I came yesterday from Woburn, where I have been a week.  The house is in building, and three sides of the quadrangle finished.  The park is very fine, the woods glorious, and the plantations of evergreens sumptuous; but upon the whole, it is rather -what I admire than like-I fear that is what I am a little apt to do at the finest places in the world where there is not a navigable river.  You would be charmed, as I was, with an old gallery, that is not yet destroyed.  It is a bad room, powdered with little gold stars, and covered with millions of old portraits.  There are all the successions of Earls and Countesses of Bedford, and all their progenies.  One countess is a whole-length drawing in the drollest dress you ever saw; and another picture of the same woman leaning on her hand, I believe by Cornelius Johnson, is as fine a head as ever I saw.  There are many of Queen Elizabeth’s worthies, the Leicesters, Essexes, and Philip Sidneys, and a very curious portrait of the last Courtney, Earl of Devonshire, who died at Padua.  Have not I read somewhere that he was in love with Queen Elizabeth, and Queen Mary -with him?  He is quite in the style of the former’s lovers, red-bearded, and not comely.  There is Essex’s friend, the Earl of Southampton; his son the Lord Treasurer; and Madame l’Empoisonneuse,(273) that married Carr,(274) Earl of Somerset—­she is pretty.  Have not you seen a copy Vertue has made of Philip and Mary?  That is in this gallery too, but more curious than good.  They showed me two heads, who, according to the tradition of the family, were the originals of Castalio and Polydore.  They were sons to the second Earl of Bedford; and the eldest, if not both, died before their father.  The eldest has vipers in his hand, and in the distant landscape appears in a maze, with these words, Fata viam invenient.  The other has a woman behind him, sitting near the sea, with strange monsters surrounding her.  I don’t pretend to decipher this, nor to describe half the entertaining morsels I found here; but I can’t omit, as you know I am Grammont-mad, that I found “le vieux Roussel, qui `etoit le plus fier danseur d’Angleterre.”  The portrait is young, but has all the promise of his latter character.  I am going to send them a head of a Countess of Cumberland,(275) sister to Castalio and Polydore, and mother of a famous Countess of Dorset,(276) who Afterwards married the Earl of Pembroke,(277) of Charles the First’s time.  She was an authoress, and immensely rich.  After the restoration, Sir Joseph Williamson, the secretary of state, wrote to her to choose a courtier at Appleby:  she sent him this answer:  “I have been bullied by an usurper, I have been ill-treated by a court, but I won’t be dictated to by a subject; your man shall not stand.  Ann Dorset, Pembroke and Montgomery.”  Adieu!  If you love news a hundred years old, I think you can’t have a better correspondent.  For any thing that passes now, I shall not think it worth knowing these fifty years.