 out with the angular regularity which Sir William had admired 
 in the flower-beds of Haarlem and The Hague. A beautiful rivulet 
 flowing from the hills of Surrey bounded the domain. But a straight 
 canal which, bordered by a terrace, intersected the garden, was 
 probably more admired by the lovers of the picturesque in that 
 age." 
 
 The form of garden which Sir William himself most approved 
 was an oblong on a slope. In his essay upon " The Gardens of 
 Epicurus, or of Gardening in the Year 1685," he says : " But after 
 so much rambling into Ancient Tomes, and Remote Places, to return 
 home and consider the present Way and Humour of our Gardening in 
 England, which seem to have grown into such vogue, and to have 
 been so mightily improved in Three and Four and Twenty years 
 of His Majesty's reign, that perhaps few countries are before us ; 
 either in the Elegance of our Gardens ; or in the number of our 
 Plants, and I believe none equals us in the Variety of Fruits, which 
 
 25 
 
GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 
 
 may be justly called good ; and from the earliest Cherry and 
 Strawberry to the last Apples and Pears, may furnish every Day 
 of the circling year." 
 
 To achieve this end, the production in this country of fruit in 
 great abundance and variety, Temple himself worked assiduously. 
 And perhaps we shall never know how much in this respect we 
 owe to the author of the Triple Alliance. 
 
 Lysons, who wrote in 1792, nearly one hundred years after 
 Temple's death, speaks of the visits which King William III. was 
 in the habit of paying to Sir William Temple at Moor Park, and of 
 his futile efforts to induce him to become his Secretary of State. 
 If the King called when Temple was laid up with the gout, Swift, 
 the Irish amanuensis, was deputed to show him round the garden. 
 On one of these occasions, it is said William offered to make Swift 
 his Master of the Horse, and taught him how to cut asparagus in 
 the Dutch manner. 
 
 But far more interesting to many of us it is to know that pretty 
 and dark-eyed Hester Johnson was about this time employed 
 in Temple's household as waiting-maid to his sister, Lady Giffard, 
 w r ho lived with him, and that in the garden at Moor Park Swift 
 first made love to Stella. 
 
 William III. no doubt would have had everybody, not only cut 
 asparagus, but also lay out gardens in the Dutch manner. At any 
 rate, Dutch taste in garden-planning now came much into vogue ; 
 and it continued so, despite all ridicule and criticism, for many years. 
 
 By the time of Addison the love of stiffness and topiary work 
 had gone to such extravagant lengths that The Spectator inveighs 
 against it. " The Chinese," he points out, " laugh at the planta- 
 tions of our Europeans, which are laid out by the rule and line ; 
 because they say anyone may place trees in equal rows and uni- 
 form figures. . . . Our British gardeners, instead of humouring 
 nature, love to deviate from it as much as possible. Our Trees 
 rise in Cones, Globes, and Pyramids. We see the mark of the 
 scissors upon every plant and Bush. . . . For my own part, I 
 would rather look upon a Tree in all its luxuriance and diffusion 
 of Boughs and Branches than when it is cut and trimmed into 
 Mathematical Figures, and cannot but fancy that an Orchard in 
 Flower looks infinitely more delightful than all the labyrinths of 
 the most finished Parterre." 
 
 26 
 
AND CELEBRATED GARDENS 
 
 But then Addison, as he himself says, was one who was looked 
 upon " as a humourist in gardening ... if a field flower pleased 
 him he gave it a place in his garden ... he always thought a 
 kitchen garden a more pleasant sight than the finest orangery 
 and artificial greenhouse : " he owns himself to be in another 
 respect " very whimsical," for his garden invites into it all the 
 birds of the country ; he offers springs and shade, solitude and 
 shelter, and suffers no one to destroy their nests in the spring, or 
 drive them from their usual haunts in fruit time. >l I value my 
 garden," he says, " more for being full of blackbirds than cherries, 
 and very frankly give them fruit for their songs." Furthermore, 
 he tells us, thus unconsciously describing for us the fashionable 
 gardens of the period, that he" thinks there are as many kinds of 
 gardening as of poetry. Your makers of parterres and flower- 
 gardens are epigrammatists and sonneteers in this art : contrivers 
 of bowers and grottoes, treillages and cascades, are romance- 
 writers ; Wise and London are our heroic poets." 
 
 Wise and London, mentioned more than once in future chapters, 
 were gardeners to William III. and Queen Anne. They had a 
 nursery between Brompton and Kensington. Evelyn mentions 
 visiting it in 1701, when he himself was in his eightieth year ; 
 and it was London, the King's gardener, who, as the reader will 
 remember, was called in by Admiral Benbow to assist Sir Chris- 
 topher Wren in estimating the damage done by the Czar Peter 
 to Evelyn's gardens at Sayes Court. 
 
 In their day Wise and London were^distinguished horticul- 
 turists, but they carried on the tradition of a bad school. Dutch 
 gardeners endeavoured to make Nature statuesque. Shears were 
 ruthlessly used, and shrubs and trees the holly, the yew, and the 
 box as The Spectator had stated, were clipped and teased 
 into all manner of unnatural shapes, with the result that the 
 natural growth of the plant and tree was destroyed in this ex- 
 travagant abuse of topiary work. 
 
 The reaction was bound to come ; and it came with the advent 
 of Bridgman, Launcelot, known as " Capability " Brown, Kent, 
 and other great landscape gardeners of the eighteenth century. 
 Horace Walpole's " Essay on Modern Gardening " issued from 
 the Strawberry Hill Press in 1785. His letters to Sir Horace 
 Mann are full of allusion to his own attempt to turn a few acres of 
 
 27 
 
GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 
 
 ground into an entire country-side. He says : ' I have enough 
 land to keep such a farm as Noah's when he set up in the Ark with 
 a pair of each kind." . . . Again : " My present sole occupation 
 is planting, in which I have made great progress, and talked very 
 learnedly with the nurserymen, except that now and then a lettuce 
 runs to seed, overturns all my botany, and I have more than once 
 taken it for a curious West Indian flowering shrub. Then the 
 deliberation with which trees grow is extremely inconvenient to 
 my natural impatience." Strawberry Hill, accurately described 
 by Walpole himself in his letters to Sir Horace Mann, is so famous 
 that, had I been allowed to do so, I would have introduced 
 a picture of the garden as it now is, with the trees its dilettante 
 owner planted, grown up. I should then have added to it a 
 fuller report of his distinct place in the history of English garden- 
 ing. But all requests, by myself and my publishers, for permis- 
 sion from its present owners to draw there, were firmly refused, 
 this being the only exception, I rejoice to say, to that universal 
 rule of kindly and courteous acquiescence, that has made my task 
 in preparing these drawings so delightful. 
 
 We learn that the taste of Pope, as shown in his own grounds 
 at Twickenham, had a marked effect on landscape gardening in 
 England, and helped a good deal to abolish the stiff Dutch style. 
 The introduction of landscape-gardening, or rather its revival 
 because it was the Romans who first brought the art to Britain- 
 whatever its defects, was undoubtedly a great improvement on the 
 extravagance of the topiary school. 
 
 So much will be said of landscape-gardening in the following 
 chapters that I will only here remark that, when formality went 
 out of vogue, fashions in gardens ere long passed to the other 
 extreme. It was the inevitable swing of the pendulum, and no 
 more need be said. 
 
 28 
 
CHAPTER II 
 LAMBETH PALACE 
 
 THE vicissitudes in the fortunes of England, political as 
 well as ecclesiastical, may be followed in the story of 
 Lambeth Palace with scarcely less completeness than in 
 that of the Tower of London itself. So truly is this the case, 
 that a series of pictures by a competent brush, of events of which 
 Lambeth has been the scene from the time of the building of 
 the chapel about 1270, up to the Gordon Riots in 1780 would, 
 if they could be executed, be almost a sufficient substitute for a 
 text-book for the use of the previously! well- instructed student 
 of English history, inasmuch as they would suffice to recall to him 
 the entire course of his studies. 
 
 Such a sequence of pictures in their right order would be es- 
 pecially serviceable in the regrettable absence of a really complete 
 history of the building. This, as Mr. Arthur Sheppard, secretary 
 to the present Archbishop, says, has "yet to be written" and 
 to write it the historian will require much help from within and 
 access to all the archives. 
 
 Dr. Ducarel, who was Librarian at Lambeth in 1758, is the 
 chief authority on its early history. His account is interesting 
 but confused ; he gives undue prominence to events comparatively 
 unimportant, and omits mention of some of greater interest. 
 The " Lambeth Palace " of the Rev. Cave-Brown is an admirable 
 paraphrase of Ducarel's work, but fails to throw much new light 
 on the subject. In the short account offered in the present chapter 
 I acknowledge considerable indebtedness to both writers, and 
 nil up the gaps in their evidence with data gleaned from general 
 
 29 
 
GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 
 
 history, whereby some sidelights on Lambeth's story are inci- 
 dentally thrown. 
 
 The connection of Lambeth with the ecclesiastical history of 
 this ^country began long before the present archiepiscopal palace 
 or any part of it was built. It began when Goda, the pious 
 sister of Edward the Confessor, and wife, first, of Walter, Earl of 
 Mantes, and afterwards of Eustace, Earl of Boulogne presented 
 the Manor of Lambeth to the Bishop and Monks of Rochester - 
 reserving, however, all church patronage to herself. At the 
 Conquest, the Manor was seized by the Crown, and a portion of 
 it granted to Odo, Bishop of Bayeux, a half-brother of William I., 
 but it was afterwards restored by William Rufus, who added to 
 the gift the Church of St. Mary at Lambeth. 
 
 Ducarel gives a somewhat drawn-out and confusing account 
 of the manner in which the land, whereon the Palace is built, 
 passed from the possession of the See of Rochester to that of 
 Canterbury. 
 
 It seems that considerable friction had for some time existed 
 between the secular clergy and the monks of Rochester, who, 
 among other privileges, claimed the right to elect the Archbishop. 
 
 Archbishop Baldwin, the prelate who afterwards accompanied 
 Richard Cceur-de-Lion to the Holy Land, was desirous of restraining 
 the power of the monks, and to this end he proposed to form a 
 college for the secular priesthood at Harlingden, near Canterbury. 
 The King, Henry II., who had suffered much from ecclesiastical 
 insolence, encouraged the scheme, and the Archbishop, in order 
 to conceal his real design from the monks, pulled down the church 
 of St. Stephen under the pretext of building one to SS. Stephen, 
 and Thomas a Becket. Meeting with strenuous opposition he 
 hurried on' the work, and having no stone for the chapel, built 
 it of wood, and solemnly consecrated it, declaring that in so doing 
 he was only carrying out the pious intention of his saintly pre- 
 decessors, Anselm, and Thomas a Becket. 
 
 Urged by the monks, who appealed to Rome, Pope Urban III, 
 ordered the Archbishop to stop all further work at Harlingden. 
 and to demolish all that was already completed there. But at 
 this juncture the Pontiff, who had protected the monks, died. 
 During the short reign of his successor, with whom Baldwin had 
 some influence, the latter finding the demolition of his collegiate 
 
 30 
 
LAMBETH PALACE 
 
 buildings could no longer be delayed, seized the opportunity to 
 begin rebuilding, but wisely decided to do so elsewhere. He 
 effected an exchange with the See of Rochester, and secured a 
 piece of land on the Thames, near London, and with the con- 
 currence of King Richard, the Bishops, and Barons, laid the founda- 
 tion of the collegiate buildings at Lambeth, and for their construc- 
 tion he moved thither, by water, all the building materials he 
 had collected at Harlingden. But the energetic prelate did not 
 see his work completed, for he died in Palestine at the Siege of 
 Acre. 
 
 It thus fell to Archbishop Hubert Walter to carry out his pre- 
 decessor's plans. To do so he made further exchange of land with 
 Rochester, and in 1197 he and his successors were confirmed in the 
 possession of the entire demesne by Richard I. But the monks, 
 still jealous and discontented, and rejecting the friendly and 
 advantageous overtures of the Primate, sent to Rome two of their 
 number, who succeeded in obtaining a Bull from Innocent III., 
 couched in arrogant and unreasonable terms. These were that 
 the newly-built chapel on the banks of the Thames was to be 
 demolished, as in Baldwin's time the dhapel at Harlingden had 
 been, and the canons were to be ejected within thirty days ; 
 failing which the province of Canterbury was to disown the Arch- 
 bishop as its Metropolitan, and he himself was to be suspended 
 from office. 
 
 So the quarrel dragged on, until in 1202 the matter, still under 
 dispute, was subjected to arbitration, the decision being that after 
 the destruction of the recently created chapel, Walter was to be 
 permitted to build an ordinary church upon its site, to place therein 
 a limited number of canons, and to endow them with one hundred 
 pounds per annum. This was only on condition that no bishops 
 were consecrated there, no councils held, no abbots admitted, and 
 no orders conferred, and, naturally, the Archbishop declined to 
 build upon such terms. 
 
 However, says Dr. Ducarel, " these disputes between the Arch- 
 bishop and monks of Canterbury proved of infinite advantage 
 to this place, since they brought and fixed the Archbishops of 
 Canterbury at Lambeth, who have ever since honoured that town 
 with their palace and chief residence." 
 
 Archbishop Hubert Walter, and his successor, Stephen Langton,. 
 
 31 
 
GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 
 
 the same who, in 1215, headed the Barons and obtained the Magna 
 Charta, each in turn resided at the Manor House, which Glanville, 
 Bishop of Rochester, at the end of the twelfth century, had built 
 for a London residence for the Bishops of Rochester. 
 
 By the year 1262 it appears to have become dilapidated, for at 
 that date a Bull from Pope Urban IV. empowered Archbishop 
 Boniface to dispose of a fourth of the offerings at the shrine of 
 St. Thomas of Canterbury, " and to turn them to pious uses " ; 
 and he was ordered either to repair his " houses " at Lambeth, or 
 to build new ones. 
 
 Which alternative he elected to follow is not quite certain ; 
 it is supposed that Boniface erected the present chapel over the 
 then existing crypt, but the crypt itself contains no architectural 
 work earlier than the close of the twelfth, or beginning of the 
 thirteenth century. Ducarel suggests that he also laid the 
 foundation of the Great Hall ; and, on the whole, Boniface is 
 generally credited with being the first builder of the present 
 palace. 
 
 Each succeeding Primate, with one exception, appears to have 
 done something to add to its dignity and convenience. The 
 exception was Archbishop Kilwarby, or Kilwardby, who, about 
 1275, robbed the See of Canterbury, and carried away with him 
 to Rome all the jewels, plate, money, and, most important of all, 
 the Register books belonging to the Archiepiscopate. The loss 
 of these Registers has made the early history of Lambeth House 
 very difficult to trace. 
 
 In 1351, during the reign of Edward II., Archbishop Reynolds 
 restored portions of the house. In 1381, in the reign of Richard II., 
 Wat Tyler, incensed by the unpopular Poll Tax, headed a rebellion 
 against the King, seized the Tower of London, and led a party 
 against Lambeth House. They beheaded the Archbishop, Simon 
 de Sudbury, sacked the building, and " did all the mischief that 
 a careless and enraged mob is capable of doing." 
 
 This mischief two succeeding prelates, Courtney and Arundel, 
 did their best to repair. Arundel, the great persecutor of the 
 Lollards, was followed by an eminent building Archbishop, Henry 
 Chicherley, to whom Lambeth owes more, architecturally, than 
 to any occupant of the See of Canterbury except Cardinal Morton, 
 who built the great Gatehouse about the year 1490. 
 
 32 
 
tX 
 
 u 
 
 -C; 
 
 h. 
 
> - - * 
 
 : Uf-:2 . -v- ., / 
 
 *, <* t> e V 
 
LAMBETH PALACE 
 
 Chicherley spent vast sums upon the demesne of Lambeth. 
 He restored the house and added a fountain, or aqueduct, and 
 also a " rabbed garden." A fountain suggests a garden, and we 
 thus come upon the earliest reference to the gardens of the Palace. 
 Chicherley's chief contribution, however, to the growing pile of 
 buildings on the south bank of the Thames, was the square, grim, 
 battlemerited tower, built of rough, grey stone, standing at the 
 western extremity of the chapel ; it was erected about the thir- 
 teenth year of the reign of Henry VI., when Chicherley had been 
 eight years Primate. An old stone building was cleared away to 
 make room for it, of which a small turret was spared and incor- 
 porated in the main body of the new tower. From the steward's 
 accounts for that year, the latter is found to have cost 278 2s. 11 Jd., 
 something like 3,000 of our present currency. 
 
 The tower has long been known as the " Lollards Tower." 
 Ducarel records this fact, but makes no comment on it. Dr. 
 Maitland, however, who was Librarian at Lambeth about 1840, 
 states authoritatively that there is no foundation for the popular 
 belief that the unfortunate followers of Wycliff were ever incar- 
 cerated there ; and that the stone chamber on the summit, in 
 which a so-called " oubliette " is shown, was never used as their 
 prison. Nevertheless, the " oubliette," though it is no oubliette, 
 and certain rings and staples to which prisoners might have been 
 chained, are still regarded by some as evidence of the melancholy 
 purpose to which they assume it had been put by its builders. 
 
 This is unfair to the memory of Chicherley, for the disgrace of 
 the persecution of the unhappy reformers should fall chiefly on 
 Arundel, who was responsible for the statute legalizing the burning 
 of heretics in 1401, the year when the fires of Smithfield were, I 
 believe, first lighted. 
 
 Any priest who had arrived at the dignity of Archbishop of 
 Canterbury, was bound in those days to be more or less a per- 
 secutor, and Chicherley was no exception ; but he was not only an 
 ecclesiastic, he was also a statesman, and a man of the world, 
 occupied with large public and benevolent undertakings. It was 
 Chicherley who encouraged Henry V. to begin the successful 
 campaign against France, and to found the famous twin monastery 
 of Sion at Isleworth, concerning which there will be more to say 
 in a succeeding chapter. Above all, he will always be remem- 
 
 33 3 
 
GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 
 
 bered as the beneficent founder of All Souls' College, Oxford, and 
 of other similar institutions. In character he was certainly more 
 humane than Arundel, for he was instrumental in passing the 
 Act that in some cases substituted the lash, and other lighter 
 punishments, for the horrible penalty of death at the stake. In 
 any case, it is difficult to believe that he could have been guilty of 
 the deliberate cruelty of building a great addition to the Lambeth 
 pile, for the express purpose of therein immuring and torturing 
 the Wycliffites, and the popular belief that he did so leaves an 
 undeserved stain on his memory. The true Lollards Tower, 
 according to Dr. Maitland and to other evidence both direct and 
 indirect, was not at Lambeth at all, but at the " Bishop's prison " 
 attached to London House, the town residence of the Metropolitan 
 Bishop, and was, in fact, a portion of old St. Paul's. 
 
 Foxe, in his " Actes and Monuments," speaks of the " Lollard's 
 Tower " of St. Paul's " Paul's," as the cathedral was colloquially 
 termed and Stowe, writing in 1598, makes mention of two towers 
 at its western extremity, of which the one at the southern corner 
 was known as " The Lowlarde Tower, and hath been used as the 
 Bishop's prison of such as were detested for opinions contrary 
 to the faith of the church." 
 
 One might suppose that such evidence would have been con- 
 sidered conclusive, but it seems it was not so ; for after the 
 Commonwealth, and the Restoration, when the Great Fire of 1666 
 had swept away every vestige of old St. Paul's, of London House, 
 its Lollard Tower, and its prison the tradition of a " Lollard's 
 Tower " still remaining, it was transferred bodily to Lambeth, 
 and the odium attaching to its erection and use, came at last, 
 by a not unnatural sequence of ideas, to be cast upon the man,, 
 who having punished heresy and built a tower, had (so it was 
 erroneously concluded) intended it, and used it, as a prison for 
 Lollards. 
 
 Popular beliefs, like prejudices, are not easily eradicated ; 
 they take much uprooting ; and, therefore, so long as the walls of 
 Lambeth Palace stand, so long will idle passers-by look up at the 
 hoary stones of the supposed Lollard's Tower, and vaguely picture, 
 as having been enacted behind them, scenes of sorrow and violence 
 that never took place. Posterity has fixed this stain upon the 
 memory of the great building Archbishop, and there it will remain, 
 
 34 
 
LAMBETH PALACE 
 
 perpetuated in the name by which the tower is best known. Thus 
 ' the evil that men do lives after them, the good is oft interred 
 with their bones." 
 
 There are people who, finding the stories they had believed ill 
 to be apocryphal, straightway lose their chief interest in history ; 
 for, robbed of its romance, it becomes to them merely a dry thing 
 of dates, and statistics, a catalogue of Acts of Parliament and 
 accounts of the struggles to get them passed, punctuated, and 
 relieved, here and there, by a battle, or a revolution. Hence, 
 while it is a good thing to bring criticism and research to bear upon 
 the perversions and exaggerations that distort historical fact, it is 
 not always necessary, while it is frequently undesirable, to sweep 
 away ruthlessly all the picturesque and innocent accretions that 
 may in time have grown round them. When a tradition apper- 
 taining to a person, or a place, is morally beautiful, inspiring 
 and harmless, when no memory is unfairly attacked by its accept- 
 ance, when there can be no question at all of giving even the devil 
 his due, it is surely a pity that it should be robbed of a shred of 
 its picturesqueness by means of a merciless investigation, that, 
 when accomplished, cannot in the least alter the trend of that 
 history of which it is, in all probability, merely an unimportant 
 side-issue. 
 
 For example, childish faith in the stories of William Tell and 
 Fair Rosamond did nobody any harm, and what earthly interest can 
 we find in " TelPs " chapel on the shores of Lake Leman now that 
 we all know that the incident of the shooting of the apple from 
 the child's head is pure fiction, and since that most disagreeable 
 person, the iconoclastic historian, has gone so far as to assure 
 us that Tell himself never existed ? 
 
 With regard to Fair Rosamond and the dreadful choice she had 
 to make, we cannot whitewash the memory of the jealous queen 
 by doing away with the bowl and the dagger, the labyrinth and 
 the clew ; for Eleanor, the divorced Queen of France before she 
 became Queen of England, was in no position to cast a stone at 
 the unhappy object of her hate. It is a sordid, ugly story, anyway, 
 though founded on solid fact, for there really was a beautiful 
 Rosamond Clifford, and, as I had occasion to mention in the first 
 chapter, Henry II. actually had a palace and a shooting lodge, 
 and a " parke " or chase, at Woodstock ; and if the poison-chalice 
 
 35 3* 
 
GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 
 
 and all the rest of the tragic happenings, be indeed all moonshine, 
 or rather limelight and stage effect, their elimination would serve 
 no purpose. 
 
 The case of the tower that Archbishop Chicherley built, however, 
 and the tradition attached to it, is altogether different, since to 
 remove the calumny from the builder, as we are bound to do, is 
 not to perceptibly diminish the interest in the building ; for so 
 intimately has Lambeth been associated with events of importance 
 in England's history, so constantly, arid of necessity, have the 
 Primates played a great part in these, that it is unnecessary to 
 work up a fictitious emotion by the aid of incorrect or uncor- 
 roborated assertions. 
 
 The Water Tower, to give it its right name, has claims upon the 
 attention of the student of history and archaeology that are 
 independent of any supposed connection with Lollardism ; to 
 these we shall return later. 
 
 The Computus Bellevorum, or steward's accounts, were very 
 regularly kept at Lambeth, and they show that Chicherley restored, 
 if he did not actually rebuild, the whole of the Great Hall, which 
 many years later was certainly carefully reconstructed by Juxon, 
 on the lines laid down by his predecessor. But if Archbishop 
 Chicherley was thus a great builder, one who has largely left his 
 mark upon Lambeth, Cardinal Morton, who became Primate in 
 'I486, and Lord Chancellor of England in the following year, 
 was yet a greater. He it was who erected the massive and 
 stately Gatehouse which is the most remarkable feature of 
 the Palace buildings. Of its kind there is no finer or more 
 characteristic example of Tudor architecture in England. It is 
 built of red brick, with stone quoins and dressings, and must have 
 been one of the earliest erections of the kind in this country, for, 
 up to the time of the fifth or sixth Henry, stone, or timber with 
 an admixture of brick, was exclusively used in buildings in the 
 southern part of the island. 
 
 There seems to have been no attempt at consistency or unity of 
 design in the several additions made at various dates at Lambeth ; 
 and there was none in the material of which they were constructed. 
 This variety makes for picturesqueness. One cannot, however, 
 fail to note that the rough grey stone of the Water Tower has 
 received no added charm and dignity from age, whereas the smooth 
 
 36 
 
LAMBETH PALACE 
 
 brickwork of Cardinal Morton's Gateway, once red, but now 
 under certain effects of light wearing a true mulberry bloom, has 
 but gained fresh charm in the process of growing old. The same 
 rich but subdued colouring may be seen in the more ancient 
 portions of Hampton Court, and also in the quaint quadrangle 
 and porch of the Bishop of London's Palace at Fulham. 
 
 What can have been the secret of that art in brick-making 
 possessed by those fifteenth- century builders ? a secret that seems 
 to have been entirely lost, for the squares and streets of Georgian 
 and Victorian London betray no sign of its possession ; they are 
 dingy, and grimy, and brown ; whereas Morton's Gatehouse, in 
 spite of equal exposure to London's atmospheric conditions, and 
 its vastly greater antiquity, has only become mellowed into 
 greater beauty in the passage of four centuries and more. 
 
 Solid though it be, when approached from Lambeth Bridge it 
 wears an aspect of curious unreality. One could easily conceive 
 its strength to be make-believe, and itself a bit of stage architec- 
 ture ; for it seems to stand, without foundation, on the bit of 
 roadway in front of it much as a painted scene might do. But 
 whether real or not, it is an anachronism seeming to belong, as 
 indeed it does belong, to another and old-time world ; it wears an 
 air of total detachment from the present. Nor have I found that 
 a more intimate acquaintance with the venerable Gatehouse 
 .destroys or even modifies this first impression. While one is 
 standing at the postern, waiting for it to open, and seeing nothing 
 of the rest of the Palace, the gateway appears a derelict survival 
 of the past, stranded there in mediaeval grandeur. But when at 
 last one is within the precincts, this impression vanishes. 
 
 Once upon a time, not so very long ago, Lambeth Palace was 
 separated only by a leafy " Bishops' Walk " from the Thames, 
 which flowed within a stone's throw of it. At the present day a 
 broad roadway and the Albert Embankment intervene ; thus its 
 environment is the spirit of modernity visualized ; and yet it 
 stands, a precious relic of England in the olden time, curiously out 
 of keeping with the constant passing of the London County Council 
 trams, and the ceaseless traffic by land and by water. 
 
 From within, the best view of the Gatehouse is to be obtained 
 from the opposite side of the courtyard on a fine summer's day. 
 Then, if one return from visiting the gardens on the north side of 
 
 37 
 
GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 
 
 the Palace by way of a little passage and a small pointed archway 
 at the base of the Water Tower, one is confronted by the impressive 
 vision of this imposing entrance gate. It might very well be the 
 approach to some gigantic fortification of the Middle Ages, instead 
 of to the peaceful dwelling of the head of the English Church. 
 
 The Great Hall, now known as " Juxon's Hall," is to our left, 
 and opposite to it is the long high wall separating the archiepis- 
 copal demesne from the public road. Intervening, there is a wide 
 stretch of green soft turf, and also a broad gravel walk, across 
 which the long shadows of the hawthorn, sumach, and other trees, 
 cast by the westering sun, travel with such rapidity that my 
 brush was well-nigh beaten in the breathless race to overtake them. 
 
 The gateway itself is facing us : the span of its nearer and inner 
 arch is greater than that of the outer. Heavy gates and -the solid, 
 iron-studded, oaken postern before mentioned, shut out the high 
 road. Below the arch, and between the great flanking towers, 
 there is a vestibule of considerable size, which has a flagged floor 
 and a groined roof. On either side of it are the janitors' private 
 rooms and offices, and above it is a spacious chamber, with an 
 embattled roof, and a three-light perpendicular window. This 
 room was formerly used as a record, or muniment room, but the 
 precious archives and registers of the See of Canterbury, once kept 
 there, are now removed elsewhere. 
 
 Abutting closely upon the Gatehouse so closely that the two 
 would appear to have drawn together for mutual comfort and 
 protection in this strange, new, twentieth century with which they 
 have so little in common is the ancient grey tower of St. Mary's, 
 the parish church of Lambeth. It owns a clock which has its 
 own independent computation of time, even bravely challenging 
 Big Ben itself, for it ventures to strike a quarter of a minute later 
 than its powerful rival.* Has it not the best of rights ? For 
 Lambeth Church Tower is of such venerable age that, compared 
 with it, the clock tower of Westminster is but of mushroom 
 growth a thing of yesterday. It forms an integral portion of 
 the picturesque, gatehouse-group of buildings, and is the only 
 remaining part of the second, possibly of the third, church erected 
 on the site, for one is mentioned in " Domesday Book," and there 
 
 * The drawing of the gateway was already far advanced, when war was declared in August, 
 1914 since when Big Ben has been silent. 
 
 38 
 
LAMBETH PALACE 
 
 have been rectors of Lambeth for eight hundred years. In the 
 churchyard lie buried several of the Archbishops, but they 
 are interred in greater number at Canterbury. 
 
 In connection with gardens and their historical evolution, it is 
 interesting to relate that in Lambeth Churchyard lie three genera- 
 tions of a family of famous gardeners, mentioned in the intro- 
 ductory chapter. John Tradescent, senior, was gardener to Queen 
 Elizabeth ; his son succeeded him in her service, and on her death 
 became gardener to Cecil, the first Lord Salisbury; thus helping 
 to make the celebrated Hatfield Gardens, and he ended his career 
 as gardener to Charles I. 
 
 His son was that John Tradescent who founded the Ashmolean 
 Museum at Oxford. The Tradescents being prosperous and highly- 
 esteemed residents of Lambeth, it is extremely probable that at a 
 period when their royal mistress frequently visited the Primate- 
 father, or son, or both, may have been called in to give advice con- 
 cerning the Archbishop's garden. Their tombstone in Lambeth 
 Churchyard has an inscription that is worth quoting ; it runs thus : 
 
 " Know, Stranger, ere thou pass, beneath this stone 
 Lye John Tredescent, Grandsire, father, son, 
 The last dy'd in his spring : the other two 
 Liv'd till they had travell'd Art and Nature through, 
 As by their choice collections may appear 
 From what is rare, in Land, in Sea, in Air. 
 Whilst they (a Homer's Illiad in a Nut) 
 A world of wonder in one closet shut; 
 These famous antiquarians that had been 
 Both gardeners to the Rose and Lily Queen, 
 Transplanted now themselves, sleep here and when 
 Angels shall with their trumpets waken men, 
 And fire shall purge the world, these hence shall rise 
 And change the garden for a Paradise." 
 
 Notwithstanding their close connection, matters did not always 
 run smoothly between Lambeth House and the township or parish. 
 
 In the quaint, but rather tedious pages of Ducarel, there is a 
 detailed report of a suit brought in 1776 by the then Archbishop, 
 by which he pleaded exemption from payment of taxes, on the 
 ground that Lambeth Palace was in the diocese of Canterbury 
 and not in that of Winchester, the bishops of which instituted the 
 Rector of Lambeth to the living, that town and parish being 
 within their ecclesiastical jurisdiction. 
 
 39 
 
GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 
 
 It was urged for the plaintiff that though " there are instances 
 of a parish lying in two counties, there is none of one lying in 
 two dioceses." Lambeth, therefore, claimed to be extra-parochial ; 
 and the claim was allowed, the question whether the house and 
 gardens known by the name of the Archbishop's Palace at Lam- 
 beth, was or was not in the parish of Lambeth, being settled in 
 favour of the plaintiff. " In consequence," says Ducarel, " the 
 Parish was condemned in costs amounting to one hundred and fifty 
 pounds, which money was raised by an assessment on all the 
 inhabitants, and paid to Archbishop Cornwallis, who a few months 
 after, very generously presented the whole and more to the Parish, 
 and paid his Solicitor's bill out of his own pocket." 
 
 Lambeth parish continued in the diocese of Winchester until 
 1877, when it was transferred to the enlarged and rearranged 
 diocese of Rochester. This circumstance is interesting, when it 
 is recalled that the Palace occupies land that, in the first instance, 
 was acquired from the Bishop and monks of Rochester. 
 
 In the days when London had but one bridge, and houses and 
 shops were crowded upon it, the right of passage by the horse 
 ferry at Lambeth, the only ferry for cattle over the Thames, was 
 a monopoly of the Archbishop of Canterbury, and brought in a 
 considerable revenue in tolls, prior to the building of a bridge at 
 Westminster in 1750. The See of Canterbury, and the surviving 
 patentee, were paid 2,208 in compensation for the loss of the tolls. 
 
 Tremendous state was kept up by the Primates, as befitted their 
 exalted position. As is well known, the Archbishop of Canterbury, 
 in the order of precedence, ranks after the Princes of the Blood 
 Royal ; but it is perhaps not so generally remembered that in the 
 past there have been six Cardinals, and eleven Lord Chancellors, 
 among them. The post of Lord Treasurer was also, in former 
 times, occasionally held by the Primate ; while Archbishop 
 Radulphon, about 1414, and Hubert Walter, about 1494, each 
 united in his own person, the offices of Lord Chief Justice and 
 Archbishop. Noblesse oblige, and William Stubbs, in his " Con- 
 stitutional History of England," tells us that the two Arch- 
 bishops maintained households on the same scale as dukes, and 
 the bishops, as far as influence and expenditure were concerned, 
 maintained the state of earls. They had their embattled houses, 
 their wide, enclosed parks, and unenclosed chases ; they kept their 
 
 40 
 
LAMBETH PALACE 
 
 court with just the same array of officers, servants, counsellors and 
 chaplains ; they made their progresses with armed retinues, and 
 trains of baggage. And we read that in 1559, Tunsdall, or Tunstall, 
 the good old Bishop of Durham, when he came up to the Metro- 
 polis to be deprived and to die, came riding to London with 
 three-score horsemen. 
 
 In the Middle Ages a body-guard and a guard-room were as 
 necessary in these great ecclesiastical establishments, as was a 
 great hall in which to dispense hospitality. After the Wars of the 
 Roses, the Guard-room at Lambeth was turned into an armoury; 
 and even as late as the time of Archbishop Laud it was said to 
 contain munitions of war sufficient to equip two hundred men. It 
 is now the state dining-room, and round its walls hang the interest- 
 ing portraits of the Archbishops. 
 
 The building at the left-hand side of the drawing of the Gate- 
 house is the Great Hall, supposed to have been originally erected 
 by Boniface when he received the Pope's mandate to repair, or re- 
 build, the Lambeth " Houses." As we have seen, it was " re-edify'd," 
 which probably meant largely reconstructed and decorated, by 
 Chicherley, but it goes by the name of " Juxon's Hall," because, 
 having been entirely wrecked by the partisans of Cromwell, it 
 was rebuilt by Archbishop Juxon in 1660. It is nearly one hundred 
 feet long, is forty feet broad, and fifty feet high ; and since Juxon 
 retained the fine oaken roof of the interior, and as far as possible 
 followed the design of the earlier building, we may assume that 
 these were the original dimensions of the great room. 
 
 Such halls were necessarily large, because, as remarked before, 
 the retinue of an Archbishop in olden times had to be commen- 
 surate with his dignity, and he kept open house. Strype, the 
 ecclesiastical historian, writing in 1694, says that of Cranmer 
 included a master of the horse, yeomen of the horse, gentlemen 
 riders, ushers of the chamber, grooms of the chamber, yeomen of 
 the chamber, yeomen of the wardrobe ; the steward, almoner, 
 treasurer, and comptroller, the janitors, chandlers, caterers, 
 clerk of the kitchen, clerk of the spicery, the butchers and bakers, 
 and the pantlers, who had charge of the bread and other provisions, 
 the butlers, who looked after the wine and ale, the server who set 
 down and removed all dishes, the carver, the cup-bearer, and 
 finally the harbinger ; whose duty seems to have been to go forward 
 
 41 
 
GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 
 
 on occasions, probably on the Primate's journeyings over his 
 diocese, to provide lodgings ; and certainly, if my lord of Canter- 
 bury travelled with but half his train of servitors, the office could 
 have been no sinecure. 
 
 Great state was kept up by his successor, Cardinal Pole, who, 
 by virtue of a patent from Philip and Mary, was allowed to keep 
 one hundred servants. 
 
 Strype gives an account of the manner in which the good Arch- 
 bishop Parker, who was appointed to the See of Canterbury by 
 Elizabeth, kept open house. ' In the daily eating," he says, 
 * this was the custom ; the steward, with servants that were 
 gentlemen of the better rank, sat down at the tables in the hall 
 at the right hand, and the almoner, with the clergy and other 
 servants, sat on the other side," which reads as though the 
 chaplains and lower order of clergy were ranked with the lower 
 order of servants. The food left over from each day's feast " did 
 suffice to feed the bellies of a great number of poor hungry people 
 that waited at the gate ; and so constant and unfailing was this 
 provision at my lord's table, that whoever came in either at dinner 
 or at supper, being not above the degree of a knight, might there 
 be entertained worthy of his quality either at the steward's or the 
 almoner's table, and moreover it was the Archbishop's command 
 to his servants that all strangers should be received and treated 
 with all manner of civility and respect, and that places at the table 
 should be assigned to them according to their dignity and quality, 
 which redounded much to the praise and commendation of the 
 Archbishop. The discourse and conversation at meals was void 
 of all brawls and loud talking, and for the most part consisted in 
 framing men's manners to religion, or to some other honest or 
 becoming subject." 
 
 There was a monitor in the hall, whose business it was at meal- 
 times to cry silence if any person spoke too loud, " or concerning 
 things less decent." 
 
 In the Great Hall were also held the consecration banquets of 
 the Southern Province, at the charge of the newly consecrated 
 bishop ; perhaps the one most memorable for its magnificence 
 being that of William of Wykeham in 1367. 
 
 These, however, were special occasions ; but so bounteous was 
 the provision even for the daily feasts, during the time of Cranmcr, 
 
 42 
 
LAMBETH PALACE 
 
 Parker, and others, that the crumbs which fell from the rich man's 
 table sufficed to feed an army of mendicants ; and not seven only, 
 but seventy times seven, scriptural basketsful of the fragments 
 that remained, must have been taken up in the course of a year. 
 The surplus was distributed daily at the gates, and thus arose 
 the famous " Lambeth Dole." 
 
 It was at Lambeth, under the roof of the Archbishop, that 
 Katherine of Arragon, on arriving in England for her first marriage 
 with Arthur, Prince of Wales, was for some days lodged. Here, 
 thirty-two years later, Archbishop Cranmer confirmed the union 
 of Henry VIII. with poor Katherine's rival and successor, Anne 
 Boleyn. Still more important was that meeting over which he 
 soon after presided, on a day late in April, 1534. England had 
 reached one of the many crises in her history. The Spanish party 
 at Rome had triumphed ; the marriage of Henry VIII. with 
 Katherine of Arragon had been pronounced valid, and if the 
 King refused to acquiesce in this decision, he was to be declared 
 " excommunicate," and to forfeit the allegiance of his subjects, 
 and the Emperor was to invade England and Henry to be 
 deposed. 
 
 He did not acquiesce, for now it was that, in the words of Froude, 
 14 the Tudor spirit was at length awake in the English sovereign 
 ... he met defiance by defiance. The Act of Parliament, altering 
 the succession to the children of Anne Boleyn, was immediately 
 passed ; Convocation, which was still sitting, hurried through a 
 declaration that the Pope had no more power in England than 
 any other bishop. The ordnance stores were examined, the repairs 
 of the navy were hastened, and the garrisons were strengthened 
 along the coast. ... A commission appointed under the Statute 
 of Succession opened its sittings to receive the oaths of allegiance. 
 - . . The peers swore, the bishops, abbots, priests, heads of 
 colleges, swore with scarcely an exception ; the nation seemed to 
 unite in unanimous declaration of freedom. . . . The Commis- 
 sioners sat at the Archbishop's Palace at Lambeth, and at the 
 end of April, Sir Thomas More received a summons to appear before 
 them. He was at his house at Chelsea, where for the last two years 
 he had lived in deep retirement, making ready for evil times. Those 
 times at length were come. On the morning on which he was to 
 present himself, he confessed and received the Sacrament in 
 
 43 
 
GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 
 
 Chelsea Church; ' and ". whereas,' says his great-grandson, 'at 
 other times, before he departed from his wife and children, they 
 used to bring him to his boat, and he there leaving them, bade 
 them farewell ; at this time he suffered none of them to follow him 
 forth of his gate, but pulled the wicket after him, and with a heavy 
 heart he took boat with his son Roper.' He was leaving his house 
 for the last time, and he knew it. He sat silent for some minutes, 
 and then with a sudden start said, 4 I thank our Lord the field is 
 won.' : Lambeth Palace was crowded with people who had come 
 on the same errand as himself. More was called in early, and 
 found Cromwell present, with the four Commissioners and also 
 the Abbot of Westminster. The oath was read to him. " He 
 desired to see the Statute of Succession himself, and, after reading 
 it, said he would swear to the part of it that secured the succes- 
 sion to the children of Queen Anne, but he refused to ' peril his 
 soul ' by subscription to the remainder of the statute. He was asked 
 to reconsider his answer." To do so he was sent into the garden, 
 and in his absence others were called in ; among these, Fisher, 
 Bishop of Rochester, who replied in the same terms. Returning 
 from the garden, More made his choice. It is a matter of history 
 what that choice was. 
 
 Here, so far as Lambeth is concerned, ends a momentous 
 chapter in the history of Tudor England, for the well-known 
 melancholy sequel belongs of right to that of the Tower, to which 
 prison More and Fisher were committed. Thus Henry VIII. had 
 his Catholic martyrs, as his daughter Mary had her Protestant 
 ones. 
 
 Meanwhile the Succession was seemingly securely settled on the 
 children of Anne Boleyn, whose star was now in the ascendant. 
 But wait ! Two short years only, and another chapter is opened, 
 another and very different page is turned. Again the stage is 
 Lambeth ; again the instrument of Henry's will is Cranmer ; 
 again the season is Spring the lovely English Spring ; everything 
 is green and bursting into beauty in the large gardens behind the 
 Palace, the same in which More had been sent to walk to reconsider 
 his refusal. But this time the scene is laid neither in the Great Hall 
 nor the Guard-room, but in the gloomy crypt beneath the beautiful 
 chapel of the Palace. 
 
 Conveyed hither by water from her prison in the Tower, pale, 
 
 44 
 
LAMBETH PALACE 
 
 frightened, hysterical, and under sentence of death, the once 
 brilliant and triumphant Anne stood before the Archbishop, who, 
 in his own words, " had loved her not a little for the love I judged 
 her to bear towards God and his gospel." She made her confession, 
 in hopes perhaps, that, if she did so, her life might be spared, and 
 Cranmer, " sitting judicially, pronounced her marriage with the 
 King null and void." 
 
 The crypt, described as a " certain low chapel beneath his [the 
 Archbishop's] house at Lambeth," is the oldest part of the Palace 
 buildings. Too long perverted to ignoble uses, it has now, by the 
 liberality of the present Primate, Archbishop Davidson, been 
 excavated and restored. On the way to the gardens, which are 
 reached at the river side by a short cut from the outer courtyard, 
 its low, dingy windows, rising but a little above the level of the 
 ground, are still in evidence. Small and square, they look dreary 
 enough, for smoke and time have still further darkened a spot 
 where God's sunshine never seems to penetrate. 
 
 In the days when the Thames washed the foundation of the 
 Water Tower, the river stairs and landing-place to the Palace, were 
 situated at its north-west corner, on a little creek, crossed, it is 
 said, by a wooden bridge. Within the tower itself a short flight 
 of steps still leads from the crypt to the " Post-room" a chamber 
 that forms a stately vestibule to the beautiful chapel. Incident- 
 ally it should be mentioned that the " Post," or pillar, which gives 
 the name to this apartment, is merely a support to the roof, and 
 was never, as is vulgarly supposed, a whipping-place for Lollards. 
 
 On that fatal Wednesday, Anne, a queen no longer, returning 
 from her dread ordeal in the crypt, must necessarily have mounted 
 the stone steps, and crossed the Post-room to reach the doorway, 
 now built up, which led to the landing-place. Here awaited her 
 the boat that was to take her back to the Tower, where, the next 
 day but one, she met her fate. Unhappy Anne Boleyn ! For 
 unhappy she was, whether sorely erring, or merely guilty of most 
 unbecoming and unqueenly levity ! One gladly closes this chapter 
 in Lambeth's chequered history, although there are others scarcely 
 less dark to follow. 
 
 Lambeth Palace has been honoured by many Royal visits, all 
 of which are duly noted in the parish vestry books in the form of 
 fees paid to bellringers. 
 
 45 
 
GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 
 
 Even so early as 1345, Edward III. received homage here from 
 John de Montfort, Duke of Brittany, during the regime of Arch- 
 bishop Stratford ; and in his " Survey of London " Stowe tells 
 us that " Henry Bolingbroke, while staying in his palace at Keri- 
 nington, accepted the hospitality of Archbishop Bouchier, a few 
 days before his coronation." 
 
 Here Henry VIII. visited Archbishop Warham in 1513, and 
 thirty years later he crossed to Lambeth Stairs to warn Cranmei 
 in a friendly manner, of the intrigues of Bishop Gardiner 
 against him. 
 
 Mary Tudor frequently came to Lambeth to see her cousin. 
 Cardinal Pole, when, as Archbishop, he was in residence here ; and 
 it is said, that, at her own expense, she furnished and redecorated 
 the Palace for his benefit. During her brief reign nought but the 
 fires of Smithfield went merrily ; two hundred and seventeen 
 persons suffered at the stake in three years, and it is difficult to 
 conceive of the gloomy Queen taking active part in any festivities : 
 and yet many such must have been held by Pole in her honour, 
 since, as previously mentioned, by virtue of a patent from herself 
 and her consort Philip, the Cardinal was permitted to keep one 
 hundred servants, a fact which implies lavish hospitality, fit only 
 for royalty. 
 
 Things changed on the rising " of that bright occidental Star 
 Queen Elizabeth; " as the translators of the Bible have designated 
 her. She loved state and show, and many times honoured 
 Matthew Parker, the Archbishop par excellence of the Reformation, 
 by visiting him during his Primacy of seventeen years. But she 
 disliked the idea of a married clergy; and on one occasion, after 
 a sojourn of three days at Lambeth, while thanking her host on 
 her departure for his hospitality, she did not hesitate to make 
 sundry caustic, and disagreeable remarks to his wife, in bidding her 
 farewell. Grindal, the next Archbishop, came under the ban of 
 Her Grace's displeasure, and to him she paid no visits, even when 
 he became old and enfeebled ; but she was frequently the guest 
 of his successor, Whitgift, visiting him no less than fifteen times, 
 and she sometimes stayed two or three days at Lambeth. 
 
 The Gatehouse dominates the precincts, and its aspect can have 
 so little changed in four hundred years, that, when the great gates 
 are closed, and the twentieth century shut out, it requires but a 
 
 46 
 
LAMBETH: The Tudor Gateway 
 
 Page 46 
 
LAMBETH PALACE 
 
 small stretch of the imagination to call up a mental vision of the 
 same place in the days when Elizabeth was Queen. 
 
 And so we will picture her on a certain fine day in the year 1574, 
 when she has come to pay one of her frequent visits to Archbishop 
 Parker, and the bells of Lambeth Church tower are ringing merrily. 
 It is " the time when lilies blow, and clouds are highest up in air; " 
 and as she issues from the shadow of the archway, the sunlight 
 flashes on the jewel in the little green cap that partially conceals 
 her frizzy, red-gold hair. She is mounted on a richly caparisoned 
 palfrey, and its saddle cloth nearly reaches the ground. Her 
 riding coat of green velvet, richly wrought in a diaper pattern with 
 gold and seed pearls, stirred by the movement of the horse, shows 
 a lining of cloth of silver, and we catch a glimpse of a jewelled 
 stomacher, and a heavy rope of pearls. Her ruff to-day is lace- 
 trimmed, but of comparatively modest dimensions ; and her hands 
 are encased in embroidered gloves, over which she wears many 
 rings. She sits with easy dignity in her saddle, and carries her 
 forty-one years lightly ; and it is very easy to see that, like her 
 cousin Mary Stuart, she has been unlucky in her portraitists, for 
 all have given more attention to the last button on her sleeve, than 
 to the force and character in the countenance of the woman in 
 whose reign England first became a world power. She is always 
 represented as a dressed-up wooden doll, with a large aquiline 
 nose, a somewhat hard mouth, and tousled red hair. But mark 
 her as she turns to address a gracious remark to the cavalier in 
 cream-coloured velvet, riding on her left, who is none other than 
 the Earl of Leicester. The severity of mien we associate with the 
 wearer of the portentous ruff and formidable farthingale, is absent 
 now. She has come from Greenwich, and ridden fast to consult 
 my Lord Archbishop on some pressing affairs of State, and the pale 
 skin wears the becoming flush of exercise. She smiles, and there 
 is even fascination in her smile, for is she not Anne Boleyn's 
 daughter ? The severe lines in her face relax, the dark-brown eyes, 
 beneath their curiously heavy lids, brighten. The woman is upper- 
 most now, yet she looks every inch a queen not the queen of starch 
 and whalebone, of tags and finery, compact of vanity and im- 
 periousness, of the National Portrait Gallery, but the " Rose and 
 Lily Queen " of the Tradescent tomb in Lambeth Churchyard. 
 Ah ! depend upon it, there was a lovable side to her nature, since, 
 
 47 
 
GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 
 
 so long after she had " shuffled off this mortal coil," and when 
 flattery could no longer reach or move her, that tender, graceful 
 epithet could be applied to her by the servants and dependents 
 who knew her best. 
 
 Its testimony does not stand alone. Numerous other memorials 
 to the great queen-regnant, erected after her death when the recol- 
 lection of her was still green and vivid, tell the same story, and 
 equally express the love, veneration, and admiration of her subjects 
 for the " good Queen Bess." 
 
 Prime favourite at this time, of his sovereign, Leicester bends 
 smilingly towards her saddle-bow ; gay words are on his lips, 
 exultation in his heart, for never again will Robert Dudley be so 
 near his ambition's goal as at this moment. 
 
 On her left rides the great Burleigh, but recently made Lord 
 Treasurer. To him she now and then addresses a few gracious 
 words, for Elizabeth, with the wit to choose her servants well, 
 knows also how best to bind them to her service. 
 
 Behind Burleigh comes his brother-in-law, Sir Nicholas Bacon, 
 distinguished father of a much more famous son, and they are 
 followed by a bevy of fair ladies and many courtiers. A number 
 of lackeys, and a detachment of those yeomen of the guard who 
 were the institution of the Queen's grandfather, Henry VII., 
 bring up the rear of a procession which, in splendour and brilliancy 
 of apparel and accoutrements, far exceeds any pageant of modern 
 times. It passes from the arch to the courtyard, and scintillates 
 for some brief minutes in the sunshine. There is a trampling of 
 horses' feet and rapid dismounting, a clatter of arms, the ringing 
 of steel upon stone, and then its constituent parts break up into 
 many-tinted, moving fragments, resembling the bits of coloured 
 glass in a kaleidoscope, and, in true kaleidoscopic fashion, they 
 separate, and come together again. They form into knots and 
 groups before the door of the Great Hall : some of these follow 
 the Queen to the principal entrance, to which the Archbishop 
 hurries to receive her ; and others wander off into the gardens 
 behind the Water Tower, and that other tower that is the com- 
 paratively recent erection of the late Archbishop Cranmer. But, 
 even as one looks, the day-dream fades, and resolves itself into 
 nothing more romantic than a group of very tall, well-grown, Boy 
 Scouts, lads of sixteen or seventeen, whose picturesque costume, 
 
with its touches of colour, and the staves that, seen from the dis- 
 tance, suggested lances, had, on that bright summer's day, sufficed 
 for one brief moment, to revivify the past, and to carry me back 
 from the twentieth century to the sixteenth. 
 
 And so it was almost with a shock of surprise that I was roused 
 from this vision to the crude, present-day reality ; for, staring at 
 the Gatehouse, one can scarcely help living backwards, and pro- 
 jecting oneself into that bygone age to which it properly belongs, 
 for the history of England, or its side-issues, is writ all over it. 
 At the present day all sorts and conditions of men pass in and out 
 of it, as they have done for four hundred years, as they did when 
 the famous Lambeth Dole was distributed there. Watching the 
 gates, I half expected to see them open to admit one of the great 
 gilded coaches, with heavy fringed hammer-cloth, decorated panels, 
 and mighty wheels, still to be seen reposing in the seclusion of a 
 dignified old age in a corner of the Victoria and Albert Museum ; 
 or else that an Archbishop's lady, of the middle of the eighteenth 
 century, would soon be returning home from some function in the 
 fashionable west- central district, conveyed by two servitors in 
 one of those cosy carry ing- chairs on poles, then in constant use ; 
 chairs, on the embellishment of which some of the greatest French 
 pastoralists did not disdain to employ their exquisite art, and 
 which took their name from a town in France which has since 
 acquired a sinister significance, Sedan. 
 
 But the gates rolled back and let in only the Archbishop's motor- 
 car, a characteristic product of this age of steel and petrol : next 
 came a boy on a bicycle, with a basket of loaves for His Grace's 
 household, and this was followed presently by that already unusual 
 sight in the metropolis, a hansom cab, which seemed even more 
 oddly out of keeping with the ancient pile than the auto- 
 mobile. It had here much the same incongruous effect that a 
 horse and cab, on the stage, always have. The pigeons, of which 
 there are many hundred at Lambeth Palace, clearly thought it 
 had no business there, for, though near feeding-time, they rose in 
 a fluttering cloud from the grass and stones, and, with the rushing 
 noise of wings in rapid flight, sought refuge on their favourite van- 
 tage ground, the cornices and pinnacles of the Great Hall. Yet 
 they did not disturb themselves at all when two grave dignitaries 
 of the Church, the Lord Bishop of - - and the Very Reverend 
 
 49 4 
 
GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 
 
 the Dean of , in close confabulation, passed out by way of 
 the postern door in the Gatehouse. As the gates closed on all 
 who went and came, one caught a glimpse of the prosaic modern 
 world outside of Lambeth Bridge, of some men in khaki, and of 
 a passing Tooting tram ! 
 
 Still, however insistently, and almost grotesquely, the present 
 may sometimes intrude itself upon the old-world calm of the 
 ancient Palace, there is a certain charm and attractiveness in this 
 strange intermingling of the old with the new, of the past with 
 the present. No doubt the old exceeds the new in interest. Yet 
 when the later chapters of its history come to be written, though 
 outwardly Lambeth seems to take but little part in the terribly 
 stirring events of our times, its inner history may prove to have a 
 large significance ; and the influences emanating from it may be found 
 to have had a most important bearing upon the trend of history. 
 At present, however, the past surges up, and its interest verily 
 overwhelms the present. In mental retrospection, we see the 
 ghosts of scores of notable men and women who lived between the 
 eras of Cranmer and Juxon. A few are smiling, many are weeping ; 
 and we place them instantly in their proper environment. As we 
 look, they shape themselves, vanish, and give place to others. 
 We see Thomas Cranmer, the tool of the King, and the instrument 
 of his pleasure in the matter of the divorce of Katherine of Arragon : 
 we see him later, truly attached to the Reformed faith, yet for 
 want of moral courage recanting his opinions ; then, repenting of 
 his recantation, nobly vindicating what he had before repudiated, 
 and dying a martyr's death, the hand that had signed the recanta- 
 tion being forced by his own will to be the member first to suffer. 
 We see the recalcitrant bishops who refused to take the oath of 
 supremacy at the beginning of Elizabeth's reign, consigned to the 
 custody of Archbishop Parker, and watch him treating them more 
 as guests than prisoners. We see the Duke of Norfolk and Lord 
 William Howard, his brother, in 1574, joining in a conspiracy in 
 favour of Mary Queen of Scots, the elder punished by death, the 
 younger, who ill requited the Primate's kindness, interned at 
 Lambeth. Next arises a vision of a wet and stormy night in 1600, 
 when the once debonair and powerful Essex, now disgraced and 
 forlorn, together with his friend, the young Earl of Southampton, 
 was on his way to the Tower by water. The river, lashed into 
 
 50 
 
LAMBETH PALACE 
 
 fury by the wind, was rough, the rain splashed on the decks of the 
 light craft, and added physical discomfort to the captives' mental 
 misery. The voyage had to be broken at Lambeth, where many 
 a time, in happier days, the favourite had landed from Elizabeth's 
 gilded and cushioned barge of state. How bitter must have been 
 the contrast between then and now ! 
 
 The boat was moored to the landing-place at the foot of the 
 Water Tower. Archbishop Whitgift, apprised of the unexpected 
 visit, met the noblemen at the head of the stairs ; the flaring light 
 from a cresset, fell full on his grey head and grave face. He was 
 visibly distressed. " My lord," he said sadly, addressing the 
 fallen favourite, " I am indeed concerned to see this time when 
 you are brought here thus ! '' But it would require the pen of a 
 Carlyle, the brush of a Rembrandt, to paint that scene ! Suffice 
 to say, that by and by, when the storm abated, the barge was 
 remanned, the prisoners took their places, and by the same watery 
 way that had swept Sir Thomas More, Anne Boleyn, and others 
 to their doom, the Earl of Essex passed to his, and, in his passing, 
 broke an old Queen's heart ! 
 
 " She is much disfavoured and unattired," wrote her godson, 
 Sir John Harrington ; ; ' she disregardeth every costly cover that 
 cometh to her table, and eateth little but manchet and succory 
 pottage. . . . Her Highness hath worn but one change of raiment 
 for many daies," a pregnant sign in one whose love of dress was 
 notorious. 
 
 Among so many tragic happenings at the old archiepiscopal 
 residence, it is a relief to meet with a romantic story of true love. 
 By a clandestine marriage, which upset the royal plans, two lovers 
 of high degree had incurred the displeasure of Charles I. The 
 bride was the Lady Elizabeth Stuart, daughter of the Earl of 
 Lennox, and ward and kinswoman to the King, whose purpose it 
 had been to unite the great Scottish houses of Lennox and Argyle, 
 by the bestowal of her hand on the Marquis of Lome. But the 
 girl had vastly preferred the Lord Montravers, heir to the earldom 
 of Arundel (the duchy of Norfolk being then under attainder). 
 For supposed connivance in the match, her parents were sent to 
 the Tower, but Charles, for all his extravagant notions of the 
 divine right of kings, was no tyrant, and he merely punished the 
 rebellious pair by committing them to the care of Archbishop 
 
 51 4* 
 
GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 
 
 Abbot. Then were there billings and cooings, other than those 
 of the pigeons, in the shady garden of the archiepiscopal residence, 
 and happy hours also; even although in the near distance could 
 already be discerned the first mutterings of coming civil strife. 
 
 Many years later, when the storm of internecine war was ac- 
 tually about to break, we find Edward Hyde, afterwards Earl of 
 Clarendon, the historian of the great rebellion, and a devoted 
 servant of the monarchy, coming to Lambeth to warn Archbishop 
 Laud of his unwisdom in forcing a liturgy on the Scots. He 
 found him in the garden pacing up and down an alley afterwards 
 called the " Clarendon Walk," which is supposed to be the leafy 
 path that runs at the side of the wall now separating the gardens 
 of Lambeth, from Lambeth Palace Road and the Embankment. 
 
 The future Chancellor entreated the Primate to be wise in time, 
 pointing out that unless he changed the course of the ship of state, 
 it must inevitably be dashed against the rocks which he discerned 
 ahead. 
 
 The warning was unheeded, and the year 1641, says Evelyn, 
 " saw the Bishop of Canterbury's Palace at Lambeth assaulted 
 by a rude rabble from South wark." A fortnight later, during which 
 the Archbishop, by his own account, had had time to get cannon 
 and fortify the house a midnight attack was made on it, " but 
 God be praised," said he, i;< I had no harm." The end of his 
 troubled reign was near, notwithstanding. Attainted by the 
 Commons in 1644, he was imprisoned, and executed a few 
 months later. 
 
 Then followed a change in the nature of the events I have been 
 recalling. From this time, for sixteen years or more, there was 
 no Archbishop Episcopacy itself was abolished, and we look 
 at Lambeth, and find it the theatre of tragic events very painful 
 to contemplate. The building itself suffered severely, as was but 
 to be expected, seeing that it was the very citadel and heart of 
 episcopacy, and naturally drew upon itself the vindictive wrath, and 
 fanatical zeal, of the most violent and iconoclastic of those spirits 
 in whose eyes the Church of England was an accursed thing. 
 Even before Laud's death, " Lambeth House lying empty and 
 convenient " began to be used by the Commons as a prison for 
 dispossessed clergymen and Royalist prisoners, " the malignants 
 
 52 
 
LAMBETH PALACE 
 
 and delinquents having to bear their own charges," which were 
 often extortionate. 
 
 " Near an hundred ministers," says Bishop Kennet in his " Regis- 
 ter and Chronicle," " were brought out of the West and clapp'd 
 up in Lambeth House where almost all of them were destroyed by 
 a pestilential fever," a gross exaggeration ; though it is true that 
 after Naseby, the Lambeth prisons were greatly overcrowded, 
 resulting in a serious epidemic, and rather heavy mortality. 
 
 This dismal retrospect is relieved but by one picturesque episode 
 -The devoted wife of Dr. Guy Carleton, who had been ejected from 
 his Berkshire living and was suffering many hardships during 
 his Lambeth incarceration, planned his escape. She managed to 
 have a boat in readiness beneath the Water Tower, and a rope 
 conveyed to him, by which to descend ; but the rope was too 
 short, and underestimating the distance, Carleton risked a drop 
 by which he severely injured both legs : he managed, however, 
 to crawl to the boat, and was rowed away to a place of safety. 
 The heroic wife, by selling her belongings, and by hard manual 
 labour, contrived to support him till he could escape to France, 
 and he lived to become after the Restoration, Bishop, first of 
 Bristol, and afterwards of Chichester. 
 
 As we follow the fortunes of Lambeth House, we find them at 
 their lowest ebb in 1648, when a considerable part of the building 
 was purchased by Colonel Scott and Matthew Hardy, two leading 
 parliamentarians, for the sum of some 70. They divided the 
 spoils, Scott taking the Great Hall, demolishing it, and selling the 
 material Hardy the chapel which he robbed and desecrated, 
 destroying the tomb, and removing the remains of Archbishop 
 Parker, which had rested there since 1575. After the Restoration 
 they were reinterred, and the Great Hall rebuilt, as before related, 
 by Archbishop Juxon. 
 
 After this, for a time, there seems to have been comparative 
 tranquillity at the Palace, and only incidentally is it mentioned 
 in contemporary diaries and chronicles. 
 
 But in 1688 one more picture presents itself. It was a night 
 in December, and Mary of Modena, Queen Consort of England, 
 with her infant son the Prince of Wales, two attendants, <md 
 Lauzun, and Saint Victor, who had arranged the flight, stole down 
 the back stairs at Whitehall, and crossed the river in an open 
 
 53 
 
GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 
 
 skiff. " St. Victor had wrapped up in his warm cloak the infant 
 heir of so many kings " . . . "It was," says Macaulay, " a 
 miserable voyage. The night was bleak, the rain fell : the wind 
 roared : the water was rough : at length the boat reached Lam- 
 beth ; and the fugitives landed near an inn where a coach and 
 horses were in waiting. Some time elapsed before the horses could 
 be harnessed. Mary, afraid that her face should be known, would 
 not enter the house. She remained with her child, cowering for 
 shelter from the storm under the tower of Lambeth Church, and 
 distracted by terror whenever the ostler approached her with his 
 horses. . . . 
 
 " At length the coach was ready. St. Victor followed it on 
 horseback. The fugitives reached Gravesend safely, and em- 
 barked in the yacht which was waiting for them. ... St. Victor, 
 having seen her under sail, spurred back with the good news to 
 Whitehall." 
 
 Thus far in Macaulay 's graphic language ; everybody knows 
 the sequel how in the early morning of the following day, 
 James himself rose, in abject fear of meeting with his father's 
 fate, commanding Northumberland not to open the bedchamber 
 door until the usual hour. Taking the Great Seal in his hand, 
 he disappeared through a secret passage, and left Whitehall. He 
 crossed the . river at Millbank in a small wherry, and as he passed 
 Lambeth threw the Great Seal into the stream, whence three 
 months later, it was dragged to light in a fishing net. 
 
 And as that picture belongs to Lambeth, so, too, does the coura- 
 geous action of Archbishop Sancroft, who, to meet the emergency 
 that immediately arose, and to stop the confusion and uproar 
 which followed when next morning the King's flight was known, 
 issued from the seclusion of his Palace, and put himself at the 
 head of a hastily-organized Provisional Government, until the 
 Prince of Orange should arrive. 
 
 But, with James' further adventures, though they are interesting 
 as a novel, the story of Lambeth Palace has 'nothing to do. 
 
 Yet once more in its history we see the old place alive with 
 men at arms, for the third time threatened with destruction, and 
 the lives of its inmates menaced by a London mob, even as they 
 had been in the days of Wat .Tyler, and during the primacy of 
 
 Laud. 
 
 . 
 
 54 
 
LAMBETH PALACE 
 
 For a second time within a century and a half, the cry of " No 
 Popery " was raised. It was during the Gordon Riots in 1780, 
 when 40,000 rioters assembled in St. George's Fields on the other 
 side of Lambeth Marsh, and in the near neighbourhood of Lambeth 
 Palace : thirty-six incendiary fires were lighted, and a second 
 great fire of London but narrowly averted. Five hundred of the 
 mob came to the Palace, but the gates were closely shut, and no 
 notice taken of their demand for admission. 
 
 Finding this, the rioters went away with the avowed intention 
 of returning at night. Before they could do so Archbishop Corn- 
 wallis and his family were persuaded to leave the place, the 
 military were summoned, and by two o'clock in the afternoon 
 one hundred guards arrived and took possession. 
 
 Sentries were stationed in the towers and elsewhere, and im- 
 mediate danger was over. Nevertheless the rioters did not at 
 once disperse. For several days they lingered about the Palace, 
 undeterred by the presence of the soldiers, who, to the number of 
 two or three hundred, were quartered there for two months. 
 
 Of the independent history of the gardens I have been unable 
 to discover much. 
 
 The Rev. J. Cave-Brown in his " Lambeth Palace : " makes 
 little or no reference to them, but in the somewhat tediously dis- 
 cursive pages of Dr. Ducarel, who is the chief authority, as before 
 said, upon the history of the archiepiscopal residence, and upon 
 whose stores Cave-Brown himself has chiefly drawn, I have found 
 allusions that bear upon the subject, incidentally. In the suit 
 brought by Archbishop Cornwallis in 1776, by which he claimed 
 exemption from taxation on the plea that the Palace was " extra 
 parochial "a legal action described, in detail by Ducarel, to 
 which I have previously referred the question raised was " whether 
 the house and garden known by the name of the Archbishop's 
 palace at Lambeth was, or is not, in the parish of Lambeth," 
 and in the course of the arguments for and against, reference is 
 made to the Archbishop's " garden" his " park," and his " cherry- 
 orchard." 
 
 Hence, since we know on the authority of Dr. William Stubbs 
 in his " Constitutional History," that wide, enclosed chases and parks 
 surrounded the " embattled " residences of the two Archbishops, 
 
 55 
 
GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 
 
 it may be safely assumed that the enclosed lands of Lambeth 
 Palace included, once upon a time, not only gardens, but also 
 chase, and park, and that they were very extensive. 
 
 Where " Lambeth Palace Road " now is, was formerly an 
 avenue of elms known as " Bishop's Walk." It was a favourite 
 promenade until it was swept away to make room for the Albert 
 Embankment ; but it did not exist in very early days, although 
 some of its patriarchal trees may have been in the Palace gardens 
 in the time when the latter stretched to the river bank. Much 
 of the land where now stands St. Thomas's Hospital, has been 
 reclaimed from the mud of the river ; the remainder of it was 
 covered by a grove of trees, no doubt originally on lands belonging 
 to the Palace. In those days Lambeth Marsh and St. George's 
 Fields must have come close up to these. " St. George's Fields," 
 says the writer of " Old and New London," " appear to have 
 been marked by all the floral beauty of meadows uninvaded by 
 London smoke. And yet these fields, together with Lambeth 
 Marsh, which lies between them and the river, were at one time 
 almost covered with water at every high tide." Across them the 
 Romans threw embanked roads, and raised villas after the Dutch 
 summer-house fashion, on piles. 
 
 When John Tombs in his " Curiosities of London " says " Lambeth 
 abounded in gardens," he probably meant market gardens, for 
 these occupied much land on the opposite Middlesex shore, and 
 doubtless did so on the Surrey side also ; and according to Pennant, 
 between Southwark and Lambeth there was not a single house in 
 1560. Even a hundred years later Pepys wrote in his diary : 
 * Went across the river to Lambeth and so over the fields to 
 Southwark." 
 
 All this goes to prove that in the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seven- 
 teenth centuries, the demesne of Lambeth was really in the country ; 
 although so rapid, even at that day, was the growth of London, 
 that James I. predicted that " England will shortly be London, 
 and London England." 
 
 It must be remembered, as mentioned in the previous chapter, 
 that before Elizabeth's days, English gardening, having developed 
 a distinct style of its own, had arrived at great excellence. The 
 pleasure-grounds of Lambeth House, which, even at the present 
 day, when they are surrounded by acres of houses and factories, 
 
 56 
 
LAMBETH PALACE 
 
 retain much charm, must have been exceedingly fair to look 
 upon in the reign of the Virgin Queen, being ideally situated 
 bounded on one side by the then pellucid Thames, which ran 
 between high and irregular banks on the other by the blue, illimit- 
 able distances of Surrey. Unfortunately our information con- 
 cerning them is meagre, and we have but slender data to go upon : 
 the Computus Bellevorwn, so regularly kept, seem to have dealt 
 only with the domestic expenditure of the household, and with 
 the outlay, for additions and repairs, to the buildings. The refer- 
 ence, however, to a " Rabbed garden " by which must have been 
 meant a rabbit warren suggests that only a portion of the attached 
 land was cultivated, the rest being allowed to remain picturesquely 
 wild. Among the long list of the Primate's servants there is no 
 mention of gardeners, probably because the outdoor service was 
 not included at all : but the flowers of Chaucer, Shakespeare, 
 and Spenser, did not spring up unbidden ; and gardeners there 
 certainly were to plant and water, before the age of the Tradescents, 
 who, though gardeners to royalty, were resident at Lambeth, 
 where their influence would be exerted and felt. 
 
 Ducarel tells us that Cranmer erected in the gardens a curious 
 " Solar " (or summer house) of exquisite workmanship ; and that 
 Archbishop Parker, who did repair and " re-edify " all the houses 
 of the See of Canterbury, " in the year of our Lord 1569, greatly 
 repaired and beautified this Palace. The Great Hall he covered 
 with shingles : he made entirely the long bridge " (i.e., the horse 
 ferry pier) "that reached into the Thames: the famous 'Solar,' 
 or summer-house in the garden built by Archbishop Cranmer 
 and now almost decayed, he restored to its ancient form and 
 beauty. He also repaired two aqueducts for the conveyance of 
 water, one in the garden, and another for the common use of the 
 household in the inner cloister." 
 
 It is probable that the summer-house was destroyed when the 
 regicides, Scott and Hardy, demolished so much that was venerable 
 and of historic interest ; for no trace of it remains. 
 
 Nor is there any longer any vestige of a park, or of the chase, or 
 wilderness ; but the grounds, at the end of the seventeenth century, 
 had already attracted attention ; and Gibson, in his account of 
 the Gardens near London in 1691, at the beginning of the reign 
 of William III., remarks that " The Archbishop of Canterbury's 
 
 57 
 
GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 
 
 garden at Lambeth hath little in it but walks, the late Archbishop 
 not delighting in one, but they are now making them better ; and 
 they have already made a greenhouse, one of the finest and costliest 
 about town. It is of three rooms, the middle having a stove under 
 it ; the foresides of the room are all, almost all glass, the roof 
 covered with lead, the whole part (to adorn the building) rising 
 gravel- wise higher than the rest ; but it is placed so near Lambeth 
 Church that the sun shines not on it in winter after eleven o'clock 
 a fault owned by the gardeners, but not thought of by the con- 
 triver. Most of the greens are oranges and lemons, which have 
 very large ripe fruit on them." 
 
 Evelyn, who did so much for horticulture in the seventeenth 
 century, when Archbishop Tillotson was installed at Lambeth in 
 1691, tells us in his diary, that he dined at Lambeth with the 
 new Archbishop " and saw the effect of my greenhouse furnaces 
 set up by my son-in-law." 
 
 It is probable that when Archbishop Howley, some seventy 
 years ago, built the residential portion of the Palace as we now 
 see it, he laid out the gardens in their present form. The gardens, 
 together with the buildings, are said to occupy about thirteen acres 
 of ground only ; for a recent Archbishop, Dr. Temple, for the term 
 of his life, generously alienated some acres of the land attached 
 to the Palace, and surrendered it to the London County Council 
 for a people's park, called the " Archbishop's Park." His successor 
 has not withdrawn the privilege, although the quiet of the place 
 is certainly disturbed by the shouts of boys and girls at play on 
 the south side of the garden walls, and the shrill cries and cockney 
 accent of these slum children strike the ear unmusically ; but 
 who would have it otherwise ? 
 
 So far as the flowers go. the character of an old English garden 
 is well maintained at Lambeth in the present day. There are 
 no hateful " ribbon borders," debased in taste, anywhere or 
 at any time ; but which would be entirely incongruous in such 
 venerable surroundings. The gardens make no claim to rival 
 those of Sion Park, Holland House, or Chiswick House, in beauty ; 
 they are too near London smoke, and Southwark's factories, for 
 that to be possible ; and I do not think that the hand of the 
 Dutch gardener of the seventeenth, or the landscape gardener of 
 the eighteenth centuries, is to be traced here at all. 
 
 58 
 
LAMBETH PALACE 
 
 No longer does "the river of Thames," as Stowe quaintly calls it, 
 wash any part of their walls, nor do the gardens themselves slope to 
 its banks. The groves where nightingales sang, are covered now 
 by the wards of a great hospital, and the benevolent Archbishop 
 makes some of its inmates free of his green lawns and shady walks, 
 for the nurses from St. Thomas's play tennis on the turf, or recline 
 on chairs beneath the trees. 
 
 Many are the garden parties for both rich and poor given at 
 Lambeth in the piping times of peace. The humblest, as well 
 as the highest in the land, find generous entertainment there, 
 though the character of that entertainment has entirely changed 
 since Archbishops Parker and Whitgift made Queen Elizabeth 
 welcome within their walls. Of course there are many al-jresco 
 gatherings, where the ecclesiastical soft hat, gaiters, and even 
 apron, are much in evidence. It was of one of these parties that 
 a story is told that I may be pardoned for introducing here, for 
 it may raise a smile at the close of this chapter, and the history of 
 Lambeth of which I have had the telling, has hitherto contained 
 much of gravity, and nothing of mirth. 
 
 Having so far tried to be accurate in matter of dates, I will 
 now merely say that once upon a time, probably at the end of 
 the last century, there was a garden fete at Lambeth, on an occa- 
 sion which drew together a concourse of newly-ordained young 
 clergymen. 
 
 It was a lovely afternoon, and all went well and gaily, until 
 the time for tea and strawberries. Then His Grace's pet parrot 
 escaped, and flew into the garden. Dear me ! It almost seemed 
 that an ecclesiastical parrot breaking bounds is as great a delin- 
 quent as was the Jackdaw of Rheims of Ingoldsby fame, so in- 
 tense was the excitement, so tremendous the hullabaloo ! The 
 ladies put down their tea-cups, and waved their parasols at him, 
 and called out " Pretty Poll ! " enticingly. The gentlemen 
 followed him from bush to bush, and from tree to tree. They 
 tempted him with sugar and strawberries, and everything to which 
 a pampered bird, brought up in a palace, might be supposed to 
 be partial. But the parrot, having newly tasted the greater sweets 
 of liberty, was not to be lightly won. No mind had he at present 
 to return to his gilded cage. He resisted both blandishments and 
 threats, and, moreover, he behaved reprehensibly ; for aggravatingly 
 
 59 
 
GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 
 
 hopping from bough to bough and flying from tree to tree, he 
 always eluded the clutch of the most agile of his pursuers at the 
 very moment of that person's apparent success. 
 
 Presently the bird began to mount higher and higher, until he 
 reached the loftiest branch of a tall and spreading ailanthus, and 
 was quite out of everybody's reach. A ladder was brought, which 
 half a dozen aspiring young curates eagerly volunteered to climb. 
 But whilst the long chase waxed sterner, and excitement grew 
 apace in the ranks of the guests below, the parrot himself, con- 
 spicuous among the foliage in his scarlet and grey, calmly began 
 to plume his feathers, which was quite a perfunctory performance, 
 because they were really not in the least degree ruffled. Serenely 
 and rather haughtily, he looked down upon his would-be captors, 
 then closing one eye, it is a way that parrots have and expresses 
 the acme of knowingness, he put his head on one side and solemnly 
 ejaculated, "Let us pray" 
 
 It is supposed by some that the smooth shaven lawn of the outer 
 court, shown in the drawing of the gateway, was at one time a 
 bowling-green. This is not unlikely, but it must certainly have 
 been paved with cobble-stones in earlier days, for then the principal 
 entrance to the great hall opened, as I understand, directly upon 
 it. The primate, as we know, kept high state, and the courtyard 
 would be crowded with men and horses on occasions commemorated 
 in the Parish annals by the usual charges for ringing the church 
 bells. 
 
 There are some ancient and dusty fig trees in the inner court, 
 and these, according to Tombs in the " Curiosities of London," are 
 the offspring of " two fine white fig trees which were traditionally 
 planted by Cardinal Pole. The parent trees were more than fifty 
 feet in height, and forty in breadth, and their circumference 
 twenty-eight to twenty-one inches." Their immediate descendants, 
 though showing signs of wear and tear, form a very interesting 
 link in the chain of- historic happenings of which the old Palace 
 has been the scene ; events which have taken us from the days 
 of Baldwin, Chicherley, Morton, and Cranmer, to those of Laud, 
 Juxon, and Tillotson. 
 
 There are many fine old trees at Lambeth, and one would be 
 glad to know who planted them, but alas ! in these gardens there 
 is no talking oak to tell us ! A distinct character is given to the 
 
 60 
 
Lambeth Palace : The Fig-tree, in Greater Courtyard. 
 
 [To face p. GO. 
 
LAMBETH PALACE 
 
 grounds by the presence in great numbers of magnificent speci- 
 mens of the ailanthus, commonly and picturesquely named the 
 " Tree of Heaven." It is singularly prolific, continually sending 
 up suckers, and there must be at least a hundred examples at 
 Lambeth, for I myself, one day counted eighty ! " The Tree of 
 Heaven," or " Tree of the Gods," has a strong family likeness 
 to the ash, and is own sister to the sumach. Can there be any 
 subtle connection between the Scandinavian idea of the great 
 World-tree " Yggdrasil " the ash-tree of existence, whose top- 
 most branches stretched up to Asgard, and whose roots reached 
 down to the regions of Hela, Queen of the Dead and the " Tree 
 of Heaven " in the garden of a Christian prelate ? Anyway, 
 these foreign-looking trees with their fern-like foliage, and signifi- 
 cant and picturesque name, give a distinct character to Lambeth, 
 where they are more in evidence than anywhere else ; and here, 
 therefore, of all places, one may feel that with 
 
 " The kiss of the sun for pardon, 
 
 The song of the birds for mirth, 
 One is nearer to God in a garden 
 Than anywhere else on earth." 
 
 01 
 
CHAPTER III 
 FULHAM PALACE 
 
 FULHAM PALACE is the well-known summer residence of 
 the Bishops of London. 
 
 It is said to be thirteen hundred years since the bishops 
 first established themselves on the banks of the Thames at Fulham, 
 and assuming this to be correct, they must have settled there soon 
 after A.D. 597, the date of the conversion of the Anglo-Saxons to 
 Christianity. 
 
 According to some authorities the word Fulham, or Fullerham, 
 means the " place " either " of fowls " or " of dirt," but we ask 
 in vain for the why, or the wherefore, of this. Somewhere, no 
 doubt, lost in the mists of centuries, there lies hidden some tradition 
 or historical fact which would explain it but most of the events 
 of that early period are shrouded in an obscurity which it is im- 
 possible to penetrate, and the false and the true are inextricably 
 mixed up together. 
 
 The " Manor House " of Fulham, as it was called until com- 
 paratively recent times, is almost as badly off for historians as 
 Lambeth, the chequered story of which was sketched in the last 
 chapter. Therefore I base my account of it mainly on the 
 testimony of Thomas Faulkner, who wrote of the Parish of Fulham 
 In 1813, and of Ly sons, whose " Environs of London " was published 
 rather earlier. These two writers have left us the best history 
 extant of the episcopal Palace, and of the lives of its learned 
 occupants. 
 
 The gardens of the Manor House are far more beautiful and 
 famous than those of the Primate, and have been so from the days 
 
 62 
 
FULHAM PALACE 
 
 of Mary Tudor. But, on the other hand, the historical interest 
 of Lambeth is incomparably greater, and this notwithstanding 
 that Fulham had earlier beginnings. Fulham, although seldom 
 entirely out of touch with passing events, was generally only a 
 passive spectator of them. The spot was in those days far removed 
 from London, which, then as now, was the arena of action and 
 conflict. Hence those public happenings, which, as we have seen, 
 cast a lurid light on the archiepiscopal residence on the south 
 bank of the river, and so often disturbed its peace, as a rule left 
 the repose of the bishop's house on the opposite shore unbroken, 
 and the tragical episodes in the lives of highly-placed men and 
 women, which have given a romantic though painful interest to 
 every stone of Lambeth, very rarely occurred at Fulham. When- 
 ever the Bishops of London were concerned in them, the scene 
 of the events was " London House " near old St. Paul's their 
 winter home. 
 
 To this rule there were, of course, exceptions. For Foxe, the 
 14 martyrologist," tells us that when Bonner was Bishop of Lon- 
 don, some of the acts of persecution of which he was guilty, were 
 perpetrated at his own summer residence at Fulham, his ghost 
 in consequence being long popularly supposed to haunt the gardens 
 and part of the Manor House. 
 
