Part 16

"You must excuse me if I say nothing of the front; indeed, I do not know which it is. A stranger would be grievously disappointed who should think to get into this house the right way. One would reasonably expect, after the entry through the porch, to be let into the hall; but alas! nothing less! you find yourself in a brew-house. From the parlor you think to step into the drawing-room, but, upon opening the iron-nailed door, you are convinced, by a flight of birds about your ears, and a cloud of dust in your eyes, that it is the pigeon-house. On each side of our porch are two chimneys, that wear their greens on the outside, which would do as well within; for whenever we make a fire, we let the smoke out of the windows. Over the parlor window hangs a sloping balcony, which time has turned to a very convenient pent-house. The top is crowned with a very venerable tower, so like that of the church just by, that the jackdaws build in it as if it were the true steeple.

"The great hall is high and spacious, flanked on one side with a very long table, a true image of ancient hospitality. The walls are all over ornamented with monstrous horns of animals, about twenty broken pikes, ten or a dozen blunderbusses, and a rusty matchlock musket or two, which we were informed had served in the civil wars. There is one vast arched window, beautifully darkened with divers scutcheons of painted glass. There seems to be a great propriety in this old manner of blazoning upon glass, ancient families, like ancient windows, in the course of generations being seldom free from cracks. One shining pane, in particular, bears date 1286, which alone preserves the memory of a knight whose iron armor has long since perished with rust, and whose alabaster nose has moldered from his monument. The youthful face of Dame Elinor, in another piece, owes more to that single pane than to all the glasses she ever consulted in her life. Who can say, after this, that glass is frail, when it is not half so perishable as human beauty or glory? And yet I can not but sigh to think that the most authentic record of so ancient a family should be at the mercy of every boy who flings a stone! In this hall, in former days, have dined gartered knights and courtly dames, with ushers, sewers, and seneschals, and yet it was but the other night that an owl flew in hither, and mistook it for a barn.

"This hall lets you, up and down over a very high threshold, into the great parlor. It is furnished with historical tapestry, whose marginal fringes do confess the moisture of the air. The other contents of this room are a broken-bellied virginal, a couple of crippled velvet chairs, with two or three moldered pictures of moldy ancestors, who look as dismally as if they came fresh from hell with all their brimstone about them. These are carefully set at the further corner, for the windows being every where broken, make it so convenient a place to dry poppies and mustard-seed in, that the room is appropriated to that purpose.

"Next to this parlor lies, as I said before, the pigeon-house, by the side of which runs an entry that leads, on one hand and on the other, into a bed-chamber, a buttery, and a small hole called the chaplain's study. Then follow the brew-house, a little green and gilt parlor, and the great stairs, under which is the dairy. A little further on the right, the servants' hall; and, by the side of it, up six steps, the old lady's closet for her private devotions, which has a lattice into the said hall, that, while she said her prayers, she might cast an eye on the men and maids. There are, upon the ground floor, in all, twenty-six apartments, hard to be distinguished by particular names, among which I must not forget a chamber that has in it a huge antiquity of timber, which seems to have been either a bedstead or a cider-press.

"The kitchen is built in form of the Rotunda, being one vast vault to the top of the house, where one aperture serves to let out the smoke and let in light. By the blackness of the walls, the circular fires, vast caldrons, yawning mouths of ovens and furnaces, you would think it either the forge of Vulcan, the cave of Polyphemus, or the temple of Moloch. The horror of this place has made such an impression on the country people, that they believe the witches keep their Sabbath here, and that once a year the devil treats them with infernal venison, a roasted tiger stuffed with tenpenny nails.

"Above stairs we have a number of rooms: you never pass out of one into another but by the ascent and descent of two or three stairs. Our best room is very long and low, of the exact proportions of a bandbox. In most of these rooms there are hangings of the finest work in the world; that is to say, those which Arachne spins from her own bowels. Were it not for this only furniture, the whole would be a miserable scene of naked walls, flawed ceilings, broken windows, and rusty locks. Its roof is so decayed, that after a favorable shower we may, with God's blessing, expect a crop of mushrooms between the chinks of the floors.

