Part 12

There are several pictures of her grandson, the first Duke of Devonshire--the patriot, the statesman, the munificent patron of letters, the poet, the man of gallantry, and, to crown all, the handsomest man of his day. He was one of the leaders in the revolution of 1688--for be it remembered that the Cavendishes, from generation to generation, have ennobled their nobility by their love of liberty, as well as their love of literature and the arts. One picture of this duke on horseback, _en grand costume a la Louis Quatorze_, is so embroidered and bewigged, so plumed, and booted, and spurred, that he is scarcely to be discerned through his accoutrements. A cavalier of those days in full dress must have been a ponderous concern; but then the ladies were as formidably vast and aspiring. The petticoats at this time were so discursive, and the head-dresses so ambitious, that I think it must have been to save in canvass what they expended in satin or brocade, that so many of the pretty women of that day were painted _en bergere_.

Apropos to the first Duke of Devonshire: I cannot help remarking the resemblance of the present duke to his illustrious ancestor, as well as to several other portraits, and particularly to a very distant relative--the first Countess of Burlington, who was, I believe, the great-grandmother of his grace's grandmother;--in both these instances the likeness is so striking as to be recognized at once, and not without a smiling exclamation of surprise.

Another interesting picture is that of Rachael Russell, the second Duchess of Devonshire, daughter of that heroine and saint, Lady Russell: the face is very beautiful, and the air elegant and high-bred--with rather a pouting expression in the full red lips.

Here is also the third duchess, Miss Hoskins, a great city heiress. The painter, I suspect, has flattered her, for she had not in her day the reputation of beauty. When I looked at this picture, so full of delicate, and youthful, and smiling loveliness, I could not help recurring to a passage in Horace Walpole's letters, in which he alludes to this sylph-like being, as the "ancient grace," and congratulates himself on finding her in good-humour.

But of all the female portraits, the one which struck me most was that of Lady Charlotte Boyle, the young Marchioness of Hartington, in a masquerade habit of purple satin, embroidered with silver; a fanciful little cap and feathers, thrown on one side, and the dark hair escaping in luxuriant tresses; she holds a mask in her hand, which she has just taken off, and looks round upon us in all the consciousness of happy and high-born loveliness. She was the daughter and heiress of Richard Boyle, the last Earl of Burlington and Cork, and Baroness Clifford in her own right. The merits of the Cavendishes were their own, but their riches and power, in several instances, were brought into the family by a softer influence. Through her, I believe, the vast estates of the Boyles and Cliffords in Ireland and the north of England, including Chiswick and Bolton Abbey, have descended to her grandson, the present duke.[64] There are several pictures of her here--one playing on the harpsichord, and another, small and very elegant, in which she is mounted on a spirited horse. There are two heads of her in crayons, by her mother, Lady Burlington,[65] ill-executed, but said to be like her. And another picture, representing her and her beautiful but ill-fated sister, Lady Dorothy, who was married very young to Lord Euston, and died six months afterwards, in consequence of the brutal treatment of her husband.[66] All the pictures of Lady Hartington have the same marked character of pride, intellect, vivacity, and loveliness. But short was her gay and splendid career! She died of a decline in the sixth year of her marriage, at the age of four-and-twenty.

Here is also her father, Lord Burlington, celebrated by Pope, (who has dedicated to him the second of his epistles "on the use of riches,") and styled by Walpole, "the Apollo of the Arts," which he not only patronised, but studied and cultivated; his enthusiasm for architecture was such, that he not only designed and executed buildings for himself, (the villa at Chiswick, for example,) but contributed great sums to public works; and at his own expense published an edition of the designs of Palladio and of Inigo Jones. In one picture of Lord Burlington there is a head of his idol, Inigo Jones, in the background. There is also a good picture of Robert Boyle, the philosopher, a spare, acute, contemplative, interesting face, in which there is as much sensibility as thought. He is said to have died of grief for the loss of his favourite sister, Lady Ranelagh; and when we recollect who and what _she_ was--the sole friend of his solitary heart--the partner of his studies, and with qualities which rendered her the object of Milton's enthusiastic admiration, and almost tender regard, we scarce think less of her brother's philosophy, that it afforded him no consolation for the loss of _such_ a sister.