 The dignity of a metropolitan bishop, though great, is inferior 
 to that of an archbishop ; and unless when exceptional circum- 
 stances, accident, or conspicuous talent and force of character, 
 brought them into unwonted prominence, the Bishops of London 
 were not called upon to take a leading part in secular affairs. As 
 a rule we find that the most distinguished of their number were 
 translated to Canterbury ; and, as in the archiepiscopal See there 
 was greater scope for their abilities and their influence, it was 
 generally during their residence at Lambeth, that the more notable 
 events in their public careers occurred. Laud and Juxon each 
 in turn Bishop of London, and Archbishop of Canterbury are 
 eminent examples of this. 
 
 Mellitus sent to Britain by Gregory I. to convert the Anglo- 
 Saxons to Christianity, was the first Bishop of London, and in 
 A.D. 619 he became the first Archbishop of Canterbury. 
 
 Erlkenwald, afterwards canonized, was bishop from A.D. 675 to 
 693. It was in his time that the Manor of Fulham was presented 
 
 63 
 
GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 
 
 to the See of London, being held by a service of prayer and masses 
 for the dead. He was the son of Otto, King of the East Saxons, 
 and is said to have heard the preaching of Mellitus in his boyhood. 
 He is credited with having spent large sums on the erection and 
 embellishment of old St. Paul's, and also to him is attributed 
 the building of the Manor House at Fulham. 
 
 In the reign of Alfred the Great, Conqueror of the Danes, that 
 people, so long the terror of northern Europe, and the veritable 
 scourge of the Anglo-Saxons, on the occasion of one of their frequent 
 incursions, sailed up the Thames and wintered at Hammersmith 
 and Fulham, on the spot where the Manor House was ultimately 
 built. It is supposed that, as a defence against attack, they con- 
 structed the moat that surrounds the demesne. 
 
 Fulham Palace is thus literally built upon an island, about 
 thirty-five acres comprising the area of the gardens and park. We 
 shall return to these later, for the historical survey of the place 
 claims some attention, and so do the lives of some of the more 
 celebrated occupants of the See, although, for the reasons before 
 given, some of these are more correctly to be associated with Lam- 
 beth than with Fulham. Many prelates, however, lived and died 
 at the latter place, and several are interred in the burial-ground 
 of the adjoining Parish Church, to which access is given by a 
 bridge over the moat, and a postern, both to be described later. 
 
 Robert de Sigilla, a monk of Reading, said by some to have been 
 Archdeacon of London, was appointed to the metropolitan See in 
 1148* He had been presented to it by Queen Matilda, but civil 
 war was raging between Matilda and Stephen, and Geoffrey de 
 Mandeville, a partisan of the latter, in spite of the protection of 
 the moat, made the unfortunate bishop a prisoner in his own 
 house at Fulham, compelling him to pay a heavy fine in order to 
 regain his liberty. 
 
 Sixteen years later we find the See occupied by one Ralph 
 Baldock, a learned man, writer of the " Annals of Ely," who also 
 filled the office of Lord Chancellor. 
 
 The prelate, however, who has most left his mark upon the 
 Manor House was Richard Fitzjames, who in 1521 rebuilt the 
 great quadrangle. 
 
 Fitzjames was a native of Somersetshire, and educated at 
 Oxford. Attracted by his talents and learning, Henry VII., in 
 
 64 
 
The Entrance to Fulham Palace. 
 
 \Tofactp. 64. 
 
FULHAM PALACE 
 
 1496, appointed him Bishop of Rochester ; from Rochester he 
 was translated to Chichester, and ultimately, in 1505, he became 
 Bishop of London. Fitzjames is credited with having done much 
 for the decoration of old St. Paul's, which seems to have been a 
 magnificent example of the combined Norman, Early English, and 
 Early Decorated styles. The spire that completed the church- 
 said to have been the highest in the world had been erected early 
 in the fourteenth century, therefore Fitzjames can have contri- 
 buted only to the internal adornment of the cathedral. Alas ! 
 nothing remains to us of old St. Paul's except the tradition of its 
 beauty ; but in the courtyard of Fulham Palace we have a very 
 interesting and picturesque example of the domestic architecture 
 of the age of Henry VII., and of the energy and taste of Fitzjames. 
 A sketch of the porch, with the clock, and beneath the latter the 
 arms of a later bishop, will be found in the illustrations. 
 
 Cuthbert Tunsdall was consecrated Bishop of London in 1522, 
 but Henry VII. and Cardinal Wolsey had previously sent him on 
 sundry diplomatic missions to Brussels and Cologne. He was 
 present at the famous Diet of Worms in 1531, negotiated 
 with Charles V. after his victory against the French in 1525 
 at Pavia, and helped four years later to arrange the Peace of* 
 Cambray. 
 
 At home his promotion was rapid. He appears to have retained 
 the favour of Henry VIII. through all that monarch's changes of 
 opinion and policy. He became successively Master of the Rolls, 
 Dean of Salisbury, Bishop of London, and Keeper of the Privy 
 Seal. On the fall of Wolsey, in 1530, he succeeded him in the See 
 of Durham, the bishops of which exercised almost regal power. 
 Tunsdall, though devotedly attached to the traditions of the 
 Church, and though he bought and burnt Tyndall's New Testa- 
 ment, betrayed no animus against the Reformers ; he even accepted 
 Henry as head of the Church. But on the accession of that King's 
 young son his troubles began. In those days persecution was not 
 confined to any one religious party ; each side in turn was equally 
 intolerant. Henry VIII. had his Catholic Martyrs, and under 
 Edward VI. many prelates who had conscientiously adhered to the 
 ancient faith, were persecuted. Among them was Tunsdall, who 
 was sent to the Tower for his steadfast attachment to Romanism. 
 He was released in 1553, when Queen Mary restored him to his 
 
 65 5 
 
GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 
 
 diocese. In 1559 he was again suspended for refusing to take the 
 oath to Elizabeth. This time he was not committed to the state 
 prison, but to the kindly guardianship at Lambeth, of Matthew 
 Parker, the Archbishop at whose consecration he had refused to 
 assist. Tunsdall was respected by all parties. " He showed 
 mercy," said Thomas Fuller, in his " Worthies of England," 
 " and found it in his adversity, having nothing but the name of 
 prisoner, in which condition he died on 18th of November, 1559, 
 aged eighty-five, and was buried at Lambeth." 
 
 Tunsdall was a distinguished scholar, educated at Oxford, Cam- 
 bridge, and Padua. Erasmus bore witness to his attainments 
 when he said " he was comparable to any of the ancients ; " and 
 Fuller tells us that " he was one of the politest scholars of the age.'* 
 It speaks well for the Romish bishop that so convinced a Protestant 
 as the author of " Church and State " and of the ic History of the 
 Worthies of England," has only high praise for both his character 
 and his learning. But then Fuller, in the opinion of Coleridge, 
 '* was incomparably the most sensible, the least prejudiced great 
 man of an age that boasted a galaxy of great men "namely, the 
 middle of the sixteenth century. 
 
 In the annals of the Bishops of London the truculent and relent- 
 less Bonner for some dozen years plays a leading part. He was 
 the successor, though not the immediate successor, of Tunsdall 
 in the See of London but in disposition and principles he differed 
 widely from that excellent prelate, in whom Fuller could find no 
 other fault than his religion. Bonner has earned an unenviable 
 notoriety by his cruel persecution of the Reformers, and by his 
 vindictive treatment of his fallen opponent, Cranmer. 
 
 Supposed to be the natural son of a priest who was himself 
 illegitimate, Bonner first rose to power by attracting the attention 
 of Thomas Cromwell, and later, by playing into the hands of 
 Henry VIII. in the matter of the royal supremacy, and the divorce 
 of Katherine of Arragon. In 1529 he was Wolsey's chaplain, and 
 he was with him at the time of his fall, after which, probably 
 through the influence of Cromwell, he was transferred to the 
 King's service. Sent to Rome to further Henry's cause, he greatly 
 incensed the Pope by the unmannerly violence of his denunciation 
 of the tyranny of the Holy See ; but there seems to be no real 
 ground for the story that the Pontiff threatened to throw him into 
 
 66 
 
FULHAM PALACE 
 
 a cauldron of molten lead a fate that it is said he only escaped 
 by flight. Violence also distinguished his conduct when on an 
 embassy to Paris, about 1538. On that occasion, owing to his 
 behaviour, Francis I. threatened him with a hundred strokes 
 from the halberd. 
 
 In 1539 he became Bishop of London, but, up to the close of 
 Henry's reign, he not only failed to protest against the drastic 
 changes introduced by the King, but was an active agent in intro- 
 ducing them. 
 
 On the accession of the boy Edward, however, both he and 
 Gardner, Bishop of Winchester, began to see whither these changes, 
 in the hands of a Protestant Council, might lead. Bonner opposed 
 the Act of Uniformity, and he refused to enforce the use of the new 
 Book of Common Prayer, nor would he consent to preach at 
 Paul's Cross in support of the young King's supremacy. For this 
 he cannot be blamed ; he was acting a more manly part than when 
 he obsequiously supported Henry VIII. in actions of which he could 
 not have conscientiously approved. He was deprived of his 
 bishopric, and was further condemned to perpetual imprisonment, 
 and Ridley, Bishop of Rochester, was translated to London in his 
 place. 
 
 But alas ! too soon for the Reformers came the reversal of all 
 this, and Bonner's hour of triumph ! The young King died, and 
 his half-sister Mary ascended the throne ; and Bonner, making 
 no difficulty about submitting again to the papal authority that he 
 had forsworn, took active measures to restore Roman Catholicism 
 in his diocese, in which he had been reinstated, and in 1555 began 
 that terrible persecution of heresy to which he owes his undesirable 
 fame. 
 
 On the accession of Elizabeth, Bonner refused to take the oath 
 of supremacy, and was committed to the Marshalsea, where some 
 years later he died. He was interred at midnight, because, owing 
 to his unpopularity, the authorities feared that there would be a 
 disturbance of the peace were his obsequies performed in daylight. 
 
 It is said, in mitigation of his offences, that he did not go out of 
 his way to persecute, and " that many of his victims were forced 
 upon him by the Council, which sometimes thought that he had not 
 been severe enough. So completely had the State dominated the 
 Church, that religious persecutions had become State persecutions, 
 
 67 5* 
 
GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 
 
 and Bonner was acting as an ecclesiastical sheriff in the most 
 refractory district of the realm." 
 
 Be this as it may, his reputation for cruelty was so great that 
 Elizabeth, on her accession, refused to allow him to kiss her hand, 
 although he sat and voted in the Parliament and Convocation of 
 1559. 
 
 The belief that Bonner's burly ghost for he was a corpulent 
 man haunts the gardens at Fulham and the north side of the great 
 quadrangle in which his private rooms had been, arose from the 
 popular belief that, owing to his misdeeds in life, his spirit could 
 find no rest in his grave. Strange to say, though he had been 
 interred by night, his ghost walked by day ! How long the legend 
 held is uncertain there may even be some living who believe 
 it now. Faulkner, writing a hundred years ago, gives the 
 story : 
 
 " In the gardens of Fulham Palace," he says, " is a dark recess ; 
 at the end of it stands a chair, which once belonged to Bishop 
 Bonner. 
 
 " A certain Bishop of London, one fine morning in the month of 
 June, more than two hundred years after the death of the afore- 
 said Bonner, just as the clock of the Gothic chapel had struck six, 
 undertook to cut with his own hand a narrow path through, 
 since called ' the Monks' Walk.' Just as he had begun to clear 
 the way, suddenly up started from the chair the ghost of Bishop 
 Bonner." 
 
 The narrator goes on to tell us that, in a tone of bitter indigna- 
 tion, the ghost spoke, upbraiding the intruder, and uttering certain 
 verses which do not seem to me worth recording ; although the 
 weird tale itself has some significance as being the expression of 
 that popular detestation in which his memory is held. Bonner's 
 chair, long existing, has now disappeared ; but the scene of the 
 visitation was an arbour down by the moat, near a small orchard, 
 which lies between the Home Park, and a shrubbery contiguous to 
 Fulham Churchyard. 
 
 If, as we have seen, a better man than Bonner, and one who was 
 as good a Catholic as he, had preceded him, so now, a better man, 
 who was an excellent Protestant, was his successor ; for high pur- 
 pose, purity of character, and humanity, are of the man, not of 
 his faith. 
 
 68 
 
I am not passing in review all the Bishops of London, but simply 
 singling out those whose names, for one cause or another, have 
 shed lustre, or brought discredit, on the famous and ancient See. 
 Nicholas Ridley, reformer and martyr, though only three years at 
 Fulham, cannot be omitted in any mention of it. A Tynedale 
 man, he was educated at Newcastle-on-Tyne and Cambridge. 
 Having taken his degree of M.A. in 1526, and making divinity 
 his principal study, he set out on his travels on the Continent. 
 He was absent three years, spending some time with the doctors 
 of the Sorbonne, at Paris, and the professors of the University of 
 Louvain. Louvain at that period was specially noted for its 
 theological teaching, and, with students numbering six thousand, 
 it was at the zenith of its fame and prosperity. The tragical fate 
 of this ancient seat of learning, has in these later days, drawn to it 
 the attention of an indignant and compassionate world. It is 
 interesting to remember that among the seventy thousand volumes, 
 and five hundred precious manuscripts in its famous and priceless 
 library, so wickedly and wantonly destroyed in 1914 by the brutal 
 soldiery of the Kaiser, not a few must have been handled and 
 studied by the young, Cambridge divinity graduate who, nearly 
 four hundred years ago, sojourned there to perfect himself in theo- 
 logy. On his return to Cambridge Ridley soon made his mark 
 as a disputant and orator, with leanings towards the Reformed 
 faith ; and he was appointed by Cranmer to the living of Herne, 
 in Kent. He became Chaplain to Henry VIII. and Canon of 
 Canterbury. Even at that time he was accused of heretical teach- 
 ing, but contrived to satisfy his ecclesiastical superiors. He came 
 into high favour in the reign of Edward VI., was one of the compilers 
 of the English Prayer Book, and in 1549, on the deprivation of 
 Bonner, became Bishop of London. It is said that he behaved 
 with great kindness to two of the relatives of the dispossessed 
 prelate, and brought them to Fulham House to live ; and if this be 
 true Bonner was guilty of base ingratitude. The part taken by 
 Ridley in the attempt to establish Lady Jane Grey on the throne, 
 even more than his religious views, drew upon him the vindictive 
 enmity of Queen Mary, and though he asked her pardon for the 
 former offence, he was committed to the Tower. There he wrote 
 a defence of his opinions, but was declared a heretic and excom- 
 municated. Refusing to recant, he was sent to Oxford with 
 
 69 
 
GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 
 
 Cranmer, and Latimer, the saintly Bishop of Worcester ; and there 
 all three were burnt at the stake in 1555. Of him it was said that 
 " he was small in stature, but great in learning and divinity." 
 
 Edmund Grindal was successively Bishop of London, Archbishop 
 of York, and Archbishop of Canterbury. He was a patron of learn- 
 ing, the friend of Burleigh and Bacon, and an ardent admirer of 
 Edmund Spenser, who introduced him into the " Shepherd's 
 Calendar " by the name of " Algrande." He enjoyed many 
 excellent preferments under Edward VI., until the death of that 
 prince and the accession of Mary, compelled him, in common with 
 many other divines, to flee the country. When Elizabeth suc- 
 ceeded her sister, Grindal returned and followed Bonner in the See 
 of London. 
 
 We are now approaching the golden age of gardening, and 
 Grindal appears to have done a good deal to improve the episcopal 
 demesne, for it was just about this time (1559) that the gardens of 
 Fulham House first began to attract attention. But even during 
 the reign of Bonner the Fulham vines had evidently made a certain 
 reputation. We find him writing : 
 
 4 My grapes this year are not yet ripe, but about the ende of 
 next weeke I hope to send some to the Queen's Majestic." 
 Presumably, therefore, Mary was fond of the fruit of the vine. 
 So appears to have been her sister, for Grindal was eleven years 
 at Fulham, during which time he seems to have been in the habit 
 of annually sending grapes to Elizabeth, who, although she with- 
 drew her favour from him after he became Archbishop, had not 
 done so at this time. Faulkner tells us that " the grapes that 
 grew at Fulham were nowadays of such fine value, and a fruit 
 that the Queen stood so well affected to, and so early ripe, that the 
 bishop used every year to send them by one of his servants ; but 
 the report was that at this very time the plague was at his house, 
 and that one nearly died of that distemper there, and three more 
 were sick, by which occasion both the Queen and the Court were 
 in danger, and well it was that no sickness happened them, for if 
 it had, all the blame would have been laid upon the bishop." The 
 bishop, foreseeing this, vindicated himself forthwith in a letter to 
 Secretary Cecil. He explained that " the man's sickness was not 
 of the plague, and he had only been three days ill in the house," 
 but with sickness upon him, he had foolishly gone abroad, had 
 
 70 
 
FULHAM PALACE 
 
 taken cold, *' and so ended his life, but I thank God there is none 
 sickness in my house." 
 
 " Gardens," in the language of Fuller, " began to creep out of 
 Holland into England in the reign of Henry VIII." In that of 
 Elizabeth, the revived interest in horticulture was stimulated by 
 patronage in high quarters, and these influences made them- 
 selves particularly felt at Fulham. The reason for this is not far 
 to seek. John Gerarde, whose "Herbal," published in 1597, and 
 described by him as 4 'the first fruit of these mine own labours, "- 
 was for twenty years head-gardener, or superintendent, to Cecil 
 Lord Burleigh, whose celebrated gardens at Theobalds, in Hert- 
 fordshire, were supposed to have partly inspired Bacon's famous 
 essay " On Gardens." Cecil was the friend of Grindal, and he and 
 his head-gardener probably assisted the bishop with advice con- 
 cerning the cultivation of the grounds attached to his residence. 
 One can easily conceive of a pleasant rivalry in this respect between 
 the master of Fulham and the owner of Theobalds. That Elizabeth 
 herself, when she visited the palace, was interested in the improve- 
 ment and growing beauty of the gardens, is pretty well established 
 by an episode in the life of the next Bishop of London, an episode 
 to which I am coming. 
 
 How Grindal, when Archbishop of Canterbury, fell under the 
 Queen's displeasure, and was never visited by her after he was 
 translated to Lambeth, and how and wherefore he was suspended 
 from the performance of his archiepiscopal duties and not restored 
 until 1582, and how towards the end of his life he became prema- 
 turely old, feeble, and blind, is well known, and belongs not so much 
 to the story of Fulham as to that of Lambeth. 
 
 Bishop Aylmer, or Elmer, his successor in the See of London, 
 does not seem to have shared Grindal's taste for horticulture ; 
 he appears to have somewhat neglected the gardens, and is said to 
 have destroyed several trees. But Strype, in his biography, says, 
 " he only cut down two or three decayed ones." It is not clear 
 whether Faulkner refers to this when, speaking of the bishop, he 
 tells us that " one of the greatest troubles he ever had was an 
 information lodged against him for cutting down the wood belong- 
 ing to his See at Fulham, which he was restrained from doing by 
 the Queen's Order, after the matter had been investigated by the 
 Council." " Wood," in this connection, may have meant a grove, 
 
 71 
 
GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 
 
 or thicket of growing trees, which belonged to the manor, and being 
 suitable timber for building purposes, was of value. It may 
 possibly have obstructed a view, or been otherwise in the way ; 
 but in touching it the bishop went beyond his province. Again, 
 on the other hand, it is possible that he merely cut down a few of 
 the trees scattered about the park and gardens, to fell which was 
 not quite so inexcusable. The incident in either case seems some- 
 what to indicate a personal concern for the beauty and integrity 
 of the gardens on the part of the Queen. 
 
 Aylmer had been domestic chaplain to the Marquis of Dorset, 
 and tutor to his children, among whom was the Lady Jane Grey. 
 It is this fact that chiefly makes him interesting to us. Like so 
 many of the Reformed clergy, he took refuge on the Continent on 
 the accession of Mary ; but he returned in 1576, and was made 
 Bishop of London by Elizabeth. 
 
 His behaviour during the visitation of the plague in 1578 is 
 deserving of much praise ; but the same cannot be said of his 
 treatment of both Puritan and Papist, and indeed of all whose 
 views differed from his own. Aylmer's friends describe him as 
 being quick-tempered, and free, and blunt in speech ; his enemies 
 declare that he was tyrannical towards inferiors, and " virulent in 
 speech." He was accused of swearing, and of the too frequent 
 use of the phrase "by my faith" an oath innocent enough in 
 our eyes. His latitudinarian views with regard to the Sabbath 
 gave great offence in some quarters, and he was charged with break- 
 ing the commandment to keep the Sabbath day holy. One 
 confesses to have more sympathy with the bishop than with his 
 Sabbatarian critics, for we learn from Strype's " Life of John 
 Aylmer, Lord Bishop of London," that he was blamed for playing 
 his favourite game of bowls on a Sunday. He said, " in excuse, that 
 he did it for the diversion of his mind from care, and for the pre- 
 servation of his health ; he further pleaded in extenuation that he 
 never withdrew himself from service, or the sermon, on the Lord's 
 Day ; that Christ, the best exponent of the Sabbath, had said, 
 ' the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath ; ' 
 that food might be cooked for health's sake on the Sabbath : 
 why not, then, have our healthy bodily exercise on that day ? " 
 And he also argued that in Geneva, and other Protestant resorts, 
 the people refreshed themselves after service was over, with bowls, 
 
 72 
 
FULHAM PALACE 
 
 walking, and other innocent recreations ; and that he only followed 
 what, in his travels abroad, he had seen practised. 
 
 After Aylmer's return from exile, his career was comparatively 
 uneventful, and it is chiefly interesting as showing the manner of 
 the domestic life of a highly-placed ecclesiastic of that day. He 
 appears to have resided much at Fulham during his episcopal reign 
 of nearly thirty years, and we may associate his idiosyncrasies, his 
 virtues, and his failings, with the older portions of the Manor 
 House, as it exists at the present day. I do not know the exact 
 position of the bowling-green to which he was so much attached, 
 but it was probably the one part of the gardens that was never 
 neglected, and very possibly it may have been on the site of the 
 well-kept tennis lawn of to-day. We know pretty well how the 
 house itself looked, for in Aylmer's time the quadrangle built by 
 Bishop Fitzjames was but fifty years old, and it has undergone 
 no change in style. Also, the quaint and picturesque Henry VII. 
 gateway of brick, separating the lawns and flower plots proper, 
 from the great walled fruit and vegetable garden, though it has been 
 restored, is unaltered. The bishop had a family of seven sons and 
 two or three daughters. His wife, " Judith," was a lady of good 
 family, and we are told that "as he came into his bishopric in 
 good circumstances, so he died very rich." One would have 
 preferred to know that he died somewhat poor. In private life 
 ''he was economical, though fond of magnificence," but we can 
 forgive his ostentation, and even excuse his violence of speech, 
 when we remember his good deeds during the severe visitation of 
 the plague in 1578 or thereabouts. It was a visitation occurring 
 soon after his appointment to the See of London, and he seems 
 at that time to have acted with great discretion and humanity. 
 We are told that the sick were visited by the clergy, every possible 
 comfort was liberally administered, and that books containing 
 directions for preventing the spreading of the contagion, were 
 freely circulated at his expense. In all these arrangements Aylmer 
 was certainly in advance of his age. 
 
 His tenure of office was, on the whole, very peaceful ; and he 
 seems to have lived the life of a great seigneur. He was wealthy, 
 and appears to have kept up great state, for his household consisted 
 of eighty persons an establishment more suited to an archbishop 
 than a bishop. He preached often in the Cathedral of his diocese, 
 
 73 
 
GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 
 
 and owing to his zeal in maintaining the discipline of the Church 
 of England he gained, and retained, the confidence and favour of 
 Elizabeth. Only on one occasion, that on which he so hastily cut 
 down the trees of the demesne, was he ever threatened with the with- 
 drawal of either, and then the Queen's displeasure seems to have 
 troubled him excessively. But Elizabeth could not doubt the 
 Bishop's devotion to her service, of which rather a comical proof 
 is recorded by Strype, who relates, as a signal instance of his courage 
 and loyalty, that on one occasion Aylmer had a tooth drawn in 
 order to encourage the Queen to submit to the same painful 
 operation. The incident, trifling though it is, speaks not a little 
 for the princess who was capable of inspiring such an act of self- 
 sacrifice. But, as remarked elsewhere, whatever her weaknesses, 
 Elizabeth won and held, the affection and confidence of her subjects. 
 With remarkable acumen she called to her councils, from a galaxy 
 of great men. exactly those best fitted to advise her ; and so 
 supported, she brought the nation to a pitch of glory and a state of 
 freedom unknown before in our island's history. Thus, notwith- 
 standing her absurd vanity, and some errors of policy and conduct, 
 she retained the esteem, as well as the love, of her people to the end 
 of her long reign. An autocrat indeed she was, and civilian, lay- 
 man, and ecclesiastic, deprecated her displeasure ; for (as we shall 
 see in the case of a bishop who succeeded Aylmer) it was felt that 
 to be out of her favour was to be out of the sun ! But the service 
 she so imperiously demanded was cheerfully rendered, because in 
 the eyes of her people she stood for all that was most dear to them : 
 for freedom to worship as they listed, and for escape from a threat- 
 ened, and intolerable foreign yoke. And this explains how it was 
 .that on her demise paeans of praise mingled with the national 
 lamentations, and that her people's grief and pride found expression 
 in various ways, notably in church monuments. It is true that 
 memorial stones are proverbially liars, and that too often they 
 extol the quite imaginary talents of mediocre persons, and the 
 virtues of those who were faulty in their lives. But when a powerful 
 ruler passes away, leaving neither kith nor kin to defend his memory 
 against detractors; when his ability to make or to mar, to bless or 
 to ban, dies with him ; when at last men dare to declare their 
 innermost thoughts ; when frank speech is not ttse-mqjeste, then 
 may even memorial stones tell the truth ! 
 
 74 
 
FULHAM PALACE 
 
 The Tradescent epitaph in Lambeth Churchyard was no isolated 
 instance ; in scores of old City churches, some still existing, others 
 swept away in the great fire of 1666, there were raised, on Queen 
 Elizabeth's death, genuine and voluntary testimonies to her worth. 
 " Religion in its primitive sincerity restored," to quote the monu- 
 ment from Blackfriars Church, which epitomized the events of 
 forty-five years. " Peace thoroughly settled, Coine to the true 
 value refin'd, Rebellion at home extinguished, France neere mine 
 by intestine mischifes relieved, Netherlands supported, Spaine's 
 Armada vanquished, Ireland with Spaniards' expulsion and 
 traitors' correction quieted, both Universities' Revenues, by a Law 
 of Provision, exceedingly augmented, Finally all England 
 enriched, 45 years most prudently governed, Elizabeth, a Queene, 
 a Conqueresse, Triumpher, the most devoted to piety, the most 
 happy, after 70 yeeres of her life, quietly by Death departed." 
 
 Elsewhere another sums up the royal virtues thus : 
 
 " This, this was she, that in dispight of Death, 
 Lives still admir'd, ador'd Elizabeth. 
 
 " Spaine's rod, Rome's ruine, 
 
 Netherland's reliefe, 
 Heaven's gem, Earth's joy, 
 
 World's wonder, Nature's chiefe." 
 
 With quaint brevity a third epitaph informs us that : 
 
 " She ruled England yeeres 44, and more, 
 And then returned to God 
 At the age of 70 yeeres, and somewhat od." 
 
 And it winds up as do all the other memorials to Queen Elizabeth 
 with a text that in the minds of her people had clearly a literal 
 meaning : 
 
 " I have fought a good fight, 
 I have kept the faith." 
 
 Possibly the reader may say : " And what has all this to do with 
 the story of Fulham Palace ? " Only this much, that it was the 
 expression at the time of the national feeling, and goes far to explain 
 the attitude of mind of Dr. Richard Fletcher, who became Bishop 
 of London in 1593, and whose grief at the loss of his royal mistress's 
 favour is supposed to have shortened his life. He had previously 
 
 75 
 
GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 
 
 been Bishop of Bristol and Bishop of Worcester, and as Dean of 
 Peterborough had attended the execution of Mary Queen of Scots at 
 Fotheringay Castle. For thirteen years he had been chaplain to 
 Queen Elizabeth, whose dislike to a married clergy was well known. 
 Time, no doubt, had modified her early prejudice, but she was 
 clearly of the opinion of St. Paul that " a bishop should be the hus- 
 band of one wife ; " and, knowing this, as he must have done, 
 Fletcher was courting disaster, when, shortly after his translation 
 to the See of London, he married for a second time. In conse- 
 quence, for twelve months he was banished from Court, where he 
 had been a constant attendant for twenty years ; and for six months 
 was suspended from the exercise of his ecclesiastical functions : 
 the period of his disgrace might have been longer but for the good 
 offices of friends. Nor does he seem ever to have completely re- 
 covered the Queen's favour, " which of all things," says Faulkner, 
 " he most desired." He died suddenly " whilst sitting in his chair 
 and smoking tobacco, which was not usually taken in those days, 
 unless by way of physic, or to divert melancholy ; " therefore we 
 may conclude that the unfortunate bishop was very melancholy 
 indeed. Unlike Aylmer, Bishop Fletcher died poor. 
 
 The bishop's initials, with the date 1595, are in the window of the 
 hall at Fulham, for he had spent much money in restoring the 
 palace, and also other houses of the See. This was pleaded at his 
 death in support of a petition to the Queen to defray his debts, 
 and assist his eight children. He had repaired the palace, says 
 Faulkner, " out of respect, as well to his duty and necessary use, 
 as to Her Majesty's satisfaction, for he hoped one day to recover 
 her gracious favour, and to see Her Majesty in his house at 
 Fulham " . . . " Such," he adds, " was Bishop Fletcher, whose 
 pride was rather in him than on him, as only gait and gesture 
 deep, not sinking to his heart, though carelessly condemned as a 
 proud man, far more humble than he appeared." 
 
 The bishop's son, John Fletcher, was the well-known dramatist 
 who wrote plays in collaboration with Francis Beaumont, and after 
 Beaumont's death, with Jonson and Massinger. The bishop's 
 nephew was that Phineas Fletcher who was the author of " The 
 Purple Island." 
 
 Queen Elizabeth appears to have been very fond of visiting the 
 prelates of the Reformed Church, and therefore that she ceased to 
 
 76 
 
FULHAM PALACE 
 
 honour Fulham Palace during the prelacy of Fletcher, was a very 
 significant sign of her displeasure, all the more so that she was in 
 the habit of very frequently coming to a house in the immediate 
 neighbourhood. The sensitive bishop must therefore have been 
 keenly conscious of the slight deliberately put by the Queen upon 
 her quondam chaplain and favourite ; nor can we withhold our 
 sympathy from him and from his wife, on those numerous occasions 
 when they must have listened to the church bells ringing in 
 honour of the royal visits to a near, and by no means distinguished 
 neighbour. 
 
 Reference is elsewhere made in these pages to the custom of ring- 
 ing the church bells whenever the reigning sovereign paid a visit 
 to a subject, or passed through a district. In popish times, they 
 were also rung on many other occasions, and for many additional 
 reasons, bells being accredited with all sorts of supernatural 
 powers. They were baptized, anointed, exorcised, and blessed 
 by the bishop. Evil spirits were supposed to dislike bells, which, 
 it was believed, had the power to drive the devils out of the air, 
 calm storms and tempests, make fair weather, extinguish sudden 
 fires, and raise the dead. Incidentally I may mention that the 
 practice of ringing changes on bells is said to be peculiar to this 
 country, and therefore according to Faulkner " Britain has been 
 called the ringing island." 
 
 The parish accounts, both of Lambeth and Fulham, record 
 frequent payment to bell-ringers of sums varying from 4d. to 5s. 6d. 
 In 1603, even so much as 7s. a large amount in those days was 
 paid to the Lambeth ringers " being the proclamation of our noble 
 King." In 1571 Is. is entered as the reward of the ringers " when 
 the Queen's Majestic rode about the fields." Lysons also tells us 
 that when Elizabeth " went through Lambeth to my Lord Cham- 
 berlain's," they received 2s. 6d. ; and 5s. 4d. when she " tooke 
 water at Lambeth and went to the Bishop of London's," in August, 
 1601. This was during the lifetime of Bishop Aylmer. 
 
 There is a tragic significance attaching to the charge of Is. for 
 ringing the bells when the Queen of Scots was put to death, and to 
 our minds they must have been " sweet bells jangled, out of tune, 
 and harsh." But, owing to the constant plots against the Queen 
 of England by the friends and supporters of Mary, a large section 
 of the nation regarded her continued existence as a menace, not 
 
 77 
 
GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 
 
 only to their sovereign's life and throne, but to the security of the 
 Protestant religion. 
 
 On a certain day mentioned by Lysons, two-and-eight pence 
 was paid " for the Queen's Majestic being at Putney for vyttels 
 for the ringers," and, as the beautiful bells of Fulham church rang 
 their merriest over and over again on similar occasions between 
 the years 1579 and 1603, the parish of Fulham must have been 
 heavily mulcted as the result of the royal favour, for during that 
 time Queen Elizabeth paid many visits to a certain commoner 
 named Lacy, who dwelt in a house near the waterside at Putney, 
 in full view probably, of the windows of the bishop's house on 
 the opposite bank of the Thames. We will let Lysons tell his 
 own story in his own words : ' ' It appears by several subsequent 
 entries that the Queen's visits were to Mr. Lacy, of whom I have 
 not been able to find any account than that he was a citizen of 
 London, and of the Cloth workers Company. Her Majesty no 
 doubt derived either convenience or amusement from his ac- 
 quaintance, for she seems to have honoured him with her company 
 more frequently than any other of her subjects, and sometimes 
 stayed at Putney for two or three nights." There are the bell- 
 ringing records of these visits long prior to Bishop Fletcher's ap- 
 pointment, so that to this friendship, if we may call it such, she 
 was curiously constant, and one cannot help wondering wherein 
 lay the attraction, when one learns that she dined at Mr. Lacy's 
 three times during 1596, and stayed there three days in March 
 of the same year. She was there again one night in 1597, two 
 nights in 1601, and dined there on January the 21st, 1602, shortly 
 before her death. It would seem that on all these occasions the 
 bells of Fulham Church were rung, although the Queen's barge 
 must have landed her at Putney, on the Surrey side of the river. 
 That this mysterious Mr. Lacy, for nearly a quarter of a century, 
 enjoyed the favour of Elizabeth showed that she could be as 
 steady in her attachments, as unforgiving in her displeasure, when 
 such an one as the unlucky Bishop Fletcher had incurred it. 
 
 Richard Bancroft, Chaplain to Elizabeth, who was raised to 
 the See of London in 1597, was honoured with visits at Fulham 
 both from Elizabeth and James, and was chief overseer of the latest 
 translation of the Bible. At a conference at Hampton Court he 
 acquitted himself with so ; much prudence that James, in 1604, 
 
 78 
 
FULHAM PALACE 
 
 raised him to the See of Canterbury. " Archbishop Whitgift 
 spoke most gravely, Bishop Bilson most learnedly, but Bishop 
 Bancroft (when out of passion) most politically." 
 
 Dr. George Abbott, Bishop of Lichfield but translated to London 
 in 1610, was only one year at Fulham before he was appointed 
 to the See of Canterbury, therefore he can be but little associated 
 with Fulham and its gardens. We are told that the latter years 
 of his life were embittered by his grief at having accidentally killed 
 a keeper while hunting in a nobleman's park in Hampshire. 
 
 Faulkner has not much of interest to tell us of Dr. John King, 
 who succeeded Abbott in the London diocese, though it is stated 
 that James I. styled him " the King of Preachers." The calumny 
 of his having died in the communion of the Church of Rome has 
 been ably refuted. 
 
 In 1628, William Laud was translated from the See of Bath and 
 Wells to that of London. But, as only five years later he was 
 promoted to Canterbury, his history belongs less to Fulham than 
 to Lambeth ; and the story of Lambeth, with mention of him 
 and his troubled reign there, has already been told. In his diary, 
 under date September 14th, 1633, he says : " I was translated to 
 the Archbishopric of Canterbury the Lord make me able,". . . etc. 
 . . . " the day before, when I first went to Lambeth, my coach 
 and horses and men sunk to the bottom of the Thames in the 
 ferry boate, which was overladen, but, I praise God for it, I lost 
 neither men nor horses." Fuller in his " Church History " describes 
 Laud as being " low of stature, little in bulk, cheerful in coun- 
 tenance." 
 
 The gentle Bishop Juxoii was the prelate who, as Bishop of 
 London, attended Charles I. on the scaffold, and to whom the King 
 addressed the mysterious word " remember." During the troublous 
 times that followed he was for a while imprisoned by the Parlia- 
 ment, but he afterwards returned to Fulham, and appears to 
 have lived there unmolested, until the Manor was sold to Colonel 
 Harvey in 1647, for the sum of 7,617 8s. lOd. Having purchased 
 an estate at Compton, in Gloucestershire, he then repaired 'thither, 
 and remained there undisturbed throughout the era of the Com- 
 monwealth. At the Restoration he became Archbishop of Canter- 
 bury, and, having rebuilt the great hall, as mentioned in the pre- 
 vious chapter, he died in 1663, at the age of eighty-one, and it 
 
 79 
 
GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 
 
 was well said of him " that even the haters of prelacy could never 
 hate Juxon." 
 
 The Sheldonian Theatre at Oxford was built and endowed by 
 Gilbert Sheldon, who succeeded Juxon both at Fulham and at 
 Lambeth. So great was his munificence that it is said that he 
 laid out in charitable, pious, and public uses, 66,000, much of 
 this money being devoted to the relief of the sufferers in the time 
 of the plague ; and a not inconsiderable sum was expended by 
 him on the Palace of Fulham. Sheldon's successor, Dr. Humphrey 
 Henckman, was instrumental in effecting the escape of Charles II. 
 after the Battle of Worcester, and was rewarded after the Restora- 
 tion by a nomination to the See of Salisbury ; in 1663 he succeeded 
 Sheldon in the See of London. 
 
 From the period when Bishop Grindal left Fulham for Lambeth, 
 little or nothing is heard of the gardens, which, in his time, had 
 promised to become so famous, until we come to Henry Compton, 
 one of the most distinguished of the metropolitan prelates. Born 
 in 1632, Compton was tutor to the Princesses Mary and Anne. 
 He was appointed to the See of London in 1675, but popery was 
 then regaining ground, and the Bishop strenuously opposed it. 
 By so doing he incurred the enmity of the Duke of York, 
 afterwards James II., and on that prince's accession to the 
 throne was removed from several posts that he had filled, and at 
 length was suspended from all spiritual functions. " He con- 
 tinued, however," says Macaulay, "to reside in his palace and 
 receive his revenue." And good came out of evil, for he was 
 able to turn his attention to his favourite pursuit of gardening. 
 We learn that " he had a real and scientific knowledge of plants, 
 an attainment not usual among the great of those days, and 
 during his long residence at Fulham of thirty- eight years, he 
 gave up much time and study to their cultivation, and was 
 able to introduce into the garden a larger number of hardy 
 exotic trees and shrubs, and a greater variety of greenhouse 
 rarities than had ever been seen in England." But he did more 
 than this for he diffused the knowledge he had himself acquired, 
 and generously opened his grounds to the inspection and study 
 of the scientific students of horticulture and botany, and his 
 collections were visited by the most eminent horticulturists 
 and botanists of the day. 
 
 80 
 
in 1688 Compton was instrumental in bringing over the Prince" 
 of Orange; and being "released from his suspension," he, together 
 with the Earl of Dorset, conveyed the Princess Anne safely from 
 London to Nottingham. He was chosen by William of Orange 
 to perform the ceremony of the coronation, and he also enjoyed 
 the high esteem and intimacy of his former pupil, Queen Mary. 
 Yet in spite of the favour shown to him, and notwithstanding 
 that the see of Canterbury was twice vacant in the reign of William 
 III., he was never nominated to fill it, but remained Bishop of 
 London until he died at Fulham in 1713, at the age of eighty. 
 From the stand he made in defence of the rights of the Church 
 in the reign of James II., he was styled the " Protestant Bishop." 
 Before the Restoration and before taking orders, Compton had 
 served in the Horse Guards, and his spirited reply to King James II. 
 oh one occasion, when the King told him he " talked more like a 
 colonel than a bishop," was a reference to this time. " His 
 Majesty," he said in polite retort, " did him honour in taking 
 notice of his having formerly drawn his sword in defence of the 
 constitution, and that he would do so again if he lived to see 
 it necessary" 
 
 Bishop Compton is supposed to have planted the famous avenue 
 of elms leading to the "Bishop's Park," which a few years ago 
 was opened as a public recreation ground. In this avenue are 
 many lamentable gaps. Only last spring I watched the felling 
 of one of these patriarchal trees which had to come down for 
 the safety of the public but if these really be the elms that Compton 
 planted, the wonder is not that so few, but that so many, remain ! 
 
 The fame of the Bishop of London's grounds was at its height 
 at the close of Compton's long term of residence ; and it was well 
 for the garden that it was so long. Thirty-seven years is a genera- 
 tion and more, in the life of a man ; but it is little in the life of a 
 tree. In this period, however, during which the good bishop had 
 dug and planted, and watered and pruned, many of the objects of 
 his tender care had time to arrive at maturity, and others were 
 well on the way to it. Evelyn mentions that " he had a thousand 
 species of exotic plants in his stores and gardens . . . there were 
 few days in the year, till toward the latter end of his life, but he 
 was actually in his garden, ordering and directing the removal 
 and replacing of his plants." But alas ! as Lysons tells us in 
 
 81 6 
 
GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 
 
 the time of his successor Robinson, who had no taste for botany 
 or horticulture, the gardener was allowed to dispose of the greater 
 part of the botanical treasures to some nurseryman at Fulham, to 
 permit which was a terrible act of vandalism. But, if Bishop 
 Robinson failed to realize his responsibilities towards the beautiful 
 moated garden left to his care by his predecessor, he did a good 
 work for the old palace itself. In 1615 he presented a petition 
 to the Archbishop of Canterbury, stating that the Manor House 
 of Fulham had grown very old and ruinous, and was much too 
 large for the revenues of the bishopric, and that a great part of 
 the building was becoming useless. Sir Christopher Wren and 
 Sir John Vanbrugh were called in to examine and make a report. 
 The result was that a number of rooms were condemned as un- 
 necessary, and permission was granted to pull them down. After 
 doing so there were still left fifty or sixty rooms in addition to 
 the chapel, hall, and garden. But whatever the work of demolition 
 may have done actually to improve the property, the restoration 
 cannot have been carried very far, for in 1749 Bishop Sherlock 
 wrote : " I find this a bad old house ; I must repair a great deal, 
 and, I am afraid, rebuild some part." 
 
 A touch of romance gilds the biography of Bishop Terrick, who 
 died in 1771, but not before he had rebuilt the river front of the 
 house. He had a daughter with whom Nicholas Ryder, son of 
 the Lord Chief Justice of the King's Bench, fell in love; but 
 Nicholas, by the terms of his father's will, might not marry any- 
 one who had not a portion of ten thousand pounds, and this the 
 lady did not possess. To get over the difficulty the lover sent 
 the bride that sum of money as a wedding-gift. 
 
 A remarkable feature of the gardens is the moat before mentioned, 
 by which they are surrounded. It is nearly a mile long, and in 
 many places twenty feet wide, at high water. By a moat we now 
 understand a ditch filled with water, but the word, taken from 
 the old French mote or motte, and meaning a lump or clod of earth, 
 did not originally refer to the ditch itself, but to the mound of 
 earth or mud thrown up in excavating it, and is a curious example 
 of a reversal of an original meaning. Before the time of Bishop 
 King he whom James I. designated " King of Preachers " there 
 was no water in the moat except what percolated through the 
 river bank. It must, therefore, have been in a chronic state of 
 
 82 
 
FULHAM PALACE 
 
 stagnation and unwholesomeness, until Dr. King connected it with 
 the Thames by means of sluices. 
 
 Bishop Blomfield, whose tomb is conspicuous in Fulham church- 
 yard, and who came to the See in 1824, was greatly attached to 
 the old place, where he dwelt for twenty-eight years; he is said 
 to have spent thousands of pounds upon cleansing and improving 
 the moat, which at the present day is very picturesque, but still 
 undesirably muddy ! Nevertheless it is easy to believe that a 
 hundred years ago it was " the haunt of the kingfisher," and well 
 stocked with fish, and that even in Faulkner's time it in some places 
 abounded with water lilies. 
 
 As mentioned in the last chapter, Lambeth Palace suffered 
 severely during the period of the Parliamentary Wars. Fulham 
 was more fortunate ; we read that a bridge of boats was thrown 
 across the river by the Parliamentarians in 1642, in order to carry 
 Cromwell's troops into Surrey ; that the headquarters of the 
 army was fixed in Putney and Fulham ; that the generals held 
 their councils in Putney Church, and that Puritan sermons were 
 preached therein ; but through all this, the innermost tranquillity 
 of the Manor House was undisturbed by the outside tumult. 
 
 At the end of the avenue the steps known as " the Bishop's 
 Steps " led to the river, where the Bishop's barge, manned by 
 many rowers, when not in use, lay at its moorings. The ferry 
 between Fulham and Putney went by the name of the " Bishop's 
 Ferry." As in the case of Lambeth, the tolls and profits accruing 
 from it belonged to the manor. The pontoon-bridge above men- 
 tioned was of course but a temporary arrangement, and the " River 
 of Thames " " noble and capacious river " as Faulkner calls it 
 remained bridgeless hereabouts, for over eighty years. Then, 
 largely through the efforts of Sir Robert Walpole, minister to 
 George II. and father of Horace Walpole, whose name was com- 
 memorated in the central arch, the quaint timber bridge, with 
 its picturesque toll-house, its bell-cot and gates since swept 
 away to make room for a substantial stone structure was built. 
 The bishops received compensation in a sum of money, and the 
 privilege of the free use of the bridge for themselves and their 
 dependents ; so that any servant of the Manor House claimed 
 freedom from the toll simply by shouting out " Bishop." 
 
 Faulkner tells us that in the year 1689, Ray, an eminent naturalist 
 
 83 6* 
 
GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 
 
 of that day, made a catalogue of the rare plants at Fulham when 
 the gardens were at the height of their fame and interest. In his 
 list are the " Norway Maple," the " Ash Maple," the " Virginian 
 Flowering Maple," the " Strawberry Tree," the " Male Cypress," 
 the " Female Cypress," the " Manna Ash," the " Black Walnut 
 Tree," the " Red Horse Chestnut," the manured or " Stone Pine," 
 the " Virginian Sumach," the " Honey Locust," the " Cork Tree," 
 the " Evergreen Oak," and the " Cedar of Lebanon " introduced 
 into England by Evelyn in 1664. " Trees of Curiosity " was the 
 name given to those brought from abroad, and 131 new specimens 
 came to this country in the seventeenth century. 
 
 The botanists who followed Mr. Ray, wrote of precious additions 
 to the gardens after his day, and the eighteenth century claims the 
 credit of the introduction of 445 new trees and plants. It was 
 Bishop Porteous, the founder of Sunday Schools, who planted the 
 cedars at Fulham. 
 
 Faulkner also states that in the year 1751 ' the late Sir 
 William Watson " who was probably the physician of that 
 name who died in 1787 made a survey of the now celebrated 
 gardens. He had previously given the Royal Society an account 
 of all that remained of the renowned garden of the Tradescents 
 at Lambeth, and he now offered them one of that " still more 
 famous Botanick Garden at Fulham." He winds up his report 
 with a eulogy on Henry Compton, formerly Bishop of London 
 " that excellent prelate, who, by means of a large correspondence 
 with the principal botanists of Europe and America, introduced 
 into England a greater number of plants, more especially trees 
 which had never been seen here, or before described by any author 
 therefore his name is mentioned with the greatest encomiums by 
 the botanical writers of the times to wit, Herman, Ray, and 
 others." 
 
 This being so, it is melancholy to reflect that, through the culpable 
 indifference of Bishop Robinson, whose duty and privilege it 
 should have been to guard the treasures to which he had succeeded, 
 many of the rarer trees and shrubs in the garden, the more tender 
 exotics, and all the greenhouse plants, had been removed to make 
 way for the more ordinary produce of the kitchen-garden. It is 
 some consolation, however, to know that very much still remains 
 at Fulham that is well worth seeing. The storms of three 
 
 84 
 
FULHAM PALACE 
 
 centuries have probably blown down most of the elms that were 
 actually planted by Bishop Compton about the year of the Revo- 
 lution in the avenue of approach ; and the caprice of later prelates 
 has no doubt considerably changed the plan of the gardens 
 though this to a less extent than at Lambeth but they are still 
 very beautiful ; many of the trees are magnificent, whilst others 
 are uncommon. 
 
 But more than all at Fulham there is the human interest, and, 
 possibly owing to the simple domestic character of its architecture, 
 nowhere, so far as I know, is this more strongly felt than here. 
 It is the human interest that gives to every garden, lordly or simple, 
 old or new but more particularly to the old its peculiar, haunting 
 charm. It is a charm distinct from that of the wilderness, the 
 lonely mountain side, and the restless, solitary sea, for it comes 
 not only from the eye's delight in nature's loveliness, but also from 
 the sense of the near neighbourhood of man, and of his controlling 
 mind and will. It is exhaled from the tended, flo wers ; it is felt 
 as we tread the well- watered, smooth-shaven lawn ; it is discovered 
 in the well- swept path ; and, in so far as all these are the signs 
 of the proximity of man, it belongs as much to the patch of soil 
 whereon the cotter grows his scarlet-runners and potatoes, his 
 Sweet Williams and his Canterbury Bells, as to the landscape- 
 gardens of the ducal residence. The difference is of degree, not 
 of kind ; because the consciousness of being in touch with humanity, 
 wherever, as in a garden, there is evidence of the industry and 
 design of man, is felt much more strongly when the building to 
 which the garden is attached, has a history of supreme importance, 
 as at Lambeth ; or picturesque features, added to historic interest, 
 as at Fulham and Holland House ; or where, without any pre- 
 tensions to either of these, it was once the scene of the private life 
 of some commanding personality, or imperial intellect. For example, 
 a certain house at Chelsea, brown and shabby, has but little out- 
 wardly to recommend it, and its garden is merely a back yard, 
 or little better ; yet both are eagerly visited by all and sundry, 
 for here dwelt Thomas Carlyle. And there is an old house, and 
 a rose-garden behind it, at Highgate, beautiful from its situation, 
 and because the garden is well-tended and stocked. For many 
 years a poet dwelt there, whose winged words had long before sped 
 to the very ends of the earth and will echo down the centuries, 
 
 85 
 
GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 
 
 Merely because the author of " Christabel " walked that garden, 
 and watched the sunsets over the valley from his window, both 
 house and garden are hallowed ground. That is the human 
 interest, and it is paramount at Fulham. 
 
 Therefore, although the fifteenth century quadrangle, with its 
 low-arched gateway and ponderous, iron-studded gates open in the 
 drawing its quaint porch, of which I have shown a pencil sketch, 
 its vine-clad walls and creeper- covered windows, and beautiful 
 ornamental brick-work, is not exactly part and parcel of the gar- 
 dens, yet, in order to carry out the original scheme of this book, 
 and to fulfil the promise of its title, which associates the garden 
 with the man, and man with the garden, it is necessary to introduce 
 it here. The porch, with the clock and Bishop Juxon's arms above 
 it, and the great quadrangle itself, are not only the oldest, and 
 architecturally most interesting, part of the group of buildings, 
 and on the direct route to the gardens, but, if these ancient walls 
 could speak, what could they not tell us of the past ? Hither, in 
 all probability, to visit the bishops of the diocese among whom, 
 as we have seen, were many makers of history came, in the 
 summer days, the great churchmen of the contending parties of 
 the state what time the Church of England was in the making ; 
 hither came the compilers of the Book of Common Prayer, and 
 the translators of the Bible ; and, antecedently, Cardinal Wolsey, 
 and Thomas Cromwell, and Sir Thomas More. Hither came all 
 the wisest of English statesmen, from Burleigh to Pitt ; Queen 
 Elizabeth, James I., William and Mary, and the Princess after- 
 wards, Queen Anne. Poets and authors, from Spenser to Pope, 
 and from Bacon to Addison. Evelyn, the diarist, who did 
 so much to revive and improve horticulture and to encourage 
 forestry. Sir Isaac Newton, and the founders and members 
 of the Royal Society ; Vanbrugh, and Sir Christopher Wren ; 
 Sir William Temple, the statesman but in this connection still 
 more interesting as the passionate lover of gardens and with 
 him probably his secretary, Jonathan Swift. Sir Hans Sloane, 
 Horace Walpole, and a host of others more or less famous. Of 
 the visits of some of these to Fulham there is written record- 
 it is very probable that all the rest, and others besides, 
 whom it would take too long to recall, came here from time 
 to time 
 
 86 
 
I 
 
FULHAM PALACE 
 
 Nor do I attempt to mention those worthies of England nearor 
 to, and of, our own day, men of light and leading, and of letters ; 
 learned divines, novelists, poet-laureates, politicians ; in a word, 
 half the illustrious men and women of the Victorian age. They 
 must all have crossed the picturesque quadrangle where even 
 now the fountain can toss its iridescent spray much higher than 
 the red-tiled roof to reach the hospitable palace in which, from 
 the eleventh century to the twentieth, the Bishops of London have 
 welcomed the coming, and sped the parting guest. 
 
 But to return to the Gardens ! I had no personal acquaintance 
 with them before the spring of 1915, when the compelling demands 
 of the most terrible war on record disturbed their tranquillity. 
 They are charming now, and must have been exceedingly lovely 
 in the summers before 1914, when all God's peace was upon them ; 
 for their seclusion was complete the encircling moat cutting them 
 off from the noisy world of Fulham as entirely as a high stone 
 wall would have done although, indeed, one of the surprises in 
 most of the larger London gardens, is their strange repose, their 
 singular aloofness from the turmoil outside. 
 
 Here and there in the Fulham grounds, as elsewhere, it was 
 even then obvious that the great strife had called away to the 
 colours, all the younger men among the gardeners, and that the 
 staff had been necessarily reduced though apparently not to the 
 same extent as in some still more extensive grounds of which I 
 know, where one boy and sundry elderly men, attempted to do 
 the work of thirteen, active under-gardeners. At Fulham the 
 War had transformed the once beautiful park and warren which 
 are separated from the flower gardens only by a low wire fence 
 into a vast drilling ground. The oaks and the elms, during all 
 their long existence, had never looked upon a stranger and sadder 
 sight, for the bridge of boats from Fulham to Putney in Cromwell's 
 day was far less significant of suffering. Nevertheless the park, 
 when I saw it, with the figures of men and horses moving among 
 the trees, was not unpicturesque ; for khaki is, to use a painter's 
 adjective, a " retiring " colour, blending better with the various 
 greens of nature than scarlet used to do. 
 
 Often, when proceeding to my work in the mornings, I 
 paused for a moment to watch the eternal marchings and 
 
 87 
 
GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 
 
 countermarchings, and to note the various stages of practice and 
 efficiency when infantry and artillery were engaged on different 
 parts of the ground in the mysterious evolutions that, to the un- 
 initiated, appear so purposeless. 
 
 But alas ! Where once in years that now seem so very, very 
 long ago the cows must have ruminated among the buttercups, 
 or where the deep clover grass in early June turned to that wonder- 
 ful warm tint that heralds the hay-making season the turf has 
 disappeared, and the ground is brown and bare ; it has been trampled 
 under foot by hundreds of men, torn up by the hoofs of the horses, 
 seamed and scored by the wheels of gun-carriages, and the dividing 
 wire fence is broken down in many places by the troops who 
 leant upon it, using it as a resting-place. Yet where I sat at work; 
 farther on in the interior of the grounds, the distant sounds and 
 sights of war could not intimidate or frighten the thrushes ; they 
 sang as blithely, answering each other across the garden, as though 
 no such dire calamity as war had ever existed : behind me, from 
 the fine old fifteenth-century tower of Fulham Church, the hours 
 and quarters were chimed out, as regularly and musically as ever 
 they had been in the piping times of peace. And by degrees, as 
 I worked, the hush of high, warm noon would steal over every- 
 thing, and for a while I heard only the murmurous voices of 
 the summer, those manifold sounds of insect life that one's ear 
 is not attuned to catch at other times. Thus soothed and engrossed 
 for nature is all absorbing, and brooks no rival when one is study- 
 ing her it was possible to forget, for a space, the black pall of 
 sorrow and wickedness that man's own hand had drawn across 
 the beautiful world till, all too soon, the distant call of the bugle 
 in the home park, and, down the avenue, the " tramp, tramp " 
 of a company of soldiers following a military band, recalled me to 
 the consciousness that England was at war, and all that that meant ! 
 
 Passing the modern flower-garden close to the house, under the 
 pointed windows of what was once, I believe, the chapel where 
 there are bedded-out plants, and the gay and strongly-contrasting 
 geraniums and calceolarias so dear to many excellent gardeners' 
 hearts and following a gravel path bounded on the left by 
 the park and the wire fence before mentioned one passes on the 
 right a beautifully- kept stretch of velvet grass, with the tennis lawn 
 beyond it, some cedars, and other non-deciduous trees and arrives 
 
 88 
 
FULHAM PALACE 
 
 at length at a turn in the walk where attention is arrested by a 
 magnificent tree of extraordinary girth, size, and shape a tree 
 that almost seems to block further progress. It dominates this 
 part of the gardens, stretching its giant arms benevolently right 
 and left ; on the one hand almost to where the soldiers drilled, on 
 the other to the ferneries and greenhouses. It is truly a patriarchal 
 and beautiful tree and daily I surveyed it in admiration, and, 
 ignorant though I am on such subjects, even I ought to have known 
 it by the large five-lobed and silky leaves, resembling those of the 
 sycamore, and by its gracefully-pendulous seed-pods, hanging low 
 from the branches much as tinsel balls do on a Christmas tree. 
 But I had noted no peeling of its bark, and misled by its unusual 
 size and freshness, I did not recognize it, and therefore one day 
 I asked the head-gardener for information, and the surprise was 
 as great as the snub, when he replied, " Only a London Plane ! " 
 Well ! if this be so, among all the rare and splendid trees, indigenous 
 and otherwise, in the Bishop of London's garden, none lives in 
 my memory as does that magnificent specimen of the commonest 
 metropolitan tree ! 
 
 We turn from it sharply to the right, and leave on our left a 
 side-walk, where rows of gorgeous tulips flaunt their brilliant 
 cup-like flowers ; tall, erect, triumphant specimens of the gardener's 
 science all of them are ; showing every tint from deepest prune 
 almost black to flame- colour and pure white, and these last 
 are dazzling when sun shines through the petals. Were we to 
 follow this path we should arrive at a part of the domain left, 
 deliberately, more or less wild and at the rockeries and shrub- 
 beries, beyond which, where the path twists and turns, is a little 
 foot-bridge over the moat, that here is very dusky and mysterious, 
 and overhung with trees. On the further side of the bridge is a 
 door, which closes with a spring, not to be opened from without, a 
 door that leads straight into the grassy churchyard of Fulham, 
 where " heaves the turf in many a mouldering heap " ; and where 
 many of the Bishops of London lie buried. The churchyard is 
 a short cut to the town. 
 
 But we do not follow that path, for the choicest bits of the old 
 garden are yet to show. We pass instead through an iron gate- 
 way, and find ourselves in the " walled garden," a kitchen and 
 fruit garden of immense acreage. It "abounds in fruit, and in 
 
 89 
 
GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 
 
 vegetables of all kinds from the humble potato to the stately, 
 graceful asparagus. But its chief attractiveness lies in the her- 
 baceous borders, which, in full summer-time, are filled with old- 
 fashioned and sweet-smelling flowers. Of some of these I do not 
 know so much as the common English name, although they may 
 be found in every cottage garden but among the rest are many 
 that, there is every reason to think, have not changed since garden- 
 ing began : they were to our ancestors what they are to us. And 
 is there not something curiously stimulating and delightful in the 
 fancy which is not indeed fancy, but fact that Chaucer, Shake- 
 speare and Bacon, and all the flower-lovers since their days- 
 plucked and smelt these very flowers, or their exact counterparts V 
 The cowslip was yellow, the wild rose was flushed with pink, in 
 mediaeval times as now : and when Spenser wrote of the " rose 
 engrained in pure scarlet dye," and of the " primrose greene," depend 
 upon it he meant to describe that on which he looked namely, a 
 red rose, and a yellow primrose : because words, in the course of 
 a century or two, may alter in both sound and sense ; but not so 
 the natural objects that they essay to paint for us. Nor do the 
 perfumes of Nature change. The violet and the lavender, the wild 
 thyme and the southernwood, are neither more nor less sweet at 
 the present day, than they were four hundred years ago. " On 
 May day," in Stowe's quaint language, " every man except impedi- 
 ment would walke into the sweete woods, there to rejoice their 
 spirits with the beauty and flavour of sweet Flowers," and these 
 were the field flowers that are with us still. When Herrick's 
 Corinna, that " sweet slug-a-bed," went " a-maying " with her 
 friends, they sniffed the same delicious flower-incense that we 
 inhale whenever the " thorn is white with blossom." The thought 
 seems to me to bridge the centuries, and to bring us nearer to Bacon 
 and Shakespeare and to their contemporaries for here, in this 
 old English garden, are no double or treble flowers unknown to 
 Bacon. Green carnations and blue roses, " they are but toyes," 
 he would have said. Look for them in the more modern borders 
 nearer the house : if they exist at all depend upon it they are 
 there. But here the flowers are Perdita's own; and, like happy 
 but unruly children, they are not to be strictly kept in bounds in 
 summer. They escape and wander sometimes into the neigh- 
 bouring territory of the strawberry, the gooseberry, and the lettuce. 
 
 90 
 
1 
 
 'O 
 
 <a 
 g 
 
FULHAM PALACE 
 
 But it is in spring that this kitchen garden is at its loveliest ; 
 for then the young apple, and pear, and plum trees, in long per- 
 spective on either side of the cinder walk, are in blossom. They 
 do not all flower at once, and they have few leaves in early April ; 
 but their white and red blend deliciously with the delicately- 
 tinted hyacinth, the daffodil, and the narcissus, and, a little 
 later, with the wallflower and the white iris ; this last is very 
 abundant and much in evidence here, growing in bushy clumps. 
 The pale spring flowers, better behaved than their summer sisters, 
 do not straggle over the borders, but hold themselves upright 
 within their legitimate limits, which are marked out by frontier 
 lines of ancient box. This is ever-green box, of course ; dark in 
 winter, but now " in the sweet of the year," bright with tender 
 young leaves. 
 
 The path itself, though only a " cinder walk," assumes in the 
 sunshine an indescribably delicate and beautiful colour something 
 between lilac and peach-blossom in tint while the short, smooth, 
 dry tufts of " bent " grass, that push themselves and lift them- 
 selves up everywhere between the minute cinders, turn to pale 
 gold as they catch the light ; for that is the way in which Nature 
 always treats her colour schemes ; to avoid monotony she carefully 
 embroiders them with something else. 
 
 The eye follows the walk up to the old brick boundary wall at 
 its farther end ; above this a magnificent evergreen-oak tells as 
 a precious touch of dark, enhancing by contrast the pallid delicacy 
 of the lovely vernal hues of earth and sky. 
 
 Though this scarcely shows in the drawing, the wall is 
 intersected by a second cinder path, which ends on the right in 
 a pergola-arch, bare in spring, but in blazing August, overhung 
 with a thick growth of the large purple clematis ; through 
 this, looking back, there is a charming vista. Passing under it 
 we turn to the left, and, keeping the glass-houses, with the vineries, 
 on the right, enter what is perhaps the prettiest, as it is certainly 
 the most old-English and interesting, corner of the Manor-House 
 demesne. It is an ancient garden within a garden, not an unusual 
 arrangement in old-fashioned pleasure-grounds ; it is a bit, stolen 
 as it were, from the kitchen garden, and separated from it on two 
 sides by a truly magnificent wisteria. This must be of patriarchal 
 age, for its gnarled and knotted stem is very strong and thick, 
 
 91 
 
GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 
 
 and its twisted branches, which in summer are closely covered 
 with foliage, have embraced one another, laced and interlaced, 
 until it has become a tangle of greenery and timber, reminding one 
 of the fairy hedge that grew round the Palace of the Sleeping 
 Beauty. And as the kiss of the Prince awakened the Princess 
 so will the kiss of the sun in due season recall to life and unfold 
 the sleeping buds of the wisteria, hanging them like violet tassels 
 among its branches. 
 
 The piece of ground it encloses is almost triangular in shape, 
 for the wisteria hedge sweeps round till it almost meets the old 
 wall and the vinery, on our right. It is cut up into scores of small 
 ' knots " or flower-beds, each with its own particular low fence 
 of immemorial box, intersected by little winding cinder-walks, 
 so narrow that only one person at a time can walk there. This 
 is the true old-English flower-garden, the equivalent to the French 
 parterre. 
 
 Opposite to us, and the proper entrance to this lovely old corner, 
 is a fine Tudor gateway. It is of brick, coeval with the Fitzjames 
 quadrangle, and bears the Fitzjames arms above it. It is as 
 picturesque a bit of old English building, on a small scale, as one 
 might hope to see, near London, and out of Hampton Court. 
 
 The little garden is primarily a rose-garden, although a few late 
 irises of a shade approaching mauve a more refined variety of 
 the earlier and common purple flag are prominently introduced. 
 It was strange to see irises and roses in juxtaposition, and 
 flowering in the same month but in this garden, and probably 
 in others, that year, the seasons met each other, and April and 
 May clasped hands with June. The bishop's head-gardener himself 
 remarked to me that : " This year everything has come up to- 
 gether ! ' So lovely it was in consequence Nature with immense 
 prodigality pouring out all her wealth and beauty at one and the 
 same time, that by slightly altering the words of the old madrigal, 
 one might apply them to this garden, and say : 
 
 " When first I saw its face I resolved 
 To honour and renown it." 
 
 And to this end I had meant to spend most loving labour on it. 
 Alas ! April, May, and June, were lovely months, then " followed 
 the deluge," and very literally so; the rose beds were swept by 
 
 92 
 
FULHAM : Gateway between Walled Garden and Grounds Page 92 
 
V '. '" l/l 
 
FULHAM PALACE 
 
 storms of rain, and the red, white, and pink petals were everywhere 
 scattered on the sodden ground. Outdoor work was entirely 
 stopped, and when by the middle of August it was possible to 
 resume it, the glory of that garden had departed! That sweet 
 oasis amid the kitchen-garden's produce so fresh and so brilliant 
 in the early summer ere the harvest-moon had risen, resembled 
 the face of a beauty all passee and forlorn. 
 
 Yet the flowers at Fulham are always choice and glorious, and 
 one cannot take leave of the Bishop of London's garden without 
 offering a tribute of sincere admiration to the presiding spirit 
 among the gardeners, who, short-handed owing to the war, had 
 yet contrived to preserve so much of their ancient beauty, by skill, 
 personal care, and indefatigable zeal. 
 
 Of Fulham Bishop Blomfield said and he knew the place, 
 for nearly thirty years that it is "a home dearly loved, so close 
 upon the restless world, yet itself a haunt of ancient peace." And 
 with this I leave it. 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 SIGN 
 
 IT seems to have been usual in England in the days of our 
 Plantagenet and Lancastrian kings, for each one, on his 
 accession, to found monasteries and convents for the repose 
 of his soul, and of the souls of his predecessors. 
 
 Henry V., who perhaps did not read his own title very clear, 
 conscious of his follies in the past, began his reign by turning over 
 a new leaf, and he followed the custom above mentioned, when 
 he founded the religious house, or houses, of Sion in Middlesex. 
 Shakespeare makes him say : 
 
 " and I have built 
 
 Two chantries, where the sad and solemn priests 
 Sing still for Richard's soul." 
 
 One of these was for monks, the other for nuns, of the order of 
 St. Bridget, a Swedish offshoot of the Augustines. 
 
 The charter of the monastery, signed by the King, ran thus : 
 44 To celebrate divine service for ever, for our estate while we live, 
 and for our soul when we shall have departed this life, and for 
 the souls of our most dear lord and father Henry, late King of 
 England, and Mary, his late wife, our most dear mother ; also for 
 the souls of John, late duke of Lancaster, our Grandfather ; and 
 of Blanche, his late wife, and of other of our progenitors, and of 
 all the faithfull departed." 
 
 The " Monastery of St. Saviour and St. Bridget," as it was 
 called, consisted of eighty-five 4C Religious," the number com- 
 memorating the seventy- two disciples and thirteen apostles. There 
 
 94 
 
SIGN 
 
 were sixty Sisters, and twenty-five professed Brothers ; thirteen 
 of whom were priests. 
 
 The monks and nuns lived entirely apart, but the chapels were 
 under one roof, with twin choirs, and were connected by a grille 
 in which was a gate allowing of the entrance and departure of the 
 priests >who said Mass in the chapel of the Sisters, and who carried 
 on the order of divine service almost unceasingly, so that the 
 sound of prayer and praise arising from the choirs, was rarely, if 
 ever, silent. 
 
 Henry V. presented to the Community the whole of his manor 
 of Isle worth, and Henry VI. still further enriched it by valuable 
 gifts of lands lying in many English counties. Its members, 
 finding themselves cramped for room in the original buildings at 
 Twickenham, soon after obtained leave of the King to remove. 
 They chose a beautiful situation on the Middlesex bank of the 
 xiver on the exact site of the present Sion House. 
 
 For a century and a quarter the monastery prospered exceed- 
 ingly ; and we are told that the nunnery " abode at the head of 
 all the Convents for women in England, in learning, riches and 
 piety." It had been by the advice of Chicherley, Archbishop of 
 Canterbury, builder of the so-called " Lollard Tower " at Lambeth, 
 that the Victor of Agincourt founded it ; and it seems always to 
 have had some connection with All Souls College, Oxford, of 
 which Chicherley himself was founder, and which he had dedicated 
 to the memory of the Lancastrian Princes who had fallen in the 
 war with France. 
 
 In 1539, under Henry VIII., the "Daughters of Sion," as they 
 were called, were turned out of their peaceful river-side home, 
 and cast adrift on the world. The convent and estates reverted 
 to the King, and the nuns then began a weary quest for another 
 home in foreign lands. 
 
 The story of the wanderings of these unfortunate ladies, all, 
 it would appear, of gentle birth, is touching. Like the dove of 
 the ark they could find no rest for the soles of their feet either in 
 the Low Countries, or in France, and they finally settled at Lisbon, 
 where, in the seventeenth century, their nunnery was destroyed 
 by fire. By the aid of the charitable, however, they ultimately 
 rebuilt it, but the new building was again destroyed in 1755, this 
 time by the great earthquake of Lisbon. Once more it was rebuilt ; 
 
 95 
 
GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 
 
 but the convent beingjrequisitioned for a British hospital in the 
 Peninsular War, the Sisters, now greatly reduced in number, 
 according to one account, made their way back to England in 
 1810. But another authority states that a quarter of a century 
 ago, they were still at Lisbon, retaining their English nationality, 
 and the keys of their former house. About a hundred and fifty 
 years ago they were visited at Lisbon by the then Duke of Northum- 
 berland, the owner of Sion House, to whom they told the story of 
 having carried their keys about with them through all their wan- 
 derings and vicissitudes in the hope of eventually returning to 
 their old home. " But," quietly remarked his Grace, " the locks 
 have all been altered since then." Edward Walford, in " Greater 
 London," is responsible for this story, and for the statement that, 
 the Sion of Lisbon remains the real and legitimate representative 
 of the Sion of Isleworth. 
 
 As everybody knows, Henry VIII. took drastic measures to 
 establish his supremacy when the convents were suppressed. 
 For some cause or other Sion seems to have specially incurred 
 the displeasure of the King, and it was one of the earliest of the 
 wealthier monasteries to be suppressed. 
 
 One Thomas Bedell, writing to Secretary Cromwell on the subject 
 of the Isleworth community, and submission to the royal authority, 
 says that he finds the " lady Abbas and susters as conformable 
 in everything as might be devised "- also the Father Confessor, 
 and a certain " father Cursone," by whose influence and good 
 example he hopes " that the residue shall shortly be brought to 
 good conformite. And if not, there be two of the brethren must 
 be weded out, whiche be somewhat sediciose, and have laboured 
 busily to infect their fellowes with obstinacy against the King's 
 said title." 
 
 The irreconcilables appear to have been two of the brotherhood, 
 named Whitford and Litell, and Bedell, in a second letter, tells 
 how, when the Queen's Almoner and other influential divines, 
 failed by argument to convert them, he himself " handled Whit- 
 ford in the garden bothe with faire words and with foule," but 
 apparently unsuccessfully, for he adds : " But he hath a brazen 
 forehead, which shameth at nothing." 
 
 Sion, with its ample revenues and large estates in almost every 
 part of England, being one of the wealthiest of the six hundred 
 
 96 
 
SION 
 
 monasteries and two thousand chapels and chantries suppressed by 
 Henry VIII., was far too valuable a prize to be lightly given away 
 when once the Abbey-breaker was in possession. He retained it 
 in his own hands until his death ; and there his frail and unhappy 
 fifth queen, Katherine Howard, was- imprisoned for some time* 
 prior to her trial and execution ; there also the King's own body 
 rested for a night, on its way from London to burial at Windsor. 
 
 The young king, Edward VI., on his accession, presented the 
 demesne, with its conventual buildings, to his uncle, the " Pro- 
 tector," Edward, Duke of Somerset, who built the present house 
 on the exact site of the renowned Monastery, which he seems first 
 to have nearly razed to the ground. The palatial mansion that 
 he erected, still stands, with little external alteration ; but the 
 interior has been almost entirely changed. It is surprising that 
 there is little that is ancient in the general outward aspect, and 
 even in the immediate surroundings, of Sion. The river has 
 prevented all encroachments on its seclusion on the east side ; 
 and although suburban London has advanced almost to the 
 northern and eastern limits of the protecting walls of the park, 
 it is so secluded that it is difficult to believe, on emerging from the 
 long, dirty, narrow High Street of the ugly township of Brentford 
 until one suddenly comes upon the beautiful Adam's gateway, which 
 is the principal entrance that between the high road and the 
 river, lies an estate of many acres, with a house of imposing 
 dimensions, the historic interest of which exceeds that of Holland 
 House, for it began at a much earlier period of English history. 
 
 This historic interest is not confined to Sion itself, and incident- 
 ally I should mention that Turnham Green, a mile east of Sion, 
 and Acton, or Oaktown, in its near neighbourhood, were the scenes 
 of stirring events in the Parliamentary Wars, and hideous and 
 unromantic as Brentford appears, it has had by no means an un- 
 eventful history. Here, in 1016, Edmund Ironside is said by some 
 authorities to have defeated the Danes, and in 1588, the closing 
 year of Mary Tudor's reign, six persons were burnt for holding, 
 and propagating, Protestant opinions. Here also, more than half 
 a century later, Prince Rupert routed two regiments of the Parlia- 
 mentary Army, compelling the Parliament, in order to prevent 
 King Charles from pressing onwards to London, to throw up 
 fortifications, and to call out the Trained Bands, under the Earl 
 
 97 7 
 
GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 
 
 of Essex ; they encamped on Turnham Green, thus obliging the 
 King to withdraw to Kingston-on-Thames. 
 
 The old posting and coaching road to the west and south-west 
 of England, passes through Brentford ; and since, even as late as 
 the end of the eighteenth century, Horace Walpole, at Twickenham, 
 described the dangerous condition of the highways round about, 
 and the Lord Mayor of London, in 1777, in his coach and four, was 
 stopped on Turnham Green and robbed by a single highwayman, 
 it is conceivable that many an episode picturesque and dramatic 
 enough when we read of it now, but most uncomfortable, and often 
 tragic, to the actors therein may have disturbed the quiet of Sion 
 during the five hundred years of its history. For, five hundred 
 stormy centuries have indeed elapsed, since that day in February, 
 1416, when Harry the King, laid, in person, the dedication stone 
 of that first monastery of the Bridgetines at Twickenham, which 
 they so soon after left for Isleworth ; and three hundred and seventy 
 years have now passed over Sion itself, since Protector Somerset 
 began his rebuilding operations there, and yet it does not look old ! 
 Viewed from the opposite bank of the Thames, whence details 
 are blurred or even lost sight of, it is indeed difficult to realize that 
 it is an ancient house at all ! This is partly owing to the clean, 
 new effect of the Bath Stone, with which it is faced, and which is 
 innocent of ivy or Virginian creeper. But truth to say, time has 
 dealt lightly with the old home of the Percys, who have themselves 
 done much to preserve it. The devastating tide of our tumultuous 
 modern existence has swept past Sion, leaving it strangely silent 
 and solitary, except on the occasional visits of its noble owner ; 
 leaving its white walls, its green lawns, and its avenues wonderfully 
 unsmirched, although they are so comparatively near the smoke 
 of London, and the Metropolitan boundary. 
 
 Protected on its east side by the river, from which, owing to 
 formidable defences, no trespasser can land, it is safeguarded else- 
 where, and effectually concealed from vulgar curiosity, by broad 
 intervening spaces of park-land, by its lovely gardens, and by what 
 Wordsworth calls : 
 
 " A brotherhood of venerable trees." 
 
 Venerable they undoubtedly are, but only comparatively so ; 
 they are not nearly as ancient as the house, though there is in the 
 
 98 
 
SION 
 
 grounds a cedar of Lebanon of such mighty girth that it almost 
 looks as if it might have been contemporary with it, if cedars 
 had been known in England when the Lord Protector made 
 his unfortunate building venture. But it is generally agreed that 
 Evelyn introduced the cedar to England. He mentions in his 
 " Sylva," published in 1664, that he had received " cones and seeds 
 from the mountains of Lebanon." The Sion cedars were probably 
 planted about 1670. 
 
 With regard to the cypresses which still abound at Sion, Dr. 
 Turner, physician to Edward VI. and to his uncle, the Lord Pro- 
 tector, who dedicated his work " The Names of Herbes," to the 
 Duke, and dated it from Sion refers to them as then growing there 
 plenteously. And Gerarde, in his " Herball," published in 1597, 
 remarks of the cypress, that there " are trees of it at Sion, a place 
 neare London." But of still greater historical interest are the 
 Sion mulberry trees ; for they include what is reputed to be the 
 oldest mulberry tree in England, said to have been introduced from 
 Persia in 1548. However this may be, and however greatly old 
 gardens such as those of Sion may have changed in the course of 
 their history, little or no change has taken place in the manner of 
 growth of their trees. We may be pretty sure that Tudor elms 
 and beeches, and Tudor cypresses and oaks, looked to our ancestors 
 much as their descendants do to us. Ancient or otherwise, they 
 bore the normal aspect of their descendants of like age to-day, and 
 in all probability they were planted, or have planted themselves, 
 very near the spot in which their ancestors flourished ; for does not 
 the baby acorn always lie close to the mother oak ? 
 
 The great attraction of Sion, however, apart from its historical 
 associations and the romantic history of its owners, is not the trees, 
 magnificent as they are, nor the beautiful gardens and unsurpassed 
 conservatories : these are rivalled elsewhere. It is its situation on 
 the bank of the Thames, the stream which, while it irrigates the 
 park and grounds by means of its tributaries feeding on the way a 
 beautiful miniature lake must always, even in monastic days, 
 when the surrounding land was nearly open country, have given 
 to it peculiar distinction and charm. It certainly does so now. 
 From no point does the stately house look so well as from the river ; 
 and standing on the towing-path by the river-gate of the Royal 
 Gardens of Kew, one gets an excellent view of the east front of the 
 
 99 7* 
 
GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 
 
 al residence, which is the only one it vouchsafes to show to a 
 legitimately interested as opposed to a merely inquisitive public. 
 The prospect on a fine summer's day, or on a sunny autumn one, 
 when the oaks, and sycamores, and beeches, are turning to red and 
 gold, is enchanting. The sweeping curve of the stream that here 
 takes a considerable bend towards Twickenham, includes the whole 
 of that portion of the grounds and park that slopes to the water's 
 edge, and shuts out all but a hint of the tall factory chimneys and 
 wharves of Brentford. There are happily no villas, pseudo- 
 Gothic, or pseudo-Queen Anne, to intrude an insistent modernity 
 into the gentle beauty of the scene ; no bridges triumphs, no doubt, 
 of engineering science, but matter-of-fact products of yesterday 
 only ; no traffic, beyond an occasional white or red-funneled steam- 
 boat, going up to Richmond, or down to London, with the tide- 
 nothing, in a word, to distract one's dream of the past, if one be 
 in the mood to indulge in it. It is true that there is the towing- 
 path itself ; but there have been towing-paths, surely, from time 
 immemorial, and a sad day it will be for London when its familiar 
 barges, though now they are propelled by steam, have become as 
 much part of a bygone age as the red, blue, and yellow omnibuses 
 of less than a dozen years ago. How picturesque those omnibuses 
 were we never knew till we had lost them ! 
 
 Lower down the river, at the Tower, at London Bridge, at Green- 
 wich, or Westminster, where all is lively and busy, it is impossible 
 to invoke the mood of reverie necessary to the reconstruction of 
 the past. Even at Chelsea and Cheyne Walk itself, it is difficult 
 to do so, for, from medisevalism to modernism, from that same past 
 as we conceive it to have been, to the actual, living present, is a 
 cry too far for the most vivid imagination to compass, even though 
 it may have been fed by years of archaeological and historical 
 study ; and this is because we are obsessed by the reality, some- 
 times in itself as beautiful as any dream. 
 
