GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 



he was walking through Chiswick House with the poet Rogers, 

 who relates the anecdote, describing how they wandered up and 

 down stairs, and into various apartments. 



The diplomatist asked the poet in which room Fox had died. 

 ' In this very room," was the answer whereupon Adair burst 

 into tears, "with a vehemence of grief," says Rogers, " I hardly 

 ever saw exhibited by a man." 



Chiswick House is thus full of memories of great men. In 

 addition to those whom Lord Burlington collected around him, 

 it is highly probable that all the wits and politicians who fre- 

 quented Holland House and made it famous, at times wandered 

 down to the Villa, received its hospitality and enjoyed its lovely 

 gardens for ties both social and political, united the houses of 

 Cavendish and Fox. In later times all the distinguished people 

 in art, literature and politics must have visited Chiswick, for 

 the sixth Duke of Devonshire entertained lavishly. He took 

 but little part in politics, but he went on a special embassy to 

 Moscow in 1826, on the occasion of the Czar Nicholas's Coronation, 

 when he is said to have spent 50,000. He received the Allied 

 sovereigns when they visited London in 1814, when the Czar 

 Alexander, the King of Prussia, and Marshal Bliicher, were of the 

 company ; and in 1844 he entertained the Czar Nicholas, and the 

 King of Saxony, at Chiswick, with great magnificence. Whether 

 at this time of his life, when nearly seventy years of age, he retained 

 his passion for Natural History, and still permitted animals to 

 wander about his grounds, I do not know, but on the occasion of 

 Czar Nicholas's visit, according to Mr. Lloyd Sanders in his in- 

 teresting " Old Kew, Chiswick and Kensington," four giraffes 

 perhaps hired for the event were conspicuously present in the 

 gardens. The statement when I read it, recalled a fact connected 

 with my childhood, which I have never entirely forgotten. When 

 I was walking out with my mother, or nurse, we often remarked 

 with curiosity, a large and somewhat dilapidated wooden building, 

 standing in a bit of waste ground, not a quarter of a mile from 

 the place where I now know Chiswick House to be ; for this was 

 long before the time when we made our pilgrimage to find the 

 golden gates. Painted on the wall in large letters, more than half 

 effaced by time and weather, were scrawled the mysterious words 



Four Giraffes." When I first read of the giraffes at Chiswick 



186 



