“The surprise the pictures gave me is again renewed. Accustomed for many years to see wretched daubs and varnished copies at auctions, I look at these as enchantment.... A party arrived just as I did, to see the house: a man and three women, in riding dresses, and they rode fast through the apartments. I could not hurry before them fast enough; they were not so long in seeing for the first time, as I could have been in one room, to examine what I knew by heart. I remember formerly being often diverted by this kind of seers; they come, ask what such a room is called, in which Sir Robert lay: admire a lobster, or a cottage in a market-piece; dispute whether the last room was green or purple; and then hurry to the inn, for fear the fish should be overdressed. How different my situation! Not a picture here but recals a history; not one but I remember in Downing-street, or Chelsea, where queens and crowds admired them, though seeing them as little as these travellers.
“When I had drank tea I strolled into the garden. They told me it was now called the pleasure-ground. What a dissonant idea of pleasure! Those groves, those alleys, where I have passed so many charming moments, are now stripped up, or overgrown; many fond paths I could not unravel, though with a very exact clue in my memory. I met two gamekeepers, and a thousand hares! In the days when all my soul was tuned to pleasure and vivacity, I hated Houghton and its solitude; yet I loved this garden; as now, with many regrets, I love Houghton;—Houghton, I know not what to call it: a monument of grandeur or ruin! How I wished this evening for Lord Bute! How I could preach to him!—The servants wanted to lay me in the great apartment—what! to make me pass the night as I had done my evening! It were like proposing to Margaret Roper to be a duchess in the court which cut off her father’s head, and imagining it could please her. I have chosen to sit in my father’s little dressing-room, and am now in his escritoire, where, in the height of his fortune, he used to receive the accounts of his farmers, and deceive himself, or us, with the thoughts of his economy. How wise a man, at once, and how weak! For what has he built Houghton? For his grandson to annihilate, or his son to mourn over.”
Horace Walpole’s Letters, vol. ii. pp. 227-8.
Having made these preliminary observations, I will now give a specimen or two from my native neighbourhood, because necessarily more familiar with them; let every reader throughout England look round him in his, and he will find others as interesting there.
CHAPTER V.
HARDWICK HALL.
Mrs. Jameson has lately given a very vivid and charming account of this fine old place. I am not going to tread in her steps, but to describe the impression it made upon myself at different times, in my own way, and with reference to my own object.
My first visit to it was when I was a youth of about seventeen. I had heard nothing at all of it, and had no idea that it was an object of any particular interest. I was at Mansfield, and casually heard that the present Duke of Devonshire, its proprietor, was come of age, and that there, as at his other houses, his birth-day was to be kept by his tenants and the neighbouring peasantry in the old English style. The house lies about five miles to the north of Mansfield, not far from the Chesterfield road. I set off, and learning that there was a footway, I passed through one or two quiet, old-fashioned villages, through solitary fields and deep woody valleys, a road that for its beauty and out-of-the-world air delighted me exceedingly. I at length found myself at the entrance of a large old park. The tall towers of the hall had been my landmarks all the way, and now that unique building, standing on the broad, level plain, surrounded at a distance by the old oaks of the park, burst upon me with an unexpected effect. It was unlike anything I had seen; but there were solemn halls in the regions of poetry and romance, that my imagination immediately classed it amongst. I advanced toward it with indescribable feelings of wonder and delight. I could have wished that it had been standing in its ordinary solitude, for that seemed to my mind its true and natural state; but it was not so: around it swarmed crowds of rustic revellers, and I determined to take things as I found them; to consider this very scene as a feature of the olden time; and to see how it went, about the baronial dwellings in the feudal ages, on occasions like that.
It was not long before I came upon a man lying on his face under the trees,—he was dead drunk. Soon I passed another, and another, and another: a little farther, and they lay about like the slain on the outskirts of a battle. When I came into the open plain before the hall, the sound of a band of music which had probably been some time silent through the musicians themselves dining, reached me; I heard drunken songs and wild outcries mingling with it. All about the lawn were scattered clustered throngs. I saw barrels standing; spigots running; men catching their hats full, and running here and there, while others were snatching at their prize, and often spilling the ale on the ground. Sometimes there were two or three trying to drink out of a hat at once; others were stooping down to drink at the spigots; there were fighting, scuffling, clamour, and confusion. All round the hall people swarmed like bees. At the doors and gates dense masses were trying to force their way in; while stout fellows were thumping away at their sculls with huge staves, with an energy that one would have thought enough to kill them by dozens, but which seemed to make little impression.
While this was going on, being a slim youth, I slipped beneath the uplifted arm of a stout yeoman, and made a safe ingress. I stood astonished at the place into which I had entered. Those ample and lofty rooms, in which stood huge pieces of roast-beef on huge pewter dishes, and great leathern jacks, tankards, and modern jugs of ale, at which scores of people were eating and drinking as voraciously as if they had been fasting all the one-and-twenty years to do due honour to this great birth-day; while the servants were running to and fro, filling up foaming measures, which were emptied again with wonderful rapidity. Those vast kitchens too, with their mighty fireplaces, and tongs, and pokers, and spits fit for the kitchen of Polyphemus; with broiling cooks and hurrying menials, called on by twenty voices at once. I made my way to the front court, where, under canvass awnings, long tables were set out for the tenantry and yeomanry of the neighbourhood, admitted by ticket. O what a company of jolly, rosy, full-grown, well-fed fellows, was there, making no sham onset on the plum-pudding and roast-beef of Old England! The band kept up a triumphant din; but when it ceased for a moment, what a rattle of knives and forks, and a clatter of ale-cups, what a clamour of tongues and hearty laughter became perceptible! And all round the court, the walls were covered with swarms of men, that climbed up no trivial height to get a view of the jovial banquet, and many a cry was raised to throw up thither some of those good things. And sure enough, here went a piece of beef, and here a lump of pudding; and a score of hands caught at them; and a hundred voices joined in the roar of laughter as they were caught, or fell back again into the court, or flew over the wall amongst the scrambling crowd.