Chapter II: Part 2

The other entrance is from the eastward. The gateway is at some height from the foundation of the wall, and there are opposite to it the remains of a _perron_, or ramp of mason-work, which those who desired to enter must have ascended by steps. A drawbridge, which could be raised at pleasure, united, when it was lowered, the ramp with the threshold of the gateway, and when raised, left a gap between them, which answered the purpose of a moat. On the inside of the eastern gateway is a figure, much mutilated, said to have been that of Pope Julius II., the same Pontiff who sent to James IV. the beautiful sword which makes part of the Regalia.

“To what base offices we may return!” In the course of the last war, those beautiful remains, so full of ancient remembrances, very narrowly escaped being defaced and dishonoured, by an attempt to convert them into barracks for French prisoners of war. The late President Blair, as zealous a patriot as he was an excellent lawyer, had the merit of averting this insult upon one of the most striking objects of antiquity which Scotland yet affords. I am happy to add, that of late years the Court of the Exchequer have, in this and similar cases, shown much zeal to preserve our national antiquities, and stop the dilapidations which were fast consuming them.

In coming to Linlithgow by the Edinburgh road, the first view of the town, with its beautiful steeple, surmounted with a royal crown, and the ruinous towers of the Palace arising out of a canopy of trees, forms a most impressive object. All that is wanting is something of more elevated dignity to the margin of the lake. But it is not easy to satisfy the inconsistent wishes of amateurs.

We may in taking leave of this subject, use once more the words of old Sir David of the Mount, in his Complaint of the Papingo:--

_Farewell Linlithgow, whose Palace of pleasaunce
Might be a pattern in Portugal or France._

ARUNDEL CASTLE

ALICE MEYNELL

Even pastoral England, which has a character of its own so different from that of pastoral districts elsewhere--so much richer in its details is it, and so much blunter and rounder in its forms, than the pasture-lands and cornlands of Italy, or France, or Spain, or Greece--even this distinctive and separated country has variations within itself. The heart of England--the country of George Eliot and the tract which lies within near or distant sight of the Malvern Hills--has a drier, crisper beauty about its green fields and rich woods. The great peaceful plain is broken by undulations, which are lost from a distant view, and nowhere, not even by the brimming waters of the Severn, are there such perfectly flat fields, pasture, marsh, and cornfield lying together, even and low, as those into which the gently raised tablelands of England subside between the downs of the South Coast. Such lands lie about the feet of the Arundel hills, open to a boundless sky, invested in light night mists, full of cattle, watered by a little river and its streams which scarcely creep towards the sea where it lies level with the land, or in some places level with the hedgerows.

The aspect of things here is Tennysonian. Looking along the fields towards Arundel where it curves into the arm of its hill, and from a distance sufficient to lend enchantment to the mean details which mar any English town upon a close sight, the place looks like the “dim rich city” in Elaine. There might be a warder looking out from the castle keep, a knight might be riding up to the walls in the twilight. Not many years ago owls did hoot about that tower, but they died and were stuffed. The peacefulness of the flat lowlands too, the richness of the level pastures, in which the dark brown cattle stand knee-deep, the softening haze of lowland mist, and the general prosperity of things, all have something of the flavour of the same poetry. It is otherwise when the hills are climbed, and the free breezy uplands of the park, with the moory, dry, gay country towards Petworth, opens out. There we have a beauty which suggests a less mild and meditative muse.

Arundel dates back to the most respectable antiquity, for King Alfred bequeathed the Castle in his will, with the neighbouring lordships to his nephew Athelm. It afterwards passed into the hands of the great Earl Godwin and to his son, King Harold. And when William the Conqueror was minded to reward his Normans for their services in his wars, the Earldoms of Shrewsbury and of Arundel fell to the share of one Roger de Montgomery, who rebuilt and enlarged the fortalice of Arundel. The fair stronghold then went on changing hands, passing now to the kings of England, and now forming the marriage dower of a princess. Among its towers the Empress Maud found refuge from her enemy Stephen, and was besieged; but as she was the guest of Adeliza, widow of Henry I., he courteously permitted her at last to depart in peace, for the love of hospitality. The place was now the permanent property of Adeliza’s second husband and of his heirs, and so, roughly speaking, it has remained, the fifth in succession from him being the first who bore the name of Fitzalan. The only interruptions of their tenure were temporary ones, and consisted of two short forfeitures to the Crown, besides a seizure by the capacious and rapacious hands of good Queen Bess, who kept it until her death, when her successor restored it to its rightful lord.

One Earl of Arundel lost his head for high treason against Richard II. During the Civil Wars the Castle was besieged and besieged, being first seized by the Parliamentarians in the absence of the owner, then captured by the Royalists after three days’ fighting, and subsequently retaken by the Parliamentarians under Waller, who laid siege on the 19th of December, 1643, and entered the Castle on the 6th of January, 1644. Upon this an order in Council commanded that the walls of the town of Arundel and those of Chichester should be destroyed. Since more peaceful times have reigned, within England at least, restoration has been at work somewhat busily, and several Royal visits have wakened “our loyal passion for our temperate Kings,” in the steep high-street and in the public-houses of the borough. A borough, alas! it is no longer. Having enjoyed, in the good old times, the luxury of a couple of members, it was reduced to a pittance of one by the first Reform Bill, and entirely disfranchised by the second.