 Up here, however, on the towing-path, facing that old, yet 
 strangely new-looking palace of the Percys, " all in the blue, un- 
 clouded weather," when the surface of the river, oily and smooth, 
 either reflects the quiet temper of the sky, or, ruffled by a gentle 
 breeze, dances and sparkles in the sunshine ; when the far-away 
 cloud of smoke over London is very faint indeed, one can realize 
 a little how Sion must have looked, three, four, or even five 
 
 100 
 
SION 
 
 centuries ago. Father Thames himself helps the retrospection, for 
 here, on the whole, he has not greatly changed. A great deal 
 muddier, as to complexion, a little greyer and duller as to locks and 
 beard for such we may designate the trees and grasses about his 
 banks all this he has become ; and his quiet backwaters, with the 
 clear brown pools wherein fish loved to lurk, have gone for ever. 
 Mud is more in evidence ; it is no longer hidden by reeds and 
 rushes, nor even by the pollard willows of the Eyots which here and 
 there, as at Chiswick and Kew, cut the stream in two. The wild 
 flowers are sparser, the vegetation less verdant ; but the swans still 
 nest upon its banks. And one must remember that a tidal river, 
 which always running, may be said to have solved the secret of 
 perpetual motion, yet never stops to tell it to us is, even in respect 
 of this everlasting movement, in one sense, always the same. 
 Father Thames has grown older, but his character has not changed, 
 and he is as subject to moods now as in the far-off days when the 
 young Lord Guildford Dudley and his child-wife, a pair of happy 
 lovers then, with no foreboding of the fate before them, spent their 
 honeymoon weeks at Sion which was at that period in the pos- 
 session of Lord Guildford's father, who was John Dudley, Earl of 
 Warwick, and for a short time, Duke of Northumberland. 
 
 And because in the reach of the river that stretches from Isle- 
 worth to Twickenham, there is, nowadays, comparatively little 
 traffic, one is seldom rudely awakened from retrospective musings ; 
 from the vision of the time when, though the shipping of the 
 Thames was insignificant compared with what it is at present, 
 the river was London's great highway, alike for pleasure and for 
 business ; when the King's state barge, and my Lord Protector's, 
 and my Lord of Northumberland's, with many oars, plied constantly 
 between Whitehall Stairs and Sion and the stream was alive with 
 small craft, insignificant in tonnage, but picturesque beyond 
 compare. 
 
 For reliable information regarding Sion, I have been very much 
 indebted to two clear and able articles by the late Colonel Eustace 
 Balfour, which appeared some years ago in the Magazine of Art, 
 and which are invaluable aids to an appreciation of the ancient 
 family seat of the Northumberland family. The author's wide 
 architectural experience and taste, and his own close connection 
 with the House of Percy, rendered him peculiarly well-qualified to 
 
 101 
 
GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 
 
 write sympathetically on the subject. He supposes that the church 
 of the former monastery, with its twin choirs for monks and nuns, 
 stood on part of the ground now occupied by the present house, 
 which is fundamentally the same as that erected by the Pro- 
 tector Somerset on the actual site of the conventual buildings. 
 The fact that the quadrangular form was retained, and that a fine 
 specimen of fifteenth century architecture, a doorway evidently 
 once belonging to an important portion of those buildings, was 
 incorporated into the hall of the later structure, gives colour to the 
 hypothesis. The identity of the site of the existing house with 
 that of the monastery, is further established by the fact that in 
 Mary Tudor 's reign it was mentioned that two sides of the latter 
 had been pulled down, from which it is inferred that the Protector 
 had only carried out partial alterations in it, and had not entirely 
 rebuilt it. 
 
 The interior of the quadrangle is occupied by a flower-garden 
 about eighty feet square. A radical change in the external appear- 
 ance of the house mus.t have been effected when, somewhere about 
 1800, the walls were faced with Bath stone. The building is three 
 stories high, and the roof has an embattled parapet, at each angle 
 of which is a square embattled tower, and though owing to the 
 excellence of its proportions it has much dignity, it is plain almost 
 to ugliness, save on the east side facing the river, where a colonnade, 
 or arcade, occupying the whole space between the towers, gives 
 variety and some beauty. This arcade, or cloister, according to 
 Colonel Balfour, is, not improbably, the work of Inigo Jones, since 
 it bears much of the character of his designs. 
 
 On the demolition of Northumberland House, Strand, the famous 
 lion that had so long surmounted that mansion, was removed 
 to Sion, where it occupies a conspicuous position on a raised 
 pedestal on the roof, in the very centre of the river front. There 
 is a tradition that when it mounted guard over Charing Cross, it 
 at one time stood with its head towards St. James's Palace and 
 Carlton House but that after some act of discourtesy shown to its 
 noble owner, the loyal animal literally turned tail, and stood with 
 its back to royalty, facing thenceforth the Lord Mayor and Alder- 
 men of London, a position it retains to the present day at Sion. 
 
 With the interior of the house this book has not much to do. 
 It was reconstructed and redecorated by the brothers Adam 
 
 102 
 
SION 
 
 the famous eighteenth- century architects, and is a fine monument 
 to their genius, particularly to that of Robert Adam, who, says 
 Colonel Balfour, " drew his inspiration straight from Italy, where he 
 studied for several years. He succeeded in adapting with great 
 elasticity and considerable originality the later Roman style to 
 English uses. His plan had included a central dome over the 
 quadrangle, and a fine entrance and staircase in the north side, as 
 well as a beautiful bridge in the grounds." These plans were 
 never carried out. But the elegant gateway on the Isleworth and 
 Brentford Road which is so familiar to passengers on the Hampton 
 Court trams was completed, and remains as a characteristic 
 example of Adam's work. " It certainly possesses," says Colonel 
 Balfour, " all the delicate qualities for which Adam was remark- 
 able, the fine mouldings, the chaste composition and the slight 
 relief of the severe but well-cut ornament. We must never seek 
 in Adam's work the boldness of great projection. He belonged to 
 the school of reaction against the fashion of Rococo, with its huge 
 undercut twists and scrolls, and its heavy cornices. But in dealing 
 with his masses Adam was never weak, and he clearly acted on the 
 principle of subordinating ornament to proportion." . . . With all 
 this I am in cordial agreement, and the gateway, as Colonel Balfour 
 says, " forms a very dignified and fitting entrance to the flat but 
 finely timbered park, which stretches, with its broad avenues, 
 between the public road and the river." 
 
 Many historical associations cluster around the walls of Sion 
 House and they are chiefly tragic ones. The Protector Somerset 
 did not long remain in the enjoyment of his beautiful estate 
 indeed, in one way his possession of it contributed to his undoing ; 
 because his great building-works at Sion and elsewhere were 
 brought up against him in his attainder. By the machinations of 
 his enemies he was found guilty, not of treason, but of felony, and 
 was executed in 1552, and in the following year Sion was bestowed 
 upon his arch-enemy, John Dudley, quondam Earl of Warwick, 
 who had already contrived to secure the vast estates of the Earl- 
 dom of Northumberland, then in abeyance, owing to the death, 
 in 1537, of the last Earl without children, and the attainder of his 
 brother, Sir Thomas Percy. 
 
 Dudley not only received the estates, but a dukedom with them, 
 and thus it will be seen that the first holder of the title of Duke of 
 
 103 
 
GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 
 
 Northumberland was not a Percy at all, though the Percys had 
 previously been Earls of Northumberland for one hundred and sixty 
 years. 
 
 It may be interesting in this connection to quote from an old 
 number of the Quarterly Review concerning the history of this 
 famous English family, by which it will be seen that for several 
 centuries tragedy dogged their footsteps. ' Their ancestor, 
 Jocelaine de Louvaine, a younger son of the ancient Princes of 
 Brabant, and brother of Adelina, second consort of our Henry I., 
 married, in 1122, Agnes de Percy, the heiress of a great northern 
 baron, seated at Topcliffe and Spoffard, County of York, on condi- 
 tion that the male posterity should bear the name of Percy. Their 
 son, Henry, was great-grandfather of Henry, Lord Percy, sum- 
 moned to Parliament in 1299, whose great-grandson Henry, fourth 
 Lord Percy, was created Earl of Northumberland in 1377, at the 
 coronation of Richard II. He was slain at Bramham Moor in 
 1408. His son, Henry, Lord Percy (' Hotspur '), had already 
 fallen at Shrewsbury in 1403. Henry, second Earl, the son of 
 Hotspur, was slain at the Battle of St. Albans, in 1455. His son 
 Henry, third Earl, was slain at the battle of Towton in 1461. 
 Henry, fourth Earl, was murdered by an insurrectionary mob at 
 Thirske, in Yorkshire, in 1480. Henry, fifth Earl, died a natural 
 death in 1527, but his second son, Sir Thomas Percy, was executed 
 in 1537 for his concern in Ask's rebellion. Henry, sixth Earl, the 
 first lover of Queen Anne Boleyn, died in 1537 issueless, and the 
 honours were suspended for twenty years by the attainder of his 
 brother, Sir Thomas Percy, in 1537, during which time the family 
 had the mortification to see the dukedom of Northumberland 
 conferred on John Dudley, Earl of Warwick. But this nobleman 
 being attainted in 1553, the Earldom was restored to Thomas 
 Percy, the son of the attainted Sir Thomas, who became the 
 seventh Earl of Northumberland. He was eventually beheaded 
 in August, 1572. His brother, Henry Percy, was allowed, in right 
 of the new entail, to succeed as eighth Earl of Northumberland. 
 In 1585 this Earl, still blind to his family interests, entered into the 
 intrigues in favour of Mary Queen of Scots, and, being committed 
 to the Tower, committed suicide 21st June." 
 
 To return to John Dudley, Duke of Northumberland, whose 
 vaulting ambition, as is well known, over-leapt itself, and worked 
 
 104 
 
SIGN 
 
 his final overthrow. Having married his fourth son, Lord Guildford 
 Dudley, to the Lady Jane Grey, upon whom the youthful King 
 Edward weakened by ill-health and influenced by Northumber- 
 land passing over his sisters Mary and Elizabeth had settled the 
 succession he succeeded in persuading her, against her inclination 
 and her better judgment, to accept the crown. She and her 
 youthful bridegroom were living at Sion which had then newly 
 passed into her father-in-law's hands when the demise of the young 
 King occurred. Thence she went in semi-state, by water, to the 
 Tower, the usual residence of the monarchs of England on their 
 accession, there to be proclaimed Queen in due form. Sion, in all 
 its long history, has never witnessed a more sorrowful scene, for 
 whether the sun shone, or the rain beat, on the banks of the Thames 
 that day, it saw the first act in a tragedy, the catastrophe of which 
 was not far distant, when, controlled by the will of her formidable 
 father-in-law, urged even by her boy-consort himself but a puppet 
 in Northumberland's hands the pathetic figure of the unwilling 
 Queen stepped into the gaily-painted barge that was to carry her 
 to her doom. 
 
 As in the case of the last owner, Somerset, Dudley did not long 
 enjoy possession. He paid the penalty of his ambition on the 
 scaffold, and two of his chief supporters also suffered. The Lady 
 Jane and her husband were condemned to die, and, after a delay 
 that had almost seemed to promise a pardon, they were executed. 
 Queen Mary retained the estate which by the attainder of the 
 Duke of Northumberland now reverted to the crown in her own 
 hands, until 1557, when she recalled the " Daughters of Sion." 
 She did her best to reinstate them in their old home, re-endowing 
 them with the manor and demesne of Isleworth and other 
 property ; but Queen Elizabeth again suppressed them, and kept 
 possession of the house and lands until her death, in 1603, when 
 they were bestowed, with the Manor of Isleworth, on Henry 
 Percy, ninth Earl of Northumberland, in the possession of whose 
 family they have ever since remained. He expended large sums 
 on the improvement of the mansion, but soon fell on evil days ; for 
 he was accused and convicted by the Star Chamber, it is thought 
 unjustly, of complicity in the Gunpowder Plot, deprived of all his 
 offices, condemned to imprisonment for life in the Tower of London, 
 and to pay a fine of 30,000. His offer to- restore Sion to the JCing 
 
GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 
 
 in liquidation of the fine, all his other estates being entailed, was 
 refused ; but he was ultimately released on payment of 11,000. 
 
 The tenth Earl repaired the buildings, and it is possible that 
 Inigo Jones may have been the architect employed ; if this was the 
 case he did not materially alter the structure, and the cloister on the 
 east front alone suggests his work. The House of Commons in 
 1646 made the Earl of Northumberland the guardian of the children 
 of Charles I., and it was from Sion that they were taken to St. 
 James's Palace for an affecting farewell interview with their 
 unfortunate father before his execution. 
 
 Charles II. sought refuge here when the plague was raging in 
 London a doubtful asylum, since Brentford, at its very gates, 
 seems to have been the reverse of immune ; for in August, 1665, 
 Mr. Pepys mentions in his " Diary " that " the plague was very bad 
 round Brentford." A month later he writes that one of his water- 
 men "fell sick as soon as he landed me in London, when I had been 
 all night upon the water, and I believe he did get his infection that 
 day at Brentford, and is now dead of the plague." 
 
 Under date a month earlier, John Evelyn makes the following 
 entry : 
 
 ' To London and so to Syon, where his Majesty sat at Council 
 during the Contagion (Great Plague). When business was over, I 
 viewed that seat, belonging to the Earle of Northumberland, built 
 out of an old Nunnerie of stone, and faire enough, but more cele- 
 brated for its garden than it deserves ; yet there is excellent wall 
 fruite, and a pretty fountaine ; nothing else extraordinary." 
 
 When the Lady Elizabeth Percy, neiress to all of the Percy 
 estates, who had already been twice a widow, wedded the Duke 
 of Somerset before she was sixteen years old, she carried Sion again 
 into the Somerset family, but it only remained during two genera- 
 tions in the possession of the Seymours ; for Lady Elizabeth's 
 grand-daughter, who was also an heiress, married Sir Hugh Smith- 
 son, belonging to an old family in the north of England. He had 
 already Percy blood in his veins, and he was afterwards created 
 first Duke of Northumberland in the present line. 
 
 It was this nobleman who employed Adam to carry out the 
 extensive alterations in the interior at Sion House, and projected 
 external work, that, owing to unexplained circumstances, was 
 never executed. This is scarcely to be regretted, because the 
 
 106 
 
SION 
 
 mansion as it stands now is, externally, what it has been for 
 generations. Had it been otherwise, the fascinating chain of 
 historical associations would inevitably have been broken and 
 Colonel Balfour might have been unable to say, as he does say : 
 
 " Plain as is the whole exterior, it has about it a quiet dignity 
 which well befits the dwelling of an English gentleman. The quality 
 of repose has almost ceased to be sought for in modern architecture, 
 and we seem now to lack the courage of simplicity. It is there- 
 fore with a sense of peaceful satisfaction that our eyes turn away 
 from the more troubled and tumbled fa?ades of modern edifices 
 to such old-fashioned houses as Syon, which still possess something 
 of a monastic calm." 
 
 These words were written over thirty years ago, but the " monastic 
 calm," the air of detachment from the outside haunts of men, 
 lingers about the place still ; and the quality that most strikes 
 a visitor is the absolute quiet and aloofness of Sion. It speaks, 
 as the writer above quoted, has said, " of the palmy days of the 
 classical revival of the eighteenth century, but its classical character 
 is touched to some extent with medievalism. . . . The romance 
 of the Gothic period, outliving the structure in which it was ex- 
 pressed, has impressed upon this particular work of Adam an 
 unique quality." ... Of course the reference here is to the in- 
 terior, which alone bears traces of Adam ; but the idea expressed 
 applies to some extent to the grounds outside, where romance 
 also lingers ; and this because imagination, working under certain 
 conditions and in certain moods, is easily led back to the past in 
 the actual scene of events that were picturesque, and of episodes- 
 that were poignant, all the more that the river, the silent 
 highway to all these events, the silent witness to all these episodes, 
 remains unchanged, or nearly so ! 
 
 What the gardens were like in the years when the " Daughters 
 of Sion " lived there one does not know, but the Protector Somerset 
 seems to have been at considerable pains to lay them out. He had 
 a botanical garden here, superintended by the celebrated Dr. 
 William Turner, author of the first " English Herbal," and often 
 spoken of as the " father of British botany." Turner was Dean of 
 Wells and physician to Edward VI. He was also Somerset's 
 physician, and though his principal work, the "Herbal," was not 
 published until the year before the attainder and death of the 
 
 107 
 
GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 
 
 Protector, it is highly probable that he had all along been his 
 adviser as to the designing and planting of the grounds at Isle- 
 worth. According to a map extant a few years ago, there were 
 large walled gardens on the east and west sides ; the wall was con- 
 tinued along the south side, and in the angle where the walls 
 met was a high triangular terrace, doubtless erected for the enjoy- 
 ment of the fine river views thence obtainable, but which, when 
 the unfortunate Lord Protector was attainted for high treason, 
 was declared by his eneniies to be a fortification. A mound of 
 irregular shape on the south-east side of the house, now planted 
 with cedars, is by some people supposed to mark the site of this 
 platform or terrace. 
 
 Queen Anne, when Princess of Denmark, made Sion her 
 temporary residence, and it is probable that the fashions in garden- 
 planning and floriculture prevailing under William and Mary, 
 and to a much later period, were for a time followed here, as at 
 Hampton Court. They were fashions against which, as we know, 
 Addison inveighed, and that Pope ridiculed when he wrote : 
 
 " each Alley hath a brother, 
 
 And half the garden just repeats the other." 
 
 But whether or not London and Wise, gardeners, as mentioned 
 in an earlier chapter, to William III. and to Queen Anne, had 
 anything to do with the gardens at Sion, does not appear. A print 
 by H. Bush, dated 1737, and reproduced in Walford's " Greater 
 London," certainly looks as though they had. The pictured 
 garden is stiff enough to have rejoiced the heart of William of 
 Orange and probably also of George II., who, because its long, 
 narrow street reminded him of his native Hanover, is said to have 
 been so fond of Brentford that his coachman had orders to drive 
 slowly when he passed through the High Street, so that he might 
 enjoy its beauties. Bush's print shows a large garden between 
 the house and the river, bounded on the east by a wall with a 
 water-gate midway, and on the north and south by high hedges, 
 probably of yew. The wall is carried on diagonally in such a 
 fashion as to enclose a second garden, triangular in shape, and 
 intersected geometrically, in true Dutch fashion, with formal 
 walks. 
 
 Colonel Balfour thought that these walls and hedges may quite 
 
 108 
 
SION 
 
 possibly represent the laying out of the grounds by Protector 
 Somerset, but, be this as it may, the whole was swept away by 
 " Capability " Brown, probably about the time when Adam 
 made the alterations inside the house. 
 
 The estate altogether, as it appears at present to one privileged 
 for a time to wander over it and sketch, is undoubtedly beautiful 
 particularly when one remembers its nearness to London. Owing, 
 no doubt, to the neighbourhood of the river, and the artificial 
 waters fed by it, it is astonishingly verdant, and the grounds are 
 well kept ; but there is an entire and rather singular absence of 
 life about Sion. No doubt it is animated enough when the Duke of 
 Northumberland is in residence ; at other times it is a little lone- 
 some, the great house shows no sign of activity ; and sequestered 
 and charming as the grounds are, one misses the peacocks and 
 the water-fowl, and even the bold grey rabbits that scud across 
 the lawns at Chiswick House soon to be described in places 
 where, of course, they have no business to be ! 
 
 Therefore one welcomes, as the only relief from the immobility 
 of the scene, the gentle movements of the cattle on the green 
 sward lying between the flower gardens and the river, and hails 
 the appearance, even in the distance, of gardeners or woodmen 
 and I jumped up eagerly from my work one sunshiny day in 
 September, 1914, when one of the former, with considerable excite- 
 ment, called my attention to the then unusual sight of a vast cigar- 
 shaped airship, flying so low that it appeared to be little above the 
 dome of the conservatory. There were three or four men in it, 
 clearly seen, and it flew the British ensign at its stern, as any ship 
 at sea might do ; but its ocean, the air, was very calm and still, 
 and the sky serenely blue. It was an incident charged with 
 undue excitement and importance, because it happened at the 
 very outbreak of war, when the attributes and powers of Zeppelins 
 and airships were comparatively unknown. As a rule one may 
 walk for an hour at Sion, or paint undisturbedly, with nothing 
 whatever to remind one that the dirtiest hamlet in Middlesex 
 is at its very gates, and that the trams to Hampton Court pass 
 them every few minutes. 
 
 I do not know with what authority a writer, quoted by Waif or d, 
 suggested that Capability Brown's work at Sion, was in its turn 
 also " swept away." He says, " the extensive pleasure-grounds 
 
 109 
 
GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 
 
 skirting the Thames, from the middle of Brentford to Isleworth 
 Ferry, with the once notable gardens, had received little attention 
 since the early days of Capability Brown, when the late Duke of 
 Northumberland caused designs to be prepared for remodelling 
 the whole of the grounds, twenty-five acres in extent." 
 
 Colonel Balfour, who had exceptional opportunities for obtaining 
 accurate information on all such points, speaks of no such efface- 
 ment, which would have been an act of sheer vandalism, for, in 
 their own way, the gardens of Kent and his successor, Capability 
 Brown, are classic. On the contrary, he remarks : " Of its kind, 
 Capability Brown's landscape gardening is here most successful." 
 
 There is nothing in the Sion grounds as they now appear, as 
 far as my amateur knowledge goes, to suggest that they were not 
 planned in the second half of the eighteenth century, though, 
 no doubt, many interesting trees and shrubs have been added, 
 and the magnificent range of plant-houses, four hundred feet long, 
 can scarcely belong to that period, although they have a charmingly 
 old-fashioned air. Here again I have been unable to glean definite 
 information, but probably the construction of these fine con- 
 servatories, with the substitution of metallic framework for the 
 old-time wood-framed roofs and sides, were the principal features 
 in the great improvements referred to by Walford's anonymous 
 authority. ' They consist," he says, " of nine divisions, and are 
 so arranged that each can be kept at its own independent tem- 
 perature, suitable to the health and beauty of its plants ; yet 
 the doors can, upon any special occasion, be thrown open, giving 
 the various climates of the world, with their various inhabitants." 
 They are raised on a terrace two or three feet above the garden 
 level, and built in the form of a crescent, a crystal dome, sixty- 
 five feet high, rising from the centre. The terrace is punctuated, 
 as one might say, at regular intervals by tall and massive stone 
 flower vases. These vases are said to be the work of Grinling 
 Gibbons, and their heavy, florid style and debased ornament, 
 better suited to wood than stone, is little in harmony with the 
 chaste and restrained decoration, the severe and elegant archi- 
 tecture of the Adam entrance-gate before referred to. 
 
 During the absences of the noble owner, the flowering plants are 
 now removed from the conservatories, which have, in consequence, 
 at such times, a rather forlorn and bare aspect, notwithstanding 
 
 no 
 
SIGN : Looking toward the River Thames 
 
 1 10 
 
SION 
 
 the beauty of the glossy dark leaves of camellias out of bloom, 
 of orange trees, tall palms, and ferns. Conservatories, whatever 
 their architectural dignity and those at Sion have much demand 
 colour ; to obtain which, at all seasons, is surely the raison d'etre 
 of a greenhouse. However, though, in the interior, colour may 
 sometimes be lacking at Sion, outside, in September, there is 
 veritably a feast of it ! 
 
 Standing at the extreme end of the terrace, by the door of the 
 near conservatory, the angle of which in my drawing unfortunately 
 cuts off from view the curved line of the crescent-shaped houses 
 and the central dome, one looks across beds of delicately-tinted 
 flowers to the opposite and corresponding greenhouse, every 
 available inch of which is covered with Virginia creeper, which, in 
 September, changes rapidly from a warm green to scarlet, and 
 finally to blood-red. It compensates by its glorious hues for the 
 gradual weakening, as summer wanes, of the blaze of rose and pink, 
 touched here and there with white, and occasionally with a splash 
 of pure vermilion used with much reticence at Sion but which, 
 when present, strikes the final note of a colour-scheme of wonderful 
 beauty. 
 
 I may return ere long to the subject of colour in gardens to 
 Jboth the abuse and timid avoidance of scarlet, the untutored 
 eye welcoming contrasts, but ignoring harmonies. 
 
 The terrace is a vantage ground. Thence the eye is led gradu- 
 ally onward, down the broad walk between the beds of pink 
 geranium and purple heliotrope, and less familiar plants, which 
 blend admirably ; past the far end of the conservatory, with its 
 mantle of creeper just described ; past Cyprus, and cedar, and 
 Scottish fir, the dark foliage of all three contrasting with the 
 brighter greens of the deciduous trees, already painted with patches 
 of yellow ; on, right on, beyond all this to the open space of sky, 
 and stretch of quiet park, where cattle are grazing, to where the 
 glint of sunshine on a white sail, the occasional glimpse of the 
 red funnel of a steamboat, the distant objects moving on the farther 
 bank at the point at which the gardens of Kew descend to the 
 towing path, sufficiently indicate the position of the invisible 
 channel of the river. 
 
 Turn a little to the right, keeping now the Gibbons vase upon 
 your left, and a wider view of the flower-garden presents 
 
 ill 
 
GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 
 
 itself. Here is the parterre of the eighteenth century landscape- 
 gardener a decorative, if formal, arrangement of flower-plots, 
 with walks of bright green turf intervening at least so it is at 
 Sion ; at Holland House and Fulham Palace these plots are 
 separated by foot-wide gravel paths, edged by high, thick borders 
 of ancient box ; but here, as there, they are intersected by one or 
 two broad, straight gravel walks running from end to end. In 
 the centre is a fountain, and a basin filled with water-lilies. 
 
 The man, whosoever he was whether Capability Brown or 
 another who first imagined, and then laid out this beautiful 
 garden, was an artist. He knew the enormous value in every 
 picture of contrast ; and nothing more admirable in this respect 
 can be conceived than the opposition of these masses of brilliant 
 and well-harmonized flowers in the parterre, with the belt of rich, 
 dark evergreen-trees above and beyond the well-contrived alpine 
 rock-garden that shuts in this part of the grounds. 
 
 It has always seemed to me that the man who plants even a single 
 tree does a good work and an unselfish one : he plants for posterity, 
 not for himself ; he is laying up a store of perennial beauty for 
 a world as yet unborn. The tree's maturity he himself will never 
 see, nay, nor scarcely will his children see it ; for the life of a tree 
 is commensurate with the lives of generations of men.* He accepts 
 the fact and does not murmur, for in his simple way he is a prophet ; 
 he has a vision of beauty, and his oak, or his elm, may help to 
 realize it ; or, more probably, he has a vision of utility, and, 
 just as from the oaks that Evelyn planted were built the ships 
 in which Nelson fought, he is content with the knowledge that the 
 timber of his tree will be required for purposes innumerable, when 
 he himself has gone the way of all flesh. It is an act of faith and 
 of patriotism, not unworthy of comparison though the self- 
 sacrifice and the risks are immeasurably less with the faith in 
 the future, the devotion to ends that he may not live to see con- 
 summated, of the civilian who voluntarily enters the ranks of an 
 army, offering his life to his country to England, to France, to 
 Belgium, in order that, though he die, she may continue to live.* 
 
 It is the spirit of the old-time builder. Someone who dreamt 
 a cathedral, and then planned it ; who saw the work well begun 
 and then, silently passed. The cathedral took three, four, even 
 
 * This was written at the beginning of the great war, long before conscription was thought of. 
 
 112 
 
SION 
 
 five hundred years to build ; generation after generation helped 
 to evolve the idea of that first builder, whose very name probably 
 has passed into oblivion ! The sculptor, and the carver in oak, 
 and the designer of stained glass, each in turn threw himself self- 
 lessly into the work, raising for others the carved columns, the 
 curious gargoyles ; decorating the facade of the great building 
 with the sculptured figures of saint and martyr, carving the oaken 
 screen, the stalls and the pulpit, filling the tall windows with jewelled 
 glass and all this unostentatiously, each one doing, without fuss 
 or sense of special merit, his appointed task each man literally 
 " doing his bit," and doing it well, because he loved it ! They had 
 faith in God, those old artists, and their labour was part of their 
 religion, and therefore do " their works live after them," though 
 they themselves have long been dust, and many are forgotten. 
 
 It follows that if a man who planted a single tree that giant 
 cedar near the north side of Sion, for instance, which has " had 
 a past" so a gardener told me was blown down in a certain 
 memorable snow-storm twenty or thirty years ago, and then 
 replanted, and still survives, his great arms propped up with iron 
 supports if such a man well merits our gratitude for truly the 
 tree is beautiful ! if the memory of such deserves posterity's 
 blessing, how great is posterity's debt to him who planted many 
 hundreds of trees, the Beeches of Burnham, the oaks of Windsor 
 and Richmond, the trees of all sorts and climates at Kew, and 
 the no less magnificent specimens at Sion itself. Kindly permitted 
 for a time to wander over Sion, I offer my gratitude both to the 
 owner and to the landscape-gardener, whosoever he was, that laid 
 out these pleasure-grounds. Like the cathedral builder, he too 
 dreamt this garden ; laboriously he dug and delved, and pruned 
 and watered, and every sapling he planted, with due regard to 
 its proper place in the whole scheme, was one step onwards towards 
 the realization of his dream. He illustrated in his own person 
 two, at least, of the Christian virtues : charity and faith ; for what is 
 charity but unselfishness, love ? and in a degree his was an unselfish 
 act. And what is faith but and this might well be the landscape- 
 gardener's motto '' the substance of things hoped for, the evidence 
 of things not seen" 
 
 113 
 
CHAPTER V 
 THE CHELSEA " PHYSICKE GARDEN " 
 
 IN the opening chapter of this book reference is made to the 
 universal cultivation of simples, or medicinal herbs, by 
 the English country dames and damsels of old, and also to 
 the fact that in many a convent garden in this country the plants 
 used in the healing art were grown by the monks, who largely 
 helped to keep alive the science of horticulture during the dark 
 ages. 
 
 By degrees, in the sixteenth century, books on the subject began 
 to appear. As already stated, the first Englishman to compile 
 a herbal was William Turner, M.D., Fellow of Pembroke Hall, 
 Cambridge, Dean of Wells, botanist and physician to Edward VI. 
 and the Protector Somerset. 
 
 Learning Greek as he did from Nicholas Ridley, and hearing 
 Hugh Latimer preach, it is not surprising that Turner should have 
 so soon identified himself with the reforming party in the Church. 
 For preaching without a licence he was for a time imprisoned, and 
 when released, travelled on the Continent, interesting himself 
 deeply in the study of botany, and writing religious works, that 
 were forbidden by proclamation to appear in England. He came 
 into favour at court on the accession of Edward VI., and though 
 deprived of his office during Mary's reign, so that he again sought 
 refuge abroad, he was for some years Dean of Wells, till finally, 
 he was suspended for nonconformity in 1564. 
 
 " Being," he tells us, " so much vexed and occupied with preach- 
 ing and the study of divinity, he had but small leisure to write 
 herballes." Yet," said his contemporary, Dr. Bullen, " his book 
 
 114 
 
THE CHELSEA " PHYSICKE GARDEN " 
 
 of herbes will always grow green, and never wither, so long as 
 Discorides is held in mind among these mortal wights." The work 
 appeared in two parts ; the first being published in 1551 part 
 the second, ten or twelve years later. According to the practice 
 in those days, the title set forth in prolix detail the contents of 
 the book, and the author describes it as "a new Herbale 
 wherein are conteyned the names of herbes in Greke, Latin, 
 Englishe, Duche, and Frenche, and in the apothecaries and 
 herbaries latin, with the properties, 'degrees and natural place of 
 the same, gathered and made by William Turner, Physician to the 
 Duke of Somerset." 
 
 The second part included " divers confutationes of no small 
 errours that men of no small learning have committed in the in- 
 treatinge of herbes of late years." These two parts, to which were 
 added the names of herbs found "after the old writer's tyme," 
 were reprinted, and dedicated to " the surgeon's company of 
 London and all practitioners of surgery throughout England," and 
 were dated from Wells in 1564, the year of Turner's final expulsion 
 from his deanery. An edition in the British Museum, dated from 
 his " house at London the 5th day of Marche, 1568," four months 
 only before his death, has a long and fulsome dedication to Queen 
 Elizabeth ("your most excellent sublimitie," he calls her), in 
 which he extravagantly praises her Latin. Turner is described as 
 " a racy writer, a keen controversialist, and a man of undoubted 
 learning." He was a sound and eager botanist. Before his time, 
 as he himself says, botany was so much neglected that, when 
 collecting plants for the skeleton of his work, he could not find a 
 physician capable of telling him the names, in Greek, Latin, or 
 English, of any of them. 
 
 Turner cannot claim the credit of having founded the first 
 medicinal herb garden in England ; that distinction belongs to 
 John Gerarde, who also, some thirty years after Turner's death, 
 published an admirably illustrated " Herbal or Historic of Plants," 
 but Turner, who was superintendent of the Duke of Somerset's 
 new garden at Sion (of which an account has been given already), 
 had ample opportunity to encourage the growth, and test the 
 virtues, of all the simples with which he was acquainted, and to 
 cultivate many uncommon specimens. Owing to the unsettled 
 circumstances of Turner's life and the diversity of his pursuits, 
 
 115 8* 
 
GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 
 
 his medical knowledge, though it brought him high patronage, 
 could not possibly have been founded on leisurely observation, 
 and personal practice. Therefore classical scholar as he was 
 it is not surprising that in his herbal, which is certainly a monu- 
 ment to his industry and patience, he rests his faith in the virtues 
 of certain plants, on the stated experience of the ancients, and 
 constantly quotes Discorides, who wrote on the Materia Medico, 
 in the first and second centuries. 
 
 John Gerarde, before mentioned, a surgeon and citizen of 
 London, and gardener to Lord Burleigh, did the same, and 
 their two herbals make curious reading. We find that in the 
 sixteenth century strawberries were more esteemed for medicinal 
 properties than as fruit to be eaten. They " quench thirst and 
 are good for a cholerick stomack," writes Turner. " There is a 
 juice pressed out of strawberries, which by continuance of tyme 
 encreaseth in strength and that is a present remedie against the 
 sores and wheales of the face." 
 
 Gerarde remarks that " the leaves boiled in manner of a pultis, 
 taketh away the burning heat in wounds, a decoction thereof 
 strengtheneth the gums, fastneth the teeth," etc. ' The distilled 
 water " of strawberries " drunke with white wine is good against 
 the passion of the hart raiseth the spirits and maketh the hart 
 merrie." And it is also " reported to scower the face and take 
 away spots, and to make the face faire and smooth," thus recalling 
 the poet's refrain that " strawberry leaves make maidens fair." 
 Gerarde, like Turner, tells us that " strawberries quench thirst, 
 and alaie the inflammation and heate of the stomacke," but adds 
 that "the nourishment- they yield is little, thinne, and waterish." 
 Roses, medicinally used, " strengthen the hart, and helpe the 
 trembling and beating thereof. They are put into all kinds of 
 counter poysons and other like medicines, whether they be to 
 be outwardly applied or inwardly taken." He quotes Pliny to 
 prove that " the roote of a wilde Rose is a singular remedie (found 
 out by oracle) against the bite of a mad dog." 
 
 Hydrophobia was apparently a common disease, therefore many 
 are its suggested cures. " Horehound stamped " (i.e., mixed or 
 crushed) " with salt and applied, cureth the bite of a mad dog 
 as Discorides writeth." But, that one dog's meat is another dog's 
 poison, and that salt is not good for sane dogs, we have the ancient 
 
 116 
 
THE CHELSEA " PHYSIGKE GARDEN " 
 
 physician's witness for " if you have a little dog and wish to 
 keep it small you may give it daisies stamped with new butter 
 unsalted : " and we learn that " daisies do mitigate all kinde of 
 paines, but especially of the joints, and goute," if they are mixed 
 in the same way with unsalted butter. 
 
 " Snapdragon," says Gerarde, " according to Discorides, is the 
 herbe that, being hanged about one, preserveth a man from being 
 bewitched, and that maketh a man gratious in the sight of the 
 people." Faith can remove mountains : and if such nostrums did 
 no good, they very often did no harm. 
 
 The character of the herbal literature did not greatly change 
 during the next half -century, and more. In 1664 a certain Robert 
 Turner, calling himself " Botanologia Studiosus," published the 
 ' British Physician," with a title even more detailed and verbose 
 than his namesake's and predecessor's ; it set forth " the nature 
 and vertues of English plants, exactly describing such plants as 
 grow naturally in the land with their several names, Greek, Latin, 
 and English, natures, places where they flourish and are most 
 proper to be gathered ; their degree of temperature, applications 
 and vertues, physical and astrological uses, treated of ; each plant 
 appropriated to the several diseases they cure and directions for 
 their medicinal use, throughout the whole body of man ; being 
 most special helps for sudden accidents, acute and chronick dis- 
 temper. By means of which people may gather their own physick 
 under every hedge, or in their own gardens, which may be most 
 conducing to their health ; so that observing the directions in 
 this book, they may become their own physicians, for what climate 
 soever is subject to any particular disease, in the same place there 
 grows a cure." 
 
 The punctuation of Turner's long title is so erratic that, on 
 reading it, one is, as it were, breathless before reaching the 
 end. 
 
 Ten years after this work appeared one William Langham 
 brought out a herbal with a pretty name, " The Garden of Health," 
 but it was apparently of the same nature as " The British Phy- 
 sician," and proves that though Evelyn's various works on horti- 
 culture and notably his " Sylva or a Discourse on Forest Trees " 
 had awakened in some quarters an intelligent interest in horti- 
 culture and kindred sciences, the ordinary herbalist of the 
 
 117 
 
GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 
 
 seventeenth century had seldom a soul above his physic, com- 
 pounded of herbs to be " found under every hedge " and " grown 
 in every garden." The larger aims of forestry concerned him 
 but little ; and it would appear that during the sixteenth and 
 seventeenth centuries popular interest in plants and trees centred 
 in the cultivation of those vegetables and fruits, to which I have 
 made earlier reference. 
 
 Fortunately for posterity, and for botany in its relation to 
 medical science, this indifference was not universal. We have 
 seen Sir William Temple almost as good a horticulturist as he 
 was a statesman regardless of the superior claims of patriotism, 
 devoting his great gifts and his valuable time, in his voluntary 
 retirement from political life, to the culture of oranges and melons ; 
 and John Evelyn, the famous diarist, introducing " trees of curi- 
 osity " to this country and not resting until he had induced the 
 great landowners to plant new oaks and elms in the place of those 
 ruthlessly sacrificed during the civil wars ; and now we shall find 
 that about four years after Evelyn had introduced the cedar to 
 England, was founded the garden that is the subject of this 
 chapter. 
 
 As previously mentioned, the earliest botanic garden in England 
 was that of John Gerarde in Holborn. The catalogue of plants he 
 published in 1596 mentions numerous varieties of the same species, as 
 having been grown there. The next, in point of time, was that of a 
 man equally celebrated, and already referred to more than once 
 John Tradescent, gardener to Charles I. He established at Lambeth 
 a garden for exotic plants, and, as we already know, he was a good 
 botanist and collector, in other branches of natural history. In 
 1749, Mr. Watson, afterwards Sir William Watson, spoken of in 
 the chapters on Fulham Palace, visited the Tradescent garden 
 and found the house empty and ruinous, and the garden totally 
 neglected ; but though a wilderness, " it still showed traces of 
 its founder." 
 
 Both the Gerarde and Tradescent gardens were highly com- 
 mendable private enterprises, but the opportunities of their owners 
 Were necessarily limited. 
 
 A Botanic garden endowed by the Earl of Derby had been 
 founded at Oxford in 1652, but the honour of establishing in Lon- 
 don the first of its kind supported by a public body, belongs to 
 
 118 
 
THE CHELSEA " PHYSIGKE GARDEN " 
 
 the Society of Apothecaries. The Society itself was still very 
 young, having been incorporated in 1617, in the reign of James I. 
 It had from a very early period of its existence taken a lively interest 
 in botany, and so long back as 1632 we find its members making 
 annual botanical excursions, known as " herbalizings," into the 
 country round London. In founding, in the year 1670, a garden 
 for the better pursuit of botanical study, the aims of the apothe- 
 caries seem to have been threefold : firstly, the advancement of 
 botany in its relation to medicine ; secondly, the classification, for 
 the benefit of their own students, of the multitudinous forms that 
 constitute the vegetable kingdom, by means of specimens of the 
 groups of plants spread over the surface of the globe, collected 
 and arranged systematically for educational purposes : and thirdly, 
 the introduction, with a view to cultivation, of foreign trees, 
 vegetables, and plants. The young society, having recently re- 
 built their hall destroyed in the great fire of 1666, had few funds 
 at their disposal for the purposes they had at heart ; but having 
 the will, they found the way. The matter is a little obscure, but 
 it would almost appear that the apothecaries already had a lease 
 of the land upon which they proposed to make this garden ; for 
 a writer in 1693 says, " The ground upon which the Chelsea Gar- 
 den is now situated was originally taken by the Apothecaries 
 Society as a convenient place upon which to build a barge-house 
 for the ornamental barge that the Society (like the other City com- 
 panies) then possessed." 
 
 In quoting the above in 1878, Field and Simple, writing the 
 " Memoirs of the Botanic Garden at Chelsea," remark that " it 
 appears that Charles Cheyne, Esq., by his indenture of lease bearing 
 date August 29, 1673, did demise and grant unto the Master, Wardens 
 and Society of the Art and mystery of .apothecaries of the City 
 of London and their successors and assigns, the piece and parcel 
 of ground and premises therein mentioned to hold from Michaelmas 
 then ensuing, until the full term of sixty years at the yearly rent 
 of 5." There is some discrepancy in the dates, which, however, 
 is not of great importance to us, but it is interesting to know how 
 such favourite localities as Cheyne Row, and Cheyne Walk, came 
 by their names. 
 
 Certain public-spirited members of the Society of Apothecaries 
 now offered at their own expense but hoping that other 
 
 119 
 
GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 
 
 contributors might come forward to build a wall round the garden 
 on condition that the court of assistants of the Society of Apothe- 
 caries, who undertook the management of the scheme, should 
 agree to pay 2/- annually for ever, towards the cost of the 
 " herborizings." The proposal was accepted, and the members of 
 the laboratory staff contributed 50 towards building the wall, 
 in return for which they were to be allowed a piece of ground in 
 the garden for herbs. This stipulation shows that, in its first 
 inception at any rate, the Chelsea plot was not primarily intended 
 for the cultivation of medicinal plants. 
 
 The services of Piggott, the first gardener, were discontinued 
 in December, 1677, and a certain Richard Pratt was appointed 
 at a salary liberal for those days of 30 per annum. Directions 
 were given that the following year the garden should be planted 
 with the best fruit trees, and the promise to the laboratory staff, 
 carried out by a good crop of medicinal herbs. In 1680 we find 
 one Mr. Watts, who had been a contributor to the erection of the 
 wall, appointed head-gardener, his remuneration being 50 per 
 annum. There was also an allowance for two labourers. 
 
 Shortly after this, at the lower end of the ground near the river, 
 a greenhouse was constructed, costing 138. Watts then pro- 
 ceeded to Holland to arrange an exchange of plants with the pro- 
 fessor of botany at the University of Leyden, who had previously 
 visited the Chelsea garden a garden that had thus in a single 
 decade assumed importance in the world of botanical science. 
 
 It was about this time that the four famous cedars which appear 
 so picturesquely in the old prints of the garden, were planted, 
 being at the time only three feet high. Unfortunately they no 
 longer exist ; the two northern ones, having decayed, were cut 
 down about 1770, together with some limes and elms, and various 
 other trees considered to be injurious to the growth of the plants 
 for which the garden was designed. Henry Field, writing in 
 1878, mentions that the last survivor of the famous group was 
 then moribund. The timber from the two felled trees was sold 
 for 23 9s. 8d. 
 
 In 1685 Mr. Evelyn writes in his diary : 
 
 4 1 went to see Mr. Watts, keeper of the apothecaries' garden 
 of simples at Chelsea, where there is a collection of innumerable 
 varieties of that sort particularly, besides many rare annuals, the 
 
 120 
 

 sa 
 
 
 ^ W 
 
 _. .jW 
 
 t 
 
 The " Physicke " Garden: Gateway in Swan Walk, Chelsea. 
 
 [To face p. 120. 
 
THE CHELSEA " PHYSIGKE GARDEN ' 
 
 tree bearing Jesuits' bark which had done such wonders in agues. 
 What was very ingenious was the subterranean heat, conveyed 
 by a stove under the conservatory, all vaulted with brick, so that 
 he has the doors and windows open in the hardest frosts ; ex- 
 cluding only the snow." 
 
 So far Mr. Watts appears to have done well, but six years 
 later we find him getting into disgrace, and 'the Vice-President 
 of the Society of Antiquaries as appears from an original 
 manuscript afterwards published in one of twelve volumes of 
 the " Archaeologia " says "the Chelsea Physick Garden has 
 great variety of plants both in and out of the greenhouses : the 
 perennial green hedges, and rows of different coloured herbs are 
 very pretty, and so are the banks set with shades of herbs in the 
 Irish stitch way ; but many plants in the garden were not in so 
 good order as might be expected ; after I had been there, I learned 
 that Mr. Watts, the keeper of it, was blamed for his neglect and 
 would be removed." 
 
 Poor Mr. Watts whether dismissed or not, he sinned in intro- 
 ducing, in the seventeenth century, what reads very much like that 
 modern abomination, a ribbon border. 
 
 Throughout its history the lessees of the garden seem to have 
 experienced difficulties in meeting the expenses of the upkeep, and 
 various plans were tried to enable them to do so. In 1697 the 
 lease had been extended, but soon after, the Society of Apothe- 
 caries, finding that in its corporate capacity it could not support 
 the cost of the garden, adopted the expedient of making certain 
 members voluntarily responsible for it ; this was in 1707, but six 
 years later the Trustees reported that, owing to the difficulty of 
 getting in subscriptions, they would be unable to continue its 
 maintenance beyond the present term of seven years. 
 
 It is in 1714 that we find the first mention of Dr. Sloan, after- 
 wards Sir Hans Sloan, in connection with the garden. 
 
 He was at this time Lord of the Manor of Chelsea, having pur- 
 chased it two years earlier from William, Lord Cheyne. 
 
 Sir Hans Sloan was born in Ireland in 1660 of Scottish parentage. 
 A delicate youth, he came to London to study medicine and 
 the allied sciences, particularly chemistry and botany. At the 
 age of twenty-three he went to Paris to work under distinguished 
 professors, afterwards studying in the university of Montpellier, 
 
 121 
 
GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 
 
 and travelling through Languedoc collecting plants. Soon after 
 his return to London he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, 
 and two years later a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians. 
 Sloan had long wished to visit the tropics, and when, in 1687, the 
 Duke of Albemarle was appointed governor of Jamaica, Sloan 
 accompanied him as physician. The premature death of the 
 Duke cut short his visit, but not before he had made large collec- 
 tions of plants in the West Indies ; and although only fifteen 
 months in Jamaica, he contrived to collect an enormous number 
 of specimens. In 1694, Dr. Sloan was appointed physician to 
 Christ's Hospital, an office he retained for fourteen years ; and 
 shortly after, he married the wealthy daughter of a London alder- 
 man. Of four children born to him and her, two daughters alone 
 survived their parents/ They married into the aristocratic families 
 of Stanley and Cadogan ; their names, and Sir Hans Sloan's, are 
 perpetuated in several well-known streets and squares in the 
 manor of Chelsea. Sloan was the first of his profession to receive 
 hereditary honours, George I. conferring a baronetcy on him in 
 1716, and afterwards making him physician to the Forces. He 
 was principal physician to George II., and he succeeded the illus- 
 trious Sir Isaac Newton as President of the Royal Society, holding 
 office to the age of eighty. He was also President of the Royal 
 College of Physicians. Honours indeed crowded upon this dis- 
 tinguished man. His exhaustive Latin catalogue of the plants 
 of Jamaica, and the two folio volumes he published later, must 
 have involved great labour and expense ; but, otherwise, his own 
 contributions to science were not remarkable. He was, for that 
 day, a good physician, with an extensive practice among the 
 upper classes ; and from his youth, when his tastes and industry 
 brought him into touch with Robert Boyle, one of the founders 
 of the Royal Society, and with Ray, the naturalist, elsewhere 
 mentioned in this book, he was up to advanced age, an indefatigable 
 collector in the realm of natural science. So early as 1701, his own 
 collections were enriched by the inherited cabinet of William Courten, 
 another collector, and when, at the age of eighty, he removed 
 from Bloomsbury, and retired from active work to the enjoyment 
 of his estate at Chelsea, his treasures were of unique value. He 
 spent the closing years of his life hi entertaining scientific men 
 and studying his collections, to which no doubt he added, so that 
 
 122 
 
THE CHELSEA " PHYSICKE GARDEN' 
 
 when he died, at the age of ninety-two, his museum contained two 
 hundred volumes of dried plants, and 30,600 specimens of other 
 objects of natural history, besides a library of 50,000. volumes, 
 and 3,566 manuscripts. All this he bequeathed to the nation 
 on condition that Parliament should pay his executors 20,000, 
 which he estimated as the fourth of its value. 
 
 It was a munificent offer, and an Act was passed accepting it, 
 by which the vast collection, added to the books and manuscripts 
 of Sir Robert Cotton, before purchased, became the nucleus of the 
 national treasure-house. It was established either by accident 
 or design in Sloan's old neighbourhood, Bloomsbury, and was 
 first opened to the public in 1759, six years after his death. It 
 is now famous all the world over as the British Museum. 
 
 It was to Sir Hans Sloan that, finding it impossible to support 
 unaided the upkeep of their garden, the Society of Apothecaries 
 now appealed for help. A deputation waited upon him to ascertain 
 his sentiments towards it. These sentiments, though there was 
 no immediate result from the interview, were probably benevolent, 
 for it seems to have paved the way for the liberal settlement of 
 the question a few years later. This was in 1722, when a deed 
 of conveyance of the garden at Chelsea from Sir Hans Sloan to the 
 Society of Apothecaries, was laid before the court of assistants, 
 approved by them, and ordered to be sealed. The " release is 
 made between the Hon. Sir Hans Sloan, Bart., President of the 
 Royal College of Physicians on one part, and the master, wardens, 
 and Society of the art and mystery of apothecaries of the City 
 of London on the other part." It recites the original lease from 
 Lord Cheyne, and also the great expense incurred by the society 
 in laying out and supporting the Physic Garden ever since that 
 lease was granted, and goes on to say, " to the end that the said 
 garden may at all times hereafter be continued as a Physicke 
 Garden, and for the better encouraging and enabling the said 
 Society to support the charge thereof, for the manifestation of 
 the power, wisdom, and glory of God in the works of the creation,, 
 and that their apprentices and others may better distinguish good 
 and useful plants from those that bear resemblance to them and 
 yet are hurtful and other the like good purposes ; the said Sir 
 Hans Sloan grants to the Master, Warden, and Society and their 
 successors, all that piece and parcel of arable and pasture land, 
 
 123 
 
GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 
 
 situated at Chelsea in the county of Middlesex " . . . " containing 
 3 acres, 1 rood, and 35 perches, with the greenhouse, stoves, 
 barge-houses, and other creations thereon, to have and to hold 
 the same for ever, paying to Sir Hans Sloan and his heirs and 
 assigns the yearly rent of 5, and rendering yearly to the President 
 and Council and Fellows of the Royal Society of London 50 speci- 
 mens of distinct plants, well dried and preserved, which grew 
 in their garden the same year, with their names or reputed names, 
 and those presented in each year to be specifically different from 
 those of every former year until the number of 2,000 shall have 
 been delivered." 
 
 If the Society failed to fulfil any of the above conditions 
 or should attempt to use the ground for any other purpose than 
 a Physic Garden the deed empowered Sir Hans Sloan or his 
 representatives, to enter the garden and hold it for the benefit 
 of the Royal Society which, in that case, was to be subject to 
 the same conditions as to rent and delivery of the specimens, 
 as the Apothecaries ; only the specimens and the rent were to 
 be delivered by the new custodians to the President and Council 
 of the Faculty of Physic in London. 
 
 To the non-legal mind all this is very confusing, but it would 
 appear that, failing the Society of Apothecaries, the Royal Society, 
 of which Sloan was then either Secretary or Vice-President, 
 should accept the same responsibilities towards the garden for 
 the benefit eventually of the Royal College of Physicians, of which 
 Sir Hans Sloan was even then President. Soon after, the College 
 of Physicians presented the Apothecaries Society with 100 for 
 the use of the garden, and for some time we hear no more of finan- 
 cial difficulties ; on the contrary, six years later an order was given 
 to build a wharf on the river side of the garden at the cost of 
 1,000, the money being borrowed on sufficient security. In 
 1732 a scheme was set on foot to erect a greenhouse wherein the 
 various temperatures of the world should as nearly as possible be 
 imitated, so that plants might enjoy an approximation to their 
 native climes. The building cost 1,891 16s., and in it we find 
 the germ of the idea that led to the erection of the great hot-houses 
 of Sioii and Kew. In the same year, a year of astonishing activity 
 on the part of the Society ; it sent out at its own expense to Georgia 
 to collect trees and plants, in order to make experiments in raising 
 
 124 
 
THE CHELSEA " PHYSIGKE GARDEN " 
 
 the same in England, and it also erected a statue to Sir Hans 
 Sloan, by a German sculptor one Michael Rysbrach. This, 
 when finished, at the cost of 280, was placed in front of the new 
 hot-house, but was subsequently removed to its present position 
 at the junction of several of the principal walks. It is a dignified 
 presentment of a distinguished man, but, unfortunately, only a 
 distant view of it appears in my drawing. The Latin inscription 
 on the pedestal sets forth that the Society of Pharmacopaedists 
 " being sensible how necessary this branch of science is to the 
 faithful discharging of the duty of their profession, with grateful 
 hearts, and general consent, ordered this statue to be erected in 
 the year of our Lord 1733 ; that their successors and Posterity 
 may never forget their common Benefactor. Placed here in the 
 year 1737, Sir Benjamin Rawlins, Knight, master." The names 
 of the wardens are also appended. 
 
 The year that saw the erection of the Statue to Sir Hans Sloan 
 was made additionally memorable in the annals of the Physic 
 Garden by the visit to it of the great Swedish botanist, Carl von 
 Linne, better known as Linnaeus. Before his time botany was 
 a chaotic assemblage of facts ; he left it a definite science. His 
 lectures at the university of Upsala afterwards drew men from 
 all parts of the world ; the normal number of Students there was 
 500, but whilst Linnaeus occupied the chair of Botany, it rose 
 to 1,500. 
 
 At the period of his arrival in England the illustrious Swede was 
 barely thirty years of age, and although as yet comparatively little 
 known out of his own country, he brought with him such warm 
 recommendations from scientists in Holland to Sir Hans Sloan 
 and others, that it is curious that the great man of Chelsea received 
 him coldly. However, at the Physic Garden he had a better 
 reception ; Philip Miller, F.R.S., considered the first botanical 
 gardener of his time, who was in authority there for forty-eight 
 years, had apparently more discernment than his patron, and 
 more quickly recognized budding genius. Linnaeus writes in 
 his diary : " ' Miller of Chelsea ' permitted me to collect many 
 plants in the garden and gave me several dried specimens collected 
 in South America." 
 
 Thus the fame of the Chelsea garden was now so great that it 
 had sufficed to draw Linnaeus thither. He only visited two botanic 
 
 125 
 
GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 
 
 gardens in this country that of Oxford, under Professor Dillenius, 
 and that at Chelsea. To those in control at Chelsea he often 
 refers in very commendatory terms ; and commendation from 
 Linnaeus was well worth having, for his researches and writings 
 effected a scientific revolution in all the botanic gardens of the 
 educated world. 
 
 But Sir Hans Sloan, if lacking in discrimination in the matter 
 of Linnaeus, was not wanting in generosity towards the garden, 
 which he had sought by his gift to place on a self-supporting and 
 firm footing. 
 
 I do not know for certain, but I feel sure that he visited it, not 
 only periodically and of necessity, in his official capacity as head 
 of two learned societies to which the garden had obligations 
 but privately, and at odd times, much as he might have visited 
 a pet protege or a child for whose welfare he was concerned. I 
 think that he often came, accompanied by a daughter ; occasionally 
 by way of the river-gate and the wharf, but more frequently, 
 after driving over from his residence in Bloomsbury, entering by 
 the curious old gateway in Swan Lane the same that, with its 
 formidable portcullis-sort of arrangement over the gate, and its 
 caged bell, appears in the sketch, and which is so quaintly 
 reminiscent of his day. Through this gateway everyone visiting 
 the garden, even now, has no choice but to enter. The 
 bell swings, and its sonorous iron tongue speaking of olden 
 times, we have a vision of a handsome but heavy coach waiting 
 outside ; of a coachman, portly and rubicund, seated majestically 
 on the box, and of a gorgeous lackey who lets down the steps 
 for the stately old gentleman with ponderous wig and long coat, 
 whose representation in stone we see on yonder statue, and the 
 elegant young lady whose silken gown is looped up over a hoop 
 of such immense dimensions that with difficulty she squeezes 
 through the door of the coach. The whalebone or steel cages 
 worn by women were so large in the reign of the second George, 
 that the architects of the day began to curve the balustrades of 
 their staircases outwards, in order to allow of the passage of their 
 fair wearers. 
 
 The garden is a pleasant spot even now, when it is overlooked 
 from two sides. What must it have been in days when the swift 
 river washed its walls ; when, sitting in the cedar shade, one might 
 
 126 
 
THE CHELSEA " PHYSICKE GARDEN' 
 
 have watched the brown-sailed barges and the gay pleasure-boats 
 pass up and down ? Nor was Sir Hans Sloan the only distinguished 
 man to come there ; many others, eminent in various walks of 
 life, have sat, and rested, and chatted, beneath the cedars, and 
 watched old Father Thames go by. Evelyn could not have done 
 so, for he visited the garden when the cedars were only two years 
 old, but that they interested him we may be sure, for, as elsewhere 
 stated, he introduced the tree to this country. 
 
 Tradition says that Dean Swift came here, and in all proba- 
 bility he did, and perhaps pencilled a note to Stella beneath the 
 spreading branches, with the sunlit river sparkling before his 
 eyes, for the garden was over fifty years old when the Dean of 
 St. Patrick's published his " Gulliver's Travels." Here, in any case, 
 came generations of students, the learned botanists, and doctors 
 of medicine, and surgeon-apothecaries, of the future. They were 
 all apprentices of the Apothecaries' Society ; industrious some, 
 and idle others, according to the manner of apprentices to Art, 
 Science, or commercial pursuits, from time immemorial. And 
 among the head-gardeners (later styled " curators "), and the 
 Professors, and Demonstrators, whose duty it was to lecture to 
 the apprentices, were many known to fame, and others who were 
 unknown, only because the science of horticulture is not so generally 
 attractive as it well might be. Sir Joseph Banks, the naturalist, 
 founder of the Royal Institution, who was a liberal benefactor 
 to the garden, is said to have begun his botanical studies there, 
 under the auspices of the venerable Philip Miller, F.R.S., before 
 mentioned, who, besides being for forty-eight years gardener to 
 the Worshipful Company of Apothecaries, was also a member of 
 the Botanic Society of Florence. 
 
 Born in 1691, Miller left a name highly distinguished among 
 horticulturalists. His great work was " The Gardener's Dictionary," 
 and it set forth the best methods then known of improving the 
 kitchen, fruit, or flower garden, and the nursery. The hope of 
 acclimatizing the vine had not in his time been abandoned, for 
 Miller's book gives instructions for the management of a vineyard, 
 and for making and preserving the wine according to the practice 
 of experienced wine-growers in the several wine countries of 
 Europe ; and it also gave directions for the cultivation of all sorts 
 of timber trees. Miller was not the only officer of the garden who 
 
 127 
 
GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 
 
 grew grey in its service. Mr. Thomas Wheeler filled the post of 
 Prefectus Horti and Botanical Demonstrator at Chelsea, for forty- 
 two years, and for the best part of half a century demonstrated in 
 the open air in the summer months, to the members of the Society 
 and to its students. But of him and his son I shall have more to say. 
 In 1753, just after the death of Sir Hans Sloan, the expenses 
 of the garden, which for some years had been 200 and 220 
 per annum, began again to be heavily felt ; and to the regular 
 upkeep had now to be added a considerable sum for repairs. An 
 appeal for help to the new President of the Royal Society was made 
 without result. It seems strange that Sir Hans Sloan, so liberal 
 to the garden in the past, should have made no provision whatever 
 for it in his will. The Society, however, bravely struggled on 
 independently, and in 1771, with the consent of the conservators 
 of the Thames for the City of London, in order to recover ground 
 that had once belonged to them, the apothecaries embanked the 
 garden towards the river, at the cost of 400. Their efforts indeed 
 throughout its history, both in their corporate capacity, and as. 
 individual members, are deserving of all praise. We read of one 
 " honorary " demonstrator presenting forty tons of old stones from 
 the Tower of London to raise a rockery for the cultivation of plants 
 requiring a particular soil ; and of the gift by Joseph, afterwards 
 Sir Joseph, Banks, of a large quantity of lava from Iceland ; this 
 was followed later by the presentation by him of three hundred 
 different kinds of seeds, collected in his voyage round the world 
 with Captain Cook in 1768. Besides all this, public-spirited 
 outsiders were willing to help an enterprise that, for the sake of 
 science, was making such a gallant fight for existence. In 1787 
 we find a handsome gift of loam arriving from Sion, the Duke of 
 Northumberland's estate at Isleworth ; and one wonders whether 
 the " seven loads of black mould " that came about the same time 
 from Wimbledon, " with the approval of Earl Spencer," may not 
 have been sent at the suggestion of Georgiana Spencer, the beautiful 
 Duchess of Devonshire, whom we shall meet with at Chiswick 
 House. I have dealt with the famous grounds of Sion and Chiswick 
 House in other chapters ; and independent of one another, for the 
 most part, as are the different gardens described in this boo , it 
 is rather interesting to find that there are connecting links between 
 most of them. 
 
 128 
 
THE CHELSEA " PHYSIGKE GARDEN " 
 
 For all the aid they received the apothecaries made ample returns, 
 and the claims the outside public made upon them are much in 
 evidence when we arrive at the nineteenth century. 
 
 It was about 1815 that the Horticultural Society of London 
 begged the use of a part of the garden in order to promote the 
 cultivation of foreign vegetables used for food and condiments ; 
 and a plot near the river was assigned to them. 
 
 In 1829 an effort was made to render the garden more useful 
 to the medical profession at large than it had hitherto been ; 
 it was thrown open for study more often, and not only to the 
 apprentices of the apothecaries, but also to all professors and 
 students in medicine, chemistry, botany, and materia medica. 
 The Demonstrator's salary was raised, so that lectures and de- 
 monstrations might be more frequently given, and prizes and 
 medals were offered for success in the examinations. The happy 
 result was that from every medical school in London, students 
 flocked, either on foot or in boats, to the Chelsea Garden : and a 
 course of study there became part of the recognized medical curri- 
 culum, so that in 1862 there were five hundred applications for 
 admission. 
 
 In the course of instruction, demonstrations and, up to 1833, 
 herbalizings also, occupied a very large part. The Society's 
 demonstrations took place not less than once in every summer 
 month ; they began at nine in the morning ; the medical plants 
 were arranged in systematic order in a certain part of the garden, 
 and like a clinical lecturer in a hospital, the Demonstrator passed 
 from bed to bed followed and surrounded by his pupils, to whom 
 he pointed out the plants, explaining their uses in medicine, 
 tl^pir botanical character, and their place in the Linnaeian 
 classification. 
 
 But all these advantages were offered to the male sex only ; 
 it was not until 1877 that the Apothecaries' Society gave even a 
 modicum of encouragement to women. The Court of Assistants 
 then resolved to offer prizes for proficiency in botany to the female 
 sex ; and they were to be competed for in the same manner as 
 those given to men. But Field and Simple, in recording this 
 munificence, take care to explain that by this resolution " it was 
 not at all intended to promote the assumption by ladies of medical 
 titles, or to sanction the adoption of the medical profession by 
 
 129 9 
 
GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 
 
 females, but to merely encourage them in the acquisition of 
 botanical knowledge." 
 
 This makes curious reading at the present day. By what leaps 
 and bounds have we advanced since that resolution was so grudg- 
 ingly passed ! We are not informed whether or not women were 
 admitted to the lectures and to the demonstrations in the garden ; 
 they might have been with perfect propriety, for it was one of 
 the duties of the Demonstrator to preserve due " decorum " 
 among the students. Anyway, it is clear that without such 
 admission the Apothecaries were simply offering a gift with one 
 hand, and withholding it with the other. 
 
 Up to the beginning of the nineteenth century the neighbourhood 
 of London was so rich in indigenous vegetation that the botanical 
 parties on the occasion of the herborizing excursions, had not to 
 go far afield ; but sometimes they did so go, for a certain Mr. 
 Johnson (whose identity I have not been able to establish, but 
 who may possibly have been that Thomas Johnson, botanist, 
 who edited Gerarde's " Herbalia " in 1633) describes his adventures 
 on two such occasions. Travelling in those days was slow and 
 risky ; the botanists went to Reading, Bath, Bristol, and the Isle 
 of Wight, and home by Portsmouth and Guildford. The Latin 
 and English names of the plants they collected are given, and the 
 natural features of the landscape described. Johnson records 
 with much gratitude the hospitality offered to the party. 
 
 On a similar occasion, later on, the apothecaries explored Wales ; 
 their course being by way of Chester, Flint, Carnarvon and Anglesey. 
 Some of the plants were gathered on the heights of Snowdon at 
 much personal risk to the collectors. At Chester a learned doctor 
 of divinity joined them ; he had been badly entertained at^ a 
 certain inn at Stockport, and on leaving he expressed his resent- 
 ment by writing some Latin verses on the walls of his bedroom, 
 of which Field and Simple give the English translation : 
 
 " If, Traveller ! you seek for quiet, 
 An easy couch, a wholesome diet, 
 A landlord with a smiling mien, 
 A chambermaid whose face is clean, 
 At Stockport you will never stay, 
 But turn your steps another way. 
 But if in filth your soul delights, 
 At Stockport you may pass some pleasant nights." 
 130 
 
THE CHELSEA " PHYSICKE GARDEN ' 
 
 Whether the guest would have escaped with a whole skin, had 
 the host understood Latin, we shall never know. The verses 
 remind one of some that were written by a visitor in the guest 
 book of a North Welsh inn : 
 
 " With your head in a fog 
 And your feet in a bog, 
 That is the way to Festiniog." 
 
 About 1835 Mr. J. L. Wheeler, who was for thirteen years Pro- 
 fessor of Botany at the Physic Garden, " having succeeded to a 
 fortune," retired. He became Master of the Society of Apothecaries, 
 and died in 1872, at a ripe old age. His post was then filled by a 
 very distinguished man, reputed to be one of the greatest botanists 
 in Europe. 
 
 This was Dr. Lindley, who, born in 1799, at the age of twenty 
 became assistant-librarian to Sir Joseph Banks ; and in 1836, 
 was appointed Prefectus Horti, and Professor of Botany at Chelsea^ 
 He was one of those fortunate beings who could boast that until 
 past fifty, he never knew what it was to be tired in body or mind. 
 
 Ten years after this a limb from one of the cedars was blown 
 off and converted into chairs for the use of the authorities. A 
 single chair had already been fashioned from branches blown down 
 in 1812. 
 
 About this time William Anderson, the first head gardener to 
 the Apothecaries to be styled " Curator," died at the age of eighty, 
 and was buried between Philip Miller, also an octogenarian, and 
 Sir Hans Sloan, who had lived to nearly ninety-three. 
 
 In 1862, owing to the combined effects of time, weather, and 
 neglect, the valuable herbaria in the sheds at Chelsea were discovered 
 to be decaying, and it was found necessary to remove them to the 
 British Museum. Perhaps this roused the Society to the necessity 
 for exertions, for the following year the Court of Assistants voted 
 500 to defray the expense of altering and improving the garden 
 in order to make it as complete a repertory of medical botany as 
 possible. New plants were introduced, and new hot-houses con- 
 structed for the protection of the more tender species, the culti- 
 vation of which had hitherto, from lack of means, been neglected. 
 
 Seven years later the executive of the garden was served with 
 a notice from the Metropolitan Board of Works that must have 
 
 131 9* 
 
GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 
 
 been somewhat startling. It was to the effect that the Embank- 
 ment with which we are now so familiar, was to be constructed on 
 the southern bank of the Thames, involving unavoidable encroach- 
 ments on their Physic Garden and consequent loss of immediate 
 access to the river, and the right to a portion of the foreshore, since 
 a road was to intervene between the river and the garden. As 
 compensation, however, the Board of Works endowed the Society 
 with certain rights, and paid a large sum of money for the erection 
 of a handsome wall, railing, and gateway, on the river side. 
 
 Among the members of the Apothecaries' Society in the seven- 
 teenth and eighteenth centuries, were many distinguished by their 
 scientific attainments, and we are assured that " all of them were 
 good citizens and honorable men," and, according to the standard 
 f those earlier days, " efficient practitioners of the healing art.'* 
 The Curators, Demonstrators of Plants, and Professors of Botany 
 at the Physic Garden were, with rare exceptions, men of culture, 
 and the Society encouraged, and even enforced, the study of Latin 
 among its pupils. Latin had been for centuries, and particularly 
 after the revival of learning, the ordinary means of communica- 
 tion between educated men ; when it ceased to be thus generally 
 used, several modern tongues became necessary, where before, one 
 dead one had sufficed. Linnaeus himself, " whose acquirements 
 in the whole range of science were no less than gigantic," although 
 a great traveller, and one who had resided three years in Holland, 
 understood only Latin and Swedish, and because few people were 
 familiar with his native language, his letters to foreigners, and 
 most of his books, were in Latin. It is therefore not surprising 
 that all the quotations met with in the history of the garden, 
 are in the Latin tongue, and that the early members of the 
 Apothecaries' Society were for the most part well acquainted 
 with it. 
 
 So many of those holding office at the garden were distinguished 
 in botany and the allied sciences, that it is almost invidious to 
 particularize, but James Sherard, a member of the governing 
 committee of the garden, deserves mention. He withdrew from 
 the Society of Apothecaries in 1732, when, having received a 
 diploma of medicine, he began to practise as a physician, but his 
 name is perpetuated in a genus of plants known as " Sherardea" 
 of the natural order of the Rubiaceae, a species of which i& 
 
 132 
 
THE CHELSEA " PHYSIGKE GARDEN " 
 
 commonly met with in our cornfields, and Field quotes from the 
 " London Encyclopaedia of Plants," which speaks of it as "a little 
 insignificant weed by no means worthy to be associated with the 
 memory of so celebrated a man." His garden at Eltham, in Kent, 
 became famous. James Sherard's elder brother, William, also 
 a distinguished botanist, endowed the professorship of botany at 
 Oxford, but presented all his books on botany and natural history, 
 and all his drawings and dried plants, to the Library of the Physic 
 Garden at Chelsea. 
 
 William Curtis, who founded the Botanical Magazine, that 
 on his death was continued by Dr. Sims, and ultimately by Sir 
 William Hooker, merits special notice. He was born in 1746, 
 and was the son of a tanner of Alton, in Hampshire, who was a 
 member of the Society of Friends. Apprenticed to his grand- 
 father, an apothecary in the same town, chance made him acquainted 
 with an ostler from the Crown Inn, named Lagg. This man, by 
 careful study of the writings of Gerarde, the author of the Herbal 
 earlier spoken of, and of Parkinson, the herbalist, had b come 
 possessed of a considerable knowledge of plants, and he inspired 
 young Curtis with the ambition tb become a botanist. Coming to 
 London, Curtis by and by succeeded to the apothecary's practice 
 of a member of the Society of Friends, but his passion for botany 
 absorbed too much of his time to allow him to practise extensively. 
 Having been previously elected a member of the Apothecaries' 
 Society, he was, in 1773, appointed Demonstrator at Chelsea. 
 Four years later he began a great work, in which he had intended 
 to treat of every plant growing within ten miles of London ; but 
 the sale was so limited that Curtis abandoned^the project. On the 
 other hand the success of the Botanical Magazine was speedily 
 assured. 
 
 It was in 1820 that Thomas Wheeler resigned the Demonstrator- 
 ship of Botany, and the office of Prefectus Horti, which he had 
 held for forty-two years. He was born in 1754, and educated 
 at St. Paul's School, celebrated even then for its classical teaching. 
 His virtues and his eccentricities have kept his memory green in 
 the annals of the Apothecaries' Society. The members of that 
 body were certainly not prone to change, as they were to longevity, 
 and when Mr. Wheeler gave up active and regular duties, he still 
 continued to accompany the Herborizing excursions until they 
 
 133 
 
were abandoned in 1834. He died at ninety-four, leaving behind 
 him the reputation of a distinguished botanist, enthusiastically 
 attached to the doctrine of Linnaeus. 
 
 Many are the stories told of his childlike simplicity of character 
 and his benevolence, and also of his oddities. In early life he had 
 enrolled himself in the volunteer military forces which on a 
 certain occasion when rioting was anticipated, were called out 
 in readiness to quell the disturbance, should it take place. * If 
 I had been ordered to fire upon the people," he said, " I should 
 certainly have done so, offering up at the same time a prayer that 
 my bullet might not take effect." 
 
 On one of the Herborizings on the banks of the Thames, he 
 witnessed a boat accident, when a number of boys were capsized. 
 Though assured by everybody that the entire party was saved, 
 he was not satisfied, for he saw the boat floating bottom upper- 
 most, and he shouted, " Turn up the boat for heaven's sake ! ' : 
 
 This was done and a lad of fourteen was discovered insensible 
 under the thwarts. 
 
 Wheeler carried indifference to appearance, and simplicity in 
 dress, to extremes : but there was no affectation in this, and he 
 seems to have been quite unconscious of the eccentricity of his 
 appearance, although on one occasion a friend remarked to him : 
 14 Ah, Diogenes ! thy pride peeps out of every button of thy 
 coat ! " 
 
 The surgery at St. Thomas's Hospital went by the name of 
 
 4 the Shop." On a certain occasion the old professor was sitting 
 in this room with a number of students, who were joking and 
 bantering him, and each other, and he, on his part, was impressing 
 upon them the folly of superfluities in dress. A youth, who later 
 on rose to eminence in his profession, said with assumed gravity : 
 
 ' Well, but, Mr. Wheeler, how can you support such a doctrine 
 when you yourself wear such a superfluity as this ? " and he lifted 
 up the small pig-tail which the professor wore. The old man, 
 
 * taken aback," confessed that it was " superfluous." " Yes, my 
 dear sir, you are right, we are too prone to preach one thing, and 
 practise another ; cut it off, sir, pray cut it off ! " and Laurence 
 
 ' for such was his name," forthwith performed the amputation. 
 On another occasion Wheeler was driving in an open carriage with 
 James Lowe Wheeler, and Hurlock, a well-known member of the 
 
 134 
 
o 
 
 O 
 
 l-~( 
 CO 
 
THE CHELSEA " PHYSIGKE GARDEN " 
 
 Apothecaries' Society, who himself told the story. He described 
 the appearance of Thomas Wheeler ; how he sat on the box beside 
 the driver in the best of spirits, his hat off, his thin, light hair 
 blowing about his face, and his large spectacles on his nose, alter- 
 nately laughing and chatting with the coachman, and diving into 
 his hat with his huge pocket-knife, to separate and examine a 
 bundle of wild plants. Such a figure naturally attracted attention 
 along the road, and, stopping at a turnpike gate, the party 
 was rather surprised by the evident interest and eagerness of the 
 toll-keeper, as he scratched his head, and, pointing to Mr. Wheeler, 
 exclaimed in his blunt Kentish dialect : '' So ye ha' got him at 
 last ! ' : This was incomprehensible to all until they arrived at 
 a small inn close to the parish of Barming, where they read a 
 placard offering a reward for an escaped lunatic. 
 
 With the death of Thomas Wheeler a notable figure was removed 
 from the old Chelsea garden, and since that time popular concern 
 for its fortunes has not been stimulated, as in his day, by anecdotes 
 of its later professors and curators. 
 
 Up to 1899 the Apothecaries still retained possession, and under 
 their control I imagine that the arrangement for the growing of 
 plants, described by Field and Simple in 1878, still obtained. Any- 
 one at that period entering the garden by the gate in Swan Lane, 
 and proceeding down the gravel walk facing it, till he reached the 
 point at which another path crosses it at right angles, a point marked 
 by the statue of Sir Hans Sloan, would have found the ground on 
 his right given up to the culture of medicinal herbs, and that 
 on his left hand, to hardy herbaceous plants arranged according 
 to their natural orders. 
 
 At the present day a casual observer might suppose this place 
 still adhered to, but it is not so ; the plants, it is true, are still 
 arranged according to their natural orders, but no simples what- 
 ever are grown here now, for the garden is no longer under the 
 Apothecaries' management. It retains nevertheless something of 
 its unique character among the gardens of the metropolis ; even 
 without the four famous cedars that once upon a time must have 
 given it great distinction and although the Thames that formerly 
 washed its northern wall (and on the occasion of a very high 
 tide in 1774 rose fifteen inches within it) is now separated from 
 it by the width of the Embankment. The flower beds are 
 
 135 
 
GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 
 
 extended oblongs, and are all parallel with the river, each one being 
 separated from its neighbour by a rather wide turf walk, as shown 
 in the illustration. This arrangement, if formal, is effective ; but 
 it was probably made entirely for convenience in the days when 
 the Demonstrator, surrounded by a troop of students, moved from 
 plot to plot, pausing at each to discourse and explain. Here are 
 to be seen, among many beautiful growing things such as are 
 found in most gardens that boast herbaceous borders, a few un- 
 familiar, even uncanny-looking plants, survivals of the fittest 
 perhaps among the medicinal herbs of former days ; and the eye 
 is quick to note that this sunny, cultivated corner measuring, 
 I believe, about four acres is not altogether a normal garden. 
 There are no trees of great importance except a magnificent and 
 gigantic Ilex, or Evergreen Oak, of which Field and Simple, writing 
 nearly forty years ago, make particular mention. It is a tree that 
 now in a green and lusty old age, extends its giant arms farther 
 afield than in its youth while one huge limb stretches its lazy 
 length unbroken upon the ground itself. There are few flowers 
 to speak of by which I mean that here nothing blossoms con- 
 spicuously, nothing makes a floral show. There are no gay 
 parterres, or gaudy ribbon borders ; one feels instinctively that 
 the plants are grown less for their blooms than for their uses, and 
 that they themselves are intrinsically interesting to the students, 
 whether they blossom and look beautiful, or not. At the lower 
 end of the garden, near the Ilex, is the water-garden, consisting 
 of some extremely picturesque ponds or pools, rich in aquatic 
 vegetation. But in spite of the lack of gorgeous colouring, per- 
 haps in consequence of the absence of luxuriant foliage, the garden 
 is essentially sunshiny ; it is always full of the cheerful daylight : 
 one receives on entering, and one carries away, an impression of 
 sunlight even on a cloudy day. It is a charming oasis in the 
 midst of much brick and mortar ; but though it is nearly two 
 hundred and fifty years of age, one could not describe it as old- 
 fashioned, or old-English ; it has too much of space and air about 
 it to be Jacobean ; too little of formality though in a sense it is 
 formal to be Dutch ; nor are there present any of the clever devices 
 by which the eighteenth century gardener simulated spaciousness, 
 and made three acres appear to be twenty. Of the old green- 
 houses the tanks alone remain ; they may be seen in the garden. 
 
 136 
 
THE CHELSEA " PHYSIGKE GARDEN' 
 
 One has only to examine the ancient grey wall on the Swan walk, 
 or west side, of the garden, and to compare it with the smooth 
 red brick of the houses, and the southern wall, to realize how much 
 of charm has been lost by the demolition and rebuilding on the 
 same site, of the former lecture-hall and Curator's dwelling in 1900. 
 They were probably out of date, inconvenient, and falling into 
 decay and originally no more beautiful in design than the present 
 buildings ; but the mellowing hand of time can always throw 
 a veil over ugliness, and every venerable brick and stone must 
 have told its story, and age and use had doubtless dignified them. 
 Hence I regret that they no longer exist to give point to the story 
 of the ancient garden which I have so feebly told. 
 
 In 1899 the garden passed from the Apothecaries' into other 
 hands. The Charity Commissioners of England and Wales, 
 and the Trustees of the London Parochial Charities, were ap- 
 pointed its trustees in place of the Apothecaries' Society, which, 
 considering that the garden was no longer suitable for botanic 
 purposes owing to the deleterious effect of London smoke and the 
 impoverished state of the soil, desired to give it up. Provision 
 was then made for its management by a committee appointed 
 by the Trustees of the garden, the Treasury, the Lord President 
 of the Council, the Technical Educational Board of the London 
 County Council, the Royal Society of Apothecaries, the Royal 
 College of Physicians, the Pharmaceutical Society, the senate of 
 the University of London, and the representatives of Sir Hans 
 Sloan. 
 
 Under this new management and the care of Mr. Hales, its 
 learned curator, formerly of Kew, whose work at Chelsea is a labour 
 of love, and with sufficient funds to carry it on, the famous old 
 garden flourishes, and has taken on a new lease of life, amply 
 justifying the finding of the committee in 1899, that there was 
 still room for such a garden. 
 
 At the present time there are signs of revived interest in that 
 department of horticulture concerned with the cultivation of 
 simples, and even the press urges that our native medicinal plants 
 and herbs might well supply some of the drugs in constant use, 
 that have greatly increased in price since the world war cut off 
 the foreign supply. Therefore, though it should be remembered 
 that the word " Physic " was here originally employed in its wider 
 
 137 
 
GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 
 
 scientific sense as pertaining to Nature and natural objects, and 
 that the first object of the apothecaries in founding the garden 
 was the study of botany in its relation to medicine, and not the 
 cultivation of the actual plants to be converted into drugs for the 
 pharmacopoeia, yet, from an ignorant outsider's point of view, it 
 seems a pity that the spot that for nearly 230 years was honourably 
 though not exclusively associated with one important branch 
 of the study of medicine, should now ignore that branch altogether, 
 instead of leading the van in the useful movement for its revival. 
 
