A Walk from London to John O'Groat's: With Notes by the WayBurritt, Elihu
History
A Walk from London to John O'Groat's: With Notes by the Way
Burritt, Elihu
Agriculture -- Great Britain; England -- Description and travel
This one-mindedness, this one-man power of conception and execution
gives to the Duke of Devonshire's palace at Chatsworth an interest
and a value that probably do not attach to any other private
establishment in England. In this felicitous characteristic it
stands out in remarkable prominence and in striking contrast with
nearly all the other baronial halls of the country. It is the
parlor pier-glass of the present century. It reflects the two
images in vivid apposition--the brilliant civilization of this last,
unfinished age in which we live and the life of bygone centuries;
that is, if Haddon Hall shows its face in it, or if you have the
features of that antiquity before your eyes when you look into the
Chatsworth mirror. The whole of this magnificent establishment
bears the impress of the nineteenth century, inside and outside.
The architecture, sculpture, carving, paintings, engravings,
furniture, libraries, conservatories, flowers, shrubberies and
rockeries all bear and honor the finger-prints of modern taste and
art. In no casket in England, probably, have so many jewels of this
century's civilization been treasured for posterity as in this
mansion on the little meandering Derwent. If England has no grand
National Gallery like the French Louvre, she has works of art that
would fill fifty Louvres, collected and treasured in these quiet
private halls, embosomed in green parks and plantations, from one
end of the land to the other. And in no other country are the
private treasure-houses of genius so accessible to the public as in
this. They doubtless act as educational centres for refining the
habits of the nation; exerting an influence that reaches and
elevates the homes of the people, cultivating in them new
perceptions of beauty and comfort; diffusing a taste for embowering
even humble cottages in shrubbery; making little flower-fringed
lawns, six feet by eight or less; rockeries and ferneries, and
artificial ruins of castles or abbeys of smaller dimensions still.
In passing through the galleries and gardens of Chatsworth you will
recognise the originals of many works of art which command the
admiration of the world. The most familiar to the American visitor
will probably be the great painting of the Bolton Abbey Scene, the
engravings of which are so numerous and admired on both sides of the
Atlantic. But there is the original of a greater work, which has
made the wonder of the age. It is the original of the Great Crystal
Palace of 1851, and the mother of all the palaces of the same
structure which have been or will be erected in time past or to
come. Here it diadems at Chatsworth the choice plants and flowers
of all the tropics; presenting a model which needed only expansion,
and some modifications, to furnish the reproduction that delighted
the world in Hyde Park in 1851.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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