George Ticknor, Life, letters and journals of George Ticknor
George Hillard, Ed.

[389] group of a mother and child,—the mother only twenty-three,—by Chantrey, which he claimed—and I dare say rightly — to be the best of his works. It is certainly worthy to be such, by its purity and grace. Afterwards I went over the house, as you did last year. It was built by Inigo Jones, and may have been good as he left it, but it has been so altered and enlarged, that, except the fine staircase, and the entrance-hall all covered with arms brought home as trophies from the war of the Spanish Succession, there is nothing—or very little—to admire in it, except two or three good rooms. The library is large, and I occupied myself there for an hour or more among the old Spanish books, some of which are curious.

After lunch . . . . I took a long drive about the country with Lady Stanhope and Lady Granville Somerset. It is a beautiful re. gion,—indeed, the whole of the county of Kent has a good reputation, —and as the weather was bright and cool, I much enjoyed it. In the course of the drive we stopped at a most neat and even elegant little cottage, standing in the midst of a rich lawn, full of shrubbery and flower-beds, where there still lives Miss Thrale, one of the daughters of Johnson's Thrale, whose brewery—as Lady Stanhope told me—is now that of Barclay Perkins & Co. Miss Thrale is of course no longer young. She is, in fact, eighty-seven years old, but she is a stout, easy, comfortable old lady, full of good works and alms, and one who, as she has no love for books,--or very little,—does not care to talk about Dr. Johnson, and still less about her mother. But her cottage and grounds are in excellent taste, and well become the character and position of their possessor, who is much liked through all the country side.

We returned by ‘Chatham's drive,’ as it is called, a road through the highest part of the park, two or three miles long, which Lord Chatham advised to be cut, when he occupied Chevening in 1769. It proves him to have been a man of excellent taste, for the view from it is one of the finest I know of the sort . . . . . Lord Chatham said he thought it the finest view in the kingdom. I suppose it may be the finest view of an approach to such a mansion.

. . . . One or two neighbors were invited to dinner and were pleasant, especially a very rich Mr. Rogers, learned in the natural sciences. . . . . Milnes said smart, epigrammatic things in abundance after his fashion; . . . . but as I took in Lady Stanhope to dinner, I devoted myself to her, and had the best of the talk, I suspect. She is very bright, and extremely quick of apprehension. I went, a part of the evening, to Lord Stanhope's private working-room, and looked over