elicious stretch of sward over
which they troop. Less stately, but scarce more shy, indigenes are
the hares, lineal descendants of those which gave sport to Oliver
Cromwell. When that grim Puritan succeeded to the lordship of the
saintly cardinal, he was fain, when the Dutch, Scotch and Irish
indulged him with a brief chance to doff his buff coat, to take
relaxation in coursing. We loiter by the margin of the ponds he dug
in the hare-warren, and which were presented as nuisances by the grand
jury in 1662. The complaint was that by turning the water of the "New
River" into them the said Oliver had made the road from Hampton Wick
boggy and unsafe. Another misdemeanor of the deceased was at the same
time and in like manner denounced. This was the stopping up of the
pathway through the warren. The palings were abated, and the path is
open to all nineteenth-century comers, as it probably will be to those
of the twentieth, this being a land of precedent, averse to change.
We may stride triumphantly across the location of the Cromwellian
barricades, and not the less so, perhaps, for certain other barricades
which he helped to erect in the path of privilege.

Directing our steps to the left, or westward, we again reach the river
at the town of Hampton. It is possessed of pretty water-views, but of
little else of note except the memory and the house of Garrick.
Hither the great actor, after positively his last night on the stage,
retired, and settled the long contest for his favor between the Muses
of Tragedy and Comedy by inexorably turning his back on both. He
did not cease to be the delight of polished society, thanks to his
geniality and to literary and conversational powers capable of making
him the intimate of Johnson and Reynolds. More fortunate in his
temperament and temper than his modern successor, Macready, he never
fretted that his profession made him a vagabond by act of Parliament,
or that his adoption of it in place of the law had prevented his
becoming, by virtue of the same formal and supreme stamp, the equal
of the Sampson Brasses plentiful in his day as in ours among their
betters of that honorable vocation. His self-respect was of tougher if
not sounder grain. "Worth makes the man, and want of it the fellow,"
was the motto supplied him by his friend and neighbor, Pope, but
obeyed long before he saw it in the poetic form.

[Illustration: GARRICK'S VILLA.]

Garrick's house is separated from its bit of "groun