On the other side hangs another philosopher, Thomas Hobbes, of Malmsbury, whose bold speculations in politics and metaphysics, and the odium they drew on him, rendered his whole life one continued warfare with established prejudices and opinions. He was tutor in the family of the first Earl of Devonshire, in 1607--remained constantly attached to the house of Cavendish--and never lost their countenance and patronage in the midst of all the calumnies heaped upon him. He died at Hardwicke under the protection of the first Duke of Devonshire, in 1678. This curious portrait represents him at the age of ninety-two. The picture is not good as a picture, but striking from the evident truth of the expression--uniting the last lingering gleam of thought with the withered, wrinkled, and almost ghastly decrepitude of extreme age. It has, I believe, been engraved by Hollar.

I looked round for Henry Cavendish, the great chemist and natural philosopher--another bright ornament of a family every way ennobled--but there is no portrait of him at Hardwicke. I was also disappointed not to find the "limned effigy," as she would call it, of my dear Margaret of Newcastle.

There are plenty of kings and queens, truly not worth "sixpence a-piece," as Walpole observes; but there is one picture I must not forget--that of the brave and accomplished Earl of Derby, who was beheaded at Bolton-le-Moor, the husband of the heroic "Lady of Lathom," who figures in Peveril of the Peak. The head has a grand melancholy expression, and I should suppose it to be a copy from Vandyke.

Besides these, were many others calculated to awaken in the thoughtful mind both sweet and bitter fancies. How often have I walked up and down this noble gallery lost in "commiserating reveries" on the vicissitudes of departed grandeur!--on the nothingness of all that life could give!--on the fate of youthful beauties who lived to be broken-hearted, grow old, and die!--on heroes that once walked the earth in the blaze of their fame, now gone down to dust, and an endless darkness!--on bright faces, "petries de lis et de roses," since time-wrinkled!--on noble forms since mangled in the battle-field!--on high-born heads that fell beneath the axe of the executioner!--O ye starred and ribboned! ye jewelled and embroidered! ye wise, rich, great, noble, brave, and beautiful, of all your loves and smiles, your graces and excellencies, your deeds and honours--does then a "painted board circumscribe all?"

ALTHORPE.

A FRAGMENT.

It was on such a day as I have seen in Italy in the month of December, but which, in our chill climate, seemed so unseasonably, so ominously beautiful, that it was like the hectic loveliness brightening the eyes and flushing the cheek of consumption,--that I found myself in the domains of Althorpe. Autumn, dying in the lap of Winter, looked out with one bright parting smile;--the soft air breathed of Summer; the withered leaves, heaped on the path, told a different tale. The slant, pale sun shone out with all heaven to himself; not a cloud was there, not a breeze to stir the leafless woods--those venerable woods, which Evelyn loved and commemorated:[67] the fine majestic old oaks, scattered over the park, tossed their huge bare arms against the blue sky; a thin hoar frost, dissolving as the sun rose higher, left the lawns and hills sparkling and glancing in its ray; now and then a hare raced across the open glade--

"And with her feet she from the plashy earth Raises a mist, which glittering in the sun, Runs with her all the way, wherever she doth run."

Nothing disturbed the serene stillness except a pheasant whirring from a neighbouring thicket, or at intervals the belling of the deer--a sound so peculiar, and so fitted to the scene, that I sympathized in the taste of one of the noble progenitors of the Spencers, who had built a hunting-lodge in a sequestered spot, that he might hear "the harte bell."

