GARDENS OLD AND NEW. 



Hertfordshire estate must 

 mainly have been destructive, 

 and certainly the gardens 

 cannot have prospered under 

 his hand. 



The last Earl of Bridge- 

 water, an eccentric old 

 gentlemen, died in his house, 

 the Hotel Egerton, in the Rue 

 Saint Honore, in 1829. His 

 carriage, with three gold-laced 

 lackeys hanging on behind, 

 was well known to Parisians. 

 They used to collect about 

 the hotel to see the steps let 

 down, and the Earl's dogs 

 march out, dressed, if gossip 

 be true, as human beings, 

 returned from their airing in 

 the Bois. The Earl himself 

 remained at home, solacing his 

 feeble days with the " sport" 

 of shooting tame rabbits, and 

 partridges with clipped wings, 

 in his garden. It was a 



reminiscence of his days of youthful prowess in covert and 

 over the stubble. He was a wayward testator, who attached 

 impossible conditions to his will, pledging the legatee to become 

 Duke or Marquis of Bridgewater within a period, and thus he 

 well-nigh shipwrecked the estate in Chancery. 



So much for the interesting possessors of Ashridge, all men 

 in whom the spark of talent or the love of literature shone 

 The house and gardens were very fair and tasteful. The Lord 

 Chancellor had done much for the place, and it had been " a 

 stately house " in Elizabeth's lime though the collegiate church 

 was then destroyed. So the house had remained, with many a 

 change, doubtless, until the year 1800, when the last Duke of 

 Bridgewater, the canal maker, in the height of his wealth, 

 razed it to the ground, great hall and cloisters together, leaving 

 nothing of antiquity save the crypt. 



The present splendid mansion was commenced on the old 

 site in 1808 from the designs of Wyatt, and completed by Sir 



I'hala. 



THE EAST FRONT. 



Jeffrey Wyatville, his son, in 1814. It is a great and imposing 

 pile, splendid in conception and details, elaborate in its 

 character and rich in its internal fittings, now happily main- 

 tained by the excellent taste and love for true art of its noble 

 possessor and his Countess. The principal front is i.oooft. 

 in length, and the great range of buildings presents, as may 

 be seen, a wonderfully varied and picturesque aspect, with 

 towers and battlements, a splendid porch, machicolations 

 above, mullioned windows, arched doorways, and whatever 

 else the Wyatts could fitly wrest from the beauties of 

 mediaeval architecture 



But to describe Ashridge House is not the purpose here. 

 Let the pictures speak for themselves. It lies amid beautiful 

 surroundings, for the counties of Buckingham and Hertford, 

 as all the world knows, are famous for their woods. The 

 long avenues of stately trees in the park, the noble groups 

 and single specimens, the broad stretches of turf, the multitudes 



THE SKATING POND. 



"Country Lift.' 



