For Moore Park, that once belonged to Shakespeare’s Earl of Pembroke, “stands on the side of a hill; but not very steep.” Sir William Temple has described it, as it was in that day, when the Monmouth family owned it, “the sweetest place, I think, that I have ever seen in my life, either before or since, at home or abroad.” The length of the house lay upon the breadth of the garden. The great parlour, where the Countess would receive her guest, opened on the middle of a terraced gravel-walk, set with standard laurels, which looked like orange-trees out of bloom. There were fountains and statues and summer-houses in that garden—“the perfectest figure of a garden”—and shady cloisters, upon arches of stone, clustered over with vines. And beyond lay a wilderness, which was always in the shade. Robert Boyle must have been a happy man that day, as he alighted before those portals with his manuscript in his pocket. Henry Cary, second Earl of Monmouth, was a Royalist peer: his younger brother, Thomas Cary, was the faithful groom of the bedchamber to Charles I. They were sons of the old Robert—the man who, the moment Queen Elizabeth was dead, had started on his record ride from London to Edinburgh to be the first to tell James VI that he was King of England. The first Earl and his Countess—a Trevanion—lay buried in Rickmansworth Church; and the second Earl and his Countess were, at the time of Robert Boyle’s visit, living quietly at Moore Park, the Earl having of late withdrawn into retirement among his books and manuscripts.[163] For he was a scholar, skilled in modern languages, and a writer—though not one of his manuscripts remains. And he and the Countess were still passionately mourning the death of Lionel, their elder son and heir, who had fallen in the battle of Marston Moor. The second son was married, in London[164]; and the family at Moore Park must have consisted entirely of daughters, though the eldest daughter had been married for some years to Mary Boyle’s rejected suitor, Mr. James Hamilton.[165] Mr. Hamilton had married the Lady Anne Cary a few weeks after the Lady Mary Boyle’s runaway marriage with Charles Rich. But not any of the other daughters at Moore Park—and there was a bevy of them—were married, or to be married, for many years to come; which, in those days of early marriages, is a matter for some wonder, especially as it is known, on Evelyn’s authority, that one at least of these daughters was “beautifull and ingenious.”[166]