VIL APOLOGIA PRO BAMBUSIS MEIS 211 
he lined with shiny pebbles, shells, bits of glass, and every 
incongruous rubbish that he could gather together. Among 
the most famous of these were Pope’s grotto at Twickenham, 
“composed of marble, spars, gems, ores, and minerals,” and 
that of the Duke of Newcastle at Oatlands Park, which was 
afterwards the residence of the Duke of York. Dr. Johnson’s 
account of the former in his Lives of the Poets is too good 
not to be transeribed :— 
Here he planted the vines and the quincunx which his verses 
mention ; and being under the necessity of making a subterraneous 
passage to a garden on the other side of the road, he adorned it with 
fossil bodies, and dignified it with the title of a grotto,—a place of 
silence and retreat, from which he endeavoured to persuade his friends 
and himself that cares and passions could be excluded. A grotto is not 
often the wish or pleasure of an Englishman, who has more frequent 
need to solicit than exclude the sun; but Pope’s excavation was 
requisite as an entrance to his garden, and as some men try to be 
proud of their defects, he extracted an ornament from an inconvenience, 
and vanity produced a grotto where necessity enforced a passage. 
Atter all, therefore, there was some excuse for Pope’s 
folly, but what can be said for that of the Duke of Newcastle, 
over which the County history gloats with honest pride ?— 
The pleasure grounds are beautifully laid out; and a delightful 
walk through the shrubbery leads to a romantic grotto, which was 
constructed at a great expense for the Duke of Newcastle by three 
persons (a father and his two sons), who are reported to have been 
employed in the work several years. It consists of four or five 
apartments, the sides and roofs of which are incrusted with satin spar, 
sparkling ores, shells, crystals, and stalactites ; some of the quartz- 
erystals are unusually large and fine. There is also a bath-room, in 
which is a beautiful (marble) copy of the Venus di Medici, as though 
going to bathe. The rocks forming the exterior are built up with a 
whitish-coloured perforated stone, a kind of tufa. In the upper 
chamber the late Duchess of York passed much of her time when the 
Duke was in Flanders during the revolutionary war with France. 
