CHISWICK HOUSE 



having visited Chiswick. Nor do I know that Sir Joshua Reynolds 

 was ever at the Villa, but Gainsborough was probably frequently 

 there, as he had a cottage at Richmond, and must have loved the 

 neighbourhood, since, by his own desire, he lies buried in Kew 

 Churchyard. 



David Garrick, and his beautiful wife (described by Horace 

 Walpole as " the finest and most admired dancer in the world," 

 who lived to within two years of a century), spent their honey- 

 moon or part of it at Chiswick House ; but this was before 

 the death of the Earl of Burlington, when Georgiana was a child 

 of two years old. So also must have been the visits of Thomas 

 Gray, the poet, if he came there with Horace Walpole before the 

 two friends became estranged. But Horace Walpole, a man still 

 young when the Earl of Burlington died, and himself resident at 

 Strawberry Hill from about 1750, must have known the Villa under 

 several masters, for he died in 1797, at the ripe age of eighty- 

 nine years, before the comparatively early death of Georgiana. 



We now come to the sixth Duke of Devonshire, who, from the 

 standpoint of a writer on gardens, is a personage of vastly greater 

 interest than his father, because, being a keen horticulturist, he 

 did much to improve and develop the Chiswick estate. Some 

 fifty years had now elapsed since the death of Kent ; years that 

 at their close, amply proved the prescience of the great garden- 

 designer, and justified his faith in the ultimate development 

 of his plans, though he himself could not have hoped to see them 

 consummated. 



We talk glibly enough of " Time the Destroyer," forgetting that 

 he is equally " Time the Constructor," without whose patient aid 

 nothing would reach maturity. 



Time, then, had been the nurseryman upon whom Kent had 

 mainly relied, trusting also not a little to the unremitting care 

 and wise direction, of those who would come after him ; nor did 

 he trust in vain, else had the landscape on which he had traced out 

 so fair a pattern, become again an ugly, unproductive waste, with 

 nothing, maybe, but a few cabbage stalks, or a stunted thornbush, 

 to show that it had been, before his day, a country meadow, or 

 a smiling garden. 



At its best the deserted garden soon becomes but a tangled 

 wilderness ; a wilderness without the mysterious charm of the 



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