The station lies in the valley at some little distance from the town; as you follow the road from the rail you have Arundel and the Castle before you, the principal object of the view being the great church of St. Philip Neri, built by the present Duke of Norfolk some years ago at a cost of £100,000. It is still new, inevitably new. That is a fault which time will cure; but in the meanwhile no little disharmony is created between the ancient ruddy colours of the old walls, of the Castle with its town and the somewhat harsh whiteness of the church. Its form, too, being upright, is not felicitous in its composition with the lower and longer lines of antique English masonry. It may not have been the Duke’s express purpose, when he built the “house of God,” to dwarf his own hereditary home and fortress, as we once heard a passenger in a railway-train passing the place declare; but if that symbolic and ascetic intention was ever entertained, it has been effectually fulfilled. The best consolation which we can offer to the lovers of the past for the intrusion of the modern Gothic church, is that the ruins which they admire were brand-new in the old times which they cherish--strong, sharp, neat, and finished, with no ivy anywhere, and no pleasing uncertainties of outline. As you draw near to the town you see the rich woods which clothe the hillside trending off to the right towards the Black Rabbit, where the winding lines of the lazy Arun pass inland. To the left stretch the fields towards a little place called Ford, and in front climbs the High-street. At the top of the High-street is the Castle, and then the road turns to the left towards this great dominating church of St. Philip.

The donjon is manifestly the most ancient part of the Castle. It dates from Saxon times, and is traditionally believed to have been part of the stronghold as it was in the days of Alfred the Great. It stands on an artificial eminence, and from its ramparts the view is wide and fair; westwards over the rich country, over the delicate distant spire of Chichester, to the farther downs of the Isle of Wight; southwards to the mouth of the little river Arun, and the port of Littlehampton lying with sea-side pastures around it, level with the sea; eastwards to the South Downs; and northwards over the home garden and the thick woods of the lower park to Burpham, where British antiquities of no small importance were at once discovered, amongst them a canoe with its anchor--the relic of a probably half-civilized and Christian people, compared to whom the invading English were savages of furious wildness. At the top of the keep bide those stuffed owls which some years ago flew about its battlements. The rest of the Castle is merely an antique fortress dwelling-place, much restored in a jumble of styles, but with a general picturesqueness of effect. The alterations which it is now undergoing will doubtless much modify its details, if not its mass.

A little higher, and at some distance from the fortalice of Arundel, is the parish church, a venerable fane, some parts of it dating five hundred years back. Old and new are confused together in the place, a Fourteenth Century font, some frescoes of approximately the same date, and other precious antiquities being side by side with brilliant windows of modern glass and in modern taste, and a number of energetic “restorations.” From the tower the Parliamentarians poured shot and bullet into the Royalist-guarded ramparts of the Castle. The “Fitzalan Chapel,” properly the chancel of this church, has been the subject of a sufficiently celebrated law-suit. Built in the Fourteenth Century by an Earl of Arundel, it was turned to secular uses--to uses indeed of the _most_ secular kind--at the time of the Reformation and thereafter, and is now, of course, a monument and no more. As, however, it contains the bones of their fathers, the Dukes of Norfolk have naturally maintained their proprietorship and their interest in the sometime sanctuary, and it was recently shut off from the body of the church by the bricking up of the connecting doorway. The Vicar thereupon committed the legal and formal trespass of removing a brick, in order that the proprietorship of the Fitzalan Chapel might come under the decision of the courts. That decision confirmed the Duke and his rights, therefore the division remains; but the church is complete and ample enough for all purposes as it now stands. The monuments in the Fitzalan Chapel are of great interest and beauty. The earliest of them are of the same period as the foundation; the most beautiful is the chantry of William Fitzalan, with its fine and elaborate tracery; and perhaps the most interesting is the tomb of John Fitzalan, which was for centuries believed to be a cenotaph. The hero to whose memory it was erected lost a leg at the battle of Gerberoy and died in France thirteen months later, in 1435. He was buried in the Church of the Grey Friars, at Beauvais, Normandy. Not very long ago a discovery was made, in the Prerogative Court at Canterbury, of the will of one Fooke Eiton, Esquire, which had been proved in 1454, and which stated that the testator had ransomed the body of the Earl “oute of the frenchemennys handes.” In 1857 search was made under the supposed cenotaph, and the bones of a human body which had lost one leg were discovered. How or when the pious and faithful “Fooke Eiton, Esquire,” had effected the reburial by means of which the brave Fitzalan slept with his fathers, there is no record to tell.

