The Conservatories are of great extent, divided into “houses” for all the rarer plants, with vineries, pine-pits, and all the other accessories of abundance at every season of the year.
Somerleyton Church.
The principal entrance to the mansion is through iron gates, the stone piers, supporting deer couchant, sculptured by John Thomas. This view we have engraved on page 207: it is at once graceful and commanding.
Somerleyton is a magnificent house, but it was erected with a view to comfort as well as elegance; all the rooms, both above and below, are so constructed as to suggest the idea of home; the “appliances and means” of wealth have been judiciously exerted to promote the rational enjoyment of life; ease has not been sacrificed to state; and grandeur has been less studied than content. The house is splendid, and yet homely; there is none of the burden of magnificence either in the mansion or the grounds, while ostentation seems as far removed from the lofty and munificently furnished apartments as from those which ornament a simple cottage dwelling.
Its perfect architectural details, its noble conservatories, its garden, its avenues—one of elm, another of lime trees, stretching from the house across the park—its numerous vases and statues, happily placed—and especially its Winter Garden—all perfect when viewed separately, and all joined in admirable harmony—render Somerleyton remarkable among the most beautiful modern mansions of the kingdom, and do honour to the sculptor-architect under whose superintendence it was planned and executed. Somerleyton, therefore, may be described as one of the gems of the county of Suffolk—a county rich in baronial mansions, abundant of historic events, and full of traditions of the earliest, as well as of mediæval, ages in England.
It would be a long list that which gave even the names of the baronial halls in this grand historic county, and it would far exceed our space to give details of its ancient monuments—Roman, Saxon, Danish, and Norman—to say nothing of those that have descended to us from the still earlier Britons, many relics of whom are yet to be found in the neighbourhood. Suffolk is, indeed, if less graced by natural beauties than some other of our English shires, rich among the richest of them in antiquities and in traditions, while it has a high and prominent place in British history.
The scenery that neighbours Somerleyton is purely English; the lanes are pleasant and picturesque in spring and summer; the land is productive; the broad river Waveney fertilises miles upon miles of green or arable banks between which it runs; the trees have prodigious growth; and, above all, the sea is near at hand; the German Ocean rolls its waves into the harbours of these eastern shores, bearing the wealth that thousands of hardy fishermen gather in during every month of the year.
From any of the heights, which, though not numerous, occur occasionally, and, in a degree, from any of the roads that skirt the shore, may be seen a “multitudinous shipping,” so to say, from the huge three-master and the grand steamship to the comparatively small fishing-smacks that dot the sea-scape, and the heavily weighted coal vessels that are bearing sources of wealth to all parts of the world. It is to the fishing-smacks the locality is mainly indebted for its prosperity; but Lowestoft now holds rank among the fashionable and most frequented sea watering-places of the kingdom.