PREDRCIiSSOKS 235 



were terrible levellers of individuality ; but judging from the 

 photograph this picture has a little more personal cliaracter 

 about it than most of Lely's portraits. The picture is 

 now at Levens. He was a tall, thm, dark man, and his 

 conversation is connnended by Horace Walpole for its dry 

 humour. When living at Levens he was particularly fond 

 of hunting an outlying buck and bringing him back into the 

 park ; beyond this, however, I know nothing of his hunting 

 proclivities. His daughter Catherine married Lord Suffolk 

 and Berkshire, and he died at beautiful Charlton, in the 

 heart of wild Braydon, in 1730, in his eighty-first year. His 

 last wishes are expressed in the strong Commonwealth 

 English — pure as crystal. ' I hope when I die,' he had 

 written to his daughter in 1729, ' your lord will allow me to 

 be buried among my little ones at Charlton. If I die there 

 send to Bath for a leaden cofhn. I will have no hearse, but 

 be carried by my own and your servants. All what is in my 

 will observe and do it, which is not much. Thank you for 

 all your goodness to me. God bless you and your lord and 

 all the children. — ^Your affectionate father, J. Geahme.' And 

 he adds a postscript to this effect : ' Do what you can of 

 kindness to my servants who have been careful of me.' Here, 

 at all events, are none of the involutions of the non-committal 

 letters. But now it was all plain enough sailing. He was 

 very near the end of his voyage. There were no more earthly 

 accounts to square. 



In the last century the Master of the Buckhounds had a 

 charming house ' in Swinley Forest against the deer paddocks 

 and he enjoyed, in right of his office, the use of about two 

 hundred and thirty acres of arable, pasture, and w^oodland. 



' A very complete and detailed history of Swinley Lodge, traced from the 

 time when it is first specifically mentioned in Norden's Survey of Windsor 

 Forest (1007) down to its final dismantling and sale by auction in 1831, is given 

 by Mr. Hore in his History of the Buckhounds, chap, xviii. 



