204 Initios of tbe IbuntiuG^dficlCt 



figure. Colonel James Grahame, or Grahme as he 

 himself always spelt his name, who held the office under 

 the last of the Stuarts, was a person of some consequence, 

 whose letters have been preserved. In the interesting 

 little monograph on him by Mr Joscelin Bagot, there is 

 a portrait which represents him as a person of grave and 

 melancholy countenance. He is described, however, as 

 being tall and handsome, and Horace Walpole tells us that 

 he was a noted man of fashion in his day, with a re- 

 putation for dry humour. He was certainly a keen 

 sportsman, and next, perhaps, to his passion for garden- 

 ing, loved to turn his hounds on to an outlying buck. 

 He was on intimate terms with James after the Revolu- 

 tion, but this did not prevent him from making his peace 

 with William of Orange, under whom he retained his 

 Mastership of the Buckhounds. He died at the ripe age 

 of eighty. His wonderful gardens at his estate of 

 Levens near Kendal, with their hedges of box and yew 

 cut into a hundred different fantastic shapes, their 

 elaborate flower-beds, their grottos and sundials, their 

 trim walks and terraces, still remain as one of the few 

 examples of the Italian style of gardening left in England. 

 Good-natured, portly Queen Anne, with her red hair 

 and rubicund face, was as enamoured of the chase as 

 Queen Bess, and though her great bulk forbade her 

 riding to hounds, she had a high-wheeled curricle built 

 for her, in which she used to tear after the hounds at a 

 break-neck pace through the drives of Windsor forest, to 

 the dismay of the hapless courtiers who tried to follow her. 

 Ladies patronised the Royal Hunt extensively in her 

 reign and that of her successor. Their garb was so 

 masculine that Dicky Steele tells us in The Spectator, 

 how, meeting one of these dashing Amazons, he mistook 



