From London to Land's End: and Two Letters from the "Journey through England by a Gentleman"Defoe, Daniel
History
From London to Land's End: and Two Letters from the "Journey through England by a Gentleman"
Defoe, Daniel
England -- Description and travel -- Early works to 1800
Passing these, you come into several large rooms, as if contrived for the
reception of the beautiful guests that take them up; one of these is near
seventy feet long, and the ceiling twenty-six feet high, with another
adjoining of the same height and breadth, but not so long. Those
together might be called the Great Gallery of Wilton, and might vie for
paintings with the Gallery of Luxembourg, in the Faubourg of Paris.
These two rooms are filled with the family pieces of the house of
Herbert, most of them by Lilly or Vandyke; and one in particular outdoes
all that I ever met with, either at home or abroad; it is done, as was
the mode of painting at that time, after the manner of a family piece of
King Charles I., with his queen and children, which before the burning of
Whitehall I remember to hang at the east end of the Long Gallery in the
palace.
This piece fills the farther end of the great room which I just now
mentioned; it contains the Earl of Montgomery, ancestor of the house of
Herbert (not then Earls of Pembroke) and his lady, sitting, and as big as
life; there are about them their own five sons and one daughter, and
their daughter-in-law, who was daughter of the Duke of Buckingham,
married to the elder Lord Herbert, their eldest son. It is enough to say
of this piece, it is worth the labour of any lover of art to go five
hundred miles to see it; and I am informed several gentlemen of quality
have come from France almost on purpose. It would be endless to describe
the whole set of the family pictures which take up this room, unless we
would enter into the roof-tree of the family, and set down a genealogical
line of the whole house.
After we have seen this fine range of beauties--for such, indeed, they
are--far from being at an end of your surprise, you have three or four
rooms still upon the same floor, filled with wonders as before. Nothing
can be finer than the pictures themselves, nothing more surprising than
the number of them. At length you descend the back stairs, which are in
themselves large, though not like the other. However, not a
hand's-breadth is left to crowd a picture in of the smallest size; and
even the upper rooms, which might be called garrets, are not naked, but
have some very good pieces in them.
Upon the whole, the genius of the noble collector may be seen in this
glorious collection, than which, take them together, there is not a finer
in any private hand in Europe, and in no hand at all in Britain, private
or public.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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