From London to Lands End | Page 6

and regular an edging as box, or is so
soon brought to its perfection.
On the north side of the house, where the gardens seemed to want
screening from the weather or the view of the chapel, and some part of
the old building required to be covered from the eye, the vacant ground,
which was large, is very happily cast into a wilderness, with a labyrinth
and ESPALIERS so high that they effectually take off all that part of
the old building which would have been offensive to the sight. This
labyrinth and wilderness is not only well designed, and completely
finished, but is perfectly well kept, and the ESPALIERS filled exactly
at bottom, to the very ground, and are led up to proportioned heights on
the top, so that nothing of that kind can be more beautiful.
The house itself is every way answerable on the outside to the beautiful
prospect, and the two fronts are the largest and, beyond comparison, the

finest of the kind in England. The great stairs go up from the second
court of the palace on the right hand, and lead you to the south
prospect.
I hinted in my last that King William brought into England the love of
fine paintings as well as that of fine gardens; and you have an example
of it in the cartoons, as they are called, being five pieces of such
paintings as, if you will believe men of nice judgment and great
travelling, are not to be matched in Europe. The stories are known, but
especially two of them--viz., that of St. Paul preaching on Mars Hill to
the self-wise Athenians, and that of St. Peter passing sentence of death
on Ananias--I say, these two strike the mind with the utmost surprise,
the passions are so drawn to the life; astonishment, terror, and death in
the face of Ananias, zeal and a sacred fire in the eyes of the blessed
Apostle, fright and surprise upon the countenances of the beholders in
the piece of Ananias; all these describe themselves so naturally that you
cannot but seem to discover something of the like passions, even in
seeing them.
In the other there is the boldness and courage with which St. Paul
undertook to talk to a set of men who, he knew, despised all the world,
as thinking themselves able to teach them anything. In the audience
there is anticipating pride and conceit in some, a smile or fleer of
contempt in others, but a kind of sensible conviction, though crushed in
its beginning, on the faces of the rest; and all together appear
confounded, but have little to say, and know nothing at all of it; they
gravely put him off to hear him another time; all these are seen here in
the very dress of the face--that is, the very countenances which they
hold while they listen to the new doctrine which the Apostle preached
to a people at that time ignorant of it.
The other of the cartoons are exceeding fine but I mention these as the
particular two which are most lively, which strike the fancy the soonest
at first view. It is reported, but with what truth I know not, that the late
French king offered an hundred thousand LOUIS D'ORS for these
pictures; but this, I say, is but a report. The king brought a great many
other fine pieces to England, and with them the love of fine paintings
so universally spread itself among the nobility and persons of figure all
over the kingdom that it is incredible what collections have been made
by English gentlemen since that time, and how all Europe has been

rummaged, as we may say, for pictures to bring over hither, where for
twenty years they yielded the purchasers, such as collected them for
sale, immense profit. But the rates are abated since that, and we begin
to be glutted with the copies and frauds of the Dutch and Flemish
painters who have imposed grossly upon us. But to return to the palace
of Hampton Court. Queen Mary lived not to see it completely finished,
and her death, with the other difficulties of that reign, put a stop to the
works for some time till the king, reviving his good liking of the place,
set them to work again, and it was finished as we see it. But I have been
assured that had the peace continued, and the king lived to enjoy the
continuance of it, his Majesty had resolved to have pulled down all the
remains of the old building (such as the chapel and the large court
within the first gate), and to have built up the whole palace after the
manner of those two fronts already done. In these would have been