GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 



more valuable) his own good qualities daily extend themselves 

 to all about him, whereof I the meanest (next to some Italian 

 chymists, fiddlers and opera-makers) am a living instance." 



The letter in which this passage appears, was written long before 

 the Chiswick Villa was built, and the garden referred to was probably 

 that of the still existing Jacobean mansion. The Earl, although 

 engaged in building operations elsewhere, and in forming the 

 magnificent collection of art objects which he afterwards enshrined 

 in the new house, was probably often domiciled at Chiswick. 

 At this period Pope was resident with his family in New Buildings 

 now Mawson's Buildings in Chiswick Lane, where he is said 

 to have written many of his works, and he would therefore naturally 

 see much of Lord Burlington. On the death of his father, three 

 years later, he removed to the villa at Twickenham that, although 

 altered past all recognition, if not entirely rebuilt, yet goes by 

 his name. Here he would still be in touch with his noble friend, 

 but owing to the condition of the roads in the eighteenth century, 

 daily meetings could hardly have been possible. Matters only 

 grew worse as the century grew older ; when Horace Walpole could 

 describe Northamptonshire as "a clay pudding stuck full of 

 villages." Middlesex and Surrey were probably but little better, 

 and we know that the approaches to the metropolis were infested 

 by dangerous characters, and that it was unsafe to travel near 

 London without a train of servants, necessarily armed. In 1782 

 Lord North, the Prime Minister, was stopped, robbed, and wounded. 

 Horace Walpole, however, delighted in what he was pleased to 

 call " the gothicity of the times, when one could not stir out of 

 one's castle but armed for battle." People were then as much 

 afraid of highwaymen as in the present day we are of air-raids. 

 Foreigners, visiting this country, feared to go to breakfast at 

 Strawberry Hill, and its gossipy master tells his correspondent 

 that those who came to dinner " were armed as if going to Gibraltar, 

 and Lady Caroline Johnstone would not venture even from Peter- 

 sham, for in the town of Richmond they rob before dusk to such 

 perfection are all the arts brought " : yet this was at a time when 

 the fashionable dining hour was four o'clock. ' Who would 

 have thought," he goes on to say, " that the war with America 

 would make it impossible to stir from one village to another ? . . . 

 before the War the Colonies took off all our commodities, even 



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