GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 



quote from himself, " made him sage," who " was so kind, so gentle, 

 so jocular, so delightfully brisk at times, so dismally woebegone at 

 others, such a natural good creature, that the giants loved him. 

 The great Swift was gentle and sportive with him, as the enormous 

 Brobdingnag maids were with little Gulliver. He could frisk and 

 fondle round Pope, and sport, and bark, and caper, without offend- 

 ing the most thin-skinned of poets and men." Of hirn we may 

 remark that Gay by name, he was also gay by nature, and, writing 

 his own mocking epitaph, he could say the lines are inscribed 

 with Pope's at Westminster : 



" Life is a jest and all things show it, 

 I thought so once, but now I know it." 



Chiswick House in those days was Liberty Hall. Pope seems 

 to have come and gone as he pleased, and when there, to have 

 made himself thoroughly at home, ordering his meals at any time 

 he liked to have them. In a letter dated March 30th, 1744, only 

 two months before his death he mentions his intention to go 

 over to Chiswick for the day, " to dine by myself before their hour, 

 and to return in the evening " because he dared not " lie abroad." 



And what of Burlington himself ? Of the generous friend to 

 belles lettres, the kind host, the benefactor of musicians and artists, 

 so justly known as the " Architect Earl " ? His munificence and 

 public spirit seem to have impoverished him. His father, dying 

 in 1702, had left him rich, yet twenty years before his own death 

 he owed 200,000 ! That sum, even allowing a wide margin for 

 his patronage of great men and unstinted private hospitality, 

 and a still wider one for heavy expenditure on his building schemes 

 and purchases of works of art, seems large ; unless indeed he was 

 infected with that passion for high play that was one of the fashion- 

 able vices of the reigns of the four Georges. 



It is, therefore, not a matter for surprise that he was in the 

 habit of making a charge to all those who desired to visit his 

 collections who were admitted by ticket only. When he died 

 in 1753, the Chiswick estate fell to his daughter and heiress, who 

 had married the fourth Duke of Devonshire. This marriage carried 

 the unique house and its contents, and its lovely grounds, definitely 

 and finally, into the political camp of the Whigs. The fifth Duke, 

 grandson of Lord Burlington, married Georgiana, daughter of 



178 



