great apartment, which is magnificent, is untouched -. the chimney-pieces lie in boxes unopened.  The park is traversed by a common road between two high hedges—­not from necessity.  Oh! no; this lord loves nothing but horses, and the enclosures for them take place of every thing.  The bowling-green behind the house contains no less than four obelisks, and looks like a Brobdignag nine-pin-alley:  on a hill near, you would think you saw the York-buildings water-works invited into the country.  There are temples in corn-fields; and in the little wood, a window-frame mounted on a bunch of laurel, and intended for an hermitage.  In the inhabited part of the house, the chimney-pieces are like tombs; and on that in the library is the figure of this lord’s grandfather, in a night-gown of plaster and gold.  Amidst all this litter and bad taste, I adored the fine Vandvek of Lord Strafford and his secretary, and could not help reverencing his bed-chamber.  With all his faults and arbitrary behaviour, one must worship his spirit and eloquence:  where one esteems but a single royalist, one need not fear being too partial.  When I visited his tomb in the church (which is remarkably neat and pretty, and enriched with monuments) I was provoked to find a little mural cabinet, with his figure three feet high kneeling.  Instead of a stern bust (and his head would furnish a nobler than Bernini’s Brutus) one is peevish to see a plaything that might have been bought at Chenevix’s.  There is a tender inscription to the second Lord Strafford’s wife, written by himself; but his genius was fitter to coo over his wife’s memory than to sacrifice to his father’s.

Well! you have had enough of magnificence; you shall repose in a desert.  Old Wortley Montagu lives on the very spot where the dragon of Wantley did, only I believe the latter was much better lodged:  you never saw such a wretched hovel; lean, unpainted, and half its nakedness barely shaded with harateen stretched till it cracks.  Here the miser hoards health and money, his only two objects:  he has chronicles in behalf of the air, and battens on tokay, his single indulgence, as he has heard it is particularly salutary.  But the savageness of the scene would charm your Alpine taste — it is tumbled with fragments of mountains, that look ready laid for building the world.  One scrambles over a huge terrace, on which mountain ashes and various trees spring out of the very rocks; and at the brow is the don, but not spacious enough for such an inmate.  However, I am persuaded it furnished Pope with this line, so exactly it answers to the picture: 

“On rifted rocks, the dragon’s late abodes.”

I wanted to ask Pope if he had not visited Lady Mary Wortley here during their intimacy, but could one put that question to Avidien himself?  There remains an ancient odd inscription here, which has such a whimsical mixture of devotion and romanticness that I must transcribe it:-