But Pitt, debarred from the sports of the field, had always taken a lively interest in the laying out of land, in planting, in landscape gardening. He had, to use his own felicitous expression, 'the prophetic eye of taste.' At the Leasowes, at Hagley, at Radway, the Warwickshire seat of Mr. Saunderson Miller,[220] at Wickham, the home of Gilbert West, and at Chevening, the delightful residence of his friend and cousin Lord Stanhope, he freely exercised his gift. He utilised it still more freely and indeed extravagantly at his own homes, for in the pursuit of this hobby he disdained all limitations. Once, when Secretary of State, he was staying with a friend near London whose grounds he had undertaken to adorn and in the evening was summoned suddenly to London. He at once collected all the servants with lanterns, and sallied forth to plant stakes in the different places that he wished to mark for plantations. In later life he ran to still greater extremes. At Burton Pynsent a bleak hill bounded his views and offended his eye. He ordered it to be instantly planted with cedars and cypresses. 'Bless me, my Lord,' said the gardener, 'all the nurseries in the county would not furnish the hundredth part required.' 'No matter; send for them from London. And from London they were sent down by land carriage, at a vast expense. These two familiar anecdotes cannot well be omitted. In the more moderate time with which we are dealing he was the chosen adviser of his friends, who may well have been guilty of the innocent flattery of seeking his advice with regard to his favourite hobby. His own home at this time was South Lodge in Enfield Chace, which is said to have been bequeathed to him together with 10,000_l._, 'on this bequest that he should spend the money on improvements, and then grow tired of the place in three or four years.'[221] This seems dubious. But we are on safe ground in inferring from a letter of Legge's that he established himself there in 1748. Legge writes to him from Berlin (July 10, 1748): 'I congratulate myself and the rest of my unsound brethren upon the acquisition we have made by your admission into the respectable corps of woodmen and sawyers. I consider your Lodge as an accession to the common Stock and Republick of Sportsmen, which from its situation will bring peculiar advantages along with it, and that the woodcocks and snipes of Enfield may be visited at seasons of the year when those of Hampshire will not be so accessible.... As to the joiners and bricklayers, possibly too the planters of trees and levellers of walks by whom you are surrounded, don't give yourself any concern about them. They are a sort of _satellites_ which I beg leave to assure you attend a man _gratis_. Nay, I have been told by one whose opinion I rate highly, that these men's works all execute themselves with a certain overplus of profit to the person who is so happy as to employ them,'[222] and he