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