CHAPTER I BATTY LANGTON, CHRONICLER From Batty Langton, Esquire, to the Hon. Horatio Walpole BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS, .. You ask me, my dear sir, why I linger on year by year in this land of Cherokees and Choctaws, as you put it, at the same time hinting very delicately that now, with my poor old father in his grave and my own youthful debts discharged, you see no enduring reason for this exile. It is kind of you to be so solicitous: kinder still to profess that you yet miss me. But that I am missed at White's is more than you shall persuade me to believe. In an earlier letter, written when the Gaming Act passed, you told me they were for nailing up an escutcheon to mourn the death of play; they nailed up none for me. And I gather that play has recovered, and Dick Edgcumbe holds my cards. I doubt if I could endure to revisit St. James's-save by moonlight perhaps. Rappelez-moi to the waiters. They will remember me. But in good deed, dear sir, what should I be doing at home among the Malvern Hills upon a patrimony of £800?-for to that it has dwindled. Can I hoe turnips, or poke a knowledgeable finger into the flanks of beeves? I wonder if your literary explorations ever led you across the furrow of an ancient ploughman who -on a May morning, on Malvern hills was weary of wandering and laid him down to sleep beside a brook-having been chased thither betimes, no doubt, by a nagging bedfellow. I have no wife, nor mean to take one, and find it more to my comfort to sleep here by the River Charles and dream of Malvern, secure that I shall wake to find myself detached from it by half a world. Yet your last letter touched me closely; for it happens that Sir O. V., for love of whom rather than for any better reason I have kept this exile, has taken to himself a Lady. That, you'll say, should be my dismissal; and that I like her, as she appears willing to be friends with me, gives me, you'll say again, no excuse to linger. Yet I do, and shall. As for her history, Vyell picked her up in a Godforsaken fishing town, some leagues up the coast; brought her home; placed her under gouvernante and tutors; finally espoused her. Stay: finally he has built a palace for her, "Eagles" by name, whither he forces all Boston to pay its homage. For convenience of access to the goddess he has cut a road twenty feet broad through the woodlands of her demesne. The palace in a woody vale they found, or, to speak accurately, of stone and timber combined. Be pleased to imagine a river very much like that of Richmond, but covered with grey crags. "Fie," you will say, "the site is savage, then, like all else in this New World?" My dear sir, you were never more mistaken. Mr. Manley's young eye of genius fastened upon it at once, to adapt it to a house and gardens in the Italian style. Have I mentioned this Mr. Manley in former letters ? He is a young gentleman of good Midland blood (his county, I believe, Bedfordshire), with a moderate talent for drinking, a something more than talent for living on his friends, and a positive genius for architecture. He will have none of your new craze for Gothic. Palladio is his god, albeit he allows that Palladio had feet of clay, and corrects him boldlythough always, as he tells me, with help of his minor deities, Vignola and the rest, who built the great villas around Rome. He has studied in Italy, and tells me that at Florence he was much beholden to your friend Mann, who, I dare swear, lost money by the acquaint ance. Vyell, his present patron, takes him out and shows him the site. "Italy!" exclaims the Youth of Genius. "Italy?" echoes Mæcenas, astonished. "We'll make it so," says the Youth. "These terraces, this spouting water, these pines to serve us for cypresses." "But, my good sir, the House?" cries the impatient Vyell. "A fig for your house! Any fool can design a house when the Almighty and an artist together have once made the landscape for it. Grant me two years for the gardens," he pleads. "You shall have ten months to complete landscape, house, everything." "I shall need armies of workmen." "You shall have them." The Youth groaned. "I shall be sober for ten months on end!" "What of that?" says V. Lovers are unconscionable. Well, the Youth sits down to his plans, and at once orders begin to fly across ocean to this port and that for the rarest marbles-rosso antico from Mount Taenarus, verde antico from Thessaly; with green Carystian, likewise shipped from Corinth; Carrara, Veronese Orange, Spanish broccatello, Derbyshire alabaster, black granite from Vyell's Cornish estate, red and purple porphyries from high up the Nile. . . . The Youth conjures up his gardens as by magic. Here you have a terrace fenced with columns; below it a cascade pouring down a stairway of circular basins-the hint of it borrowed from Frascati (from the Villa Torlonia, if I remember); there an alley you'd swear was Boboli dipping to rise across the river, on a stairway you'd swear as positively was Val San Zibio. Yet all is congruous. The dog scouts the Villa d'Este for a "toyshop." The house at first disappoints one, being straight and simple to the last degree. "D-n me," says he, "what can you look for, in ten months?" It is of two stories, the windows of the upper story loftier by onethird than those beneath; and has for sole ornament a balustraded parapet broken midway by an Ionic portico of twelve columns, with a loggia deeply recessed above its entrance door. To this portico a flight of sixteen steps conducts you from the uppermost terrace. Such is Vyell's new pleasance of Eagles, Boston's latest wonder. I have described it at this length because you profess to take more interest in houses than in women; and also, to tell the truth, because I am shy of describing Lady V. To call her roundly the loveliest creature I have ever set eyes on, or am like to, is (you will say) no description, though it may argue me in love with her. On my honour, no! or only as all others are in loveall the men, I mean, and even some proportion of the womankind. The rest agree to call her "Lady Goodfor-Nothing," upon a double rumour, of which one half is sad truth, and the other (my life on it) false as hell. They have heard that when Vyell found her she was a serving-girl, undergoing punishment (a whipping, to |