The great House of Wilton, the seat of the Herberts, had been built in a delightful situation on the site of the old monastery, amidst beautiful gardens and grounds.  It was a veritable treasure-house for pictures by the most famous painters, containing a special gallery filled almost exclusively with portraits of the family and others painted by Vandyck.  The collection included a good portrait of Prince Rupert,[Footnote:  See page 303.] who gave the army of the Parliament such a lively time in the Civil War, and who is said, in spite of his recklessness, to have been one of the best cavalry officers in Europe.  Queen Elizabeth stayed three days there in 1573, and described her visit as “both merrie and pleasante.”  During this visit she presented Sir Philip Sidney, the author of Arcadia, with a “locke of her owne hair,” which many years afterwards was found in a copy of that book in the library, and attached to it a very indifferent verse in the Queen’s handwriting.  Charles I, it was said, visited Wilton every summer, and portraits of himself, Henrietta Maria and their children, and some of their Court beauties, were also in the Vandyck gallery.

Wilton Park attracted our attention above all, as the rivers Wylye and Nadder combined to enhance its beauty, and to feed the ornamental lake in front of the Hall.  There were some fine cedar trees in the park, and as we had often seen trees of this kind in other grounds through which we had passed, we concluded they dated from the time of the Crusades, and that the crusaders had brought small plants back with them, of which these trees were the result.  We were informed, however, that the cedar trees at Wilton had only been planted in the year 1640 by the Earl of Devonshire, who had sent men to collect them at Lebanon in the Holy Land.  Thus we were compelled to change our opinion, for the trees we had seen elsewhere were of about the same girth as those at Wilton, and must therefore have been planted at about the same period.  The oak trees in the park still retained many of their leaves, although it was now late in the autumn, but they were falling off, and we tried to catch some of them as they fell, though we were not altogether successful.  My brother reminded me of a verse he once wrote as an exercise in calligraphy when at school: 

  Men are like leaves that on the trees do grow,
  In Summer’s prosperous time much love they show,
  But art thou in adversity, then they
  Like leaves from trees in Autumn fall away.

But after autumn and winter have done their worst there are still some bushes, plants, or trees that retain their leaves to cheer the traveller on his way.  Buckingham, who was beheaded at Salisbury, was at one time a fugitive, and hid himself in a hole near the top of a precipitous rock, now covered over with bushes and known only to the initiated as “Buckingham’s Cave.”  My brother was travelling one winter’s day in search of this cave, and passed for miles through