CHAPTER IX 
HOLLAND HOUSE AND GARDENS 
ET in gardens lovely enough to have alone made it famous, 
the unique characteristic of Holland House is the fact that 
it is the only noble and ancient family mansion of wide 
historic interest and much picturesqueness, that lies, at the present 
day, well within the London radius. 
Portions of the Home Park, that once stretched to the Uxbridge 
Road on the north, and nearly to Brook Green on the west—also 
Lord Holland’s farm on the south-west side, have long disappeared. 
““ Nightingale Lahe”’ is no more, but a few of the patriarchal 
trees that were planted when Evelyn’s “ Sylva”? roused the gentry 
of England to replace the oaks and the beeches that had vanished 
in the Civil Wars, still remain. 
But Tisdall’s dairy stands on ground where, not so very long 
ago, lowing cattle waded deep in buttercups, or cropped the clover ; 
and the Earl of Warwick’s dairymaids turned homewards after 
milking time, to listen later to love tales, under the trysting oak 
in what was to become Lord Leighton’s garden. But that was 
when London was far, far away, and 
“* When all the world was young, lad, 
All the world was young.” 
I have told elsewhere, in the chapter on Chiswick House, 
how in childhood we wandered afar to find the golden gates of 
a fairy tale, and how with myopic vision found them not, because 
they were close at home ; (were I moralizing, I think a lesson might 
be drawn from that). Likewise, full many a time in student 
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