This was a day, an hour, a scene, with all its associations, its quietness and beauty, "felt in the blood, and felt along the heart." All worldly cares and pains were laid asleep; while memory, fancy, and feeling waked. Althorpe does not frown upon us in the gloom of remote antiquity; it has not the warlike glories of some of the baronial residences of our old nobility; it is not built like a watch-tower on a hill, to lord it over feudal vassals; it is not bristled with battlements and turrets. It stands in a valley, with the gradual hills undulating round it, clothed with rich woods. It has altogether a look of compactness and comfort, without pretension, which, with the pastoral beauty of the landscape, and low situation, recall the ancient vocation of the family, whose grandeur was first founded, like that of the patriarchs of old, on the multitude of their flocks and herds.[68] It was in the reign of Henry the Eighth that Althorpe became the principal seat of the Spencers, and no place of the same date can boast so many delightful, romantic, and historical associations. There is Spenser the poet, "high-priest of all the Muses' mysteries," who modestly claimed, as an honour, his relationship to those Spencers who now, with a just pride, boast of _him_, and deem his Faery Queen "the brightest jewel in their coronet;" and the beautiful Alice Spencer, countess of Derby, who was celebrated in early youth by her poet-cousin, and for whom Milton, in her old age, wrote his "Arcades." At Althorpe, in 1603, the queen and son of James the First were, on their arrival in England, nobly entertained with a masque, written for the occasion by Ben Jonson, in which the young ladies and nobles of the country enacted nymphs and fairies, satyrs and hunters, and danced to the sound of "excellent soft music," their scenery the natural woods, their stage the green lawn, their canopy the summer sky. What poetical picturesque hospitality! In these days it would have been a dinner, with French cooks and confectioners express from London to dress it. Here lived Waller's famous Sacharissa, the first Lady Sunderland--so beautiful and good, so interesting in herself, she needed not his wit nor his poetry to enshrine her. Here she parted from her young husband,[69] when he left her to join the king in the field; and here, a few months after, she received the news of his death in the battle of Newbury, and saw her happiness wrecked at the age of three-and-twenty. Here plotted her distinguished son, that Proteus of politics, the second Lord Sunderland. Charles the First was playing at bowls on the green at Althorpe, when Colonel Joyce's detachment surprised him, and carried him off to imprisonment and to death. Here the excellent and accomplished Evelyn used to meditate in the "noble gallerie," and in the "ample gardens," of which he has left us an admiring and admirable description, which would be as suitable today as it was a hundred and fifty years ago, with the single exception of the great proprietor, deservedly far more honoured in this generation than was his apostate time-serving ancestor, the Lord Sunderland of Evelyn's day.[70] When the Spencers were divided, the eldest branch of the family becoming Dukes of Marlborough and the youngest Earls Spencer--if the former inherited glory, Blenheim, and poverty--to the latter have belonged more true and more substantial distinctions: for the last three generations the Spencers have been remarked for talents, for benevolence, for constancy, for love of literature, and patronage of the fine arts.

The house retains the form described by Evelyn--that of a half H: a slight irregularity is caused by the new gothic room, built by the present earl, to contain part of his magnificent library, which, like the statue in the Castle of Otranto, had grown "too big for what contained it." We entered by a central door the large and lofty hall, or vestibule, hung round with pictures of fox-chases and those who figured in them, famous hunters, quadruped and biped, all as large as life, spread over as much canvass as would make a mainsail for a man-of-war. These huge perpetrations are of the time of Jack Spencer, a noted Nimrod in his day; and are very fine, as we were told, but they did not interest me. I had caught a glimpse of the superb staircase, hung round with pictures above and below, and not the less interesting as having been erected by Sacharissa herself during the few years she was mistress of Althorpe. A face looked at us from over an opposite door, which there was no resisting. Does the reader remember Horace Walpole's pleasant description of a party of _seers_ posting through the apartments of a show-place? "They come; ask what such a room is called?--write it down; admire a lobster or cabbage in a Dutch market piece; dispute whether the last room was green or purple; and then hurry to the inn, for fear the fish should be over-dressed."[71] We were not such a party; but with imaginations ready primed to take fire, and memories enriched with all the associations the place could suggest, to us every portrait was a history. The orthodox style of seeing the house is to turn to the left, and view the ground-floor apartments first; but the face I have mentioned seemed to beckon me straight-forward, and I could not choose but obey the invitation: it was that of Lady Bridgewater, the loveliest of the four lovely daughters of the Duke of Marlborough: she had the misfortune to be painted by Jervas, and the good fortune to be celebrated by Pope as the "tender sister, daughter, friend, and wife;" and again--

"Thence Beauty, waking, all her forms supplies-- An angel's sweetness--or Bridgewater's eyes."

