building has never been restored. The stables and kennels are still in 

 use, but the owner. Captain Lane-Fox, lives in another house on the 

 outskirts of the park. The design of the gardens has often been attri- 

 buted to Le Notre, and is undoubtedly the work of his school, but there 

 is nothing to prove that the great French master was ever in England. 



The way to the house is through a large, well-timbered park. 

 Handsome gate-piers with stone-wrought armorial ornament lead into a 

 forecourt stretching wide to right and left. A double curved stairway 

 ascends to the main door. To the left of the house is an entrance to the 

 garden through a colonnade. Next to the garden front of the house, 

 which faces south-west, is a broad gravelled terrace. The ground rises 

 away from the house by a gently sloping lawn, but in the midmost 

 space is a feature that is frequent in the French gardening of the time, 

 though unusual in England : a long theatre-shaped extent of grass. 

 There is a stone sundial standing on two wide steps near the house, and 

 a gradually heightened retaining wall following the rise of the ground. 

 Not more than two feet high where it begins below, and there accen- 

 tuated on either side by a noble stone plinth and massive urn, the retain- 

 ing wall, itself a handsome object of bold masonry, follows a straight 

 line for some distance, and then swings round in a segmental curve to 

 meet the equal wall on the further side ; thus inclosing a space of level 

 sward. Midway in the curve, where the wall is some twelve feet high, 

 there appear to have been niches in the masonry, possibly for fountains. 



The wide gravel walk next the house-front falls a little as it passes to 

 the left, divides in two and continues by an upward slope on either side 

 of a wall-fountain in a small inclosure formed by the retaining walls of 

 the rising paths. The path then passes all round the large rectangular 

 pool, one end of which forms the subject of the picture. This shows 

 well the graceful ease and, one may say, the courteous suavity, that is 

 the foremost character of this beautiful kind of French designing. The 

 high level of the water in the pool, so necessary for good effect, is a 

 detail that is often overlooked in English gardens. Nothing looks worse 

 than a height of bare wall in a pool or fountain basin, and nothing 

 is more commonly seen in our gardens. The low stone kerb bordering 

 the pool is broken at intervals with only slightly rising pedestals for 



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