CHISWICK HOUSE 
having visited Chiswick. Nor do I know that Sir Joshua Reynolds 
was ever at the Villa, but Gainsborough was probably frequently 
there, as he had a cottage at Richmond, and must have loved the 
neighbourhood, since, by his own desire, he lies buried in Kew 
Churchyard. 
David Garrick, and his beautiful wife (described by Horace 
Walpole as ‘‘ the finest and most admired dancer in the world,” 
who lived to within two years of a century), spent their honey- 
moon—or part of it—at Chiswick House; but this was before 
the death of the Harl of Burlington, when Georgiana was a child 
of two years old. So also must have been the visits of Thomas 
Gray, the poet, if he came there with Horace Walpole before the 
two friends became estranged. But Horace Walpole, a man still 
young when the Earl of Burlington died, and himself resident at 
Strawberry Hill from about 1750, must have known the Villa under 
several masters, for he died in 1797, at the ripe age of eighty- 
nine years, before the comparatively early death of Georgiana. 
We now come to the sixth Duke of Devonshire, who, from the 
standpoint of a writer on gardens, is a personage of vastly greater 
interest than his father, because, being a keen horticulturist, he 
did much to improve and develop the Chiswick estate. Some 
fifty years had now elapsed since the death of Kent; years that 
at their close, amply proved the prescience of the great garden- 
designer, and justified his faith in the ultimate development 
of his plans, though he himself could not have hoped to see them 
consummated. 
We talk glibly enough of ‘‘ Time the Destroyer,” forgetting that 
he is equally ‘“‘ Time the Constructor,’ without whose patient aid 
nothing would reach maturity. 
Time, then, had been the nurseryman upon whom Kent had 
mainly relied, trusting also not a little to the unremitting care 
and wise direction, of those who would come after him; nor did 
he trust in vain, else had the landscape on which he had traced out 
so fair a pattern, become again an ugly, unproductive waste, with 
nothing, maybe, but a few cabbage stalks, or a stunted thornbush, 
to show that it had been, before his day, a country meadow, or 
a smiling garden. 
At its best the deserted garden soon becomes but a tangled 
wilderness ; a wilderness without the mysterious charm of the 
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