Quite near the grey and mouldering parish church, with its cemetery and its yews, rises the great modern Roman Catholic church of which we have already spoken. Close by is the park, to which we hasten, as the glory of the country side. A narrow embowered road, entered by a little gate, leads to the fair space of sward and tree, with its deep valleys and sudden hills, one of the grandest parks in England; lacking, of course, the charm and pathos, the nobility and humility, which the most beautiful nature may gain from the signs of labour, agriculture, and the poor; and yet not oppressive with too heavy verdure or any blank, damp, over-green spaces of melancholy grass and sponge-like trees. The soil of Arundel Park is composed chiefly of that great flower-bearer chalk. It is so thin that it does not nourish gigantically heavy trees, but lighter and gayer beeches. The ground is high and abruptly broken, and the whole aspect of things needs only some sign of the peasant’s life to be eminently paintable. Hill beyond hill rises in distance behind distance. Under a fine sky the scene is so grand that, though fresh from contemplating that panorama of the junction of the great Rhine and the little Moselle among the hills at Coblentz--the landscape which the late Lord Lytton pronounced the most beautiful in Europe--we were constrained to think Arundel Park lovelier as we drove to Petworth over its open hills. The orthodox deer are here, in pretty and vivacious herds which number considerably over a thousand. A charming little solitary lake, haunt of that shrill bird, the dab-chick, lies in a hollow to the right; thence rises a thick beech wood, and the path that curves round the base of the beech-hill leads to one of the local lions, the dairy. The “tiled temple of cleanliness” is fascinating enough to the lover of cream and curds, but it is hard to forgive the demolition of a very ancient mill which stood on the same site. The air about the dairy is heavy with the luxurious scent of the magnolias which glow upon its walls.

The road is leading us round again out of the park towards the town; and here is a relic of the past in the shape of a ruined Dominican priory, which was built in 1396, and which gave a home to twenty poor men living under the protection of a friar, until an end was put to the charity at the dissolution of monasteries; and at the time of Waller’s siege of the Castle, the priory was already in ruins. If instead of winding back into the lower town of Arundel, whence we started, we take the road away to the left, we shall reach the “Black Rabbit,” already mentioned, where the dark, rich woods crowd the hillside, the little Arun sauntering at its feet. The Castle looks well from this side, where trees and not houses surround it.

PALAZZO VECCHIO

ALEXANDRE DUMAS

Grand as was the idea I had formed in advance of the Palazzo Vecchio, I must confess that the realization was still grander. When I saw that mass of stone so strongly rooted in the ground, surmounted by its tower that threatens the heavens like the arm of a Titan, the whole of old Florence, with her Guelphs, her Ghibelines, her balie, her priors, her lords, her guilds, her _condottieri_, her turbulent mobs and her haughty aristocracy appeared to me as though I were about to take part in the exiling of Cosmo the Elder, or in the execution of Salviati. In fact, four centuries of history and art are there on the right, on the left, in front and behind, surrounding you on all sides and speaking at once with their stone, marble and bronze of Nicholas d’Uzzano, Orcagna, Rinaldo d’Albizzi, Donatello, Pazzi, Raphael, Lorenzo de’ Medici, Flaminius Vacca, Savonarola, John of Bologna, Cosmo I. and Michelangelo.

The whole world may be searched in vain for a spot that brings such names together, without counting those I have omitted! and some of the omissions include Baccio Bandinelli, Ammanato, and Benvenuto Cellini.

I should much like to reduce this magnificent chaos to some sort of order and chronologically classify the great men, the great works and the great memories, but that is impossible. When you arrive at this wonderful square, you must go where the eye carries you, or where instinct guides you.

What first engrosses the attention of the artist, the poet, or the archæologist, is the sombre Palazzo Vecchio, still blazoned with the ancient arms of the republic, amid which glitter on the azure, like stars in the sky, those innumerable fleurs-de-lys sown along the road to Naples by Charles of Anjou.

Florence was hardly free before she wanted to have a town hall as an abode for a chief magistrate and a belfry for calling the people together. When a community is constituted in the North, or a republic established in the South, the desire for a town-hall and a belfry is always the first operation of its will, and the satisfaction of that desire the first proof of its existence.

Thus in 1298, that is to say only sixteen years after the Florentines had conquered their constitution, Arnolfo di Lapo received from the rulers the order to build a palace for them.

Arnolfo di Lapo had visited the site reserved for him and had prepared his plans accordingly. But at the moment of laying the foundations of his edifice, the people loudly forbade him to place a single stone upon the spot where the house of Farinata des Uberti had stood. Arnolfo di Lapo was forced to bow to this popular clamour; he pushed his edifice back into a corner and left the accursed spot unoccupied. Even to the present time neither stones nor trees have planted their roots there and nothing has intruded for more than six centuries where Guelph vengeance drove the plough and sowed with salt.

This palace was the residence of a standard-bearer and eight priors, two for each quarter of the city; their charge lasted for sixty days and during that time they lived together, eating at the same table and not being able to leave their residence: that is to say, they were almost prisoners. Each had two domestics to serve him and there was always a notary at their orders ready to write down their deliberations: he ate with them and was a prisoner like themselves. As a recompense for the sacrifice of his time and liberty that each prior made for the republic, he received ten pounds a day, or nearly seven francs of our money. At that day, private parsimony ruled in public economy, and the government thus found itself in a position to execute great things in art and in war. Thence resulted its surname of the Magnificent Republic.

You enter the Palazzo Vecchio by a door situated about a third of the way along the front and find yourself in a little square court, surrounded by a portico supported by nine columns of Lombard architecture embellished with applied ornaments. In the centre of this court is a fountain surmounted by a rococo Cupid holding a fish and reposing on a porphyry basin. At the time of Ferdinand’s marriage this portico was adorned with fresco paintings representing bird’s-eye views of the cities of Germany.

On the first floor is the great Council Hall, executed by the orders of the Republic and at Savonarola’s suggestion. A thousand citizens could deliberate there at their ease. Cronaca was the architect, and he pushed the work so rapidly that Savonarola used to say that the angels served as his masons.

