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.
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