CHAPTER IX 

 HOLLAND HOUSE AND GARDENS 



SET in gardens lovely enough to have alone made it famous, 

 the unique characteristic of Holland House is the fact that 

 it is the only noble and ancient family mansion of wide 

 historic interest and much picturesqueness, that lies, at the present 

 day, well within the London radius. 



Portions of the Home Park, that once stretched to the Uxbridge 

 Road on the north, and nearly to Brook Green on the west also 

 Lord Holland's farm on the south-west side, have long disappeared. 

 " Nightingale Lane " is no more, but a few of the patriarchal 

 trees that were planted when Evelyn's " Sylva " roused the gentry 

 of England to replace the oaks and the beeches that had vanished 

 in the Civil Wars, still remain. 



But Tisdall's dairy stands on ground where, not so very long 

 ago, lowing cattle waded deep in buttercups, or cropped the clover ; 

 and the Earl of Warwick's dairymaids turned homewards after 

 milking time, to listen later to love tales, under the try sting oak 

 in what was to become Lord Leighton's garden. But that was 

 when London was far, far away, and 



" When all the world was young, lad, 

 All the world was young." 



I have told elsewhere, in the chapter on Chiswick House., 

 how in childhood we wandered afar to find the golden gates of 

 a fairy tale, and how with myopic vision found jthem not, because 

 they were close at home ; (were I moralizing, I think a lesson might 

 be drawn from that). Likewise, full many a time in student 



198 