 138 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 MARLBOROUGH HOUSE 
 
 SO long ago that, according to Stowe, " it was before the time 
 of man's memory " there was founded on the pleasant 
 land lying to the west of what was formerly the village of 
 Charing, a hospital for fourteen deserving maidens, all lepers. It 
 was attached to a religious house dedicated to S. James the Less, 
 Bishop of Jerusalem. " Divers citizens of London," says the 
 ancient chronicler, " gave six-and-fifty rents thereto," and later on 
 we learn that " sundry devout men of London " gave to the hospital 
 four hides of land in the fields of Westminster. These and other 
 grants in Charlcote (now Chalk Farm), Hampstead, and Hendon, 
 were confirmed to it by Edward L, who also endowed it with the 
 benefits and privileges of a six days' fair to commence on the eve 
 of S. James. Thus originated the May-Fair, that, up to the reign 
 of George II., was afterwards held regularly in the Piccadilly 
 meadows ; a fair that has bequeathed its name to the fashionable 
 London locality that occupies the ground upon which it was held. 
 The inmates of the convent and hospital, remained in peaceful 
 possession till Henry VIII. cast his covetous eyes upon their fertile 
 acreage. He seized the land to turn it into a nursery for deer, and 
 an appendage to the Tiltyard at Whitehall, giving in exchange 
 for it some ground in Suffolk ; he pensioned off the sisterhood, 
 casting adrift the unhappy lepers and pulling down the hospital 
 and convent, and building in their place the Palace of S. James. 
 The old gate-house and turrets constructed of brick that once 
 was red, and erected in the very year of Henry's marriage with 
 Anne Boleyn still face us, when, at the present day we look down 
 
 139 
 
GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 
 
 St. James's Street, and it is believed that they occupy the exact 
 site of the ancient leper hospital. To the deer-park the King 
 added an extensive chase, to make which he enclosed some miles 
 of land to the north and north-west, and by royal proclamation 
 forbade any of his subjects to hunt or hawk in it. 
 
 Throughout the reigns of Charles II. and James II., we find 
 King and courtiers still established at Whitehall ; nevertheless 
 St. James's Palace by degrees, became the centre of English Court 
 and diplomatic life, and on the marriage of Charles he granted 
 to his queen, Catherine of Braganza, by letters patent under the 
 Great Seal, a ninety-nine years' lease of the ground upon which 
 Sir Christopher Wren afterwards erected Marlborough House. 
 The chapel which had been provided for Queen Henrietta Maria, 
 was restored for the use of the Portuguese princess, who brought 
 to England in her train, certain Capuchin monks for whom lodgings 
 were found near the chapel, the place becoming known as " The 
 Friary." Cloisters were built round a green court, in which per- 
 sons belonging to the Queen's religious establishment might be 
 interred with the Romish ceremonial. 
 
 Edward Walford in " Old and New London," mentions an old 
 plan of St. James's Palace printed in 1689, that shows a burial- 
 ground exactly opposite the Queen's Chapel. The spot was not im- 
 probably selected because it was the supposed site of the burial-place 
 of the old religious house, and therefore already consecrated ground ; 
 but it does not appear that any one of the friars was actually 
 interred there. The only human remains ever found therein were 
 those discovered in a stone coffin, of a date long anterior to the 
 Stuart kings. 
 
 Pepys describes his visit to the Queen's Chapel at the Friary. 
 His diary is a rich mine from which to dig data for the topography, 
 as well as the modes and manners, of the period immediately pre- 
 ceding the foundation of Marlborough House. 
 
 Birdcage Walk, according to Walford, was so called because the 
 aviaries of Charles II. (who was fond of birds as well as of little 
 dogs) were ranged in order along the road which then, as now, 
 forms the southern boundary of St. James's Park ; but the " Mall " 
 of those days was not the broad roadway that stretching from 
 Buckingham Palace to the Admiralty Arch now goes by that 
 name. ' The Mall " of the Pepys period seems to have been a 
 
 140 
 
MARLBOROUGH HOUSE 
 
 little farther north, and in position was almost identical with the 
 present Pall Mall, a street that, as most people know, received its 
 name from the once fashionable game of " Pell Mell," played in 
 St. James's Park with mailes or mallets. The sport consisted in 
 striking a ball through an iron hoop or ring suspended from a bar 
 at the top of a pole, and in striking it from a considerable distance. 
 
 The Mall in those days made a stately approach to the Royal 
 Palace of St. James ; and what is now clubland was, in the time 
 of Pepys, a long road shaded by elms, of which, he says, there were 
 one hundred and fifty. The houses, few and far between, and 
 standing on the south side only, were " fair mansions enclosed 
 with gardens." In one of these mansions dwelt Nell Gwynne, 
 and her garden had a mount, or mound, or raised terrace, over- 
 looking St. James's Park. The north side of the Mall, according 
 to Walford, was entirely open ; one or two haystacks might be 
 seen on the spot where now stands the Junior Carlton Club, and a 
 thick grove of trees occupied the site of Marlborough House. 
 " The Mall " was the resort of fashion in the seventeenth and part 
 of the eighteenth centuries, and during the reign of Queen Anne 
 was thronged daily with gaily-dressed people in chariots, on foot, 
 and in Sedan chairs. Men, as well as women, used these carrying- 
 chairs, and in 1706, John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough, came 
 to the levee at St. James's Palace in one of them ; hoping, by so 
 doing, to escape the attentions and acclamations of the multitude 
 after his victory at Ramillies. His successful campaign in France 
 had made Marlborough the idol of the nation, and Queen and 
 Parliament had showered honours and gifts upon the all-con- 
 quering general. But his successes abroad did not prevent his 
 influence being undermined by party intrigues at home, and even 
 before the battle of Oudenarde in 1708, the star of Marlborough,. 
 and of his handsome and imperious wife, was already rapidly 
 on the wane, while Queen Anne's love for Sarah Jennings was fast 
 turning to aversion. 
 
 Things, however, were not quite so bad in 1709, at least not 
 openly so. The master of Blenheim required also a mansion in 
 town, and on the 18th of April, 1709, the supplement to the London 
 Gazette announced that he was to obtain it. " Her Majesty having 
 been pleased to grant to His Grace the Duke of Marlborough 
 the Friary next St. James' Palace in which lately dwelt the 
 
 141 
 
GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 
 
 Countess du Roy, the same is pulling down in order to rebuild 
 the house for His Grace ; and about a third of the garden lately 
 in the occupation of the Right Honourable Henry Boyle, Her 
 Majesty's principal Secretary of State, is marked out in order to be 
 annexed to the house of His Grace the Duke of Marlborough." 
 
 The lease, granted for a period of fifty years, was obtained on 
 easy terms, but the Duke was abroad ; he was (to use a now familiar 
 phrase) " somewhere in France," engrossed in the business of war. 
 The business of building a house and settling into it, had, perforce, 
 to be managed entirely by the Duchess, who showed her wisdom 
 in employing Sir Christopher Wren as the architect, although he 
 was then verging on eighty years of age. 
 
 She herself laid the foundation stone on Tuesday, May 24th, 
 1709 (O.S.), " a fine warm day ' we are told. The stone was 
 inscribed, " Laid by her Grace the Duchess oj Marlborough, May ye 
 24<th June ye 4>th, 1709." The use of both the old and new style 
 of chronology, was unusual, for though the new style had been 
 accepted on the Continent, it was not adopted in this country 
 until 1752. 
 
 The Marlboroughs were thrifty people history has called them 
 parsimonious, but in using Dutch bricks for Marlborough House 
 as they are said to have done, they were not blameworthy. Dutch 
 bricks were redder, smaller, and also cheaper, than English ones. 
 They were probably brought over as ballast, from Holland, in the 
 picturesque ' bluff-bowed " and high-sterned transports plying 
 between Deptford and Holland. Mr. Arthur Beavan, the author 
 of " Marlborough House and its Occupants," points out that 
 the names of these vessels Elephant, Expedition and so on, 
 are to be seen again and again in the records of the transport 
 office in 1709, and that they might very well have conveyed 
 *' a cargo of the raw material for the house then building in 
 Pall Mall." 
 
 However this may have been, " the third of the garden lately 
 in the occupation of the Right Honourable Henry Boyle " was 
 by no means sufficient to content Her Grace of Marlborough. 
 Therefore she obtained, -under the Great Seal, a second lease, 
 which cancelled the first, and gave into her possession a plot of 
 ground about two acres in extent, next to the Friary and known 
 as " the Royal Garden." 
 
 142 
 
MARLBOROUGH HOUSE 
 
 It was probably to this garden that Charles II. was proceeding 
 with Evelyn the lover of gardens when, walking through St. 
 James's Park, he scandalized his companion by stopping to talk 
 with Nell Gwynne, on which occasion the diarist both saw and 
 heard a very familiar discourse " between the King and ' Mrs. 
 Nelly ' as they called an impudent comedian ; " she looking out 
 of her garden from a terrace at the top of the wall ; the monarch 
 standing on " the green walk beneath it." 
 
 Since it seems certain that not only the " Royal Garden " but 
 Nell Gwynne's garden also, was incorporated in the grounds of 
 Marlborough's new mansion, I think that there can be but little 
 doubt that " the terrace " above mentioned by Evelyn, formed 
 the nucleus of the present one gay now in summer with a border 
 of fine herbaceous plants which runs the entire length of the 
 south or park side of Queen Alexandra's garden. It ends in a 
 spacious summer-house, a summer-house that has little side win- 
 dows overlooking the Mall, and that is comfortably furnished 
 with lounge chairs, but which I am informed, is not much fre- 
 quented by the royal inmates of the mansion. 
 
 But to go back to a period even earlier than Nell Gwynne's, and 
 before the Friary on the site of which the house is built, existed. It 
 is interesting to recall that on a winter's morning in 1649, Charles I. 
 passed the spot on his way to the scaffold at Whitehall, after an 
 affecting parting with his children, who had been brought from 
 the Duke of Northumberland's at Sion, Isleworth, as mentioned 
 in the chapter on Sion, to bid him farewell. He crossed St. James's 
 Park from his lodging in the palace, on foot, and is said to have 
 pointed out on the way, to those with him, a tree that his brother, 
 the late Prince Henry, had planted. At that period St. James's 
 Park was a private park belonging to the royal palace, and the 
 general public would not be freely admitted ; thus neither the 
 merry monarch's gossip with Nell Gwynne, or his father's sad 
 passage to his doom, would be observed by curious eyes. Though, 
 strictly speaking, the parks are royal property, they belong to 
 the people in the sense that possession is nine points of the law ; 
 and it is to the credit of Sir Robert Walpole, the otherwise corrupt 
 minister of George II., that St. James's Park has been preserved 
 to the nation. Queen Caroline of Anspach proposed to turn it 
 into a garden for the palace, and " she asked my father," says 
 
 143 
 
GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 
 
 Horace Walpole, '* what the alteration might possibly cost " 
 " only three crowns," was the significant, pertinent, and witty 
 answer ; the Queen took the hint, and nothing more came of 
 the suggestion. 
 
 According to Mr. Arthur Beavan, the cost of laying out the 
 ground for the Duchess of Marlborough's garden was about 500, 
 the labourers being paid Is. 8d. per day. Many magnificent trees, 
 were felled in the process. 
 
 The mansion, a one-storied one, was completed and occupied 
 by the Duke and Duchess by midsummer, 1711. 
 
 Defoe, in his " Journey through England in 1722," remarks, 
 that " the palace of the Duke of Marlborough is in every way 
 answerable to the grandeur of its master. ... It is situated at 
 the west end of the King's garden on the Park side, and fronts the 
 park, but with no other prospect but that view." 
 
 And if there is but little to be seen from the house, neither is, 
 it possible to get a 'view of it, except from the Mall. In former 
 times it was concealed on two sides by chestnut trees ; it is now 
 closely built up on the north and east by houses, and in its situation 
 is still as sequestered as though it were miles in the country. Marl- 
 borough House lacks an entrance befitting the rank and dignity 
 of those who dwell there, befitting also its own native stateliness 
 and beauty. On the side of Pall Mall it may be said to have no 
 frontage, and the handsome courtyard entered from a side road 
 of which the gates are in Pall Mall, and the dignified proportions 
 of the red brick faade, are lost. This cannot have been Sir 
 Christopher Wren's intention when he designed this noble residence 
 for one who was perhaps the greatest military genius this country 
 has produced ; and this gives colour to the story that " Queen 
 Sarah " had intended to possess herself of certain obstructive 
 houses in Pall Mall on purpose to demolish them and secure a 
 proper approach, but, that before she could do so, Sir Robert 
 Walpole stepped in and effected their purchase in order to frustrate 
 her schemes. Beautiful, grasping, and haughty, and possessed 
 of by no means inconsiderable political talents, her importance 
 enhanced by her husband's military glory, and moreover for ten 
 years the virtual ruler of Queen Anne, she had naturally many 
 enemies, and her political friends were probably the persons most 
 jealous of her enormous influence. When the Tories came into 
 
 144 
 
MARLBOROUGH HOUSE 
 
 power, she became practically head of the opposition, yet there 
 seerns to have been no love lost between her and Sir Robert Walpole, 
 notwithstanding that like herself, he was a Whig. 
 
 In a letter to the Duchess dated October, 1710, relating to 
 the construction of the house, Sir Christopher Wren says" the 
 rooms will take about 12,000 tiles, and the chimneys about 2,200 ; " 
 and in one of her own letters preserved at Blenheim, Her Grace 
 says that Marlborough House had cost herself and the Duke close 
 on 50,000. In plan it is almost a square : it contains 106 rooms, 
 inclusive of the domestic offices, and a noble saloon occupies the 
 centre. The conservatory now covering the steps leading to the 
 garden did not exist in 1710. 
 
 Sarah survived the Duke twenty- two years, dying in 1744. 
 Although sixty-two at the time of his death, she had many offers 
 of marriage, for besides being a woman of wit, with the remains 
 of great beauty, she was immensely rich ; but she refused them 
 all, saying " that the widow of Marlborough shall never become 
 the wife of another man." Her devotion to and pride in her 
 husband were indeed the best traits in her character. 
 
 After the death of the Duchess certain alterations were made in 
 the house. Charles, the third Duke, removed the balustrade with 
 which Wren had crowned the first story and added a second 
 story, insignificant in design ; and George, the fourth Duke, 
 built a large riding-school where now stand the royal stables. 
 After this the structure remained practically unaltered until Albert 
 Edward, Prince of Wales, afterwards King, Edward VII., took 
 possession on his marriage in 1863. A print of " Prior Court " 
 as Marlborough House was formerly called taken in 1710, shows 
 that except in altitude, the garden front of the house has been 
 but little altered. The building in its original form had perhaps 
 more of symmetry and lightness and from its low elevation 
 might almost have been designed for a country, rather than a town 
 residence ; but though it may have lost something in elegance, it 
 has gained in dignity. As it stands as may be seen in the frontis- 
 piece to this book it is a stately, red-brick edifice, its proportions 
 massive yet not inharmonious, its colour enriched and softened by 
 time ; a fitting residence either for the eldest son of the sovereign, 
 or for a beloved, and venerated, and admired Queen-Mother. 
 
 145 10 
 
GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 
 
 My drawing shows the broad gravel walk, that, running from 
 east to west parallel with the terrace, is an effective feature of 
 the garden. At its western extremity we catch a picturesque 
 glimpse, though it is a side one only, of the old Palace of St. James. 
 
 When the lease of the estate to the Duke of Marlborough, lapsed, 
 the property reverted to the Crown. 
 
 In 1817 the house was assigned as a town residence for the 
 Princess Charlotte and her consort Prince Leopold ; but before 
 the arrangements could be completed, the premature death of 
 the beloved heiress to the throne, threw the whole nation into 
 mourning. Prince Leopold, however, made Marlborough House 
 his home for some years. So also did Queen Adelaide, widow of 
 William IV., upon whom it was settled by Act of Parliament. 
 She dwelt there until her death in 1849. 
 
 After this the place was used for a time as a school of Art, a 
 library and a museum, under the auspices, says Walford, of " the 
 department of practical Art ; " the Vernon collection of pictures 
 was temporarily housed there. 
 
 These events, however, occurring between the death of the 
 Duchess of Marlborough and 1863 count but little ; they are 
 merely episodes, accidents of no historic moment ; but with 1863 
 a new era opens, and the old brick mansion in Pall Mall, designed 
 by Wren, with the garden laid out under the direction of Sarah 
 Jennings, Duchess of Marlborough, is at the present day associated 
 less with the victor of Blenheim and Malplaquet, than with our 
 late sovereign, Edward VII., who as Prince of Wales made it his 
 London home during forty years. And this is because there are 
 some people, well-educated, and even highly-instructed in special 
 branches of culture, whose interest in general history is com- 
 paratively slight ; and they do not pause to conjecture the probable 
 origin of the name of a street or dwelling suggestive though these 
 may be. Others there are who deem that a great soldier though 
 he may have won splendid victories, stands in history on a lower 
 pedestal than the prince, or statesman, whose tact and gentleness, 
 foresight and wisdom whilst preserving the nation's honour- 
 has saved it from the horrors of a devastating and sanguinary 
 war. 
 
 " Never draw me without just cause, 
 Or sheath me without honour," 
 146 
 
MARLBOROUGH HOUSE 
 
 is the motto inscribed on an old sword in Warwick Castle, and I 
 like it well ; for surely unless it be drawn from pure motives of 
 patriotism unsullied by ambition in support of treaty obligations, 
 or in defence of the defenceless it were better not drawn at all. 
 John Churchill's fame has suffered a partial eclipse, obscured by 
 that of soldiers as great as he and its lustre was dimmed even 
 in his lifetime by his avarice. Yet that Blenheim was indeed " a 
 famous victory " we all agree. 
 
 " But what good came of it at last ? quoth little Peterkin." 
 
 Little or none, and " Edward the Peacemaker " remains a prouder 
 title than " Marlborough the Conqueror." 
 
 Therefore forgetting for a time the great Duke and his Duchess, 
 forgetting Queen Adelaide, and Prince Leopold, and their con- 
 nection with Marlborough House, we will concentrate our atten- 
 tion on the more recent history of the place, associated as it is with 
 our late King. 
 
 " This is a little garden, and the Queen uses it a great deal," 
 wrote to me General Sir Dighton Probyn in a courteous note 
 when, with Her Majesty Queen Alexandra's gracious permission, 
 he made the necessary arrangements for me to draw it. 
 
 And no doubt, regarded as the pleasure-ground of a royal resi- 
 dence, and since in this world we bring most things to the test 
 of comparison, it is small ; yet the space covered by Marlborough 
 House and its garden, is nearly four acres and three-quarters, 
 though much of this is occupied by courtyard and carriage drive. 
 The actual dimensions according to Mr. Beavan, are 542 feet 
 east and west, and 364 north and south. It is rectangular in shape, 
 and can be scanned in its entirety at once, there being no cunning 
 devices by which it is made to appear .larger than it really is : 
 there are no walks, shut in by yew and cypress, and screened by 
 evergreen oak ; walks which twist, and turn, and double back, as 
 at Chiswick House and elsewhere. And just as there has been 
 no attempt at landscape gardening, so also are there no signs of 
 the still earlier topiary work, of which Duchess Sarah probably 
 saw rather too much in the reign of Dutch William. 
 
 I believe the garden to be substantially the same as it was in 
 the days of Queen Anne and the Georges, and that such changes 
 as have been made have not materially altered its general appear- 
 
 147 10* 
 
GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 
 
 ance. However, there are certainly some points of difference, the 
 greatest, of course, being in the presence of trees which have been 
 planted and grown up in the place of those felled by Sarah's order ; 
 they make the garden shadier than in her time. If any survive of 
 those she spared, their trunks are now dingy with London smoke, 
 so that their twigs and branches are all relieved as touches of pure 
 black, whether against the sweet new green of their spring foliage, 
 or the prevailing dull russet of the early metropolitan " fall." 
 Another change arises from the defection of the singing birds ; 
 the place is no longer vocal with their songs as it was two hundred 
 years ago, for, if less than a century earlier than now, nightingales 
 sang, as they are said to have done, in the grounds of Carlton 
 House, which was, so to speak, next door, then they also sang in 
 the garden of which I am writing ; and if the rooks, as we are told, 
 had a settlement in the Carlton House gardens, we may be sure 
 they sometimes visited the lawn at Marlborough House to fend 
 for breakfast, cawing as loudly for a good fat worm, as little Tommy 
 Tucker sang sweetly for " white bread and butter." But alas ! 
 the traffic of St. James's Street has scared away the nightingales, 
 and as for the rooks, they have either been made into pies this 
 many a year, or they migrated for good and all when Carlton House 
 was demolished in 1827. 
 
 It is chiefly in the matter of flowers that the twentieth-century 
 garden is better off than the eighteenth. In cultivated areas the 
 smile of Flora is more radiant, the embroidery on her robe more 
 vivid and varied, than of yore ; the sweet pea, the dahlia, an end- 
 less variety of roses, geraniums, and chrysanthemums the tall 
 Japanese lilies, the rhododendrons, and scores of other flowering 
 shrubs, all of which abound in Queen Alexandra's flower-garden 
 to-day, were unknown in the days of Queen Anne. However, with 
 the long list of blossoming plants which even Bacon knew, all of 
 which he says in his famous essay flourish " in the climate of 
 London," and with the offspring of Dutch William's parterres to 
 fall back upon, I have no doubt but that London and Wise, and 
 other fashionable horticulturists of the eighteenth century, con- 
 trived to make almost as brave a show as does the gardener of 
 to-day. 
 
 But notwithstanding the fact that few changes can have taken 
 place in the garden, I found that when, according to my habit, I 
 
 148 
 
MARLBOROUGH HOUSE 
 
 tried to repeople it with the men and women of long ago, I 
 could not do so. Partly because a garden Should be associated 
 with summer with hot sunshine and leafy shade, dewy mornings, 
 glowing noons, and calm, delicious evenings spent out of doors. 
 People do not promenade for pleasure in gardens, on bleak days, or 
 when rain threatens. Eden itself under such conditions would 
 have ceased to be Paradise. 
 
 Or ever I saw Marlborough House the summer of 1915 had 
 departed, leaving behind it a reputation as regards weather, nearly 
 as evil as that of 1916, though it is only those whose play, or work 
 as does my own, demands steady sunshine, who can realize how 
 very bad the meteorological records of both years have been. 
 
 It was early September, yet autumn had set in. The leaves 
 of the noble trees upon the lawn were falling sooner than is usual 
 in normal years ; and they were brown and faded, and in far from 
 agreeable contrast with the vivid, emerald-green sward on which 
 they lay for, kept verdant by the heavy rains, the lawns looked 
 curiously cold, and phenomenally green. There were rapidly- 
 widening gaps in the foliage, and sundry patches of bright sky 
 were visible where but a fortnight earlier there had been no break. 
 A day soon followed of alternate sun and clouds, when gusts of 
 wind blew off the drier leaves in showers, tossing them mischie- 
 vously to and fro, sending them whirling in the air, and dancing 
 gleefully on the gravel walks like the giant, upright drops of 
 thunder-rain upon the pavement, that, when we were children, 
 watching from a window, we called " pennies.'.' 
 
 That week Queen Alexandra's gardeners had need of patience, 
 for the task of brushing them up was scarcely ended ere it had to 
 begin all over again ! 
 
 Thus it came about that when at Marlborough House I failed 
 to visualize the eighteenth century mentally. I had no thought 
 of the ducal pair who had planned the gardens, in days when both 
 were still handsome, and very, very rich, though elderly, and 
 declining in the Royal favour. I ought not to have forgotten them, 
 for the Churchills belonged to the place, and the place to the 
 Churchills ; and in their day a brave company must at times have 
 gathered there. Up and down, up and down, the broad walk 
 (the walk which appears in the frontispiece) have paced in summer 
 days, the brightest luminaries of a very brilliant literary era 
 
 149 
 
GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 
 
 the age of Queen Anne. Joseph Addison, then in the prime of his 
 manhood, though not yet of his literary fame, was doubtless often 
 there for he had written to order, after Blenheim, a eulogy on the 
 victor said to be excellent of its kind ; distinguished by more of 
 truth, and less of bombast and flattery, than is common in such 
 effusions and he was for a time Secretary of State under Sunder - 
 land, Marlborough's son-in-law. 
 
 With Addison may sometimes have come his friend, Dick Steele, 
 who about the date when the Duke and Duchess went to Pall 
 Mall, issued the first number of The Taller soon to be followed by 
 the more famous Spectator. 
 
 And others there were, more or less famous, in that motley 
 crowd of hooped and powdered dames, and splendid gentlemen ; 
 who laughed, and flirted, and talked scandal, and discussed high 
 politics, and took snuff, in that pretty garden in the early days of 
 the eighteenth century. At a distance from Marlborough House 
 one may recall them, but on the spot one chiefly remembers that 
 hither King Edward VII., when Prince of Wales, first brought his 
 bride, the " sea-King's daughter from over the seas," who took the 
 hearts of London, and afterwards of the whole country, by storm ; 
 arid that here he resided during the greater part of his life and 
 that here our present King was born. I should think that to 
 those who knew King Edward best, the garden must be pervaded 
 with a sense of his presence. One interesting corner is a dog's 
 burial-place, and here among many canine pets of the Royal pair 
 each little grave distinguished by a separate head-stone lies 
 Caesar, the faithful animal which half London saw following the 
 cortege, on the day of his master's funeral. 
 
 The Prince dwelt chiefly at Marlborough House when in 
 England ; but he travelled much, and country life, and sport, 
 and in particular his estate at Sandringham, had great attractions 
 for his leisure. Yet from the fact that Queen Victoria had practi- 
 cally abandoned London, Marlborough House became from the 
 period of his marriage to his accession to the throne, the chief seat 
 of his activities. 
 
 As after years abundantly proved, Edward VII. was born with 
 the instincts, and many of the special gifts, of a diplomat ; though 
 the opportunity to use them was denied him until he began to 
 reign. 
 
 150 
 
MARLBOROUGH HOUSE 
 
 However, he played the only role left to him to perfection. He 
 became the recognized ruler of society the leader of the world of 
 iashion, and the Queen's accredited representative at the cere- 
 monial opening of public buildings, the laying of foundation stones, 
 and so forth. 
 
 He performed all these often tedious duties with exceptional 
 grace and bonhomie, always saying and doing the right thing at 
 the right moment ; and pleasing everyone concerned by his 
 geniality, charm of manner, and accessibility, also by his intelligent 
 interest and quickness of observation. But to a man of the 
 Prince's parts and ambition, the position, with its strictly limited 
 prerogatives, could not have been satisfactory. 
 
 These pages, however, are not the place in which to comment 
 on the anomaly, that, for a generation, debarred the heir to the 
 throne from all knowledge of passing events and their possible 
 trend, except through channels equally open to the humblest of 
 his future subjects. 
 
 But whatever Queen Victoria's reasons may have been, the 
 Prince's tact and discretion never failed him. He accepted the 
 situation with as good a grace as possible, contenting himself with 
 cultivating, on his own initiative, the most friendly relations with 
 foreign ambassadors, and winning golden opinions in continental 
 countries, particularly in France ; thus laying the foundation of 
 the great work of his life, the famous entente, which has had such 
 far-reaching results. 
 
 In July, 1870, Delane, the famous editor of the Times, happened 
 to be dining at Marlborough House when he received the first 
 intimation of the outbreak of war between France and Germany. 
 There could be no question as to the feelings of his Royal host on 
 the occasion, for, from the time when in 1855, as a mere boy, the 
 Prince had first visited France, he had cherished a warm regard for 
 the country and its people. The sympathies of his mother were 
 on the opposite side, and the relations between the Queen and her 
 heir, must therefore, have been often strained. But they were 
 never severed ; nor was there any cessation of intercourse, nor 
 active hostility on either side, as had been the case with two previous 
 Princes of Wales ; Albert Edward's tact and good temper smoothed 
 over the rough places ; and on the celebration of the Prince and 
 Princess's silver wedding in 1888, the day after the death of the 
 
 151 
 
GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 
 
 old Emperor of Germany, the Queen dined at Marlborough House, 
 and actually permitted .the suspension of the Court mourning for 
 the occasion. Three months later her favourite grandson the 
 now notorious Kaiser William, became Emperor in succession to 
 his father Frederick. 
 
 It is said that the nephew's social charm is as great as was the 
 uncle's ; and one authority states that no personal or political 
 rivalry existed between them, that " there was no estrangement," 
 and that " the ill-feeling disappeared when they met." 
 
 This may be so, but in the light of subsequent events it is difficult 
 to believe it, impossible not to attribute sinister and selfish motives 
 for the German Emperor's professed friendship, and formerly very 
 frequent visits.* 
 
 There could have been no ties of opinion and sympathy to bind 
 the two together, for France was still bleeding from the wounds 
 that Germany had inflicted on her ; and we are told that King 
 Edward, at Biarritz, at Cannes, and in Paris, had long before 
 " emphatically declared in all circles his love for France, his hope 
 of a perpetual peace between her and England, and his dread of 
 another Franco-German War." Nor did he qualify such senti- 
 ments when he travelled in Germany. " He loved France," said 
 Gambetta, " d la jois gaiment et serieusement" and his dream was 
 of an Anglo-French entente. 
 
 In Germany " There's such divinity doth hedge a king " that to 
 dare to criticize the Emperor in the smallest particular is Use 
 majeste, a crime severely punishable. 
 
 The Kaiser is " The All Highest," and regards himself as God's 
 vicegerent upon earth. Because he is " over-lord," he does not 
 acknowledge the rights of small states, nor their just claim to self- 
 determination, but works to bring the whole world under his sway. 
 To this end he has waged ruthless war, bringing bereavement, and 
 untold misery, on half the families of Europe. 
 
 There was, it is true, the tie of blood, but beyond that I fail to 
 see what common interest or purpose could unite him to the gracious, 
 kindly Prince ; condescending without appearing to condescend, 
 
 * This sentence is not strong enough. It was written in 1916, before the Gerard and 
 Lichnowsky revelation, and before the publication of the " Willy-Nicky " correspondence 
 had betrayed to the world the worthlessness of the Kaiser's professions of friendship even 
 for his kinsmen. I think there can be now no doubt but that the uncle read the nephew's 
 nature clearly, and gauged his capacity for evil and his boundless ambition, and that the 
 " estrangement," though not open, was real. 
 
 152 
 
MARLBOROUGH HOUSE 
 
 easy of access, yet maintaining his dignity as the constitutional 
 monarch of a democratic race. 
 
 Ruling as he did over an empire already wider than Caesar's, 
 he had no ambition to extend it. Secure in the affection of the 
 majority of his subjects, King Edward could afford to be indifferent 
 to what the disloyal might say. Fearless of personal danger, 
 as various episodes in his life prove him to have been, he yet 
 abhorred and dreaded war and its attendant horrors, and the chief 
 aim of his career was to avert it. 
 
 To the first Prince of Wales' famous motto " I serve " he might 
 well have added the words, " Peace and conciliation," for in very 
 deed they were his watchwords. And in brief, he was in the truest 
 and best sense, " An English gentleman." 
 
 153 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 CHISWICK HOUSE 
 
 I HOPE the reader will forgive me if I begin my chapter on 
 Chiswick House with a page of personal retrospection ; the 
 more so that it describes a garden that, though neither cele- 
 brated itself, nor the garden of a celebrity, had not a little to do- 
 with my first introduction to the famous Palladian villa of the Duke 
 of Devonshire, concerning which it is my business to write. 
 
 The happiest childhood is one that is spent in a garden. Of 
 this I am convinced. When I was a very little girl I lived with 
 my parents, who had come from the north, in a somewhat eld- 
 fashioned house near the river Thames, a house that stood by 
 itself in a delightful garden, shut in on every side by high walls, 
 on the top of which wallflowers and snapdragons grew. There 
 was a favourite corner on these walls, so overgrown with yellow 
 stonecrop that it formed, in the angle, a broad and softly-cushioned 
 seat. Up to this, by means of the gardener's ladder, I have many 
 times climbed, like Cowper's cat, " to sit and think," to read a 
 fairy-tale, or "do my lessons ; " but still more often, I fear, to 
 watch, with other children, the friendly nuns who were our neigh- 
 bours. For there was a convent garden on the other side of the 
 wall, concerning which, as we could not see very much of it, we 
 were frankly curious. The good sisters did not appear to resent 
 our observation, which indeed was very intermittent ; for in June, 
 a white-heart cherry-tree, trained against the wall, and laden with 
 fruit, became vastly more interesting than the convent ; and in 
 August the mulberries were ripe, and diverted our attention from 
 the nuns. This, at least, was so on week days. On fine Sunday 
 
 154 
 
CHISWIGK HOUSE 
 
 afternoons, in summer-time, regularly at five o'clock, there was a 
 service of some sort or other in the grounds. We always supposed 
 that there was a graveyard there ; and, during many years, we 
 children never failed to rush upstairs the instant we caught the 
 strain of a certain processional hymn, to watch from our top windows 
 the glint of lighted candles among the trees, and catch glimpses 
 of veiled figures, white and black, and slowly-moving banners. 
 I do not know the music to which the nuns walked, but I remember 
 it well, and if I could hear that same tuneful hymn again, in any 
 place, and in any circumstances, it would bring the whole scene 
 back to me. So strong are the impressions of childhood, and so 
 powerful the association of ideas and memory with music ! 
 
 The nuns were good neighbours : One day one of my brothers, 
 to our great consternation, fell over the wall on to a bed of soft 
 cabbages. They picked him up, treated him kindly, and sent 
 him home by the road ; and the next morning they came to the 
 base of the wall and handed up, on a long stick, a beautiful moth 
 for " the little boy who had fallen over." 
 
 Our garden was much more ancient than the house, having 
 once formed part of the demesne of a large mansion, said to have 
 been long ago destroyed by fire. It abounded in fruit ; old goose- 
 berry bushes, raspberries, and currants, black, white, and red. 
 There was one spot near the strawberry-beds where the rosy stalks 
 of the rhubarb held up their giant leaves like plates, in order, as 
 it were, to catch, or break the fall of, the yellow apricots that 
 dropped from a tree above them, quite beyond our reach. Such 
 windfalls were windfalls indeed ! 
 
 The garden was rich in fruit-trees of various kinds, particularly 
 in apple-trees, all twisted and knotted, and gnarled with age ; 
 but still yielding fruit plentifully. The flavour of some of these 
 apples, no Newtown Pippin, or Blenheim Orange of the present 
 day, can approach. 
 
 April, in our garden, was a reminder of a snowy January ; only 
 the snow did not completely cover the grass, and on the trees it 
 was dashed here and there with rose and pink. The old Ribstone 
 Pippin that faced the drawing-room windows was covered with 
 bloom, and was in itself the very incarnation of the spirit of Spring. 
 
 On the right-hand corner of the lawn a Russet stood sentinel 
 over the flower-beds. Near it a plum tree, past bearing fruit, wept 
 
 155 
 
GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 
 
 tears of amber gum. Opposite to these were a Codlin, a large and 
 ancient thorn (rose-red all over in May), and an acacia, certainly 
 the largest I have ever seen; "as high as the 'cacia " being our 
 nursery standard of comparison, where height was in question. 
 Close to the house was a Golden Pippin, which made a practice 
 of dropping its smooth and yellowing apples on the dewy grass in 
 the early morning, a tempting bait to the child who was the earliest 
 bird among us. He or she needed to rise betimes, for soon the old 
 gardener would arrive, and pick them up before whetting his 
 scythe to mow the lawn. How well I remember the sunshiny 
 mornings when one awoke to the pleasant sound of the sharpening 
 of the scythe, and to the " swish ! " of the long sweep of it over the 
 grass ; no patent lawn-mower ever invaded our paradise in those 
 days ! 
 
 In the far corner of the garden, hard by the nunnery wall, was 
 a very ancient mulberry- tree. According to tradition it was one 
 of many planted in this corner of Middlesex by order either of 
 Queen Elizabeth or James L, both monarchs having wished to 
 encourage the silk industry in England. History says their attempt 
 was a failure ; but ours was a success ! My brothers and sisters 
 and I all kept silk- worms ; and very busy we were, every summer, 
 with our improvised winding-machines, reeling off the shining, 
 flossy silk from the cocoons ; whilst half the children of the hamlet 
 came begging at our gates for the daily dole of mulberry leaves to 
 feed their curious grey pets. 
 
 There was a bowling-green at the back of the house ; at the 
 front a straight, stone-paved walk led up from the gate to the front 
 door-steps, and on each side of it, like sentries on guard, stood a 
 tall, dark tree, either cypress or fir ; at this distance of time I am 
 not sure which ; nor could I swear to anything concerning them, 
 except that they were coniferous, or cone-bearing trees. 
 
 The flowers in our garden were all of the old-fashioned sort. 
 There were no " Standards," but everything grew on bushes ; 
 " York and Lancaster " roses, striped red and white ; sweet- 
 scented blush-roses, moss-roses (seldom seen nowadays) ; and 
 enormous pink cabbage-roses, in which it was delicious to bury 
 one's nose and inhale a long. draught of unrivalled fragrance. 
 
 How it all comes back to me, bit by bit, little by little ! I did 
 not think I could recall it, until I tried. I remember particularly 
 
 156 
 
GHISWICK HOUSE 
 
 the handsome scarlet Japonica, beneath the dining-room window 
 (the lovely waxen flowers of which I early essayed to paint) ; 
 and over one of the two windows of the kitchen, trailed a yellow 
 jessamine. A doorway led into the stable yard, that was separated 
 from the garden by an old fence, that, as years glided by, bent more 
 and more beneath the weight of some patriarchal ivy. Hard by 
 grew a flowering currant-bush, the first shrub in our garden to 
 bloom in early Spring, and give a welcome signal of the departure 
 of Winter. 
 
 At one side of the garden there was a plantation of box trees, 
 very dense and thick, and since box is an extremely slow-growing 
 plant undoubtedly of great antiquity. They were about ten or 
 twelve feet high, and must therefore have been in the garden at a 
 period even anterior to the destruction by fire of the first mansion 
 on the estate. In our youthful imagination this little thicket, 
 although in reality but a few yards square, was a deep, dark, 
 mysterious wood almost an enchanted forest, and the scene of 
 various singular and dangerous adventures, that, however tragic, 
 generally ended happily ; in these we, of course, invariably played 
 the leading parts. The events that took place in that forest were 
 so wildly improbable, that only the fertile and illogical brain of 
 childhood, could have conceived them. They were first suggested, 
 no doubt, by fairy tales. How potent such suggestions can be, 
 few grown-ups remember or realize ; but to us, happy boys and 
 girls as we were, they stood for much ; they left us open to belief 
 in the possibility of real adventures to be met with outside the 
 boundaries of our own beloved garden, and as time passed on 
 inspired us with the desire to prosecute them actively. 
 
 I myself was fed on fairy tales, and I still possess a copy of 
 Hans Christian Andersen, a birthday gift from an uncle, bearing 
 on the fly-leaf the inscription : 
 
 " With the sincere and earnest hope that these little 
 tales may get firmly fixed in her little head." 
 
 And the wish was verified ! But I delighted also in the " Arabian 
 Nights," in Grimm, and the delectable stories of the Countess 
 d'Aulnoy, the latter, a volume beautifully illustrated, by, if I 
 remember rightly, Sir John Gilbert. 
 
 157 
 
GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 
 
 My brothers' romance took an active form ; they were embued 
 with a fine spirit of adventure, and some of the escapades into which 
 it led them egged on frequently by a boyish love of mischief 
 would make entertaining reading, but would be out of place here. 
 
 How and when the rumour first reached us of a beautiful garden 
 in our neighbourhood, and of its wonderful entrance gates, or why 
 we were convinced that its gates were golden, I do not exactly 
 remember. It is all so very, very long ago. But some of us had 
 heard of the Garden of the Hesperides, and of the golden apples 
 therein, guarded by a dreadful dragon with a hundred heads, and 
 we communicated the wondrous fable to the others. Possibly, 
 also, the Florentine Ghiberti's " Gates of Paradise " may have been 
 mentioned before us, and we caught at the word " Paradise." 
 " Paradise ? ' we reflected. c That is heaven ; Jerusalem the 
 golden," described in the Book of the Revelation, which in itself 
 was to us but a glorified and very mystical fairy-tale, telling of a 
 place where everything glittered with gold and precious stones 
 just as it does in fairyland. Moreover, " Paradise " was the 
 Garden of Eden the happy garden that men lost. And might 
 it not be up to us to regain it ? I think it was by some such 
 process of reasoning, and by that quaint commingling of ideas to 
 which even grown-up people are unconsciously prone, that we 
 arrived at the conclusion that the garden we had heard of was a 
 sort of enchanted Eden, and that its gates were gates of gold. 
 
 Not one of us, I am sure, believed that in it was a dragon, as 
 in the classical story, or a serpent, as in Eden ; though the boys 
 would fain have done so, in order to give scope for valorous deeds, 
 if ever they reached it. But more or less we all believed that 
 golden apples might grow in that garden ; for had we not at home 
 pippins called " golden " by courtesy, and in humble imitation of 
 the Hesperidian reality ? 
 
 Perhaps I have dwelt too long on all this, and on that happy 
 garden of my childhood that I have been describing but it was 
 necessary to explain how it happened that, though we knew nothing 
 of the Duke of Devonshire, and had never heard of his famous 
 Palladian Villa, yet, when vague reports concerning the beautiful 
 gates of a garden even more enchanting and wonderful than our 
 own, reached us from time to time, and when we heard them 
 continually as we slowly grew older too slowly in those days we 
 
 158 
 
CHISWIGK HOUSE 
 
 pondered the matter, and with all the picturesque accretions and 
 variations that the vivid fancy of youth chose to add, we discussed 
 them in family conclave. 
 
 Immediately the spirit of adventure rife in the boys, met the 
 spirit of romance uppermost in the girls ; and finally, without 
 consulting our elders, or even telling them of our dreams, we 
 resolved to make a real pilgrimage, in order to verify the truth of 
 the rumours, and the accuracy of our own imaginings. 
 
 When I think of it now, I remember that we did not even know 
 in what direction the garden lay, and whether the golden gates 
 were in the Moon, or in Middlesex. We asked nobody, for we had 
 youth's self-confidence, and if any well-meaning person had 
 voluntarily told us that what we were seeking was actually within 
 a mile or two of our own garden, it would not have shaken our 
 faith in our distant objective, for we should not have believed 
 him ! We never doubted that sooner or later we should arrive 
 at our goal. For Ghiberti's famous bronze gates before referred to, 
 the gates of the Baptistery at Florence, were not more real and 
 beautiful in the eyes of Michael Angelo, when he pronounced them 
 " worthy to be the gates of Paradise," than, to our vivid fancy, was 
 the undiscovered entrance to the mysterious undiscovered country 
 we sought. 
 
 Therefore, on several consecutive holiday afternoons, when, on 
 the principle that there is safety in numbers, we were left to our 
 own devices, we sallied forth, a joyous band of brothers, sisters, and 
 school-mates, in search of the wonderful gates, and the Paradise 
 to which they, like Ghiberti's, were the fitting portal. But we never 
 found them, for they lay close to home ; and in our wanderings 
 we had overshot the mark, and passed them by ; and when at 
 last, after four futile attempts made all " on our own," we con- 
 descended to ask the way the way to the " Golden Gates " 
 no one had ever heard of them ! 
 
 And well might it be so, for the gates were the gates of Chiswick 
 House, and they were not golden at all ! but of wrought-iron, 
 gilded. They are beautiful, nevertheless, and have an interesting 
 history. Originally they were the gates of Heathfield House, 
 Turnham Green, which, after changing hands more than once, 
 was purchased by George Elliot, Lord Heathfield, the defender of 
 Gibraltar, who died there in 1790. 
 
 159 
 
GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 
 
 When Heathfield House was sold, in 1887, the gates were bought 
 by the sixth Duke of Devonshire, who set them up at Chiswick 
 House, where for sixty years they formed the principal entrance 
 to the lovely grounds of the famous Villa, built by the Earl of 
 Burlington, about 1730 to 1735. 
 
 In 1897 the gates, and their handsome piers, were transplanted 
 to the Duke of Devonshire's residence in Piccadilly, where they 
 still form one of the chief ornaments of that famous thoroughfare. 
 
 The removal, I believe, gave great dissatisfaction to the in- 
 habitants of Chiswick, who had taken considerable pride in the 
 beauty of the gates which stood at the bottom of what is now 
 known as Duke's Avenue. 
 
 When the old Jacobean mansion that preceded the existing 
 Chiswick House, came into the possession of Richard Boyle, third 
 Earl of Burlington a nobleman notable for his patronage of art 
 and artists, and his large building undertakings, it had already 
 had a chequered history. Many people more or less famous and 
 infamous, had made it a place of residence ; indeed the rapidity 
 with which it changed hands was remarkable. 
 
 The Wardour family, to whom it originally belonged, sold it to 
 that Robert Carre, made successively Earl of Rochester and 
 Earl of Somerset, whose supposed share in the murder of his 
 greatest friend, Sir Thomas Overbury, a poet, was one of 
 the lurid sensations of the reign of James I. In the memor- 
 able trial that followed the crash of discovery, the details 
 of the whole horrible conspiracy were . unmasked. The 
 Countess admitted her guilt ; her four chief accomplices were 
 hanged, but, extraordinary to relate, the two principal offenders 
 were pardoned. A short imprisonment, and the forfeiture of their 
 estates, was their very inadequate punishment. A pension sufficient 
 for their needs was granted to them, and in 1624 an entry in the 
 " State Papers domestic " states " that the Earl of Somerset is 
 pardoned, and has taken a house at Chiswick, but promises not to 
 go near Court." This was the original Chiswick House. It was said 
 of the guilty pair that though they lived in one and the same build- 
 ing, it was " only in an alternation of sullenness and chiding 
 . . . they were a mutual torment in their old age as they had 
 been a mutual snare in their youth, until they sank unregretted 
 and unhonoured into the grave." 
 
 160 
 
CHISWIGK HOUSE 
 
 Somerset made some futile attempts to regain favour with the* 
 King by gifts of fruit from the Chiswick garden " peaches con- 
 ceivably good, and all that was left of his plums ; " and he said that 
 if His Majesty would supply him with a good gardener, he would 
 send him yearly a tribute of the produce of his garden. 
 
 Thus we get a favourable report of the famous grounds of Chiswick 
 House, as early as 1631. The disgraced Countess died the following 
 year. The child of this unfortunate marriage, the Lady Anne, was 
 betrothed to a son of the Earl of Bedford, who, not unnaturally, 
 appears to have objected somewhat to the match, and Somerset, to 
 endow her with 12,000, had to sell or mortgage his Chiswick pro- 
 perty, with all his plate and household belongings. Her son was the 
 famous Lord William Russell, who in 1683 perished on the scaffold. 
 
 In 1664 Chiswick House and its contents were granted by 
 Charles II. to his son, the Duke of Monmouth ; a transaction that 
 cost the King 6,000. Four years later the Duke parted with it 
 to Lord Gerard of Brandon, in exchange for an appointment as 
 Captain of the King's Life Guard and 4,000. Lord Gerard sold 
 the house to Sir Edward Seymour, Speaker of the House of Commons,, 
 who, in his turn in 1682 or thereabouts disposed of it to the 
 first Earl of Burlington. 
 
 Richard Boyle, the third earl, was a famous building nobleman, 
 and patron of art and letters. During his travels in Italy, from 
 which he returned in 1716, he had made it his business, as it was 
 also his pleasure, to collect pictures and statuary, and had greatly 
 admired the works of Palladio. 
 
 The villa that so much attracted the young Earl that he ultimately 
 made it the model for the house that he built on his Chiswick 
 estate, was the Villa at Vicenza, designed by Palladio for the 
 Marquis Capra. The architect whom Burlington employed to 
 carry out his ideas was William Kent, who claimed to be painter, 
 architect, and landscape gardener. Horace Walpole in his " Anec- 
 dotes of Painting," styles Kent " the father of modern gardening," 
 and certainly the mark Kent left upon the gardening of the eigh- 
 teenth century is so definite, that no apology need be made for 
 dwelling at some length upon his history. 
 
 Born in 1685, in Yorkshire, and apprenticed to a coach-maker, 
 Kent soon came to London fired with the ambition to become 
 a painter. London in those days, over sixty years before the 
 
 161 II 
 
GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 
 
 foundation of the Royal Academy, offered no facilities at all for the 
 serious study of art, nor does Kent's real talent seem to have lain 
 in the direction of portraiture, historical, or religious painting, 
 the branches that he elected to follow, for apparently he had but 
 little success in any of them. He must, however, have shown 
 some earlier promise, for friends came forward and sent him to 
 study in Italy, and he is credited with having won the Pope's 
 annual prize for a painting, in 1713. Luckily for him, and for the 
 line of art that he ultimately made his own, he met Lord Burlington 
 in Rome, and with him returned to England in 1719. From that 
 time forward until his death in 1748, he seems to have made his 
 home entirely with the Earl, although he had several Court appoint- 
 ments, and many commissions, bringing him in an income of 
 600 per annum. 
 
 Kent, as before stated, tried his hand at many branches of art, 
 including sculpture and architecture, as well as painting. Horace 
 Walpole, who had excellent opportunities for judging his capabilities 
 as a painter, pronounced him to be in that capacity below medio- 
 crity, and there is a statue of Shakespeare by him in West- 
 minster Abbey, that shows that, as a sculptor, also he was not 
 above it. But the late Phene Spiers, F.R.I.B.A., F.S.A., speaking 
 with professional authority, says : " Judging by his architectural 
 work at Chiswick alone, he was certainly an architect of no mean 
 capacity ; the design for the front of the villa, shows that he 
 possessed a good sense of proportion, and an accurate knowledge 
 of the Corinthian order, which he employed for the portico ; in 
 the double staircases of the north and south fronts, he displays 
 considerable originality, whilst in the scheme of his plan and the 
 decorative design of the interior, he certainly equals, if he does 
 not surpass, the work of his distinguished predecessor Palladio." 
 This is high praise, but it is not undeserved. Working as he did 
 at Chiswick, immediately under the eye of Lord Burlington, he 
 must have thrown himself enthusiastically into the scheme, and 
 have been in perfect accord with his patron, to achieve there so 
 successful a result. The directing taste, however, as well as the 
 first inception of the whole, was Burlington's, for he was justly 
 surnamed the " architect Earl." Kent was merely the instrument 
 whose function it was to translate his patron's ideas into the correct 
 language of architecture, according to the recognized rules of 
 
 162 
 
CHISWIGK HOUSE 
 
 its grammar. These rules he can only have studied in Italy, under 
 the guidance of Lord Burlington, who, passionately enamoured of the 
 Palladian, or later Renaissance style, desired above all things to popu- 
 larize it in this country. To this end he trained Kent in his own 
 views, and collected and published at his own expense all the draw- 
 ings by Palladio, Inigo Jones, and others, that he could get hold of. 
 Lord Burlington's building plans had time to mature between 
 the date of his introduction to Kent and the erection of the Chiswick 
 Villa. During that period he expended time and money in re- 
 constructing Burlington House, Piccadilly. When at last, about 
 1730, he began to carry out his cherished schemes at Chiswick, 
 he did not start by the total demolition of the original Jacobean 
 mansion, but retained a part of it as a residence. Had comfort 
 and convenience been his first consideration, the earl would have 
 contented himself with restoring, and perhaps enlarging it, to 
 receive his collections ; but the Italian villa was, at the outset, 
 intended for a museum in which to enshrine and display the precious 
 works of art that he had lovingly collected ; and devoted as he 
 was to the style of the late Renaissance, he determined to satisfy 
 his own taste by following it in the construction of the new build- 
 ing. The result was that Gay's line in his " Trivia," on " How 
 to walk the Streets of London " 
 
 " Beauty within, without proportion reigns " 
 
 was equally applicable to Chiswick House and to Burlington 
 House. The central portion of the villa, for which the Earl was 
 responsible comprising the portico and principal saloon, are, 
 indeed, of splendid " proportion," and they remain in their pristine 
 condition ; fortunately the two wings since added by the architect 
 Wyatt, are completely in harmony with it. The house was origin- 
 ally built more to be looked at than to be lived in ; therefore the 
 famous gibe of Lord Hervey, Vice-Chamberlain to George II., 
 to the effect that " the Earl of Burlington had built a house too 
 small to live in, and too great to hang on one's watch-chain " 
 a witticism suggested by the eighteenth century beau's fob and 
 heavy seals, lost its point. The laugh was on the side of the Earl, 
 not of the courtier, when a member of a distinguished party of 
 visitors to the villa in 1732, reported that " both within and without 
 it is a fine bijou, and much beyond anything I have seen in my life." 
 
 163 II* 
 
GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 
 
 Lord Burlington's severer and finer taste must have restrained 
 his lieutenant's tendency to the baroque and rococo in art ; for 
 Kent's extravagances and limitations, are much in evidence in 
 some of the rooms he decorated at Kensington Palace. Fortunately 
 for Chiswick House, the ceilings and cornices there are apparently 
 by a less heavy hand, and the Earl, in all probability, brought over 
 foreign workmen to carry out this part of his scheme. 
 
 The grounds of Chiswick House, though they differ from those 
 of the imagined paradise of my childhood, are not less beautiful 
 in reality than in our conception of them. They are very fine and 
 characteristic examples of the landscape-gardening of the eighteenth 
 century, when landscape-gardening reached its highest develop- 
 ment. English taste soon framed a national style far removed 
 from the wide, formal, and stately manner of the French Le 
 Notre, and his English pupil, Rose. According to the author of 
 " Horace Walpole's World," trees in France became royal pro- 
 perty as soon as they had attained the age of thirty years ; in 
 England, happily for us, they were spared to grow old gracefully. 
 Horace Walpole remarks in his " Essay on Gardening " that 
 " when a Frenchman reads of the Garden of Eden, his mind 
 conjures up a picture of Versailles, with clipt hedges, berceaux 
 and trellis work. . . . He does not consider that four of the largest 
 rivers in the world were half so magnificent as one hundred 
 fountains, full of statues by Girardin." 
 
 Horace contrasts this artificiality with the lovely freedom 
 of nature, in which each tree and shrub is suffered to grow as it 
 lists. He ridicules the fact that the " venerable oak, the romantic 
 beech, the useful elm, and even the sweeping circuit of the lime, 
 and the regular round of the chestnut, and the almost moulded 
 orange-tree, were corrected by such fantastic admirers of symmetry. 
 The compass, the square, were of more use in the plantation," 
 he says, " than the nurseryman." 
 
 But while thus singing the praises of natural beauty, this ac- 
 complished product of the age of whalebone and wiggery, at the 
 same time applauded and encouraged the most rampant artificiality ; 
 for he advocates the introduction into the picture of a " feigned 
 steeple, of a distant church, or an unreal bridge, to disguise the 
 termination of water," and argues that " being intended to improve 
 the landscape, they are no more to be condemned because common, 
 
 164 
 
: MPfiT%! 
 
 Chiswick HOUM : Sketch of Temple in Grounds. 
 
 [To face p. 164. 
 
GHISWIGK HOUSE 
 
 than they would be if employed by a painter in the composition 
 of a picture." 
 
 His contemporary, Wheatley, in his introduction to his " Ob- 
 servations on modern gardening," claims for landscape-gardening, 
 " in the perfection to which it has been lately brought in England," 
 not only a considerable place among the liberal arts, " but also 
 that it is as superior to landscape painting as a reality to a re- 
 presentation . . . being relieved now," he says, " from the restraints 
 of regularity, and enlarged beyond the purposes of domestic con- 
 venience, the most beautiful, the most simple, the most noble 
 scenes of nature are within its province." But Wheatley, like 
 Walpole, held that artificial aids to the picturesque were not only 
 justifiable, but necessary, to make Nature natural ; and therefore, 
 to deceive successfully, soon became an end in itself. " In wild 
 and romantic scenes," he remarks, " may be introduced a ruined 
 and low bridge, of which some arches may be still standing, and 
 the loss of those which are fallen may be supplied by a few planks, 
 with a rail thrown over the vacancy. It is a picturesque object : 
 it suits the situation, and if due care be taken in certain respects, 
 it gives an imposing air of reality." 
 
 Thus it was that when topiary work, which is the clipping and 
 training of trees and shrubs into shapes, had had its day, when 
 French gardening and Dutch gardening were beginning to pall, 
 a reaction set in. Stiffness and conventionality went out of vogue, 
 and under the Georges, fashions in gardens soon passed to the other 
 extreme. No device was omitted, no sham was too barefaced, that 
 might contribute to the desired effect of picturesqueness, freedom 
 of growth, and apparent naturalness, while to secure a prospect, 
 to carry the eye up to a given point, no sacrifice was too great. 
 The walls of the old Elizabethan garden disappeared, and the sunk 
 fence or " Ha Ha" took its place. Trees were carefully planted just 
 where they would look best in twenty, forty or fifty years' time. 
 
 " Those groups and belts of trees and avenues of varied timber 
 which have actually clothed a scenery upon the simple undulations 
 of the midlands," says the author of " Horace Walpole's World," 
 " result from no pure accident of benevolent nature ; they are 
 a heritage from that strange century, a legacy (even if in a second 
 or third degree) from opulent designers who sketched the picturesqu e 
 by the mile." 
 
 165 
 
GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 
 
 The phrase " landscape-gardening " is quite legitimate. 
 These old designers, Bridgeman, Kent, " Capability ' Brown, 
 and the rest, were true artists, though the pigments they juggled 
 with were trees, rivulets, brown earth and green grass ; and the 
 canvas they worked upon was frequently an estate of fifty, eighty, 
 or one hundred acres in extent. They had faith in their art, 
 perfect selflessness, and the prophetic vision : and hence they 
 industriously delved, and sowed, and planted, and schemed for 
 posterity ; looking forward with complete confidence and content, 
 to a future that they themselves could never hope to see ; and 
 now they rest from their labours and their work speaks for them. 
 I have said all this before I may say it again, for in studying the 
 inception and development of gardens, the consciousness that we 
 owe our present pleasure in them to the industry and forethought 
 of past generations, is ever present or it ought to be. And the 
 question arises : " Are we in our turn doing as much for those who 
 will come after us ? ' 
 
 If we regard landscape gardening as a liberal art, then the words 
 of Walter Pater are peculiarly applicable to it. " The sensuous 
 material of each art," he says, " brings with it a special phase or 
 quality of beauty untranslatable into the form of any other art, 
 an order of impressions distinct in kind." He further reminds us 
 that " each art having, therefore, its own peculiar incommunicable 
 sensuous charm, has its own special mode of reaching the imagination, 
 its own special responsibilities to its material" Kent realized this, 
 and neglected nothing that might be likely to stimulate the fancy, 
 and unconsciously excite pleasurable or solemn emotions in the 
 spectator. Walpole says of him " that he was painter enough 
 to taste the charms of landscape, bold and opinionated enough 
 to dare to dictate, and born with a genius to strike out a great 
 system from the twilight of imperfect essays." 
 
 He had a fine eye for proportion, and fully appreciated the 
 fascination of vistas, and long perspectives. Having banished 
 the horrors of the topiary art, he knew how so to dispose of 
 his masses of foliage whether evergreen or deciduous so that 
 in all the circling hours of the day, and in every month of 
 the year, they remained broad and effective. He made great 
 play with cedars and yews ; he knew both the preciousness of 
 harmony, and the importance of [contrast, in the colour and 
 
 166 
 
OH 
 
 o 
 
 ^ 
 
 ^ 
 
 h 
 
 o 
 
GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 
 
 paint it under some such aspect. Ultimately my drawing was made 
 in late October, when the spot looks much as in February, for 
 
 " The sedge has withered from the lake 
 And no birds sing." 
 
 Earlier in the year the pretty little moor-hens and the larger 
 water-fowl disport themselves gaily in the pool ; and the peacock 
 makes its margin its haunt, furling and unfurling its brilliant 
 plumage fanlike in the sunshine. The fine strut of the bird over 
 the lawns at Chiswick is natural and excusable when his gorgeous 
 tail can sweep the turf ; but it is ludicrous after the moulting 
 season, when seemingly all unconscious of the deplorable change 
 in his appearance, he often parades the grounds, dragging after 
 him the one miserable, mangy feather which is all that is left in 
 his tail ! 
 
 It would, however, be unfair to Kent to let the reader suppose 
 that the Chiswick House grounds are melancholy. They are far 
 from being so ; here and there the designer deliberately struck the 
 chord of sadness, and worked in the minor key, but for the most 
 part they are charmingly cheerful, and I can conceive of a delightful 
 week's holiday spent entirely in the shady groves and sunny glades 
 of these delectable gardens. 
 
 The trees are magnificent, and very varied. No words can 
 exaggerate the exquisite beauty in early summer, when the green 
 of the young leaves is fresh, of the very long avenue of limes, 
 which leads from one principal gate to another : nor of the striking 
 aspect of the south front of the house, when, if one proceed a little 
 farther, it bursts upon one's view through a double avenue of giant 
 cedars and limes. Beneath the cedars are ranged terminal busts, 
 antique vases, and recumbent animals, carved in stone. Lord 
 Burlington brought from abroad much fine sculpture, some of which 
 has no doubt been removed to Chatsworth and elsewhere, by the 
 Dukes of Devonshire who have succeeded him : a good deal, 
 however, still remains ; notably, there are some lovely flower- vases 
 of fine Greek workmanship, in the Italian flower-garden. 
 
 The serpentine lake is over 2,000 feet long by 60 feet wide. Water 
 from the Bollo Brook supplies it, the overflow finding its way into 
 the River Thames. The lake is spanned by the handsome stone 
 bridge before referred to, and at its lower extremity by a wooden 
 one. We cross the stone bridge and follow the footpath on the 
 
 168 
 
GHISWIGK HOUSE 
 
 western side of the lake ; it is a lovely woodland walk, and from 
 the bank we catch charming glimpses of the grounds on the opposite 
 shore, and of the dome, and stately north front of the house. The 
 west front of the little Ionic temple by the pool, with steps descend- 
 ing to the water, is visible from the lakeside, but the steps are 
 partially hidden by a picturesque overgrowth of reeds, and water 
 plants. 
 
 Time and weather have made serious gaps in the broad cedar 
 avenue at the south front, and one or two splendid old trees have 
 had to be shored up ; but on the north side, the most magnificent 
 group of these stately trees which I have ever seen, remain. They 
 are still in their prime, and are certainly superior to any at Kew or 
 Sion.* Farther east, between the north avenue and the Italian 
 flower-garden, are some fine beeches, and delicious it is in the early 
 autumn mornings to cross beneath them, over the carpet of fallen 
 leaves which, red-brown, or golden, rustle and scatter beneath one's 
 feet, revealing an understratum of bright green moss of perennial 
 beauty. 
 
 Three diverging avenues radiating from a common centre, 
 was a favourite device of Kent's in garden-planning ; he adopted 
 it on both sides of the lake at Chiswick. Each walk terminated 
 in an arbour, a statue, a grot or a pavilion. On the western 
 side, a handsome obelisk with a finely carved classical panel below 
 it, marks the spot towards which three paths once converged ; 
 only two now remain, the third would seem to have lost its way 
 in a maze of shrubbery and undergrowth. 
 
 Apparently the same thing happened on the eastern side of 
 the grounds, where two avenues out of those which once spread 
 fan-like in three directions, have disappeared. One led to a 
 pavilion, another to a temple of the Corinthian order, and the third 
 of yew which still exists, leads to an arbour in which is a bust 
 of Napoleon. Hence the avenue is known as the " Napoleon 
 Walk," although Kenjt, of course, died twenty years before Napoleon 
 first saw the light. Its conversion to a memorial of the great 
 Corsican, is significant of the political leanings of the fifth Duke 
 of Devonshire and of his Duchess, the beautiful Georgiana ; just 
 as a similar bust in the gardens of Holland House, is of those of 
 
 * The finest of all was unfortunately blown down in the great gale of March, 1916, when 
 sixteen other trees were also laid prostrate. 
 
 169 
 
GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 
 
 the third Lord Holland. I have not penetrated to the arbour, 
 for the path to it is very narrow, its length some five or six hundred 
 feet, and the curious, clipt yew hedges, walling it in on either side, 
 are sixteen feet high, making it mysterious and impressive, but 
 somewhatjuninviting for a solitary stroll. The lovely open glades 
 and lawns, across which the bold brown rabbits fearlessly scud, 
 playing hide-and-seek with one another, are more to my taste, 
 and the beautiful Italian flower-garden with its fine maidenhair 
 tree-fern, its straight grass walks, and exquisite classic vases, 
 and with flower plots gay with yellow wall-flower in spring, and 
 scarlet with geraniums and salvia in late summer, are infinitely 
 more attractive. 
 
 Kent had a great acreage to deal with at Chiswick, and he made 
 it still larger by the adoption of a plan not new to English gardeners, 
 where the maze had long been a feature. Into his shrubberies 
 and plantations of laurustinus, rhododendron, and other flowering 
 shrubs, he introduced a network of walks which, by continually 
 twisting, and turning, and doubling back, made the most of a 
 small area, and induced a pleasant sense of seclusion, awaking 
 that sustained interest and curiosity in the path one follows, 
 that one never can have in the long lane which has no turning. 
 
 From all this it will be realized that Kent was the first to intro- 
 duce into this country the charming combination of the Italian 
 with the English garden. He did not altogether abolish conven- 
 tionality, for the true Italian garden has much of it. Obelisks, 
 and bridges, and balustrades ; classic temples, vases at regular 
 intervals, and statuary galore, were made use of by him. But as 
 a modern writer says, " Kent was the first in English gardening 
 to vindicate the natural against the artificial. Banishing all the 
 clipped monstrosities of the topiary art in yew, box, or holly, 
 releasing the stream from the conventional canal and marble basin, 
 rejecting the mathematical symmetry of ground plan then in vogue 
 for gardens, Kent endeavoured to imitate the variety of nature, 
 with due regard to the principles of light and shade,and perspective/' 
 
 There can be no doubt but that, whatever his deficiencies as a 
 decorator and painter, and however questionable his claim to be 
 an architect, as a landscape-gardener he stands in the first rank. 
 
 Of very conspicuous interest is the Inigo Jones gateway ter- 
 minating the gravel walk that runs at the north side of the Chiswick 
 
 170 
 
CHISWICK HOUSE: The lingo Jones Gateway 
 
 Page 170 
 
GHISWICK HOUSE 
 
 Villa. It was built in 1621, and was originally erected in the 
 grounds of Beaufort House at Chelsea. That mansion was sold 
 in 1736 to Sir Hans Sloan, who, knowing Lord Burlington's passion 
 for the art of Inigo Jones, presented the gateway to him. 
 
 A stone tablet on the left bears the inscription : 
 
 " Builded by Inigo Jones at Chelsea, M.D.CXXI." 
 And on the right hand side are inscribed the words : 
 " Given by Sir Hans Sloan, Baronet, to the Earl of Burlington, M.D.CXXX VII." 
 Pope, personating a traveller, thus apostrophizes the gateway : 
 
 " Passenger : Oh, Gate, how cam'st thou here ? 
 Gate : I was brought from Chelsea last year, 
 
 Batter'd with wind and weather ; 
 Inigo Jones put me together ; 
 Sir Hans Sloan let me alone ; 
 Burlington brought me hither." 
 
 The master of Burlington House and Chiswick House was a 
 generous patron of musicians and men of letters, as well as of 
 artists and architects, and it was a brilliant society over which 
 he presided. 
 
 Handel, for three years his honoured guest, was Impresario 
 of the Italian Opera at the Haymarket Theatre, and a keen rivalry 
 existed between him and an Italian composer named Buononcini, 
 whose music is said to have had the merit of being melodious. 
 The fashion of the day was for Italian Opera, and Handel, humouring 
 it, wrote over forty operas ; but, excepting for some scattered 
 arias, they are now no more remembered than those of Buononcini. 
 It speaks not a little for the taste and discernment of the Earl 
 that although Handel's genius for oratorio, and choral music, was 
 as yet undiscovered he sided with him in a dispute that for a 
 time divided the town, and that was commemorated in these 
 lively lines by a contemporary : 
 
 " Some say compared to Buononcini 
 That Mynheer Handel's but a ninny ; 
 Others aver that he to Handel 
 Is scarcely fit to hold a candle, 
 Strange all this difference should be 
 r Twixt Tweedledum and Tweedledee." 
 171 
 
GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 
 
 The poet Gay, Swift, Pope, Arbuthnot, and Bolingbroke, were 
 all members of the famous " Scriblerus " Club that Swift, in 1714, 
 had founded. Gay, Pope, and Swift, were intimate friends, and 
 all had the entree of the Earl of Burlington's house. Chiswick 
 was then a picturesque riverside village in the sequestered heart 
 of Middlesex, and doubtless Lord Burlington's guests found the 
 country-house infinitely restful and delightful. Dean Swift fre- 
 quently visited the Earl, and must have been often at the Villa 
 no doubt mentally contrasting its gardens with those of his 
 former patron Sir William Temple. Sir Walter Scott relates that 
 visiting England soon after the Earl's marriage, Swift accepted 
 an invitation to dinner. Through inadvertence, or perhaps a 
 momentary whim, Burlington did not introduce his wife to the 
 Dean. But Swift was not to be so overlooked : after dinner he 
 turned to Lady Burlington and said, " I hear you can sing ; sing 
 me a song." And when, somewhat nettled by the manner of the 
 command, she declined, Swift would take no refusal : he insisted 
 that " she should sing," he would " make her." " Why, Madam," 
 he argued, " I suppose you take me for one of your English hedge- 
 parsons ; sing, when I bid you." The Earl looked on with much 
 amusement, and did not attempt to interfere, but his wife, annoyed 
 and astonished at this unusual mode of address, burst into tears 
 and left the room. The next time Swift saw her he said, " Pray, 
 Madam, are you as proud and ill-natured now as when I saw you 
 last ? ' She had learnt in the meantime that licence, permitted 
 to no one else, was the privilege of the Dean of St. Patrick's, and 
 good humouredly replied " No, Mr. Dean, I'll sing for you if you 
 please." From that time forward Swift had a great liking and 
 respect for her ladyship. Nevertheless one is inclined to regret 
 her surrender, and to wish that she had continued to teach the 
 spoilt humorist manners. 
 
 Alexander Pope, the greatest member of that wonderful literary 
 coterie to which Swift, and Gay, Arbuthnot, and Bolingbroke 
 belonged a galaxy of genius which shed lustre on the reign of 
 Queen Anne and her immediate successors for many years fre- 
 quented Lord Burlington's house, on pleasant terms of intimacy. 
 As is well known, he was deformed and sickly, but in spite of ill- 
 health he must have contributed greatly to the " feast of reason 
 and the flow of soul " of which he himself wrote. 
 
 172 ' 
 
CHISWIGK HOUSE 
 
 The most brilliant writers of that day did not hesitate to assail 
 with cruel satire, and to belittle, their rivals in literature, and 
 those from whom they differed in politics, and religion. The 
 lampoon, and the scurrilous literary squib, flew about and exploded 
 like so many bombs ; and were as merciless in their effect on 
 human reputations as the latter on human lives. 
 
 Pope was unscrupulous in his attacks on rivals, or those whom 
 he considered literary upstarts or charlatans ; and he also castigated 
 his critics severely. The " Dunciad," dangerously full of per- 
 sonalities as it is, assailed the literary reputation of so many 
 people that it was at first published anonymously with names 
 veiled by initials ; when its success was assured, a second edition 
 was issued with the names openly given ; and, to protect himself, 
 the author assigned the copyright to three noblemen whose position 
 practically rendered them immune from prosecution for libel ; 
 one of these three sponsors was Lord Burlington. 
 
 Pope was vain, and unduly eager for posthumous praise, defeating 
 his own ends by the measures he took to ensure the publication 
 of his letters in his lifetime, and by his manipulation of these same 
 letters, after he had collected them from his correspondents, in 
 order to make himself appear in the best light to posterity : this, 
 however, only came to light some hundred years after his 
 death. Although his weaknesses must have been well known to 
 his associates, yet he was greatly loved by all who knew him 
 well, and the friendship with the Earl lasted to the end of 
 his life. 
 
 In that age, when no dynasty was secure, politics could nowhere 
 be totally excluded : and a circle which included Swift, Pope, and 
 Bolingbroke, among its members, must have been built on a solid 
 substratum of Toryism. Later on in its history, as we shall soon 
 see, Chiswick House, like Holland House, though in a lesser degree, 
 became a stronghold of Whiggism, but during the regime of Lord 
 Burlington, so far as I can discover, no man received a welcome, 
 or was refused it, on account of his political opinions. His wit, 
 his humour, his art, his literary merit in a word, his genius, gave 
 the entree. 
 
 Pope seems to have been sincerely attached to the Earl. When 
 he was only twenty-eight years old he wrote of him, " His garden 
 flourishes, his statues rise, his pictures arrive, and (what is far 
 
 173 
 
GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 
 
 more valuable) his own good qualities daily extend themselves 
 to all about him, whereof I the meanest (next to some Italian 
 chymists, fiddlers and opera-makers) am a living instance." 
 
 The letter in which this passage appears, was written long before 
 the Chiswick Villa was built, and the garden referred to was probably 
 that of the still existing Jacobean mansion. The Earl, although 
 engaged in building operations elsewhere, and in forming the 
 magnificent collection of art objects which he afterwards enshrined 
 in the new house, was probably often domiciled at Chiswick. 
 At this period Pope was resident with his family in New Buildings 
 now Mawson's Buildings in Chiswick Lane, where he is said 
 to have written many of his works, and he would therefore naturally 
 see much of Lord Burlington. On the death of his father, three 
 years later, he removed to the villa at Twickenham that, although 
 altered past all recognition, if not entirely rebuilt, yet goes by 
 his name. Here he would still be in touch with his noble friend, 
 but owing to the condition of the roads in the eighteenth century, 
 daily meetings could hardly have been possible. Matters only 
 grew worse as the century grew older ; when Horace Walpole could 
 describe Northamptonshire as "a clay pudding stuck full of 
 villages." Middlesex and Surrey were probably but little better, 
 and we know that the approaches to the metropolis were infested 
 by dangerous characters, and that it was unsafe to travel near 
 London without a train of servants, necessarily armed. In 1782 
 Lord North, the Prime Minister, was stopped, robbed, and wounded. 
 Horace Walpole, however, delighted in what he was pleased to 
 call " the gothicity of the times, when one could not stir out of 
 one's castle but armed for battle." People were then as much 
 afraid of highwaymen as in the present day we are of air-raids. 
 Foreigners, visiting this country, feared to go to breakfast at 
 Strawberry Hill, and its gossipy master tells his correspondent 
 that those who came to dinner " were armed as if going to Gibraltar, 
 and Lady Caroline Johnstone would not venture even from Peter- 
 sham, for in the town of Richmond they rob before dusk to such 
 perfection are all the arts brought " : yet this was at a time when 
 the fashionable dining hour was four o'clock. ' Who would 
 have thought," he goes on to say, " that the war with America 
 would make it impossible to stir from one village to another ? . . . 
 before the War the Colonies took off all our commodities, even 
 
 174 
 
CHISWICK HOUSE 
 
 to highwaymen . . . now the roads are stocked with them, and 
 they are so tame that they even come into houses." 
 
 Things, however, were not quite so bad in the first half of the 
 century, and no doubt Pope was able to watch with growing interest 
 the foundation and erection of the Italian Villa at Chiswick, and 
 even to advise in the gradual transformation of the gardens under 
 Kent.* 
 
 The poet Gay, for many years Pope's intimate friend, in an 
 epistle to Lord Burlington, conveys the idea that Pope was a 
 frequent visitor at Chiswick, and very highly appreciative of the 
 fruit-garden there. 
 
 " You, my Lord, bid stately piles ascend, 
 And in your Chiswick bow'r enjoy your friend, 
 When Pope unloads the boughs within his reach, 
 The purple vine, blue plum, and blushing peach." 
 
 The picture thus sketched is attractive, and not without its 
 humorous side. The author of the " Beggars' Opera " was long 
 resident with the earl, and must have been often at hand to join 
 his friend in his depredations on their host's fruit. Indeed, how 
 otherwise could Gay have known of them ? ' Lazy, kindly, un- 
 commonly idle," says Thackeray, "... for ever eating, and 
 saying good things," that he shared the spoil there can be no 
 doubt, and certainly little wonder : for where is the man, woman, 
 or child, who can resist the blandishments of a red-cheeked apple, 
 or of a scarlet strawberry peeping from its leaves ? Not peasant, 
 peer, nor poet ; not the fine lady of the second George's court, if 
 hoop and stiff brocade permitted her to stoop down, or stretch 
 up ; not Queen Caroline herself, who, towards the end of her life 
 when the " bijou " was a-building, was living at Kew. And what 
 more likely than that, curious to inspect Lord Burlington's folly 
 concerning which all the mode was gossiping anxious to compare her 
 own crude attempt at garden-planning, her pseudo-Gothic " Grots " 
 and hermitages, with Kent's improvements on the Burlington 
 estate, she would order her chariot, and go lumbering forth through 
 the dirty Middlesex lanes to have a look at the garden celebrated 
 even two hundred years earlier, when it had produced fruit so 
 
 * Horace Walpole admits that Pope did much to promote the development of a better taste 
 in the arrangement of pleasure grounds. 
 
 175 
 
GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 
 
 fine that the disgraced and unhappy Somerset seeking to placate 
 his offended sovereign, had offered it as a " dainty dish to set before 
 the King." 
 
 Pope and Gay were the products of an artificial age ; or rather 
 it would be more correct to say that the trend of their genius was 
 decided by the manners and mental habits of the society in which 
 they found themselves but they were true poets, notwithstanding 
 their upbringing, and therefore, being once brought into touch 
 with nature, were more sensitive to her charms than ordinary 
 folk of their class, and world. More especially was this so with 
 Pope, whose earlier verse shows much appreciation of inanimate 
 natural beauty ; and, as Campbell pointed out, the faculty which 
 enabled him to describe so exquisitely and humorously the court 
 and city manners, and objects of art, is essentially the same which 
 would have made him, under other circumstances and in a different 
 environment, a faithful lover, and student, and a poetic exponent, of 
 outside nature. Even in that artificial day, a few choice spirits, 
 such as Addison, found solace and refreshment in nature, and 
 in communing with her. Addison, as we know, delighted in a 
 garden, in its flowers, its seclusion, and its singing birds, to which 
 last we have seen him cheerfully sacrificing his fruit in exchange 
 for their songs. Minds such as his needed not to be " brought 
 into touch " with nature, for they already walked hand-in-hand 
 with her. But others, like Pope and Gay, whose office it was to 
 reflect in their writings as in a mirror, the manners of society, to 
 satirize and show up its social vices, and its political venality, must 
 sometimes have wearied of the task. For though it is true that 
 as Pope himself says, " the proper study of mankind is man," 
 society was then largely compounded of men and women who 
 lived chiefly in the limelight, and were perpetually posing ; who, 
 metaphorically speaking, were always in full dress. The reality 
 of pastoral life was unknown to them. Their rustic maidens were 
 Arcadian shepherdesses, wearing sacques of flowered brocade, 
 carrying crooks bedecked with ribbons ; and Corin, as well as 
 Corinna, was utterly unreal : he was an impossible swain in an 
 impossible country ! The age of Pope and Gay was the age of 
 petticoats " Stiff with hoops, and armed with ribs of whale " 
 of snuff boxes, and pomander, of long stiff-skirted gold-laced satin 
 or velvet coats, of ruffles, swords, and full-bottomed wigs. A 
 
 176 
 
tJHISWIGK HOUSE 
 
 generation later, Horace Walpole, writing to the Earl of Hertford, 
 could tell him of " the entertaining petition of the peri wig- makers 
 to the King, complaining that men will insist on wearing their own 
 hair," and he sagely remarks that a carpenter might just as ; 
 reasonably complain that " since the peace their trade decays 
 because there is no demand for wooden legs." 
 
 Pope, however, appears in his portraits in a full-bottomed wig, 
 except in one in which he wears a night-cap, the alternative to it. 
 The wig must have looked ridiculous on his small person. " He 
 was the only wit of the day," writes Thackeray, " who was not 
 fat. . . . Swift was fat ; Addison was fat : Steele was fat. Gay 
 and Thomson were ^preposterously fat. All that fuddling, and 
 punch-drinking, that club and coffee-house boozing, shortened 
 the lives and enlarged the waistcoats of the men of that age." 
 To me it is very pleasant to think of these two men dropping 
 for the nonce, the manner of St. James's, and in the retirement of 
 that delightful garden, becoming entirely natural. Gay, " a little 
 round French Abbe of a man, sleek, soft-handed and soft-hearted," 
 ..." little Mr. Pope, the decrepid papist." Listen to them, 
 laugh at them, and with them, as they strip the branches, for the 
 two have become boys again. And see ! they are caught in the 
 very act ! they hear footsteps and look up who is that coming 
 quickly round the corner, arm in arm with the Dean of St. Patrick's, 
 newly come to town ? It is Dr. Arbuthnot, author of " John 
 Bull " and " Martinus Scriblerus." He was Queen Anne's physician 
 until her death hearing which a modern wit remarked " Then 
 if Queen Anne is really dead, it was Dr. Arbuthnot who killed her ! ' 
 Well, well ! They have all gone. Swift survived Pope (if his 
 mental state in his latter days can be called living) only about 
 a twelvemonth, and twelve years earlier Pope himself had written 
 Gay's epitaph for the monument in Westminster Abbey, raised 
 to his memory by his good friends the Duke and Duchess of Queens- 
 berry every word of it was inspired by genuine feeling ; and 
 it is a fine tribute. It begins : 
 
 " Of manners gentle, of affections mild ; 
 In wit a man ; simplicity a child." 
 
 The last three words scarcely fit the facts of the case. " Simplicity," 
 depend upon it, never raided an orchard ; he who did so was the 
 sophisticated grown-up schoolboy, whose "long experience," to 
 
 177 12 
 
GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 
 
 quote from himself, " made him sage," who " was so kind, so gentle, 
 so jocular, so delightfully brisk at times, so dismally woebegone at 
 others, such a natural good creature, that the giants loved him. 
 The great Swift was gentle and sportive with him, as the enormous 
 Brobdingnag maids were with little Gulliver. He could frisk and 
 fondle round Pope, and sport, and bark, and caper, without offend- 
 ing the most thin-skinned of poets and men." Of hirn we may 
 remark that Gay by name, he was also gay by nature, and, writing 
 his own mocking epitaph, he could say the lines are inscribed 
 with Pope's at Westminster : 
 
 " Life is a jest and all things show it, 
 I thought so once, but now I know it." 
 
 Chiswick House in those days was Liberty Hall. Pope seems 
 to have come and gone as he pleased, and when there, to have 
 made himself thoroughly at home, ordering his meals at any time 
 he liked to have them. In a letter dated March 30th, 1744, only 
 two months before his death he mentions his intention to go 
 over to Chiswick for the day, " to dine by myself before their hour, 
 and to return in the evening " because he dared not " lie abroad." 
 
