CHATSWORTH. 499 



bloom deepen without any of that strong personal interest which 

 glads the heart of the possessor of a small, dearly-prized garden. He 

 gains by the possession of the mighty whole, but he loses as much by 

 losing the familiar interest in the inexhaustible little. Such is the 

 divine nature of the principle of compensation ! 



August^ 1850. 



CHATSWORTH, the magnificent seat of the Duke of Devonshire, 

 has the unquestionable reputation of being the finest private country 

 residence in the world. You will pardon me, then, if I bestow a 

 few more words on it, than the passing tourist is accustomed to do. 



I ought to preface my account of it by telling you that the pre- 

 sent Duke, now about sixty, with an income equal to what passes for 

 a very large fortune in America, has all his lifetime been remark- 

 able for his fine taste, especially in gardening : and that this resi- 

 dence has an immense advantage over most other English places, in 

 being set down in the midst of picturesque Derbyshire, instead of 

 an ordinary park level. In consequence of the latter circumstance, 

 the highest art is contrasted and heightened by the fine setting of a 

 higher nature. 



If you enter Chatsworth, as most visitors do, by the Edensor 

 gate, you will be arrested by a little village Edensor itself; a 

 lovely lane, bordered by cottages, just within the gate, that has been 

 wholly built by the present Duke. It is quite a study, and is pre- 

 cisely what everybody imagines the possibility of doing, and what 

 no one but a king or a subject with a princely fortune, and a taste not 

 always born with princes, could do. In short, it is such a village as 

 a poet-architect would design, if it were as easy to make houses of 

 solid materials as it is to draw them on paper. There may be thirty 

 or forty cottages in all, and every one most tasteful in form and pro- 

 portions, most admirably built, and set in its appropriate framework 

 of trees and shrubbery, making an ensemble such as I saw no- 

 where else in England. There are dwellings in the Italian, Gothic, 

 Norman, Swiss, and two or three more styles ; each as capital a 



