Before he died, Vanbrugh's estate was sold to the Earl of Clare, who added a banqueting-hall to the architect's modest dwelling, purchased additional land, and, after the custom greatly honoured in the observance during the eighteenth century, stole much more from the neighbouring common, until he brought the palings of the park coterminous (as the political geographers might say) with the Portsmouth Road. In midst of the land he had thus filched from the commoners of Esher, the Earl of Clare built a kind of belvidere on a pleasant eminence overlooking the country-side, and called it Clare Mount. Thus arose the name of the house and park. Soon afterwards, however, the Earl was created Duke of Newcastle, and, to honour his new pomp and circumstance the more, employed Kent, the celebrated landscape gardener, to re-arrange the grounds and gardens, until their magnificence called forth this eulogium from Sir Samuel Garth, a dabbler both in medicine and metre:-- "Oh! who can paint in verse those rising hills, Those gentle valleys, and their silver rills; Close groves and opening glades with verdure spread, Flow'rs sighing sweets, and shrubs that balsams bleed?" Ah! who indeed? Not Sir Samuel Garth, though, if this be a representative taste of his quality. The Claremont that we see now was built by the "heaven-born general," Clive, who purchased the estate upon the death of the Duke of Newcastle in 1768. He built, with the aid of Lancelot Brown (Capability Brown his contemporaries eke-named him), in a grand and massive style that excited the gaping wonder of the country folk. "The peasantry of Surrey," says Macaulay, in his "Essay on Clive," "looked with mysterious horror on the stately house which was rising at Claremont, and whispered that the great wicked lord had ordered the walls to be made so thick in order to keep out the devil, who would one day carry him away bodily." This unenviable reputation for wickedness was the work of Clive's enemies, of whom, perhaps, from one cause and another, no man has possessed so many. The men above whose heads his genius and daring had carried him, and the Little Englanders of that day, both hated the hero of Plassey with a lurid and vitriolic vehemence. They circulated strange tales of his cruelty and cupidity in India, until even well-informed people regarded Clive as an incarnate fiend, and "Capability" Brown even came to wonder that his conscience allowed him to sleep in the same house with the notorious Moorshedabad treasure-chest. [Illustration: LORD CLIVE.]