Cronaca had need of haste, for three years later Savonarola was to die and thirty years afterwards the Republic was to fall.

Therefore this immense hall has retained nothing of that period but its original form: all of its ornamentation belongs to the time of the principality; its frescoes and ceiling are by Vasari; its pictures by Cigoli, Ligozzi and Passegnano; and its statues by Michelangelo, Baccio Bandinelli and John of Bologna.

All is to the great glory of Cosmo I.

In fact, Cosmo I. is one of those gigantic statues that history raises like a pyramid to mark the limit where one era ends and another begins. Cosmo I. is at the same time the Augustus and the Tiberius of Tuscany, and this is so much the more true in that at the moment when Alexander fell beneath the poniard of Lorenzino, Florence found herself in the same situation as Rome was after Cæsar’s death: “There was no longer a tyrant, but there was no longer any liberty.”

At fifteen years of age his character was already outlined and those who approached him could form an idea of what he would be later. His appearance was grave and even severe; he was slow to form familiar relations and would seldom allow any familiarities; but when he granted this double concession it was a proof of his friendship, and his friendship was sure; nevertheless, even with his friends he was discreet in all his actions and did not want any one to know what he intended to do until it was done. The result was that he always seemed to be seeking some end contrary to his real one, which always rendered his answers brief and sometimes obscure.

This was Cosmo when he learnt the news of the assassination of Alexander and the flight of Lorenzino; this flight left him without a competitor for the princedom and therefore his measures were quickly taken. He gathered together a few friends on whom he could depend, mounted his horse, and set out for Florence.

Cosmo was rewarded for his confidence by the welcome that he received: he entered the city amid the joyous acclamations of all the inhabitants. Two days after, he was named chief and governor of the republic on four conditions:

To dispense justice indifferently to the rich and to the poor.

Never to consent to restore the authority of Charles the Fifth.

To avenge the death of Duke Alexander.

To treat well Giulio and Giula, the natural children of the latter.

Cosmo accepted this species of charter with humility and the people accepted Cosmo with enthusiasm.

But there happened to the new grand duke what happens to all men of genius who are raised to power by revolution. On the lowest step of the throne they receive laws, from the top step they impose them.

The position was difficult, particularly for a youth of eighteen. It was necessary to fight external and internal foes at the same time; to substitute a firm government, a single power and a durable will for all those flabby or tyrannical governments, for all those powers that were opposed and consequently destructive to one another, and for all those wills which sometimes starting from above and sometimes from below caused a perpetual ebb and flow of aristocracy and democracy upon which it was impossible to establish anything solid and durable. And yet with all that it was necessary so to manage the liberties of this people that neither nobles, citizens, nor artisans might feel the master. In fact it was necessary to manage this horse, that was still rebellious under tyranny, with an iron hand beneath a silken glove.

Cosmo was in every respect the man needed to carry through such a work. As dissimulating as Louis the Eleventh, passionate as Henry the Eighth, brave as Francis the First, persevering as Charles the Fifth and magnificent as Leo the Tenth, he had all the vices that make private life sombre and all the virtues that make public life brilliant. Therefore his family was unhappy and his people happy.

Cosmo was one of the most learned men of his time. Among other things he knew a great number of plants and the places where they grew, where they lived the longest, where they had the strongest scent, where they produced the most beautiful flowers, or bore the finest fruits, and what were their virtues for curing the diseases or wounds of men and animals; then, as he was an excellent chemist, with the plants he made waters, essences, oils, medicaments, and balms, and gave his remedies to all who asked for them whether they were rich or poor, Tuscan subjects or foreigners, inhabitants of Florence or any other part of Europe. Cosmo loved and protected letters. In 1541 he founded the Florentine Academy which he called his “very dear and happy Academy”: Plutarch and Dante were read and commented on there. The sessions were first held in the Via Larga Palace and afterwards, so that it might have more ease and freedom, he gave it the great council-room in the Palazzo Vecchio. After the fall of the republic this great hall had become useless.

Cosmo was an artist and it was not his fault if he arrived at the moment when great men were departing. Of all that brilliant galaxy that had illuminated the reigns of Julius the Second and Leo the Tenth, Michelangelo alone remained. He did everything he could to get the latter: he sent a cardinal and an embassy offering him any sum of money he might name, the title of senator and any office he wished; but Paul the Third kept him and would not give him up. Then, in default of the Florentine giant, he gathered together the best he could find. Ammanato, his engineer, built for him the fine bridge of the Trinity after the plans of Michelangelo, and carved for him the marble Neptune in the Palazzo Vecchio Square. He made Baccio Bandinelli produce the statues of Pope Clement the Seventh, Duke Alexander, Giovanni de’ Medici, his father, and his own statue; the Loggia of the Mercato Nuovo and the choir of the Cathedral. Benvenuto Cellini was recalled from France to cast his _Perseus_ in bronze, to carve agate cups and to engrave gold medals for him. Then as there had been found in the environs of Arezzo a lot of little bronze figures, some of which lacked the head, others the hands, and others the feet, Cosmo cleaned them himself and carefully removed the rust so that they might not be damaged.

By means of his chemical researches, Cosmo, with Francesco Ferruci of Fiesole, recovered the art of cutting porphyry, which had been lost since Roman times.