 And what of Burlington himself ? Of the generous friend to 
 belles lettres, the kind host, the benefactor of musicians and artists, 
 so justly known as the " Architect Earl " ? His munificence and 
 public spirit seem to have impoverished him. His father, dying 
 in 1702, had left him rich, yet twenty years before his own death 
 he owed 200,000 ! That sum, even allowing a wide margin for 
 his patronage of great men and unstinted private hospitality, 
 and a still wider one for heavy expenditure on his building schemes 
 and purchases of works of art, seems large ; unless indeed he was 
 infected with that passion for high play that was one of the fashion- 
 able vices of the reigns of the four Georges. 
 
 It is, therefore, not a matter for surprise that he was in the 
 habit of making a charge to all those who desired to visit his 
 collections who were admitted by ticket only. When he died 
 in 1753, the Chiswick estate fell to his daughter and heiress, who 
 had married the fourth Duke of Devonshire. This marriage carried 
 the unique house and its contents, and its lovely grounds, definitely 
 and finally, into the political camp of the Whigs. The fifth Duke, 
 grandson of Lord Burlington, married Georgiana, daughter of 
 
 178 
 
GHISWIGK HOUSE 
 
 Lord Spencer, known as " the beautiful Duchess " though, ac- 
 cording to Horace Walpole, she had more charm than beauty. 
 He says of her, " She effaces all without being a beauty ; but her 
 youthful figure, flowing good nature, sense and lively modesty, 
 and modest familiarity, make her . a phenomenon." Elizabeth, 
 Lady Holland, in her journal, edited by the present Lord Ilchester, 
 makes an unflattering reference to the celebrated Duchess when 
 her physical attractions were declining. " Scarcely has she a 
 vestige of those charms that once attracted all hearts. Her figure 
 is corpulent, her complexion coarse : one eye gone, and her neck 
 immense. How frail is the tenure of beauty." After this it is 
 curious to read in the diary, and only a few pages farther on : 
 " A long acquaintance, with me, is a passport to affection." Lady 
 Holland, herself a beauty in her youth when she broke the bonds 
 of an unhappy first marriage for the sake of Lord Holland, ought, 
 even in her private journal, to have written more tenderly of one 
 who had visited her at Holland House, when other ladies of position 
 held aloof. The Duchess was an acknowledged leader of society, 
 and her power was sufficient to achieve the abolition of the hideous 
 fashion of the hoop and the adoption of the graceful costume 
 which we admire so much in the pictures of Reynolds and Gains- 
 borough. Gainsborough, whose brush was " light as the sweep 
 of a cloud, as swift as the flash of a sunbeam," to quote Ruskin's 
 description of his touch, painted her two or three times. He 
 quitted Bath for London in 1774, when Georgiana, a girl of seven- 
 teen, and newly-married, was in the fresh, ripe glory of her beauty. 
 In his portraits of her he could not satisfy himself. ' Her Grace 
 is too hard for me ! " he exclaimed when engaged upon one of 
 these ; and seizing his brush he painted out the mouth, though 
 others had pronounced it lovely. Everybody knows the picture 
 of the Duchess of Devonshire with her child on her knee the 
 little one's hands raised in imitation of its mother. For grace 
 of movement and spontaneity, it is unsurpassed by any of his 
 works. 
 
 The Duchess was remarkable for her strong Whig proclivities, 
 and for the active part she took in Whig propaganda. Charles 
 James Fox, and Sheridan, were among her intimate friends, and 
 she was a conspicuous ornament in the Holland House political 
 circle a circle which seems to have included no other woman 
 
 179 12* 
 
GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 
 
 of any distinction. She retained the confidence of the Whig 
 leaders to the end of her life, and while the Duke haunted 
 " Brooks's," the Duchess entertained at Devonshire House and 
 Chiswick House, in every way seeking to advance the interests of 
 her party. In this connection I may repeat a story told of the 
 manner in which, aided by others, she manoeuvred to secure the 
 election of Sheridan into " Brooks's," when he entered the House 
 of Commons in 1789. Membership of that famous Whig club 
 was a passport to the great Whig houses, also to Carlton House, 
 where the Prince of Wales estranged from his father held inde- 
 pendent court. At the ballot, one black ball was sufficient to 
 exclude, and George Selwyn, the wit, and the Earl of Bessborough, 
 were determined to keep out Sheridan. In order to upset their 
 plans it was necessary to secure their absence on the day of elec- 
 tion. Therefore urgent messages, inventing the alarming illness of 
 a relative, were sent to each of the two members who had intended 
 to keep out the brilliant dramatist, and orator. The ruse succeeded, 
 for each trusted to the other being present to black-ball and 
 Sheridan was elected. 
 
 When Fox was seeking the suffrages of the electors of West- 
 minster Georgiana personally canvassed the slums, and purchased 
 a vote from a burly butcher, with a kiss. 
 
 Her Grace was an inveterate card-player, and lost heavily, 
 but the Duke paid her debts two years before her death. Of him 
 it may be said that his fame was somewhat overshadowed by that 
 of his brilliant wife, of whom it is hinted he had soon grown tired : 
 he does not seem to have been a man of lively parts, and he was 
 chiefly remarkable as being the husband, in succession, of two 
 charming and distinguished women, his second Duchess, the Lady 
 Elizabeth Foster, a great friend of Georgiana, who had declined 
 the hand of Gibbon, possessing mental gifts above the average. 
 
 It was owing, I believe, to Georgiana, that the wings to 
 Chiswick House, designed by the architect Wyatt, afterwards 
 President of the Royal Academy, were added in 1788, at a risk 
 of destroying the symmetry of the Palladian house, that the 
 result has amply justified. But although such an ardent Whig, 
 the beautiful Duchess was patriotic enough to lament the death 
 of Pitt, and to entertain Dr. Johnson hardened old Tory as he 
 was at Chatsworth ; there is no record to my knowledge of his 
 
 180 
 
CHISWICK HOUSE 
 
 having visited Chiswick. Nor do I know that Sir Joshua Reynolds 
 was ever at the Villa, but Gainsborough was probably frequently 
 there, as he had a cottage at Richmond, and must have loved the 
 neighbourhood, since, by his own desire, he lies buried in Kew 
 Churchyard. 
 
 David Garrick, and his beautiful wife (described by Horace 
 Walpole as " the finest and most admired dancer in the world," 
 who lived to within two years of a century), spent their honey- 
 moon or part of it at Chiswick House ; but this was before 
 the death of the Earl of Burlington, when Georgiana was a child 
 of two years old. So also must have been the visits of Thomas 
 Gray, the poet, if he came there with Horace Walpole before the 
 two friends became estranged. But Horace Walpole, a man still 
 young when the Earl of Burlington died, and himself resident at 
 Strawberry Hill from about 1750, must have known the Villa under 
 several masters, for he died in 1797, at the ripe age of eighty- 
 nine years, before the comparatively early death of Georgiana. 
 
 We now come to the sixth Duke of Devonshire, who, from the 
 standpoint of a writer on gardens, is a personage of vastly greater 
 interest than his father, because, being a keen horticulturist, he 
 did much to improve and develop the Chiswick estate. Some 
 fifty years had now elapsed since the death of Kent ; years that 
 at their close, amply proved the prescience of the great garden- 
 designer, and justified his faith in the ultimate development 
 of his plans, though he himself could not have hoped to see them 
 consummated. 
 
 We talk glibly enough of " Time the Destroyer," forgetting that 
 he is equally " Time the Constructor," without whose patient aid 
 nothing would reach maturity. 
 
 Time, then, had been the nurseryman upon whom Kent had 
 mainly relied, trusting also not a little to the unremitting care 
 and wise direction, of those who would come after him ; nor did 
 he trust in vain, else had the landscape on which he had traced out 
 so fair a pattern, become again an ugly, unproductive waste, with 
 nothing, maybe, but a few cabbage stalks, or a stunted thornbush, 
 to show that it had been, before his day, a country meadow, or 
 a smiling garden. 
 
 At its best the deserted garden soon becomes but a tangled 
 wilderness ; a wilderness without the mysterious charm of the 
 
 181 
 
GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 
 
 virgin forest in which, as yet, the footsteps of man have never 
 laid a trail, nor his axe hewed its way. It may be picturesque 
 it often is ; but with landmarks lost, flower-beds overrun and choked 
 by weeds, lawns, once trim, now rank and coarse, walks grass- 
 grown, hedges undipped, terrace-steps and balustrades (where 
 there is stone -work), moss-grown and mouldering, fountains 
 quiescent, pools half stagnant its picturesqueness is melancholy. 
 There is in such a garden an ever-present sense of loss and absence, 
 almost of death ; for too plainly has the tending hand been with- 
 drawn, the guiding mind removed. Like Lord Bacon, " I am 
 speaking now of gardens that are Prince-like " ; that even in 
 desolation may retain some beauty but, for the untidy small 
 garden, there is nothing good to be said ! Bacon, in that notion 
 of his of a " Prince-like garden," sets much store upon " Decent 
 Order" ; and although he advises that, in a large acreage, a portion 
 should be " framed as much as may be to a Natural Wildernesse," 
 this wilderness is to be deliberately planned, and not due to 
 neglect. " Order is Heaven's first law," and it is a sine qua 
 non in an enclosed garden, differentiating it from the field, and 
 the common land, which lie beyond its pale. But, because the 
 beauty of the " Greene Grasse kept finely shorne " is greatly 
 enhanced by contrast, wherever there are wide lawns to 
 be mown, as at Chiswick, Fulham, Lambeth and Sion, there 
 should be wild bits left of set purpose to be a playground, as 
 it were, for Nature, wherein she may riot and do just what 
 she likes. 
 
 " Who loves a garden, loves a greenhouse too," says Cowper. 
 It is to the sixth Duke of Devonshire the gardens owe the very 
 beautiful conservatory which is shown in the illustration. It is 
 remarkable for its great length, and for having been the first 
 important work undertaken by Joseph, afterwards Sir Joseph, 
 Paxton, whose talent the Duke discovered when Paxton was a 
 mere boy in his employment. It is unnecessary to remind anyone 
 that Paxton, born in 1801 of quite humble parentage, rose from 
 the modest position of an under-gardener in the Arboretum at 
 Chiswick, to be superintendent of the Duke's gardens at Chats- 
 worth, and manager of his Derbyshire estates ; and that he designed 
 the palace of crystal in which was held the first great international 
 exhibition. 
 
 182 
 
CHISWICK HOUSE: The Conservatory 
 
 Page 182 
 
CHISWIGK HOUSE 
 
 A feature of the conservatory is the bank, or thicket, of magnifi- 
 cent camellia shrubs, or rather trees, for they rise from the ground 
 to the roof. They extend the entire length of the glass-house, 
 which is three hundred feet ; the glossy beauty of their smooth 
 dark leaves would render them attractive at any season ; even when 
 out of flower, but in the earlier months of the year, when, from 
 base to summit, they are laden with blossoms rose, scarlet and 
 white the effect of the long perspective of the conservatory, 
 studied from either extremity, is really wonderful. The camellia 
 is an aristocratic flower, almost as much so, although in shape and 
 manner of growth it differs widely from it, as the stately white 
 Nile Lily, of which the conservatory at Chiswick shows fine speci- 
 mens. There are fashions in floriculture as in everything else, 
 and except in old-fashioned greenhouses like this, one rarely 
 meets now with the exquisite waxen flowers that Japan and China 
 sent to us. Yet they are no more stiff than the sunflower or the 
 dahlia, or the hollyhock, which we admire so much, and they are 
 quite as decorative, and more lasting. Why, then, are they 
 banished ? Is it because some thirty years ago a craze set in for 
 cottage flowers, old English flowers, to the exclusion of foreign 
 ones ? Up to a certain point the preference was explained, since 
 no one can deny the peculiar attractiveness and sweetness of such 
 but it ran to absurd extremes. The glorious scarlet geranium, 
 for instance, was voted vulgar, although the vulgarity only lay 
 in the bad taste which could plant it in a " ribbon " border, or 
 contrast it with the peculiarly inharmonious yellow of the cal- 
 ceolaria ; consequently many gardens have been denied altogether 
 the cheerful blaze of " Tom Thumb " and his brethren ; and those 
 who in the last generation pretended to special culture, and arrayed 
 themselves in sad-coloured serges, and art muslins of secondary 
 and tertiary tint although they highly approved the daffodil, 
 did not altogether despise the violet, nor quite taboo the rose- 
 mostly shunned flowers of indefinite form, and of positive colour, 
 and sat up all night worshipping lilies ! Truly the last generation 
 saw the apotheosis of the lily, the columbine, and the Canterbury 
 bell, and all other flowers of undefined shape and pale complexion. 
 
 In March, when the bright petals of the camellia commence to 
 drop, making a splash of red on the ground below the shrubs, the 
 conservatory at Chiswick begins to think of putting on its summer 
 
 183 
 
GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 
 
 robe, for at midsummer it wears a new, and very lovely aspect. 
 The gardener has then rilled the space to the left with rows of 
 choice greenhouse plants, in bloom. All down the long vista, and 
 pendant from the glass roof, the cup-like blossoms of fuchsias 
 that have climbed all over it inside, soften the glare from the 
 hot sun which filters through them, making a cool green shade 
 that is very restful and agreeable to the eye. The fuchsia flowers 
 are purple and red, red and white, and white and purple ; and 
 they hang like myriads of silent fairy bells. " Heard melodies 
 are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter," sings Keats maybe 
 these bells do actually ring, or chime the hour, for ears that, 
 unlike ours, are not too dull to hear them ! 
 
 One of the Misses Berry, those neighbours of Horace Walpole 
 who were his great friends, writing in her journal under date of 
 June 1st, 1813, says: "Drove with the Duke of Devonshire 
 in his curricle to Chiswick, where he showed me all the alterations 
 that he was about to make, in adding the garden of Lady Mary 
 Coke's house to his own. The house is down, and in the garden 
 he has constructed a magnificent hot- house, with a conservatory 
 for flowers, the middle under a cupola ; altogether it is three 
 hundred feet long. The communication between the two gardens 
 is through the old greenhouse, of which they have made a double 
 arcade, making the prettiest effect imaginable." It was this Duke 
 who also brought to Chiswick the beautiful gates, rumour of 
 which sent us forth as children on a futile voyage of discovery. 
 But besides his horticultural tastes, the sixth Duke of Devonshire 
 had a great interest in wild animals, and a love of Natural History. 
 He actually had a menagerie, of which his sister Harriet, Countess 
 of Granville, gives an amusing account. Among the animals 
 were " a few kangaroos who, if affronted, will rip up anyone as 
 soon as look at him ; elks, emus, and other pretty sportive death- 
 dealers playing about." " The lawn," we are told, was " beautifully 
 variegated by an Indian Bull and his spouse, and goats of all colours 
 and dimensions." 
 
 Sir Walter Scott writes in his Diary on May 17th, 1828 : "I 
 drove down to Chiswick, where I had never been before. A 
 numerous and gay party were assembled to walk and enjoy the 
 beauty of that Palladian House. The place and highly ornamental 
 garden belonging to it, resembles a picture by Watteau. There 
 
 184 
 
CHISWICK HOUSE 
 
 is some affectation in the picture, but in the ensemble the original 
 looked very well. The Duke of Devonshire received me with the 
 best possible manners. The scene was dignified by the presence 
 of an immense elephant, who, under the charge of a groom, 
 wandered up and down, giving an air of Asiatic pageantry to the 
 entertainment. I was never more sensible," continues the author 
 of " Waverley," " of the dignity which largeness of size, and 
 freedom of movement give to this otherwise very ugly animal." 
 This elephant occupied a paddock near the house, and his in- 
 telligence, docility and affection were remarkable. 
 
 Chiswick House, where in health Charles James Fox was a 
 frequent visitor, was the scene of his end. In August, 1806, not six 
 months after the death of his friend Georgiana, the great Whig 
 statesman and orator, came there to die. He was unable to stand 
 the fatigue of the journey to his own home of St. Anne's Hill, 
 and it was hoped that the change to the country for Chiswick 
 was in the country a hundred and twelve years ago would do some- 
 thing towards restoring him to health, and his nephew, Lord 
 Holland, tells us that for a while the beauty of the gardens outside, 
 and of the works of art within, did indeed revive and benefit him ; 
 but only for a time ; and a fortnight later, in September, 1806, 
 he passed away, with the words : ' I die happy," on his lips. 
 
 Twenty-one years after the death of Fox, George Canning came 
 to Chiswick, also to die. He had caught cold at the Duke of York's 
 funeral, and his health had already begun to give way, when, on 
 the death of Lord Liverpool, he was called upon to form a ministry. 
 The difficulty he found in doing so, the anxiety and strain he 
 had undergone, proved too much for him. He came to Chiswick 
 House to recuperate, but three weeks later, on the 8th of August, 
 1827, he died. It is said, but of the truth of the statement I 
 am doubtful, that he passed away in the same room in which 
 Fox had breathed his last. 
 
 With regard to Fox and the affection with which he was regarded 
 by his associates, Sir George Trevelyan tells us that it was said 
 in 1794 : " There are only forty of them, and any of them would 
 be hanged for Fox." 
 
 Sir Robert Adair, British Minister at Vienna and Constantinople, 
 who died in 1825, at the age of ninety-two, was actually the last 
 survivor of Fox's friends. Many years after the death of Fox, 
 
 185 
 
GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 
 
 he was walking through Chiswick House with the poet Rogers, 
 who relates the anecdote, describing how they wandered up and 
 down stairs, and into various apartments. 
 
 The diplomatist asked the poet in which room Fox had died. 
 ' In this very room," was the answer whereupon Adair burst 
 into tears, "with a vehemence of grief," says Rogers, " I hardly 
 ever saw exhibited by a man." 
 
 Chiswick House is thus full of memories of great men. In 
 addition to those whom Lord Burlington collected around him, 
 it is highly probable that all the wits and politicians who fre- 
 quented Holland House and made it famous, at times wandered 
 down to the Villa, received its hospitality and enjoyed its lovely 
 gardens for ties both social and political, united the houses of 
 Cavendish and Fox. In later times all the distinguished people 
 in art, literature and politics must have visited Chiswick, for 
 the sixth Duke of Devonshire entertained lavishly. He took 
 but little part in politics, but he went on a special embassy to 
 Moscow in 1826, on the occasion of the Czar Nicholas's Coronation, 
 when he is said to have spent 50,000. He received the Allied 
 sovereigns when they visited London in 1814, when the Czar 
 Alexander, the King of Prussia, and Marshal Bliicher, were of the 
 company ; and in 1844 he entertained the Czar Nicholas, and the 
 King of Saxony, at Chiswick, with great magnificence. Whether 
 at this time of his life, when nearly seventy years of age, he retained 
 his passion for Natural History, and still permitted animals to 
 wander about his grounds, I do not know, but on the occasion of 
 Czar Nicholas's visit, according to Mr. Lloyd Sanders in his in- 
 teresting " Old Kew, Chiswick and Kensington," four giraffes 
 perhaps hired for the event were conspicuously present in the 
 gardens. The statement when I read it, recalled a fact connected 
 with my childhood, which I have never entirely forgotten. When 
 I was walking out with my mother, or nurse, we often remarked 
 with curiosity, a large and somewhat dilapidated wooden building, 
 standing in a bit of waste ground, not a quarter of a mile from 
 the place where I now know Chiswick House to be ; for this was 
 long before the time when we made our pilgrimage to find the 
 golden gates. Painted on the wall in large letters, more than half 
 effaced by time and weather, were scrawled the mysterious words 
 
 Four Giraffes." When I first read of the giraffes at Chiswick 
 
 186 
 
GHISWIGK HOUSE 
 
 House, it was impossible not to connect one circumstance with 
 the other, and to wonder whether the wooden shed with the un- 
 explained legend on its walls, could possibly have been that 
 which, once upon a time, had sheltered the queer-looking animals 
 provided by the Duke of Devonshire for the Czar's entertainment. 
 I think it must have been so. 
 
 The sixth Duke left Chiswick House to his sister, the widowed 
 Countess of Granville, who spent the last four years of her life 
 there ; occupying herself with works of philanthropy. Lloyd 
 Sanders tells us, on the authority of her son, the late Mr. Leveson 
 Gower, that " she wished to sell the camellias in the hot-houses 
 in order to devote the proceeds to charity, but she had some 
 misgivings whether she was justified in doing so." No one raising 
 any objection, she wrote to a friend : ' Dear me, how rich my 
 poor will be ! " 
 
 Among interesting people who have visited Chiswick and planted 
 memorial trees in the grounds, Garibaldi, brought there in 1869 
 by the Duchess of Sutherland, was one of the most prominent. In 
 more recent years, the late King Edward, when Prince of Wales, 
 had the place for a time ; and the present King and his brothers 
 spent some of their childish years there. At the present day the 
 spacious and beautiful gardens that I have so inadequately de- 
 scribed, and the history of which I have essayed to trace, afford 
 solace and refreshment to the mentally afflicted. The objects 
 of the tenderest care and skill, their heavy lot is here alleviated, 
 and in these lovely and peaceful surroundings they have every 
 possible chance of ultimate recovery. 
 
 187 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 WALPOLE HOUSE 
 
 THE MALL, CHISWICK 
 
 WHEN the present century was in its teens and on a sun- 
 shiny morning in June, there drove up to the great 
 iron gate of Miss Pinkerton's Academy for young 
 ladies, on Chiswick Mall, a large family coach, with two fat horses 
 in blazing harness, driven by a fat coachman in a three-cornered 
 hat and wig, at the rate of four miles an hour. A black servant 
 who reposed on the box beside the fat coachman, uncurled his 
 bandy legs as soon as the equipage drew up opposite Miss Pinker- 
 ton's shining brass plate, and as he pulled the bell at least a score 
 of young heads were seen peering out of the narrow windows of 
 the stately old brick house. Nay, the acute observer might have 
 recognized the little red nose of good-natured Miss Jemima Pinker- 
 ton herself, rising over the geranium pots in the window of that 
 lady's own drawing-room." 
 
 At the moment when William Makepeace Thackeray wrote 
 these words in the well-known opening to " Vanity Fair," there 
 is no doubt that he had in his mind's eye Walpole House the 
 beautiful old Restoration House on Chiswick Mall at which, once 
 upon a time, he had been at school. A certain Doctor Turner 
 was the pedagogue into whose care the little fatherless boy from 
 India had been entrusted. There is no reason to think that he 
 was not kindly treated though he seems to have been very unhappy 
 there and to have attempted to run away, but got no farther 
 than Young's Corner. A pretty, gentle, timid child who was 
 
 188 
 
WALPOLE HOUSE 
 
 short-sighted, and did not care for games he was probably merely 
 homesick, and pining for the mother whom he had left behind 
 in India, and who soon married again, wedding one who made an 
 excellent stepfather to her son. 
 
 So far as I know no tradition connects Walpole House with 
 a young ladies' seminary but on the authority of Lysons, writing 
 about the time Thackeray was born there had been for some years 
 a boarding-school for girls at " the College House," which was 
 also on the Mall, but a little farther west, and of which the Principal 
 was a certain Mrs. Solicux. 
 
 College House of which no vestige now remains had had 
 an interesting history. In the reign of Elizabeth, the old 
 Prebendal Manor House which stood at the east of Chiswick 
 Church, and the corner of Chiswick Lane, was partially pulled 
 down, and the materials used for building a sanatorium " a 
 school for Her Majesty's scholars at Cheswycke in times of in- 
 fection." Up to 1733, the Master, Usher, and forty scholars of 
 Westminster, regularly retired thither during the frequent and 
 terrible visitations of the plague, so that for over 160 years there 
 was a very close connection between the great Abbey school 
 and its river-side offspring, in the Prebendal Manor of Chiswick. 
 The name " Chis wicks " applied, still I believe, to the " studies " 
 used by the Foundation boys (at the present day eighty in number) 
 sufficiently attest this fact. 
 
 Lloyd Sanders, who makes reference to the College House 
 in his account of " Chiswick," thinks that the actual existence 
 of a boarding-school for girls on the Mall, so very near 
 to it, probably suggested to Thackeray Miss Pinkerton's famous 
 " Academy for Young Ladies," only that he located it in 
 Walpole House instead of the College House. I agree, but 
 go farther. Several generations of reverend Headmasters in 
 mortar-board and college gown, some thin and ascetic, others 
 portly and rubicund, have walked that pleasant road by the 
 Eyot, or island from end to end. They were, all alike, the 
 terror of small boys : each in turn staunchly upholding at least 
 three of the cardinal virtues for justice and prudence demanded 
 of them that they should not spare the rod and spoil the child, 
 and in this respect they fulfilled their duty but they practised 
 fortitude by proxy on their pupils with the birch. 
 
 189 
 
GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 
 
 The awful Dr. Busby, who for fifty-five years, ruled Westminster 
 School, left behind him an unenviable reputation for severity ; 
 and many are the tales of his excessive addiction to the birch. 
 
 I think it must have been of this famous pedagogue that the 
 story was told that when on one occasion a dozen boys appeared 
 before him, he at once concluded that they were misdemeanants 
 sent up to him for correction, and had already birched half of 
 them, before the remainder could explain that they were the 
 new confirmation class ! 
 
 The doctor numbered among his pupils Dryden, Locke, Prior 
 and Atterbury, Bishop of Rochester and was able to boast that 
 at one time, sixteen of the bishops who then occupied the bench, 
 had been punished by his " little rod." 
 
 It is probable that these and similar stories haunting the College 
 House, and the dwelling still nearer to Walpole House in which the 
 School staff resided when at Chiswick and reaching the ears 
 of the boy Thackeray, impressed his childish imagination ; and 
 so much so, that, in after years the plot of his immortal novel- 
 demanding the introduction of a schoolmistress rather than a 
 schoolmaster he created Miss Pinkerton, ' that austere and 
 god-like woman " " that majestic woman," the friend of the great 
 lexicographer ; the correspondent of Mrs. Chapone of whom, never- 
 theless, Becky Sharp so completely got the better. 
 
 Among the earliest tenants of Walpole House which must 
 have gone by another name in her time was one of the three 
 notorious women of whom Macaulay in his history says, that 
 " their charms were the boast, and their vices the disgrace of 
 three nations." No longer young in 1685, when Charles II. died, 
 *' Barbara, Duchess of Cleveland " better known as Lady Castle- 
 maine " still retained some traces of that superb and voluptuous 
 loveliness, which, twenty years before, overcame the hearts of 
 men." In her old age she retired to Chiswick then a pretty 
 waterside village chiefly inhabited by fisher folk, and watermen. 
 She died in 1709 and was buried in Chiswick Church, in company 
 far too good for so graceless a dame. -She had been created 
 Duchess of Cleveland in 1670, with limitations to her son Charles 
 Fitzroy, and his heirs male and his name appears among the 
 inhabitants of Chiswick in 1723 so that presumably he retained 
 Walpole House during his lifetime as a residence. 
 
 190 
 
WALPOLE HOUSE 
 
 The tower of Chiswick Church, the only part that has not under- 
 gone material changes in restoration, has kept watch and ward 
 over the hamlets of Chiswick and Sutton, for 500 years. It forms 
 a landmark towards Kew. It has witnessed many changes, for 
 most of the older houses which must have given great distinction 
 to the neighbourhood in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, 
 have one by one disappeared. Corney House, the old home of 
 the Russell family, with the beautiful gardens by the river-side 
 in which Queen Elizabeth walked was pulled down in 1832, 
 and on part of the site Messrs. Thorny croft established their 
 boat-building works, where the first launches made of steel were 
 constructed, and here, in 1876, the first torpedo boat for the British 
 navy, named " The Lightning," was built. 
 
 College House, before mentioned, has also passed away ; so, 
 too, has Sutton Court, formerly the Manor House of " The Dean's " 
 or Manor of Sutton where at one time dwelt the Viscount and 
 Viscountess Fauconberg. The Viscountess was the third daughter 
 of the Protector Cromwell. After her father's death she favoured 
 the Restoration, which her husband certainly helped to bring about. 
 
 Left a widow, she lived on at Chiswick for many years, dying 
 a benefactress to the poor of the hamlet. 
 
 These and other memorials of a vanished age have all, with one 
 exception passed away, and left no trace, and now the oldest 
 houses remaining in Chiswick Mall, are mostly, Queen Anne or 
 Georgian. 
 
 The exception is Walpole House, attractively situated on the 
 water-side, with the willowy island separating it from the 
 broad course of the stream. It is a beautiful example of 
 the early Wren period. Its windows command extensive views 
 towards Kew on the one hand, and Fulham on the other. There 
 is no garden in front, but there is a flagged space between the 
 front door and the wrought-iron entrance gate and in this respect 
 the place does not correspond with Thackeray's own drawing 
 of Miss Pinkerton's Academy, the variations being probably made 
 intentionally. On the river side of the Mall, the row of dainty little 
 shut-in gardens each one belonging to the house it faces are 
 a quaint and pretty feature of the locality. 
 
 Beyond these the long narrow Eyot green with willows in 
 the summer, yellow with kingcups in the spring, is divided from 
 
 191 
 
GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 
 
 the bank to which it is parallel, by a narrow strip of water, the 
 main stream running on its farther side. The banks are muddy 
 when the water is low ; but at exceptionally high tides coinciding 
 with a season of rain and storm, the basement kitchens of Walpole 
 House are sometimes flooded. They are large, rambling, and 
 picturesque kitchens. Not far from the garden-door is a curious 
 fixture. It is a spacious barred cage the bars far apart suggestive 
 of an exaggerated hen-coop and traditionally said to have been 
 used as a place of detention for refractory pupils in the days when 
 Walpole House was a boys' school. The story is not improbable, 
 since apparently there is no other purpose to which such a cage 
 could have been put, and since children were often treated with 
 much sternness a hundred years ago. If indeed so used in 
 Dr. Turner's time, the fear of incarceration on a bread-and- 
 water diet, may have inspired young Thackeray's attempt to run 
 away. 
 
 The restoration and improvements in the place made chiefly 
 by the late Sir Herbert and Lady Tree, who resided there for 
 many years have been carefully carried out, and happily for 
 Chiswick, which should be proud of the old mansion are con- 
 gruous, and in correct taste. 
 
 It is by no means clear how Walpole House came by its name. 
 Probably some member of the Walpole family may have possessed 
 it for a time. One of these, the Hon. Thomas Walpole, son of 
 Horatio, Lord Walpole, lies buried in Chiswick Church, and Orford 
 House, and Strawberry House, the latter next door to Walpole 
 House, are significant of some connection with the master of 
 Strawberry Hill. The house wherein the frail Barbara ended 
 her wasted days, has had a chequered history, and one a little 
 difficult to trace. I think it must have been subsequent to Dr. 
 Turner's retirement from school- mastering, that it became for a 
 time a boarding-house at which Daniel O'Connell, the Irish " libera- 
 tor," stayed. Forty-eight years ago, and possibly during some 
 years later, it was again a boys' school, kept by a Mr. John Watson 
 Allen. But public day schools began to come into fashion, and 
 with these he probably found it difficult to compete. But before 
 he gave up the attempt to do so he did yeoman's service to all 
 lovers of the picturesque, for I understand it was he who suggested 
 to Sir John Thorny croft the purchase of the place with its 
 
 192 
 
WALPOLE HOUSE 
 
 charming garden, in order to rescue it from the fate which 
 threatens all old houses in unfashionable districts. 
 
 For which of us does not recall some such mansion in one of 
 the outlying districts around the metropolis ? A house that has 
 obviously seen better days, and is still striving to hold up its head 
 above its plebeian, or upstart neighbours. We have all passed 
 such in the motor- 'bus or the tram ; and, through the bars of its 
 wrought-iron gates, have had glimpses of green-sward and spread- 
 ing cedars. The big board set up above the high brick walls of 
 the garden, announces that " this desirable residence, standing 
 in its own ground with coach house, and stabling," and so forth, 
 " is for sale." Fifty or sixty years ago maybe, it was a fine country 
 house ; but the town, and the shabby side of it had crept up, 
 elbowed it, and finally passed it by, leaving it derelict. For some 
 time it struggled bravely against its impending fate, becoming a. 
 hospital, or industrial school ; or else an institution for the blind r 
 the halt, and the lame ; or it was turned to account as local muni- 
 cipal offices but factory or board-school hemming it in, its situation 
 became too noisy, so that ere long a firm of housebreakers wa& 
 called in to pull it down. And though reconstruction followed! 
 disintegration, it was that of the speculative builder, who put up 
 a tall, ugly, tenement building for factory hands, on its site. And 
 when, in a year or two, we passed that way again the cedars had 
 disappeared, the oaks and the elms were felled, and a double row 
 of workmen's cottages stood where once was a fair avenue ! Alas ! 
 for the house that had once been a home whence may have 
 radiated gracious influences and generous impulses, whose walls 
 were storied, could we but have read them ; alas ! for the tide of 
 fashion set the other way and left it stranded ! 
 
 And the end of Walpole House would have been much the same, 
 had it not been for the beneficent intervention of Sir John Thorny- 
 croft. 
 
 Just as Lieutenant-Colonel Shipway, by his spirited action 
 saved Hogarth's country house from demolition, by purchasing 
 it and presenting it to the Middlesex Urban District Council, so 
 Sir John Thornycroft at an opportune moment, bought Walpole 
 House lest it should be turned to objectionable uses. 
 
 He did so none too soon, for though the Mall lies as it were, in 
 a sort of backwater, away from the traffic on the high road to 
 
 193 13 
 
GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 
 
 Richmond, and (protected on one side by the river) is so out of 
 the way that no trams or 'buses are likely to disturb its picturesque 
 seclusion it is a fact that no sooner was it known that Sir John 
 had bought it, than someone in Hammersmith came to him and 
 sought to purchase it from him, in order to turn it into a steam 
 laundry ! 
 
 No member of the Thornycroft family a family distinguished 
 both in art and engineering science, has resided at Walpole House 
 but one has made great use of the garden. Beautiful in itself, 
 the garden gains in interest from the fact that the group in plaster 
 of the well-known Boadicea group at Westminster, the work of 
 the late Thomas Thornycroft, was housed for some time in a 
 corrugated iron building erected in the garden in a spot at some 
 distance from the house itself, which it is probable was formerly 
 the playing-ground of Dr. Turner's pupils. ' The Boadicea group," 
 to quote from a letter from Lady Thornycroft, " was cast at 
 Frome, but lived in plaster for some years in the building put 
 up for it by my husband, until he could get a site given whereon 
 it could be put up in bronze." She also tells me, in this con- 
 nection, that " A really interesting fact is that my husband, feeling 
 sure that motor vehicles would become general, started twenty-three 
 years ago, ' the Steam Wagon Company ' as a private enterprise ; 
 not in connection with the Church Wharf works where torpedo- 
 boats, and destroyers were built. The Steam Wagon Co. has now 
 become the motor works at Basingstoke, where the weekly turn-out 
 is over twenty sometimes thirty motor lorries a week, all of 
 which are built for the Government, besides motors for boats 
 for the Admiralty. ' Boadicea House,' as we called the building, 
 was the early workshop for the motor vehicles which took the 
 place of the steam-driven lorries first made." 
 
 ' Boadicea House " no longer exists the site that once it stood 
 on is now a stretch of green lawn bordered with flowers and 
 separated from the tennis lawn by a pergola of considerable length, 
 and of much beauty when the sun, shining through the trellised 
 roof, sends flickering lights and shadows across the walk below. 
 
 The erection of " Boadicea House " in the rear of the garden 
 must necessarily have destroyed its picturesqueness for a time, 
 and corrugated iron in a Restoration garden seems incongruous. 
 What would Evelyn have said to it ? 
 
 194 
 
WALPOLE HOUSE 
 
 
 
 But when the late Sir Herbert Tree took the place on a long 
 lease from Sir John Thorny croft, he proceeded to restore the 
 house and rehabilitate the garden, and this, he and Lady Tree 
 accomplished, in the judicious, tasteful, and correct fashion that 
 might have been expected of them. 
 
 When I was drawing there in the absence of its present owners, 
 the skill and industry of one old gardener kept the garden in order ; 
 his kindly wife acted as caretaker, and the pair had evidently 
 conceived a high regard for their former mistress, and often re- 
 marked that " Lady Tree planted this " or " Lady Tree did that," 
 from which I realized that she and her distinguished husband 
 must have cared much for the place, and cared for it intelligently. 
 The finest standard roses were of Lady Tree's planting. The 
 stone-flagged pathway which appears in my drawing, and the 
 paved sunken area, to which, from the garden, the descent is by 
 stone steps were probably features of the house in its earlier 
 days ; how grateful should we be that, having fallen into 
 disrepair, asphalt, or gravel, was not substituted for stone, as in 
 philistine hands, one or the other might easily have been. 
 
 Every ancient house perforce has its ghost story ; its respecta- 
 bility would be impugned without it : Walpole House is no excep- 
 tion. There is a tale that a weird old man clad in black velvet, 
 with iron-grey hair, and a sad, but not unpleasing countenance, 
 his face twisted and drawn down by paralysis, is occasionally 
 seen in the upper rooms, but who he was in life, and what the 
 purport of his visitations, nobody seems to know. The house 
 with its broad, well-lighted staircase, is indeed much too cheerful 
 to fittingly harbour ghosts. 
 
 Its present owner is a picture-lover, and many beautiful works 
 of art now adorn it ; they are principally by the late Sir Edward 
 Burne-Jones. To see these came one day someone who requested 
 permission to view the works of Mr. John Burns ! 
 
 ' The grand old gardener and his wife " to whom I have before 
 referred, far from smiling " at the claims of long descent " as 
 did their Tennysonian prototypes revelled in apocryphal stories, 
 testifying to the antiquity of the house. It is an absolute fact 
 that, first the one and then the other, informed me with delightful 
 naivete, that " Queen Elizabeth used to come here to see her 
 minister, Mr. Pitt," that even the story of King Alfred and the 
 
 195 13* 
 
GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 
 
 cakes had some connection though I forget what it was with 
 Walpole House, and that " Henry the Eighth came here to see one of 
 his ladies." I felt it my duty to defend even a royal Bluebeard 
 from so unwarranted an aspersion and I explained as gravely 
 as I could that " he was not that sort of person at all ! That 
 he had six wives ! ' The remark fell on deaf ears, and no doubt 
 as to the truth of the stories remained in the minds of my in- 
 formants, and probably they still confuse the husband of Anne 
 Boleyn with Charles II. and believe my Lady Castlemaine to 
 have been Henry's enchantress ! 
 
 On one warm September day, when I was drawing at Walpole 
 House, though I myself sat in the shade, I could no longer work, 
 for the sun had moved round and altered the effect in my subject. 
 Therefore I put down my brush and gave myself up as one is 
 prone to do in old gardens to the pleasure of day-dreaming. 
 
 And just as at Lambeth the year before, I had seen in fancy 
 the Maiden Queen and a brilliant retinue, issue from the great 
 Tudor gateway into the courtyard of the Archbishop's palace so 
 now I saw the " Majestic Miss Pinkerton " standing in the door- 
 way, and gesticulating for I could not hear a word she said 
 and realized that she was giving instructions to kind Miss Jemima. 
 
 The pair passed inside, and as I waited, wondering if they 
 would return two girls both fair to look upon, their arms round 
 each other's waists came out of the house and tripped across the 
 lawn to where I sat ; and at once I knew them for Becky Sharp, 
 and Amelia Sedley ! 
 
 Then a curious thing happened ; a thing that until then I 
 should have said never could have chanced save in a dream- 
 where chronology is of no account, and when the past and the 
 present the real and the unreal, get inextricably mixed a pretty, 
 rather delicate-looking little boy, ran out of the house and followed 
 the girls a boy with curly head, and short-sighted eyes, and in- 
 tuitively I recognized him as the home-sick pupil from overseas- 
 little Willie Thackeray. The two girls turned and spoke to him, 
 and it was then I remembered that here, these three first met, 
 and I knew that I was witnessing the reconstruction of their 
 meeting, and I knew also -that for nearly thirty years they would 
 not meet again, but that during all that long time the boy would 
 not cease to remember the maidens and the sunny garden ! 
 
 196 
 
WALPOLE HOUSE 
 
 The trio vanished indoors, but though I watched, nobody else 
 came forth never a Duchess of Cleveland, or a Daniel O'Connell, 
 not even a sculptor who had wrought a great work, and made 
 much use of the garden ; nor the eminent actors who later trod 
 that stage not one of these came into my day-dream. And this 
 was not unnatural when one comes to think of it, because romance 
 is more lasting than history and while fiction of the first class will 
 live for ever in the human mind, bald, unadorned facts are forgotten. 
 
 ' The Castlemaine " I am told, drew her last breath in a 
 panelled upper room to the front ; where two large windows face 
 the Eyot, and another, set in the angle of the house, commands 
 the whole length of the Mall, the lovely bend of the Thames towards 
 Kew, and glorious views of the sunset. This may be so, but I am 
 more interested to know that in a certain little attic in the roof, 
 with a tiny window buried in greenery, had slept the dependent, 
 Becky Sharp, one who was no better, but no worse, than the 
 Duchess herself ; and that the sweet face of the well-to-do pupil 
 from Russell Square, had looked out upon the garden from yonder 
 window to the left, on the first-floor back ; the window that is 
 nearest to the great sumach tree, in the corner next to Strawberry 
 House. 
 
 197 
 
CHAPTER IX 
 HOLLAND HOUSE AND GARDENS 
 
 SET in gardens lovely enough to have alone made it famous, 
 the unique characteristic of Holland House is the fact that 
 it is the only noble and ancient family mansion of wide 
 historic interest and much picturesqueness, that lies, at the present 
 day, well within the London radius. 
 
 Portions of the Home Park, that once stretched to the Uxbridge 
 Road on the north, and nearly to Brook Green on the west also 
 Lord Holland's farm on the south-west side, have long disappeared. 
 " Nightingale Lane " is no more, but a few of the patriarchal 
 trees that were planted when Evelyn's " Sylva " roused the gentry 
 of England to replace the oaks and the beeches that had vanished 
 in the Civil Wars, still remain. 
 
 But Tisdall's dairy stands on ground where, not so very long 
 ago, lowing cattle waded deep in buttercups, or cropped the clover ; 
 and the Earl of Warwick's dairymaids turned homewards after 
 milking time, to listen later to love tales, under the try sting oak 
 in what was to become Lord Leighton's garden. But that was 
 when London was far, far away, and 
 
 " When all the world was young, lad, 
 All the world was young." 
 
 I have told elsewhere, in the chapter on Chiswick House., 
 how in childhood we wandered afar to find the golden gates of 
 a fairy tale, and how with myopic vision found jthem not, because 
 they were close at home ; (were I moralizing, I think a lesson might 
 be drawn from that). Likewise, full many a time in student 
 
 198 
 
HOLLAND HOUSE AND GARDENS 
 
 days, have I turned up Holland Walk to the spot whence, standing 
 on the public pathway, it was possible, at that time, to catch 
 a glimpse across the stately avenue, of the courtyard and principal 
 entrance, and I have wondered, and wondered, what lay beyond ! 
 Nor was this in the least from idle curiosity ; I cared not who 
 came out. Had any done so it would have destroyed the spell 
 of romance and of mystery that Holland House, its gables, its 
 turrets, and all that could at that period be seen of its terraces 
 and arcades, had, almost all my life, laid upon me. That glimpse 
 of the interior at such times vouchsafed, was a glimpse into the 
 world of romance for I then knew little or nothing of the actual 
 history of the place. It was the positive architectural charm 
 and picturesqueness of that particular corner, added to its mystery, 
 that always fascinated me so that returning under the stately 
 trees, where the twisted roots of the giant elms still push them- 
 selves up through the soil, and their branches interlace overhead 
 to the dusty pavements, the dull brick and mortar of Kensing- 
 tonia to the daily round, the common task (for an artist's 
 serious training has its irksome side), was much like receiving 
 a chilling welcome from the Present after an excursion into the 
 fanciful Past. 
 
 And Lord Holland himself ? Looking very lonely and solitary 
 as he sits there behind his iron grid as though counting the 'buses 
 that pass the boundaries of his ancestral acres not the real Lord 
 Holland, of course, but his counterpart in bronze. 
 
 Stationary, unmoved, and immovable hatless, whether in 
 summer heat or winter's frost. Why is he there ? Does he watch 
 the realization of much he had dreamed of and striven for the 
 freeing of the slave, Catholic Emancipation, Reform reform of, 
 and for, the masses the greater happiness of the greater number ? 
 If not, what else can he see in these new men and women with 
 their new-fangled manners and dress ? these hurrying, hustling 
 crowds of the twentieth century, who, whether of the leisured 
 or the w r orking classes, pay no heed to him ? W T hy does he not 
 turn his back on the long, unlovely street ? 
 
 The reader will know before this chapter closes. 
 
 The air of aloofness, of mystery and repose, in which Holland 
 House is now more than ever enveloped for new and thick plan- 
 tations of trees are growing up rapidly between the old house and 
 
 199 
 
GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 
 
 the road adds tantalizingly to its charm ; only in winter, or early 
 spring, or in the fall of the leaf, may one now, from the roof of 
 an omnibus, catch sight of its tall chimney -tops above the 
 embosoming trees. Therefore, is it more than ever at least in 
 my eyes some palace of fairyland in which a Sleeping Princess 
 dreams away the centuries may the kiss of the Prince never 
 be that of the jerry builder ! 
 
 It cannot be claimed for Holland House that it has the symmetry 
 and proportion of strict architectural beauty much of its charm 
 lies in the unexpectedness and irregularity of the pile but it is emi- 
 nently picturesque, and being so has always attracted the attention 
 of painters but it has been very difficult to get permission to 
 draw there. Therefore I render grateful thanks to Mary, Lady 
 Ilchester, for making an exception in my favour. 
 
 There is a tradition that Vandyke dwelt at Holland House for 
 a year or more ; but the fact has not been established. Sir Joshua 
 Reynolds probably frequented the place for there is a " Reynolds 
 room " and there, too, is the famous picture of Charles James Fox 
 as a boy, his aunt, the Lady Sarah Lennox first love of George III., 
 and the Lady Susan Strangways. Canova, the sculptor, was enter- 
 tained there ; and Wilkie was an occasional visitor. This we 
 know from Macaulay's letters, but otherwise I can find no trace 
 of any steady and special encouragement of the fine arts by the 
 third Lord Holland. The late G. F. Watts, who was an intimate 
 friend of the owners, and Sir Frederick Leighton, had the entree 
 in the eighties, during the reigns of the fourth Lord and Lady 
 Holland, and of the Earl and Countess of Ilchester. 
 
 Independently of the beauty of its gardens and the picturesque- 
 ness of its exterior (this is not the place in which to refer to its 
 internal treasures), Holland House has the additional attraction 
 of a famous history. In the seventeenth century Cromwell and 
 Ireton crossed its stage ; Fairfax and William Penn were for a 
 time resident there. 
 
 But after the Civil Wars were over, the place played no great 
 part in military history ; but it concerned itself greatly with 
 politics as well as with literature. Joseph Addison's connection 
 with it is commemorated in the name of the well-known road 
 and station : and it was the boyish home of Charles James Fox, 
 the great Whig leader. In the next generation the great house 
 
 200 
 
HOLLAND HOUSE AND GARDENS 
 
 attracted to itself whole constellations of wits and illustrious men 
 of letters, who clustered round the engaging personality of its 
 genial and cultivated master, the third Lord Holland. He had 
 adopted the political faith of his famous uncle, and Holland House 
 was for long the centre of the social life of the Whig party. To 
 mention Holland House at the beginning of the nineteenth century, 
 is to think of Rogers, and Sydney Smith and Sheridan, of Campbell 
 and Moore, Byron and Scott ; of Mackintosh and Canning, Hallam, 
 Macaulay, of Talleyrand, " the diplomatic wit and witty diploma- 
 tist ; " of Guizot, Madame de Stael ; of Philip Francis, supposed 
 author of " Junius," of Sir Samuel Romilly, of Lords Chancellor 
 Thurlow, Lyndhurst, and Erskine ; of Eldon, who spoke for the 
 prosecution, at the trial of Queen Caroline, and of Brougham, who 
 defended her, and who later carried the Reform Bill ; of the 
 two Humboldts, and Sir Humphrey Davy, Lord John Russell, and 
 Palmers ton, of Lord Holland himself, actively interested in the 
 abolition of the Slave Trade, Catholic Emancipation and Reform 
 nor can we forget the extraordinary woman who kept these guests 
 in order, and whose pungent wit added spice, and sometimes 
 vinegar, to the intellectual diet. 
 
 The active history of the house begins when Henry Rich, Baron 
 Kensington and Earl of Holland, married the only daughter of 
 Sir Walter Cope of Cope Castle, Kensington, and succeeding in 
 right of his wife, changed the name of the mansion to Holland 
 House, and entertained there lavishly. The second son of the 
 Earl of Warwick and of Penelope his wife the " Stella " of Sir 
 Philip Sidney, Rich was a splendid courtier, and a great favourite 
 of James I. He modelled himself on the pattern of the Duke of 
 Buckingham, and almost equalled him in magnificence. 
 
 However, when the Civil Wars broke out, the Earl wavered in 
 his allegiance to King Charles played fast and loose, and as a 
 consequence, did not retain the confidence of either of the con- 
 tending parties. Clarendon remarks that he was " a fine gentle- 
 man in good times, but too much desired to have ease and plenty 
 when the King could have neither, and did think poverty the most 
 unsupportable thing that could befall any man in his condition." 
 
 The sequel was naturally and inevitably tragic. Rich, returning 
 to the King's side, headed an unsuccessful Royalist rising at 
 Kingston-on-Thames was taken prisoner, kept for a time a 
 
 201 
 
GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 
 
 captive in his own house, the scene of many meetings of the Par- 
 liament party, and just three months after Charles's dea f h he 
 ended his days on the scaffold. An exquisite to the last, he was 
 beheaded in a white satin waistcoat, and a white satin cap with 
 silver lace. His head was exposed at the Tower, and his headless 
 corpse was brought back next day to Kensington, and buried 
 in St. Mary Abbot's churchyard. 
 
 After this event General Fairfax made Holland House his resi- 
 dence for a time; and Cromwell is said to have conferred with 
 Ireton on the lawn in front of the mansion, choosing that spot 
 in order to be out of hearing of others, since, Ireton being deaf, 
 it was necessary to shout at him. However, the widowed countess 
 herself probably through the influence of her brother-in-law, the 
 Earl of Warwick a staunch Parliamentarian was ere long per- 
 mitted to return to her home, and during her reign there, Holland 
 House was one of the great mansions at which stage plays were 
 privately performed, although, by the laws of the Commonwealth, 
 they had been prohibited. 
 
 Her son, the second Earl of Holland, succeeded to the title and 
 estates of his uncle, the Earl of Warwick ; yet notwithstanding, the 
 Riches, after the Restoration, do not seem to have recovered their 
 former position. Apparently Holland House lost for a time its 
 place in the sun, for we find that down to the middle of the eighteenth 
 century it was sometimes let to strangers, one of them being the 
 famous William Penn. 
 
 Later on it narrowly escaped becoming a Royal residence ; but 
 ultimately William and Mary settled at Nottingham House, since 
 known as Kensington Palace the Court, however, occupied Holland 
 House until Nottingham House was ready for its reception ; there- 
 fore when we read that after this " the garden of Holland House 
 was being prepared for lodgers " we surmise that arrangements 
 were made for the accommodation of the lords and ladies in 
 attendance, and their servants the term " lodgings," in the 
 eighteenth century, having a more distinguished signification than 
 at present. 
 
 The most illustrious name in English literature associated with 
 Holland House, is that of Joseph Addison, who, marrying the widow 
 of the sixth Earl of Warwick, went to reside there during the last 
 three years of his life, and died there in 1719. 
 
 202 
 
HOLLAND HOUSE AND GARDENS 
 
 But the " Spectator's " association with the spot began many 
 years before this. He had had a small house and a pretty garden 
 at Chelsea, and to quote Lord Macaulay's well-known essay, 
 ' in the days of Anne and George I., milkmaids and sportsmen 
 wandered between green hedges and over fields bright with 
 daisies from Kensington almost to the shore of the Thames. 
 Addison and Lady Warwick were country neighbours, and 
 became intimate friends." The great wit and gentle satirist of 
 men and manners, whose own life was so consistently virtuous- 
 strove to wean the young Lord Warwick from the vices and the 
 follies of the town, and to encourage him to live up to his 
 great place and opportunities but he failed ! " Lord Warwick 
 grew up a rake and Addison fell in love !' : and the gardens 
 and groves of Holland House have been classic ground ever 
 since ! 
 
 Even in those days when mere rank unsupported by distin- 
 guished merit or shining talents counted for more than it does 
 now, the haughtiest and most aristocratic beauty in her first youth, 
 which Lady Warwick was not, must have been flattered by the 
 sincere and delicate devotion of such a man as Addison. He had 
 genius, and genius that had already received the widest recogni- 
 tion from an admiring and even affectionate public ; for " Mr. 
 Spectator " was a vivid and living personality in thousands of city 
 homes, and in quiet parsonages and country houses, whose in- 
 mates had never set eyes on him. There, like The Taller before 
 it, the little paper was eagerly watched for and when read, and 
 digested, was passed on to others. Its matter, grave or gay, 
 appealed to everyone, and Addison was the Spectator, and the 
 Spectator was the " Mode." 
 
 Yet in society he himself was rarely seen : the Countess, who 
 liked him best when his political star was in the ascendant, would 
 have preferred a husband who would shine therein. But he shunned 
 it. He, the most witty, the most charming of companions, when 
 alone with her or in the company of his intimates, could not be 
 got to utter a word among strangers, or in the House of Commons. 
 He was indeed curiously shy " shamefaced," " bashful," he would 
 himself have designated it ; singularly timid, when we consider 
 his intellectual supremacy, and that he was certainly the most 
 popular person of the day 
 
 203 
 
GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 
 
 His tragedy of Cato had been a phenomenal success. The 
 Spectator, when it followed The Tatler, a still greater one. It 
 ventured boldly, to take a high moral and religious tone, even in 
 that age of licence, and riotous irreligion. But what need to 
 enlarge upon its merits ? Or to tell how it alternated gravity 
 with innocent mirth, and moved men to better living, by laughter 
 as well as by pathos. The Countess must have glowed with pride 
 pride in him who wooed her when she heard Addison's praises 
 passed from mouth to mouth, knowing that the choicest treasures 
 of the great writer's wit and conversation were still reserved for 
 her. Rumour says that she was arrogant, and had the pride of 
 place and birth but there must have been " something in her," 
 as we should phrase it now, or Addison would not have loved her 
 so long and faithfully. Therefore I like to think that in her 
 heart she recognized how far she was beneath him, that when she 
 opened her Spectator, as she sipped her chocolate or her bohea, a 
 little smile that was not all triumph in her conquest, but was, 
 indeed, all tenderness, nickered round her beautiful mouth, when 
 she read ; and I would fain believe that she had indeed the " pride 
 of place," but that it was her place in the heart of her so noble 
 lover. 
 
 Addison was only forty-seven at the time of his death. As is 
 well known, he summoned his wild young stepson to his bedside 
 " to see how a Christian can die," referring to which Horace 
 Walpole sardonically remarked : " He died of brandy ! ' : In this 
 connection I may mention that the celebrated library at Holland 
 House, formerly a picture gallery, which runs across the buildings 
 from east to west, and measures 110 feet by about 17 the great 
 west window of which is shown in my illustration is the place 
 where the famous essayist was in the habit of walking his de- 
 tractors said, " with a bottle at one end and a bottle at the other." 
 I do not believe this. Addison was in failing health, though still 
 in early middle age, and if he indulged to some extent in a vice 
 unhappily very common among men of position in those days 
 every excuse should be made for him particularly if there be 
 any truth in the assertion that he and the countess whom he had 
 wooed so long, did not live happily together. "Holland House," 
 says one author, " is a large mansion, but could not contain Mr. 
 Addison, the Countess of Warwick, and one guest peace." 
 
 204 
 
HOLLAND HOUSE AND GARDENS 
 
 Less than fifty years after Addison's death, Holland House 
 passed into the possession of Henry Fox, the younger son of Sir 
 Stephen Fox, of the Manor House, Chiswick who was the founder 
 of the Fox fortunes. 
 
 Sir Stephen Fox had begun life in the service of the Earl of " 
 Northumberland, chamberlain to Charles II. while in exile. By 
 keeping in touch with loyalists at home, Stephen was able to be 
 the first to announce the death of Cromwell to the King at Brussels, 
 at a moment when Charles was playing tennis with the Arch- 
 duke Leopold, and some Spanish Grandees. 
 
 Starting on this auspicious foundation, Fox's advance was 
 rapid. Evelyn has only good to say of him ; but though he used 
 his great wealth well, there can be no doubt but that as Paymaster 
 to the King's Forces in England, he contrived, far too easily, to 
 amass a very large fortune. 
 
 To his credit it must be said that, together with Nell Gwynne, 
 he was one of the founders of Chelsea Hospital ; and he was also 
 one of the original members of the Royal Society. He served in 
 four reigns, those of Charles II., James II., William and Mary, and 
 Queen Anne. At seventy-five he married for the second time ; 
 his wife, a Miss Christian Hope, being only twenty-six. They were 
 united at Chiswick Church, and their two sons became respectively 
 Earl of Ilchester, and Baron Holland. 
 
 There was no connection between the families of Rich and 
 FOX and " the barony of Holland," says the Princess Marie 
 Lichstenstein in her history of Holland House, " took the place 
 of the extinct earldom simply because the first Fox proprietor of 
 Holland House, chose the latter title when elevated to the 
 peerage." 
 
 Henry Fox, afterwards first Lord Holland, left a memorandum 
 written when he was fourteen years old, and now in Lord Ilchester's 
 possession, beginning: "My dear Mamma died on ye 21st of 
 February 1718, and a fortnight afore she died, calling us all about 
 her, with a mild air she said ' My Dears, will ye be good ? I 
 am now going to leave you and entreat you to serve and be constant 
 in your Duty towards him.' Then taking off all that mildness, 
 she assumed a more than ordinary majestick air, and directing 
 her discourse chiefly to my brother said, ' I don't desire you, but 
 command you to be good. . . . Don't be a Fop, don't be a 
 
 205 
 
GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 
 
 Rake, mind on yr name Stephen Fox ; that I hope will keep you 
 from being wicked. Think on your name, it will even fly in your 
 face, and say did your Father do so ? Think on his virtues and 
 follow yi. Love your Brother I charge you Stephen. I charge you 
 all love one another. You have Ennemys enough, make not one 
 another so ; you will have too many Stephen that will flock about 
 you, court you, and fawn upon you. these are your worst Ennemys, 
 take care of y m . You Harry having a less fortune, won't be 
 subject to so many temptations, but withstand those you have 
 when you grow up take care and avoid ill company, if you don't 
 you are gone. . . . Then you'd learn to swear, to drink, to rake 
 about, to game, and at last be ruined by those, you unhappily 
 think your friends. Don't affect, or think it a genteel or a pretty 
 thing to be a Rake, for if you are wicked what will your Estate 
 signify e. . . . Be humble and obliging to and obey your Trustees 
 and though they may have failings never laugh at them, take 
 their advice in everything, mind what they say to you ; while 
 you are at School. . . . W" you come of age don't be conceited 
 or self-sufficient, don't think above advice, for y n you'd want it 
 most. ... I have said all I can think of now. Let me tell you 
 when I am gone, it will show you Love or hate me, as you obey, or 
 disobey, these my instructions.' ' 
 
 I have left spelling and punctuation, written by a mere boy, as 
 they appear in the original. 
 
 The tender mother's admonitions read strangely when \\e 
 consider the extraordinary upbringing, by him who records them, 
 of his favourite son, afterwards the famous Whig statesman, 
 Charles James Fox. 
 
 The lad was but fourteen when his father took him from Eton 
 to the Continent where he introduced him to undesirable society, 
 and supplying him with money for the purpose, during four months 
 deliberately taught him to gamble. This was at the period when, 
 as Horace Walpole tells us, " young men lose five, ten, fifteen, 
 thousand pounds in an evening" when the Earl of Carlisle could 
 write : " The hazard last evening was very deep Meynell won 
 4,000, Pigot 5,000 "when we learn from Sir George Trevelyan's 
 " Early History of Charles James Fox," that during the years that 
 preceded the American war "5,000 was staked on one card, and 
 70,000 changed hands in a single night." 
 
 206 
 
HOLLAND HOUSE AND GARDENS 
 
 One marvels where all the wealth thus squandered came from, 
 and how even the richest could support such charges, but in 
 that corrupt period money was easy to get. " Private vices," 
 says Trevelyan, " were reflected in the conduct of public affairs, 
 and the enormous expenditure which the habits and ideas of 
 good society inexorably demanded, had to be met by one 
 expedient or another, and an expedient was not far to seek 
 when the same men who, as a class, were the most generally 
 addicted to personal extravagance possessed a practical 
 monopoly of political power. Everybody who had influence 
 in Parliament or at court, used it for the express purpose 
 of mending or repairing his fortunes. . . . One nobleman had 
 8,000 a year in sinecures, and the colonelcies of three regi- 
 ments . . . another, an auditor of the Exchequer into which 
 he never looked, had 8,000 a year in peace time, and 20,000 
 in years of war." 
 
 Henry Fox himself held many of these lucrative appointments. 
 Ultimately he became Paymaster to the Forces as his father 
 had been before him ; and whilst holding that post he was de- 
 nounced in an address of the citizens of London, as a defaulter 
 to the tune of millions. He cleared himself, but he was always 
 unpopular. 
 
 Before purchasing Holland House Fox had rented it on a lease 
 of twenty-one years. He did a great deal for the gardens, for he 
 was an enthusiastic gardener; and his wife, the daughter of the 
 second Duke of Richmond, whose elopement with Fox had been 
 a nine days' society wonder, shared his horticultural tastes. In 
 a letter to a friend he says : " And if you will permit us, Lady 
 Caroline has a thousand questions to ask you about flowers, and 
 not much fewer about plants." Again, he writes concerning 
 cypresses. " Can you procure me any cones ? . . . I want also 
 some acorns of scarlet oak, and a bushel or more of chestnuts for 
 sowing. Excuse me for troubling you ; I think they are less 
 likely to think of imposing on one so learned, than on your ignorant 
 and humble servant, H. Fox. P.S. Mr. Watson advised me to 
 sow something with a hard name, to creep on the ground and 
 cover with green all the vacant places in my young plantations. 
 I wish you would tell me what it was." 
 
 A note on the letter, probably written by the recipient, says : 
 
 207 
 
GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 
 
 " Double snowdrops ... to remind him in March to sow candy- 
 tuft, Rock stuff, Venus' looking glass," etc. 
 
 Though in some respects, as we have seen, Henry Fox dis- 
 regarded his mother's dying advice, his runaway marriage with 
 Lady Caroline Lennox proved a happy one. He was an affec- 
 tionate, but over- indulgent father, gratifying every foolish whim 
 of his children. On one occasion a wall having been pronounced 
 unsafe, it was to come down, and he had promised Charles James 
 Fox that he should witness its fall. By some chance the boy was 
 absent on the day of its destruction, and rather than disappoint 
 him the father had the wall rebuilt, and again demolished in his 
 son's presence. Another time the child wanted to break a watch. 
 The parent protested. " But I must," persisted the lad. " Oh, 
 if you must you must," replied the father, and the watch was 
 smashed. 
 
 The folly of this sort of bringing-up, and particularly of the 
 teaching he had given to the boy at the Continental gaming- 
 tables, probably came home to Henry Fox when he afterwards 
 had to pay his son's gambling debts, amounting to one hundred 
 and forty thousand pounds. Charles James had certainly learnt 
 his lesson well. 
 
 Nevertheless, to his credit be it told that he never touched a 
 card while in office but, unfortunately, most of his life was spent 
 in opposition. His friends who were devoted to him, once collected 
 a sum of money for his benefit, and then, considering the matter 
 rather a delicate one, " wondered how he would take it." ' Take 
 it ! " exclaimed his father's friend, George Selwyn the wit, " why, 
 quarterly, of course ! 5: Of Selwyn it is told, that he had an extra- 
 ordinary passion for looking upon the dead. When Lord Holland 
 was dying he gave instructions with regard to Selwyn' s admission, 
 *' If Mr. Selwyn calls again, let him in ; if I am alive I shall be 
 very glad to see him, if I am dead he will be very glad to see me." 
 
 Lord Holland was clever in repartee and epigram. From the 
 " Life and Times of Charles James Fox," we learn that having 
 stipulated|for an earldom and received only a barony, Henry Fox 
 reproached Lord Bute for so great a breach of faith ! "It was 
 only a pious fraud," protested Lord Bute ; said Fox, " I perceive 
 the fraud, my lord, but not the piety." He had the faults of 
 his class and time the same may be said of his famous son ; but 
 
 208 
 
HOLLAND HOUSE AND GARDENS 
 
 in his case there were shining virtues to counterbalance the faults. 
 " To Charles James Fox," says Trevelyan, " belongs the credit 
 that he did much to reform all the corruption of political life at 
 that time, and with more temptations to evil than most, he did 
 resist the opportunities of place this in spite of his bringing 
 up." He was " the only English statesman who has left a reputa- 
 tion of the first order, acquired in lifelong opposition, who manfully 
 and cheerfully surrendered all that he had been taught to value, 
 for the sake of principles at which he had been diligently taught 
 to sneer." 
 
 The birth of the nephew who, in infancy, became the third Lord 
 Holland, and to whom he was so much attached, destroyed any 
 hopes he might otherwise have entertained of succeeding to the 
 title and estates. He was not born at Holland House, and it so 
 chanced that he did not die there but he loved the spot where 
 so much of his boyhood had been spent with an abiding affection, 
 and Burke justly remarked of him : " Yes, he is like a cat he is 
 fond of the house, though the family be gone." Shortly before 
 he died, he went to Holland House and walked all over the gardens, 
 looking tenderly at each familiar spot, "as if he wished," says 
 Marie Lichstenstein, " to carry through the gates of death the 
 impression engraved on his soul during his childhood." And he 
 lingered long in the Green drive describing to Lord Holland and 
 General Fitzpatrick, the making of it, by his mother, Caroline, Lady 
 Holland. 
 
 The years of the young Lord Holland's minority were strenuous 
 ones nearly as difficult and dangerous as those in which our 
 own lot is cast. For they witnessed the Reign of Terror in 
 France the rise and fall of Napoleon the revolt of the American 
 Colonies and their declaration of Independence ; and many other 
 events international and domestic of vast, if comparatively 
 secondary importance, and in many of which Holland House was 
 more or less concerned. 
 
 It was in 1797, that the figure of Elizabeth, Lady Webster, 
 afterwards Lady Holland, first crosses its picturesque stage. At 
 once she seems to fill it. Nor are we allowed to lose sight of her, 
 for she stands in the cruel glare of the footlights when first she 
 enters, and afterwards, wherever she moves, she is followed by the 
 
 209 14 
 
GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 
 
 fierce political and social limelight which played upon Holland 
 House for nearly five-and-forty years. 
 
 She is conspicuous, too, as being for a long time the only woman 
 in the crowded and busy scene for although young, beautiful, 
 charming, and intellectually gifted she is ostracized by her own 
 sex. This because she had sacrificed everything husband, home, 
 children, and reputation besides the greater part of a large 
 fortune, for love the love of Richard Henry, third Baron Holland, 
 who married her at Rickmansworth Church, the very day after 
 Sir Godfrey Webster, Bart., of Battle Abbey, Hastings, her first 
 husband, had obtained his divorce. 
 
 Thirty-four years later in May, 1831, Lord Macaulay, then 
 just entering political life, was presented to her at a reception 
 at Lansdowne House. 
 
 " I was shaking hands with Sir James Macdonald," he writes 
 to his sister, " when I heard a command behind me : ' Sir James, 
 introduce me to Mr. Macaulay ' and we turned, and there sat 
 a large bold-looking woman, with the remains of a fine person 
 and the air of Queen Elizabeth. ' Macaulay,' said Sir James, c let 
 me introduce you to Lady Holland.' Then was her ladyship 
 gracious beyond description and asked me to dine and take a bed 
 at Holland House next Tuesday." 
 
 Time partially effaced the writer's first unfavourable impression, 
 and he came to recognize Lady Holland's good points, her real 
 kindness of heart, her steadfastness in friendship ; to admire her 
 ability and her humour ; and to smile good-naturedly at her weak- 
 nesses. But he never cordially liked her, and always slightly 
 resented her freedom of speech and her airs of command ; and 
 I think it very significant that in the eloquent tribute he paid to 
 Lord Holland after his death, in one of his " Critical Essays " he 
 is altogether silent concerning his wife. He had not the key 
 to the softer and more feminine traits in her character which we 
 possess in her " Journal," which begins in 1791, and ends in 1811. 
 
 In recent years this has been edited and published by the Earl 
 of Ilchester. Lord and Lady Holland's son, the fourth Baron, 
 died childless, so that the title became extinct ; and the estates 
 passed into the hands of Lord Ilchester, the representative of the 
 " elder branch of the Fox family, who alone had the right to publish 
 the diary. He has done well to do so, for without condoning 
 
 210 
 
HOLLAND HOUSE AND GARDENS 
 
 Lady Holland's offences most people, on learning the true facts 
 of the case, will allow that there were many excuses to be made 
 for her. 
 
 She was the only child and heiress of Richard Vassall, owner 
 of an estate in Jamaica, which greatly decreased in value after 
 the abolition of the Slave trade in 1807. 
 
 Her over-indulgent parents, of whom she speaks affectionately, 
 troubled her but little with education, and left her, she tells us, 
 to form her own conclusions in the matter of religion and morals. 
 They married her at fifteen to a " pompous coxcomb " (as she 
 frankly calls Sir Godfrey Webster, of Battle Abbey, near Hastings), 
 who was twenty years her senior, and quite unfitted to take charge 
 of the happiness of a bright, beautiful, but wayward girl. It 
 must be owned, however, that the patience of the mature husband 
 was sometimes severely tried ; for even in these early days Eliza- 
 beth betrayed much of the imperious temper that only increased 
 with advancing years, so that when, the lapses of her youth for- 
 gotten, she was an acknowledged leader in political society, Lady 
 Granville could write of her, when in 1825 Lady Holland once 
 visited her in Paris, as being " to me, of course, all smiles, but 
 rather more of a termagant than ever." 
 
 Lord Ilchester, in the introduction to the " Journal," describes 
 an amusing feud that raged between the girl- wife and her husband's 
 aunt, who, as widow of the late baronet, had the right to reside at 
 the Abbey, until her death. She played various schoolgirl pranks 
 upon the dowager, and for some time sent across every morning to 
 the Abbey, to inquire whether " the old hag were still alive." 
 But let us not judge her over-harshly. Hers had been a marriage 
 of convenience ; wealth and beauty, in exchange for a title and 
 position, and somehow the girl seems to have felt herself unfairly 
 treated. She had to live in a small, dull, country house with one 
 who apparently made no effort to win the affections of the mere 
 child he had married. In her own words, " the union was perdition 
 to her ! " She was very unhappy, when she met in Florence in 
 1794, the only man she seems ever to have loved ; but the resolution 
 to renounce everything for the young Lord's sake was not quickly 
 made. She dreaded the scandal, and still more the inevitable 
 separation from her children. The surrender of the greater part 
 of her own large fortune to Sir Godfrey, does not appear to have 
 
 211 14* 
 
GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 
 
 weighed with her. But Lady Webster now took a step which 
 cannot be defended. " The certainty," she writes, " of losing all 
 my children was agony to me, and I resolved to keep one in my 
 possession, and I chose the one which from her tender age and sex, 
 required the tenderness of a mother." 
 
 She gave out that the child was dead, and for three years she 
 kept the little girl concealed ; then, influenced chiefly by the 
 fear that her action might compromise Lord Holland, in the 
 spring of 1799, she slowly made up her mind to give her up. Not 
 till after the event do entries in the " Journal " betray how great 
 had been her mental suffering, for at first she will not put her 
 trouble into words, even in the pages of her locked diary. But 
 she is restless, seeks relief in society, and entertains a great deal ; 
 and her remarks remind us that in those days conversation was 
 almost a fine art, and that a bon mot or an epigram was a passport 
 to great houses. " The wits and humorists," she writes, " were in 
 high spirits ; nothing could be pleasanter." But few ladies attend 
 her parties, and the divorced wife of Sir Godfrey Webster is received 
 as yet, only by the wives of her husband's political friends. But 
 she goes with her mother to the opera ; and to Lady Heathfield's 
 masquerade where, in spite of her disguise, the Prince of Wales 
 recognizes her and where (as she thinks it worth while to note 
 in her " Journal ") two great ladies are cordial. We find her 
 at the theatre with a gay party seeing Sheridan's play Pizarro. 
 Apparently it was the first night, for Sheridan comes into her 
 box and explains the cause whenever there is a hitch in the per- 
 formance. " I was surprised," she writes, " at his eagerness, 
 and was glad to find that drinking had not totally absorbed his 
 faculties." Canning dines at Holland House. " He is very enter- 
 taining, or can be," she remarks on June 1st. " I made him repeat 
 the parody on Lewis's ' Alonzo and Imogene.' It goes very well 
 to music a ' Parson so grave and a baron so bold.' : But her 
 moods are variable one day she praises a friend, the next she is 
 captious and sarcastic. She now finds that " Canning's jokes are 
 local, and that unless he gives laws to his little senate he is silent." 
 " The Prince has given up Lady Jersey and is now trying to make 
 up with Mrs. Fitzherbert. He ought to try and make his peace 
 with Heaven if he has any account to settle, as he does not look 
 long for this life." " Sheridan, since he gained such credit as a 
 
 212 
 
HOLLAND HOUSE AND GARDENS 
 
 witness can never give a direct answer " (an allusion to his brilliant 
 repartees at a celebrated state trial) under the same date we 
 read : " The Brest fleet is out, and the alarm is great." It is 
 noticeable that Lady Holland's wit is less caustic at this time 
 than in after years. At any rate, she spares her friends in public, 
 and confines her sarcasms to her " Journal." 
 
 But although she shows nothing outwardly of the mother- 
 hunger that is gnawing at her heart, it is significant of mental 
 unrest to find her spending so much of her time alone in the grounds. 
 ' I passed a great part of the evening and night in the garden," 
 she writes ; " the weather is delicious and the nightingales in the 
 full vigour of song." And thereupon, much as a jester laughs and 
 jokes whilst his heart is breaking, she passes to that unfailing 
 topic which we all employ sometimes to camouflage our deepest 
 feelings the weather. 
 
 ' The spring," she remarks, " is very tardy ; vegetation is now 
 as it was in the first week of May," and she repeats : " Our garden 
 is delicious, Drew and I have begun our lounging walks in the 
 Green Lane in the garden chair." 
 
 But we have the truth at last ! "I have been out of spirits," 
 she writes, " at the approach of a crisis very painful to my feelings ; 
 but my duty and justice, compel me. I shall now be obliged to 
 dwell on the particulars Heaven knows the agony I endure." 
 
 The denouement follows ; on June 19th she says : "I restored 
 to her father my little daughter Harriet . . . she was here with 
 my mother and has now gone," and on the following day she 
 adds : '" On Sunday the event took place, there was a sort of scene 
 at dinner. Sydney Smith, William Lamb " (afterwards Lord 
 Melbourne) " were present. . . . The story is very much talked 
 about but ... I had rather hear nothing of the fables engrafted 
 on it. I only feel I have renounced a darling child . . . would to 
 God I were allowed to bring her up ! ' : 
 
 The entry closes with the matter of fact statement significant 
 owing to its studied indifference : " To-day Digby, and A. S. Bess- 
 boro dined. We went into the garden and stayed late." 
 
 Thus abruptly closes the tragic story, and it loses nothing in 
 pitifulness, and poignancy, because Lady Holland's own offence 
 was the immediate cause of the tragic happening ; for surely the 
 ultimate one was the early and loveless marriage ? 
 
 213 
 
GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 
 
 It is difficult to recognize in the writer of the "Journal," the 
 Lady Holland of the Princess Lichstenstein's " Holland House," 
 of Macaulay's letters to his sisters, and of the accounts and casual 
 remarks of contemporaries. Unfortunately the " Journal " ceases 
 in 1811, and therefore does not help us as it might otherwise have 
 done, to trace the gradual hardening that undeniably took place 
 in her character. 
 
 There were two Elizabeths, one capable of committing a felony 
 to keep her child, and yet of giving her up at last, lest she should 
 injure the man who held her heart and the brilliant, but embittered 
 woman who founded what was virtually a salon on the French 
 lines where she queened it over the wits, men of letters, and poli- 
 ticians, whom her genial and cultured husband aided no doubt 
 in the first instance by her own beauty and piquant personality 
 attracted to Holland House. I am sure she was embittered : 
 I believe that rebellion against what she probably felt to be a 
 monstrous price for a woman to pay for happiness first led 
 her to assume those " airs of Queen Elizabeth," upon which 
 Macaulay remarked ; and that she assumed them as defensive 
 armour against a world prepared to ostracize her unheard. Un- 
 happily she wore it so long that it became part and parcel of 
 herself. 
 
 Other children gathered round her to whom she was a tender 
 mother. Her daughter, Mary Fox, afterwards Lady Lilford, 
 who died in 1891, was a charming character, greatly beloved by 
 her family though, as years went on Lady Holland's sharp tongue 
 did not spare even her. From time to time she saw the young 
 Websters secretly, at her mother's. The eldest boy went to Harrow, 
 and we learn from the " Journal " that she could see the spire of 
 Harrow Church from her window, and " sighed to be near 
 him." 
 
 Harriet grew up and married ; she never lived in close intimacy 
 with her mother, but when Lady Holland, who survived her 
 husband, was dying, the daughter, in obedience to an urgent 
 summons, promptly crossed the Channel and came to receive her 
 last breath. 
 
 But that was long after, and meanwhile we see her, not without 
 amusement, rapping on the table with her fan, calling first one and 
 then another of her guests to order commanding them to do 
 
 214 
 
HOLLAND HOUSE AND GARDENS 
 
 this or that, telling Sydney Smith to ring the bell ! " Oh, yes, 
 and shall I sweep the floor too ! " answers that most amiable of 
 wits and when a seat for some late- comer had to be found at the 
 already over-crowded table, bidding Luttrell "make room." "It 
 must certainly be made," he retorts, "for it does not exist." We 
 watch her insisting upon her guests exchanging places so often, 
 that at last Lord Melbourne, exclaiming " I'll be damned if I 
 dine with you at all," marches off in dudgeon. We see her not 
 hesitating to instruct even Sheridan in the niceties of the English 
 language ; and, at a later period, correcting Guizot's pronunciation, 
 and rebuking him for quoting the proverb : " Hell is paved with 
 good intention," because she said " that word, except in an epic, 
 is never heard in good society ; " and snubbing a literary aspirant 
 with the remark : "I hear you are going to publish a poem. 
 Cannot you suppress it ? ' 
 
 I owe the reader an apology perhaps for introducing such well- 
 known stories here. I do so because they may be new to some. 
 But she had her kinder moments ; Lord Jeffreys, of the Edinburgh 
 Review, after a large dinner-party at Holland House in 1840 
 describes his hostess as having been " in great gentleness and 
 softness." 
 
 The poet Campbell, on his first visit to Holland House in 1806, 
 had not known " whether he was standing on his head or his heels," 
 until Charles James Fox, divining his nervousness, walked round 
 with him arm in arm, showing him the wonders of the place. He 
 told his nephew, Lord Holland, that he liked Campbell, he was 
 " so right about Virgil," and asked him down to St. Anne's : two 
 years later we find Campbell again at Kensington, and this time 
 Her Ladyship herself, grown matronly, but still sprightly and 
 handsome, walked about with him for about an hour, showing 
 him the gardens ; and though he found her " a most formidable 
 person, cleverer by many degrees than Buonaparte," she soon 
 set him at his ease so completely, that " never did he feel 
 such self-possession, such a rattle of tongue and spring-tide of 
 conversation, so perfectly joyous." And she herself must have 
 been secretly amused, for Campbell had a strange taste in dress, 
 and according to Byron " dressed to sprucery, as if Apollo had sent 
 him a birthday present." On this occasion he wore, by his own 
 account, a huge cravat resembling a halter. 
 
 215 
 
GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 
 
 Lord Holland was the good genius of Holland House. " I 
 would not go to Heaven with Lady Holland, but I would go to 
 Hell with Lord Holland," says Ugo Foscolo. 
 
 " Lord Holland," wrote Macaulay to his sister, " is extremely 
 kind. But that is of course, for he is kindness itself. Her Lady- 
 ship, too, which is by no means of course, is all graciousness and 
 civility." These remarks expressed the general opinion of society ; 
 but despite her despotism and her whims, those who knew Lady 
 Holland best and longest, testify to her real kindness of heart. 
 
 Lord Holland was a victim to gout, and during the greater part 
 of his life he was a confirmed invalid, and a cripple ; but his 
 patience and invariable sweetness of temper, were phenomenal. 
 If unable to appear at dinner he would be wheeled in afterwards ; 
 and he always came down to breakfast, said Samuel Rogers, 
 his friend for forty years " like a man on whom some sudden 
 good fortune had just fallen." Thomas Moore describes him in 
 1818 as being " full of sunshine, as usual; " and in 1832 Macaulay 
 wrote that " the sight of him spreads good humour over the face 
 of every one who comes near him." 
 
 When not suffering, Lord Holland was the most delightful 
 companion ; cheerful, intellectual, and well read ; and he was 
 sometimes " extravagantly entertaining," for he enhanced his 
 delightful gift of story-telling with the drollest mimicry. 
 
 Macaulay once spent a Saturday and Sunday at Kensington, 
 when " my Lord was ill, and my Lady thought herself so " . . . 
 She had " fretted herself into being ill, could eat nothing but the 
 breast of a partridge, and thought the howling of a dog portended 
 her own death, or Lord Holland's." They dined at four instead 
 of six or seven, and the company was " scant "for " Allen, like 
 the poor, we have always with us "Macaulay says he did his best 
 to keep the house alive, but he found the day dull, for Lord Holland 
 was in bed ; but since he had the library and the delightful gardens 
 all to himself, I cannot extend much compassion to him. 
 
 Dr. Allen was the factotum, and useful friend, practically resident 
 at Holland House. The poet Rogers was its " Oracle," and 
 persona grata, with both master and mistress. He delighted in 
 healing quarrels, was fond of children, and staunch in friendship ; 
 to him the dying Sheridan turned for help, when there was an 
 execution in his house, and almost everybody else had deserted him. 
 
