quoins and dressings, ornamental chimney-shafts, and handsome bays, like Hampton Court, in fact, with the same kind of turreted central gate-house in the principal front. There are drawings of it in the Bodleian at Oxford. The foundations are said to have been traced over fourteen acres. Terraces, flower-gardens, orchards, fountains, fishponds, and detached summer-houses adorned the pleasance round the magnificent edifice; and beyond, fenced about by a quickset hawthorn hedge, was the deer park. An example of wasted labour and misapplied ingenuity, the grotto constructed in the eighteenth century by an Italian and his two sons for Henry Clinton, Duke of Newcastle, may be cited as one of the questionable glories of modern Oatlands. The artificers were twenty years at their work, which cost the Duke, it is said, £40,000; the sum stated in the early accounts being between £12,000 and £13,000. Outside, this egregious sham is built of tufa, which is a volcanic substance, or the calcareous deposit of certain springs. Within, the building has three or four chambers connected by low dark passages, on the ground floor, and one large chamber over all, with an elaborate cupola of satin-spar stalactites. All the inner walls are a mosaic of minerals, shells, and spars of various kinds, blending in many devices, and inlaid with endless patience and skill. Among the many fine specimens of minerals still left, are quartz, crystals, and ammonites of rare perfection. Horace Walpole delivered himself of this criticism on the Oatlands grotto: "Oatlands, that my memory had taken it into its head was the centre of Paradise, is not half so Elysian as I used to think. The grotto, a magnificent structure of shell-work, is a square, regular, and, which never happened to grotto before, lives up one pair of stairs, and yet only looks on a basin of dirty water." [Illustration: SHEPPERTON LOCK.]