"All the doors are as little and low as those to the cabins of packet-boats; and the rooms have, for many years, had no other inhabitants than certain rats, whose very age renders them worthy of this venerable mansion, for the very rats of this ancient seat are gray. Since these have not yet quitted it, we hope, at least, that this house may stand during the small remnant of days these poor animals have to live, who are too infirm to remove to another. They have still a small subsistence left them in the few remaining books of the library.

"We had never seen half what I have described but for an old, starched, gray-headed steward, who is as much an antiquity as any in the place, and looks like an old family picture walked out of its frame. He failed not, as we passed from room to room, to entertain us with several relations of the family; but his observations were particularly curious when he came to the cellar. He showed where stood the triple rows of butts of sack, and where now ranged the bottles of tent for toasts in a morning. He pointed to the stands that supported the iron-hooped hogsheads of strong beer; then, stepping to a corner, he lugged out the tattered fragments of an unframed picture. 'This,' says he, with tears in his eyes, 'was poor Sir Thomas, once master of all this drink! He had two sons, poor young masters! who never arrived to the age of this beer; they both fell ill in this very cellar, and never went out upon their own legs.' He could not pass by a heap of broken bottles without taking up a piece, to show us the arms of the family upon it. He then led us up the tower by dark, winding stone steps, which landed us into several little rooms, one above another. One of these was nailed up; and our guide whispered to us a secret occasion of it. It seems the course of this noble blood was a little interrupted, about two centuries ago, by a freak of the Lady Frances with a neighboring priest, since which the room has been nailed up, and branded as the Adultery Chamber. The ghost of Lady Frances is supposed to walk there, and some prying maids of the family report that they have seen a lady in a farthingale through the keyhole; but this matter is hushed up, and the servants are forbid to talk of it.

"I must needs have tired you by this long description; but what engaged me in it was a generous principle to preserve the memory of that which must itself soon fall into dust; nay, perhaps, part of it, before this letter reaches your hands. Indeed, I owe this old house the same gratitude that we do to an old friend, who harbors us in his declining condition, nay, even in his last extremities. I have found this an excellent place for retirement and study, where no one who passes by can dream there is one inhabitant; and even any body that could visit me does not venture under my roof. You will not wonder that I have translated a great deal of Homer in this retreat; any one that sees it will own that I could not have chosen a fitter or more likely place to converse with the dead."

