Читать книгу Knole and the Sackvilles онлайн

22 страница из 45

The accounts of how and when the various outlying portions of the park were taken in can only be of local interest, and I do not therefore propose to go into them. They were mostly bought by John Frederick, the third duke, and by Lord Whitworth, who had married John Frederick’s widow. The ruins round the queer little sham Gothic house called the Bird House—which always frightened me as a child because I thought it looked like the witch’s house in Hansel and Gretel, tucked away in its hollow, with its pointed gables—were built for John Frederick’s grandfather about 1761, by one Captain Robert Smith, who had fought at Minden under Lord George Sackville, of disastrous notoriety, and who lived for some time at Knole, a parasite upon the house; they apparently purport to be the remains of some vast house, in defiance of the fact that no upper storey or roof of proportionate dimensions could ever possibly have rested upon the flimsy structure of flint and rubble which constitute the ruins. They, together with the Bird House, form an amusing group of the whims and vanities of two different ages. But, to go back to the park, I conclude with the following letter, which is among the papers at Knole: