adds in a postscript a list of shrubs or trees which he recommends. Legge's playful sarcasms as to expense did not deter his friend. By 1752 Pitt had converted South Lodge, in the opinion of his friends or flatterers, into a delightful pleasance. He had, in the fashion of those days, constructed a Temple of Pan with appropriate surroundings, which excited the admiration of critics, and is mentioned with special admiration, we are told, 'by Mr. Whately, a forgotten expert, in his "Observations on Modern Gardening," as one of the happiest efforts of well-directed and appropriate decoration.' The famous blue-stocking, Mrs. Montagu, writes of the 'shady oaks and beautiful verdure of South Lodge.' 'There can,' she says in another letter, 'hardly be a finer entertainment not only to the eyes, but to the mind, than so sweet and peaceful a scene.' Yet Pitt assured her that he had never spent an entire week there. Gilbert West paid a visit there, when suffering presumably under an attack of the gout. 'He had provided for me a wheeling-chair, by the help of which I was enabled to visit every sequestered nook, dingle, and bosky bower from side to side in that little paradise opened in the wild.'[223] So that the garden would seem to have really been a success. But Pitt was to prove fickle to all these charms. On leaving Tunbridge Wells after the completion of his course of waters, he intended, besides long visits to Stowe and Hagley, to pay a passing visit to Hayes, a place near Bromley, of which his friend, Mrs. Montagu, had a lease. Whether it was a case of love at first sight or not, we do not know, but Hayes was destined to be the home of his affections and the place most closely identified with himself. At the termination of Mrs. Montagu's lease in 1756, he bought it of the Harrison family, who owned it, and a letter from him is dated thence in May 1756. But in January 1765 he inherited the Burton Pynsent estate, and so, in the following October, he offered the Hayes property to his friend, the Hon. Thomas Walpole, at a fair valuation, indeed at cost price. He had wasted on it, we are told, prodigious sums, with little to show for it, for he had spent much in purchasing contiguous houses to free himself from neighbours. 'Much had gone in doing and undoing, and not a little portion in planting by torchlight, as his peremptory and imperious temper could brook no delay.' He had, moreover, Wallenstein's morbid horror of the slightest sound. Though he doted on his children, he could not bear them under the same roof; they were placed in a separate building communicating with the main structure by a winding passage. Vast sums were thus expended without adding to the value of the property. But now he was eager to leave the cherished home which had swallowed so much of his fortune, and to hurry to the new scene. His intention of retiring into Somersetshire seems to have caused some alarm among his friends, who feared that it