Lastly, he brought together in the Via Larga and Pitti Palaces all the pictures, statues and medals, whether ancient or modern, that had been painted, carved, engraved or discovered in excavations by Cosmo the Elder, Lorenzino, and Duke Alexander, and that had twice been pillaged and dispersed:--first, when Charles VIII. passed through, and again at the assassination of Duke Alexander by Lorenzino.

Therefore the praise of his contemporaries outweighed the blame of posterity: the dark side of his life was lost in the brilliant side, and people forget that this protector of art, science and literature slew one son, poisoned one daughter and violated another.

We see then that there was something of both Augustus and Tiberius in Cosmo I.

Now let us return to the hall of the Palazzo Vecchio. The picture, not the most remarkable from an artistic point of view, but certainly the most extraordinary as a recorded fact, is one by Ligozzi representing the reception given by Boniface VIII. to twelve ambassadors of twelve powers, who were all found to be Florentines; so incontestable throughout the world was the political genius of the Magnificent Republic during the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries.

These twelve ambassadors were:

Muciato Franzizi for the King of France.

Ugolino di Vicchio for the King of England.

Raniere Langru for the King of Bohemia.

Vermiglio Alfani for the King of the Germans.

Simone Rossi for Rasca.

Bernardo Ervai for the Lord of Verona.

Guicardo Bastai for the Khan of Tartary.

Manno Fronte for the King of Naples.

Guido Tabanca for the King of Sicily.

Lapo Farinata des Uberti for Pisa.

Gino di Dietaselvi for the lord of Camerino.

Bencivenni Folchi for the Grand Master of the Hospital of Jerusalem.

It was this strange gathering that made Boniface VIII. say that a fifth element had come into the world, and that the Florentines constituted this element.

The enormous frescoes that cover the walls, as well as all the pictures on the ceiling, are by Vasari. The frescoes represent the wars of the Florentines against Siena and Pisa. It was for the latter that Michelangelo prepared those beautiful cartoons that disappeared without any one knowing what had become of them.

In the other chambers of the palace, which are the living-rooms, there are also a considerable number of paintings of almost the same period. One exception is a charming little chapel by Rodolfo Guirlandaio, the restrained and religious execution of which forms a strange contrast to the facile and pagan painting of the beginning of the Decadence.

Entirely upset as it was by the arrangements of Cosmo I., the Palazzo Vecchio yet materially preserves one memory of the Republic: this is the Barberia Tower in which Cosmo the Elder was confined, and at the door of which, later during the Pazzi conspiracy, the brave standard-bearer, Cesare Petrucci, mounted guard with a spit. In this tower, Cosmo the Elder spent what were certainly the four worst days of his long life, the fear of being poisoned by his enemies preventing him from taking any nourishment.

KENSINGTON PALACE

LEIGH HUNT

It is not improbable that Kensington Palace and Gardens originated in the royal nursery established in this district, for the benefit of his children, by King Henry the Eighth. If so, here Queen Elizabeth grew up awhile, as well as Queen Victoria, and here health was in vain attempted to be given to the sicklier temperaments of Edward the Sixth, who died young, and his sister, Queen Mary, who lived only to be an unhappy bigot.

As the circumstance, however, does not appear ascertainable, antiquaries must put up with the later and less illustrious origin which has been found for these distinguished premises, in the house and grounds belonging to the family of the Finches, Earls of Nottingham, whether the tenement which they occupied had once been royal or not, it seems to have been but a small mansion in their time; probably consisting of nothing more than the now least-visible portion of it north-west; and indeed, though it was subsequently enlarged under almost every one of the sovereigns by whom it was occupied, it was never, in one respect, anything but what it is still, namely, one of the plainest and least pretending of princely abodes.

In vain we are told, that Wren is supposed to have built the south front, and Kent (a man famous in his time) the east front. We can no more get up any enthusiasm about it as a building, than if it were a box, or a piece of cheese. But it possesses a Dutch solidity; it can be imagined full of English comfort; it is quiet; it is a good air; and though it is a palace, no tragical history is connected with it; all which considerations give it a sort of homely, fireside character, which seems to represent the domestic side of royalty itself, and thus renders an interesting service to what is not always so well recommended by cost and splendour. Windsor Castle is a place to receive monarchs in; Buckingham Palace to see fashion in; Kensington Palace seems a place to drink tea in; and this is by no means a state of things, in which the idea of royalty comes least home to the good wishes of the subjects. The reigns that flourished here, appositely enough to this notion of the building, were all tea-drinking reigns--at least, on the part of the ladies; and if the present queen does not reign there, she was born and bred there, growing up quietly under the care of a domestic mother; during which time, the pedestrian, as he now goes quietly along the gardens, fancies no harsher sound to have been heard from the Palace windows, than the “tuning of the tea-things,” or the sound of a piano-forte.

We may thus, in imagination, see the house and the gardens growing larger with each successive proprietor. First, there is Heneage Finch, the Speaker of the House of Commons, at the accession of Charles the First; for he is the earliest occupant we can discover.

This gentleman possessed but fifteen acres of ground; which his son, Sir Heneage Finch, afterwards Earl of Nottingham, increased by a grant that was made him out of Hyde Park. To the Earl’s son and heir, Daniel, succeeded King William the Third, who bought the house and grounds of Daniel, and enlarged them both, the latter to the extent of twenty-six acres. Anne added thirty acres; Queen Caroline, wife of George the Second, added three hundred; and the house, which had been growing all this time, was finally brought to its present size or appearance by the late Duke of Sussex, who added or rebuilt the rooms, with their still fresh-looking brick-work, that form the angle on the south-west.

The house nominally possesses gardens that are miles in circumference; but these having become public every day in the week, which in the early times of the Georges was not the case, it has, in reality, to any sequestered purpose of enjoyment, no gardens at all, except at one corner.

The gardens in the time of the Finches consisted of little but the ground squaring with the north side of the Palace, laid out in the first formal and sombre style of our native gardening, and originating the still existing circle of yew trees, a disposition of things congenial with the owners. Heneage Finch, the Speaker, and his sons, the first and second Earls of Nottingham, were all lawyers and statesmen; and though a clever, and upon the whole, a worthy, appear to have been a melancholy race. The first Earl suffered under a long depression of spirits before he died; the second was a man of so atrabilarious a complexion that he was nicknamed Dismal; and Dismal’s son, from a like swarthy appearance, and the way in which he neglected his dress, was called the chimney-sweep. Hanbury Williams, the reigning lampooner of the days of George the Second, designated the whole race as the “black funereal Finches.”

These unusual “Finches of the Grove,” made way for a kind of Jupiter’s bird in the eagle-nosed, hawk-eyed, gaunt little William the Third; a personage as formal and melancholy as themselves, though not so noisy (for Dismal, notwithstanding his formality, was a great talker); and under William, the Gardens though they grew larger, did but exchange English formality for Dutch. The walks became longer and straighter, like canals; the yews were restrained and clipped; there was, perhaps, a less number of flowers, comparatively; for the English had always been fond of flowers, and the Dutch had not yet grown mad (commercially) for tulips; in short, William the Third with a natural love for his Dutch home, made the palace and gardens look as much like it as he could.

And his Court, for the most part, was as gloomy as the gardens; for William was not fond of his new subjects; did not choose to converse with them; and was seldom visible but to his Dutch friends. Yet here were occasionally to be seen some of the liveliest wits and courtiers that have left a name in history, forsakers, indeed, of reserved and despotic King James, rather than enthusiasts for the equally reserved and hardly less power-loving King William, who had become, however, by the force of circumstances, the instrument for securing freedom. Here came the Earl of Dorset, Prior’s friend, who had been one of the wits of the Court of Charles the Second; Prior, himself, who had stirred William’s Dutch phlegm so agreeably as to be made one of the gentlemen of his bedchamber; Congreve, whose plays Queen Mary admired; Halifax, a minor wit, but no mean statesman; Sir William Temple, who combined public with private life to so high a degree of wisdom and elegance; Swift (probably) then a young man, whom Sir William made use of in his communications with the king; Burnet, the gossiping historian, sometimes wrong-headed, but generally right-hearted, whose officious zeal for the Revolution had made him a bishop; the Earl of Devonshire, whose nobler zeal had made him a duke, one of a family remarkable for their constant and happy combination of popular politics with all the graces of their rank; Lord Monmouth, afterwards the famous, restless Earl of Peterborough, friend of Swift and Pope, conqueror of Spain, and lover, at the age of seventy, of Lady Suffolk; Sheffield, afterwards Duke of Buckinghamshire, a minor wit and poet, in love with (the rank of) the Princess Anne; and last, not least in anything, but good-breeding, and a decent command over his passions, Peter the Great, semi-barbarian, the premature freer of Russian pseudo-civilization, who came to England in order to import the art of ship-building into his dominions, in his own proper mechanical person, and out of the five months which he spent here, passed a good many days out of one of them in interchanging visits with King William at Kensington. The only distinct personal anecdote recorded of William the Third in connection with Kensington will remind the reader of similar paternal stories of Agesilaus and others.

A tap was heard one day, at his closet door, while his secretary was in attendance.

“Who is there?” said the king.

“Lord Buck,” answered the little voice of a child of four years of age. It was Lord Buckhurst, the son of his Majesty’s lord high chamberlain, the Earl of Dorset.

“And what does Lord Buck want?” returned William, opening the door.

“You to be a horse to my coach,” rejoined the little magnate. “I’ve wanted you a long time.”

William smiled upon his little friend, with an amiableness which the secretary had never before thought his countenance capable of expressing, and taking the string of the toy in his hand, dragged it up and down the long gallery till his playfellow was satisfied.

The Court and Gardens of Kensington were not livelier in Queen Anne’s time than in that of King William. Anne, as we have seen at Campden House, was a dull woman with a dull husband. They had little to say for themselves; their greatest pleasures were in eating and drinking; the Queen was absurdly found of etiquette; and as there was nothing to startle decorum in the court morals, the mistress in King William’s time had given something of a livelier stir to the gossip. Swift describes Anne in a circle of twenty visitors as sitting with her fan in her mouth, saying about three words once a minute to some that were near her, and then upon hearing that dinner was ready, going out. In the evening she played at cards; which, long before, and afterwards, was the usual court pastime at that hour.

She does not appear to have been fond of music, or pictures, or books, or anything but what administered to the commonest animal satisfactions, or which delivered her mind at all other times from its tendency to irresolution and tedium.

