THE KITCHEN, STANTON HARCOURT.
To properly impress the reader, or the beholder, with this kitchen, it is necessary to give its dimensions. It has a total height of seventy-two feet, made up of thirty-nine feet of the wall, twenty-five feet roof, and the eight feet, as aforesaid, of that banner-bearing monster.
There are no chimneys. The fires were made against the walls, which are three feet thick; the smoke from them escaping through wooden louvres, or shutters, above. According to the direction from which the wind blew, these louvres were shut to on one or other of the four sides. The mechanical ingenuity of the age was at a low level, and was not able to contrive means by which these ventilators could be opened or shut from within; so we find a turret staircase leading up to the roof, around which runs an open-air passage for access to the louvres.
Alexander Pope, residing in the neighbouring old tower during three summers, “translating” Horace, and writing fantastic letters in the meanwhile to his friend, the Duke of Buckingham, exercised his fancy on this kitchen, and found it to resemble the forge of Vulcan, the cave of Polyphemus, and the Temple of Moloch: “The horror of it has made such an impression upon the country people that they believe the witches keep their Sabbath here, and that once a year the Devil treats them with infernal venison, viz. a toasted tiger, stuffed with tenpenny nails.”
But all, according to him, was decrepit at Stanton Harcourt:—
“Its very rats are grey. I pray the roof may not fall upon them, as they are too infirm to seek other lodgings.”
It is the nature of rats to be grey; but we need not seek to deprive Pope of his point. The place was haunted, too, by the ghost of one “Lady Frances,” and we hear “some prying maids of the family report that they have seen a lady in a fardingale through the keyhole; but the matter is hushed up, and the servants are forbidden to talk of it.”
“Pope’s Tower” is in three floors. On the ground-floor is the domestic chapel, roofed in fan-vaulting. You enter it by an ante-chapel with a wooden ceiling in blue, spangled with gilt stars: a gorgeous, but tarnished firmament. The upper room, known as “Pope’s Study,” was occupied by him during two hard-working summers, and he celebrated the completion of his task by inscribing on a pane of red glass in one of the windows, “In the year 1718 Alexander Pope finished here the fifth volume of Homer.” The glass has been removed, and is now at Nuneham.