 216 
 
HOLLAND HOUSE AND GARDENS 
 
 But to try conclusions with Rogers was a dangerous game, for 
 nobody could say disagreeable things so wittily. Even Lady 
 Holland's sharp tongue must have found its match in his, and it 
 is to the credit of both that their friendship was never broken. 
 
 It was Rogers who introduced Byron to Lord and Lady Holland, 
 about the time that " Childe Harold " appeared ; and afterwards 
 until he left England he was frequently at their house. 
 
 It is surprising that he never fell foul of his hostess, for he could 
 be a most uncomfortable dinner guest. " Did he take soup ? ' 
 ' No, he never took soup." " Did he take fish ? " " No, he never 
 took fish." " Mutton ? " " No, he never ate mutton." 
 ' Would he take wine ? " " Thank you, I never take wine." 
 
 ' What will you take ? " inquired the distressed host (who on 
 this occasion happened to be Rogers, but might quite as well have 
 been Lord Holland). ' I take nothing but biscuits and soda- 
 water." There were no biscuits, and there was no soda-water in 
 the house. So Byron helped himself to a plate of potatoes, mashed 
 them with a fork, and drenched them with vinegar ; " and con- 
 trived," says Tom Moore, who was present, " to make rather a 
 hearty meal out of this meagre material." 
 
 In this year of grace 1918 we ourselves are fast learning to live 
 on vinegar and potatoes, but minus Byron's compensations ; for 
 it appears in the sequel, that on leaving St. James' Street, the poet 
 turned into his club and had a good meat supper ! 
 
 Moore was a welcome guest on the Kensington Mount Parnassus ; 
 and once Rogers, desiring to take him to his sister's at Highbury, 
 met with strong opposition from her ladyship. " Do you allow 
 him," she cried to Moore, " to dispose of you like a little bit of 
 literary property ? " She did her utmost to prevent " her dear, 
 dear Macaulay " from going to India. She cried and raved ; and 
 afterwards stormed at the Ministry for letting him go, rousing even 
 her good-humoured husband to say : " Don't talk nonsense, my 
 Lady ! what the devil ! can we tell a gentleman who has a claim 
 upon us that he must lose his only chance of getting an independ- 
 ence, in order that he may come and talk to you in an evening ? " 
 
 The intimates of Holland House were Rogers, Luttrell, the epi- 
 curean, witty, and polished man-about-town ; and when he was 
 in London Sydney Smith, the most lovable of the wits. In earlier 
 days Charles James Fox was a welcome guest, and his delightful 
 
 217 
 
GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 
 
 conversation, as we learn from the " Journal," tempted the family 
 party, whenever he came, to sit up late Lady Holland being 
 relieved to find that he had as little inclination to talk politics as 
 she then had. 
 
 But in this respect she changed in later years, and when the 
 Whigs were in power, as everybody knows, the old house, under her 
 regime, was their social headquarters. The tables were still over- 
 crowded at times, as in earlier years ; and Lord Jeffreys in 1840 
 the year of Lord Holland's death being invited to dine there on 
 Sunday en jamille, was astonished to find a goodly company of 
 sixteen, assembled, " foreign ambassadors and everyone ! " In 
 those later days Palmerston and Lord John Russell might be seen 
 there : and old Talleyrand : ' his face like a corpse his hair, 
 thickly powdered and pomatumed, hanging down straight on either 
 side of his face, like a pair of tallow candles, but whose odd appear- 
 ance was forgotten when he began to talk." 
 
 The hostess managed these heterogeneous elements with admir- 
 able tact. She encouraged the talk, but let no one talk too much 
 not even Macaulay, whose prodigious memory for facts led him 
 sometimes to tire his audience however appreciative before he 
 exhausted his subject. At such times she ruthlessly applied the 
 closure with, " Now, Macaulay, that's enough of that ; can't you 
 give us something else ? " 
 
 Epigrams sparkled, and witticisms flashed, at that wonderful 
 table, like the old silver and cut and jewelled glass upon it, and the 
 wine that, without excess, passed round the polished board. There 
 was fun in plenty without flippancy, and serious talk that was never 
 dull. And if an argument threatened to become over warm, or 
 a repartee were too pungent, or my Lady were displeased, because 
 the French cook was ill, and the favourite dishes or even the 
 dining-hour itself delayed the host might be trusted to restore 
 good humour. 
 
 And what mattered it if the guests did elbow and jostle one 
 another sometimes in the dining-room, when there would be room 
 and to spare in the great library later ? The season permitting, 
 they wandered out into the gardens, and after sunset, in the soft 
 summer darkness, listened to the nightingales answering one another 
 in the great avenue or the " Green Lane," that favourite walk before 
 mentioned, that is still a lovely forest glade, and which now forms 
 
 218 
 
g 
 
 CO 
 
HOLLAND HOUSE AND GARDENS 
 
 the western boundary of the estate. At other times, when the moon 
 cast athwart the lawn, the shadows of the cedars, oaks, and 
 cypresses, that Henry Fox, the first Lord Holland, had planted, 
 and, rising higher and higher, threw every gable, and pinnacle, and 
 arcade of the old house into strong relief, and the harper played 
 beneath the trees they would stay out of doors till long past mid- 
 night for guests were generally asked to " take a bed " at Holland 
 House. Those whose duties prevented them from doing so, or 
 who were too poor to afford a hackney coach to town, had like 
 Sydney Smith, when Canon of St. Paul's to bring their dress shoes 
 with them and change them in the hall. 
 
 Incidentally, the gardens are very frequently mentioned by 
 Lady Holland in the " Journal," when writing from Holland 
 House. But a very large proportion of it is dated from abroad, 
 whither the Hollands often went, since foreign travel brought 
 some alleviation to his Lordship's gout. 
 
 At all times in their history the gardens seem to have been much 
 used by the inmates of the house. As far back as the eighteenth 
 century, they are mentioned as the scene of a weird ghost story. 
 Lady Diana Rich, one of the daughters of the Earl of Warwick, 
 when walking in her father's park in the forenoon, was confronted 
 by her own apparition, and died within a month, two of her 
 sisters meeting with the same uncanny experience elsewhere. 
 This is tradition, but it is a matter of history that the young King 
 George III., when riding down to Kew, fell in love with the Lady 
 Sarah Lennox, sister-in-law of Henry Fox, when, dressed up as a 
 charming shepherdess, she was making hay on the lawn between 
 the house and the high road, on the very spot where once Cromwell 
 shouted in the ear of Ireton, and where, in later days, the statue 
 of the great Lord Holland was placed. 
 
 While fully appreciating the courtesy that extended to me the 
 rare and coveted privilege of painting in these delectable gardens 
 at a time when I had no thought of this book in my mind, I regretted 
 that I was allowed to make but one' drawing there. For they are 
 so varied and picturesque, and at the present day still so extensive, 
 that they offer subjects without end to painters even to those to 
 whom their historical associations may make no special appeal. 
 I was simply saturated with the summer loveliness of the scene on 
 that brilliant August day in 1913, when first I went there. The old 
 
 219 
 
GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 
 
 house lay sleeping in the sunshine, and the place wore the same air 
 of " profound seclusion " that Sir Walter Scott remarks upon in 
 his diary in 1829. Then, after an afternoon at Chiswick House, 
 on the occasion of a fete given by the Duke of Devonshire to which 
 I have elsewhere referred, he spent a night at Holland House, 
 where his works were so much appreciated that, when the " Tales of 
 my Landlord " appeared, his lordship remarked to the publisher, 
 Murray, who had asked him whether he liked them : " Like them ! 
 Why we sat up all night to read them, and nothing slept but my 
 gout ! " 
 
 But the Wizard of the North himself, had he waved his magical 
 wand, could not, by his own unaided art, have summoned up for 
 us a complete picture of the scene that met his eyes when he drew 
 up his blinds and looked out next morning. It is here that painting 
 steps in. For the things that make the chief charm of a garden are 
 not to be described in words, and they are not even hinted at in 
 black and white. Only colour and form in partnership, can give to 
 others a true and vivid image of the appearance of things as we 
 ourselves remember them, at a moment when they are not before 
 the eye ; and colour is too elusive, too dependent on such accidents 
 as the sun's position, and the season of the year, and form is too 
 subtle and abstract, to be explained by words only. Words can 
 tell us no more of the splendour and character of last night's sunset 
 than that it was stormy, or calm ; crimson fusing with gold, gold 
 melting into tender green and so on through the entire chromatic 
 scale of colour. They cannot show us the shapes of things, unless 
 by the cumbrous and incomplete method of analogy and compari- 
 son ; nor demonstrate in what manner the fleecy cloudlets, that 
 high up in the ether, catch the last rosy glow from the setting sun- 
 differ so greatly in bulk and character, from the grand, rolling, 
 heaped-up masses of vapour, that, nearer the horizon, are slowly 
 sailing before a gentle summer's breeze as I write. For what should 
 the factory hand, or the Board- school child, brought up in a City 
 alley where they really never see the sky (though both may have 
 passed the seventh standard) know, practically, of the meaning 
 of cirrus and cumulus ? 
 
 Nor can words describe a rose or a lily to one who has never 
 seen either, by merely saying : " It is red " or " white," without 
 telling him whether it is touched with its complementary blue, or 
 
 220 
 
HOLLAND HOUSE AND GARDENS 
 
 dashed with its complementary yellow ; and of its shape he 
 learns nothing at all ! The artist-monk in his mediaeval cloister, 
 illuminating his missal or his breviary with loving patience and 
 skill, in the long hours between matins and compline, did more 
 for the rose and the lily when, mixed with gold-leaf, he introduced 
 them into his borders than Shakespeare and Spenser have done 
 for he indicated their shape and their colour. 
 
 And words are unreliable, as well as inadequate ; because, in 
 process of time, their signification may change. Damask with us 
 means dark red ; with the Elizabethans (who were not colour- 
 blind) it meant pink ; for their poets, one and all, describe a 
 maiden's cheek as " damask." 
 
 The beautiful rose-walk at the north side of Holland House was, 
 when I saw it, lined with roses that were pink, not crimson. Had 
 Scott so seen them from his bedroom window and described them 
 in Spenserian terms, he would have called their colour " damask." 
 It all resolves itself into this a splash of colour quite rightly 
 chosen, and deftly laid on by a trained hand, will better convey the 
 beauty of a natural scene than whole pages of descriptive poetry, 
 or prose. 
 
 The things that make for beauty in open landscape, when land- 
 scape is left to itself, do so equally in a garden ; but there, alas, 
 discords blatant and unnecessary ones are too frequently de- 
 liberately encouraged by an arrangement of planting of which 
 Nature would be ashamed, and so much so that she would pro- 
 ceed at once to rectify, or conceal her error in taste. She is a 
 wonderful and artful pacifist. By means of play of light and 
 shadow, by notes of colour, accidentally struck, and by the free use 
 of her own glorious sunshine, she brings discords into perfect 
 harmony : and the eye trained to harmony in colour is as sensitive 
 as the ear attuned to harmony in music, and much more frequently 
 suffers, because more people are taught to detect discord in sound 
 than in colour. Unfortunately, Nature cannot always interfere in 
 a garden, for there man is responsible. Nevertheless, she does 
 what she can, as I can testify from my personal and recent ex- 
 perience. In the garish noontide of a most glorious May, my 
 windows, facing east, looked out on a trim little garden, gay with 
 masses of wallflowers, mostly yellow ; and immediately beyond 
 were two well-grown hawthorns of the scentless, double-blossomed, 
 
 221 
 
GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 
 
 crimson variety, dear to the ordinary gardener's heart. Behind 
 them lay a stretch of meadow-land, yellow with buttercups, shut 
 in by a belt of trees, barely in leaf, and empurpled by distance. 
 It was all so crude in colour that, except in the early morning, 
 when the newly risen sun behind them, merely catching the edges 
 of the crimson May, threw its masses into broad, purplish shadow, 
 I had little pleasure in looking out, for the violent contrast jarred. 
 But towards evening, when the sun having travelled round to the 
 back of the house, poured a flood of all-embracing amber light 
 over the entire scene, fusing and harmonizing the fiery elements 
 that were before at war, changing the fierce crimson of the May- 
 flower into orange, and warming into " old gold " the yellow of 
 the meadow in which the hay grass was beginning to turn colour 
 the effect was superb, though singular and unconventional. 
 
 It is the painter's mission to reveal facts in their environment 
 that the majority of people do not see them for themselves. Their 
 senses are not keenly alive to pleasure or pain, and they pass by 
 half the loveliest things in Nature, and would resent, or at best not 
 heed, a verbal demonstration. I once remarked to a friend upon 
 some unfortunate arrangement in a garden, due to insensitiveness 
 to colour -discords. He shrugged his shoulders, regarded me 
 compassionately, and said : " How thankful I am I am not an 
 artist ! ' : The obvious answer to this, though I did not give it, 
 was : "If we suffer much that you do not suffer, we enjoy more ! ' 
 On the other hand, there are people who may feel, but who are 
 inarticulate ; unable to convey in words what they see, or to 
 make others see it too ; and it is our business as painters, to explain 
 and interpret Nature for them, because : 
 
 " We love first, first when we see them painted 
 Things we have seen a hundred times 
 
 Nor cared to see 
 
 Art was given for that God uses us to help each other so 
 Sending our minds out." 
 
 I would that the first and greatest of all Impressionist painters, 
 Turner, could return to life and reconstruct for us, the vision of the 
 Lake of Lucerne as he must have seen it, and as once I, too, saw it, 
 many, many years ago ; when, opening my hotel window the 
 morning after my arrival, I looked forth, and beheld for the first 
 
 222 
 
HOLLAND HOUSE AND GARDENS 
 
 time the panorama of radiant splendour that stretched before my 
 dazzled and delighted eyes. I can just recall that all colour was 
 eliminated, and there was nothing left but light. The town, with 
 its covered bridges, was behind me ; the twin towers and pointed 
 spires of the cathedral to the left ; but all this I found out later 
 I observed no details, and of anything that was going on down below 
 in the foreground, I took no heed all that I carried away with me, 
 all that remains in my memory to this day, was the broad impres- 
 sion of a world of glittering, dancing, silvery light, sparkling water, 
 and gleaming snowy peaks. Of course no feeble words of mine 
 could paint it, then or now, but and herein lies my point 
 neither could Sir Walter Scott's. It was the record of a poet-painter's 
 impression that was wanted. But no impressionist below the rank 
 of Turner could have touched it ; and better, far better, a feeble 
 effort in words, that we have all been taught to lisp, and that, how- 
 ever halting, are not without suggestiveness to one who has passed 
 through similar experiences than the amateur artist's daring 
 attempt to paint the unpaintable to rush in to clamber Alps, 
 where we find the pebbles difficult ! 
 
 I cannot paint Alps ; no, nor sketch them but I think I can 
 paint gardens and possibly what my brush fails to explain, my 
 pen may help to elucidate. And just as it is the painter's supreme 
 joy to seize the passing impression and paint it with such force and 
 truth as is in him so it is also his solemn duty and his high voca- 
 tion. Every artist recognizes this, and knows the vital and insistent 
 call for self-expression at every hour, at every moment ; and if 
 life were not so short, and its many uncongenial tasks so long, 
 there would be more evidence of this fact in the world around us. 
 
 And since, as I said before, many things that cannot be described 
 in words are of the very essence of the loveliness of gardens, particu- 
 larly of large gardens, how can bare words, and one drawing only, 
 convey the dignity and charm of the grounds of Holland House ? 
 Of the long, straight rose-walk in the north garden before referred 
 to grassy, not gravelled, and bordered on either side by roses that 
 are all pink though when I beheld it in August, its beauty had 
 somewhat departed ; of the pleasing effect, in the Japanese Garden, 
 of the miniature ponds and pools, fringed, and filled with all manner 
 of foreign aquatic plants rising, as it were in low steps, to the higher 
 ground ; and of the interest of the curious exotic shrubs to be 
 
 223 
 
GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 
 
 found there. Nor can language alone demonstrate how happy was 
 the thought that converted the old brick arches all that remains 
 
 o 
 
 of the former stables in which Cromwell and Ireton had installed 
 their horses into a graceful arcade, festooned with creepers, 
 through which one catches glimpses of a terraced wall, descending, 
 by one or two steps, to the wilder woodland below, where begins 
 the leafy glade still known as the " Green Lane." 
 
 It was after one of her later continental trips, that Elizabeth, 
 Lady Holland for it is necessary to distinguish between her and 
 her daughter-in-law, wife of the fourth baron brought back from 
 Spain the dahlia a plant that she is erroneously supposed by some 
 people to have been the very first to introduce into this country. 
 
 The flower which it is scarcely necessary to say, is the lovely 
 single variety still grows abundantly near " Rogers' Seat," the 
 famous alcove where the poet Rogers was wont to sit, which faces that 
 bust of Napoleon, by Canova, that, ten years after Waterloo, Lord 
 Holland put up on a pedestal in the " Dutch " or " West Garden." 
 
 I chanced upon that bower accidentally, selecting it as a suitable 
 place in which to eat my sandwiches I chose it simply because it 
 happened to be within a few yards of the point of view that I finally 
 fixed upon for my illustration. Looking up, I read the lines by 
 Lord Holland himself : 
 
 " Here Rogers sate, and here for ever dwell 
 For me, the pleasures that he sang so well." 
 
 Who reads Rogers now ? The couplet was an enigma to me. I 
 speculated on its meaning, associating it vaguely with Campbell's 
 "Pleasures of Hope " which, indeed, Rogers' earlier work had 
 inspired for I frankly confess that I had forgotten if I ever knew 
 that Rogers had written " The Pleasures of Memory," a poem 
 that had great vogue a hundred years ago. Moreover, beyond that 
 I knew Holland House to have been a centre of Whiggism and of 
 culture, I was unversed in its history when I first went there. 
 
 I turned to my work ! And the " Pleasures of Memory " will 
 always be mine when I recall that brilliant summer day when I 
 first beheld the " Dutch Garden." I prefer to call it that, though 
 it scarcely bore out its name at the time, being ablaze, not with 
 such flowers as have come to us from Holland, but with scarlet 
 geraniums. These were astonishing ; never shall I forget the 
 
 224 
 
HOLLAND HOUSE AND GARDENS 
 
 impression they made on me when I turned the corner of the house 
 from the north side, and came upon them suddenly. This garden, 
 which lies to the west of the house, is a vast parterre that slopes 
 gently downwards from the mansion, till it is shut in at the lower 
 end by the high, creeper-covered arcade just mentioned. My 
 drawing is taken looking east, in order to introduce the fine old 
 house itself as a background. The parterre is intersected by the 
 little, lozenge-shaped beds, known as " knots." These are separated 
 from each other by very narrow walks, edged with high box as 
 we have seen them in the Bishop's rose-garden at Fulham but 
 in this larger area the dividing borders are lost sight of, and the 
 effect in sunshine, is of a lake of scarlet flame. 
 
 It is the fashion one which I have deprecated elsewhere to 
 brand the geranium as vulgar, and crude. It is undoubtedly 
 vulgar, in opposition to certain strongly-contrasting yellows and 
 blues ; or when used in " ribbon-borders," or, as commonly 
 planted, in beds, in the garden plots of suburban villas. But as 
 seen at Holland House it is a truly regal flower, and its splendour 
 under such conditions is undeniable. 
 
 Quite as striking and surprising as the effect of this blazing 
 parterre, was the profound quiet and seclusion of the place. For 
 all that it is within a few minutes' walk of one of the liveliest of 
 London's thoroughfares, the sunny stillness was unbroken. 
 
 ' I might be fifty miles in the country," I said to myself, " instead 
 of well within the four-mile radius." 
 
 True, the season was over ; the great house shut up ; society 
 had fled to the sea or the moor ; or had crossed the Channel, to the 
 Continent, for as yet no war. or rumours of war, had disturbed the 
 tranquility of Europe. But even in normal years, though fashion 
 is out of town there is an influx from the country to take its place ; 
 and the great arteries of London are thronged, and of these the 
 gayest and busiest is that which passes the handsome gates of 
 Holland House. 
 
 Eighty years ago it was not so peaceful ; then the Whigs were in 
 power, and the house was the ministerial social headquarters. 
 Dinner-parties and crowded receptions were the order of the day. 
 Lady Holland, sardonic but brilliant, ill-tempered and kindly, 
 imperious, and gracious by turns, " received her subjects," says one 
 of them, " on her throne, a pony-chaise on the lawn "a much 
 
 225 15 
 
GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 
 
 more formidable ceremony, we are assured, than going to kiss a 
 young Queen's hand. There might be seen Lord Melbourne, 
 Lord John Russell, Palmerston, Guizot, and notabilities by the 
 legion and the garden itself was a perennial joy ! Lord Jeffreys 
 describes " a sweet walk under the cedars .... where he listened 
 in vain for the nightingales, though Lord Holland and Allen chal- 
 lenged them to answer by divers fat and asthmatical whistles." 
 
 This was in 1840, the year of Lord Holland's death, which 
 brought to a sudden close the most wonderful chapter in the 
 remarkable history of Holland House. Such another era the world 
 can never see again, unless one gifted like the third Lord Holland 
 should arise, capable of attracting a company as brilliant as that 
 which he gathered round him in the earlier half of the nineteenth 
 century, to a house as picturesquely and historically interesting. 
 
 226 
 
CHAPTER X 
 HOGARTH HOUSE, CHISWICK 
 
 OMEWHERE about the year 1750, in the reign of the 
 Second George, William Hogarth, of Leicester Fields, 
 in the parish of St. Martin, in the county of Middlesex, 
 Painter and Engraver, he being at the time some 53 years old, and 
 a prosperous man deemed it right and necessary that he and his 
 wife, like other well-to-do London " cits," should have a " country 
 box " of their own, wherein to pass the summer days. 
 
 Born in 1697, within the sound of Bow Bells and baptized in the 
 beautiful church of St. Bartholomew the Great Hogarth was a 
 Londoner, every inch of him, and never looked for the subject of 
 his brush or his graver, in country life ; the men and women whom he 
 loved to study, and whom by laughing at their foibles and showing 
 up their vices, he sought to reform, were not picturesque, unsophisti- 
 cated rustics, nor yet the country gentry who in those days of slow 
 travelling, on roads infested by highwaymen, seldom stirred beyond 
 the boundaries of their own estates ; they were the denizens of 
 town alone. Therefore it is a little surprising to find that the 
 country attracted him to the extent of inducing him to buy a 
 residence there. 
 
 Before finally settling down in a village to the far west of Charing 
 Cross, we may be quite sure that he and his wife explored the 
 districts, north, east, and south of the confines of the metropolis. 
 But evidently the beauty of the Thames made a strong appeal to 
 the painter, for in the course of his peaceful, uneventful life we find 
 record of " summer lodgings " at South Lambeth, and at Isle- 
 worth ; and he eventually purchased a small house in a large 
 garden, within easy reach of the river, at Chiswick. 
 
 227 15* 
 
GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 
 
 This house is the little messuage which appears in the illustration. 
 The Hogarths were intending to set up their " chariot," therefore 
 the considerable distance between their cottage for it is but little 
 more and Leicester Fields, was no deterrent. 
 
 Even at the present day the water-side parts of Chiswick are 
 wonderfully picturesque, and there are bits that are entirely 
 unspoilt. The church, considerably restored, but with a tower 
 built by Vicar Brydell, about 1420, stands well, at a fine bend of 
 the river a river that, even at this point, is still beautiful at high 
 tide and the old-world houses on the Mall facing the island, or 
 Eyot, with little enclosed front-gardens between roadway and 
 water, command a pleasant prospect of it. With these attractions, 
 Chiswick in the twentieth century, can easily hold its own in friendly 
 rivalry with Hampstead and Highgate, where many quaint corners 
 still exist. But in the eighteenth century and earlier, i.e., in 
 Commonwealth and Revolutionary times, before that arch-enemy 
 of natural beauty the ubiquitous jerry- builder had covered the 
 meadows, lanes, and market-gardens that lay between the river and 
 the high-road, with rows of ugly, fourth-rate streets the entire 
 village must have been a charming spot. 
 
 Besides which, up to a comparatively recent date, there were 
 many comfortable, even stately residences dotted about Chiswick. 
 Incidentally I may mention that there were two manors in Chis- 
 wick, the Prebendal Manor of St. Paul's Cathedral, and the Dean's, 
 or Manor of Sutton. The Chapter of St. Paul's Cathedral had 
 prebendal rights in Chiswick which, by the way, are commemo- 
 rated in certain roads and terraces at the present day. These 
 rights they had to surrender in the revolutionary year of 1643, to 
 the Lord Mayor and citizens of London. Chaloner Chute, for a 
 short time Speaker of the House of Commons under Cromwell, 
 who is buried in a vault in Chiswick Church, lived at Sutton Court 
 (the Sutton Manor House), one of the finest of the old houses of the 
 district. His son-in-law, Barker, who resided in the neighbouring 
 Grove House, had taken up arms for the King, but remained on 
 good terms with his wife's family. At Sutton Court afterwards 
 dwelt Viscount Fauconberg, a son-in-law of Cromwell's, whose 
 wife, compared with her brother Richard, is said to have been the 
 better man of the two. Her husband actively worked for the 
 restoration of the Stuarts yet was one of those who invited over 
 
 228 
 
HOGARTH HOUSE, GHISWICK 
 
 William of Orange. Sutton Court, with all these historic memories, 
 has disappeared ; so, too, has the mansion belonging to the Pre- 
 bendal Manor. Close to it, in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, 
 as mentioned elsewhere, Gabriel Goodman, Dean of Westminster, 
 erected a house whither the masters and boys of Westminster 
 School might retire in times of the plague and sickness. Hither, 
 as we have seen, frequently came the awful Dr. Busby, who died in 
 1695, when nearly 90, and who for fifty-five years was Headmaster 
 at Westminster. But the use of College House, as the place came 
 to be called, as a sanatorium, ceased in 1733. Lysons tells us 
 that in 1810 it was a ladies' boarding-school. 
 
 Corney House, associated with the Russell family, and visited by 
 Queen Elizabeth, another famous Chiswick residence, was pulled 
 down in 1832 ; but its beautiful gardens on the river side remained 
 until they were absorbed in the works of Messrs. Thornycroft, Of 
 the Mall I have already spoken in the chapter on " Walpole House." 
 
 Sir Stephen Fox, founder of the fortunes of the Fox family, who, 
 when seventy-five years old, married, in Chiswick Church, a lady 
 fifty years his junior, built the Manor House and the " Manor House 
 Farm." The grounds of the Manor House, a residence for some time 
 occupied by Lady Mary Coke, were on her death incorporated by 
 the Duke of Devonshire in those of Chiswick House, and the house, as 
 we know, was pulled down ; but the Manor House Farm, a creeper- 
 covered mansion with dormer windows, existed for two hundred 
 years. All these fine houses gave distinction to the river-side 
 village at the period of the Hogarth settlement there when the 
 success of the " Marriage a la mode " had enhanced his fame as an 
 artist and a moralist. 
 
 Hogarth House, the name by which Hogarth's country residence 
 is now known, is literally within a stone's-throw of the gates of Chis- 
 wick House, " the fine bijou," to use the eighteenth-century phrase, 
 described in an earlier chapter, which Richard Boyle, Earl of Bur- 
 lington, built to contain the precious works of art that he had 
 collected abroad. Together with the beautiful gardens laid out by 
 William Kent, and stocked Horace Walpole says overstocked 
 with classic statuary, terminal busts, sculptures, and so forth, it 
 was, as we know, well worth a day's journey to see. 
 
 I do not think it at all likely, however, that Hogarth himself 
 had ever seen it. In earlier days he had cast too much ridicule on 
 
 229 
 
GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 
 
 Kent that " Jack-of- all-trades " who was the Earl's pet artist 
 to be a persona grata with Lord Burlington. In two early plates, 
 " The Taste of the Town " and " The Man of Taste," or " Burling- 
 ton Gate," he had burlesqued Burlington's favourites, Kent and 
 Pope, representing Kent as perched aloft on the summit of the gate, 
 with Michael Angelo and Raphael for supporters, while little Mr. 
 Pope, on a scaffolding, is whitewashing the gate and bespattering the 
 people passing below, among them Lord Chandos, whom the poet, 
 in a letter to Lord Burlington, had lampooned. Nor did Hogarth 
 spare the Earl himself, for he makes him bring the whitewash ! 
 But this lively raillery was as nothing compared with the contempt 
 that he had contrived to pour upon the unlucky Kent in the 
 matter of an altar-piece for St. Clement's Danes, which Kent's 
 ignorance of his ow r n limitations had induced him to execute. It 
 was so execrably bad, that to satisfy the parishioners, Bishop Gibson 
 had ordered its removal. But Hogarth held it up to worse derision, 
 by publishing a print thereof, purporting to be " exactly engraved ' : 
 from it. Nor was this unfair ; Hogarth, uncompromisingly sincere 
 himself (though he, too, did not always recognize his own limita- 
 tions witness his " Pool of Bethesda " and " Sigismunda "), was 
 intolerant of charlatans, and pretenders of all sorts. 
 
 Part of his strong aversion to Kent may have arisen from his 
 championship of his father-in-law, Sir James Thornhill, whom, in 
 his own individual line, Kent had attempted to rival. And this 
 painter of bad portraits, this high priest of the Baroque, who tried 
 his hand at everything, from the decoration of a ceiling to the 
 designing of a lady's dress, no doubt really deserved the true artist's 
 scorn. He was a passable architect, but his best efforts in archi- 
 tecture seem to have been inspired and directed by the superior 
 taste of his patron ; he was a good planner of fine gardens indeed, 
 a past-master in the art of landscape-gardening ; but that was an 
 art of which the painter of city scenes, the resident in Leicester 
 Fields, knew nought. 
 
 So far as I am aware, no writer on Hogarth or on Chiswick, with 
 one exception and he was under the mistaken impression that 
 Kent was still resident at Chiswick House when Hogarth came 
 to the cottage has remarked on his rather singular choice of a 
 country house situated at the very gates of the nobleman ridiculed 
 by him in " Burlington Gate," the patron of the man who had been 
 
 230 
 
HOGARTH HOUSE, GHISWIGK . 
 
 chief victim of Hogarth's satiric humour. Yet why should Hogarth 
 have avoided Chiswick ? The satire in question had been published 
 a quarter of a century before Hogarth came to Chiswick, and his 
 burlesques, if pointed, were not venomous. Pope, who appears 
 never to have retaliated for the " Burlington Gate " affront, in 
 which he had been included, no doubt feeling that with so formid- 
 able an antagonist as Hogarth, silence was the wisest course 
 Pope was dead, and the remainder of the brilliant circle of which 
 Lord Burlington had been the centre, was melting away. He 
 himself had fallen on evil days, brought about chiefly by his own 
 splendid public spirit and hospitality ; possibly he was not even 
 aware of the presence of the stranger i.e., the painter at his 
 gates ; possibly he chose not to be ; anyway, I have come across 
 no record of his dealings with the artist. 
 
 Hogarth, sturdily independent, would be loftily indifferent alike 
 to his noble neighbour's notice or disdain, and in his walks abroad 
 there was no danger of an encounter with Kent himself, either in 
 the flesh or in the spirit, for, unless the date given by the most 
 reliable authorities as that of Hogarth's settlement at Chiswick, be 
 incorrect, the man whose " oracle," says Horace Walpole, " was 
 so much consulted by all who affected taste, that nothing was 
 thought complete without his assistance," had two years earlier 
 gone the way of all men, whether geniuses or mediocrities, and had 
 been honourably interred by Lord Burlington, in the family vault 
 of the Boyles, in Chiswick Church. If, indeed, his unquiet ghost 
 walked at all, it would naturally do so at Westminster Abbey or 
 Kensington Palace, where his sins as an artist are most glaring and 
 still in evidence, rather than near the scene of his genuine successes. 
 
 The " country box " to which Hogarth now came, is a mere slip 
 of a house nay, rather a cottage in dimensions bearing, indeed, 
 some sort of resemblance to a shallow box turned up on end and 
 divided into stories, and these again into rooms, and pierced in front 
 only in doll's-house fashion with windows. There is a large 
 overhanging bay above the front door, overlooking the garden ; it 
 is the window of what must have been Mrs. Hogarth's withdrawing- 
 room, where with her mother, widow of the late Sergeant-painter 
 to the King, and M.P. for Weymouth, and her cousin, Mary Lewis, 
 she entertained Mrs. Garrick, and other lady friends. Here they 
 sipped fine bohea out of handleless cups of delicate porcelain, dis- 
 
 231 
 
GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 
 
 cussing the taste of the town in the latest modes, comparing 
 embroidery, and the samplers they were working, and maybe talking 
 a little scandal too, to give flavour to the tea. Below, in the oak- 
 panelled parlour, seated on either side of the wide fireplace in 
 chairs that may be seen at Hogarth House to-day, Hogarth and 
 " Little David " talked and joked, and at intervals puffed at their 
 long clay pipes. Fielding, even then in failing health, might 
 sometimes have been present, and possibly Wilkes, for as yet there 
 was no quarrel. 
 
 The affection between Hogarth and Garrick was very real, and 
 we know how the actor wrote to Churchill the poet, when the 
 latter was meditating the slashing attack, that, associated with 
 Wilkes' s, he delighted to think helped largely to bring Hogarth to 
 his grave. He entreated him to refrain, for he said, speaking of 
 the painter, " He is a great and original genius ; I love him as 
 a man, and reverence him as an artist," which I take to be 
 as fine a panegyric as that afterwards written upon his friend's 
 tombstone. 
 
 Hogarth, it will be remembered, some twenty years earlier, had 
 run away with Sir James Thornhill's only daughter. The knight 
 had contrived to make a considerable fortune, even although, 
 according to Walpole, he received only forty shillings a square 
 yard for painting the cupola of St. Paul's, and twenty-five shillings 
 a yard, for the hall at Blenheim. Angry at first, he rather quickly 
 forgave the young couple, for Hogarth, at the time of his marriage, 
 had just made his mark with " The Harlot's Progress ; " and, with 
 his conversation- groups of small family portraits, was making a 
 competency. Thornhill lived long enough to rejoice in the begin- 
 nings of his son-in-law's fame, to recognize his genius, and to 
 acknowledge that his pretty daughter had not made a bad match, 
 after all. The union proved a very happy one ; Jane made the 
 painter an excellent wife. But her father died fifteen years before 
 they came to Chiswick, where Mrs. Hogarth continued mostly to 
 live after her famous husband's death. He left her his house at 
 Chiswick, and all his other property, consisting chiefly of his 
 engraved copper-plates. One is glad to know that, by a special 
 Act of Parliament, the copyright of these was secured to her for a 
 considerable number of years, and that, when the sale of the prints 
 gradually decreased, the Royal Academy, at the instance of the 
 
 232 
 
8 
 
 I 
 
 oo 
 b 
 
 
 
 
,; z f i f'i'*** "* ? **"* '* v 
 
HOGARTH HOUSE, GHISWIGK 
 
 King, had bestowed upon her a pension of forty pounds. She 
 could not have been at all wealthy, and the carriage was probably 
 soon given up ; but she kept up her dignity, and, accompanied by 
 a relation, who was probably Mary Lewis, to whom she leCt her 
 property, she was long wheeled to the parish church in a bath-chair, 
 attended by her grey-headed man-servant Samuel, who walked 
 before her carrying her books up the aisle. Sir Richard Phillips 
 had vivid recollections of seeing her on these occasions ; he was a 
 boy at the time, but recalls the stately air with which, carrying a 
 cane, she sailed up the church in her silken sacque, high head-dress, 
 and black whaleboned hood, being locked in her pew by her 
 dependant. 
 
 Living as they did for the greater part of their lives, in the city, 
 the attraction that drew Hogarth and his wife to Chiswick was 
 probably the garden, which in their day, according to Mary Lewis, 
 44 Was laid out in good style." It was then in the midst of fields ; 
 it is now nearly built up by small, shabby houses and fifth-rate 
 streets. Factories, steam laundries, and large board-schools, turn- 
 ing out daily hundreds of noisy children, steam-whistles and 
 buzzards, screaming out the hour for the factory hands to assemble 
 or disperse, the cries of the cats'-meat man, and of costermongers 
 many of these unintelligible to the uninitiated ear, disturb the 
 otherwise sunny silence of the place, and have destroyed the peace 
 that must have reigned there two hundred and fifty years ago. 
 
 Thanks to the public-spiritedness and munificence of Lieutenant- 
 Colonel Shipway, of Chiswick, who in 1902 purchased the house 
 and garden, and presented them to the Middlesex County Council 
 in trust for the nation the place where the most individual and 
 original of British artists, and one of the most distinguished of 
 moralists and teachers, spent his summers, is saved from actual 
 desecration. The slums can no farther encroach upon the sacred 
 privacy of the former haunts of genius. So far as is possible, the 
 garden is still " laid out in good style." The beautiful old brick 
 wall to the left of my picture, is high enough to shut out the ugly 
 street on its outer side, and the old vine still clings to it in places. 
 The Filbert Walk, of which one reads, has gone, but the path 
 remains, lined by plane trees which lend a grateful shade in what 
 Carlyle called the " July blazes." Hogarth's country studio, at 
 its lower end, has been absorbed in the surrounding buildings ; 
 
 233 
 
GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 
 
 it has been turned into a stable or a warehouse ; and, sighing, 
 one exclaims, " What sacrilege ! 5: 
 
 No trace exists of the gravestone of the bullfinch " Dick," on 
 which he roughly etched its name and epitaph with a nail ; nor yet 
 of the tomb of Pompey, the dog ; but the famous mulberry tree, 
 beneath which tradition says he feasted the country children with 
 luscious fruit, survives, or did so a year ago. It occupies a 
 subordinate place in the centre of my drawing, and is partly hidden 
 by the intervening trees. 
 
 The level of the garden is below the roadway, and when the heavy 
 old gate, or door, in the wall to the left, is opened, we see a well-kept 
 acre, gay in spring-time with daffodils and yellow wallflowers. In 
 the sequence of the seasons, these are followed in May by irises and 
 pansies, and a month later the air is heavily scented with the 
 fragrance of a magnificent snowy syringa. This is the signal for 
 the garden to don its summer dress, a lavish mantle of scarlet 
 geraniums, beautiful in themselves, but somewhat out of keeping 
 with the memories the place enshrines. 
 
 It is a peaceful, retired spot, an oasis in a dreary wilderness of 
 dingy brick, and shabby stucco. In respect of its situation among 
 houses, it is not unlike the Chelsea Physic Garden described in 
 another chapter ; but the surroundings of the old botanic garden 
 are fashionable, and speak of prosperity, while on three sides it is 
 overlooked ; the environment of Hogarth's garden, on the contrary, 
 though not exactly squalid, is dreary, ugly, and vulgar ; and if 
 poverty is not actually present, its spectre seems to hang over it 
 and point at it a threatening finger ; but from without nothing of 
 the garden is visible, and but little of the house occupying an 
 angle of it. 
 
 During the not inconsiderable time that I was going backwards 
 and forwards to and from Hogarth House, the place was nearly 
 deserted. It is open to the public on Mondays, Wednesdays, and 
 Fridays, at the modest charge of sixpence ; yet not more than half 
 a score of visitors came near it, and the caretaker's office is a 
 sinecure. Is this because interest in the work of this unique 
 artist has waned ? that his art itself is discredited ? Or is it that 
 few have the courage to make the unpleasing pilgrimage to his 
 shrine, through the grey back-lanes of Chiswick, for they are green 
 lanes no longer ? To such I would say, " The game is worth the 
 
 234 
 
HOGARTH HOUSE, CHISWIGK 
 
 candle," the Mecca to be reached is worth the pilgrimage, part 
 of which may be made by way of the river-side, and picturesque 
 Mall. 
 
 It is to be feared, however, that lack of interest, due to changed 
 views of the mission of art, or, rather, to the circumstance that 
 nowadays many people deny art's claim to a mission at all, has 
 much to do with the defection of the pilgrims. 
 
 The art critic of to-day looks askance at every modern picture 
 with a story. He often writes, openly or anonymously, in half 
 a dozen papers, varying his words but not his views, and thus 
 disseminates these among a wide public ; and so great is the power 
 of the Pre s, that by a light word he can make or mar a reputation. 
 The reputation of Hogarth is of course unassailable ; it has stood 
 the test of changing taste and fashion, but it can be temporarily 
 lowered, and eclipsed. 
 
 For when the public is told that a painting with a story or a 
 message is to be despised, however admirable its technique ; that 
 an appeal to the intellect, or the emotions, is commonplace ; that 
 ' the painter is not to think, but to see, and record exactly what he 
 sees ; " when, on the other hand, the Post Impressionist claims 
 that an entire philosophy lies hidden in his unattractive perform- 
 ances ; when the Futurist asserts that the truth is veiled in certain 
 rhythmic scratches and blotches, of which the purport is too recon- 
 dite for the ordinary intelligence to grasp ; when, trusting to 
 native cleverness and facility, there are some, who, though they 
 profess to follow the great French Impressionists, yet neglect the 
 patient methods by which they arrived at breadth and brilliancy, 
 and offer merely dashing sketches as finished pictures ; when, in 
 an era of self-advertisement and wanton violation of the honoured 
 canons of art, strange, unwholesome productions from abroad 
 astonish the land of Turner and Reynolds, and are admired by 
 some it is surely wonderful that Hogarth should receive any 
 recognition at all ! For he is the prince of story-tellers ; his art 
 is all story, it is literary from beginning to end. Of him William 
 Sharp says : " Into the darkest work the artist has put meaning, 
 and there is instruction and sarcasm in all that he has introduced." 
 Therefore, whenever he duly subordinates details, and lets them 
 simply unfold themselves to the observer, bit by bit, without disturb- 
 ing the unity of the whole, is his picture any the worse ? 
 
 235 
 
GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 
 
 Nay, is it not all the better for making an appeal to the faculties 
 and nobler emotions of man ? 
 
 It is true that a picture may satisfy the requirements of Art 
 without any such direct appeal ; that a work of art should first 
 attract attention on its aesthetic merits, and not as a study of men 
 and manners. The story, if there be any, should be of secondary 
 importance, otherwise it were better told in words than in print. 
 For Art is not to be the mere handmaiden of Literature ; such a 
 position would derogate from her dignity. However, she is safe- 
 guarded by the needs of the case, because without high technical 
 excellence, the artist cannot reach the heart and intellect of the 
 spectator, and it is obvious that the finer the technique, the more 
 forcibly will the thought, and lesson, be conveyed. 
 
 Hogarth lies in Chiswick Churchyard. Most people know the 
 spot, and the heavy-railed, eighteenth- century tomb raised by his 
 friends to his memory. 
 
 Even those who have never visited Chiswick are familiar with 
 Garrick's epitaph thereon inscribed : 
 
 " Farewell, great painter of mankind, 
 
 Who reached the noblest point of art, 
 Whose pictured morals charm the mind 
 And through the eye correct the heart. 
 
 " If genius fire thee, Reader, stay ; 
 
 If Nature touch thee drop a tear ; 
 If neither move thee turn away, 
 
 For Hogarth's honoured dust lies here." 
 
 James McNeill Whistler, the stranger from across the Atlantic, 
 who made his home with us, and William Hogarth, so sturdily 
 British, whose work, or some of it, Whistler nevertheless greatly 
 admired, types as they are of opposing principles and aims in 
 Art, lie interred in the same graveyard. There are many mansions 
 in the Heaven of Art ; let those who so mercilessly abuse the 
 dissenters from their own narrow creeds, remember this ; and that 
 the apostle of breadth and mystery, with no story to tell beyond 
 the beauty of the vague and suggestive, and the great teacher and 
 humorist who felt no detail to be unworthy of his brush if it 
 accentuated, in language artistically worthy, the force of the human 
 dramas he presented, has each in that heaven his appropriate place. 
 Who will be bold enough to say that we could have spared either ? 
 
 236 
 
CHAPTER XI 
 
 THE GROVE, HIGHGATE, AND SAMUEL TAYLOR 
 
 COLERIDGE 
 
 IF the history of William Hogarth, as we have just seen, was 
 uneventful, and, except in the episode of his run-away 
 marriage, entirely devoid of romance, the illustrious poet and 
 philosopher, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who was born eight years 
 after the death of the great English painter of men and manners, 
 crowded as much of adventure and poignant emotion as was 
 possible into sixty-two years of a life mainly devoted to sedentary 
 pursuits. 
 
 For the benefit of those who may have forgotten, I would recall 
 that the author of " Christabel " and " The Ancient Mariner," 
 was the youngest son of the Vicar and schoolmaster of St. Mary 
 Ottery, a village in Devonshire, that boasted a grammar school 
 at which, under his parent's eye, the future poet received the 
 rudiments of his education. His father dying when he was about 
 nine years old, Samuel was presented to a scholarship at Christ's 
 Hospital, spending some eight years of his life there, and he rarely 
 visited his native place after he had left it. 
 
 " He was transplanted," says he himself, " before his soul had 
 fixed its first domestic loves," and his filial and fraternal feelings 
 do not appear to have been very strong. He seems, however, to 
 have retained an admiring recollection of the rural beauty of his 
 early home, for the sensitive boy spent much of his spare time 
 lying on the leads of the School House of Christ's Hospital, gazing 
 at the sky and dreaming of the scenes of his childhood. 
 
 He tells us that " he never closed his eyes in the sun without 
 seeing afresh the waters of the Otter and its willowy banks, the 
 
 237 
 
GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 
 
 plank that crossed it, and the sands of varied tint that lay in its 
 bed." In another place he recalls his daylight vision of the old 
 church tower of St. Mary Ottery " The bells of which haunted him 
 even under the preceptor's stern gaze, when his eyes were fixed in 
 mock study on his swimming books." This being so, we can well 
 believe him when he says that he " never thought as a child, never 
 had the language of a child." 
 
 In his "Table Talk," Coleridge, in later years, describes the iron 
 discipline at Christ's Hospital in those days as being, indeed, " ultra 
 spartan" ; all thoughts of home were to be banished. " Boy," he 
 remembered the head master saying to him once when he was crying, 
 the first day of his return after the holidays, " Boy, the school 
 is your father, Boy, the school is your mother ! Boy, the school 
 is your brother ! the school is your sister, the school is your first 
 cousin and your second cousin, and all the rest of your relations. 
 Let's have no more crying ! '' The head-master's severity, also 
 the excellence of his teaching, is recorded by Coleridge's school- 
 fellow and lifelong friend, Charles Lamb, his junior by some three 
 years, and himself a sizar at Christ's ; he recalls in the " Essays of 
 Elia " how " the walls of the old Grey Friars re-echoed to the 
 accents of the inspired charity boy," who even then read Virgil 
 for amusement. 
 
 On monthly holidays the scholars were turned adrift for a day 
 those who had friends in London seeking them out, while those who 
 had not, wandered about the streets till it was time to return. 
 On one such occasion Coleridge, swimming in the New River in his 
 clothes, caught jaundice and rheumatic fever, to the deleterious 
 effects of which may be traced much of the trouble of later life. 
 
 Another time he made the acquaintance of a shoe-maker and his 
 wife, whose kindness to the friendless lad resulted in his announcing 
 his determination to make shoe-making his trade, instead of 
 entering the Church, for which, in common with most of the scholars 
 of Christ's Hospital, he was being prepared. Asked his reason, he 
 boldly declared that he was an " infidel," whereupon the head 
 master, sensible but severe, birched him. " So, sirrah, you are an 
 infidel, are you ? Then I'll flog your infidelity out of you ! " 
 
 Sent to Cambridge, Samuel left it without the knowledge of the 
 authorities, and escaping to London, spent a night on a doorstep 
 in Chancery Lane, and next day enlisted in a regiment of dragoons, 
 
 238 
 
THE GROVE, HIGHGATE 
 
 under the assumed name of " Silas Comberbach." As might 
 have been expected, he made a very indifferent dragoon, but his 
 excellent conversational powers made him popular with his com- 
 rades ; he nursed the sick in the hospital, and told admirable 
 stories to the men ; but at the end of four months he betrayed him- 
 self by a Latin legend which he wrote on the wall, stating that 
 " he is doubly wretched who had never once been happy." This 
 attracting attention, he became orderly to an officer, and one day, 
 walking behind him in the street, a Cambridge student recognized 
 Coleridge, and the upshot was that his friends procured his dis- 
 charge from the army, and he was sent back to complete his term 
 at the University, but he left it without taking a degree. 
 
 He formed a scheme, in common with Southey and some others, 
 to emigrate to America, and found a colony started on entirely new 
 principles on the banks of the Susquehanna. It failed because the 
 would-be emigrants had not the wherewithal to pay their passages. 
 Coleridge was bitterly disappointed. 
 
 He was only twenty-three when he married the eldest Miss 
 Fricker, of Bristol, one of whose sisters shortly after became Mrs. 
 Southey. The poet and his young wife settled at Clevedon on the 
 Bristol Channel, in a pretty one-storied cottage, with whitewashed 
 parlour walls, and roses peeping in at the casement, that they rented 
 at five pounds per annum. They soon after removed to Nether 
 Stowey, and Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy came to Alfoxden, 
 distant a mile and a half, to be near them. 
 
 Coleridge's appearance at this time is described by Dorothy 
 14 thin and pale, the lower part of the face not good, wide mouth, 
 thick lips, not very good teeth, longish, loose, half-curling, rough, 
 brown hair." 
 
 There is nothing in the annals of literature more remarkable 
 than the beautiful and lifelong friendship of Coleridge and Words- 
 worth, founded on mutual attraction and instinctive sympathy, 
 and cemented by a profound appreciation of each other's gifts. 
 
 It is doubtful whether Wordsworth's most human lyrics, not 
 to speak of his longer poems, would ever have been published, or 
 even written at all, but for the enthusiastic encouragement given 
 by his friend, at a moment of early and acute disappointment. 
 On the other hand, it was at Watchet, on the Bristol Channel, that 
 the idea of the " Rime of the Ancient Mariner " was developed ; 
 
 239 
 
GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 
 
 Wordsworth suggesting the shooting of the albatross as the central 
 thought and turning-point of the wonderful story. They emulated, 
 criticized, and inspired each other, taking each his individual line, 
 his own view of the powers and province of poetry. From this 
 time forth Coleridge was to concern himself with the supernatural 
 and the mystical, Wordsworth to be the exponent of the wonder 
 and the beauty underlying even common things in life and nature. 
 The subsequent events of Coleridge's life are well known. 
 Having to support a growing family, he began to lecture on religion 
 and politics at Bristol, and there he published his first volume of 
 poems in 1796. To start a periodical called The Watchman, that 
 only survived two months, he toured the country, canvassing for 
 subscribers. He preached in several Unitarian pulpits, and was 
 about, half-heartedly, to enter the Unitarian ministry, when the 
 brothers Wedgwood (foreseeing the loss to the world of a poetical 
 genius), by a beneficent arrangement, stepped in and rendered 
 the sacrifice unnecessary. In 1798 he travelled in Germany with 
 the Wordsworths ; there, in the Hartz Mountains, though ill- 
 dressed and slovenly, he was the very life of the party, rhyming 
 and poetizing, singing and joking, and " discoursing in eloquent 
 monologue, as was his wont, on every subject from the captivity 
 of nations to the Millennium."- He then left his friends, and spent 
 eight or nine months in Germany, making himself master of the 
 language, attending lectures, and, in a period of great intellectual 
 activity and excitement, accepting for the time being many of 
 the dogmas and theories held by German philosophers and thinkers. 
 In 1800 he left London and settled in the Lake district, sharing 
 Greta Hall with Southey. A cold that he caught on the occasion 
 of a tour in Scotland with the Wordsworths, resulted, on his return, 
 in a long and severe illness, during which, to assuage pain, he first 
 fell into the terrible opium habit that wrecked his after life. 
 Cursing his weakness, and fleeing, as it were, from himself, he now 
 again -went abroad. For nearly a year he acted as secretary to 
 the Governor of Malta ; he stayed seven or eight months in Italy, 
 and during the whole of that period he never communicated with 
 his family at the Lakes. Back in England again, he was offered 
 shares in two newspapers, and could have made two thousand a 
 year ; but he refused, declaring that he wouldn't give up the 
 country and the leisurely reading of old folios for " two thousand 
 
 240 
 
THE GROVE, HIGHGATE 
 
 times two thousand," and that beyond three hundred and fifty 
 pounds a year, he held money to be an evil. Finally, at forty-two, 
 a broken and aged man, a slave to a vice which he felt that he 
 himself was too infirm of purpose to overcome, he voluntarily put 
 himself under the care of Dr. James Gillman, of Highgate, who 
 ultimately effected a cure. All this is well known to the world 
 at large. 
 
 Dr. Gillman, in two volumes, of which the first alone has been 
 published, has left an interesting account of the great poet's advent 
 at the Grove, Highgate, and how he came to fix upon his house 
 as his home. 
 
 A physician wrote to him, suggesting that he should under- 
 take the professional charge of a distinguished literary man who 
 was the victim of an unfortunate habit, but was so eager to cure 
 it that he was willing to submit to any regimen, however severe. 
 " As he is desirous of retirement and a garden," he wrote, " I 
 could think of no one so readily as yourself." 
 
 Thus the garden, the same beautiful garden shown in the drawing, 
 was the determining factor which took the author of " Christabel '* 
 to the place where he lived for twenty years. 
 
 Dr. Adams, who made the proposal, was to drive Coleridge 
 
 to the Grove the following evening but in the end he came alone. 
 
 ' An old gentleman of more than ordinary acquirements," says 
 
 Dr. Gillman, was sitting by the fireside when Coleridge was 
 
 announced. 
 
 Anyone who knows the pleasant, old-fashioned drawing-room 
 at the Grove even as it is to-day, will readily reconstruct 
 the scene. It is a long, quaint room with several windows, 
 opening on to a verandah overlooking the garden, where 
 crocuses and a " cloud of golden daffodils "the flowers beloved 
 of Wordsworth would in daylight have been in evidence ; but 
 night was closing down the maid had shut the shutters, and 
 drawn the curtains. As it was the 9th of April, there was a 
 fire in the grate ; and wax tapers glimmered on the high mantel- 
 shelf, and on the centre-table, shedding a soft light over the 
 apartment. 
 
 Dr. Gillman, a dignified, benevolent-looking man in his prime, 
 rose up when the guest was announced ; his wife a pretty 
 woman, fair-haired and blue-eyed, as her grandson has described 
 
 241 16 
 
GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 
 
 her in the memoirs of his family wearing the lace cap that in 
 those days even the youngest matron wore dropped her work, 
 and came forward to receive him. So great was the poet's tact 
 and savoir-faire that there seems to have been neither constraint 
 nor awkwardness on either side. They met as old friends rather 
 than as strangers ; Dr. Gillman says, " Coleridge took his seat ; 
 his manner, his appearance, and above all, his conversation, were 
 captivating ; we listened with delight." So much at ease were 
 hosts and guests, that, on the first pause, the visitor before men- 
 tioned, who had not been there long, rose to go, under the im- 
 pression that he was witnessing the reunion of long-parted friends. 
 
 Such a successful meeting between total strangers with none 
 present to introduce them and bring forward topics of common 
 interest would even under ordinary circumstances, speak well 
 for the native courtesy of the hosts, and the utter freedom from 
 self-consciousness of the newcomer : it was nothing less than 
 wonderful when we remember what were the actual conditions 
 under which it took place, and the deep emotions that (under- 
 lying their calm exterior) must have been stirring in the breasts 
 of at least two of the actors in the silently-tragical drama : but 
 the poet had come in his life to the parting of the ways, had made 
 a stern and heroic resolve ; and the physician was a man of subtle 
 sympathy and insight. He beheld in his new patient a dis- 
 appointed and saddened man of genius ; whose magnificent 
 poetry and prose works, had met with small success ; who, conscious 
 of his own powers paralysed as they were by slavery to the drug 
 after receiving an unprofessional and cruel opinion warning 
 him that to discontinue it would be fatal, yet at the same time 
 telling him the consequences of persistence in its use had braced 
 himself to come to him to cure him. 
 
 In a pathetic letter written next day, Coleridge urges the doctor 
 to watch him closely, for though he could not bring himself to 
 speak an untruth, he might be tempted to act one. " Not sixty 
 hours," he said, " have yet passed without my taking laudanum 
 . . . for the first week I shall not, must not, be permitted to 
 leave your house unless with you. Delicately or indelicately, this 
 must be done, and both the servants and assistants must receive 
 absolute command from you. The stimulus of conversation 
 suspends the terror that haunts my mind, but when I am alone, 
 
 242 
 
THE GROVE, HIGHGATE 
 
 the horrors I have suffered from laudanum, the degradation, the 
 blighted utility, almost overwhelm me. If, as I feel for the first 
 time ... I should leave you restored to my moral and bodily 
 health, it is not myself only that will love and honour you ; every 
 friend I have (and thank God ! in spite of this wretched vice, I 
 have many and warm ones who were friends of my youth, and 
 have never deserted me) will thank you with reverence." 
 
 One is reluetant to bring this touching letter, well known as it 
 is to the eyes of any who may never, as yet, have read it. For 
 instinctively we feel that the writer would have shrunk from 
 such publicity : but the hero belongs to posterity, and posterity 
 claims the right to know all about him even to the smallest detail 
 of his appearance : whether he wore his hair long or short and 
 whether the buttons of his coat were black or brown and he 
 pays heavily for his posthumous honours in the blazoning forth 
 in exaggerated form for the special behoof of a scandal-loving 
 world, of all his failings and peccadilloes. Therefore, if in the 
 house of genius, as in the case of Thomas Carlyle, with whom 
 my next chapter is concerned there should be a certain cup- 
 board, that, according to report, conceals a ghastly skeleton- 
 it is just" as well that it should at last be unlocked ; because, ten 
 chances to one, as in the Chelsea house, when we let in the air 
 and the light, and the cobwebs are all swept away, it will be found 
 to contain nothing more damning than a bundle of old letters- 
 breathing of love and regret, of longing, and of exaggerated self- 
 blame ; all of which appear in the epistle in which the suffering 
 Coleridge appeals to the physician for help and rescue ; and to which 
 Dr. Gillman appends a footnote : " Vice is too strong an expression. 
 It was not idleness or sensuous indulgence that led Coleridge to 
 contract this habit. No ! it was latent disease." 
 
 The Lancet, commenting on Coleridge after the autopsy which 
 followed his death, remarked " that this intellectual giant suffered 
 more than the world was aware of, and it can be understood that 
 his indolence as well as his opium habit had a physical basis. It 
 can only add to the marvel with which his achievements are justly 
 regarded, that one so physically disabled, should have made 
 such extensive and profound contributions to philosophy and 
 literature. It is one more instance of the triumphs of mind 
 over body." 
 
 243 16* 
 
GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 
 
 The heights of Hampstead, now easily reached by the Under- 
 ground Railway, have been invaded by the builder, and although 
 some quiet corners remain that are deliciously old-world, the 
 place is fast losing its former charming air of dignified seclusion. 
 But Highgate, twin sister to Hampstead, also seated aloft above 
 the stir and hum of London City, has been hitherto greatly pro- 
 tected by the exceeding steepness of her hill, and even now, when 
 the all- conquering electric tram ventures to climb the gradient 
 the place retains something of the character of a rural hamlet. 
 
 Of its rustic beauty over a century ago, when Coleridge went 
 to live at the Grove, it is possible still to form some conception 
 if one stands on the summit of the hill on a clear evening in 
 summer, at the moment when the westering sun behind casts 
 one's own long shadow in front. A violet mistiness is beginning 
 to creep up the lower slopes of the incline, veiling in kindly 
 mystery, the sordid streets at its foot ; but, looking beyond and 
 above it, one catches a glorified glimpse of London when no heavy 
 pall of smoke overhangs it, and when the distant and familiar 
 landmarks are bathed in suffused and golden light. 
 
 Some of Highgate' s former architectural dignity lingers in the 
 comfortable Queen Anne Terrace to the left, and in the fed brick 
 front of Cromwell House lower down, its rows of windows all afire 
 with the reflection from the sky ; and one can still look past the 
 clustering roofs of S. Joseph's to the ancient buttressed wall of 
 Willoughby Park once a residence of Nell Gwynne, over which 
 one gets a glimpse of a tall, picturesque dovecot among the 
 embowering trees. 
 
 Many and many a time has the author of " Christabel " stood 
 on the same spot, at the same time of day and season looking 
 down upon a changed London arrested by its beauty. 
 
 For in this magical light all things are transfigured, and it is 
 a new heaven and a new earth one looks upon verily a new 
 revelation of the utter peace and loveliness of Nature the Divine. 
 Distance lends enchantment ; the outlines of the ugliest buildings 
 are lost in the amber haze. The hum of the great city reaches 
 us but faintly from afar, like the heart-beats of humanity throbbing 
 in unison. That flat, grey-blue plain of houses, that, far as the 
 eye can reach, is London, seems almost to be a " no man's land," 
 so silently it sleeps in the evening sunshine ; but by and by, a 
 
 244 
 
THE GROVE, HIGHGATE 
 
 familiar dome or spire will detach itself, and as one gazes, there 
 are various signs significant of life. Yonder thin column of smoke 
 against the warm sky, rises straight up in the windless air from the 
 slender shaft of a factory chimney while nearer the horizon, a 
 white moving streak follows the track of a railway, and the scream 
 of a locomotive is faintly heard all telling of the near neighbour- 
 hood of working, enjoying, spending, suffering man. 
 
 In Coleridge's day, the outlook was wider, for there were far 
 fewer buildings to obstruct it, and the cloud of smoke that except 
 on such clear days as that just described, often hides the prospect 
 now was then comparatively light. The denizen of London 
 nowadays, must choose his hour to see it but it is well worth while 
 to do so ; and my Highgate drawing will for ever be associated 
 in my mind with that glimpse of glorified London so often vouch- 
 safed to me on my homeward way. There was no monotony ; 
 sometimes rolling cumulus clouds ahead (piled snow-white on 
 each other) caught and reflected the glow from the sunset ; or if 
 fleecy cirri were about, they too caught it, and dyed the heavens 
 to the zenith with rippling waves of rose-red. But always the 
 glory was short-lived the shadows crept up higher and descended 
 the spell of enchantment holding me on the hill-top, was broken, 
 and everything was grey, and cold, and matter-of-fact, when at 
 length I reached the neighbourhood of the '* Archway," with its 
 mundane noise and bustle, and entered the nether regions of the 
 Hampstead and Highgate tube station. 
 
 The general features of the Grove the name given to a row of 
 large, comfortable-looking and dignified houses early Georgian 
 or older standing in an old world corner of Highgate a little off 
 the main road from London remain much as they were in the 
 days when Dr. James Gillman resided at No. 3 had a large and 
 lucrative practice, and had attracted some attention among his 
 professional brethren by the publication of a pamphlet on hydro- 
 phobia. They speak now, as they did then, of the refinement and 
 taste of well-to-do inhabitants. 
 
 They were built when large cellar- kitchens were universal, 
 and when hot and cold water laid on, were unheard-of luxuries. 
 No doubt, added to the charm of a romantic situation, they have 
 now domestic conveniences of which our forefathers knew nothing. 
 They face east and west, and the old-fashioned, green-shuttered 
 
 245 
 
GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 
 
 windows in the rear of No. 3, command a glorious prospect, for 
 they look right across the " Nightingale Valley," over Lord Mans- 
 field's Park, to the sunsets, while in the early days of the nine- 
 teenth century, there must have been a magnificent view from the 
 front of the house also. 
 
 Coleridge came to the Grove in 1813. An acquaintance that 
 we have seen so auspiciously begun, ripened daily throughout 
 the years of his residence at Highgate ; and the friendship thus 
 felicitously formed, only ended with his death in 1834. 
 
 " Here on the brow of Highgate Hill," wrote Carlyle, " he sat 
 looking down on London, and its smoke and tumult, like a sage 
 escaped from the 'inanity of life's battles, and attracting the 
 thoughts of innumerable brave souls still engaged there a heavy- 
 laden, high aspiring, surely much suffering man." 
 
 Among the poet's ardent admirers and disciples, Carlyle himself, 
 then newly come to London, cannot be classed but the picturesque 
 sidelights that he throws upon this period of Coleridge's life are 
 invaluable ; and it is interesting to contrast his description of his 
 personal appearance in his last days, when prematurely aged, 
 with that by Dorothy Wordsworth of the poet in his youth, before 
 quoted : ' l A good man," he says, " he was now getting old and 
 gave you the idea of a life full of suffering ; a life heavy laden, 
 half vanquished, still swimming painfully in seas of manifold 
 physical and other bewilderment. Brow and head were round 
 and of massive weight, but the face was flabby, irresolute. The 
 deep eyes, of a light hazel, were as full of sorrow as of inspiration, 
 compressed pain looked mildly from them, as in a kind of mild 
 astonishment ; the whole figure and air good and amiable, other- 
 wise might be called flabby, irresolute ; expressive of weakness 
 under possibility of strength. He hung loosely on his limbs, 
 with knees bent and stooping attitude ; in walking, he rather 
 shuffled than decisively stepped ; and a lady .once remarked he 
 could never fix which side of the garden walk would suit him 
 best, but continually shifted corkscrew fashion, and kept trying 
 both." 
 
 Truly doctors differ, and it is amusing to find that Emerson 
 saw in Coleridge " a short, thick old man, with bright blue eyes 
 and fine, clear complexion who took snuff freely, which presently 
 soiled his clothes and neat black suit." Harriet Martineau, 
 
 246 
 
THE GROVE, HIGHGATE 
 
 visiting the Grove in 1832, says in her autobiography, " He looked 
 old with his rounded shoulders, and drooping head, and excessively 
 thin limbs. His eyes were as wonderful as they were reported, 
 light grey and extremely prominent and actually glittering." Was 
 this a subconscious mental comparison of the creator with the 
 creation ? of Coleridge himself with the ancient mariner who 
 with his " long grey beard and glittering eye " willed men 
 involuntarily to halt and listen ? 
 
 Others besides Carlyle have left on record Coleridge's peculiar 
 gait. Hazlitt remarked it long before the opium habit began. 
 In his later days at Highgate, his rough, black locks turned white, 
 his figure bent, " dressed all in black as he moved about the house 
 and garden," writes Alex. Gillman, " he might have been taken for 
 a clergyman ; he shared his breakfast with the birds, and his 
 knowledge with his friends." Among these friends he did not 
 always discriminate ; he sometimes wasted his conversational 
 powers, which were never greater than at this period of his life ; 
 and he often cast his pearls of wisdom before the young, or those 
 otherwise unfitted to appreciate them. 
 
 One who bore witness to this was Lord Hatherley, then Mr. 
 William Page Wood ; who was a frequent visitor at the house of 
 Basil Montague, scholar and barrister of Bedford Square. 
 Thursday was the only day when Mr. and Mrs. Montague did 
 not receive that evening being always reserved for the Grove 
 whither the future Lord Chancellor frequently accompanied 
 them. He says that Coleridge " poured out all the riches of his 
 prodigious memory, and all the poetry of his brilliant imagination 
 to every listener. I was not only addressed myself, but I heard 
 the whole of the poet-philosopher's favourite system of Polarites, 
 the Thesis, the Menothesis, and Antithesis showered down on a 
 young lady of seventeen, with as much unction as he afterwards 
 expounded it to Edward Irving." 
 
 Gillman's son, when a schoolboy, once asked him for help in 
 a school exercise, but never did so again, as the sage gave him a 
 lecture an hour long on the profoundest principles of the subject, 
 beginning with our first parents ! 
 
 Audiences of older people, however, generally hung entranced 
 upon his words. Dr. Dibdin met him at a dinner-party " where 
 the orator rolled himself up as it were, in his chair," and talked 
 
 247 
 
GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 
 
 for nearly two hours, and where " there seemed to be no dish 
 like Coleridge's conversation to feed upon," the company listen- 
 ing in wonder and delight ; " he thought a second Johnson had 
 visited the earth to make wise the sons of men," and wished he 
 himself could have been his Bos well. But, as is remarked in the 
 preface to Coleridge's " Table Talk," " Johnson talked with his 
 companions, Coleridge talked to them." He monopolized the 
 conversation and Carlyle (himself an astonishing conversation- 
 alist), who did much the same, said that Coleridge's voice, naturally 
 soft and good, had contracted itself into a plaintive snuffle 
 and sing-song ... he spoke as if preaching you would have 
 said preaching earnestly and almost hopelessly, the weightiest 
 things. . . ." 
 
 " I think, Charles," said Coleridge once to his old school-fellow 
 Lamb, referring to the days when he so nearly became a Unitarian 
 preacher, " you never heard me preach ? " 
 
 " My dear boy," replied Lamb, " I never heard you do anything 
 else ! " 
 
 A more sympathetic report of Coleridge's conversational gifts 
 is that of Justice Talfourd. " Who that has ever heard him can 
 forget him ? ' he wrote, " his mild benignity, the unbounded 
 variety of his knowledge, the fast-succeeding products of his 
 imagination, the childlike simplicity with which he rises from the 
 driest and commonest theme, into the wildest magnificence of 
 thought, pouring on the soul a strain of beauty and of wisdom to 
 mellow and enrich it for ever." It is a description that forcibly 
 recalls his own lines : 
 
 " And now 'twas like all instruments, 
 
 Now like a lonely flute ; 
 And now it is an angel's song, 
 
 That makes the heavens be mute." 
 
 Even Carlyle could say " no talk in his century or any other 
 could be more surprising." 
 
 Coleridge could more than hold his own on any theme, for the 
 variety and extent of his knowledge were extraordinary, and every 
 topic under the sun brought some inspiration to him. Yet during 
 the Highgate period, his chief interest lay in philosophy and 
 religion, and whatever the starting-point of the conversation, he 
 always led the talk towards those subjects. The man who, study- 
 
 248 
 
THE GROVE, HIGHGATE 
 
 ing Voltaire, when a boy had announced himself to be an infide* 
 who .later steeped himself in German metaphysics, in Pan- 
 theism, and Socinianism and was once on the point of throwing 
 in his lot with the Unitarians now in his declining years severely 
 censured them to Emerson, one of themselves, cared only to 
 reconcile German philosophy with Christian dogmas, and died 
 in the odour of orthodoxy. 
 
 His theological wanderings are explained, for as Emerson says, 
 "" His was a catholic mind with a hunger for ideas, with eyes 
 looking before and again to the highest bards and sages." And 
 in his " Table Talk," Coleridge himself states : "I owe under 
 God, my return to the faith to my having gone much further 
 than the Unitarians, and having come round to the other side." 
 
 Coleridge's flow of speech, readiness, and rapidity of thought, 
 were as remarkable when he lectured, as in conversation. He 
 would not, Dr. Gillman tells us, lecture on any topic that he had 
 specially to get up. Once his readiness was put to a severe test, 
 he had to lecture on the growth of the original mind, " and the 
 subject was only given out to him at the moment before delivery. 
 He turned to Dr. Gillman : "A pretty stiff subject they have 
 chosen for me," and he looked rather startled ; but it was not 
 for long. Arranging with his friend that if the audience seemed 
 bored he was to touch his leg but that if they seemed pleased he 
 was to let him go on for an hour, he began : " The lecture I am 
 about to give you is purely extempore, but I have thought and 
 read much on the' subject. Should you find a nominative case 
 looking out for a verb, or a fatherless verb for a nominative case 
 you must secure it." " This beginning," says Dr. Gillman, " was 
 a sort of mental curvetting," the audience began to smile and 
 it gave him confidence ; and the result was " he was brilliant, 
 eloquent, and logically consecutive." The time sped so swiftly 
 that the hour had passed before Dr. Gillman looked at his watch 
 but Coleridge never knew what gave rise to the singular request 
 that he should lecture on the spur of the moment. 
 
 Coleridge was very happy in his relations with the Gillmans. 
 His grandson, Ernest Hartley Coleridge, says, " There were some 
 chords in his nature that were struck for the first time by these 
 good people. . . . Their patience must have been inexhaustible, 
 their loyalty unimpeachable, their love indestructible." 
 
 249 
 
GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 
 
 But loyalty, patience, and love, were not expended in vain ; 
 there can be no manner of doubt that the patient, ere the close 
 of his life, was cured, and that no opium except to relieve pain 
 ever entered the doctor's house although a report to the contrary 
 was circulated : a boy employed at the Grove was in the habit 
 of making weekly journeys to town to procure drugs for the doctor, 
 and it was asserted that on these occasions he had often brought 
 laudanum for Coleridge, from a chemist's in the Tottenham Court 
 Road. But this was entirely disproved when the same lad, no 
 longer in Dr. Gillman's service and now grown up, was questioned 
 on the point. He stated emphatically that the little packages he 
 used to bring for Mr. Coleridge from London, contained nothing 
 more noxious than the poet's favourite brand of snuff, of which 
 he took large quantities ; and that moreover he had never heard 
 a whisper of his addiction to laudanum. 
 
 Mrs. Gillman was an excellent manager, and what, in view of 
 Coleridge's passion for self-expression, was almost equally im- 
 portant, she was an admirable and patient listener also. She 
 was proud, her grandson tells us, of so distinguished a guest, and 
 welcomed his friends, and those thinkers and searchers after 
 truth, who flocked to the philosopher-poet as to an oracle. Among 
 these were Frederick Denison Maurice, Arthur H. Hallam, and 
 Edward Irving, together with many others who were leaders or 
 followers of the new schools of thought ; and the Grove soon became 
 famous as a centre of intellectual activity. The Wordsworths 
 came when in London, Charles Lamb, whosfc deyotion to the 
 '' inspired charity boy ' : the friend of his youth, knew no bounds 
 dined at the Gillmans' every Sunday, and frequently came on 
 week-day evenings also, returning to town by the coach that 
 then ran from the " Fox and Crown " to Holborn fares for inside 
 passengers 2s., for outside Is. 6d. Mrs. Coleridge spent the Christ- 
 mas of 1822 at the Grove, and ultimately came to live with her 
 daughter Sara, when she married her cousin, and settled at 
 Hampstead. Mrs. Gillman corresponded with Mrs. Coleridge : 
 and we learn that her letters to her husband used to sadden him 
 no doubt the thought of what might have been, and regrets 
 for what he had missed of domestic happiness in the society 
 of his wife and children, were at such times uppermost in the mind 
 of the too-severely self-accusing man. Perhaps these were the 
 
 250 
 
c 
 
 'C 
 
 'O 
 
 Ss 
 
 ^s 
 
 'O 
 
 "O 
 
 fe; 
 
THE GROVE, HIGHGATE 
 
 occasions on which he fled to the garden ; there is a tradition 
 current on the spot, that his favourite haunt was a certain bosky 
 walk between the right-hand wall, and the evergreen oak shown 
 in my drawing. 
 
 The gardens behind the Grove houses vie with each other in 
 charm. They have in common the great beauty of their situation, 
 and some of the larger ones No. 3 is not among these wander 
 down the slopes of the valley which the houses overlook : in the 
 days when land was not at a premium, and labour s was cheap, 
 when everything near London grew easily and well they probably 
 lost themselves on the hillside till they met a neighbouring garden 
 and accepted a boundary wall. Dr. Gillman's garden at the 
 present day does not continue over the crest of the hill if it ever 
 did so, it was no doubt simply as a kitchen-garden. ^ In any case, 
 the existing garden the picture of which was taken at the moment 
 in late afternoon when the sinking sun sent sharp shadows from 
 behind me was probably, then as now, a flower-garden only. It 
 is a long, comparatively narrow strip, set between two' high brick 
 walls. That to the left was not built yesterday : I should say 
 that a portion of it is older than the house itself the house that, 
 once red- brick like its neighbours, was faced with stucco in the 
 time of Dr. Gillman's successor. It was probably he who raised 
 the entire top story to the level of Coleridge's study window, 
 which Dr. Gillman, in order to give his friend and patient un- 
 disturbed quiet and a perfect view had had lifted higher than 
 the rest. In an engraving in " The Gillmans of Highgate," it is 
 shown standing tower-like by itself. In my illustration it is the 
 top window to the extreme right of the picture. But this was 
 not the only change made after Dr. Gillman's death ; the stone 
 steps leading to the garden from the drawing-room, were removed 
 from the centre of the verandah to their present position at the 
 extreme left of it. They are of a venerable age the feet of many 
 distinguished literary men have trodden and worn them down 
 and for twenty summers Coleridge must have used them daily, 
 supporting his hesitating steps by the iron railing. As for the 
 garden itself, as it is to-day, I can only say that of all the gardens, 
 little and large, that I have drawn that of No. 3, the Grove, 
 Highgate, though almost the smallest, is the sunniest and most 
 flowery. There is scarcely an inch of soil between the roots of the 
 
 251 
 
GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 
 
 plants and yet it is not over -crowded and while all sorts of plants 
 seem to do well, it is pre-eminently a rose-garden ; every rose 
 there is a magnificent specimen, and many have taken prizes. 
 There are roses new-fangled, and roses old-fashioned ; and they 
 vary in tint from white and pale-blush, nearly to black. I am not 
 learned in flower-lore and know next to nothing of the nomen- 
 clature of roses, but I learnt from the label attached to it, that 
 the beautiful white rose-bush that appears in the immediate 
 foreground of the drawing, is designated " John Craig." Who 
 that individual was I do not know, but he has given his very 
 matter-of-fact name, to a rose with small green leaves that is 
 picturesque in its manner of growth, as well as lovely in its 
 individual blossoms. 
 
 Mrs. Gillman seems to have been an excellent gardener ; she 
 kept the house bright with geraniums and myrtles these being 
 Coleridge's favourite plants. In a letter to his hostess, written in 
 1827,. the poet says : " The rose is the pride of the summer, the 
 delight and beauty of the garden the eglantine, the honeysuckle 
 and the jasmine, if not so bright and ambrosial, are less transient, 
 creep nearer to us, clothe our walls, twine over our porch, and 
 haply peep in at our chamber window with the crested wren or 
 linnet within." There is much more in the same strain, extolling 
 the virtues of the geranium, singing enthusiastically, in somewhat 
 high-flown and stilted language, the praises of the myrtle. " Oh, 
 precious," he exclaims, " in its sweetness is the rich innocence of 
 its snow-white blossoms," and he points out that when these 
 have fallen, " they survive invisibly in every more than fragrant 
 leaf. As the flashing strain of the nightingale to the yearning 
 murmur of the dove, so the myrtle to the rose ! He who once 
 possessed a prized and genuine myrtle, will rather remember it 
 under the cypress tree than seek to forget it among the roses 
 of a Paradise." Thus does Coleridge rhapsodize over his floral 
 favourites, and Mrs. Gillman no doubt thought it all very fine 
 poetry ; she was very proud of her guest, whose innate love of a 
 garden, had had time to grow, and his taste for flowers to specialize, 
 during the fourteen summers that he had already spent at the 
 Grove. 
 
 That shelter so happily provided, he seldom quitted for long. 
 '' His luxuriant white hair was like a crown of honour," says one 
 
 252 
 
THE GROVE, HIGHGATE 
 
 of his biographers, " and wherever he appeared, whether in the 
 flowery fields, or woods of Highgate, old and young took off their 
 hats." 
 
 Once a year he visited Ramsgate ; and on one occasion during 
 his sojourn with the Gillmans, he went abroad with the Words- 
 worths with Dorothy, and her brother William, his almost life- 
 long friend, who said of him : " The only truly wonderful man 
 I ever met was Coleridge." 
 
 His friends learnt to identify him with the Grove, and Lamb 
 wrote mournfully after his death : " Never saw his likeness, nor 
 probably the world can see it again. I seem to love the house he 
 lived in more passionately than when he lived." 
 
 The house was originally panelled throughout, and though it 
 was modernized sixty years ago, it has still a powder-closet, and a 
 fine carved staircase. It is, therefore, interesting, apart from its 
 association with the author of " Christabel " and " Kubla 
 Khan." And Coleridge loved it, for he went to it intending to 
 stay a few months, he remained over twenty years ! And having 
 in his youth sung of mystic Southerfi seas where 
 
 " The Sun's rim dipped, the stars rushed out, 
 With one stride came the dark," 
 
 throughout his middle -age and premature decline, he must have 
 watched from his window at Highgate, the sun's slow sinking, 
 the afterglow, and stealthy oncoming of night in our Northern 
 land. He was happy at the Grove, and he loved the garden well. 
 
 Writing from Maiden to Mrs. Gillman in July, 1818, he com- 
 pares the fine gardens of a house at which he was a guest, with that 
 at the Grove. 
 
 " To the right, a flower and fruit garden not without kitchenry. 
 To the left a kitchen garden, not without fruit and flowers ; and 
 both a perfect blaze of roses. Yet so capricious is our, at least, my 
 nature, that I feel I do not derive the fifth part of the delights 
 from this miscellany of Flora, flowers at every step, as from the 
 economized glasses and flower-pots at Highgate so tended and 
 worshipped by me, and each the gift of some kind friend or courteous 
 neighbour. I actually make up a flower-pot every night, in order 
 to imitate my Highgate pleasures." 
 
 When at the cost of untold pain and humiliation, Coleridge 
 made his high resolve, at the eleventh hour, to seek to reinstate 
 
 253 
 
his powers, and to save the remnant of his shattered life it was 
 a garden for which the wise physician had expressly stipulated, 
 for he looked to a garden to complete the cure. 
 
 And I am sure that one born later a poet too, though com- 
 paratively unknown but voiced the silent thought of Coleridge 
 when he wrote : 
 
 " A garden is a lovesome thing, 
 God wot, 
 Rose plot, 
 Fringed pool, 
 Ferned Grot, 
 The veriest school 
 Of peace ; and yet the fool 
 
 Contends that God is not 
 Not God ! in gardens, and when 
 
 The eve is cool ? 
 Nay, but I have a sign, 
 'Tis very sure God walks in mine." 
 
 T. E. BROWN. 
 
 254 
 
CHAPTER XII 
 CARLYLE HOUSE, CHELSEA 
 
 SO much has been written and read of the two remarkable 
 people who, for the best part of half a century, were the 
 tenants of No. 5 now 24 Cheyne Row, that there is little 
 that is new and not generally known to record of them. 
 
 It will serve some purpose, however, to collect the existing 
 memoranda of the not inconsiderable part the little garden at the 
 back of the house played in their lives. 
 
 James Anthony Froude has been severely censured for the 
 manner in which, as Carlyle's literary executor and trusted friend, 
 he fulfilled his task. 
 
