but I stayed to write till I could send you the things, and when I had them, I stayed to send them by Mr. Chute, who tells you by to-night's post when he will bring them. The butter-plate is not exactly what you ordered, but I flatter myself you will like it as well. There are a few seeds; more shall follow at the end of the autumn. Besides Tom Hervey's letter, I have sent you maps of Oxfordshire and Northamptonshire, having felt the want of them when I was with you. I found the road to Stowe above twelve miles, very bad, and it took me up two hours and a half: but the formidable idea I conceived of the breakfast and way of life there by no means answered. You was a prophet; it was very agreeable. I am ashamed to tell you that I laughed half an hour yesterday at the sudden death of your new friend Sir Harry Danvers, "after a morning's airing," the news call it; I suspect it was after a negus. I found my garden brown and bare, but these rains have recovered the greenth. You may get your pond ready as soon as you please; the gold fish swarm: Mr. Bentley carried a dozen to town t'other day in a decanter. You would be entertained with our fishing; instead of nets, and rods and lines, and worms, we use nothing but a pail and a basin and a tea-strainer, which I persuade my neighbours is the Chinese method. Adieu! my best compliments to Miss Montagu. P.S. Since writing my letter, I have received your twin dispatches. I am extremely sensible of the honour my Lord Guildford does me, and beg you to transmit my gratitude to him if he is ever at Wroxton when I visit Greatworth, I shall certainly wait upon him, and think myself happy in seeing that charming place again. As soon as I go to town, I shall send for Moreland, and harbour your wardrobe with great pleasure. I find I must beg your pardon for laughing in the former part of my letter about your baronet's death; but his "wine and water a little warm" had left such a ridiculous effect upon me, that even his death could not efface it. Good night! Mr. Miller told me at Stowe, that the chimney-piece (I think from Steane) was he believed at Banbury, but he did not know exactly. If it lies in your way to inquire, on so vague a direction, will you? Mr. Chute may bring me a sketch of it. MY DEAR SIR: 369. TO RICHARD BENTLEY, ESQ. Arlington Street, September, 1753. I AM going to send you another volume of my travels; I don't know whether I shall not, at last, write a new Camden's Britannia; but lest you should be afraid of my itinerary, I will at least promise you that it shall not be quite so dry as most surveys, which contain nothing but lists of impropriations and glebes, and carucates, and transcripts out of Domesday, and tell one nothing that is entertaining, describe no houses nor parks, mention no curious pictures, but are fully satisfied if they inform you that they believe that some nameless old tomb belonged to a knight-templar, or one of the crusado, because he lies cross-legged. Another promise I will make you is, that my love of abbeys shall not make me hate the Reformation till that makes me grow a Jacobite, like the rest of my antiquarian predecessors; of whom, Dart in particular wrote Billingsgate against Cromwell and the regicides; and Sir Robert Atkins concludes his summary of the Stuarts with saying, "that it is no reason, because they have been so, that this family should always continue unfortunate." I have made my visit at Hagley,' as I intended. On my way I dined at Park-place, and lay at Oxford. As I was quite alone, I did not care to see anything; but as soon as it was dark, I ventured out, and the moon rose as I was wandering among the colleges, and gave me a charming venerable Gothic scene, which was not lessened by the monkish appearance of the old fellows stealing to their pleasures. Birmingham is large, and swarms with people and trade, but did not answer my expectation from any beauty in it: yet, new as it is, I perceived how far I was got back from the London hegira; for every ale-house is here written mug-house,' a name one has not heard of since the riots in the late King's time. As I got into Worcestershire, I opened upon a landscape of country which I prefer even to Kent, which I had reckoned the most beautiful county in England: but this, with all the richness of 1 In Worcestershire, the seat of Sir George, afterwards Lord, Lyttelton. The house since Walpole visited it has been rebuilt.-CUNNINGHAM. 2 See "The Tatler," June 3, 1710, No. 180; and the song, "The Mug House," in Thompson's "Collection of One Hundred and Eighty Loyal Songs, all written since 1678." 1694.-CUNNINGHAM. Kent, is bounded with mountains. Sir George Lyttelton's house is immeasurably bad and old: one room at the top of the house, which was reckoned a conceit in those days, projects a vast way into the air. There are two or three curious pictures, and some of them extremely agreeable to me for their relation to Grammont: there is le sérieux Lyttelton,' but too old for the date of that book; Mademoiselle Stuart, Lord Brouncker,' and Lady Southesk; besides, a portrait of Lord Clifford the Treasurer, with his staff, but drawn in armour (though no soldier) out of flattery to Charles II., as he said the most glorious part of his life was attending the King at the battle of Worcester. He might have said, that it was as glorious as any part of his Majesty's life. You might draw, but I can't describe, the enchanting scenes of the park: it is a hill of three miles, but broke into all manner of beauty; such lawns, such wood, rills, cascades, and a thickness of verdure quite to the summit of the hill, and commanding such a vale of towns, and meadows, and woods extending quite to the Black Mountain in Wales, that I quite forgot my favourite Thames! Indeed, I prefer nothing to Hagley but Mount Edgecumbe. There is extreme taste in the park the seats are not the best, but there is not one absurdity. There is a ruined castle, built by Miller, that would get him his freedom even of Strawberry: it has the true rust of the Barons' Wars. Then there is a scene of a small lake, with cascades falling down such a Parnassus! with a circular temple on the distant eminence; and there is such a fairy dale, with more cascades gushing out of rocks! and there is a hermitage, so exactly like those in Sadeler's prints, on the brow of a shady mountain, stealing peeps into the glorious world below! and there is such a pretty well under a wood, like the Samaritan woman's in a picture of Nicolò Poussin! and there is such a wood without the park, enjoying such a prospect! and there is such a mountain on t'other side of the park commanding all prospects, that I wore out my eyes with gazing, my feet with climbing, and my tongue and my vocabulary with commending! The best notion I can give you of the satisfaction I showed, was, that Sir George proposed to carry me to dine with my Lord Foley; 1 Sir Charles Lyttelton, distinguished in the Mémoires de Grammont' as "le sérieux Lyttelton." He died in 1716, at the age of eighty-six.