so; it may, indeed, be said that the river is made into a canal.
When we come into the courtyards before the house there are several
pieces of antiquity to entertain the curious, as particularly a
noble column of porphyry, with a marble statue of Venus on the top
of it. In Italy, and especially at Rome and Naples, we see a great
variety of fine columns, and some of them of excellent workmanship
and antiquity; and at some of the courts of the princes of Italy
the like is seen, as especially at the court of Florence; but in
England I do not remember to have seen anything like this, which,
as they told me, is two-and-thirty feet high, and of excellent
workmanship, and that it came last from Candia, but formerly from
Alexandria. What may belong to the history of it any further, I
suppose is not known–at least, they could tell me no more of it
who showed it me.
On the left of the court was formerly a large grotto and curious
water-works; and in a house, or shed, or part of the building,
which opened with two folding-doors, like a coach-house, a large
equestrian statue of one of the ancestors of the family in complete
armour, as also another of a Roman Emperor in brass. But the last
time I had the curiosity to see this house, I missed that part; so
that I supposed they were removed.
As the present Earl of Pembroke, the lord of this fine palace, is a
nobleman of great personal merit many other ways, so he is a man of
learning and reading beyond most men of his lordship’s high rank in
this nation, if not in the world; and as his reading has made him a
master of antiquity, and judge of such pieces of antiquity as he
has had opportunity to meet with in his own travels and otherwise
in the world, so it has given him a love of the study, and made him
a collector of valuable things, as well in painting as in
sculpture, and other excellences of art, as also of nature;
insomuch that Wilton House is now a mere museum or a chamber of
rarities, and we meet with several things there which are to be
found nowhere else in the world.
As his lordship is a great collector of fine paintings, so I know
no nobleman’s house in England so prepared, as if built on purpose,
to receive them; the largest and the finest pieces that can be
imagined extant in the world might have found a place here capable
to receive them. 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