 Some think he betrayed the confidence reposed in him, but 
 without entering far into that vexed question, we must in fairness 
 remember that, as he tells ,us in his preface to the " Life of Carlyle," 
 the philosopher himself, in reviewing Lockhart's " Life of Scott," 
 had defended Lockhart from a similar charge, insisting that every 
 biographer should be honest, and candid ; because, he says, " to 
 produce not things, but the ghosts of things, can never be the 
 duty of man . . . your true hero is not a white, stainless, imper- 
 sonal ghost-hero," by which he means, of course, that every hero 
 is a man, with human failings as well as virtues, and that it rests 
 with the biographer to give these their proper proportion. I 
 scarcely think that Froude, though sometimes he may have been 
 indiscreet and mistaken in his conclusions, failed, on the whole, 
 to do this, because, speaking for myself, I must say I rose from 
 the perusal of the " Life," and afterwards of " The Letters and 
 Memorials," with a much greater enthusiasm and admiration for 
 
 255 
 
GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 
 
 Carlyle, than I formerly possessed. The ' New Letters and 
 Memorials of Jane Welsh Carlyle " are calculated, as intended, 
 to raise still higher the reader's opinion of Thomas Carlyle ; but 
 I think that, in vindicating the philosopher in his Introduction, 
 Sir James Crichton-Browne is not infrequently unjust to Mrs. 
 Carlyle. " The course of true love never did run smooth," which 
 applies equally to married, and unmarried lovers. These two 
 gifted people were genuinely devoted. Who can read the letters 
 that passed between them to the end of their long, wedded lives, 
 letters never intended for the eye of the public, and doubt it ? 
 But, unluckily for perfect harmony, they were temperamentally 
 too much alike. Both were highly-strung ; victims of a peculiarity 
 of physical and mental organization that influenced their thoughts 
 and actions ; both were emotional, and, unfortunately, equally 
 endowed with hot tempers, as well as mental gifts. Here perhaps 
 the resemblance between them ended, for the character of their 
 mentality, and their outlook, and aspirations, were different. 
 Mrs. Carlyle longed for children and she was childless ; his children 
 were the offspring of his genius. She herself was not without the 
 ambition, and, as her letters show, the capacity, to excel in litera- 
 ture ; yet she generously and cheerfully immolated her talents 
 in that direction on the altar of her husband's genius, " because," 
 says Froude, " she honoured his character, she gloried in his fame, 
 and she was sure of his affection." She was the first to recognize 
 the merit of " The French Revolution," and it is touching, as well 
 as amusing, to find her celebrating its accomplishment by treating 
 him to a bread pudding, of which he remarks, " he consumed it 
 with an appetite got by walking far and wide." 
 
 Although sufficiently capable in business affairs, Carlyle was at 
 heart a mystic. ' The word God," says Froude, " was too awful 
 for common use, and he veiled his feelings in metaphor to avoid 
 it." On the other hand, Mrs. Carlyle was eminently practical ; 
 an excellent and active housekeeper, who, even with the narrow 
 means at her disposal, made light of domestic difficulties that 
 would have appalled most women brought up as she had been, 
 in comparative ease and luxury. No one, we are assured, calling 
 at Cheyne Row in the days of their poverty, could have told 
 whether the Carlyles were rich or poor. The house was well- 
 furnished, the drawing-room even elegant. The little garden at 
 
 256 
 
CARLYLE HOUSE, CHELSEA 
 
 the back was carefully tended, and her own dress was always 
 tasteful. She had been born into a refined home, a home that 
 she was well fitted to adorn, whereas he was a peasant-farmer's 
 son. " But, though unpolished," says Froude, "he was a gentle- 
 man in every fibre, never to be mistaken for anything else." 
 Though he professed to be unsociable, when he went into company, 
 although he might suffer from sleeplessness and indigestion after- 
 wards he received, as well as gave, pleasure, for he was one of the 
 best of living talkers : " Wise, tender, scornful, humorous, as the 
 inclination took him." 
 
 If his dislike to society was a pose, he could drop it when the 
 occasion demanded. As early as 1839, when his mother-in-law, 
 Mrs. Welsh, was staying at Cheyne Row, he, writing to his own 
 mother, good-humouredly describes how " Jane audaciously got 
 up a thing called a soiree one evening ... it really went off in 
 a most successful manner, though at midnight 4 I ' smoked a 
 peaceable pipe, praying it might be long before we saw the like 
 again." 
 
 Mrs. Carlyle was charming, witty, brilliant, but had a hasty 
 temper, and a tongue that could sting. " Do you know, Mrs. 
 Carlyle, you would be vastly more amiable if you were not so 
 damnably clever," said the elder Sterling once to her ; and Carlyle 
 wrote on one occasion : " Thanks, thanks to thee, my good wife 
 though very hot-tempered one." 
 
 But it was a case of " the pot calling the kettle black." His 
 own nervous irritability was excessive ; he was bilious, dyspeptic, 
 a bad sleeper, and acutely, even abnormally, sensitive to sounds. 
 A barking dog, a crowing cock, were his betes noires, and the sound 
 of a piano next door, in his hours of work, drove him nearly dis- 
 tracted. In this respect many of us can sympathize with him, 
 and he certainly seems to have suffered more than his share from 
 this sort of nerve-racking, and unnecessary annoyance ; and 
 though his mother, for whom he cherished the warmest filial affec- 
 tion, described him as " Gi ill to deal wi'," his was no case of chronic 
 bad temper, and in his happier moods he was a most charming 
 companion : but through lack of self-restraint, he was often given 
 to express himself in extravagant language (" London," for example, 
 " was an accursed, dirty, deafening distraction of cockney dom "). 
 Happily his own very keen sense of humour sometimes saved the 
 
 257 17 
 
GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 
 
 situation, and he would stop short in the midst of a torrent of 
 denunciation, and burst out laughing at the absurdity of his own 
 invective. The philosopher who can laugh, particularly at his 
 own expense, is a very human one, and Carlyle himself had once 
 said that " when he called out ' murder,' he was not always killed." 
 
 Mrs. Carlyle herself, if less violently demonstrative, yet both 
 wrote and spoke, as one may say, in italics. Froude, who liked 
 her well, said she was " intense in all things ; " therefore, we may 
 take as the passing jest of a wife proud of her husband, though it 
 was quoted by Froude as tragically significant, her remark to a 
 friend : " My dear, never marry a genius ! " She loved her 
 " genius " truly, and in spite of friction, was his real helpmeet, 
 shielding him to the end of her days from a thousand hindrances 
 to his work and quiet, such as ordinary mortals humbly doing 
 their own bit of unimportant creative work in circumstances 
 equally unfavourable, have to put up with. 
 
 Writing in 1837, she tells him that she " cried over his letter 
 three or four hours. ... I wanted to kiss you into something 
 like cheerfulness," she said, " and the length of the kingdom is 
 between us ; and if it had not been, the probabilities are that, 
 with the best intentions, I should have quarrelled with you rather." 
 But, as Crichton-Browne points out, " it is those who love intensely 
 who are intolerant, and brisk affections are scarcely less apt to 
 clash than quick tempers." 
 
 Carlyle's work was to him as a religion, and as he could not 
 write when anyone was in the room, sometimes he and his wife 
 only met at meals ; and so he temporarily forgot even the woman 
 whom he had set up, as it were, on a pedestal to be worshipped, 
 but worshipped undemonstratively, when she would have much 
 preferred a caress. At other times he was tender, thoughtful, and 
 anxious. He had numerous " sport " names for her " Jeannie," 
 " Jeanikins," his "necessary evil," and others, but "Goody" 
 was the favourite one ; once he speaks of himself as " Good " 
 (" Good," he prettily explains in a footnote, being masculine for 
 '* Goody "). When " Jeannie >: was absent, he seems to have 
 written to her almost daily, long, brilliant letters, very wonderful 
 coming from one whose business was literature, and who must often 
 have been physically weary of the pen; and he was restless and 
 anxious, unless she wrote constantly, and fully, in return. 
 
 258 
 
GARLYLE HOUSE, CHELSEA 
 
 Carlyle's admirable conscientiousness in refusing to use his gifts 
 in support of what he did not thoroughly approve, a line of conduct 
 in which his wife nobly seconded him, kept him poor for many 
 years ; but, through his thrift, and her excellent management, 
 |C the extremity of poverty never came near them." 
 
 ' I mean to write according to my strength," he writes to his 
 brother in 1834. "As to riches, fame, success, and so forth, I 
 ask no questions. Were the work laid out for us but the kneading 
 of a clay brick, let us, in God's name, do it faithfully, and look for 
 our reward elsewhere." He finds no encouragement in the book- 
 selling world, for at this time the author of " Sartor Resartus " 
 was an unpopular person with the reading public. " On July 26, 
 at ' Sunset ' " (an ominous hour), he writes in his journal, " nothing 
 can exceed the gravity of my situation here. ' Do or die ' seems 
 the word ; and, alas ! what to do ? ... no periodical editor 
 wants me ; no man will give me money for my work. Bad health, 
 too . . . despicable fears of coming to absolute beggary, etc., etc., 
 besiege me." But he never entirely despaired, and a month 
 earlier he had written : " Surely as the blue dome of Heaven 
 encircles us all, so does the providence of the Lord of Heaven. He 
 will withhold no good thing from those that love Him ! This, as 
 it was the ancient psalmist's faith, let it likewise be ours. It is 
 the Alpha and Omega, I reckon, of all possessions that can belong 
 to man." 
 
 Sir Leslie Stephen truly says " that Carlyle was too often judged 
 by his defects, and regarded as a selfish and eccentric misanthrope, 
 with flashes of genius, rather than a man with the highest qualities 
 of mind and character, clouded by constitutional infirmities." 
 For alas ! ' The fierce light that beats upon a throne " beats also 
 upon the home of genius, betraying all the little flaws 'and imper- 
 fections that escape remark when they are seen on commoner clay. 
 
 To my mind, therefore, what men have called a tragedy, was 
 no tragedy at all, and the dingy, old house in Cheyne Row, though 
 it saw tragic moments, is coloured rosy- red with romance romance 
 that did not end, as is the way with most fiction, with marriage 
 rejoicings, the union of the Haddington belle with the peasant's 
 son ; but romance that followed them throughout the rough and 
 tumble of their early days in Annandale and Edinburgh, through 
 the struggles, and disappointments, and joys, the growing fame, 
 
 259 17* 
 
GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 
 
 the bereavements and difficulties, the successes and losses, of forty 
 years, each marking, as with a milestone, that difficult road of life 
 down which, for the most part, they walked together, hand in 
 hand. 
 
 Of bereavements and passionate grief, the old house at Chelsea 
 has seen much. When she lost her mother, and he his. And what 
 an episode was that, what a shock, what a stunning blow, what 
 an irretrievable calamity, must have appeared to them, the acci- 
 dental destruction of the precious manuscript of the first volume 
 of the " French Revolution " ! A work of art, be it picture, 
 sculpture, or book, once destroyed, cannot be recreated exactly 
 in the same form. The germ of the idea for the book, or the 
 statue ; the design and motive for the painting, may still exist, but 
 its evolution in each case will inevitably be different ; for when 
 once the effort is spent, not all the industry in the world can recall 
 just the mood in which it was begun, or the enthusiasm for 
 creation like unto the enthusiasm of early youth, that, sur- 
 mounting all obstacles, carried us forward to achievement. " It 
 is gone," wrote Carlyle in his journal ; " the whole world, and 
 myself backed by it, could not bring it back ; nay, the old spirit, 
 too, is fled." 
 
 Carlyle's own description in a letter to his wife of Chelsea and 
 Cheyne Row eighty years ago, is interesting reading now : " We 
 are called Cheyne Row (pronounced Chaine Row) and are a genteel 
 neighbourhood ; two old ladies on one side, unknown character 
 on the other, but with ' pianos.' The street is flag-pathed, sunk- 
 storied, iron-railed, all old-fashioned and tightly done up ; looks 
 out on a rank of sturdy old pollarded (that is beheaded) lime trees, 
 standing there like giants. . . . Beyond this a high brick wall ; 
 backwards a garden, the size of our back one at Comely Bank, 
 with trees, etc., in bad culture ; beyond this green hay-fields and 
 tree avenues, once a bishop's pleasure grounds ; an unpicturesque 
 yet rather cheerful outlook." He describes the house in detail, 
 ending up with : '" On the whole a most massive, roomy, sufficient 
 old house, with places, for example, to hang, say, three dozen 
 hats and cloaks on, and as many crevices and queer old presses 
 and shelved closets (all tight, new painted in their way) as would 
 gratify the most covetous Goody rent, thirty-five pounds I 
 confess I am strongly tempted." 
 
 260 
 
3 
 C 
 
 ap 
 
 Qs 
 
 o 
 
GARLYLE HOUSE, CHELSEA 
 
 Chelsea, that he calls " a singular, heterogeneous kind of spot, 
 very dirty and confused in some places, quite beautiful in others," 
 with its memories of Sir Thomas More, Steele, and Smollett, was 
 even more fascinating in pre-embankment days than it is now. 
 Cheyne Walk was at that time a wide highway, with boats lying 
 moored, and a smell of shipping and tar. Up and down the broad 
 river darted myriads of canoes manned by " white-trousered, white- 
 shirted Cockneys," and beyond lay the peaceful villages, and 
 beautiful green undulations of Surrey, " a most artificial, green- 
 painted, and yet lively, fresh, almost opera-looking business," 
 wrote Carlyle ; for though he professed dislike of the avowedly 
 picturesque, he was not insensitive to it, and, fresh from the silence 
 and solitudes of Craigenputtoch, he was clearly attracted ; but 
 he left the decision to his practical wife. " Revolve all this in thy 
 fancy and judgment, my child," he wrote to her, " and see what 
 thou canst make of it." 
 
 The removal to Number Five, " a right old, strong, roomy brick 
 house," took place in the summer of 1834, when the cherries were 
 ripening on the tree in the garden. Carlyle cheerily describes it : 
 " A hackney coach, loaded to the roof and beyond it with luggage 
 and the passengers, tumbled us all down at eleven in the morning. 
 Chico, the canary-bird, struck up his lilt in the very London streets 
 wherever he could see green leaves or feel the free air. There we 
 sat on three trunks. I, however, with a match-box, soon lit a 
 cigar, as Bessy (who pro tern, was acting as maid) did a fire, and 
 thus, with a kind of cheerful solemnity we took possession by 
 raising a reek, and even dined in extempore fashion on a box covered 
 with some accidental towel." 
 
 In the strip of garden at the back of the house, which the drawing 
 shows as it is seen to-day, Carlyle now set to work. Slips of jessa- 
 mine and gooseberry bushes, brought from Scotland, were planted. 
 Mrs. Carlyle tended two tiny leaves plucked from her father's 
 grave, which, " after twelve months in the garden at Chelsea 
 declared itself a gooseberry bush ! " But the old gardener, when 
 asked if it could be got to bear, said, " A poor, wild thing ! No, 
 if you want to have gooseberries, ma'am, better get a proper goose- 
 berry bush in its place ! ' The old Goth ! ' Long, long after, in 
 1863, three little gooseberries appeared on the bush. Great was 
 the exultation. " But, alas ! " she wrote, " whether through too 
 
 261 
 
GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 
 
 much staring at them, or too much east wind, or through mere 
 delicacy . . . the three bits of gooseberries, instead of growing- 
 larger, grew every day less, till they reached the smallness of pin- 
 heads and dropped on the ground ! I could have cried when the 
 last one went ! " She was more fortunate with the ivy that she 
 brought from her mother's house at Templans ivy that still 
 clothes the old brick wall at Cheyne Row, 
 
 I fancy they employed no regular gardener during the years of 
 their poverty. Carlyle himself kept the grass trim and tidy, and 
 in 1837 he writes to John Sterling : " I have done nothing of 
 late but dig earth and rubbish in the little garden so called." 
 
 " The little garden so called " was to Carlyle a refuge " from the 
 irrational, inarticulate spectacle of the streets " ; but he elsewhere 
 says their tumult is becoming to him " a kind of marching music 
 as he walked along, following his own thoughts, undisturbed by it." 
 Gardening, however, was better exercise and recreation for him than 
 walking, insomuch as he could not both think and dig. And he 
 hated London, which he designated as " The Devil's Own with 
 its dirt and noises." 
 
 In an entry in his diary in the dog-days of 1838, he tells how heat 
 and indigestion making sleep impossible, he went downstairs in his 
 nightshirt to smoke in the " back yard." " It was one of the 
 beautifullest nights ; the half-moon clear as silver looked out as 
 from an eternity, and the great dawn was streaming up. I felt a 
 remorse, a kind of shudder at the fuss I was making about a sleep- 
 less night, about my sorrows at all, with a life so soon to be absorbed 
 into the great mystery above and around me. Oh, let us be 
 patient ! Let us call to God with our silent hearts if we cannot 
 with our tongues." 
 
 Once again, in a very hot August, many years later, unable 
 to sleep, and Mrs. Carlyle away, he descended, at 3 a.m., to the 
 garden, " and smoked a cigar on a stool." The same soft mood 
 again inspired him as on the earlier occasion : " Have not seen so 
 lovely, sad and grand a summer weather scene, for twenty years back. 
 Trees stood all as if cast in bronze, not an aspen-leaf stirring ; sky 
 was a silver mirror, getting yellowish in the north-east, and one 
 big star, star of the morning, visible in the increasing light." 
 
 Earlier in that same year (1857) Mrs. Carlyle's health had begun 
 to fail, and he had induced her to go to Scotland. Writing to his 
 
 262 
 
CARLYLE HOUSE, CHELSEA 
 
 brother before her departure, he says : " Meanwhile she is very 
 busy ornamenting the garden, poor little soul ; has two china seats, 
 and speculates even upon an awning or quasi -tent against the 
 blazes of July that are coming." One of the seats here mentioned, 
 made of blue glazed earthenware, may be seen in the drawing on 
 page 260, and was probably the identical stool upon which Carlyle, 
 in his wife's absence, sat watching the coming of the dawn on that 
 early summer morning nearly sixty years ago. 
 
 Mrs. Carlyle was fond of pets, the most extraordinary of these 
 being a leech. " Chico," the canary that had accompanied her to 
 Cheyne Row, took unto himself a wife, and " his two bright yellow 
 young ones, as soon as they were fledged," so we learn from the 
 " Reminiscences," " got out into the trees of the garden and vanished 
 to swift destruction." The successors to Chico, if not his posterity, 
 together with her little dog " Nero," were confided to Carlyle's 
 care in his wife's absence in 1857, with strict injunctions to look 
 after them. Several references to birds and dogs in his letters at 
 this time show how scrupulously he fulfilled his trust. He made 
 Nero more than ever his companion in his evening strolls, gave 
 chickweed to the canaries, for which they said, ' Thank you 
 kindly, as plain as could be sung. . . . Nero came into the 
 garden, stationed himself on the warm flags to inquire about 
 dinner." When Jeannie returned after two months' absence, 
 " there was joy in Nero, and the canaries, and in creatures more 
 important." 
 
 The stone flags mentioned here are still much in evidence at 
 Cheyne Row, and give a certain old-fashioned touch to the garden, 
 redeeming it from the commonplace. One must cross them to 
 pass from the lobby door to the bit of turf doing duty for a lawn. 
 Their presence there in lieu of gravel or flower-bed, explains why 
 Carlyle sometimes referred to the plot of ground as the " back 
 area," or "back yard," and occasionally apologetically, as "the 
 garden so-called." They help to give the " old black house," as 
 he termed it, though the bricks are rather grey than brown or black, 
 that pleasant air of Georgian or Queen Anne distinction, which 
 clings to it, and an interest even independent of the claim of 
 Carlylian associations. 
 
 Carlyle liked to see them spotless. One December day he him- 
 self turned to and scrubbed them. " I decided," he wrote to his 
 
 263 
 
GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 
 
 wife, " not to walk, but to take water and a scrub-brush and swash 
 down into some degree of tolerability those greasy, clammy flags 
 in the back area. I did it without rebuke of Anne. I said she 
 couldn't do it in her present state of illness, and on the whole 
 proceeded, and found it decidedly hard work, for three-quarters 
 of an hour. Some ten or twelve pails of water with vigorous 
 scrubbing did, however, reduce the affair to order, whereupon I 
 washed myself and sat down to breakfast in virtuous peace. ' Dirt 
 shall not be around me, ' said Cobbett, 'so long as I can handle a 
 broom.' : 
 
 It is a pity that Carlyle did not always turn to violent exercise 
 of this sort, instead of losing his temper and making his unselfish, 
 clever, but fiery little wife uncomfortable, when things went 
 wrong; and when cocks and hens, street organs, and neighbours' 
 pianos, interrupted his work and his rest. 
 
 But he did not ; and therefore it is tragi- comic to read the com- 
 ments of both husband and wife in their letters, on the painful 
 subject of the " demon fowls." Tragic that a man of genius should 
 be so disturbed and no redress be obtainable, comic as to the cause, 
 which was a " two-and-sixpenny worth of bantams." Comic, too, 
 in the theatrical deduction that " The cocks must either withdraw 
 or die ! 5: He would, indeed, have cheerfully shot them, but he had 
 no gun, and could not have hit them if he had had one the more so, 
 as he says, he " seldom saw the wretched animals," because they 
 were just on the other side of the garden wall, and the pear tree 
 intervened. If the reader will look at the picture of the garden 
 and back of the house, he will realize the absurdities of the position 
 proposed. The author of " Sartor," with a blunderbuss, taking 
 aim from his bedroom window at a moving quarry ! But the 
 matter was serious enough, in all conscience, for the birds were so 
 very close, and they " screeched," and they " crowed " from 
 midnight to morn. " What is to be done ? " wrote Mrs. Carlyle 
 to her mother. " God knows, if this goes on he will soon be in 
 Bedlam, and I too. ..." She wrote piteous appeals to the next- 
 door neighbours, but they were returned unopened. She sent 
 for the maid, but she would not come. In the law there was no 
 help. ; ' People," she wrote, " may keep wild beasts in their back 
 yard if they care to do so." This was in 1842, and the annoyance 
 seems to have gone on with intervals for twenty years, alternating 
 
 264 
 
GARLYLE HOUSE, CHELSEA 
 
 with the piano-practice on the other side. Mrs. Carlyle's diplomacy, 
 however, was not altogether without effect, and there were lucid 
 intervals ; but in 1853 the " cocks were springing up more and 
 more till it seemed as if the universe were growing into one 
 huge poultry yard." After this, her feminine tact prevailing, 
 matters mended, and the poultry were all removed, " to the last 
 feather," on a certain Saturday afternoon. Even after this, on 
 more than one occasion Mrs. Carlyle was recalled home from 
 a visit, to settle the cock-crowing question that at length reached a 
 climax. 
 
 In his desperation Mr. Carlyle had had some thoughts of buying 
 the lease of next door, and turning out the tenants, human and 
 feathered, neck and crop ; but instead of measures quite so drastic 
 and expensive, a soundless room was built at the top of the house 
 costing one hundred and seventy pounds, the roof being, as it were, 
 lifted over it. Comparative quiet was thus obtained, but the room, 
 which must have been very cold in winter, was found to be too hot 
 in summer, and during that season Carlyle formed the habit of 
 descending to the garden, where he generally worked very com- 
 fortably under the shade of a sort of tent, his books and papers 
 being on a butler's tray beside him ; but on one occasion he 
 caught cold, " sitting in the sweep of the wind under the awning." 
 
 The cock-crowing nuisance reasserted itself in 1865, and caused 
 Mrs. Carlyle to lie awake at night devising means to meet it. 
 The neighbours fortunately were more amenable than those of 
 earlier days, and they were not unwilling to oblige, particularly as 
 by this time Carlyle had become famous. So the offending chan- 
 ticleer was shut up in a cellar, and the hens were to evacuate the 
 garden premises at Christmas on hearing which, Carlyle clasped 
 his wife in his arms and called her " his guardian angel." 
 
 I have enlarged upon the topic of the fowls, because they were 
 a garden grievance, but I have only touched upon the annoyances 
 caused by the street-organ and piano nuisances, since, strictly 
 speaking, they have no place in this book ; suffice to say, that the 
 young lady next door was so obliging as to postpone her practising 
 until after two in the afternoon, and that Carlyle was duly grateful. 
 
 If we look back through the nebulae of half a century to that 
 little house in Chelsea, we see that certain personages detach 
 themselves from the quiet surroundings of the dwelling and the 
 
 265 
 
GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 
 
 garden. They are both articulate, and inarticulate. First there 
 are the master and mistress, who are indeed highly articulate ; 
 secondly, the little dumb pet Nero ; and thirdly, more mistily and 
 changefully, the maid- servant for the time being. The servant 
 problem would seem to have been almost as acute and difficult 
 in the mid- Victorian era as during the social upheaval of a great 
 war, and the Carlyles had a vast and trying experience of maids- 
 of-all-work. "Anne," " Sarah," " Little Charlotte," and "Big 
 Charlotte," the former a worshipper of Mrs. Carlyle, follow one 
 another with bewildering rapidity. There was a simple-looking 
 Scottish lassie, who did not know her work, but who had a pleasing 
 physiognomy, and therefore might be teachable, but was not, 
 and who, moreover, after two days, broke forth into " bottomless 
 lying," and drank the cream on the way up to the drawing-room. 
 While Mrs. Carlyle was telling her husband of her delinquencies, 
 the charwoman burst in with the information that " our simpleton 
 was off at 10 p.m., bag and baggage, plus a sovereign that had just 
 been advanced to her." 
 
 In 1860, when the lean times were over, Mrs. Carlyle set up a 
 second servant, but said it was just like " taking lodgers into one's 
 lower story. Often in the dead of night I am seized with a wild 
 desire to clear the house of these new-comers ; and take back my 
 own little Charlotte, who is still hanging on at her mother's in a 
 wild hope that one or other of them may break down, and she be 
 reinstated in her place." Mrs. Carlyle's bright letters when from 
 home to this young girl, who became cook-general at No. 5 in 1858, 
 when she was only fifteen, have recently been discovered and 
 published. 
 
 " Oh, little woman, little woman ! I wonder how you get on 
 there all by yourself in that highly-genteel seven-roomed house 
 (as the retired cheesemonger would describe it). . . . Tell Nero, 
 with my dear love, that I fervently hope he is not overeating 
 himself! and to the sparrow .give in my name a good-sized 
 worm ! ' : She warns her against " a certain person who is always 
 at the elbow of an idle girl," to which the maid replies : " Me and 
 Nero are quite well and happy . . . the sparrow is doing very well, 
 and, Dear Madam, I will do my best to keep that certain person 
 at a distance from my elbow." 
 
 Mrs. Carlyle does not, it is true, warn her husband not to overeat 
 
 266 
 
CARLYLE HOUSE, CHELSEA 
 
 himself, but in 1863, when life " in the valley of the shadow of 
 Frederick the Great " had become for her too dreary and mono- 
 tonous, and she was haunted every day by the Prussian's ghost, 
 she went away to friends for a little change, and wrote, entreating 
 Carlyle " not to sit up till two, nor take a sixth cup of tea, nor 
 commit any indiscretion in the management of himself." And she 
 had previously concluded another letter with : " Oh ! please do 
 go to bed at a reasonable hour, and don't overwork yourself ; and 
 consider you are no longer a child." All of which is both touching 
 and amusing, for Carlyle at this time was sixty-eight. No wonder 
 she was weary, for " Frederick the Great " took six years in which 
 to get itself written as " Cromwell " had taken five. In 1864, 
 when the house would appear to have been redecorated, she writes 
 charging him to " tell the maids not to rub on the clean paper with 
 their abominably large crinolines, and not to put back the chairs 
 against it, as is their habit." 
 
 Mrs. Carlyle was, indeed, a notable housekeeper. She usually 
 waited until she could get her husband away before she made an 
 " earthquake " in the house. She then set the girls " raging and 
 scrubbing," and ordered all the feather beds and pillows out on to 
 the grass to get aired. On one occasion after she had done so, it 
 rained pretty continuously, and the beds only went out to come 
 back again, " having," she wrote, "all to retreat into the lobby, 
 where they lie appealing to posterity." 
 
 Nero, the little dog, bulks largely in the annals of No. 5, Cheyne 
 Row. "He is part and parcel of myself," Mrs. Carlyle wrote to 
 her husband. " When I say ' I am well,' it means also c Nero is 
 well ! ' Nero c'est moi, moi c'est Nero." Perhaps all Mrs. Car- 
 lyle's friends did not share the passion for dogs which made Nero's 
 successor the innocent cause of his mistress's death for when she 
 went from home on a visit, Nero had sometimes to be left behind 
 his dignity, like hers, must be kept up, and he should not go, she 
 said, " where he is de trop." So Mr. Carlyle took what care he could 
 of him in her absence ; he liked the little animal well enough, 
 but I think it was a case of " love me, love my dog," with him, for 
 he said he was " a real nuisance and absurdity in the house." 
 When she was seeking health in Scotland, Nero was wont to accom- 
 pany him in his nocturnal rambles, and returned home, wrote 
 Carlyle, " the joyfullest, dirtiest little dog we may wish to see." 
 
 267 
 
GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 
 
 On one occasion Nero ran away at the bottom of Cadogan Place 
 Eleven o'clock struck. " Time to go home to porridge, but the 
 vermin was wanting. ... I had to go back as far as Wilton 
 Crescent. Then the miserable quadruped appeared, and I nearly 
 bullied the life out of him, but he licked my milk-dish at home with 
 the same relish." Nero bore no malice, because he knew from 
 experience that what his Master himself described as " his sul- 
 phurous moods, were very closely related to tenderness." 
 " Always," he writes, " on his coming home he trips up to your 
 room till I call him back. I wish he would give it over, for it makes 
 me wae. I have been mainly under the awning all day, and got 
 my sheets, three of them, corrected. God help thee ever, dearest ; 
 whom else have I in the world ? Be good, be quiet " (she was to 
 rest) " and write ! " Another time she is at home, he is absent, 
 and no doubt the little dog missed the evening rambles, for she wrote 
 that " he was well, notwithstanding that he gets no exercise beyond 
 the garden." 
 
 Once, when Carlyle returned home somewhat unexpectedly, 
 there was no one to receive him but Nero, who " barked a welcome, 
 and the cat, who sat reflective, without showing the smallest 
 "emotion." He was " obliged to Nero, he forgave the cat." On 
 this occasion the improvement his wife had made in the house 
 enchanted him ; he exclaimed : " Oh, Goody, incomparable 
 artist Goody ! It is really a series of glad surprises . . . my bonnie 
 wee artistikin." 
 
 Poor Nero, run over by a cart, recovered to a certain extent, but 
 developed asthma, and asthma and old age rendered his little life 
 a misery. Mrs. Carlyle made him a little red coat, and he " kept 
 the house with her." She goes from home, and returning, for the 
 first time in eleven years, misses his welcoming bark. But Nero 
 was not yet dead as she feared, and was even a little better, for he 
 ran up the long kitchen stairs to greet her, but " the more he tried 
 to show his joy, the less he could do it " and a bad fit of coughing 
 arrested him. Mr. Carlyle suggested a little prussic acid but 
 about the same time was overheard talking to the dog in the garden. 
 ' Poor little fellow," he said, " I declare I am heartily sorry for 
 you. If I could make you well again, upon my soul, I would." 
 
 Years after he appended a note to a letter which referred to 
 Nero's death. " Poor little, foolish, faithful dog. . . . The wreck 
 
 268 
 
CARLYLE HOUSE, CHELSEA 
 
 of poor Nero who had to be strychnined by the doctor, is still 
 memorable, sad and miserable to me. The last nocturnal walk he 
 took with me, his dim white little figure in the universe of dreary 
 black, and my then mood about Frederick and other things." 
 
 " What is become of that little, beautiful, graceful life, so full 
 of love and loyalty and sense of duty," wrote Mrs. Carlyle. 
 " One thing is sure, anyhow, my little dog is buried at the top of 
 our garden, and I grieve for him as if he had been a little human 
 child." 
 
 But Mrs. Carlyle might have written differently if she had ever 
 had a child to lose. She must have sighed for one sometimes, when 
 Carlyle's bilious outbursts were frequent, or, when all going 
 well, he was work- engrossed, or on the other hand, could produce 
 nothing to satisfy himself in many long months. One day he 
 brought all that he had written into the room where she was 
 peacefully darning stockings, " and it was up the chimney in a fine 
 blaze " before she knew what he was burning. 
 
 There was, I think, a good deal in common between Michael 
 Angelo and Thomas Carlyle. Each got rid of his superfluous 
 energy, or drove away painful thoughts, by dint of hard, bodily 
 exercise ; and just as A. J. Symonds tells us that a contemporary 
 describes Michael Angelo when well over sixty, hewing away at a 
 block of marble " in a sort of fury ' : so we have seen Carlyle clean- 
 ing flags before breakfast, with a will ; both, too, had long periods 
 of inertia, in which the brain was lying fallow, a state of unconscious 
 preparation for future effort, but inexplicable to their friends ; 
 and Carlyle sometimes openly declared that " he preferred to ripen 
 and rot for a while." 
 
 When the sun shines athwart the turf in the little " garden so 
 called " at the back of No. 5 and, leaving the grey old house in 
 shadow, penetrates the vine leaves that drape the wall to the right, 
 and turns them to a veil of gold the place where Carlyle dwelt for 
 forty strenuous years has still its moments of positive beauty, for 
 sunshine glorifies everything. At other times although very 
 neatly tended by the kindly Scottish caretaker, whose intelligent 
 interest and pride in her great countryman, helps many a visitor- 
 it is rather dreary. The ivy that came from Mrs. Carlyle's early 
 home, still mantles the old buttressed wall to the left, but in common 
 with the surrounding trees, it is darkened by London's smoke, 
 
 269 
 
GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 
 
 and the walk on the opposite side, which may once have been yellow 
 gravel, is now an ambiguous, purply-grey of nondescript composi- 
 tion. It would be well if " the Trust " could stand the expense of a 
 few gay flowers to enliven a spot that fifty or sixty years ago must 
 have been bright and pretty enough. For here Carlyle sat and 
 dreamed in the early summer dawn, and worked beneath his awning 
 in the July " blazes." Here " Jeannie " directed her maids, or 
 weeded or watered, while Nero frisked about her, the happiest of 
 little dogs. It is, or should be, hallowed ground ; how many great 
 thoughts germinated here, we shall never know. Although Carlyle 
 professed to dislike art the art of the days of Maclise and Creswick 
 for he knew nothing of his great contemporary and neighbour, 
 Turner, who breathed his last, a stone's throw from No. 5 nor of 
 Millais, in Millais' greatest days and though a tour in search of the 
 picturesque had no charms for him, he was yet unusually sensitive 
 to the appeal of nature in all her moods. That this was so, is 
 obvious to any reader of the " Journal," and particularly of the 
 earlier letters, written from Scotland ; but it was the blossoming 
 tree in his London garden that inspired the words written in April, 
 1851. " Birth of a cherry in the spring of the year, birth of a 
 planet in the spring of the aeons. The All producing them alike, 
 builds them together out of its floating atoms, out of its infinite 
 opulence. The germ of an idea lies behind that." 
 
 Little Nero is buried at the end of the garden, immediately behind 
 the point from which I took my drawing. It was the month of 
 the outbreak of War in 1914 that I began it, and troops of lively 
 Americans as yet unable to secure a passage back to their country 
 came, drawn by legitimate interest, to visit the house and garden, 
 and to look at the little stone raised by Mrs. Caflyle's loving hands. 
 '* Ah, poor little Nero's grave ! '' exclaimed one and all then, 
 finding the ground occupied by a lady and a camp-seat, they stared 
 at me instead ; and all but the bravest beat a hasty retreat. 
 
 ' Tell Sir George," wrote Mrs. Carlyle, in a very wet summer, 
 under date August 20th, 1860 " I planted the cowslips with my 
 own hand, and have not needed to water them ; the heavenly 
 watering-can . . . having saved me the trouble. I gave them the 
 place of highest honour (round poor little Nero's stone)." 
 
 270 
 
CO 
 
 b 
 
 O 
 
 O 
 O 
 
S I > * 
 
 1 '* ' ft 1 " 
 
 -^ *". l'.".. 
 
 *^J ?" ' J*** 
 
CHAPTER XIII 
 
 KELMSCOTT HOUSE, UPPER MALL, 
 HAMMERSMITH 
 
 BROWN of brick, square of frontage, solid and comfortable- 
 looking, but externally by no means " The House Beau- 
 tiful," of which its most celebrated occupant dreamed, the 
 Georgian mansion in which William Morris died, stands facing the 
 river, and separated from it only by a narrow roadway, and a row of 
 noble elms. 
 
 The spectator who stands opposite the house, has on his right a 
 somewhat squalid area of small cottages, dingy courts, and narrow 
 passages ; in the rear is a large and beautiful garden, separated 
 from the slum by high brick walls, and by Hampshire House ; 
 the latter is an early Georgian residence, now a workmen's social 
 club, founded long after Morris's death, but carried on on lines of 
 which he would have strongly approved. ; J |J Jj 
 
 The interior of Kelmscott House is not remarkable, but the 
 five windows of the drawing-room command a fine prospect of 
 two of the Thames reaches ; to the right the eye is carried past 
 Chiswick Eyot, towards Kew and Richmond, and to the left, 
 through the piers of Hammersmith Bridge to Putney and Fulham.j J 
 
 The house and garden had a history or ever " the idle singer of 
 an empty day " stamped upon them, as he could not fail to do, 
 the impress of his own strong individuality. So long back as 
 1816 as a plaque on the outer wall records Sir Francis Ronalds, 
 the inventor of the electric telegraph, resided there, and laid down 
 in the garden eight miles of insulated wire " charged with static 
 electricity and worked by electrometers and synchronized discs 
 at either^end.",.&It ^was the ; first ^electric communication ever 
 
 JJ -4M i nlTM _t.W j_^-j * ,j 
 
 271 
 
GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 
 
 practically used, and portions of the apparatus are, I believe, still 
 to be seen at South Kensington. 
 
 Ronalds offered the invention to the Admiralty of the day, 
 but my Lords rejected it on the ground that as the war with France 
 was just concluded, they had no use for it curious reading in our 
 eyes at the present time. 
 
 How long Ronalds resided at Hammersmith I do not know ; but 
 he died in 1873, at the advanced age of eighty-five. After him 
 came Dr. George Macdonald. The son of a Scottish farmer, he was 
 the direct descendant of one of the families who suffered in the 
 famous massacre of Glencoe a fact which may have helped to 
 colour his mind with romance, and to tinge it with religious fervour. 
 Anyway, he was a successful portrayer of Scottish peasant life in 
 fiction, and a pioneer in a charming by-way of literature, since 
 traversed by other men with even greater results. Through the 
 medium of his popular novels, and sincere verses (marked as they 
 were by strong religious feeling), he made a powerful appeal to a 
 large section of the serious reading public. He also wrote delight- 
 fully for children, and was for a time editor of Good Words /or the 
 Young ; and he published a fascinating " faerie romance " called 
 " Phantastes." 
 
 He had many children, and during his residence at the river-side 
 dwelling at Hammersmith, the garden must have been lively with 
 their glad voices, so that the name by which he called the house, 
 ' The Retreat," was rather a misnomer. William Morris changed 
 it to " Kelmscott House " thus linking it with his beloved country 
 home on the Upper Thames, thirty miles from Oxford. The latter 
 place he himself describes in 1871 in a letter to his friend Faulkner, 
 as " a heaven on earth, an old stone Elizabethan house like Water 
 Eaton, and such a garden ! close down to the river, a boat-house 
 and all things handy." His biographer, Mr. J. W. Mackail, tells 
 us that during twenty-five years he found in the beautiful old house, 
 a peace and joy that no other place gave him, and his attachment 
 to it deepened as years went on, became indeed passionate, because 
 ' with him the love of things had all the romance and passion 
 that is generally associated with the love of persons only." It 
 became to him as he himself said, in one of his letters, " the type 
 of the pleasant places of the earth, and of the homes of harmless, 
 simple people, not over-burdened with the intricacies of life ; and, 
 
 272 
 
KELMSGOTT HOUSE 
 
 as others love the race of man through their lovers or their children, 
 so I love the earth through that small space of it." 
 
 Again : " O me ! O me ! How I love the earth, and the seasons, 
 and weather and all things that deal with it, and all that grows out 
 of it as this has done ! The earth and the growth of it, and the 
 life of it. If I could but say and show how I love it ! " 
 
 He did say it in his poetry, he did show it in his art ; for, just as 
 all his decorative designs have their origin in natural forms, so, too, 
 his narrative poetry is highly picturesque and descriptive of Nature. 
 But though all the world to him was, indeed, an " earthly Paradise," 
 he loved his native land best, and next to it, Iceland and Scandi- 
 navia, and he never really got far away from England and the North. 
 What could be more English in description and sentiment than the 
 following lines, taken, almost at random, from the " Story of 
 Rhodope " in " The Earthly Paradise " ? : 
 
 " March was it, but a foretaste of the June 
 The earth had, and the budding linden-grove 
 About the homestead, with the brown bird's tune 
 Was happy, and the faint blue sky above 
 The black-thorn blossoms made meet roof for love, 
 For though the South wind breathed a thought of rain, 
 No cloud as yet its golden breadth did stain." 
 
 If we substitute for the words 4 linden-grove " their English 
 equivalent, " an avenue of limes," we have a very true picture of 
 an early English spring. Yet Rhodope was a " Grecian-speaking " 
 maiden, dwelling in the sunny south. When Morris was in Italy 
 he expressed his admiration for the wondrous beauty of St. Mark's 
 at Venice, but he found a visit to Torcello, " where he was once more 
 among the hedges and green grass and singing birds, a great rest." 
 
 Indeed, he was never really happy away from green pastures 
 and brown earth, and both the decadence and restorations of the 
 silent water city, grieved him and weighed upon his spirits, which 
 only rose when he went on to Padua and Verona. The truth was, 
 that his heart was in the thirteenth century, and that he delighted 
 in mediae valism and all things Gothic ; ancient and Renascent art 
 having for him but little attraction. 
 
 All the same, whether founded on classic or Scandinavian stories, 
 every page in his long narrative poems written always in felicitous 
 language offers a subject to painters, but whereas he excels in 
 
 273 18 
 
GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 
 
 describing the moods and aspects of inanimate Nature, he makes 
 no attempt to strike a note of real human tragedy ; for as before 
 mentioned, he cared less for people than for things, and Socialist 
 and Idealist though he was, valued the type, more than the indi- 
 vidual man. Hence he was not concerned with idiosyncrasy, 
 mentality, and the hidden springs of human actions ; nor yet with 
 the forces, spiritual, and sensuous, that move men and women, 
 to do right and to sacrifice, to suffer and to sin. The affinities and 
 repulsions, the relations of the sexes, the social problems yet 
 unsolved, as they touch individual lives, and all those elemental 
 human passions that, before the war, bulked so largely I think 
 too largely in current fiction, have no place in his poetry, for they 
 did not interest him at all. Consequently the reader follows the 
 adventures of his heroes and heroines much as we watch the dumb 
 actors in a kinematograph show they are not flesh and blood 
 realities ; they are far removed from the cosmic upheavals, the 
 tragic happenings, and also from those complexities of daily and 
 domestic life that, in the middle of a world-war, are not the least 
 of our present troubles ; and we look at them from the outside 
 only, 
 
 Morris was a man of fiery temper, great physical strength, and 
 remarkable energy ; so restless that his friends say he could never 
 sit still for long, but must be always springing up and pacing the 
 room like a caged lion. The contrast, therefore, between his poetry 
 and himself is one of the most extraordinary things about him ; 
 and one might have expected to find in his writings some self-reve- 
 lation of his temperament ; something of the ruggedness, and the 
 vigorous style of his great contemporary, Browning ; perhaps, too, 
 something of Browning's power of creating strong and entangling 
 situations, and of his dramatic force ; but, strange to say, the man 
 who designed so many intricate and beautiful patterns (all founded 
 on natural objects), who rose at sunrise to weave them with his own 
 loving hand into a lovely tapestry of colour and line, setting up for 
 the purpose a loom in his bedroom at Kelmscott House, troubled 
 himself but little about plot in his epics. Unlike the old Greek 
 tragedians, unlike Shakespeare, unlike Browning, too, he cared 
 nothing for the interplay of passion and circumstance, for the inter- 
 minglement of tragedy and comedy in the warp and woof of human 
 existence. Life, as he paints it, is never a resistless torrent, carrying 
 
 274 
 
KELMSGOTT HOUSE 
 
 along with it men and women, struggling still, though battered and 
 well-nigh spent ; a torrent that, in its wild onward rush to the 
 misty ocean of futurity, may sometimes, it is true, wash them into 
 a safe and gentle backwater but oftener dashes them against the 
 rocks to an untoward fate. His conception of life, as shown in 
 " The Earthly Paradise " at all events, is rather that of a placid 
 stream, flowing smoothly between flowery banks, and watering 
 some lotus-eating land in which it seems always afternoon. 
 Chaucer to whom physically as well as mentally he was said to 
 bear a resemblance was professedly Morris's model for the age 
 of Chaucer was to him the Golden Age but though after Chaucer 
 he is the greatest of story-tellers, his poetic genius has more affinity 
 with that of Keats, whom he called " one of his masters," and 
 admired more than any modern poet. He is always musical and 
 often dreamy ; the lovely lines that end " The Earthly Paradise " 
 - adopted for the front cover of this book, because they so exactly 
 explain its purpose, are typical of Morris at his best, though he has 
 written many others of which the sentiment is as true, and the 
 language as choice. Nevertheless, his sweetest stanzas have not 
 the haunting melody, the rich suggest! veness, to be found in such 
 lines of Keats as those beginning : 
 
 ' Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird ! " 
 
 Nor so far as I know, from a reading that has been necessarily 
 limited, is there anything in the whole range of Morris's poetry 
 which has the splendid imagery, the languorous beauty of diction, 
 and at the same time the fervour, the depth, and the suppressed 
 passion, of that dream within a dream, " The Eve of St. Agnes," 
 
 when : 
 
 " ages long ago 
 
 These lovers fled away into the storm." 
 
 It is much to Morris's credit that his meaning is always clear ; 
 and that if in his verse there are no passages that, owing to their 
 incisiveness, wisdom, and originality, have passed into proverbs, 
 becoming " familiar in our mouths as household words "neither, 
 on the other hand, are there any worrying obscurities, such as we 
 encounter in Browning. He makes, it is true, no heavy demands 
 on the intellect, or the emotions, and though I cannot see that it is 
 necessarily the province of poetry to do the former it should 
 
 275 18* 
 
GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 
 
 sometimes touch the heart, and his does not thrill or move ; while 
 even in his vigorous translation into verse from the Icelandic, he 
 never terrifies. But he certainly charms and soothes ; hence, an 
 hour spent with him in " The Earthly Paradise " the best-known of 
 his poems is infinitely restful ; is an hour well spent. 
 
 Morris wrote copiously, composing reams of polished verses ; 
 these he made a practice of afterwards reading to his friends. On 
 one occasion he produced seven hundred lines in a day. But he 
 under- valued his gifts when he said : " That talk of inspiration is 
 sheer nonsense, I may tell you that flat ; there is no such thing ; 
 it is a mere matter of craftsmanship ; " and again : " If a chap 
 can't compose an epic while he is weaving tapestry, he had better 
 shut up ; he'll never do any good at all." For it could only have 
 been under the stimulus of a mood, an insistent call to express 
 himself in verse, rather than in prose or the decorative arts, that he 
 could possibly have poured out his melodious narrative in such 
 unstinted measure. It must, however, be remembered that his 
 poetry is objective, not subjective, and that ideas and images 
 suggested by outside things, are naturally more numerous than 
 those deeper thoughts that spring unbidden from the brain and 
 heart. 
 
 Although Morris wrote so flowingly, his range in subjects and 
 centuries was limited by his own choice. 1C In the scheme of 
 4 The Earthly Paradise,' : says Mr. Mackail, " the two corner- 
 stones are the Greek and the Northern epic cycles, the two greatest 
 bodies of imaginative narration which the world has produced. 
 The stories which he chose out of both are told by Greeks and by 
 Norsemen of the later Middle Ages." Some additional material 
 was derived from Oriental and European sources ; but outside the 
 mediaeval period Morris never went ! He delighted in the old 
 ballad poetry as he did in Chaucer, but he knew little of Elizabethan 
 literature, and many of our English classics interested him not at 
 all. Besides this, he was in no sense cosmopolitan, and therefore 
 
 never could it be said of him, great story-teller though he was, 
 that : 
 
 " Each phase of many-coloured life he drew, 
 Exhausted worlds and then imagined new." 
 
 Morris had early conceived a passionate admiration for Rossetti. 
 who held the comfortable doctrine that it was the business of half 
 
 276 
 
KELMSCOTT HOUSE 
 
 the world to paint pictures, and of the other half to buy them ! 
 Rossetti admired Morris's poetry, but urged him to become a painter 
 on the plea that " if any man has any poetry in him, he should 
 paint, for it has all been said and written, and they have scarcely 
 begun to paint it." For two years or more, therefore, Morris 
 worked hard at drawing and painting, but he never became a 
 painter. Had he done so, his claim to be in the first rank whether 
 pre-Raphaelite or not would have been inevitably challenged, 
 whereas as a decorative artist he was unique : there is but one 
 William Morris ! 
 
 Owing to Rossetti's influence, and his own natural bent that way, 
 there is much of Romanticism in his earlier poetry. His ultimate 
 preference for the heroic and epic form of verse, first showed itself 
 when, about 1869, the Rossetti influence waning, his Icelandic 
 studies seriously began. In 1870, in company with Mr. Magniissen, 
 the Icelandic scholar under whose guidance he had been studying 
 the Icelandic heroic literature, he went to Iceland, calling, en route, 
 at the lonely Faroe Islands. 
 
 " God made the world, but the Devil made Iceland," says a 
 Danish proverb ; and in Iceland, " burst up, the geologists say, by 
 fire from the bottom of the sea, swallowed many months of the 
 year in black tempests, yet with a wild, glittering beauty in summer- 
 time ; towering up there ; stern and grim in the North Ocean 
 with its snow Jokuls, roaring geysers, sulphur pools and horrid 
 volcanic caverns ; like the waste chaotic battlefields of frost and 
 fire ; where of all places we least looked for literature and written 
 memorials the records of these things were written down." 
 
 The literary remains of which Carlyle here speaks, were the Eddas, 
 or religious poems of Scandinavia, together with the Sagas, that 
 dealt with the wanderings, deeds, and adventures of the Vikings ; 
 all of which were fortunately preserved for posterity in Iceland, by 
 the Norwegians who colonized it A.D. 872. At that period Harold 
 Fairhair uniting all Norway under his sway, some of the mal- 
 contents among his new subjects, among them many of the best 
 and bravest of the race, fled to Iceland for independence and 
 shelter, carrying with them the religion of Odin. 
 
 It flourished there until the introduction of Christianity, about 
 the eleventh century. And even then the Icelanders seem to 
 have been but half-hearted converts to the new faith, for not only 
 
 277 
 
GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 
 
 did they stipulate that they should be baptized in the hot springs 
 'in cold weather, for which we can scarcely blame them but we 
 hear of sea-kings, nominally Christians, who never put to sea or 
 engaged in any serious undertaking, without invoking the aid of 
 Thor. 
 
 Halfred the Skald (or poet), when he accepted Christianity, 
 announced that he should never speak ill of the old gods, nor cease 
 to celebrate them in his songs ; and no doubt the Christian doctrine 
 of humility and forgiveness, was a bitter pill to the heroes of many a 
 deed of valour and vengeance ; one can picture the flash of scorn 
 in the Viking's blue eyes, when first told that if his enemy smote 
 him on one cheek he was to turn to him the other ; that if he stole 
 his coat, he was to give him his cloak also. 
 
 Before the awakening of the literary spirit in Iceland (one of the 
 effects of the introduction of Christianity) the scattered Sagas which 
 so commended themselves to William Morris, and the poems called 
 collectively the " Elder Edda " or " The Edda of Saemund," a 
 certain learned Icelandic Priest of the eleventh century, had been 
 passed down by word of mouth from generation to generation, 
 by the Skalds. Grotesque and obscure though they are, having 
 lost much in translation because the peculiarly alliterative form of 
 the verse is difficult to translate into English poetry yet many of 
 the songs of the " Elder Edda " are full of a wild and original 
 beauty. 
 
 The Sagas were prose epics, and the finest, though they deal with 
 events and people belonging to the tenth and eleventh centuries, 
 were not written down till the thirteenth century, William Morris's 
 favourite period. 
 
 But it was not alone the period that commended itself to him ; 
 physically and temperamentally, he was the true descendant of 
 those Norsemen whose heroic literature he so delightedly un- 
 earthed. The man who could drive his head against a wall, so as 
 to leave a deep dent in the plaster, bite almost through the wood- 
 work of a window frame, and who, on one occasion, in illustration 
 of the manner in which passengers landing from a cross-channel 
 steamer staggered beneath the weight of luggage, to the horror and 
 amusement of his audience, tucked a chair under each arm, and 
 lifted the coal-box with his teeth, might well have drawn the sword 
 of Odin from the heart of the Branstock tree, as Sigmund the 
 
 278 ' 
 
KELMSGOTT HOUSE 
 
 Viking succeeded in doing, after all the other heroes had tried in 
 vain to remove it. 
 
 Very handsome in his youth, according to the testimony of Sir 
 Edward Burne- Jones, in later years, Morris's picturesque head, with 
 its leonine locks and somewhat ragged beard, might well have 
 served his friend for the model of a Viking of old, had that great 
 painter drawn any of his subjects from a Scandinavian source. 
 
 His hair was remarkably beautiful, fine, yet also very thick and 
 curly and therefore, among his intimates he went by the name of 
 " Topsy " " Tops " for short. It was so strong that he used to 
 amuse his children by letting them take hold of it, and then lifting 
 them by means of it from the ground. His hands were broad, 
 fleshy, and rather short and clumsy ; yet they executed the most 
 delicately minute work with unequalled precision and celerity. 
 
 He had a ruddy complexion and a rocking walk, and, we are 
 told, might easily have been mistaken for a sea-captain, in his 
 loose suit of blue serge and soft felt hat ; and once when he was 
 " walking down Kensington High Street a fireman from the brigade- 
 station stopped him and said : ' Beg pardon, sir, but were you ever 
 Captain of the Sea Swallow ? ' This was long before the period 
 when he so frequently donned the blouse of the French workman ; 
 but even in his Oxford days his unconventionality led him to wear 
 purple trousers. " Morris went to Jones's on Sunday night," runs 
 a note in a friend's diary, when, after leaving Oxford, he and 
 Burne- Jones shared rooms in Bloomsbury, " and his hair was so 
 long, and he looked so wild, that the servant who opened the door 
 would not let him in, thinking he was a burglar," and at a much 
 later period of his life, when he one day went in his blue blouse and 
 without a hat, as was his wont, from his workshop in Queen Square 
 to lunch with his friend, Faulkner, a few doors off, the new house- 
 maid who let him in, went downstairs to the kitchen in some 
 perplexity, describing him to the cook as the butcher. 
 
 In one of his own lectures on Art he sensibly remarks upon the 
 absurdity of modern masculine attire, usage condemning a man to 
 wear two coats where one would suffice ; a front one, or waistcoat, 
 that has no back, and over it another that has no front ! 
 
 But indifferent to appearance though he, Morris, was, and though 
 it is said that he never looked really peculiar except when con- 
 ventionally dressed, he yet strove at times to adapt himself to 
 
 279 
 
GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 
 
 circumstances. At one period of his life he had to attend the 
 meetings of a board of directors, and actually kept a tall hat for 
 the occasion. At the end of four years he resigned his directorship 
 and solemnly sat down upon the hat, which was never replaced ! 
 His little daughter one day found it, and asked her mother what 
 the strange object was, and whether Papa ever wore it. 
 
 I myself once heard Morris lecture ; it was towards the end of 
 his life, on an occasion supposed to be big with possibilities for the 
 revival of the arts in this country the meeting of -an Art Congress 
 in Liverpool. His delivery, so far as I recall it, was not effective, 
 and I cannot recollect what he said, but I remember well his appear- 
 ance his sturdy figure, his artisan-like dress, and his cheerful, 
 kindly, rubicund face. Artists, and those men of light and leading 
 whose work came at all within the scope of the conference from 
 the President of the Royal Academy downwards had accepted 
 the cordial invitation of the sanguine and enthusiastic promoters 
 of this festival of the Arts, and crowded to the sea-city of the north 
 to take part in the proceedings. I remember well certain grandiose 
 prophecies to the effect that Liverpool, proudly standing on the 
 banks of Mersey, would become, to the present age, what Venice, 
 mistress of the seas, had once been, i.e., the commercial centre of the 
 fine arts. 
 
 The congress was to inaugurate a new era, and to be the first of 
 many similar meetings. Alas ! for the futility of human hopes, 
 the thing was repeated once at Edinburgh, where Morris attended 
 and afterwards stated, I think in a letter, that only Walter Crane 
 and he himself spoke to any purpose : after that it fizzled out, 
 and nothing more came of a very praiseworthy undertaking. But, 
 in the meantime, the first occasion was a considerable success. Sir 
 Frederick Leighton presided, and the various sections met, each 
 under the presidency of a man distinguished in his own branch 
 of art ; papers were read, and the discussions that followed them 
 were interesting if not always illuminating. As a social event it 
 was noteworthy. Hospitality, always great in Liverpool, was 
 unbounded ; civic and private entertainments were the order of 
 the day and night. To this great gathering of people came many 
 genuinely earnest in the cause of art ; came the dilettanti, and the 
 simply curious ; and those who followed, because their superiors 
 in the social scale set the fashion ; came too William Morris. On 
 
 280 
 
KELMSGOTT HOUSE 
 
 his appearance there was some surprise. " Could this robust per- 
 sonality, this practical, breezy-looking, sailor-like, artisan-like sort 
 of person, be really the famous decorative artist, the poet who 
 styled himself ' the idle singer of an empty day.' Then, the rumour 
 that had identified him with views inimical to the public weal, was 
 well founded. For he had discarded the stiff collar, frock-coat, 
 and silk hat, then held to be de rigueur, and his unconventional 
 costume reminded his audience that he had made himself very 
 prominent on the Socialist platform, and correct and conservative 
 Liverpool was then the last place in which his advanced views 
 would be acceptable. 
 
 I think there was some such fluttering of the dove-cotes, but 
 he was well received, and well he might be, for among those 
 invited to attend there was none greater than William Morris ! 
 For some thirty years he had been preaching to the world 
 the cult of beauty as a vital necessity in man's environment, 
 and in the common things of daily use ; and he had been 
 already hailed as the good genius who had brought the useful 
 arts of life to a new birth. The movement to redeem the world 
 from the crass vulgarity of the Mid- Victorian age of crimson 
 flock papers, imitation oak, wax flowers, and Berlin woolwork 
 from the depressing effect of decoration misapplied in architecture 
 and the lesser but allied arts, was rapidly spreading, a quarter of a 
 century ago, even in districts removed from London. So it was, 
 at least, among the professional and upper-middle classes ; I 
 myself was personally familiar with several homes of the wealthier 
 Liverpool merchants, that were already ordered and decorated 
 after the fashion, or by the firm, of Morris and Co. But so far the 
 movement had made little or no progress in a lower stratum of 
 society ; for it was argued that while the deplorable degradation 
 of the working classes continued, it was impossible and indeed 
 ridiculous that they should themselves aspire to the " House 
 Beautiful." Morris, however, with a nobler creed, held, and 
 justly, that the degradation of architecture and the subsidiary 
 arts of decoration, was at once the cause, and the effect, of the whole 
 degradation of life. He held too but here I cannot follow him 
 particularly as his attempt to put theory into practice absorbed 
 so much of his invaluable time, and deprived the world of many 
 of the fruits of his genius that only by becoming apparently one 
 
 281 
 
of themselves, might the capitalist and wealthy employer of labour 
 hope to benefit those beings less fortunate than himself. Hence 
 the artisan's blue shirt, that, on one occasion at least, he wore 
 at the Congress. But why, one is inclined to ask, should a 
 strong and original genius, on an occasion like that described, 
 run counter to the harmless prejudices and customs, of the 
 class to which he himself actually belonged, when those whom 
 he desired to serve, could in no wise benefit by his action ? 
 He might, if he chose, in his passion for work, and urged by 
 his resolve to let nothing be done in his workshops that he 
 could not with his own hand do himself, rise at daybreak, and 
 be at his loom ten minutes after waking. Sharp work certainly, 
 but he wasted no time over an unnecessary toilette ; for he 
 never looked in a mirror, and indeed would not have one in 
 his bedroom, or in any of the downstairs rooms. In his own 
 house and garden, he might dress as he pleased ; and at Queen 
 Square or Oxford Street show his chintzes and papers to 
 customers, himself making out the bill to purchasers, in any 
 costume, that his taste or common-sense, suggested as appropriate, 
 It might be wise to mingle with his workmen and with his fellows 
 on the Socialist League to all appearance one of themselves, but 
 surely it was unnecessary to appear before an audience of his 
 equals looking like a working man, for he was not a working 
 man except in the restricted sense of being an indefatigable 
 worker. 
 
 Everybody present knew this ; knew that he was well-born and 
 wealthy ; had been educated at Marlborough and Oxford, and 
 had originally intended to enter the Church ; that a visit to the 
 Continent, where he fell in love with the grand Gothic churches 
 of France, made him resolve to become an architect that he 
 entered Street's office and remained a year ; that, urged by 
 Rossetti, he had had thoughts of adopting painting as his profession, 
 but that, after all, impelled by the overmastering wish to make 
 things, and make them well and beautifully the selling of them 
 being of secondary importance and aware that to do so on any 
 extensive scale would necessitate co-ordination of labour, he became 
 a manufacturer. It was also common knowledge that he had a 
 lovely house on the Upper Thames, and a comfortable London 
 residence with a large and charming garden at Hammersmith. 
 
 282 
 
KELMSCOTT HOUSE 
 
 His may have seemed to some people " the pride that apes 
 humility ! " 
 
 But it was not so ! In his passionate sympathy with the labour- 
 ing poor as a class (he was not interested in them as individuals), 
 he felt himself to be one with them, and he desired to show this 
 to the world at large. For it was his personal possession of beauti- 
 ful things, and his happiness in work, by both of which he felt 
 his own life to be desirable, that awoke in him the altruistic longing 
 to bestow the like upon those who, though themselves unconscious 
 of their degradation were leading lives entirely devoid of sweetness 
 and light, and refinement and education ; many of them being 
 raised but little above the brutes. " He felt ashamed," he said, 
 when he contrasted their lot with his, and the dreary, unrelieved 
 drudgery of their daily labour with his own happy working hours. 
 " As I sit at my work at home, which is at Hammersmith," he 
 said, addressing a school of science and art, " I often hear some 
 of that ruffianism go past the window of which a good deal has 
 been said in the papers of late ... as I hear the yells, and shrieks, 
 and all the degradation cast on the glorious tongue of Shakespeare 
 and Milton, as I see the brutal, reckless faces and figures go past 
 me . . . fierce wrath takes possession of me till I remember, 
 as I hope I mostly do, that it was my good luck to be born re- 
 spectable and rich, that has put me on this side of the window 
 amongst delightful books and lovely works of art, and not on the 
 other side in the empty street, the drink-steeped liquor shop, 
 the foul and degraded lodgings." 
 
 Morris, if he could, would have had erased from the dictionary 
 the dreadful words " rich and poor." Carried away by a sense of 
 the burning injustice and inequality of life, we find that he even 
 faced " the thought " that true civilization may have to be 
 reached through the destruction, and not the transformation of 
 the existing order. Yet it should always be remembered to 
 his credit, when moderate men who love and revere him as an 
 artist, assail him for his violent socialism, that it sprang quite 
 naturally in the beginning out of his noble desire to see other 
 men's lives happier and healthier, and the world they dwell in 
 more beautiful. 
 
 To Morris's keen appreciation of venerable, historic, and beautiful 
 
 283 
 
GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 
 
 things, we owe the movement to preserve, rather than to restore, 
 old buildings. 
 
 In 1877 the idea materialized into the " Society for the Pro- 
 tection of Ancient Buildings," popularly known as " The Anti- 
 Scrape," a word of Morris's own coinage. From that time it did, 
 quietly and unostentatiously, much work of inestimable value, 
 counting among its working members many enthusiastic and 
 promising young architects keen to protect the " sacred monu- 
 ments," as Morris deemed them, of " the nation's growth and 
 hope." Some of these were among the first to answer the call to 
 the colours, and crossing the Channel at the beginning of the 
 European War in August, 1914, they had the exquisite pain of 
 witnessing, with their own eyes, the ruthless and wanton destruction 
 in Belgium and France, of many of the noblest memorials of mediae- 
 val architectural genius. But their work at home has merely 
 been postponed, for I feel sure that " The Anti- Scrape " has 
 still a future before it in the happy day, so certainly coming, 
 when the arts of peace shall emerge from the horrid welter of 
 war. 
 
 But above and beyond aught else, William Morris was a great 
 and original genius in all the arts that are decoratively applicative 
 to domestic life. 
 
 Poet, dreamer, social reformer all this he was but as Mr. 
 Mackail well says, speaking at the moment of his poetry 1 ' the 
 faculty of design in its highest form was the quality in which 
 Morris's unique strength lay," and the remark is even more ap- 
 plicable to his art than to his verse. 
 
 I do not think with Mr. Clutton-Brock, the author of a charming 
 monograph on " William Morris's Work and Influence," that the 
 latter made itself widely felt on the Continent. Though he 
 passionately admired the French Gothic (the first intense pleasure 
 of his life was his introduction to Rouen Cathedral), yet he himself 
 was essentially English in all he thought and did, and the almost 
 severe simplicity of effect at which he aimed in much of the work 
 he produced, was alien to the genius and sentiment of the Latin 
 races : it certainly was entirely opposed, in its orderly restraint, 
 to the prevailing taste of Germany, as shown in the heavy, florid, 
 rococo decoration that I remember to have hated a dozen years 
 ago in Berlin, and elsewhere. 
 
 284 
 
KELMSCOTT HOUSE 
 
 But for us at home Morris has done nothing less than totally 
 alter the aspect of our domestic environment. He has put a new 
 face on those externals that all unconsciously help to mould 
 character, and to direct the trend of man's evolution, externals that, 
 in the mid- Victorian era until the advent of Morris were inex- 
 pressibly heavy, ugly, and depressing. 
 
 Some ridicule was brought upon the movement soon known as 
 " sestheticism," by the extravagances of some of its votaries ; people 
 laughed with Gilbert and Sullivan, at the absurdities of the " very 
 intense young man 
 
 " The greenery-yallery Grosvenor Gallery 
 Foot-in-the-Grave young man," 
 
 at the apotheosis of the lily and the peacock-feather ; and at those 
 feminine devotees of the new art cult, who, arraying themselves 
 in loose draperies of sage-green, dirty yellow, or cloudy-blue, fondly 
 imagined that they looked as though they had just stepped out 
 of a picture by Rossetti or Burne-Jones. 
 
 Never were people more mistaken, Burne- Jones's finest works 
 glow with sumptuous colour, so too do Rossetti's ; while to Morris 
 a muddy-green was of all tints most abhorrent. He did not alto- 
 gether object to sage-green, but the rusty red and peacock blues 
 only prevailed in his fabrics whilst he was without a dye-house of 
 his own, and was tentatively feeling his way to the production of 
 the indigoes, madder-reds, and yellows obtained from a scentless 
 species of mignonette called Weld. His unerring eye for colour 
 enabled him ultimately to harmonize all these even in juxtaposition. 
 
 Curiously enough, as Mr. Mackail mentions, these dingy colour- 
 ings were associated with his name long after he gave them up. 
 A customer of rank calling one day at Oxford Street turned over 
 the beautiful Hammersmith carpets (then produced in bright, 
 clear colour) dubiously. They were not what he had intended 
 to purchase. " Are these all ? " he asked. Being answered in the 
 affirmative, he said, " But I thought your colours were subdued ? ' 
 This was more than Morris, whose hot temper had been rapidly 
 rising, could stand. He exploded on the spot. 
 
 " If you want dirt," he exclaimed, " you can find it in the street." 
 The offended great man departed, and never troubled Morris and 
 Co. again. 
 
 285 
 
GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 
 
 The coal-tar dyes had wrought havoc with what I may call the 
 palette, of the textile artist and Morris, wishing to return to the 
 disused vegetable dyes, carried his researches back even to the 
 age of Pliny, and many old Herbals notably Gerarde's, to which 
 I have elsewhere referred, and which was a favourite of his boy- 
 hood gave him substantial help. 
 
 Morris's first experiments with the dye vats were all made with 
 his own hand, with the help of an errand boy from his glass-painting 
 workshop. Want of space in London soon compelled him to 
 continue his experimental efforts for a time at Leek in Derbyshire 
 but neither carpet nor silk-weaving could be carried on on any 
 considerable scale, until he was able later to set up dye-works of 
 his own at Merton Abbey. His greatest difficulty was experienced 
 in his attempt to revive the almost lost art of Indigo dyeing, and 
 Prussian Blue had taken its place in the manufacture of textiles, 
 long before the introduction of aniline dyes. This was because 
 success in the preparation of indigo was so exceedingly uncertain ; 
 if the exact moment when fermentation has reached a certain point 
 be missed, the vat becomes useless, and as it is said that scientific 
 tests cannot be employed, the dyer, in order to judge when that 
 moment has arrived, has only experience, and his own keen sense 
 of smell, to guide him. Even after the first processes have suc- 
 ceededj the yarn must not be allowed, in the act of dipping, to 
 come in contact with the air. In an essay on dyeing, Morris himself 
 says " that the setting of the blue vat is a ticklish job, and re- 
 quires, I should say, more experience than any other dyeing pro- 
 cess," but to a man of Morris's temperament this difficulty became 
 only an incentive to further effort and we are told that at the 
 time his hands were always " unwashably blue." 
 
 But not alone dyeing, but everything else that was done or 
 made in his workshops, he had first learnt to do himself. After a 
 visit to the Low Countries as early as 1856, he had adopted or 
 modified for his personal use, John Van Eyck's motto 1 ' Als ich 
 kanne" ' If I can" and in an early prose romance in which 
 he half-consciously describes himself, he says, " I could soon find 
 out whether a thing were possible or not to me ; then if it were 
 not, I threw it away for ever, never thought of it again, no regret, 
 no longing for that ; it was past and over to me ; but if it were 
 possible, and I made up my mind to do it, then and there I began 
 
 286 
 
KELMSCOTT HOUSE 
 
 it, and in due time finished it, turning neither to the right hand 
 nor the left till it was done. So I did with all things I set my hand 
 to." 
 
 It was in this way that, when under Rossetti's influence, he 
 at one time had resolved to become a painter but soon, as we have 
 seen, gave up the idea, finding that not in that line lay his genius. 
 In his subsequent career as a decorative artist and craftsman, 
 everything done in his workshops was tested, tried, and examined 
 by himself; whether carpet- weaving, tapestry-weaving, chintzes, 
 wall-paper, or stained glass. His chintzes were primarily intended 
 for wall-hangings, to be used instead of paper but people would 
 not have them. 
 
 His industry and consequent output, were astonishing. Seventy 
 or eighty designs for wall-papers, and nearly forty for chintzes, 
 were produced by him during the years he was in business. Woven 
 stuffs, and stamped velvets, silk damasks, carpets and tapestries, 
 occupied him in turn. " He carried on his business as a manu- 
 facturer," says Mr. Mackail, " not because 'he wanted to make 
 money, but because he wanted to make the things he manufac- 
 tured ... in every manual art which he touched he was a skilled 
 expert ; in the art of money-making he remained to the last an 
 amateur." 
 
 A great painter once said to me, when sitting before an unfinished 
 picture on my easel and gazing with kind eyes thoughtfully at it, 
 " Ah, Jessie, an artist's greatest reward in his work, is his pleasure 
 in the doing of it." The words sank into my mind, and I have never 
 forgotten them. 
 
 o 
 
 To Morris all work was pleasure ; one of his dicta being that 
 " no work that cannot be done with pleasure in the doing, is worth 
 doing," which is only another way of saying, less comprehensively, 
 that the work can not be well done unless the worker's heart be 
 in it. The aphorism is broadly true, but must be accepted with 
 modification ; it applies of course in a special manner to the Arts, 
 to craftsmanship, to literature, to scientific research, to inventions, 
 to the instruction of youth and in short to avocations innumerable 
 wherever brain power, skill, initiative, and perseverance, are 
 essential to achievement. But it is obvious that the dustman, the 
 scavenger and the sweep, for example, can find no positive pleasure 
 in their occupations, yet they are hygienic and necessary, and 
 
 287 
 
GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 
 
 therefore worth the doing ; and surely one born with a natural 
 taste for science, for music or for painting, yet condemned by 
 circumstance to work for which he has no particular aptitude, 
 need not fail to make it " worth the doing," nor even to find a 
 modicum of satisfaction in it. 
 
 Experimental work delighted Morris, who cared less for the 
 end attained, than the end unattained. 
 
 I think all true artists show that feeling ; and, like Morris, spare 
 no pains in the doing. Mr. Mackail, referring to a piece of cabbage- 
 and-vine tapestry, executed at Kelmscott House, at which he 
 sometimes laboured nine or ten hours a day, remarks " and this 
 was the work of a man who had a hundred other things to attend 
 to, and was never in a hurry." 
 
 But when Morris felt a thing to be good he left it, he did not seek 
 to make good better he did not want to gild refined gold, to paint 
 the lily. This may have been partly the secret of the stupendous 
 amount of very varied work that he accomplished in a life that 
 terminated at sixty -two. 
 
 Another explanation was the great physical strength and 
 resulting unflagging energy that enabled him, after sound and 
 dreamless sleep, to rise, like a giant, refreshed, to the engrossing 
 task of the moment, and to continue working at it all day ; another 
 lay in the rare ability to detach himself from one piece of work 
 whilst still interested in it, and to turn with freshness and en- 
 thusiasm to another. He thus found sufficient recreation in the 
 
 
 
 change of occupation ; but if he needed any further relaxation, 
 he sought it, indoors, in back-gammon, cribbage and draughts, out 
 of doors in angling, or in the good old game of bowls, for which the 
 lawn at Kelmscott House offered excellent opportunities. 
 
 Although Morris soon gave up his youthful intention to become 
 an architect, yet architecture, using the term in its widest sense, 
 was his mistress, for he held that painting and sculpture were 
 but component parts of architecture, and had only intelligible pur- 
 pose when employed decoratively in relation to an entire archi- 
 tectural scheme. 
 
 The " sister arts," in his view, were not sisters at all sisterhood 
 implying equality. Architecture was the mistress art, and sculpture 
 and painting merely her agreeable handmaidens, very useful 
 adjuncts to her state, when kept in due subordination. " He 
 
 288 
 
KELMSGOTT HOUSE 
 
 knew well enough," says Mr. Glutton-Brock, ' that Michael 
 Angelo and Velasquez were great men, but he judged the art of 
 an age rather by its cottages, and cups and saucers, than by its 
 great pictures." 
 
 Morris, it is true, may never have exactly stated this, in words, 
 but the elaborate character of his designs for wall-paper and 
 hangings, which really renders paintings unnecessary, are, it seems 
 to me, practical and ocular proof that this was his belief. He 
 appears never to have regarded a wall as the natural setting for 
 pictures, which is the way in which painters regard it, and he 
 valued pictures only so far as they helped the decorative scheme. 
 They might, of course, conceivably, serve an ornamental end, 
 and conduce to a desirable tout ensemble, but not more successfully 
 than any well-designed wall-paper. Pictures indeed, so Mr. 
 Mackail allows, gave to Morris the uneasy feeling that their decora- 
 tive value was out of proportion to the labour expended upon 
 them ; and he would have preferred that the faces in Burne-Jones' 
 paintings should have been less highly finished, less charged with 
 concentrated meaning and emotion ; and this notwithstanding 
 that Burne-Jones was not a dramatic painter. Much as he appre- 
 ciated Fra Angelico, Van Eyck, and Holbein, " his three greatest 
 admirations among the painters of past ages," he would willingly 
 at any time have exchanged the National Gallery and everything 
 in it, for the illuminated books in the British Museum, illuminating 
 being one of the arts in which, quite early in life, he had become 
 proficient. 
 
 Thus, in Morris's scheme for the " House Beautiful," he left 
 no room for pictures, large, or of cabinet size ; nor for fine original, 
 or excellent reproductions of great masters, nor for etchings or 
 engravings. The easel picture was ignored, or rather I should say 
 forgotten. He would have had people hang their walls with 
 tapestries ; for those who would not or could not do this, he de- 
 signed wall-paper of wonderful beauty and originality, but his 
 earlier patterns for these for example, " The Daisy " and the 
 " Pomegranate " delicate and simple though they are, are very 
 " spotty " when regarded as background. His more ambitious 
 and intricate later designs are open to what, from my point of 
 view as a painter of pictures, is the very serious objection that 
 they are complete in themselves, and so attractive and interesting, 
 
 289 19 
 
that the eye is bound to follow and admire them to the exclusion 
 of anything hung upon them ; and that, while there is not a 
 painting in the world that would not suffer partial eclipse from 
 the restlessness of the elaborate wall pattern behind it, the rhythm 
 of the flowing and continuous design of the paper is itself disturbed 
 and broken up, by the introduction of the picture. 
 
 It must, therefore, be conceded by even his greatest admirers, 
 that Morris's theory and practice in wall decorations were inimical 
 rather than helpful, to what is generally known as high art and 
 it is not altogether surprising that his wall-papers, beautiful as 
 they are, have more or less gone out of fashion. 
 
 Though not its founder, Morris was a distinguished member of 
 the " Art Workers' Guild," which now, after many years of vivid 
 life, during which it has counted in its ranks numerous artists and 
 handicraftsmen of note, is as much alive as ever. 
 
 In natural sequence to this there followed " The Arts and 
 Crafts Exhibition Society," which Morris did not found, but which 
 he soon actively supported. Space does not admit, nor does, 
 properly speaking, the scope of this book allow me to more than 
 briefly mention these, and other developments of ideas connected 
 with the improvements of art, and of the condition of the workman, 
 which, as a matter of fact, had originated years before with Ruskin, 
 as Morris, whose admiration for the great teacher and author, was 
 sincere and deep, would have gladly acknowledged. 
 
 About 1890 the Kelmscott Press started working on the Upper 
 Mall in a cottage contiguous to Kelmscott House. To revive the let- 
 tering of the best periods, e.g., the perfected Roman type as seen in 
 the admirable work of the Venetian printers of the fifteenth century, 
 seemed to him as worthy of vast expenditure of time and labour 
 as was anything else he had taken up and carried to perfection. 
 He was tremendously excited about it ; the designing and cutting 
 of the letters, the quality of the specially-made paper, all absorbed 
 his attention. He himself went down to Little Chart, near Ashford, 
 with Mr. Emery Walker, to superintend the making of the paper, 
 and characteristically took off his coat and tried to make a sheet 
 with his own hands, and at the second attempt he succeeded in 
 doing very creditably what it is usually supposed must take a 
 man several months to master. 
 
 About this time Morris, disapproving of the anarchist tendencies 
 
 290 
 
KELMSGOTT HOUSE 
 
 of a large section of the Socialist League of which he had been 
 the moving spirit, seceded from it, together with some of his 
 personal friends and neighbours, and formed an independent 
 branch called the " Hammersmith Socialist Society," the object 
 of which was to spread the principles of Socialism peacefully. 
 The meetings took place twice a week until, some time after Morris's 
 death, the affair came to a natural ending. They were held in 
 the large room built out of the stable and coach-house in which 
 he had first set up the carpet looms, on which were woven under 
 his immediate eye, the beautiful Hammersmith carpets. 
 
 Until his removal to Merton Abbey, Morris was not able to 
 weave carpets larger than twelve feet square, for the space at his 
 disposal did not allow it. He designed them entirely himself, begin- 
 ning as one does in setting to work on a picture, by making a small, 
 careful design in his case to be enlarged by assistants on point 
 paper, divided into minute spaces, each representing a particular 
 bit of the carpet, or the proposed painting. The designs he coloured 
 carefully himself. When finished he sometimes spread the carpet 
 out on the lawn at Kelmscott House, in order that he might judge 
 properly of the effect. The drawing at the opening of this chapter 
 shows on the right the red- tiled roof of the apartment in which 
 the carpet looms were set up. 
 
 Everybody knows Morris's famous rule, " Have nothing in 
 your house that you do not know to be useful, and believe to be 
 beautiful." He could quite conscientiously stretch it to include 
 not alone carpets and embroidery, and wall-paper and stained 
 glass, and metal work, but tapestry also ; and he did so, for when 
 he had mastered one art, he immediately hungered to wrestle with 
 another ; and by and by he set up a tapestry loom as well as a carpet 
 loom the first tapestry loom being that which, as we have seen, 
 he put up in his own bedroom at Hammersmith. His ambition 
 was to revive the splendid and famous Flemish and French tapestries 
 of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Arras, round which at 
 this very moment, the middle of April, 1917, surges the tide of 
 the most terrible war in history, was in the earlier part of the 
 fifteenth century the centre of the peaceful industry, and from it 
 wall-hangings came to be known as " Arras." Other Flemish 
 cities, notably Brussels, soon surpassed Arras in the manufacture. 
 The greatest artists of the time designed for them, indeed the 
 
 291 19* 
 
GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 
 
 workers were bound by law to employ only professional painters 
 in the more important features of the design, though they were 
 permitted to introduce flowers, grasses, and such subsidiary 
 decoration of their own invention. Morris, an artist in every other 
 respect, was not very successful when he attempted to draw 
 figures and animals, and therefore while the conventionalized flowers, 
 fruit, and so forth, are of his own designing, he left the others to 
 Burne-Jones and to Philip Webb, who had been Edmund Street's 
 senior clerk when Morris had been articled to that architect and 
 who was succeeded, in Street's office, by Norman Shaw. 
 
 Morris thought that the house should be to the man what the 
 body is to the soul the outward and visible sign of life itself ; and 
 that was a quaint notion of his that " the garden, if not a part of 
 the house, should be in a sense the clothing of it." He never 
 graduated as an architect, he never built a house, he scarcely 
 remained any time in Street's office. It would seem that his 
 architectural knowledge " just growed," as did, by her own account, 
 the body of the original Topsy, his namesake ; he did not value 
 himself upon it, but he took real pride in his knowledge of gardening, 
 and of flowers, and fruits, and vegetables ; " we are told that he 
 knew all their ways and capabilities." 
 
