GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 
more valuable) his own good qualities daily extend themselves 
to all about him, whereof I the meanest (next to some Italian 
chymists, fiddlers and opera-makers) am a living instance.” 
The letter in which this passage appears, was written long before 
the Chiswick Villa was built, and the garden referred to was probably 
- that of the still existing Jacobean mansion. The Earl, although 
engaged in building operations elsewhere, and in forming the 
magnificent collection of art objects which he afterwards enshrined 
in the new house, was probably often domiciled at Chiswick. 
At this period Pope was resident with his family in New Buildings 
—now Mawson’s Buildings—in Chiswick Lane, where he is said 
to have written many of his works, and he would therefore naturally 
see much of Lord Burlington. On the death of his father, three 
years later, he removed to the villa at Twickenham that, although 
altered past all recognition, if not entirely rebuilt, yet goes by 
his name. Here he would still be in touch with his noble friend, 
but owing to the condition of the roads in the eighteenth century, 
daily meetings could hardly have been possible. Matters only 
grew worse as the century grew older; when Horace Walpole could 
describe Northamptonshire as “a clay pudding stuck full of 
villages.” Middlesex and Surrey were probably but little better, 
and we know that the approaches to the metropolis were infested 
by dangerous characters, and that it was unsafe to travel near 
London without a train of servants, necessarily armed. In 1782 
Lord North, the Prime Minister, was stopped, robbed, and wounded. 
Horace Walpole, however, delighted in what he was pleased to 
call ‘‘ the gothicity of the times, when one could not stir out of 
one’s castle but armed for battle.” People were then as much 
afraid of highwaymen as in the present day we are of air-raids. 
Foreigners, visiting this country, feared to go to breakfast at 
Strawberry Hill, and its gossipy master tells his correspondent 
that those who came to dinner “‘ were armed as if going to Gibraltar, 
and Lady Caroline Johnstone would not venture even from Peter- 
sham, for in the tewn of Richmond they rob before dusk—to such 
perfection are all the arts brought ”: yet this was at a time when 
the fashionable dining hour was four o’clock. ‘‘ Who would 
have thought,” he goes on to say, ‘‘ that the war with America 
would make it impossible to stir from one village to another? .. . 
before the War the Colonies took off all our commodities, even 
174 