Addison and Steele might have been occasionally seen at her Kensington levees among the Whigs; and Swift, Prior, and Bolingbroke among the Tories. Marlborough would be there also; ever courtly and smiling, whether he was victorious as general and as the favourite Duchess’s husband, or only bowing the more obsequiously alas! for fear of losing his place and his perquisites.

Anne enlarged the Gardens, but she did not improve the style of gardening. Addison in a paper of the _Spectator_, written during the last year but one of her reign, catching the last glimpse of a variation, speaks with rapture of the conversation of a disused gravel-pit, which had been left remaining, into a cultivated dell; but it would seem as if this exploit on the part of the gardeners was rather in the hope of making the best of what they considered a bad thing, than intended as an advance towards something better; for they laid out the Queen’s additional acres in the same formal style as King William’s.

Long, straight gravel-walks, and clipped hedges, prevailed throughout, undiversified with the present mixture of freer growing wood. An alcove or two, still existing, were added; and Anne exerted herself to build a long kind of out-house, which still remains; and which she intended, it is said, for the balls and suppers which certainly took place in it; though we suspect, from the narrowness of its construction, it never was designed for anything but what it is, a green-house.

These most probably constituted all those “elegancies of art,” with which a writer of the time gives her credit for improving the Gardens. Such, at any rate, was the case in the more public portions of them; and if the private ones enjoyed any others, we may guess what they were, from Pope’s banter of the horticultural fashions of the day, in a paper which he contributed to the _Guardian_, the year after the appearance of that of Addison’s in the _Spectator_. The following is a taste of them. The poet is giving a catalogue of plants that were to be disposed of by auction:

“Adam and Eve in yew; Adam a little shattered by the fall of the Tree of Knowledge in the great storm; Eve and the Serpent very flourishing.

“St. George in box; his arm scarce long enough, but will be in a condition to stick the Dragon by next April.

“An old Maid of Honour in wormwood.

“A topping Ben Jonson in laurel.

“A quick-set hog, shot up into a porcupine, by its being forgot a week in rainy weather.”

The Kensington Gardens were popular throughout the whole of the three Georges’ reign, but flourished most, as far as names and fashions are concerned, in those of the first and second. The space of time includes half a century; and Walpole, Lady Suffolk, Beau Nash, and Colley Cibber, lived through it all; the two last from a much earlier period, and Walpole into a much later one, down to the French Revolution. At the beginning of it, Lady Mary Wortley Montague, with the wits of the Kit-Cat club about her, may be considered as having been the reigning belle of the promenaders; to her, succeeded the Bellendens and Lepells, with the same wits grown older; then came Lady Townshend, with the new wits, Horace Walpole, Selwyn, Hanbury Williams, and others; and then crowds were alternately drawn by the “Chudleigh” and the Miss Gunnings.

With the decease of George the Second, glory departed from Kensington as far as Courts were concerned. No reigning sovereign has resided there since George the Third, who inheriting, perhaps, a dislike of the place from his father, the Prince of Wales, appears to have taken no notice of it, except in appointing the clever, but impudent quack, Sir John Hill, its gardener, at the recommendation of Sir John’s then omnipotent brother botanist, the Earl of Bute.

George the Fourth probably regarded the place as a homely concern, quite out of his line. It might suit well enough the book-collecting inclinations of his brother, the Duke of Sussex, with which he had no sympathy; was not amiss as a means of affording a lodging to his brother, the Duke of Kent, with whose habits of regularity, and pardonable amount of debt, his sympathies were as little; and lastly he was well content to think, that the staid-looking house and formal gardens rendered the spot a good out-of-the-way sort of place enough, for obscuring the growth and breeding of his niece, and probable heiress, the Princess Victoria, whose life, under the guidance of a wise mother, promised to furnish so estimable a contrast to his own. As to his brother, King William the Fourth, though he too was a brother, in most respects, very different from himself, we never heard his name mentioned in any way whatever in connection with Kensington.

Adieu then, for the present, and for we know not how long a time hereafter, to Court-holdings in the Palace; to Court splendours, and Court scandals. Adieu Kings listening in closets, and Queens calumniated by ungrateful biographers. Adieu even Maids of Honour. They departed their life with George the Second, and went to live a terribly dull one with his grandson’s Queen, Charlotte, who nearly tired Miss Burney into a consumption.

THE MIKADO’S PALACE

PIERRE LOTI

An enclosure of large walls. My _djin_ stop in front of a first gateway in the ancient severe and religious style: massive columns with bases of bronze; a narrow frieze sculptured with strange ornaments; and a heavy and enormous roof.

Then I walk into the vast deserted courtyards, planted with venerable trees, to the branches of which they have given props like crutches for old men. The immense buildings of the palace first appear to me in a kind of disorder wherein I can discern no plan of unity. Everywhere appear these high, monumental and heavy roofs, whose corners turn up in Chinese curves and bristle with black ornaments.

Not seeing anyone, I walk on at random.

Here is arrested absolutely the smile, inseparable from modern Japan. I have the impression of entering into the silence of an incomprehensible Past, into the dead splendour of a civilization, whose architecture, design, and æsthetic taste are to me strange and unknown.

A bonze guard who sees me, advances, and, making a bow, asks me for my name and passport.