Jervas was supposed to have been presumptuously and desperately in love with this beautiful woman, who died at the age of five-and-twenty: hence Pope has taken the liberty--by a poetical licence, no doubt--to call her, in his Epistle to Jervas, "_thy_ Bridgewater." Two of her fair sisters, the Duchess of Montagu and Lady Godolphin, hung near her; and above, her fairer sister, Lady Sunderland. Ascending the magnificent staircase, a hundred faces look down upon us, in a hundred different varieties of expression, in a hundred different costumes. Here are Queen Anne and Sarah Duchess of Marlborough placed amicably side by side, as in the days of their romantic friendship, when they conversed and corresponded as Mrs. Morley and Mrs. Freeman: the beauty, the intellect, the spirit, are all on the side of the imperious duchess; the poor queen looks like what she was, a good-natured fool. On the left is the cunning abigail, who supplanted the duchess in the favour of Queen Anne--Mrs. Masham. Proceeding along the gallery, we are met by the portrait of that angel-devil, Lady Shrewsbury,[72] whose exquisite beauty fascinates at once and shocks the eye like the gorgeous colours of an adder. I believe the story of her holding the Duke of Buckingham's horse while he shot her husband in a duel, has been disputed; but her attempt to assassinate Killegrew, while she sat by in her carriage,[73] is too true. So far had her depravities unsexed her!

----"Lorsque la vertu, avec peine abjuree, Nous fait voir une femme a ses fureurs livree, S'irritant par l'effort que ce pas a coute, Son ame avec plus d'art a plus de cruaute."

She was even less famous for the number of her lovers, than the catastrophes of which she was the cause.

"Had ever nymph such reason to be glad? Two in a duel fell, and one ran mad."

Not two, but half a dozen fell in duels; and if her lovers "ran mad," it was in despite, not in despair. Lady Shrewsbury is past jesting or satire; and after a first involuntary pause of admiration before her matchless beauty, we turn away with horror. For the rest of the portraits on this vast staircase, it would take a volume to give a _catalogue raisonnee_ of them. We pass, then, into a corridor hung with two large and very mediocre landscapes, representing Tivoli and Terni. Any attempt, even the best, to paint a cataract _must_ be abortive. How render to the fancy the two grandest of its features--sound and motion? the thunder and the tumult of the headlong waters? We will pass on to the gallery, and lose ourselves in its enchantments.

Where shall we begin?--Any where. Throw away the catalogue: all are old acquaintances. We are tempted to speak to them, and they look as if they could curtsey to us. The very walls breathe around us. What Vandykes--what Lelys--what Sir Joshuas! what a congregation of all that is beauteous and noble!--what Spencers, Sydneys, Digbys, Russells, Cavendishes, and Churchills!--O what a scene to moralize, to philosophize, to sentimentalize in!--what histories in those eyes, that look, yet see not!--what sermons on those lips, that all but speak; I would rather reflect in a picture-gallery, than elegize in a churchyard. The "poca polvere che nulla sente," can only tell us we must die; these, with a more useful and deep-felt morality, tell us how to live.

