On our way we saw Kiveton, an ugly neglected seat of the Duke of Leeds, with noble apartments and several good portraits!  I went to Welbeck.  It is impossible to describe the bales of Cavendishes, harleys, Holleses, Veres, and Ogles:  every chamber is tapestried with them; nay, and with ten thousand other fat morsels; all their histories inscribed; all their arms, crests, devices, sculptured on chimneys of various English marbles in ancient forms (and, to say truth, most of them ugly).  Then such a Gothic hall, with pendent fretwork in imitation of the old, and with a chimney-piece extremely like mine in the library.  Such water-colour pictures! such historic fragments!  In short, such and so much of every thing I like, that my party thought they should never get me away again.  There is Prior’s portrait, and the column and Varelst’s flower on which he wrote; and the authoress Duchess of Newcastle in a theatric habit, which she generally wore, and, consequently,, looking as mad as the present Duchess; and dukes of the same name, looking as foolish as the present Duke; and Lady Mary Wortley, drawn as an authoress, with rather better pretensions; and cabinets and glasses wainscoted with the Greendale oak, which was so large that an old steward wisely cut a way through it to make a triumphal passage for his lord and lady on their wedding, and only killed it!  But it is impossible to tell you@ half what there is.  The poor woman who is just dead passed her whole widowhood, except in doing ten thousand right and just things, in collecting and monumenting the portraits and relics of all the great families from which she descended, and which centred in her.  The Duke and Duchess of Portland are expected there to-morrow, and we saw dozens of cabinets and coffers with the seals not yet taken off What treasures to revel over!  The horseman Duke’s man`ege is converted into a lofty stable,. and there is still a grove or two of magnificent oaks that have escaped all these great families, though the last Lord Oxford cut down above an hundred thousand pounds’ worth.  The place has little pretty, distinct from all these reverend circumstances.

(707) Hatfield, the seat of the Earl of Salisbury, was exchanged by King James I. with Robert Cecil, first Earl of Salisbury, for Theobald’s, in the same county.  Evelyn visited Hatfield in March 1643:  “I went,” he says, “to see my Lord Salisbury’s palace at Hatfield, where the most considerable rarity, besides the house,” (inferior to few then in England for its architecture,) " was the garden and vineyard, rarely well-watered and planted.  They also showed us the picture of Secretary Cecil in mosaic work, very well done by some Italian hand."-E.

(708) built by the great Lord Burleigh, lord treasurer to Queen Elizabeth, who visited him at this place, and where several articles still remain which had belonged to her.-E.

(709) The episcopal palace of the Bishops of Lincoln.-E.