I Say, They "Might Have Found," As If They Could
Not Now, Which Is In Part True; For At Present
The whole house is
so completely filled that I see no room for any new piece to crowd
in without
Displacing some other fine piece that hung there before.
As for the value of the piece that might so offer to succeed the
displaced, that the great judge of the whole collection, the earl
himself, must determine; and as his judgment is perfectly good, the
best picture would be sure to possess the place. In a word, here
is without doubt the best, if not the greatest, collection of
rarities and paintings that are to be seen together in any one
nobleman's or gentleman's house in England. The piece of our
Saviour washing His disciples' feet, which they show you in one of
the first rooms you go into, must be spoken of by everybody that
has any knowledge of painting, and is an admirable piece indeed.
You ascend the great staircase at the upper end of the hall, which
is very large; at the foot of the staircase you have a Bacchus as
large as life, done in fine Peloponnesian marble, carrying a young
Bacchus on his arm, the young one eating grapes, and letting you
see by his countenance that he is pleased with the taste of them.
Nothing can be done finer, or more lively represent the thing
intended--namely, the gust of the appetite, which if it be not a
passion, it is an affection which is as much seen in the
countenance, perhaps more than any other. One ought to stop every
two steps of this staircase, as we go up, to contemplate the vast
variety of pictures that cover the walls, and of some of the best
masters in Europe; and yet this is but an introduction to what is
beyond them.
When you are entered the apartments, such variety seizes you every
way that you scarce know to which hand to turn yourself. First on
one side you see several rooms filled with paintings as before, all
so curious, and the variety such, that it is with reluctance that
you can turn from them; while looking another way you are called
off by a vast collection of busts and pieces of the greatest
antiquity of the kind, both Greek and Romans; among these there is
one of the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius in basso-relievo. I never
saw anything like what appears here, except in the chamber of
rarities at Munich in Bavaria.
Passing these, you come into several large rooms, as if contrived
for the reception of the beautiful guests that take them up; one of
these is near seventy feet long, and the ceiling twenty-six feet
high, with another adjoining of the same height and breadth, but
not so long. Those together might be called the Great Gallery of
Wilton, and might vie for paintings with the Gallery of Luxembourg,
in the Faubourg of Paris.
These two rooms are filled with the family pieces of the house of
Herbert, most of them by Lilly or Vandyke; and one in particular
outdoes all that I ever met with, either at home or abroad; it is
done, as was the mode of painting at that time, after the manner of
a family piece of King Charles I., with his queen and children,
which before the burning of Whitehall I remember to hang at the
east end of the Long Gallery in the palace.
This piece fills the farther end of the great room which I just now
mentioned; it contains the Earl of Montgomery, ancestor of the
house of Herbert (not then Earls of Pembroke) and his lady,
sitting, and as big as life; there are about them their own five
sons and one daughter, and their daughter-in-law, who was daughter
of the Duke of Buckingham, married to the elder Lord Herbert, their
eldest son. It is enough to say of this piece, it is worth the
labour of any lover of art to go five hundred miles to see it; and
I am informed several gentlemen of quality have come from France
almost on purpose. It would be endless to describe the whole set
of the family pictures which take up this room, unless we would
enter into the roof-tree of the family, and set down a genealogical
line of the whole house.
After we have seen this fine range of beauties--for such, indeed,
they are--far from being at an end of your surprise, you have three
or four rooms still upon the same floor, filled with wonders as
before. Nothing can be finer than the pictures themselves, nothing
more surprising than the number of them. At length you descend the
back stairs, which are in themselves large, though not like the
other. However, not a hand's-breadth is left to crowd a picture in
of the smallest size; and even the upper rooms, which might be
called garrets, are not naked, but have some very good pieces in
them.
Upon the whole, the genius of the noble collector may be seen in
this glorious collection, than which, take them together, there is
not a finer in any private hand in Europe, and in no hand at all in
Britain, private or public.
The gardens are on the south of the house, and extend themselves
beyond the river, a branch of which runs through one part of them,
and still south of the gardens in the great park, which, extending
beyond the vale, mounts the hill opening at the last to the great
down, which is properly called, by way of distinction, Salisbury
Plain, and leads from the city of Salisbury to Shaftesbury. Here
also his lordship has a hare-warren, as it is called, though
improperly. It has, indeed, been a sanctuary for the hares for
many years; but the gentlemen complain that it mars their game, for
that as soon as they put up a hare for their sport, if it be
anywhere within two or three miles, away she runs for the warren,
and there is an end of their pursuit; on the other hand, it makes
all the countrymen turn poachers, and destroy the hares by what
means they can.
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