Then the great park at Woodstock became ducal property. I have said it was richly worth visiting; its encircling wall is twelve miles in length; the oaks are magnificent; the artificial waters skirt gardens and shrubberies that extend over three hundred acres; the grass is velvety; the fallow deer are in troops of hundreds. And one must remember, in visiting the locality, that there stood the ancient and renowned royal mansion of Henry II.--that there was born the Black Prince--and, very probably, Chaucer may have wandered thereabout, and studied the “daisies white,” and listened to the whirring of the pheasants--a wood-music one may hear now in all the remoter alleys. How many hundred thousands were expended upon the new Blenheim palace, built in Anne’s time, I will not undertake to compute. The paintings gathered in it--spoils of the great Duke’s military marches--interest everyone; but the palace is as cold and stately and unhome-like and unloveable as was the Duchess herself. _Builders and Streets._ Sir John Vanbrugh[104] was the architect of Blenheim, and you will recognize his name as that of one of the popular comedy writers of Queen Anne’s time, who not only wrote plays, but ran a theatre which he built at the Haymarket. It was not so successful as the more famous one which stands thereabout now; the poor architect, too, had a good many buffets from the stinging Duchess of Marlborough; and some stings besides from Swift’s waspish pen, which the amiable Duchess did not allow him to forget. Another architect of these times, better worth our remembering--for his constructive abilities--was Sir Christopher Wren, who designed some forty of the church-spires now standing in London; and he also superintended the construction of the Cathedral of St. Paul’s, which had been steadily growing since a date not long after the great fire--thirty-five years intervening between the laying of the foundations and the lifting of the cross to the top of the lantern. It is even said that, when he was well upon ninety, Wren supervised some of the last touches upon this noble monument to his fame.[105]