“I carried Tom with me through the whole tour, and a more
delightful fellow traveller I never can have, unless his Mother was
raised from the dead or Heaven would give me another Lucy! Wherever
we went he won all hearts, and you may believe mine beat with joy
at the sight of his conquests, my only fear is that hereafter he
may please the ladies too well. You must instruct him, Madonna, as
Minerva did Telemachus to avoid the dangers of the Calypsos he may
meet with in his travels, and let him learn by admiring you that no
charms are truly amiable, but those that are under the government
of wisdom and virtue.”
[205] Hampton Court, Herefordshire, built by Henry IV.
[206] Edward Harley, 24th Earl of Oxford.
[207] In Herefordshire.
Tom was fifteen at this time, having been born January 30, 1743–4. His
father’s fears as to his attractions for the fair sex were prophetic.
Tom writes to Mrs. Montagu on September 9, giving her an account of his
travels. Here is a description of Hampton Court, Herefordshire, the
seat of Lady Coningsby--
“The house stands at the end of a line of regular planted trees,
and looks more like a Monastery than a nobleman’s house. The
garden is very large, and would have been pretty enough if Nature
had been left in it unmolested. In the middle of it is a piece of
water of about an acre, cut into two square lines, in which, to the
astonishment of the beholder, you see Neptune upon his throne, and
twenty Tritons waiting behind him. The carver has express’d great
fierceness in his countenance, and well may the god who shakes the
earth with his Trident, be angry at being confined in a Pool, which
would scarce hold two hundred fish. From the garden one might see
a noble lawn bounded with an amphitheatre of wood, was it not for
the high Yew Hedges clipt into a thousand ridiculous shapes which
hinder the eye from passing them, the park, too, is very large, but
so overrun with Bushes that some of the Lawns resemble bogs....
From my Lady Coningsby’s we went to my Lord Oxford’s, a place where
nature has done a great deal, which by a little money judiciously
laid out may be made the prettiest _ferme ornée_ in England. My
Lord’s House is a very good one, built in a remarkable good taste
for the times of Queen Anne.”
Lord Lyttelton, as usual, adds a few words at the end of the letter,
and congratulates Mrs. Montagu on the King of Prussia’s “most glorious
success, but I am in pain till I hear what has become of Emin.”
Dr. Monsey writes from Claremont on September 6--
“DEAR MADAM,
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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