-WRIGHT. 2 William, second Viscount Brouncker, and first President of the Royal Society. --CUNNINGHAM. 3 Anne, daughter of William, Duke of Hamilton, mortally wounded at the Battle of Worcester, and wife of Robert, third Earl of Southesk. Her intrigue with the Duke of York, is described in 'Grammont.'-CUNNINGHAM. [at Whitley Court]; and when I showed reluctance, he said, "Why, I thought you did not mind any strangers, if you were to see any thing!" Think of my not minding strangers! I mind them so much, that I missed seeing Hartlebury Castle, and the Bishop of Worcester's' chapel of painted glass there, because it was his public day when I passed by his park.-Miller has built a Gothic house in the village at Hagley for a relation of Sir George: but there he is not more than Miller; in his castle he is almost Bentley. There is a genteel tomb in the church [at Hagley] to Sir George's first wife,' with a Cupid and a pretty urn in the Roman style. You will be diverted with my distresses at Worcester. I set out boldly to walk down the high-street to the cathedral: I found it much more peopled than I intended, and, when I was quite embarked, discovered myself up to the ears in a contested election. A new candidate had arrived the night before, and turned all their heads. Nothing comforted me, but that the opposition is to Mr. Trevis; and I purchased my passage very willingly with crying, "No Trevis! No Jews!" However, the inn where I lay was Jerusalem itself, the very head-quarters where Trevis the Pharisee was expected; and I had scarce got into my room, before the victorious mob of his enemy, who had routed his advanced guard, broke open the gates of our inn, and almost murdered the ostler-and then carried him off to prison for being murdered. The cathedral is pretty, and has several tombs, and clusters of light pillars of Derbyshire marble, lately cleaned. Gothicism and the restoration of that architecture, and not of the bastard breed, spreads extremely in this part of the world. Prince Arthur's tomb, from whence we took the paper for the hall and staircase, to my great surprise, is on a less scale than the paper, and is not of brass but stone, and that wretchedly whitewashed. The niches are very small, and the long slips in the middle are divided every now and then with the trefoil. There is a fine tomb for Bishop Hough,' in the Westminster Abbey style; but the obelisk at the back is not loaded with a globe and a human figure, like Mr. Kent's design for Sir Isaac Newton [in Westminster Abbey]: an absurdity which nothing but himself could surpass, when he placed three busts at the foot of an altar-and, not content with that, placed them at the very angleswhere they have as little to do as they have with Shakspeare. 1 Isaac Maddox, Bishop of Worcester in 1743 till his death in 1759.-CUNNINGHAM. 2 Lucy, daughter of Hugh Fortescue, Esq. of Filleigh; upon whose death, in 1746-7, Lord Lyttelton wrote his celebrated monody.-WRIGHT. 3 By Roubiliac.-CUNNINGHAM. VOL. II. A A From Worcester I went to see Malvern Abbey. It is situated half way up an immense mountain of that name: the mountain is very long, in shape like the prints of a whale's back: towards the larger end lies the town. Nothing remains but a beautiful gateway and a church, which is very large every window has been glutted with painted glass, of which much remains, but it did not answer: blue and red there is in abundance, and good faces; but the portraits are so high, I could not distinguish them. Besides, the woman who showed me the church would pester me with Christ and King David, when I was hunting for John of Gaunt and King Edward. The greatest curiosity, at least what I had never seen before, was, the whole floor and far up the sides of the church has been, if I may call it so, wainscoted with red and yellow tiles, extremely polished, and diversified with coats of arms, and inscriptions, and mosaic. I have since found the same at Gloucester, and have even been so fortunate as to purchase from the sexton about a dozen, which think what an acquisition for Strawberry! They are made of the natural earth of the country, which is a rich red clay that produces every thing. All the lanes are full of all kind of trees, and enriched with large old apple-trees, that hang over from one hedge to another. Worcester city is large and pretty. Gloucester city is still better situated, but worse built, and not near so large. About a mile from Worcester you break upon a sweet view of the Severn. A little farther on the banks is Mr. Lechmere's house; but he has given strict charge to a troop of willows never to let him see the river: to his right hand extends the fairest meadow covered with cattle that ever you saw at the end of it is the town of Upton, with a church half ruined, and a bridge of six arches, which I believe, with little trouble, he might see from his garden. The vale increases in riches to Gloucester. I stayed two days at George Selwyn's house, called Matson, which lies on Robin Hood's Hill: it is lofty enough for an Alp, yet is a mountain of turf to the very top, has wood scattered all over it, springs that long to be cascades in twenty places of it; and from the summit it beats even Sir George Lyttelton's views, by having the city of Gloucester at its foot, and the Severn widening to the horizon. His house is small, but neat. King Charles lay here at the siege; and the Duke of York, with typical fury, hacked and hewed the window-shutters of his chamber, as a memorandum of his being there. Here is a good picture of Dudley Earl of Leicester in his later age, which he gave to Sir Francis Walsingham, at whose house in Kent it remained till |