It is satisfactory: he will take me himself to see the entire palace on condition that I will take off my shoes and remove my hat. He brings me even velvet sandals which are offered to visitors. Thanks, I prefer to walk with bare feet like himself and we begin our silent walk through an interminable series of halls all lacquered in gold and decorated with a rare and exquisite strangeness.

On the floor there is always and everywhere that eternal spread of white matting, that one finds just as simple, as well kept, and as neat in the homes of the emperors, in the temples, and among the middle classes and the poor. No furniture anywhere, for this is something unknown in Japan, or slightly known at most; the palace is entirely empty. All the surprising magnificence is upon the walls and ceilings. The precious golden lacquer is displayed uniformly on all sides, and upon this background, Byzantine in effect, all the celebrated artists of the great Japanese century have painted inimitable objects. Each hall has been decorated by a different and illustrious painter, whose name the bonze cited to me with respect. In one there are all the known flowers; in another, all the birds of the air, and all the beasts of the earth; or perhaps hunting-scenes and combats, where you see warriors dressed in armour and terrifying helmets, on horseback pursuing monsters and chimæras. The most peculiar one, assuredly, is decorated entirely with fans,--fans of all forms and of all colours, open, shut, and half open, thrown with extreme grace upon the fine golden lacquer. The ceilings, also of golden lacquer are in compartments, painted with the same care and the same art. What is, perhaps, the most marvellous of all, is that series of high pierced friezes that extends around all the ceilings; you think of generations of patient workmen who have worn themselves out in chiselling such delicate, almost transparent, things, in such thicknesses of wood: sometimes there are rosebushes, sometimes entanglements of wistaria, or sheaves of rice; elsewhere flights of storks that seem to cleave the air with great velocity, forming with their thousands of claws, extended necks, and feathers, a crowd so beautifully combined that it is alive and scurrying away, nothing lags behind, nor falls into confusion.

In this palace, which is windowless, it is dusky,--a half-darkness favourable to enchantments. The greater number of these halls receive a shimmering light from the outside verandas composed only of lacquered columns, to which they are entirely open on one side; it is the subdued light of deep sheds, or of markets. The more mysterious interior apartments open on the first by other similar columns, and receive from it a still more attenuated light; they can be shut at will by bamboo curtains of an extreme delicacy, whose tissue in its transparency imitates that of a wave, and which are raised to the ceiling by enormous tassels of red silk. Communication is had by species of doorways the forms of which are unusual and unexpected: sometimes they are perfect circles and sometimes they are more complicated figures, such as hexagons or stars. And all these secondary openings have frame-works of black lacquer which stand out with an elegant distinction upon the general background of the gold, and which bear upon the corners ornaments of bronze marvellously chiselled by the metal-workers of the past.

The centuries have embellished this palace, veiling a little the glitter of the objects by blending all these harmonies of gold in a kind of very gentle shadow; in its silence and solitude one might call it the enchanted dwelling of some _Sleeping Beauty_, of a princess of an unknown world, or of a planet that could not be our own.

We pass before some little interior gardens, which are, according to the Japanese custom, miniature reductions of very wild places,--unlooked-for contrasts in the centre of this golden palace. Here also time has passed, throwing its emerald upon the little rocks, the tiny lakes, and the small abysses; sterilizing the little mountains, and giving an appearance of reality to all that is minute and artificial. The trees, dwarfed by I know not what Japanese process, have not grown larger; but they have taken on an air of extreme old age. The _cycas_ have acquired many branches, because of their hundreds of years; one would call the little palms of multiple trunks, antidiluvian plants; or rather massive black candelabra, whose every arm carries at its extremity a fresh bouquet of green plumes.

What also surprises us is the special apartment chosen by this Taïko-Sama, who was both a great conqueror and a great emperor. It is very small and very simple, and looks upon the tiniest and the most artificial of the little gardens.

The Reception Hall, which they showed me last of all, is the largest and the most magnificent. It is about fifty metres long, and, naturally, all in golden lacquer, with a high and marvellous frieze. Always no furniture; nothing but the stages of lacquer upon which the handsome lords on arriving placed their arms. At the back, behind a colonnade, is the platform, where Taïko-Sama held his audiences, at the period of our Henri IV. Then it is that one dreams of these receptions, of these entrances of brilliant noblemen, whose helmets are surmounted by horns, snouts and grotesque figures; and all the unheard-of ceremonial of this court. One may dream of all this, but he will not clearly see it revive. Not only is the period too remote, but it is too far away in grade among the races of the earth; it is too far outside of our conceptions and the notions that we have inherited regarding these things. It is the same in the old temples of this country; we look at them without understanding, the symbols escape us. Between Japan and ourselves the difference of origin has made a deep abyss.

“We shall cross another hall,” the bonze said to me, “and then a series of passages that will lead us to the temple of the palace.”

In this last hall there are some people, which is a surprise, as all the former ones were empty; but silence dwells there just the same. The men squatting all around the walls seem very busy writing; they are priests copying prayers with tiny pencils on rice-paper to sell to the people. Here, upon the golden background of the walls, all the paintings represent royal tigers, a little larger than their natural size, in all attitudes of fury; of watching, of the hunt, of prowling, or of sleep. Above these motionless bonzes they lift their great heads, so expressive and wicked, showing their sharp teeth.

My guide bows on entering. As I am among the most polite people in the world, I feel obliged to bow also. Then the reverence that is accorded to me passes all along the hall, and we go through.