GIFT-BOOKS.
PALACES, ROYAL AND OTHER.* IN beginning her description of Windsor Mrs. Tooley remarks that " it alone redeems the countiy from the opprobrium of
• (1.) Royal Palaces and their Memories. By Sarah A. Tooley. London: Hutchinson and Co. (16s. net.]—(2.) Other Famous Homes of Great Britam and their Morin. Edited by A. H. Malan. London: G. P. Putnam's Sons. [21s. mita having no Royal residence commensurate to the grea- tnisiof the Empire over which the Monarch rules." "Commen- surate to the greatness of the Empire" means very much. An architect who had that ideal before him would want a matchless genius and the command of boundless wealth. It may be readily allowed that Windsor alone approaches to the conception. Still, it may be pleaded in arrest of an unfavourable judgment on the other palaces that the Empire has outgrown them. Hampton Court was a not inadequate residence for the Monarchy of the sixteenth and even of the two following centuries; and Buckingham Palace, though not rich in associations, and certainly not commanding in architecture, in the not un- important matter of commodiousness is worthy of its rank. Still, it must be conceded that Windsor is not only first, but first without a second. Its historical interest is unmatched. It has been a Royal residence more than eight hundred years; every Monarch since the Conquest has dwelt in it, though the first two Georges saw very little of it, and many have made additions to it. Mrs. Tooley has traced this almost unbroken line of occupation with no little skill, compelled, indeed, by necessary limitation of space to be brief—a page for every decade is a scanty allowance—but giving her readers a clear and interesting narrative. Now and then she makes state- ments that might be criticised—we are afraid that St. George was not quite so respectable a person as she represents him—but the work, as a whole, is well done. So is the story of Hampton Court, the next to that of Windsor in importance and general picturesque.
ness. But the Royal associations of this palace are com- paratively few and brief, and have not a little melancholy about them. Here it was that the one of Henry VIII.'s Queens who may be recalled without any sinister memories
was brought to an early death by the folly of her attendants. She still haunts the place, it is said, and has a companion rerenante in Catharine Howard. Kensington and St. James's (which, strangely enough, still gives its name to the "political" Court of Great Britain) we must pass over with this bare mention.
Whatever may be said of the palaces of Great Britain, there can be but one opinion about its "famous homes." This is the third series of articles in which some of these homes are described, and the editor of the Pall Mall Magazine, from which they are reprinted, tells us that they never fail to rouse a lively interest in the readers of the magazine. Of the twelve described in this volume, Dunvegan, the home of the Macleods of Skye since the early part of the thirteenth cen- tury, stands by itself. Dunrobin may have been the possession of the Sutherland family for a longer time, but the castle of to-day is not that which was built by the far-away Earl Robin. Dalkeith is old, but it cannot compete with Dunvegan. Among the English homes, St. Michael's Mount must be allowed to hold the first place in historic interest as in pic- turesqueness. The view given in the frontispiece can hardly be matched, for it is as strange as it is beautiful. The other English homes are of a more familiar type. Perhaps the finest of them is Andley End. It has been greatly changed from the building erected by the first Earl of Suffolk between 1603-1610. Sir John Vanbrugh worked a great deal of mis- chief, and successive owners imitated him only too faithfully. The western part still remains to show the original design. Itbears a remarkable resemblance to Lord Suffolk's other seat, Charlton Park, near Malmesbury. That one man should have built two such places, leaving, indeed, one of them unfinished, is certainly strange. The fact gives a fresh point to King James's remark when he visited Lord Suffolk in 1610, that "the house was too large for a King, though it might do for a Lord Treasurer." Woollaton Hall, however, comes close to Andley End, if it does not surpass it. But here, too, the mischievous hand of the capricious owner has been at work. One of them called in that arch-destroyer, Wyatt, who, how- ever, did not do as much harm as he did elsewhere, at Salisbury Cathedral, for instance. Lady Middleton, who writes the• description, expresses herself with remarkable energy about the wrongs that have been inflicted on the place and ite possessions by the injustice of predecessors in title. The other mansions described are Castle Bromwich, Castle Howard, Clumber, Stoneleigh, and Stowe.
Previous page
