“When I had drank tea I strolled into the garden. They told me it was now called the _pleasure-ground_. What a dissonant idea of pleasure! Those groves, those _alleys_, where I have passed so many charming moments, are now stripped up, or overgrown; many fond paths I could not unravel, though with a very exact clue in my memory. I met two gamekeepers, and a thousand hares! In the days when all my soul was tuned to pleasure and vivacity, I hated Houghton and its solitude; yet I loved this garden; as now, with many regrets, I love Houghton;--Houghton, I know not what to call it: a monument of grandeur or ruin! How I wished this evening for Lord Bute! How I could preach to him!--The servants wanted to lay me in the great apartment--what! to make me pass the night as I had done my evening! It were like proposing to Margaret Roper to be a duchess in the court which cut off her father’s head, and imagining it could please her. I have chosen to sit in my father’s little dressing-room, and am now in his escritoire, where, in the height of his fortune, he used to receive the accounts of his farmers, and deceive himself, or us, with the thoughts of his economy. How wise a man, at once, and how weak! For what has he built Houghton? For his grandson to annihilate, or his son to mourn over.” _Horace Walpole’s Letters_, vol. ii. pp. 227-8. Having made these preliminary observations, I will now give a specimen or two from my native neighbourhood, because necessarily more familiar with them; let every reader throughout England look round him in his, and he will find others as interesting there. CHAPTER V. HARDWICK HALL. Mrs. Jameson has lately given a very vivid and charming account of this fine old place. I am not going to tread in her steps, but to describe the impression it made upon myself at different times, in my own way, and with reference to my own object.