The park at Cobham extends over an area of no less than 1,800 acres, diversified with thick groves and finely scattered single trees and gentle slopes and broad smooth lawns.  Some of the trees are singularly beautiful and of great age and size.  A chestnut tree, named the Four Sisters, is five and twenty feet in girth.  The mansion, of which, the central part was built by Inigo Jones, is a very noble one.  George the Fourth pronounced the music room the finest room in England.  The walls are of polished white marble with pilasters of sienna marble.  The picture gallery is enriched with valuable specimens of the genius of Titian and Guido and Salvator Rosa and Sir Joshua Reynolds.  There is another famous estate in Kent, Knole, the seat of

    Dorset, the grace of courts, the Muse’s pride.

The Earl of Dorset, though but a poetaster himself, knew how to appreciate the higher genius of others.  He loved to be surrounded by the finest spirits of his time.  There is a pleasant anecdote of the company at his table agreeing to see which amongst them could produce the best impromptu.  Dryden was appointed arbitrator.  Dorset handed a slip of paper to Dryden, and when all the attempts were collected, Dryden decided without hesitation that Dorset’s was the best.  It ran thus:  “I promise to pay Mr. John Dryden, on demand, the sum of L500.  Dorset.”

[022] This is generally put into the mouth of Pope, but if we are to believe Spence, who is the only authority for the anecdote, it was addressed to himself.

[023] It has been said that in laying out the grounds at Hagley, Lord Lyttelton received some valuable hints from the author of The Seasons, who was for some time his Lordship’s guest.  The poet has commemorated the beauties of Hagley Park in a description that is familiar to all lovers of English poetry.  I must make room for a few of the concluding lines.

    Meantime you gain the height, from whose fair brow,
    The bursting prospect spreads immense around: 
    And snatched o’er hill, and dale, and wood, and lawn,
    And verdant field, and darkening heath between,
    And villages embosomed soft in trees,
    And spiry towns by surging columns marked,
    Of household smoke, your eye excursive roams;
    Wide stretching from the hall, in whose kind haunt
    The hospitable genius lingers still,
    To where the broken landscape, by degrees,
    Ascending, roughens into rigid hills;
    O’er which the Cambrian mountains, like far clouds,
    That skirt the blue horizon, dusky rise.

It certainly does not look as if there had been any want of kindly feeling towards Shenstone on the part of Lyttelton when we find the following inscription in Hagley Park.

      To the memory of
    William Shenstone, Esquire,
      In whose verse
    Were all the natural graces. 
      And in whose manners
    Was all the amiable simplicity
      Of pastoral poetry,
    With the sweet tenderness
      Of the elegiac.