Yet I cannot say I felt thus pensive and serious the first time I looked round the gallery at Althorpe. Curiosity, excitement, interest, admiration--a crowd of quick successive images and recollections fleeting across the memory--left me no time to think. I remember being startled, the moment I entered, by a most extraordinary picture,--the second Prince of Orange, and his preceptor Katts, by Flinck. The eyes of the latter are really shockingly alive; they stare out of the canvass, and glitter and fascinate like those of a serpent. If I had been a Roman Catholic, I should have crossed myself, as I looked at them, to shield me from their evil and supernatural expression.[74] The picture of the two Sforzas, Maximilian and his brother Francis, by Albert Durer, is quite a curiosity; and so is another, by Holbein, near it, containing the portraits of Henry the Eighth, his daughter Mary, and his jester, Will Somers,--all full of individuality and truth. The expression in Mary's face, at once saturnine, discontented and vulgar, is especially full of character. These last three pictures are curious and valuable as specimens of art; but they are not pleasing. We turn to the matchless Vandykes, at once admirable as paintings, and yet more interesting as portraits. A full-length of his master and friend, Rubens, dressed in black, is magnificent; the attitude particularly graceful. Near the centre of the gallery is the charming full-length of Queen Henrietta Maria, a well-known and celebrated picture. She is dressed in white satin, and stands near a table on which is a vase of white roses, and, more in the shade, her regal crown. Nothing can be in finer taste than the contrast between the rich, various, but subdued colours of the carpet and background, and the delicate, and harmonious, and brilliant tints which throw out the figure. None of the pictures I had hitherto seen of Henrietta, either in the king's private collection, or at Windsor, do justice to the sparkling grace of her figure, or the vivacity and beauty of her eyes, so celebrated by all the contemporary poets. Waller, for instance:--

"Could Nature then no private woman grace, Whom we might dare to love, with such a face, Such a complexion, and so radiant eyes, Such lovely motion, and such sharp replies?"

Davenant styles her, very beautifully, "The rich-eyed darling of a monarch's breast." Lord Holland, in the description he sent from Paris, dwells on the charm of her eyes, her smile, and her graceful figure, though he admits her to be rather _petite_; and if the poet and the courtier be distrusted, we have the authority of the puritanic Sir Symond d'Ewes, who allows the influence of her "excellent and sparkling black eyes." Henrietta could be very seductive, and had all the French grace of manner; but, as is well known, she could play the virago, "and cast such a scowl, as frightened all the lords and ladies in waiting." Too much importance is attached to her character and her influence over her husband, in the histories of that time. She was a fascinating, but a superficial and volatile Frenchwoman. With all her feminine love of sway, she had not sufficient energy to govern; and with all her disposition to intrigue, she never had discretion enough to keep her own or the king's secrets. When she rushed through a storm of bullets to save a favourite lap-dog; or when, amid the shrieks and entreaties of her terrified attendants, she commanded the captain of her vessel to "blow up the ship rather than strike to the Parliamentarian,"--it was more the spirit and wilfulness of a woman, who, with all her faults, had the blood of Henri Quatre in her veins, than the mental energy and resolute fortitude of a heroine. Near her hangs her daughter, who inherited her grace, her beauty, her petulance,--the unhappy Henriette d'Orleans,[75] fair, radiant, and lively, with a profusion of beautiful hair; it is impossible to look from the mother to the daughter, without remembering the scene in Retz's memoirs, when the queen said to him, in excuse for her daughter's absence, "My poor Henrietta is obliged to lie in bed, for I have no wood to make a fire for her--et la pauvre enfant etait transie de froid."

Another picture by Vandyke hangs at the top of the room, one of the grandest and most spirited of his productions. It represents William, the first Duke of Bedford, the father of Lord William Russell, when young, and his brother-in-law, the famous (and infamous) Digby, Earl of Bristol. How admirably Vandyke has caught the characters of the two men!--the fine commanding form of the duke, as he steps forward, the frank, open countenance, expressive of all that is good and noble, speak him what he was--not less than that of Digby, which, though eminently handsome, has not one elevated or amiable trait in the countenance; the drapery, background, and more especially the hands, are magnificently painted. On one side of this superb picture, hangs the present Earl Spencer when a youth; and on the other, his sister, Georgiana Duchess of Devonshire, at the age of eighteen, looking all life and high-born loveliness, and reminding one of Coleridge's beautiful lines to her:--

"Light as a dream your days their circlets ran From all that teaches brotherhood to man, Far, far removed! from want, from grief, from fear! Obedient music lull'd your infant ear; Obedient praises soothed your infant heart; Emblazonments and old ancestral crests, With many a bright obtrusive form of art, Detain'd your eye from nature. Stately vests, That veiling strove to deck your charms divine, Rich viands and the pleasurable wine, Were yours unearn'd by toil."----

And he thus beautifully alludes to her maternal character; for this accomplished woman set the example to the highest ranks, of nursing her own children:--