No one, after reading this, can doubt that Pope possessed that rare talent of painting in words which Thomson called so truly "the portrait painting of Nature," and which, in a letter to Doddington from Italy, he justly laments as so rare a faculty. "There are scarcely any to be met with who have given a landscape of the country through which they traveled, seen thus with the mind's eye, though that is the first thing which strikes, and what all readers of travels demand." "We must lament," says Warton, "that we have no more letters of Bishop Berkeley, who, we see by this before us (from Naples), possessed the uncommon talent of describing _places_ in the most _lively_ and _graphical_ manner, a talent in which he has only been equaled or excelled by _Gray_, in many of those lively and interesting letters published by Mason; those especially written during his travels." The want continues to the present hour; the want of the art of bringing the things you speak of livingly before the reader. It is this want, which can only be supplied by the same principles of study in the writer as in the painter, which first suggested to me the necessity of "Visits to Remarkable Places." No one could have made such visits more effectual than Pope. This is a merit for which he yet has received little or no praise; and yet no talent is rarer, and few more delightful. In his letters, especially those addressed to his two lovely, charming, and life-long friends, Martha and Teresa Blount, such living portraitures of places abound. His description of Sir Walter Raleigh's old mansion and gardens at Sherbourne is a master-piece of the kind. You are now at Letcombe, in Berkshire, with Swift, where the author of Gulliver used to run up a hill every morning before breakfast; now at Bevis Mount, near Southampton, with his friend Lord Peterborough, the conqueror of Spain; and in his journeys to Bath, or to Lord Cobham's at Stowe, you peep in at a number of country houses, and rich peeps they are. Bath and London society is sketched with great vivacity and gusto; but such sketches are more common than these peeps into aristocratic country life. Thus you have him rolling along slowly from Cobham toward Bath, drawn by the very horse on which Lord Derwentwater rode in the Rebellion, but then employed by Lord Cobham in rolling the garden. He looks in at Lord Deloraine's on the Downs. He lies one night at Rowsham, the seat of Colonel Cotterell, near Oxford; "the prettiest place for water-falls, jets, ponds inclosed with beautiful scenes of green and hanging wood, ever seen." Then at Mr. Howe's in Gloucestershire, "as fine a thing of another kind, where Nature has done every thing, and luckily, for the master has ten children." Then he calls at Sir William Codrington's, at Durhams, eight miles from Bath, where he thus describes his entertainment: "My reception there will be matter for a letter to Mr. Bethel. It was perfectly in his spirit. All his sisters, in the first place, insisted that I should take physic preparatory to the waters, and truly I made use of the time, place, and persons to that end. My Lady Cox, the first night I lay there, mixed my electuary; Lady Codrington pounded sulphur; Mrs. Bridget Bethel ordered broth; Lady Cox mounted first up stairs with the physic in a gallipot; Lady Codrington next, with the vial of oil; Mrs. Bridget third, with pills; the fourth sister with spoons and tea-cups. It would have rejoiced the ghost of Dr. Woodward to have beheld this procession." But two years before his death he was again at Stowe, when he says, "All the mornings we breakfast and dispute; after dinner and at night, music and harmony; in the garden fishing; no politics, and no cards nor novel reading. This agrees exactly with me, for the want of cards sends us early to bed."

This was the way he describes spending the latter part of his life: "Lord Bathurst is still my constant friend, but his country seat is now always in Gloucestershire, not in this neighborhood. Mr. Pulteney has no country seat; and in town I see him seldom. In the summer I generally ramble for a month to Lord Cobham's, or to Bath, or elsewhere."

Such were the homes and haunts of Pope. In his life, one thing is very striking. How much the literary men of the time and the nobility associated; how little do they now. Are our nobility grown less literary, or our authors less aristocratic? It may be said that authors now are more independent, and can not flatter aristocracy. But no man was more independent, and proud of his independence, than Pope. But I leave this question to wind up this article with a glance at Twickenham as it is.

Pope was anxious that some of his friends should have the lease of his house and grounds, and prevent their being pulled to pieces; but it was never done. Since his day they have gone through various hands. His house has long been pulled down; his willow has fallen down in utter decay; his quincunx has been destroyed. Two new tenements, having the appearance of one house, with a portico opening into the highway, have for some years been built at the further extremity of Pope's grounds next to the Thames. The house itself was stripped, immediately after his death, of all mementoes of him, by the operation of his own will. To Lord Bolingbroke he left his own copy of his Translation of Homer, and his other works. To Lord Marchmont, other books, with the portrait of Bolingbroke by Richardson. To Lord Bathurst, the three statues of the Hercules of Farnese, the Venus de Medici, and the Apollo in chiaro oscuro, by Kneller. To Mr. Murray, the marble head of Homer, by Bernini, and Sir Isaac Newton, by Guelfi. To Dr. Arbuthnot, another picture of Bolingbroke. He left to Lord Littleton the busts in marble of Shakspeare, Spenser, and Milton, presented to him by the Prince of Wales. His library went among his friends; the pictures of his mother, father, and aunts, to his sister-in-law, Mrs. Rackett. Of that of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, by Kneller, there is no mention; but all the furniture of his grotto, with the urns for his garden, given by the Prince of Wales, he left to Martha Blount. Thus flew abroad those precious relics, then; and what changes in the place itself! A new house is at this moment rising on a part of the Thames bank, so that there are actually three tenements on the spot, and it is cut up and divided accordingly. With all this havoc, there are still, however, more traces of Pope left than might have been expected. The Thames is there; nothing can remove or cut up that. The scene across the river is woody, rich, and agreeable as ever. The sloping bank from the road to the river, once Pope's garden, is a pretty garden still. There is even at the end nearest to London a conservatory still standing, which has all the characteristics of another age, and probably was Pope's. It has Tuscan columns, and large panes of glass fit for sash windows. But a fine, fantastic sort of Swiss villa is rapidly rising, called by the people about Elizabethan. It has deep, depending eaves, full of wooden ornament, and a lofty tower. It is the property of a Mr. Young, a wholesale tea-dealer. Around were lying heaps of lime and other building materials, when I visited it a few weeks ago, and troops of work-people were busily employed where the lords, ladies, and literati of George II.'s reign resorted.

The subterranean passage, or grotto, still runs under the road, spite of Bowles telling us that all these things were pulled down and done away with. It is secured by iron gates at each end, and far more of the original spar and shell-work remains than you could have believed. Near the opening facing the Thames, under some ivied rockwork, stands the figure of a nun in stone, which, no doubt, has been placed there by some occupant subsequent to Pope.

On the opposite side of the road there is a field of some half dozen acres, still bearing traces of its former character. This was Pope's larger garden and wilderness, where he used to plant and replant, contrive and recontrive, pull down and build up, to his heart's content. Around it still are traces of shrubberies, and over all are scattered many of those trees which, upward of a hundred years ago, Pope said he was busy planting for posterity. They are now stupendous in size--Spanish chestnuts, elms, and cedars. No doubt many of them have been felled, but what remain are lofty and magnificent trees. The walks and shrubberies are to a great extent annihilated; the center of the field was planted with potatoes. In the midst of a clump of old laurels, near the road, there is a remains of a large tree, hewn out into the shape of a seat, not unlike a watchman's box, which is said to have been Pope's, but is doubtful. At the top of the grounds is another grotto, that which was erected by Sir William Stanhope, who purchased the estate, or the lease of it, at Pope's death. This grotto seems to have formed the passage to still further grounds; for we are informed that Sir William Stanhope not only built two wings to Pope's house, but extended his grounds. There was placed over the entrance of this grotto a bust of Pope in white marble, and on a white marble slab the following inscription:

"The humble roof, the garden's scanty line, Ill spoke the genius of a bard divine: But fancy now displays a fairer scope, And Stanhope's plans unfold the soul of Pope."--_Clare._

These vaunting lines, which represent the addition of another grotto and another field as unfolding the soul of Pope, and Sir William Stanhope as somebody capable of far greater things than the poet himself, still remain, the monument of the writer's and the erector's folly. The bust, of course, is gone. The grotto is lined with spars; pieces of basalt, perhaps the very joints of the Giant's Causeway sent to Pope by Sir Hans Sloane in 1742, but two years before Pope's death; some huge pieces of glazed and striped jars of pottery; and masses of stalactites and of stone worn by the action of the waters, evidently brought from some cavernous shore or bed of a torrent, perhaps from a great distance, and no doubt at a great expense. As this, however, was the work of Sir William Stanhope, and not of Pope, the whole possesses little interest. Every trace of the temple of which Pope speaks, as being in full view from his grotto, is annihilated; and if the small obelisk, having a funeral urn on each side, said to have been placed in a retired part of the grounds, remain, it escaped my observation. It had this inscription in memory of his mother:

Ah! Editha, Matrum Optima, Mulierum Amantissima, Vale!

Lord Mendip, who married Sir William Stanhope's daughter, is said to have been particularly anxious to retain every trace of Pope. Yet in his care to maintain, he must have very much altered. He stuccoed the house, and adorned it, says a writer in the Gentleman's Magazine, in an elegant style. He inclosed the lawn, and propped with uncommon care the far-famed weeping willow, supposed to be the parent stock of the willows in Twickenham Park. Yes, Pope is said to have been the introducer of the weeping willow into England; that, seeing some twigs around the wrapping of an article of _vertu_ sent to Lady Sylvius from abroad, he planted these, saying they might belong to some kind of tree yet unknown in England. From one of these sprung Pope's willow, and from Pope's willow thousands. Slips of his tree were anxiously sought after; they were even transmitted to distant climes; and in 1789, the Empress of Russia had some planted in her garden at Petersburgh. Notwithstanding every care, old age overcame this willow, and in spite of all props, it perished, and fell to the ground in 1801.

On the decease of Lord Mendip in 1802, the property was sold to Sir John Briscoe, Bart.; after whose death it was again sold to the Baroness Howe. This lady and her husband, Sir J. Waller Wathen, with a tasteless Vandalism, leveled the house of Pope to the ground; extirpated ruthlessly almost every trace of him in the gardens, and erected that house already mentioned at the extremity of Pope's property, now occupied as two tenements. This house of the unpoetical Lady Howe was also erected on the site of an elegant little villa, belonging to Hudson, the painter, the master of Sir Joshua Reynolds.

Such are the revolutions which have passed over Pope's villa and its grounds. Where he, and such celebrated gardeners as Swift, Bolingbroke, and Gay labored, I found potatoes, black with the disease of 1846, growing. The giant trees planted by his hands, which still lift aloft their noble heads, we know not how long may escape some fresh change. The whole of the larger garden of Pope in which they grow, bears the evidences of neglect on its face. Laurels grow wild under the lofty hedges. The stones of Stanhope's grotto lie scattered about; and vast quantities of the deadly nightshade, as if undisturbed for years, displayed to my notice its dark purple and burnished berries of death.

The remains of Pope rest, with those of his parents, in Twickenham church. In the middle aisle, the sexton shows you a P in one of the stones, which marks the place of their interment. To see the monuments to their memory, you must ascend into the north gallery, where at the east end, on the wall, you see a tablet, with a Latin inscription, which was placed there by Pope in honor of his parents; and on the side wall of the gallery nearest the west is a tablet of gray marble, in a pyramidal form, with a medallion profile of the poet. This was placed here by Bishop Warburton, and bears the following inscription:

ALEXANDRO POPE, M. H. Gulielmus Episcopus, Glocestriensis, Amicitiæ causâ fac: cur: 1761. _Poeta loquitur._

FOR ONE WHO WOULD NOT BE BURIED IN WESTMINSTER ABBEY.

Heroes and kings, your distance keep; In peace let one poor poet sleep, Who never flattered folks like you: Let Horace blush, and Virgil too.

By one of those acts which neither science nor curiosity can excuse, the skull of Pope is now in the private collection of a phrenologist. The manner in which it was obtained is said to have been this. On some occasion of alteration in the church, or burial of some one in the same spot, the coffin of Pope was disinterred, and opened to see the state of the remains; that by a bribe to the sexton of the time, possession of the skull was obtained for a night, and _another_ skull returned instead of it. I have heard that fifty pounds were paid to manage and carry through this transaction. Be that as it may, the skull of Pope figures in a private museum.

DEAN SWIFT.

The principal scenes of residence of Dean Swift lie in Ireland. Johnson, in his life of the dean, makes it doubtful whether he was really an Englishman or an Irishman by birth. He says: "Jonathan Swift was, according to an account said to be written by himself, the son of Jonathan Swift, an attorney, and was born at Dublin on St. Andrew's day, 1667; according to his own report, as delivered by Pope to Spence, he was born at Leicester, the son of a clergyman, who was minister of a parish in Herefordshire. During his life the place of his birth was undetermined. He was contented to be called an Irishman by the Irish, but would occasionally call himself an Englishman. The question may, without much regret, be left in the obscurity in which he delighted to involve it."