The house is made thoroughly comfortable as a home; it has never been abandoned by the family, but has been their continual residence. Everywhere, consequently, there is an aspect of thorough comfort. Grace, elegance, and indeed splendour, are sufficiently apparent, but the obvious study has long been to render the dwelling in all respects the abode of an English nobleman who loved to live among his own people. None will wonder at this who knew the late Lord Herbert of Lea, who so long and so continuously lived in that delightful home.
To the Gardens and Grounds of Wilton House we desire to direct the reader’s especial attention; they have been by no means left solely to the guardianship of Nature. Art has done much to give aid to the beauties of hill and dell, and river and wooded slopes and pasture-land. Immediately around the mansion the skill of the gardener is manifest: trim walks, and pastures, and summer-houses, and conservatories add to the natural grace and beauty of the scene. One garden especially, into which there is a passage from the Drawing-room, is very beautifully laid out, overlooked by a graceful arcade, in which are vases and busts, and to which, no doubt, the family and their guests often retreat to enjoy the bounties of free air and light among the adornments that are here so lavish.
The Drawing-room.
A most picturesque and singularly beautiful bridge joins the park to the grounds, crossing the Nadder. It was built from a design by Palladio, and has an open Ionic colonnade. The park slopes up from the river; and in the grounds are some of the finest cedars to be seen in England.
Here, it is said, Sir Philip Sidney wrote the “Arcadia;” and the memorable book bears conclusive evidence that he drew much of his inspiration from these gardens and grounds. The book may be, as Milton styles it, “a vain amatorious poem;” but it is full of beautiful descriptions of Nature, and shows how dearly the chivalric writer really loved the natural and the true; and it demands no strong stretch of fancy to imagine Philip Sidney, accompanied by William Shakspere, Edmund Spenser, and Philip Massinger (he was born in the place, and probably in the house), walking among these now aged trees, along these embowered walks, and by the banks of the fair river that runs to enrich them as it did centuries ago:—
“And all without were walkes and alleys dight
With divers trees enrang’d in even rankes;
And here and there were pleasant arbors pight,
And shadie seates and sundry flowring bankes,
To sit and rest the walker’s wearie shankes.”
Yes; it is obviously to these grounds and gardens that reference is made in the “Arcadia:”—
“There were hilles which garnished their proud heights with stately trees; humble vallies whose base estate seemed comforted with refreshing of silver rivers; medowes enamel with all sortes of eypleasing floures; thickets, which, being lined with most pleasant shade, were witnessed so too, by the cheerfull disposition of many well-tuned birds; each pasture stored with sheepe feeding with sober securitie, while the pretie lambes with bleating oratorie craved the dams’ comfort; here a shepheard’s boy piping as though he should neuer be old; there a young shepherdesse knitting and withall singing; and it seemed that her voice comforted her hands to worke, and her hands kept time to her voice’s musick.”
It is to-day as it was so long ago—when the sweetest of all the singers and the most heroic of all the cavaliers of old times had their healthy walks through these woods, and their poetic “talks” under the branches of these patrician trees—old then, and very old now. Truly Wilton is “a place for pleasantnesse,” and “not unfit for solitarinesse.”