 It is this fact that renders the garden on the Upper Mall so 
 interesting to us, for though it never held the place in his affections 
 occupied by that of Kelmscott Manor, or even by that of The Red 
 House (his first residence after his marriage), still Morris, being 
 what he was, an ardent lover of nature, " of the earth and 
 the seasons and the weather, and all that grows out of it," the 
 garden on the Upper Mall and " the growth of it " could not fail 
 to bring moments of joy into his existence. 
 
 Circumstances prevented him from residing altogether at the 
 beloved home on the Upper Thames, but he liked to think that 
 the river that ran under his windows at Hammersmith, had passed 
 the meadows, and grey gables of Kelmscott : and more than once 
 a party of summer voyagers went from one house to another by 
 water, embarking at their own door in London, and disembarking 
 in their own meadow at Kelmscott. 
 
 Writing in 1875 to his wife, then in Italy with his daughters, 
 about the time when he took the house, he describes the situation 
 as being " certainly the prettiest in London (you may scoff at this 
 
 292 
 
a. 
 
 O 
 
 o 
 
" v*i 
 
 :'..; 
 
KELMSCOTT HOUSE 
 
 among the olives beside the midland sea). . . . The house could 
 easily be done up at a cost of money . . . the garden is really 
 most beautiful. If you come to think of it, you will find that 
 you won't get a garden or a house with much character unless 
 you go out as far as the Upper Mall, and I don't think that either 
 you or I could stand a modern house in a street. . . ." 
 
 This praise of his London garden is not exaggerated. There is 
 only a small plot of ground in front ; with two scrubby bushes of 
 box, so far as I remember on either side of the front door. " It 
 neither ' clothes ' nor gives grace to the house," but at the 
 back stretches -away, almost to King Street, Hammersmith, the 
 loveliest and most extensive town-garden that it has fallen to 
 my lot to describe and to depict. I do not, of course, compare 
 it with the '' princely gardens," to repeat once more Bacon's 
 famous phrase but with those usually attached to 'the middle- 
 class Londoner's home. 
 
 Strictly speaking, at Kelmscott House there are three gardens, each 
 opening out of the other connected, however, by an encircling walk. 
 
 A wide, smooth lawn, much used for tennis and bowls, and 
 shaded by splendid trees among them a fine tulip tree is the 
 principal feature of the first garden. A row of terra-cotta vases, 
 almost large enough to hold a small man, therefore sometimes 
 called the " AH Baba " pots, which are Italian oil jars, used in 
 importing olive oil, cuts off the lawn at the lower end. When I 
 saw them, they were filled with scarlet geraniums, as seen in the 
 drawing ; it was remarked significantly that " of course they were 
 not there in Morris's time." No doubt they were held to be 
 vulgar by the worshippers of the sunflower and the lily ; and 
 vulgarity indeed is too mild a term applied to geraniums when 
 they are contrasted with a garish yellow ; but that Morris 
 himself considered them as altogether beyond the pale, and that 
 he started the prejudice against them, seems almost incredible 
 in face of his efforts to get pure, bright dyes in his vats. His 
 infallible eye for colour enabled him to harmonize everything, 
 even tints inherently discordant ; and he could not have failed 
 to realize the preciousness of a dash of scarlet which is as valuable 
 sometimes as a touch of black in a decorative scheme but then 
 Morris would never have contrasted it with calceolaria-yellow ; 
 and that is exactly jwhat the ordinary garden-lover does ! 
 
 293 
 
GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 
 
 This first enclosure leads to another abounding in old-fashioned, 
 sweet-scented flowers. Here there is a mulberry tree of great 
 age ; and at the farther end a highly picturesque, rather tumble- 
 down conservatory which has still, suggestions of quite aristo- 
 cratic beginnings ; and over this sweet peas stacked in rows, and 
 tall hollyhocks standing in battalions, seem to mount guard. I 
 am speaking, be it remembered, of the Kelmscott House garden as 
 it was some three or four years ago. Since then it has changed 
 hands, and as the new owner has, with lamentable vandalism, 
 pulled down the red-tiled wing, formerly coach-house and stables, 
 in which Ronalds made his first experiments in telegraphy, and 
 Morris installed his carpet looms and held Socialistic meetings 
 he has probably replaced the pretty old greenhouse with a spick 
 and span new one. Alas, the founder of the " Anti-Scrape " is 
 no longer here to utter a word of protest ! 
 
 This part of the enclosure shows some disposition to change its 
 character and to deviate into the ways of a kitchen-garden ; but 
 the result of this irresolution is delightful ; it always is, when 
 cabbages and Canterbury bells, and mint and mignonette, claim 
 kinship as being all part of the same vegetable kingdom ! 
 
 The kitchen-garden proper, however, is beyond all this. It 
 straggles down almost to King Street, Hammersmith ; a postern 
 door that shuts with a spring in the old buttressed wall gives 
 upon a narrow passage called euphoniously Hog Lane and this 
 by devious ways leads to the shops and the trams, and the bustle, 
 of the outside world. 
 
 But within, all is charming and peaceful enough it is but 
 slightly overlooked, and like the middle garden, it also boasts a 
 mulberry tree. Is the plant very slow growing ? if so, these 
 Kelmscott trees must be of great antiquity for each now greatly 
 exceeds the dimensions of a " bush," and pray remember that it 
 was a mulberry bush, not a mulberry tree, round which, in the 
 '' luxury of vain imagination " (for never was either shrub or 
 tree present), we have all danced in childhood " on a cold and 
 frosty morning." In any case, the game is as old as the tree. 
 
 I mentioned elsewhere that according to tradition, Queen Bess, 
 but more probably King Jamie, fired with the ambition to estab- 
 lish the silk industry in this country, caused many mulberry 
 trees to be planted near London, and it is true that there is scarcely 
 
KELMSGOTT HOUSE 
 
 an old garden in Hammersmith, Chelsea, or Chiswick, that does 
 not rejoice in the possession of at least one. 
 
 One cannot suppose that the Kelmscott specimens were among 
 those planted so long ago by royal command but they are their 
 direct descendants. The mulberry is a beautiful tree, growing 
 picturesquely ; it has large handsome leaves ; the fruit, when 
 newly-gathered, is most delicious and the berries, ripe and unripe, 
 red, black and green appear simultaneously on the boughs. We 
 must prize those we have, for unless we mend our ways, and plant 
 for posterity as our ancestors did for us, the mulberry-bush in 
 common with many other trees, may in a generation or two 
 become extinct for nobody plants it now ! 
 
 It was natural that this town garden should compare unfavour- 
 ably with that on the Upper Thames in the heart of the country 
 but certain entries in Morris's letters and diaries, show that he 
 found pleasure in it. 
 
 In 1882 he wrote from Hammersmith, 4 Well ! one thing I 
 long for will certainly come, the sunshine and the spring. Mean- 
 while we are hard at work gardening here, making dry paths 
 and a sublimely tidy box- edging ; how I love tidiness ! " Per- 
 haps he meant the remark for a joke ; anyway, it is amusing 
 coming from one who appears to have been notoriously untidy. 
 
 " Both the Hammersmith and the Merton gardens," he writes 
 in September, 1866, "are looking very nice just now" Merton 
 Abbey being the picturesque Surrey works, seven miles from 
 Charing Cross, to which he had removed his plant for dyeing, 
 weaving, and cotton-printing. This was according to a plan he 
 had long entertained for he felt that " this world-without-end, 
 for- ever last ing hole of a London " was not the place to do more 
 than carry out experimental work in. But though he abused 
 London, he was typically a Londoner of the middle-class and 
 being a poet and an artist to boot his native city at times made 
 strong appeal to him. His Hammersmith garden with its brown 
 brick walls, and smoky environment illustrated his own text, 
 when in May, 1891, he wrote, " The blossom is splendid London, 
 in the older parts like the Inns of Court, really looks well in the 
 springtime, with the bright, fresh green against the smoky old 
 walls. Spring over, it becomes London again, and no more an 
 enchanted city ; " a day or two later he^adds, " The weather is 
 
 295 
 
GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 
 
 beautifully bright and quite hot. The pear and cherry blossom 
 are going off, and spring will soon have slid into summer, though 
 the lilac is to come." With greater brevity he expresses the same 
 idea in " The Earthly Paradise " : 
 
 " When April tide was melting into May." 
 
 It was characteristic of Morris to remark upon the weather. 
 "It is a hottish close morning," he wrote once in June, " rather 
 dull with London smoke ; I have just been down the garden to 
 see how things were doing, and find that they are getting on. Not 
 so many slugs and snails by a long way, and the new-planted things 
 are growing now ; the sweet peas promising well, the peonies in 
 bud, as well as the scarlet poppies." 
 
 This habit of close observation, his joy in work, and nature, and 
 in growing things, his intense vitality, and untiring energy, explain 
 how it was that William Morris accomplished in a generation 
 nothing less than the renaissance of the practical and decorative 
 arts. 
 
 296 
 
LEIGHTON HOUSE: The Studio Balcony, from Garden 
 
 Page 296 
 
CHAPTER XIV 
 LEIGHTON HOUSE 
 
 THIS book professes to tell all about gardens, gardens either 
 famous for their beauty, or for their associations with the 
 celebrated men and women who have walked in them. 
 
 Let me here say at once that in this concluding chapter, J am 
 not going to talk very much about the garden of Leighton House, 
 but a great deal concerning him who directed its laying out, and 
 owned it. 
 
 And in giving my personal experience of one phase of Lord 
 Leighton's character, and in bearing testimony to his kindliness, 
 his helpfulness, his interest in the rising generation of artists, and 
 his self-sacrificing devotion to his high duties and to Art I shall 
 be shedding some light on the secret of his vast influence in his 
 lifetime. 
 
 The ideal president of any society of eminent scientists, scholars, 
 literary men, or artists, must be a many-sided man ; in his own 
 profession sufficiently distinguished to command the respect and 
 confidence of his fellows, though not of necessity as was the case 
 with the august first President of the Royal Academy incontest- 
 ably the greatest among them. The ideal president must combine 
 in his own person many and various qualities that meet but rarely 
 in one individual. Were it not so, now that the glamour of Lord 
 Leighton's presence has been removed, and the singular charm of 
 his winning personality is no more than a memory, there are 
 many among the younger generation of artists and critics of to-day, 
 who might wonder how it came about that, for the greater part 
 of a quarter of a century, he influenced the destinies of art in this 
 country, and was for seventeen years its official representative. 
 
 297 
 
Even those most strongly opposed to his method, manner, and 
 style if they judge him only from the amount, and the serious 
 quality of the work he left behind him and consider how far he 
 carried out his own ideals will generally be found to admit that 
 if there were greater painters in the latter half of the nineteenth 
 century, there was no greater all-round artist, and certainly there 
 was no other who, by common consent owing to a rare union of 
 intellectual and physical gifts seemed so marked out by nature 
 for his great position was born to be President of the Royal 
 Academy. 
 
 Singularly handsome, of distinguished presence, genial in 
 manner, speaking fluently many tongues ; a much-travelled man 
 who had lived long in several Continental cities ; a thoughtful and 
 eloquent speaker, and moreover a ready one for I myself have 
 heard him speak at a moment's notice, effectively and well 
 Frederick Leighton had the high-bred air, and the accomplishments, 
 of a finished courtier. But the charm of voice and smile, the 
 graces of manner and of mind, that attracted all who came near 
 him, were not learnt in courts for though of gentle blood, he 
 was not high-born ; and the President's courtliness was the out- 
 come of a courtesy that was innate. 
 
 Born at Scarborough in 1830, he was the grandson of a man who, 
 during two reigns, had been physician to the court of St. Peters- 
 burg. His father also was a medical man, one who might have 
 made in medicine a greater mark than he did, had not a cold caught 
 at the outset of his career, just after he had taken his Edinburgh 
 degree left him partially deaf. Frederick was the eldest child, 
 an only son ; he had two sisters, one of whom, the late Mrs. Suther- 
 land Orr, made some mark in literature ; the remaining sister,, 
 Mrs. Matthews, survives him. 
 
 The family seems to have been of a roving inclination, for we 
 hear of them as resident for a time in Florence, Rome, Paris, and 
 Frankfort ; and the cosmopolitan tastes and habits thus acquired 
 by the young Frederick, no doubt stood him in good stead in the 
 part he afterwards so admirably played in London society ; for 
 though insularity may assist in forming the individuality of an artist 
 who is destined ultimately to become a pillar of a national school 
 of painting it is by no means an asset in the equipment of one 
 whose business it is to represent that school in the world at large. 
 
 298 
 
LEIGHTON HOUSE 
 
 Leighton's artistic bent displayed itself early ; he was a very 
 small boy when he first went on the Continent with his mother, 
 who was at the time out of health ; and he was but ten years old 
 when he took drawing lessons in Rome. Although he already 
 showed signs of talent, Dr. Leighton did not encourage his desire 
 to become an artist ; indeed, in those days many parents held 
 Art as a profession, in abhorrence, regarding its followers as but little 
 better than vagabonds, or strolling players. That this is not so 
 now, we owe primarily to Sir Joshua Reynolds, who, in his own 
 person, first established the claim of Art to be a career for gentle- 
 men but it was reserved for Frederick Leighton finally to raise 
 the social status of artists generally ; and he has elevated the rank 
 of a craftsman in the fine arts should he care to assume it even 
 to what it had been in the days of Titian, Rubens, and Vandyke 
 who were courtiers, ambassadors, and the companions of kings. 
 
 Leighton was in Italy, and was only fourteen, when his father 
 consulted Hiram Power, the sculptor, in Rome touching his son's 
 career. " Shall I make him an artist ? " 
 
 ' Sir," replied the American, " you have no choice, he is one 
 already, and he may become as eminent as he pleases." 
 
 Thus the boy obtained his heart's desire, but it was a desultory 
 sort of art training that in the intervals of his regular education, 
 now began. He who afterwards did so much to awaken and keep 
 alive an ideal of beauty amid the grime and smoke of London 
 derived his own passionate love of that beauty from his early 
 Italian surroundings. But the actual and existing Academies of 
 Art in Italy, were sadly decadent; and Florence was a bad place 
 to begin in, for the boy there picked up mannerisms that it took 
 long years to undo. But fortunately, his general education having 
 been begun in Frankfort, he returned there to continue it, and 
 came under the corrective and formative influence of Steinle, an 
 artist little known in England but to whom as a master though 
 he studied also in Brussels and Paris, Lord Leighton always 
 confessed the greatest obligations. 
 
 In 1852, when twenty- two years of age, Leighton proceeded to 
 Rome, where he was well received by the English colony, and 
 where his long friendship with the Brownings began. Thackeray, 
 who was there at the time, was so greatly impressed by the young 
 artist's promise, that on his return to London, meeting Millais, 
 
 299 
 
GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 
 
 of whom and of his Pre-Raphaelite brothers all the Art world was 
 talking, he exclaimed : " Millais, my boy, I have met in Rome 
 a versatile young dog called Leighton, who will one of these days 
 run you hard for the Presidency." 
 
 Leighton's first picture of any importance, " The Cimabue 
 Madonna," was painted in Rome ; and being exhibited in London 
 in the Academy of 1855, attracted great attention, and was pur- 
 chased by the Queen for six hundred pounds. Yet it does not 
 appear that its success established the painter's position. The 
 critics, we are told, were puzzled by him, and did not know where 
 to place him. Holman-Hunt and Millais were known, and had 
 made their mark but " who was Leighton ? " The question was 
 answered in the sixties, when, after an interregnum during which 
 the artist again visited the Continent there appeared year after 
 year at the Royal Academy, works revealing a passionate love of 
 beauty, an unrivalled feeling for form, and glowing with southern 
 colour. 
 
 Leighton, it was clear, was a worshipper of classic art ; indeed, 
 founded himself upon it, yet owed much to French influences 
 to Bouguereau, Gerome, and Robert Fleury. The critics were 
 divided ; though classed by Ruskin as the true successor of 
 Correggio while certain French writers on Art missed in his style 
 " some attractive British singularity," others discovered in him 
 qualities essentially English. It was not, however, until some 
 years later that one of these wrote : " La Grandeur de la com- 
 munion humaine, la noblesse de la paix, tel est le theme qui a 
 le plus souvent et le mieux inspire M. Leighton. Et cela il ne 1'a 
 pas trouve en France, ni ailleurs. C'est bien une idee anglaise." 
 
 In the heyday of Lord Leighton's artistic and social success, no 
 disturbing and anarchic forces arose, to bewilder the Art-loving 
 public, and bring despair into the hearts of most serious painters, 
 as they have done of late. 
 
 It is true that " flung straight on to the bosom of Nature, where 
 safety is," as Lord Leighton once finely said in another connec- 
 tion, the Pre-Raphaelites had done much to break down the 
 barbed wire of conventionalism, and had even forced an entrance 
 into the sacred enclosure of the Royal Academy. But it was a 
 very mild and modified Pre-Raphaelitism that obtained a footing 
 there ; for there was something in the atmosphere of the Royal 
 
 300 
 
LEIGHTON HOUSE 
 
 Academy in those days as there is apt to be more or less, in the 
 atmosphere of every academic body that had a deadening effect. 
 Besides which, Holman-Hunt, Madox Brown, and Rossetti, remained 
 sternly outside Burne- Jones a sort of younger son of the Brother- 
 hoodthough elected an associate an honour, I believe, not of 
 his seeking only exhibited there once, and sent his best work 
 elsewhere. And after entering the Academy, Millais himself 
 who certainly possessed genius, and will live when most of us are 
 forgotten in sundry notable portraits, in " The Boyhood of 
 Raleigh," and other examples of his exuberant middle period 
 examples that are satisfying till compared with his youthful efforts 
 broke entirely away from Pre-Raphaelite principles. A certain 
 devolution from them was to be expected and for some years he 
 betrayed no decline in painting-power rather the reverse but 
 his work ceased to show the intensity of intellectual vision the 
 emotional and dramatic force, and the passionate admiration for, 
 and close loving study of, nature, of " The Huguenot " and similar 
 subjects, while it lacked the subtle meanings carried through 
 every inch of the canvas to be found in that noblest of British 
 pictures, " The Blind Girl," well worth a pilgrimage to Birmingham 
 to see ! 
 
 These pictures, and others by the Brotherhood, though they 
 did not lead to a revolution in Art had effected what sincerity 
 and earnestness will more or less always effect in the most con- 
 servative society. Before Frederick Leighton appeared upon the 
 scene Pre-Raphaelitism had sent a revivifying breath of fresh 
 air through the closed and musty chambers of Burlington House 
 and had blown away the cobwebs of a century of conventional 
 art ; and though this had passed, and to some extent the dust had 
 settled again yet the windows were left open for the admission of 
 a healthy realism, and later, of a broad and sane impressionism 
 using the word for the moment in the narrow sense in which it is 
 usually applied. Both of these had originated in this country, 
 and only came back to us from France ; for if it be doubtful how 
 far our own Constable inspired the great French landscapists and 
 the French nature school none will deny that Turner was the 
 first great Impressionist. Mr. Charles J. Holmes, perhaps the 
 chief authority on Constable, thinks that his influence on French 
 Art has been exaggerated, and that the Impressionists when they 
 
 301 
 
GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 
 
 sought after the secret of painting air and sunshine, looked to 
 Turner rather than to Constable. 
 
 It is, however, a cardinal doctrine of my artistic faith that 
 every sincere painter be he pigmy or giant, unconsciously gives 
 us in his picture, his personal " impression " of the things he 
 paints, and of their relative value in his eyes and that, therefore, 
 " impressionism " in its wider sense, is nothing new ; for as long 
 ago as the days of Titian, Tintoret, and Rembrandt (I am leaving 
 Velasquez out of count, because he is always claimed by the 
 avowed Impressionists) all great artists recognized more or less 
 the vast importance of selection and emphasis in Art, of the just 
 subordination of the lesser to the greater, and were therefore 
 " Impressionists," though they did not entirely eliminate all 
 detail. 
 
 The happy result of all this was, that, by the time Frederick 
 Leighton was established in London, there had already been a 
 slow but steady broadening of Academic sympathies, and a welcome 
 slackening of Academic rules shown not only in a wider tolerance 
 of new styles and methods but in the admission of women to the 
 training in the Fine Arts given in the schools at Burlington House 
 those schools in which Lord Leighton' s interest was always 
 great. I think it is right here to pause to express the gratitude 
 that all women artists ought to feel to the courageous lady, Laura 
 Herford by name whose act had first led to the opening of the 
 door of the Academy Schools to her sex. Aware that a woman 
 was then ineligible as a student, she sent in the required specimen 
 of work, concealing from the authorities that it was not by a 
 man. It was accepted and although I am ignorant of the details 
 of the story I know that she so urged her claim that she was 
 admitted as a probationer, and in due time, as a student. I have 
 often thought that she, the only woman in that place must have 
 endured a good deal of discomfort and ridicule, and perhaps of 
 veiled opposition for, as I found out to my cost, a good many 
 years later young men even embryo artists are not always 
 chivalrous. I am not aware that she even made her mark in a 
 profession which it is possible that she never seriously intended 
 to follow her aim may have been merely to prepare the way for 
 others but her niece, Helen Paterson better known as Mrs. 
 Allingham, has most certainly done so. 
 
 302 
 
LEIGHTON HOUSE 
 
 I do not know how long it was after this that permission was 
 given for thirteen women students Helen Paterson and the late 
 Edith Martineau among them to work in the schools, but as this 
 took place in the days when the Royal Academy occupied rooms 
 in the National Gallery and was cramped for space the number 
 working there at one time never exceeded the proverbial baker's 
 dozen. 
 
 Yet notwithstanding that they were so greatly in the minority, 
 a young American lady Louisa Starr, afterwards Madame Canziani 
 first woman to win the gold medal for historical painting over 
 the head of her more favoured fellow- students, had proved, before 
 the Academy removed to Burlington House, that women were 
 capable of becoming good painters. 
 
 It was in the seventies, after the migration to Piccadilly, that 
 the restrictions as to number were abolished ; but for a long time 
 after this women were debarred from attendance at anatomical 
 lectures, and denied the study of the figure from life a branch of 
 art-education that is of first importance, and for which, in the case 
 of the men, every facility was afforded. In my time we were 
 limited to drawing from the antique, and painting drapery on the 
 lay-figure, to still-life, copying old masters, and to painting heads 
 from the costume model in the Upper Painting School. There, of 
 course, we had the benefit of the instruction of the greatest artists 
 of the day. 
 
 I have heard it objected to the Academy training that the change 
 of masters monthly, must confuse the student ; Millais, Calderon, 
 and Pettie, for example, in my time, advocating the practice which 
 seeks to get at once as near to nature as possible ; Leighton, recom- 
 mending an elaborate preparation, by under-painting ; but in a 
 multitude of counsellors there is wisdom, and a student of capacity, 
 while learning something from each, may be trusted to adopt the 
 practice that suits him best, bringing all to the test of his own 
 experience : not many of us, I think, adopted one dear old Acade- 
 mician's recipe for flesh-painting, which, whether the model posing 
 were a brunette or a blonde, was invariably "black, white, and 
 indian red." 
 
 These reminiscences of very happy days, are leading one by a 
 very circuitous route to the garden of Leighton House ; but Lord 
 Leighton's last words were, " Give my love to the Royal Academy," 
 
 303 
 
GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 
 
 and of the Academy the schools are an integral part ; and since the 
 interests of the students were very near his heart, some further 
 reference to them may be pardoned by the reader. When I was 
 there the butt of the Painting School was a tall, thin, old man, un- 
 kempt, and unshaven, of whom tradition said that he had been there 
 sixty years, having in his youth gained some prize that carried with 
 it a life-studentship. However exaggerated this report, he was 
 there, to my knowledge, long after I left wearing, I am told, the 
 same shabby, grey, coat, his sparse, grey locks no whiter, his grey, 
 colourless face no cleaner than he was in my day, when, as I 
 distinctly remember, he was grey from head to foot ! He always 
 contrived to be in time to secure the best view of the model, and to 
 set up his easel where he could reserve a clear space between it and 
 the window. Then, having dabbed some paint on his canvas, he 
 would run backwards to judge at a distance of the effect, glance at 
 the model, rush forward again, and implant another splash of 
 pigment on the study, which somehow, nevertheless, never advanced 
 at all ; and he always used the same old canvas over again. He 
 took no notice of anybody, and nobody interfered with his runs to 
 and fro, for everybody gave him as wide a berth as possible ; the 
 men played practical jokes upon him, and left pails of water, soap 
 and a towel near him. All this took place in the days when both 
 sexes worked together in the costume-painting school, and the 
 
 girls showed their disapproval of Mr. P by drawing their skirts 
 
 aside when he came near them ; but he remained superbly 
 indifferent, and superlatively dirty ! He looked eighty, though he 
 was probably a quarter of a century younger, but he seemed to us, 
 to even the kindest-hearted, an apt example of the survival of the 
 tmfittest. Nevertheless, it was round this curious specimen of 
 fossilized humanity, that the late Mr. de Morgan has kindly thrown 
 the mantle of romance, and made his dry bones live. It is impossible 
 to read " Alice for Short," without perceiving that the character 
 of Verrinder, whose devotion to his insane wife is a touching episode 
 in the story, was drawn from life, and that the original was " Old 
 
 P ." If his history were really what de Morgan makes it, 
 
 and had we known it, there was not a student among us but would 
 have looked kindly on the old artist. 
 
 At that time the R.A. Studentship, now shortened to five years, 
 lasted to seven, if anyone cared to stay so long, which rarely 
 
 304 
 
LEIGHTON HOUSE 
 
 happened. Among the characters of the Schools when I was there, 
 was a certain Annie Little Little was not her name, but it will 
 serve. In comparison with most of us, she was old when she was 
 admitted, which was at the time I was. If she had ambitions 
 they were not satisfied, for she never succeeded even in passing out 
 of the Antique school, but finished her seven years' training there. 
 Whereupon she once more sent in the specimen works required, 
 was re-admitted, and began the routine of study all over again ! 
 Visiting the Schools one day, long after I had ceased to work there, 
 I was greeted by the little, pale-faced, elderly lady, who had first 
 been a probationer when I was, and who was still patiently slaving 
 away at chalk drawings of the Discobolus and the Antinous. 
 Whether she died in harness or not, I do not know. I hope she 
 did, if the rules allowed of it, for wherever her nominal home may 
 have been, she was happiest within the Academy walls. 
 
 In competition with the men for the very few prizes open to both 
 sexes, the women, in my time, were handicapped by their limited 
 training. I felt this severely when the only girl-competitor 
 I successfully tried for the Gold Medal for Historical Painting, a 
 biennial prize, and in those days, at any rate, very highly coveted. 
 I think it carried more outdoor prestige then than now, when so 
 many of the best male students finish their training abroad, or did 
 so before the war. 
 
 I recall the genuine and unselfish joy among the students of my 
 own sex, and the ignoble annoyance of the men, who with one or 
 two exceptions, promptly sent me to Coventry. Long afterwards 
 I learnt on unimpeachable authority, that that night, in their absurd 
 wrath at the success of a girl, a mere tyro, as they considered me 
 for I had but very recently passed into the Upper Painting School, 
 and to the majority of the more advanced students was unknown 
 the men students smashed a cast in the schools either a statue or 
 a bust. Their attitude was unjust, as well as ungenerous, because 
 the voting for the students' prizes by the Academicians, is by ballot. 
 I think and hope that a better spirit among men towards women 
 now prevails, and did so even before the war ; but I am not quite 
 sure that it does, for as yet there are no women lawyers in this 
 country. However, a generation and a half ago there were no 
 women doctors, so there is hope for the woman attorney, and 
 barrister the more so as ere long the women's vote will make itself 
 
 305 20 
 
GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 
 
 felt ; but is there any at all for the woman artist, who has not yet 
 received official position ? for since Angelica Kauffmann, no one 
 of my sex has passed within the sacred pale of the Royal Academy, 
 although I could mention at least half a dozen women whose work 
 during the last twenty-five years if measured by the masculine 
 standard ought to have carried them in ; they have not been 
 geniuses, it is true ; but the ranks of the Academicians would be 
 sadly depleted if all who are not geniuses walked out. 
 
 At the period of which I have just been speaking, the would-be 
 woman artist had advanced a very little way, even on the road to 
 equal educational rights. The step taken by Laura Herford led, 
 it is true, straight to the closed door of the Academy Schools, which 
 was now set partly open ; but here someone within must have 
 cried " Halt ! " In vain we begged for fuller opportunities for 
 study. It was the year before mentioned, when the women, still 
 largely in the minority in the Schools, and permitted to compete for 
 but few of the premiums, had done well ; two silver medals, as well as 
 the gold, falling to our share. On the principle that half a loaf is 
 better than no bread, we asked for a partial removal of our dis- 
 abilities, and that at least we might be allowed to study from a 
 half-draped model. I had been made to head the petition, and back 
 came the reply to me : " Unanimously condemned as inexpedient." 
 Therefore we had to supplement the very excellent training we had 
 so far received, with the best practice from the life that we could 
 obtain elsewhere. 
 
 I enlarge upon this subject, not only because it may be not 
 without interest to those who care for the fortunes of British art 
 to consider the difficulties that long beset the path of the woman 
 who was ambitious to become more than a mere amateur but also 
 because I think those who have freely enjoyed and others who 
 now enjoy, what came too late to be of use to us, already launched 
 as we were on our careers as exhibiting artists owe something of 
 their good fortune to our pioneer efforts, and most of all because I 
 am convinced that it was mainly the influence of Lord Leighton 
 as he afterwards became that so fortunately brought about the 
 change. No doubt Philip Calderon both before and after he 
 became Keeper, deserves some of the credit for I remember how 
 strongly t he always insisted that every draped figure in a costume 
 picture should firstpf all have been carefully/lrawn from the nude. 
 
 306 
 
LEIGHTON HOUSE 
 
 That Millais felt the disabilities under which the women in my time 
 laboured to be very unjust, I am sure, for he did what he could to 
 mitigate the injustice. I well remember an occasion immediately 
 following on my admission to the Upper Painting School, when he 
 was the " Visitor " for the month and that the model he provided 
 was a beautiful little boy of some eight or nine years old graceful, 
 lithe, and nearly nude. The innovation was chiefly for the benefit 
 of the women students in the class. 
 
 The pose was a kneeling one, and the child moved a good deal, and I 
 recall how on this my first attempt at painting the figure from the 
 life wrestling with the difficulties of flesh-painting in oil, and keep- 
 ing the drawing correct at the same time I made the boy's curly 
 head rather too large. When the great master came round to me, 
 he detected this at once, saying sympathetically : "I know, it's just 
 like having a tooth out, but it must come out," and out it came ! 
 
 Millais was a wonderful personality ; he had a handsome presence, 
 a genial, breezy, almost jovial manner, and a kindly smile ; and he 
 had a humorous way of putting things, with a touch of fun which 
 was very effective. 
 
 I never knew him very well, not nearly so well as in the same 
 relation that of master and pupil I came, soon after, to know 
 Leighton ; but he never forgot anyone, or one's work ; he would 
 come out of his way to speak of it of that I might give instances 
 pleasant to look back upon, but they would be out of place here 
 
 In the light of that early remark of Thackeray's, before quoted : 
 " Millais, my boy, I met in Rome a versatile young dog called 
 Leighton, who will one day run you hard for the Presidency " 
 it is curious to remember how some twenty-five years ago, Millais 
 and Leighton (like Reynolds and Romney had done before them) 
 " divided " the suffrages of the town. I think now no one will 
 hesitate to say that Millais was far and away the greater painter, 
 though, as I said before, he was not a greater all-round artist. 
 But it seems to me that while Millais had more than a touch of 
 native genius, Leighton had greater accomplishment. However, 
 to enlarge upon this would only be to repeat in extenso what I 
 briefly said at the beginning of the chapter, touching the great 
 President's versatility we are still too near them both in point of 
 time to judge either fairly ; at present both have suffered that 
 partial and temporary eclipse which I have elsewhere remarked as 
 
 307 20* 
 
GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 
 
 so frequently following the removal from among us of those who 
 have played a conspicuous part in their day ; and this is more 
 particularly true of artists, and literary men ; for work that is 
 scientific and practical in its purpose, can be brought to the test 
 of experiment ; and science is essentially progressive, and not 
 subject to the fluctuation of taste, and the caprices of fashion. It 
 is otherwise with the fine arts, and the generation succeeding 
 Leighton and Millais, has witnessed in some quarters and these 
 actually defended by the Press the violation of every canon of 
 art by which taste might be guided and controlled. High ideals, 
 and a reverence for nature and the great achievements of the past, 
 have given way to a passionate desire to be original at any cost, 
 and to a clamorous self-advertisement. Looking back to the 
 condition and prospects of the Arts in the years immediately 
 preceding the great war, one realizes that we had then reached an 
 era of aesthetic topsy-turvydom that if art has anything to do 
 with morals, and I think it has, was significant of much that has 
 happened since. The sinister pictures that amused the thought- 
 less, bewildered the inexperienced, and caused deep resentment and 
 fears for art, in the breasts of the serious thinker seem to me to 
 have been the fitting foreword to the vision of the world as we now 
 see it ; a world in which international law has been wantonly 
 violated much as the rules of Art have been, and in which horror 
 succeeds horror. Is it too fanciful to say that the malign influence 
 of Nietzsche, spread over a continent, found visible expression in 
 Post Impressionism, and Futurism ? That as anarchy and cruelty 
 were openly preached by the man so anarchy and frightfulness 
 appear in the pictures ? 
 
 Fortunately for Lord Leighton himself, though perhaps less so 
 for the arts, in the heyday of his artistic predominance and social 
 success, the anarchic influences that have since disturbed that 
 small section of the world that takes genuine interest in Art, had 
 not made themselves seriously felt. Revolutionary symptoms 
 had indeed appeared from time to time ; and of these Mr. Philip 
 Calderon, Keeper of the Royal Academy from 1887 to 1898 
 makes amusing mention in a letter he wrote to me in 1892 
 from which I shall have occasion to quote. These symptoms of 
 extravagance, however, were kept in check until the close of his 
 career, by the President's controlling influence and correct taste. 
 
 308 
 
LEIGHTON HOUSE 
 
 But, although Post Impressionism and Futurism were as yet un- 
 born, a certain unrest in artistic circles chiefly outside the Royal 
 Academy unmistakably existed. It was an unrest bequeathed 
 by the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood ; an unrest of spirit, method, 
 and outlook, that was all to the good, and in which some dis- 
 tinguished members of the Royal Academy as well as the President, 
 deeming any sort of movement to be better than stagnation- 
 must have rejoiced. It expressed itself in a profound discontent 
 with Victorian art in all its manifold forms. 
 
 In the last chapter we saw its awakening in the realms of the 
 decorative and industrial arts, in William Morris's various activities. 
 In the fine arts it worked by means of an attempt to destroy, or 
 at least to weaken, the supremacy of the Academy, by means of 
 a counter attraction. The Grosvenor Gallery was opened ! Here 
 Sir Edward Burne- Jones and his followers, and other innovators, 
 came to their own ; here even Watts the idealist, also a few more 
 of the Academicians who disliked the conventionalism and much 
 of the meaningless prettinesses to be met with at Burlington 
 House elected to exhibit. 
 
 It was a praiseworthy effort ; but in the long run it failed, though 
 supported by society and fashion as any such attempt to reform 
 from outside an institution so firmly established in popular 
 favour as the Royal Academy was foredoomed to fail ; and there- 
 fore the shillings of the public continued to drop chiefly into the 
 cash receptacles in the Piccadilly turnstiles ! Nevertheless, it was 
 followed by the New Gallery ; and with a broad-minded President 
 at Burlington House, its results were far-reaching. Closely in 
 touch with the Continent as Leighton was, and cognizant of all 
 new movements there it was during his reign that, throwing over 
 the hide-bound traditions of the Maclise, Redgrave, and Creswick 
 period, the Royal Academy became gradually less conservative, 
 until, at the present moment it includes in its membership the 
 best men from every school ; but as yet no woman. Short of 
 Post Impressionism and Futurism, I think all modern groups are 
 represented and receive fair play. Indeed, the swing of the 
 pendulum is now to the other side, and it is rather the exponents 
 of the older methods and aims in art, who now complain and with 
 good reason not of the Royal Academy, but of the unfair attitude 
 of the Press towards them. Art criticism has passed almost 
 
 309 
 
GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 
 
 entirely into the hands of a few, a very few, able men of strong 
 predilections, and stronger prejudices. These men hold, and quite 
 legitimately hold, their own views on the province and practice 
 of the arts both of painting and sculpture, but unfortunately 
 they are partisans rather than critics. Yet I believe that the 
 clever, and very enthusiastic writers who sign their names to articles 
 filled with laudatory passages on this or that leader of some very 
 advanced clique, or who advocate the latest fad or craze brought 
 over from abroad by speculative dealers, honestly feel the admira- 
 tion they express for works which, in spite of their supporters' 
 ubiquitous efforts to convince are not convincing, either to common 
 sense, or to artistic intelligence. 
 
 And remember, no man can be a fair judge of art ; fit, that is, 
 to lead a pliant and uninstructed public the public which, after 
 all, supplies the artist with his bread and cheese who is not sym- 
 pathetic as well as critical who is a special pleader ; who is 
 incapable of laying aside for the moment his own preferences, 
 pet aversions, and pet theories even his personal independent 
 convictions, and of contemplating and judging a work of art from 
 the standpoint of the artist himself. In doing so he may rest assured 
 that the artist is more dissatisfied with it than ever he can be 
 though for different reasons because it is no mere platitude to 
 say that a true artist never attains to his ideal. 
 
 " What is art ? " is a question never yet satisfactorily answered. 
 v And it is one that every fair-minded man whose business it is to 
 
 translate the artist to the public, should ask of himself. For one 
 thing it is a means to the expression of a man's idiosyncrasy ; his 
 mentality, his emotions, his attitude towards nature, and his 
 outlook on life and so varied is this idiosyncrasy, that within 
 certain felt limits beyond which no man may go and call himself 
 artist, men " gang their ain gait," and no man should say them 
 4 nay." The Royal Academy itself has had room at one and the 
 same time for a Tadema and a Brangwin, and outside it might 
 recently be found, almost contemporaneously, men of such diverse 
 aims and practice, as Holman-Hunt and Augustus John, Whistler 
 and Burne-Jones yet each has his place in the firmament of 
 art, although of some of them it may be said that whether they 
 are fixed stars, or passing vaporous meteors, the world is not yet 
 old enough to know. 
 
 310 
 
LEIGHTON HOUSE 
 
 Nevertheless, there are certain fundamental rules which should 
 guide the impartial critic, certain tests of Tightness and wrongness, 
 which he is bound to apply. But the modern writer on art is 
 not impartial, and he does not apply them ; his are not the senti- 
 ments of the dying Gainsborough when, reconciled at the last 
 to Reynolds, the President, bending over him, caught the 
 murmured words : " We are all going to Heaven, and Vandyck 
 is of the party." He does not seek out what there is of good in 
 that with which he may be personally out of sympathy. He looks 
 only for qualities in which his own little group of painters excel, 
 forgetting that art is compounded of compromises, and that in the 
 attainment of one quality, to him of vital importance, the artist 
 may have had deliberately to sacrifice another, as he had a perfect 
 right to do 1 And this being so, how manifestly unfair the whole 
 system of art criticism is ! To begin with, the lead of the Press 
 to induce the public to take interest in pictures at all, is very weak ; 
 and compared with that given to the drama and music in the course 
 of the year, the space allotted to art is exceedingly small ; and it 
 is therefore to be regretted that men who themselves are mere 
 dilettanti, should be able, either thoughtlessly to make an ephemeral 
 reputation with exaggerated praise, or to slay a well-earned one 
 with a contemptuous word. Possibly they are themselves good 
 amateurs up to a certain point, but clever sketching, is not painting 
 a picture, and they would fail completely if they tried to carry one 
 out from start to finish. If they knew as little practically of science, 
 or of music, as they know practically of Art, they would not venture 
 to comment publicly, on either. 
 
 An author, whose professional status may be no higher than 
 that of a score of painters whose works are ignored or venomously 
 attacked, is usually safe in the hands of his critic, who at least 
 understands the construction of books, who appreciates language, 
 style, and so forth, and who will not fall out with his author as 
 does the art-critic with the artist merely because the opinion 
 voiced, or the manner of the matter, are not to his taste. 
 
 What comfort the artist can draw from the cynical and oft- 
 quoted remark of Lord Beaconsfield " that the critics are the 
 men who have failed in literature or art " he may draw ; but 
 the Press is all-powerful and the painter who belongs to another 
 school than the critics, who could not paint like the men he eulogizes. 
 
 311 
 
GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 
 
 if he tried ; and would not if he could ; who has been true to his 
 own ideals, and finds that the nearer he gets to them, the farther 
 he is from those of his critic must suffer in silence, and wait 
 patiently, as he has already done for twenty or thirty years, for 
 the advent of a more catholic school of art- criticism. He is 
 inarticulate save through his art, as most artists are and indeed, 
 in the words of that wise and witty Royal Academy Keeper from 
 whose humorous letter written when once I rushed into print 
 I shall quote again : " We must beware of the inkpot our business 
 is to paint let others talk the men who row don't speak ; it is 
 the idle fellows running along the bank who shout : ' Ha, you 
 duffer, why don't you pull ? ' 
 
 It was just the recognition of the fact that men do not all tread 
 the same path in reaching their goal that though all roads are 
 supposed to lead to Rome, there is, in art, but one reliable finger- 
 post, and that is sincerity that made Lord Leighton such an 
 excellent critic, and helped to make of him the ideal President. 
 Those who, like myself, have benefited by his wise advice, have the 
 best possible reasons for stating, that though his own instincts 
 might lead him in a certain direction, he took into account that 
 the natural bent of a student in whom he might conceivably 
 discern promise, might be in another. Earnestness and industry 
 were his watchwords. Himself an ardent lover of ordered and 
 classical art, cheap and merely showy work winning easy success 
 but often concealing ignorance and impatience of labour were 
 abhorrent to him. Possibly he did not go so far as Sir Joshua 
 Reynolds, who held that perseverance is genius ; but he certainly 
 believed that however fanciful and free its ultimate application, 
 fine work must fundamentally depend on sound drawing and good 
 painting, and that these must of necessity be based on the reverent 
 study of Nature. In his relations with us students, and in his 
 lessons on composition, he refused to consider a mere " sketch " 
 at all. He insisted that the design presented to him for criticism 
 should be clearly worked out, and if for a figure picture, should 
 be worked out from living models a matter of considerable expense 
 to young artists, but and I speak from experience, the lesson that 
 followed was well worth the outlay ! 
 
 Lord Leighton was tolerant of everything except insincerity ; 
 but his tolerance was never put to a very severe test, for the first 
 
 312 
 
LEIGHTON HOUSE 
 
 symptoms of extravagance and wilful eccentricity in British Art 
 showed themselves only four years before his death, and he was 
 out of England that autumn. The occasion was a violent con- 
 troversy that had arisen in Liverpool over the merits and demerits 
 of a small picture entitled " Summer," by Mr. Homel of the New 
 Glasgow group of painters. 
 
 I was then resident in Liverpool, and naturally was drawn into the 
 discussion. A paper of mine on the subject, read at the Liverpool Art 
 Club, was printed by the members and published. It drew forth some 
 interesting replies from Millais, Watts, Holman-Hunt, and many 
 other leading artists, also from some well-known writers on art. 
 
 The most amusing of these letters came from Mr. Philip Cal- 
 deron : " No," he wrote to me ; " the echoes of the great storm 
 have not reached so far, we are too far from the teapot ; and to 
 tell the truth we in London are quite blase about tremendous 
 revolutions in Art, we have had them so very often, we have passed 
 through Realists, Impressionists, then Vibrists, then Square- 
 brushists, then Smudgists, let alone the school (save the mark) 
 that used no palette, but a marble-topped dining- table instead." 
 It was indeed true that the stir caused by the Glasgow pictures 
 was local and evanescent ; and Sir Frederick Leighton wrote that 
 having been abroad all autumn, he had " heard nothing of the 
 war in Liverpool, until a rumour reached me the other day, I 
 forget how." Thus he never saw them, which is to be regretted, 
 since they were premonitory of much that has happened in the 
 world of aesthetics since his death ; but I think that even if Post 
 Impressionism and Futurism had appeared in his time, so great 
 was his social influence, and the prestige of his name, that the 
 Grafton Galleries would not have been thronged by fashion as 
 they were in certain years before the war, when the Post Im- 
 pressionist pictures were the talk of the town ; nor would Futur- 
 ism have fared any better, for whatever philosophic basis its 
 supporters may claim for it, its philosophy is not that of art, wherein 
 abstract ideas must of necessity have concrete expression. 
 
 The President, I take it, would have simply ignored the move- 
 ment as in no way demanding his serious consideration, or the 
 interposition of his authority. 
 
 Returning for a moment to the subject of the Academy Schools 
 in which Leighton was interested, the students, in my day men 
 
 313 
 
GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 
 
 and girls alike literally worshipped him, and he deserved our 
 appreciation, for nobody ever made greater efforts to inspire and 
 stimulate. It is certain that he contrived to infuse into those 
 with whom he came in contact, his own enthusiasm for work. 
 Himself an early riser in his studio I have understood before 
 eight o'clock when Visitor at the Schools he had insisted that 
 the Painting- school should be opened, and the models posed, at 
 nine, the usual hour being ten o'clock. And he would often come 
 down, booted and spurred, to go round the classes, when on his 
 way to the headquarters of the Artists' corps, of which he was 
 colonel. How little did its first commander guess that the now 
 famous " Artists " would one day share with the " Inns of Court " 
 " The Devil's Own " the distinction of training most of the 
 young officers in our new armies who, in the greatest war in history, 
 have so valiantly fought and bled on the Continent, in the cause 
 of their country, and the world's freedom. But Leighton's interests 
 in the students did not cease when he passed out of the schools. 
 In order to encourage the study of composition he set subjects 
 invariably classical or historical and invited, from the Upper 
 schools, all who would take the trouble to work them out to 
 bring their designs on a certain day, to his own beautiful studio 
 in Kensington. So far as I remember, though many went on the 
 first occasion, the students dropped off by degrees his proviso 
 that he would not waste time in criticizing rough sketches 
 possibly not pleasing them but I think it was in this way that 
 I acquired the habit of seeking his advice in the designs for my 
 early pictures and of taking to him, for criticism, the scheme 
 of the work I proposed to do. Composition, of course, cannot 
 really be taught ; the sense of arrangement, relative value of parts, 
 line, balance, and so forth, must be more or less intuitive ; and no 
 one who is entirely devoid of the instinct will ever be an artist ; 
 but the natural sense being there, even in a small degree, it can be 
 cultivated. That the great President was a past-master in the 
 difficult art of grouping many figures, of arranging them naturally 
 into a homogeneous whole his noble decorative lunettes at 
 South Kensington" The Arts of Peace " and " The Arts of War," 
 far more than large ambitious canvases such as " Daphnephoria " 
 suffice to show. In these, every part is busy not restless, not 
 obtrusive but if the application of a popular phrase much used 
 
 314 
 
LEIGHTON HOUSE 
 
 now in a very different connection may^be pardoned every unit 
 in both designs is "doing its bit" is connected in some way 
 with the whole. Everything helps to tell the story a point 
 Leighton greatly insisted on. 
 
 I well remember how, in a carefully worked-out design of mine 
 the subject of which was chosen by himself from " Plutarch's 
 Lives " and the history of Coriolanus my illustration of the 
 tragic moment when, exclaiming " Mother, you have saved 
 Rome, but lost your son ! " the hero yields to the prayer of his 
 mother, what he had refused to concede to his wife and others 
 pleased him extremely, except in one respect. In order to fill up 
 a corner otherwise empty, I had introduced a boy stretched on the 
 ground merely as an onlooker. The introduction was immediately 
 condemned ; the boy had no right to be there as he in no way 
 helped the elucidation of the story rather, he diverted attention 
 from the central group and the moving moment. And yet the 
 critic abhorred small empty spaces. " Your little mean spaces," 
 he used to call them. 
 
 It was very characteristic of him that he could discern and 
 praise in others, qualities that we do not find in his own pictures. 
 For instance, he looked for feeling i.e., emotion in a student's 
 work, because he had remarked its presence there before and 
 finding it, he praised it. 'I have seen that in your work already." 
 And so I repeat what I said earlier, that because he divined un- 
 erringly in what direction a student's natural bent lay he was a 
 sympathizing and successful teacher ; and it was the same rare 
 gift of understanding and of insight the ability to take the point 
 of view of another, to appreciate and encourage the development 
 in others of qualities that some may miss in his own work that 
 helped to make his success as President. 
 
 Feeling, in the sense of human emotion, does not exist in 
 Leighton's own pictures and it is a cause of wonderment to me 
 now as it was in the days when I was privileged to learn so much 
 from him that he seemed to value much in others qualities, that 
 he certainly did not strive after himself; but I think now, that 
 herein he showed his greatness, and his peculiar fitness for his 
 position. In this respect he was a great critic. 
 
 Feeling, of course, using the word in its more limited aesthetic 
 sense that intangible something that may exist in one portion 
 
 315 
 
GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 
 
 of an artist's work, and possibly not in another which is the 
 unconscious expression of his own pleasure at the moment in what 
 he does expressed itself in Leighton's case in an exquisite sensitive- 
 ness to line and colour, to grace and sweetness, and, when under 
 its influence in an unrivalled delicacy, a charm of touch and 
 treatment. This sort of " feeling " he possessed in abundance, 
 and it shows in such idyllic pictures as " Cleobaulos teaching his 
 daughter Cleobouline "in " Wedded," " The Music Lesson," 
 " Winding the Skein," and in some delicious Oriental studies 
 but I cannot help wishing that he had never painted " Elijah and 
 the Angel," " Rispah," and " The Sea gave up her Dead ! ' : 
 
 Sir Frederick Leighton was the handsomest man I ever knew 
 perhaps more handsome as he grew older, and his hair began to 
 whiten than when I first became acquainted with him. The 
 charm of his manner and his smile were felt by all who, having 
 the entree to Holland Park Lane, flocked there on Studio Sundays. 
 On such occasions one saw there in the seventies and eighties, 
 many of the most eminent men and women of the day, he himself 
 generally wearing a brown velvet coat being in appearance the 
 most distinguished. 
 
 Many will remember the gallant and stately figure he presented 
 on the evenings of the Royal Academy conversazioni, when, wear- 
 ing the gold chain and badge of his office, and supported by some 
 members of the Council of the year, he stood to receive the 
 Academy's guests with a charming grace, at the end of the long 
 crimson pathway, lined breast-high with flowering plants, that 
 led from the staircase to the Central Hall. Behind this flowery 
 barrier, many of the earlier comers took their stand to watch the 
 arrivals, and hear their names announced by a pair of dignified 
 Academy servitors attired in long crimson betasselled gowns. 
 Somehow, the Royal Academy soirees seemed more brilliant affairs 
 in Leighton's time than ever they have done since, even in those 
 seemingly far-off days, after his death, but before the great war, 
 which has put a veto on all such functions for no President, how- 
 ever courtly, was ever so popular in Society and among his con- 
 freres and students as he. He always stood to " receive " in person 
 from nine to twelve o'clock never moving from his place till after 
 the stroke of midnight when with a sigh of relief, he would turn 
 away and mingle for a while with the gay throng in the Galleries. 
 
 316 
 
LEIGHTON HOUSE 
 
 I remember once watching this scene when, somewhere about 
 11.30 p.m., when nearly everybody had arrived a belated pair 
 a lady and gentleman, breathless and eager hurried up the car- 
 peted pathway between the flowers clear enough by this time- 
 to where the President still stood, now almost alone, and deserted 
 by the Council. " Oh, Sir Frederick," they panted, " we are so 
 sorry we're so late, but we've been all the way down to your house 
 at Kensington we thought the party was there ! ' 
 
 I caught his reply : " But this is the Academy soiree ! " They 
 must have been strangers to London and its ways though they 
 evidently knew him well, and had probably made his acquain- 
 tance abroad and receiving the invitation card had mistaken 
 both the nature of the function, and the scene. 
 
 Leighton's discourses, delivered to the students at the biennial 
 prize distribution of the Royal Academy, when the gold medals in 
 painting, sculpture, and architecture, and the travelling student- 
 ships, are awarded his speeches at the Academy banquets and on 
 similar occasions, were all marked by the same dignity, finish and 
 evidence of punctilious care, as were his pictures. Those pictures, 
 in the years of which I have been speaking, were outstanding 
 features of the annual exhibitions, and together with Millais' and 
 Alma-Tadema's, gave to them, if not a greater distinction, 
 certainly a greater general interest, than they have at the present 
 day notwithstanding the presence there now of much masterly 
 work, especially among the portraits. Yet even in his lifetime, 
 many people objected to the excessive smoothness and sometimes 
 " sugariness " of the President's style of painting ; and in his 
 larger decorative works, and more monumental and classical 
 subjects in spite of the magnificent drawing the impressiveness 
 is marred by a certain want of virility in execution. Yet, as Mr. 
 Pepys Cockerell has said, " Whatever judgment the future may 
 pass upon his own productions, the fact must never be lost sight 
 of that even without them, Leighton was a great man. Intellec- 
 tually, spiritually, and socially, he was the most brilliant leader 
 and a stimulator of artists we have ever seen in England." 
 
 And this is true. To young artists the Academy students, 
 for whom he cared so much one of his great charms, lay in his 
 accessibility ; his helpful interest in any one of them, once exerted, 
 never flagged. I do not suppose he ever refused to receive any 
 
 317 
 
GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 
 
 student to whom his advice would be of real service. Personally, 
 I owe him much : though he was one of the busiest men in London 
 if I sought his counsel, he would find time to write, with his own 
 hand, and make a studio appointment, usually for Sunday morn- 
 ing. Unfortunately, I was not resident in London at the time : 
 in spite of Leighton's saying, " You must be in London, and your 
 friends should know it," circumstances unfortunately prevented 
 me from being so. 
 
 Those who have only seen Leighton House as it is at the present 
 day stripped of all the significant trifles that go to make up the 
 domestic environment of every human being, man or woman- 
 denuded of the pictures by other artists that once clothed the walls, 
 of the bric-a-brac and curios, the rare tapestries and Oriental 
 carpets that formerly filled it can form but a faint conception of 
 its aspect in the Master's life-time. The Arab Hall loveliest 
 souvenir of the East in London, when the sun shines, a veritable 
 dream of beauty otherwise so strangely out of place in the foggy 
 atmosphere of the Metropolis ; and the noble staircase, remain much 
 as in other days ; for the rest, to me the place is a tomb little 
 more than the shell of a habitation, and bare of all save association. 
 
 I can recall one of the first visits I ever paid there, when the Master 
 himself showed me and a friend who accompanied me, all over his 
 beautiful home ; and pointed out the things that he most prized. 
 
 It is a long while ago when I was quite young and still a student ; 
 but I remember what a lovely June morning it was, and that the 
 surrounding trees still wore their early summer dress of vivid green ; 
 that the sun shining, illuminated the pictures in the drawing-room, 
 where there were some fine examples of Corot, and an exquisite 
 George Mason a windy picture of calves, and a girl driving them. 
 Also there was a Paris Bordone. Fresh from his own lessons in 
 composition, I had the temerity to criticize the really faulty arrange- 
 ment of line of the Venetian. Leighton smiled indulgently, and 
 conceded the point ; " but," he said, " we are not all great Colour- 
 ists, like Paris Bordone," and certainly the sumptuous colour of the 
 picture atoned for the defective composition. 
 
 I do not, on this occasion, recall much of the Studio, that occupies 
 the entire upper story of the house, and is about 17 feet high, 
 about 60 feet long by 25. I think I associate it more with later 
 visits. Besides, since Lord Leighton's death I have had to deliver 
 
 318 
 
LEIGHTON HOUSE 
 
 a course of lectures there on the Italian Schools of painting ; and 
 have also attended in it many meetings of the Imperial Art League ; 
 so that the more recent memories have partly effaced that very 
 early impression. 
 
 It was characteristic of the owner to collect round him things he 
 required in the production of his classical subjects, and to contrive 
 for them copies of furniture as near the originals as might be. 
 I remember there was a chair with long rockers, copied, no doubt, 
 from an Etruscan vase or frieze. Crossing the room quickly to 
 fetch something, Leighton tripped over the projecting rocker and 
 nearly fell. " That comes of having Greek chairs ! " he exclaimed. 
 
 From the little Venetian balcony at the East end of the great 
 Studio shown from without in my drawing, and suggestive of 
 Romeo and Juliet we get a charming view of the garden at the 
 back of the house. 
 
 Into that garden the owner presently took us. It is reached by a 
 flight of steps descending from the dining-room window. 
 
 The comprehensive title of this book has enabled me to include 
 in it the " little garden, so called," of the great author of " Sartor 
 Resartus," which played no small part in his life at Cheyne Row. 
 Of the garden of Leighton House, though it is very many times 
 larger than Carlyle's, I can find less to tell the reader. It was 
 much prettier in the days I have been speaking of than it is now, 
 when it is rather closely built up with houses, and more or less 
 overlooked, overgrown, and comparatively neglected ; and 
 Holland Park Lane is no longer a " lane ! ' : 
 
 Mr. Cockerell speaks of delightful Sunday mornings in summer, 
 spent in the garden, when " he sat chatting on random subjects 
 with the President, who in slippers, a so-called c land and water hat,' 
 and a smock'-frock, leant back in a garden chair and talked as no 
 one else could. The quiet, the sun overhead, the grass under our 
 feet, the green trees around us, and the house visible between them, 
 form an ineffaceable picture of aesthetic contentment it is a delight 
 to recall." He " received " every Sunday morning when the weather 
 was fine and warm. As mentioned already, it was a lovely 
 June day when I saw the garden first my drawing of it was 
 made in autumn but Leighton did not receive us in the free- 
 and-easy costume just described. So far as I remember he wore 
 a brown velvet coat, such as on ater occasions I usually saw him 
 
 319 
 
GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 
 
 wear. There were more flowers in the garden then than now 
 but I cannot recall the " All Baba " pots of which there are now 
 several and which appear in the drawing, though they may have 
 been there ; but the President probably secured them when William 
 Morris obtained those that are so conspicuous in the garden at 
 Kelmscott House. It was the month of roses, and from a standard 
 tree near the house, he plucked and gave to me a lovely rose. I believe 
 I have it still, shrivelled and faded, but intact, somewhere in the 
 recesses of an old writing-desk used by me in those girlish days. 
 
 And lest any should deem me foolishly romantic, let them 
 remember that the bond between master and pupil is a very strong 
 one as strong as that which binds students to their Alma Mater, 
 that I shared to the full the passionate admiration that all who 
 came in contact with Sir Frederick Leighton felt for the man, and 
 that, at that time, all students, and a large section of the art world, 
 felt for the genius of the artist. Perhaps he was right when he 
 himself said for his opinion of himself was a humble one " I 
 am not a great painter ; " but he was inspired by lofty ideals, 
 and insomuch as he was always striving to finish his work up to his 
 first conception, he was a great artist. 
 
 320 
 
AFTERWORD 
 
 THIS Book, as the Reader must long ago have discovered, deals 
 with gardens and gardeners discursively. 
 
 I have freely used the privilege that I claimed at the beginning 
 to introduce sometimes matter that might seem to have no direct 
 bearing on the ostensible subject, if by so doing I could interest 
 my readers in the men and women who made the gardens, or loved 
 them ; as well as in the gardens themselves. 
 
 I have not chosen for illustration by my pen or my brush, any 
 garden, however picturesque, that is devoid of associations, histori- 
 cal or biographical. 
 
 On the other hand, I have admitted some that on aesthetic grounds 
 might well have been left out. But the steps of genius have paced 
 their walks ; and the good and the wise have rested, and dreamed, 
 and thought, therein. Therefore I have introduced them ; knowing 
 that if the influence of Man on the Garden has been great, great too 9 
 has been the influence of the Garden on Man. 
 
 Printed at The Gliapel River Press, Kingston, Surrey. 
 
INDEX 
 
 ABBOTT, George, Bishop of London, 79. 
 
 Adair, Sir Robert, 185-6. 
 
 Adam, Brothers, The, 102-3, 106 el sq. 
 
 Adams, Dr., 241. 
 
 Addison, Joseph, 26-7, 150, 176-7, 200 et sq. 
 
 Alexandra, Queen, 145 et sq. 
 
 Allen, Dr., 216-17, 226. 
 
 Allingham, Mrs., 302. 
 
 Alma-Tadema, Sir Lawrence, 31G, 317. 
 
 Anderson, William, 131. 
 
 Anne, Queen, 27, 141, 147 et sq., 177, 205. 
 
 Anne Boleyn, 43 et sq., 196. 
 
 Antiquaries, Society of, 121. 
 
 Apothecaries, Society of, 119 et sq. 
 
 Arbuthnot, Dr. John, 172, 177. 
 
 Aylmer, John, Bishop of London, 71 et sq. 
 
 BACON, Francis (Viscount St. Albans), 17 
 
 et sq., 70-1, 90, 180, 293. 
 Bacon, Sir Nicholas, 48. 
 Baldock, Ralph, Bishop of London, 64. 
 Baldwin,- Archbishop of Canterbury, 30. 
 Balfour, Colonel Eustace, 101 et sq., 107 et sq. 
 Bancroft, Richard, Bishop of London, 78-9. 
 Banks, Sir Joseph, 127-8, 131. 
 Beavan, Mr., 147. 
 Benbow, Admiral, 21, 27. 
 Berry, The Misses, 184. 
 Blenheim, 2. 
 Blomfield, Charles J., Bishop of London, 
 
 83, 93. 
 
 Boccaccio, 2 et sq. 
 Bolingbroke, Henry St. John, Viscount, 
 
 172-3. 
 Bonner, Edmund, Bishop of London, 68, 
 
 66 et sq. 
 
 Boyle, Robert, 122. 
 Brangwin, Frank, 310. 
 Bridgeman, Charles, 166. 
 Brougham and Vaux, Lord, 201. 
 Brown, Lancelot (" Capability "), 109 et sq., 
 
 166. 
 
 Browne, Sir James Crichton, 256, 258. 
 Browning, Robert, 274-5, 299. 
 Burleigh, Lord, 6, 16, 48, 70-1, 80. 
 Burlington, Richard Boyle, 3rd Earl of, 
 
 160 et sq., 168, 229 et sq. 
 Burlington House, 163. 
 
 Burne-Jones, Sir Edward, 195, 279, 285, 
 
 289, 292, 301, 309-10. 
 Busby, Dr., 190, 229. 
 Byron, Lord, 201, 215, 217. 
 
 CALDERON, Philip, 303, 306, 313. 
 
 Campbell, Thomas, 176, 201, 215. 
 
 Canning George, 185, 212. 
 
 Carleton, Dr. Guy, 53. 
 
 Carlyle, Jane Welsh, 256 et sq. 
 
 Carlyle, Thomas, 85, 233, 243 et sq., 255 
 
 et sq., 279, 319. 
 Carlyle House, Chelsea : 
 
 life of the Carlyles at, 255 et sq. 
 
 Carlyle's description of Cheyne Row, 
 260-1. 
 
 the garden, 261 et sq., 269. 
 Charles I., 10, 16 et sq., 51, 79, 143. 
 Charles II., 16, 19, 21, 23, 106, 140, 190, 
 
 196, 205. 
 Chaucer, 2, 3. 
 Chelsea Physicke Garden : 6, 9, 114 et sq. 
 
 its origin, 117 et sq. 
 
 under Sir Hans Sloan, 121 et sq. 
 
 visited by the great Linnaeus, 125 el sq. 
 
 descriptive of the garden, 126-7, 135 
 
 et sq. 
 
 Cheyne; William, Lord, 121, 123. 
 Cheyne, Charles, 118. 
 
 Chicherley, Henry, Archbishop of Canter- 
 bury, 32 et sq., 36, 60, 95. 
 Chiswick House : 58, 109, 154 et sq. 
 
 its famous gates, 159, 160. 
 
 early history of, 160 et sq. 
 
 the grounds, 164 et sq., 181 el sq. 
 
 famous visitors, 171 et sq. 
 Christ's Hospital, 237-8. 
 Christina, Abbess of Romney, 1. 
 Cleveland, Barbara Villiers, Duchess of,190, 
 
 192, 196-7. 
 
 Clutton-Brock, Mr., 284, 289. 
 Cockerell, Pepys, 317, 319. 
 Coleridge, Ernest Hartley, 249. 
 Coleridge, S. T., 86, 237 "et sq. 
 Coleridge, Mrs. S. T., 239. 
 Coleridge, Sara, 250. 
 
 Compton, Henry, Bishop of London, 80 et aq. 
 Constable, John, 301-2. 
 Cotton, Sir Robert, 128. 
 Courten, William, 122. 
 
 323 
 
INDEX 
 
 Cowper, William, 182. 
 Crane, Walter, 280. 
 
 Cranmer, Thomas, Archbishop of Canter- 
 bury, 42 et sq., 50, 57, 60, 69, 70. 
 Curtis William, 133. 
 
 D 
 
 DAVIDSON, Dr., Archbishop of Canterbury, 
 
 45. 
 
 Delane, John, 151. 
 Devonshire, Georgiana Spencer, Duchess of, 
 
 128, 167, 169, 178 et sq. 
 Devonshire, William Cavendish, 5th Duke 
 
 of, 178 et sq. 
 Devonshire, William Cavendish, 6th Duke of, 
 
 181 et sq. 
 Dibdin, Dr., 247. 
 Disraeli, Isaac, 22. 
 Dryden, John, 190. 
 
 K 
 
 EDWARD III., 4, 46. 
 
 Edward VI., 5, 65 et sq., 97 et sq. 
 
 Edward VII., 145 et sq., 187. 
 
 Eldon, Lord, 201. 
 
 Elizabeth, Queen, 5, 8 et sq.. 23-4, 39, 46 
 
 et sq., 57, 59, 66, 70 et sq., 86, 105, 189, 191, 
 
 193, 229. 
 
 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 246, 249. 
 Evelyn, John, 7, 16, 20 et sq., 27, 52, 58, 81, 
 
 99, 118, 120, 127, 194. 
 
 F 
 
 FAIRFAX, General, 200, 202. 
 
 Field, Henry, 119-20, 129, 130, 135-6. 
 
 Fielding, Henry, 233. 
 
 Fitzherbert, Mrs., 212. 
 
 Fitzjames, Richard, Bishop of London, 
 
 64-5, 73. 
 Fletcher, Richard, Bishop of London, 75 
 
 et sq. 
 Fox, Right Hon. Charles James, 179, 180, 
 
 185-6, 200, 205 et sq., 217-18. 
 Fox, Christian, Lady, 205-6. 
 Fox, Sir Stephen, 204 et sq., 229. 
 Froude, James Anthony, 255 et sq. 
 Fulham Palace : 
 
 its founders and early history, 62 et sq. 
 
 a story of the " Monk's Walk," 68. 
 
 early history of the gardens, 70 et sq. 
 
 histories of the early bishops of, 72 
 et sq. 
 
 under Bishop Compton, 81 et sq. 
 
 the moat, 82. 
 
 rare plants, 84. 
 
 description of the garden, 87 et sq. 
 
 historic associations, 86-7. 
 
 GAINSBOROUGH, Thomas, 181, 311. 
 Garibaldi, 187. 
 
 Garrick, David, 181, 232. 
 Garrick, Mrs., 231. 
 Gay, John, 163, 172, 175 et sq. 
 George I., 122. 
 George II., 122, 143. 
 George V., 187, 212. 
 
 Gerarde, John, 6, 71, 99, 115 et sq., 286. 
 Gillman, Dr. James, 241 et sq., 247, 249 et sq. 
 Gillman, Mrs. James, 241-2, 250, 252-3. 
 Granville, Harriet, Countess of, 184, 187. 
 Grindal, Edmond, Bishop of London, after- 
 wards Archbishop of Canterbury , 46, 70, 80. 
 Grove, The (Highgate), 237 et sq. 
 
 Wordsworth's life there, 241 et sq. 
 
 descriptive of, 244 et sq. 
 
 the gardens, 251 et sq. 
 Gwynne, Nell, 141, 143, 205, 244. 
 
 H 
 
 HALES, Mr., 137. 
 
 Hallam, Arthur H., 250. 
 
 Hampton Court, 68, 92, 108. 
 
 Handel, G. F., 171. 
 
 Hardy, Matthew, 53. 
 
 Hazlitt, W. C., 4, 11, 15, 21, 247. 
 
 Hearne, Thomas, 10. 
 
 Henchman, Humphrev, Bishop of London, 
 
 80. 
 
 Henry I., 1. 
 Henry II., 12, 30, 35. 
 Henry V., 94 et sq. 
 Henry VI., 4, 95. 
 Henry VII., 48, 64-5. 
 Henry VIII., 4, 5, 8, 9, 19, 43 et sq. f 65 
 
 et sq., 69, 95 et sq., 139, 196. 
 Herford, Laura, 302, 306. 
 Hills, Thomas, 5. 
 Hogarth, William, 227 et sq. 
 Hogarth, Mrs., 231 et sq. 
 Hogarth House, 228 et sq. 
 
 descriptive of the house and garden, 
 
 231 et sq. 
 
 Holland, Caroline, Lady, 207 et sq. 
 Holland, Elizabeth, Lady, 209 et sq. 
 Holland, Henry Fox, 1st Lord, 205 et sq., 219 
 Holland, Richard Henry, 3rd Lord, 185, 200- 
 
 1, 209 et sq. 
 
 Holland, Henry Rich, Earl of, 201. 
 Holland House : 58, 85, 112, 169, 173. 
 
 house and gardens described, 198 et sq., 
 218 et sq. 
 
 its early history, 200 et sq. 
 
 Joseph Addison's associations with, 202 
 et sq. 
 
 first connection with the Fox family, 
 205 et sq. 
 
 history of Elizabeth, Lady Holland, 
 209 et sq. 
 
 Lady Holland's salon, 214 et sq. 
 Holman-Hunt, W., 300-1, 310, 313. - 
 Holmes, Charles J., 301. 
 Homel, Mr., 313. 
 Hooker, Sir William, 133. 
 Horticultural Society, 129. 
 Howley, William, Archbishop of Canterbury, 
 58. 
 
 324 
 
INDEX 
 
 ILCHESTER, Mary, Lady, 200. 
 
 Ilchester, Giles Stephen Holland Fox- 
 
 Strangways, 6th Earl of, 210-11. 
 Ilchester, Stephen Fox, 1st Earl of, 205. 
 Irving, Edward, 250. 
 
 JAMES I. of England, 5, 16, 56, 86, 119. 
 
 James I. of Scotland, 3, 4. 
 
 James II., 80 el sq. 
 
 Jeffreys, Lord, 215, 218, 226. 
 
 Jennings, Sarah (Duchess of Marlborough), 
 
 141 et sq. 
 
 John, Augustus, 310. 
 Johnson, Dr., 180, 190, 248. 
 Johnson, Hester (Stella), 26. 
 Johnson, Thomas, 130. 
 Jones, Inigo, 102, 106, 163, 170-1. 
 Juxon, William, Archbishop of Canterbury, 
 
 36, 41, 50, 53, 60, 63, 79, 80. 
 
 K 
 
 KEATS, John, 275. 
 Kelmscott Press, 290. 
 Kelmscott Manor, 292. 
 
 Kelmscott House (The Mall, Hammer- 
 smith) : 271 et sq. 
 
 interior and early history, 271 et sq. 
 
 William Morris at, 272 et sq. 
 
 the garden, 293 et sq. 
 Kennet, Dr., Bishop of London, 53. 
 Kent, William, 161 et sq., 166 et sq., 175, 229, 
 
 230. 
 King, John, Bishop of London, 79, 82. 
 
 M 
 
 MACAULAY, Thomas Babington, Lord, 22 
 et sq., 54, 80, 190, 200, 203, 210, 214, 216, 
 218. 
 
 Maclise, Daniel, 309. 
 
 Mackail, J. W., 272, 276, 282, 284-5, 287 
 et sq. 
 
 Madox-Brown, Ford, 301. 
 
 Mann, Sir Horace, 27-8. 
 
 Markham, Alexander, Abbot, 2. 
 
 Marlborough House, 139 et sq. 
 early history, 139 et sq. 
 descriptive of, 144 et sq. 
 the garden, 147 et sq. 
 
 Marlborough, John Churchill, Duke of, 141 
 et sq. 
 
 Martineau, Edith, 303. 
 
 Martineau, Harriet, 246-7. 
 
 Mary Tudor, 44, 65, 67, 69 et sq., 97, 105. 
 
 Maurice, Frederick Denison, 250. 
 
 Melbourne, William Lamb, Lord, 213, 215, 
 226. 
 
 Mellitus, 1st Bishop of London, 63-4. 
 
 Millais, P.R.A., Sir John, 270, 299 et sq., 
 307-8, 315, 317. 
 
 Miller, Philip, 125, 127, 181. 
 
 Milton, John, 15-16, 283. 
 
 Moore, Thomas, 201, 216-17. 
 
 More, Sir Thomas, 43-4, 51, 86, 260. 
 
 Morgan, William de, 304. 
 
 Morris, William, 272 et sq., 309, 320. 
 
 Morris, Mrs. William, 280, 294. 
 
 Morton, Cardinal, Archbishop of Canter- 
 bury, 36 et sq., 60. 
 
 N 
 
 NORTH, Lord, 174. 
 
 Northumberland, John Dudlev, 1st Duke of, 
 103 et sq. 
 
 LAMB, Charles, 248, 250. 
 Lambeth Palace : 5, 29 et sq. 
 
 its founders, 30 et sq. 
 
 Lollards Tower, 33 et sq., 95. 
 
 Gatehouse, 37 et sq., 46 et sq. 
 
 Great Hall, 36, 38, 41, 57, 79. 
 
 State ceremonial at, 40 et sq. 
 
 historical associations, 43 et sq. 
 
 history of the gardens, 55 et sq., 112. 
 Langham, William, 117. 
 Langton, Stephen, Archbishop of Canter- 
 bury, 31-2. 
 
 Latimer, Hugh, Bishop of London, 70, 114. 
 Laud, William, Archbishop of Canterbury, 
 
 52, 60, 63, 79. 
 Lawson, William, 11. 
 Leighton, Dr., 299. 
 Leighton, P.R.A., Sir Frederick, 200, 297 
 
 et sq. 
 Leighton House, 297 et sq. 
 
 early history of Sir Frederick Leighton, 
 297 et sq. 
 
 the garden, 319-20. 
 Louis XIV., 19, 22. 
 Lysons, Daniel, 26, 189, 229. 
 
 O 
 
 O'CoNNELL, Daniel, 192, 197. 
 
 Osborne, Dorothy (Lady Temple), 22 et sq. 
 
 Overbury, Sir Thomas, 160. 
 
 PALMERSTON, Lord, 201, 218, 226. 
 
 Parker, Matthew, Archbishop of Canterbury, 
 
 42-3, 46 et sq., 56, 59, 66. 
 Parkinson, John, 133. 
 Pater, Walter, 166. 
 Paterson, Helen, 303. 
 Paxton, Sir Joseph, 182. 
 Penn, William, 200, 202. 
 Pepys, 20, 23, 56, 106, 140. 
 Percy Family, History of the, 104 et sq. 
 Pettie, John, 303. 
 
 Physicians, Royal College of, 122 et sq. 
 Piggott (Gardener), 120. 
 Pole, Cardinal, 5, 42, 46, 60. 
 Pope, Alexander, 28, 86, 108, 172 et sq., 230-1. 
 Porteus, Beilby, Bishop of London, 84. 
 
 325 
 
INDEX 
 
 Power, Hiram, 299. 
 
 Pratt, Richard, 120. 
 
 Prior, Matthew, 190. 
 
 Probyn, General Sir Dighton, 147. 
 
 R 
 
 RALEIGH, Sir Walter, 4, 5, 8, 9. 
 
 Ray, John, 85, 123. 
 
 Reynolds, Sir Joshua, 180, 200, 235, 299, 312. 
 
 Ridley, Nicholas, Bishop of London, 69, 114. 
 
 Robinson, Dr., Bishop of London, 82, 84. 
 
 Rogers, Samuel, 186. 216-17, 224. 
 
 Ronalds, Sir Francis, 271-2. 
 
 Rosamund, Clifford (Fair Rosamund), 1, 2, 
 
 9,35. 
 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 277, 282, 285, 287, 
 
 301. 
 
 Royal Society, 122 et sq. 
 Ruskin, John, 19, 300-1. 
 Russell, Lord John, 201, 218, 226. 
 
 Temple, Lady William, see Osborne. 
 
 Temple, William, Archbishop of Canter- 
 bury, 58. 
 
 Thackeray, W. M., 175, 177, 188 et sq., 299, 
 307. 
 
 Thornhill, Sir James, 230, 232. 
 
 Thornycroft, Sir John, 192 et sq., 239. 
 
 Thornycroft, Lady, 194. 
 
 Tillotsbn, John, Archbishop of Canterbury, 
 58, 60: 
 
 Tombs, John, 56. 
 
 Tradescent, John, 10, 39, 118. 
 
 Tree, Sir H. Beerbohm, 192, 195-6. 
 
 Tree, Lady, 192, 195-6. 
 
 Trevelyan, Sir George, 185. 
 
 Tunsdall, Cuthbert, Bishop of London, 65-6. 
 
 Turner, J. M. W., 222, 235, 270. 
 
 Turner, Robert, 117. 
 
 Turner, Dr., 5, 6, 99, 107, 114 et sq. 
 
 Turner, Dr. (Thackeray's schoolmaster), 
 188, 192, 194. 
 
 S 
 
 SANCROPT, William, Archbishop of Canter- 
 bury, 54. 
 
 Sanders, Lloyd, 186-7. 
 Sayes Court,* 20-1, 27. 
 St. James's Palace, 139 et sg. 
 Scott, Colonel, 53. 
 Scott, Reginald, 4. 
 Scott, Sir Walter, 20, 172, 184-5, 201, 220 
 
 et sq., 255. 
 
 Selwyn, George, 180. 
 Shakespeare, 9, 12-13, 18, 90, 283. 
 Sharp, William, 235. 
 Shaw, Norman, 292. 
 Sheldon, Gilbert, Bishop of London, 80. 
 Sherard, James, 132-3. 
 Sherard, William, 133. 
 Shipway, Lieut.-Colonel, 193, 233. 
 Sigella, Robert de, Bishop of London, 64. 
 Sloan, Sir Hans, 86, 121 et sq., 131, 135, 137, 
 
 171. 
 
 Smith, Sidney, 201, 213, 215, 217, 219. 
 Somerset, Protector, 5, 97 et sq., 101, 114. 
 Somerset, Robert Carr, Earl of, 160-1. 
 Southey, Robert, 239, 240. 
 Spedding, J. D., 20. 
 Spenser, Edmund, 18, 70, 86. 
 Spiers, Phene, 162. 
 
 Starr, Louisa (Madame Canziani), 303. 
 Steele, Richard, 150, 177, 261. 
 Stephen, Sir Leslie, 259. 
 Sterling, John, 257, 262. 
 Stubbs, Dr., Bishop of Oxford, 40-1, 55. 
 Swift, Jonathan, 26, 86, 127, 172-3, 177-8. 
 Symonds, J. A., 269. 
 Syon House : 5, 6, 33, 58. 
 
 its monastic history, 94 et sq., 102. 
 
 historic associations, 97, 163. 
 
 its beautiful situation, 99 et sq. 
 
 interior of, 106. 
 
 the gardens, 107 et sq. 
 
 Queen Anne at, 108. 
 
 TALFOTJRD, Mr. Justice, 248. 
 
 Temple, Sir William, 17, 22 et sq., 118, 172. 
 
 VANBRUGH, Sir John, 86. 
 Vassall, Richard, 211. 
 
 WALFORD, Edward, 56, 140, 146. 
 
 Walker, Mr. Emery, 290. 
 
 Walpole, Horace (Earl of Orford), 9, 10, 16-17, 
 
 27, 83, 86, 98, 144, 161 et sq., 174, 177, 
 
 181, 185, 204, 229, 231-2. 
 Walpole, Sir Robert, 143 et sq. 
 Walpole House : 188 et sq. 
 
 W. M. Thackeray and, 188 et sq. 
 Barbara Villiers resides at, 190. 
 descriptive of house and garden, 191 
 
 et sq. 
 Walter, Herbert, Archbishop of Canterbury, 
 
 31, 40. 
 
 Warwick, Charlotte, Countess of, 202 et sq. 
 Warwick, 7th Earl of, 202 et sq. 
 Watson, Sir William, 118. 
 Watts, G. F., 200, 309, 313. 
 Watts, Mr., 120-1. 
 Webb, Philip, 292. 
 Webster, Sir Godfrey, 211 et sq. 
 Webster, Lady, see Holland, Elizabeth, Lady. 
 Webster, Harriet, 212 et sq. 
 Wheatley, H. B., 2, 165. 
 Wheeler, J. L., 131. 
 Wheeler, Thomas. 128, 133 et sq. 
 Whistler, J. McNeill, 236, 310. 
 Whitgift, John, Archbishop of Canterbury, 
 
 46, 51, 59, 79. 
 
 Wilhelm II. of Germany, 150. 
 William III., 16, 26-7. 
 Wilkie, R.A., David, 200. 
 Wise, Henry, 27, 108. 
 Wolsey, Cardinal, 66, 86. 
 Wordsworth, Dorothy, 239, 246, 250, 253. 
 Wordsworth, William, 239 et sq., 250, 253. 
 Worlidge, John, 11 et sq. 
 Wren, Sir Christopher, 21, 27, 86, 140, 142 
 
 et sq. 
 Wyatt, James, 180. 
 
 326 
 
THIS BOOK IS DUE ON THE LAST DATE 
 STAMPED BELOW 
 
 AN INITIAL FINE OF 25 CENTS 
 
 WILL BE ASSESSED FOR FAILURE TO RETURN 
 THIS BOOK ON THE DATE DUE. THE PENALTY 
 WILL INCREASE TO SO CENTS ON THE FOURTH 
 DAY AND TO $I.OO ON THE SEVENTH DAY 
 OVERDUE. 
 
 JAN 26 1937 
 
 LD 21-100m-8,'34 
 
YE 0093 
 
 oo 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY