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Thus the house wakes into a whispering life, and we resurrect the Sackvilles.

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Such interest as the Sackvilles have lies, I think, in their being so representative. From generation to generation they might stand, fully equipped, as portraits from English history. Unless they are to be considered in this light they lose their purport; they merely share, as Byron wrote to one of their number:

... with titled crowds the common lot,

In life just gazed at, in the grave forgot...

The mouldering ’scutcheon, or the herald’s roll,

That well-emblazoned but neglected scroll,

Where lords, unhonoured, in the tomb may find

One spot, to leave a worthless name behind:

There sleep, unnoticed as the gloomy vaults

That veil their dust, their follies, and their faults:

A race with old armorial lists o’erspread

In records destined never to be read.

But let them stand each as the prototype of his age, and at the same time as a link to carry on, not only the tradition but also the heredity of his race, and they immediately acquire a significance, a unity. You have first the grave Elizabethan, with the long, rather melancholy face, emerging from the oval frame above the black clothes and the white wand of office; you perceive all his severe integrity; you understand the intimidating austerity of the contribution he made to English letters. Undoubtedly a fine old man. You come down to his grandson: he is the Cavalier by Vandyck hanging in the hall, hand on hip, his flame-coloured doublet slashed across by the blue of the Garter; this is the man who raised a troop of horse off his own estates and vowed never to cross the threshold of his house into an England governed by the murderers of the King. You have next the florid, magnificent Charles, the fruit of the Restoration, poet, and patron of poets, prodigal, jovial, and licentious; you have him full-length, by Sir Godfrey Kneller, in his Garter robes and his enormous wig, his foot and fine calf well thrust forward; you have him less pompous and more intimate, wrapped in a dressing-gown of figured silk, the wig replaced by an Hogarthian turban; but it is still the same coarse face, with the heavy jowl and the twinkling eyes, the crony of Rochester and Sedley, the patron and host of Pope and Dryden, Prior and Killigrew. You come down to the eighteenth century. You have on Gainsborough’s canvas the beautiful, sensitive face of the gay and fickle duke, spoilt, feared, and propitiated by the women of London and Paris, the reputed lover of Marie Antoinette. You have his son, too fair and pretty a boy, the friend of Byron, killed in the hunting-field at the age of twenty-one, the last direct male of a race too prodigal, too amorous, too weak, too indolent, and too melancholy.