What remains of the park and gardens around Chiswick House now looks sorry enough. The place came into the hands of the Dukes of Devonshire in 1753, when William Cavendish, the fourth duke, who had married the daughter and heiress of the third and last Earl of Burlington, succeeded on that nobleman’s death. It was this Earl of Burlington who had created the glories of Chiswick. A princely patron of the arts, especially those of architecture and sculpture, he had brought home with him from his travels in Italy a taste for the grand exotic manner in the building of mansions and the planning of gardens; and built the house here in 1729, after the Palladian model. It has been somewhat altered since, but the general idea remains, and sufficiently proves that the grand manner, learned abroad under summer skies, is not the comfortable manner as evolved by the necessities of a less ardent clime. English architects have been slow to unlearn the classic fallacy, but the home-grown architecture wins in the end, not from any appreciation of the artistic merits or demerits of the many methods, but on the score of sheer comfort or discomfort in living.
The gardens of Chiswick House abounded in formal walks and long vistas, with conventional “ruins” and groups of antique statuary, but most of these are now gone.
Chiswick House, deserted by its owners, became a lunatic asylum, and stands at last more than a little forlorn, with new streets and roads everywhere around its grounds, and a newer suburb with the projected name of “Burlington” arising by piece-meal, instead of being created ad hoc, as the intention originally was. Burlington is an excellent name; substantial people, with good bank balances should surely reside at such. It radiates respectability; no one could be ashamed of it. I can easily imagine confiding tradesfolk giving unlimited credit to residents at Burlington; but it has not yet come into being, and the vast wilderness-like expanse of Duke’s Meadows, projecting far southward, like a great cape between two bends of the river, remains a tussocky place of desolation, looking over to Mortlake.
In Burlington Lane, which is an old name, is a new length of villas, “The Cresent,” its name so misspelled, and kept so with the valiance of ignorance, uncorrected, for at least five years past.
What remains of the old village of Chiswick lies considerably to the east of all these developments, and beside the river. There, past Hogarth House, where that famous painter lived and worked—now a museum and showplace at sixpence a head, in memory of him—stands old Chiswick church. Restorations and additions have left really very little of the original building, but it wears a very plausible appearance of age. The weather-vane exhibits a figure of St. Nicholas, to whom the church is dedicated, standing in a boat and holding a staff surmounted by a cross.
A strange inscription may be seen on the churchyard wall, at the east end. It seems to tell of a time when Chiswick was a village in every rustic circumstance:
This wall was made at ye charges of
Ye right honourable and Truly pious
Lorde Francis Russell, Earle of Bedford,
out of true zeale and care for ye keeping of this church yarde and
ye wardrobe of godds saints whose
bodies lay theirin buryed from violating by swine and other
prophanation so witnesseth
William Walker V. A.D. 1623.
Rebuilt 1831. Refaced 1884.
No one appears to know who was William Walker the Fifth, and history is equally silent on the subject of the others of that dynasty.
The neighbourhood is now one of remarkably striking contrasts. By the church stands the “Burlington Arms,” an old inn claiming a remote origin, early in the fifteenth century, and with obvious honesty, for the ancient oaken timbers remain to bear witness to the fact. It is a quite humble, but cosy, little inn, astonishingly dwarfed by a great towering fortress-like brewery at the back; as though Beer had withdrawn itself into a final stronghold, there to defend itself to the last vat. Opposite the inn and this Bung Castle stands a stately red-brick mansion of early in the eighteenth century, with fine wrought-iron garden-gates. Up the street are other fine old mansions, mingled with squalid streets; and round by the riverside is Chiswick Mall, with other noble houses of the olden times. Osiers are cut even to this day on Chiswick Eyot, the reedy island opposite.