The present possessor, with an income of seventy thousand pounds, is so much in debt that his property is administered for the benefit of his creditors, and he receives five thousand a year for his life. It is a grievous pity that he spends this little in pulling in pieces Brown's imposing gardens, and modernizing them in a miserable taste; transforming the rich draperies which Brown had thrown around Nature, into a harlequin jacket of little clumps and beds. A large portion of the old pleasure-ground is thus destroyed; as the old gardener, almost with tears in his eyes, remarked to us. Many noble trees lay felled around; and a black spot on the turf showed the place where a laurel, nearly as large as the one I mentioned, lately stood in all its pride and beauty. I thought with grief how vain it is to attempt to found anything lasting, and saw in imagination those of my successors who will destroy the plantations which we have designed and tended together with so much fondness. Blenheim is chiefly situated on the spot where stood the ancient royal park of Woodstock (which you remember from Walter Scott's last novel). A great part of the oak wood which existed in the time of the unhappy Rosamond is still alive, and dying in an agony of a century's duration. There are perfect monsters of oaks and cedars, both as to form and size. Many are so entirely enwreathed with ivy that it has killed them, but at the same time clothed them with a new and more beautiful evergreen foliage which enwraps the decayed trunk, like a magnificent shroud, till it falls into dust. Deer, pheasants and cattle, people the park, whose green plains seemed, in the uncertain mist, boundless as the sea; in some places, bare as a Steppe, in others thickly planted. The interior of the house looks rather neglected, but contains a number of valuable works of art. It must be confessed that never did a nation bestow a richer reward on one of its great men than Blenheim, which is princely even in its minutest details.[38]