Withdrawing Room opens from the hall. It is remarkable for its carved and illuminated ceiling of oak. Over the chimney is a portrait of Wolsey in profile on wood, not the least interesting of a long list of pictures which are a leading attraction of the place. These are assembled, with few exceptions, in the third quadrangle, built in 1690. Into this we next pass. It takes the place of three of the five original courts, said to have been fully equal to the two which remain.
The modern or Eastern Quadrangle is a hundred and ten by a hundred and seventeen feet. It is encircled by a colonnade like that in the middle square, and has nothing remarkable, architecturally, about it. In the public rooms that surround us there are, according to the catalogue, over a thousand pictures. Leonardo da Vinci, Paul Veronese, Titian, Giulio Romano, Murillo and a host of lesser names of the Italian and Spanish schools, with still more of the Flemish, are represented. To most visitors, who may see elsewhere finer works by these masters, the chief attraction of the walls is the series of original portraits by Holbein, Vandyck, Lely and Kneller. The two full-lengths of Charles I. by Vandyck, on foot and on horseback, both widely known by engravings, are the gems of this department, as a Vandyck will always be of any group of portraits.
Days may be profitably and delightfully spent in studying this fine collection. The first men and women of England for three centuries handed down to us by the first artists she could command form a spectacle in which Americans can take a sort of home interest. Nearly all date before 1776, and we have a rightful share in them. Each head and each picture is a study. We have art and history together. Familiar as we may be with the events with which the persons represented are associated, it is impossible to gaze upon their lineaments, set in the accessories of their day by the ablest hands guided by eyes that saw below the surface, and not feel that we have new readings of British annals.
Among the most ancient heads is a medallion of Henry VII. by Torregiano, the peppery and gifted Florentine who executed the marvelous chapel in Westminster Abbey and broke the nose of Michael Angelo. English art—or rather art in England—may be said to date from him. He could not create a school of artists in the island—the material did not exist—but the few productions he left there stood out so sharply from anything around them that the possessors of the wealth that was then beginning to accumulate employed it in drawing from the Continent additional treasures from the newly-found world of beauty. The riches of England have grown apace, and her collectors have used them liberally, if not always wisely, until her galleries, in time, have come to be sought by the connoisseurs, and even the artists, of the Continent.
The last picture-gallery we traverse is the only one at Hampton Court specially built for its purpose; and it is empty. This is the room erected by Sir Christopher Wren for the reception of the Cartoons. It leads us to the corridor that opens on the garden-front. We leave behind us, in addition to the state apartments, a great many others which are peopled by other inhabitants than the big spiders, said to be found nowhere else, known as cardinals. The old palace is not kept wholly for show, but is made useful in the political economy of the kingdom by furnishing a retreat to impecunious members of the oligarchy. Certain families of distressed aristocrats are harbored here—clearly a more wholesome arrangement than letting them take their chance in the world and bring discredit on their class.
Emerging on the great gardens, forty four acres in extent, we find ourselves on broad walks laid out with mathematical regularity, and edged by noble masses of yew, holly, horse-chestnut, etc. almost as rectangular and circular. We are here struck with the great advantage derived in landscape gardening from the rich variety of large evergreens possible in the climate of Britain. The holly, unknown as an outdoor plant in this country north of Philadelphia, is at home in the north of Scotland, eighteen degrees nearer the pole. We are more fortunate with the Conifers, many of the finest of which family are perfectly hardy here. But we miss the deodar cedar, the redwood and Washingtonia of California, and the cedar of Lebanon. These, unless perhaps the last, cannot be depended on much north of the latitude of the Magnolia grandiflora. They thrive all over England, with others almost as beautiful, and as delicate north of the Delaware. Of the laurel tribe, also hardy in England, our Northern States have but a few weakly representatives. So with the Rhododendra.
When, tired of even so charming a scene of arboreal luxury, we knock at the Flower-Pot gate to the left of the palace, and are admitted into the private garden, we make the acquaintance of another stately stranger we have had the honor at home of meeting only under glass. This is the great vine, ninety years or a hundred old, of the Black Hamburg variety. It does not cover as much space as the Carolina Scuppernong—the native variety that so surprised and delighted Raleigh's Roanoke Island settlers in 1585—often does. But its bunches, sometimes two or three thousand in number, are much larger than the Scuppernong's little clumps of two or three. They weigh something like a pound each, and are thought worthy of being reserved for Victoria's dessert. Her own family vine has burgeoned so broadly that three thousand pounds of grapes would not be a particularly large dish for a Christmas dinner for the united Guelphs.
We must not forget the Labyrinth, "a mighty maze, but not without a plan," that has bewildered generations of young and old children since the time of its creator, William of Orange. It is a feature of the Dutch style of landscape gardening imprinted by him upon the Hampton grounds. He failed to impress a like stamp upon that chaos of queer, shapeless and contradictory means to beneficent ends, the British constitution.
Hampton Court, notwithstanding the naming of the third quadrangle the Fountain Court, and the prominence given to a fountain in the design of the principal grounds, is not rich in waterworks. Nature has done a good deal for it in that way, the Thames embracing it on two sides and the lowness of the flat site placing water within easy reach everywhere. This superabundance of the element did not content the magnificent Wolsey. He was a man of great ideas, and to secure a head for his jets he sought an elevated spring at Combe Wood, more than two miles distant. To bring this supply he laid altogether not less than eight miles of leaden pipe weighing twenty-four pounds to the foot, and passing under the bed of the Thames. Reduced to our currency of to-day, these conduits must have cost nearly half a million of dollars. They do their work yet, the gnawing tooth of old Edax rerum not having penetrated far below the surface of the earth. Better hydraulic results would now be attained at a considerably reduced cost by a steam-engine and stand-pipe. At the beginning of the sixteenth century this motor was not even in embryo, unless we accept the story of Blasco de Garay's steamer that manoeuvred under the eye of Charles V. as fruitlessly as Fitch's and Fulton's before Napoleon. Coal, its dusky pabulum, was also practically a stranger on the upper Thames. The ancient fire-dogs that were wont to bear blazing billets hold their places in the older part of the palace.
Crossing the Kingston road, which runs across the peninsula and skirts the northern boundary of Hampton Park, we get into its continuation, Bushy Park. This is larger than the chief enclosure, but less pretentious. We cease to be oppressed by the palace and its excess of the artificial. The great avenues of horse-chestnut, five in number, and running parallel with a length of rather more than a mile and an aggregate breadth of nearly two hundred yards, are formal enough in design, but the mass of foliage gives them the effect of a wood. They lead nowhere in particular, and are flanked by glades and copses in which the genuinely rural prevails. Cottages gleam through the trees. The lowing of kine, the tinkling of the sheep-bell, the gabble of poultry, lead you away from thoughts of prince and city. Deer domesticated here since long before the introduction of the turkey or the guinea-hen bear themselves with as quiet ease and freedom from fear as though they were the lords of the manor and held the black-letter title-deeds for the delicious stretch of sward over which they troop. Less stately, but scarce more shy, indigenes are the hares, lineal descendants of those which gave sport to Oliver Cromwell. When that grim Puritan succeeded to the lordship of the saintly cardinal, he was fain, when the Dutch, Scotch and Irish indulged him with a brief chance to doff his buff coat, to take relaxation in coursing. We loiter by the margin of the ponds he dug in the hare-warren, and which were presented as nuisances by the grand jury in 1662. The complaint was that by turning the water of the "New River" into them the said Oliver had made the road from Hampton Wick boggy and unsafe. Another misdemeanor of the deceased was at the same time and in like manner denounced.
