Tour through the Eastern Counties of England, 1722Defoe, Daniel
History
Tour through the Eastern Counties of England, 1722
Defoe, Daniel
England -- Description and travel -- Early works to 1800
Here I fancied myself in the Circus Maximus at Rome seeing the ancient
games and the racings of the chariots and horsemen, and in this warmth of
my imagination I pleased and diverted myself more and in a more noble
manner than I could possibly do in the crowds of gentlemen at the
weighing and starting-posts and at their coming in, or at their meetings
at the coffee-houses and gaming-tables after the races were over, where
there was little or nothing to be seen but what was the subject of just
reproach to them and reproof from every wise man that looked upon them.
N.B.—Pray take it with you, as you go, you see no ladies at Newmarket,
except a few of the neighbouring gentlemen’s families, who come in their
coaches on any particular day to see a race, and so go home again
directly.
As I was pleasing myself with what was to be seen here, I went in the
intervals of the sport to see the fine seats of the gentlemen in the
neighbouring county, for this part of Suffolk, being an open champaign
country and a healthy air, is formed for pleasure and all kinds of
country diversion, Nature, as it were, inviting the gentlemen to visit
her where she was fully prepared to receive them, in conformity to which
kind summons they came, for the country is, as it were, covered with fine
palaces of the nobility and pleasant seats of the gentlemen.
The Earl of Orford’s house I have mentioned already; the next is Euston
Hall, the seat of the Duke of Grafton. It lies in the open country
towards the side of Norfolk, not far from Thetford, a place capable of
all that is pleasant and delightful in Nature, and improved by art to
every extreme that Nature is able to produce.
From thence I went to Rushbrook, formerly the seat of the noble family of
Jermyns, lately Lord Dover, and now of the house of Davers. Here Nature,
for the time I was there, drooped and veiled all the beauties of which
she once boasted, the family being in tears and the house shut up, Sir
Robert Davers, the head thereof, and knight of the shire for the county
of Suffolk, and who had married the eldest daughter of the late Lord
Dover, being just dead, and the corpse lying there in its funeral form of
ceremony, not yet buried. Yet all looked lovely in their sorrow, and a
numerous issue promising and grown up intimated that the family of Davers
would still flourish, and that the beauties of Rushbrook, the mansion of
the family, were not formed with so much art in vain or to die with the
present possessor.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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