He says, "the duke sent Lord John with me to Hardwicke, where I was again disappointed; but I will not take relations from others; they either don't see for themselves, or can't see for me. How I had been promised that I should be charmed with Hardwicke, and told that the Devonshires ought to have established themselves there! Never was I less charmed in my life. The house is not gothic, but of that _betweenity_ that intervened when Gothic declined, and Palladian was creeping in; rather, this is totally naked of either. It has vast chambers--aye, vast, such as the nobility of that time delighted in, and did not know how to furnish. The great apartment is exactly what it was when the Queen of Scots was kept there.[53] Her council-chamber (the council-chamber of a poor woman who had only two secretaries, a gentleman usher, an apothecary, a confessor, and three maids) is so outrageously spacious that you would take it for King David's, who thought, contrary to all modern experience, that in the multitude of counsellors there is wisdom. At the upper end is the State, with a long table, covered with a sumptuous cloth, embroidered and embossed with gold--at least what was gold; so are all the tables. Round the top of the chamber runs a monstrous frieze, ten or twelve feet deep, representing a stag-hunt in miserable plastered relief.[54] "The next is her dressing-room, hung with patchwork on black velvet; then her state bed-chamber. The bed has been rich beyond description, and now hangs in costly golden tatters; the hangings, part of which they say her majesty worked, are composed of figures as large as life, sewed and embroidered on black velvet, white satin, &c., and represent the virtues that were necessary to her, or that she was found to have--as patience, temperance,[55] &c. The fire-screens are particular;--pieces of yellow velvet, fringed with gold, hung on a cross-bar of wood, which is fixed on the top of a single stick that rises from the foot.[56] The only furniture which has any appearance of taste are the table and cabinets, which are of oak, richly carved." (I must observe _en passant_, that I wonder Horace did not go mad about the chairs, which are exactly in the Strawberry Hill taste, only infinitely finer, crimson velvet, with backs six feet high, and sumptuously carved.) "There is a private chamber within, where she lay: her arms and style over the door. The arras hangs over all the doors. The gallery is sixty yards in length, covered with bad tapestry and wretched pictures of Mary herself, Elizabeth in a gown of sea-monsters, Lord Darnley, James the Fifth and his queen, (curious,) and a whole history of kings of England not worth sixpence a-piece."[57] "There is a fine bank of old oaks in the park over a lake: nothing else pleased me there."