GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 
quote from himself, ‘“‘ made him sage,” who “ was so kind, so gentle, 
so jocular, so delightfully brisk at times, so dismally woebegone at 
others, such a natural good creature, that the giants loved him. 
The great Swift was gentle and sportive with him, as the enormous 
Brobdingnag maids were with little Gulliver. He could frisk and 
fondle round Pope, and sport, and bark, and caper, without offend- 
ing the most thin-skinned of poets and men.” Of him we may 
remark that Gay by name, he was also gay by nature, and, writing 
his own mocking epitaph, he could say—the lines are inscribed 
with Pope’s at Westminster : 
‘* Life is a jest and all things show it, 
I thought so once, but now I know it.” 
Chiswick House in those days was Liberty Hall. Pope seems 
to have come and gone as he pleased, and when there, to have 
made himself thoroughly at home, ordering his meals at any time 
he liked to have them. In a letter dated March 30th, 1744, only 
two months before his death—he mentions his intention to go 
over to Chiswick for the day, “‘ to dine by myself before their hour, 
and to return in the evening ’’—because he dared not “‘ lie abroad.” 
And what of Burlington himself? Of the generous friend to 
belles lettres, the kind host, the benefactor of musicians and artists, 
so justly known as the “‘ Architect Earl’? ? His munificence and 
public spirit seem to have impoverished him. His father, dying 
in 1702, had left him rich, yet twenty years before his own death 
he owed £200,000! That sum, even allowing a wide margin for 
his patronage of great men and unstinted private hospitality, 
and a still wider one for heavy expenditure on his building schemes 
and purchases of works of art, seems large; unless indeed he was 
infected with that passion for high play that was one of the fashion- 
able vices of the reigns of the four Georges. 
It is, therefore, not a matter for surprise that he was in the 
habit of making a charge to all those who desired to visit his 
collections—who were admitted by ticket only. When he died 
in 1758, the Chiswick estate fell to his daughter and heiress, who 
had married the fourth Duke of Devonshire. This marriage carried 
the unique house and its contents, and its lovely grounds, definitely 
and finally, into the political camp of the Whigs. The fifth Duke, 
grandson of Lord Burlington, married Georgiana, daughter of 
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