GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 
he was walking through Chiswick House with the poet Rogers, 
who relates the anecdote, describing how they wandered up and 
down stairs, and into various apartments. 
The diplomatist asked the poet in which room Fox had died. 
‘“In this very room,” was the answer—whereupon Adair burst 
into tears, “‘ with a vehemence of grief,” says Rogers, “‘ I hardly 
ever saw exhibited by a man.” 
Chiswick House is thus full of memories of great men. In 
addition to those whom Lord Burlington collected around him, 
it is highly probable that all the wits and politicians who fre- 
quented Holland House and made it famous, at times wandered 
down to the Villa, received its hospitality and enjoyed its lovely 
gardens—for ties both social and political, united the houses of 
Cavendish and Fox. In later times all the distinguished people 
in art, literature and politics must have visited Chiswick, for 
the sixth Duke of Devonshire entertained lavishly. He took 
but little part in politics, but he went on a special embassy to 
Moscow in 1826, on the occasion of the Czar Nicholas’s Coronation, 
when he is said to have spent £50,000. He received the Allied 
sovereigns when they visited London in 1814, when the Czar 
Alexander, the King of Prussia, and Marshal Bliicher, were of the 
company; and in 1844 he entertained the Czar Nicholas, and the 
King of Saxony, at Chiswick, with great magnificence. Whether 
at this time of his life, when nearly seventy years of age, he retained 
his passion for Natural History, and still permitted animals to 
wander about his grounds, I do not know, but on the occasion of 
Czar Nicholas’s visit, according to Mr. Lloyd Sanders in his in- 
teresting ‘‘ Old Kew, Chiswick and Kensington,” four giraffes— 
perhaps hired for the event—were conspicuously present in the 
gardens. The statement when I read it, recalled a fact connected 
with my childhood, which I have never entirely forgotten. When 
I was walking out with my mother, or nurse, we often remarked 
with curiosity, a large and somewhat dilapidated wooden building, 
standing in a bit of waste ground, not a quarter of a mile from 
the place where I now know Chiswick House to be; for this was 
long before the time when we made our pilgrimage to find the 
golden gates. Painted on the wall in large letters, more than half 
effaced by time and weather, were scrawled the mysterious. words 
“ Four Giraffes.” When I first read of the giraffes at Chiswick 
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