every two steps of this staircase, as we go up, to contemplate the
vast variety of pictures that cover the walls, and of some of the best
masters in Europe; and yet this is but an introduction to what is beyond
them.

When you are entered the apartments, such variety seizes you every way
that you scarce know to which hand to turn yourself. First on one side
you see several rooms filled with paintings as before, all so curious,
and the variety such, that it is with reluctance that you can turn from
them; while looking another way you are called off by a vast collection
of busts and pieces of the greatest antiquity of the kind, both Greek and
Romans; among these there is one of the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius in
basso-relievo. I never saw anything like what appears here, except in
the chamber of rarities at Munich in Bavaria.

Passing these, you come into several large rooms, as if contrived for the
reception of the beautiful guests that take them up; one of these is near
seventy feet long, and the ceiling twenty-six feet high, with another
adjoining of the same height and breadth, but not so long. Those
together might be called the Great Gallery of Wilton, and might vie for
paintings with the Gallery of Luxembourg, in the Faubourg of Paris.

These two rooms are filled with the family pieces of the house of
Herbert, most of them by Lilly or Vandyke; and one in particular outdoes
all that I ever met with, either at home or abroad; it is done, as was
the mode of painting at that time, after the manner of a family piece of
King Charles I., with his queen and children, which before the burning of
Whitehall I remember to hang at the east end of the Long Gallery in the
palace.

This piece fills the farther end of the great room which I just now
mentioned; it contains the Earl of Montgomery, ancestor of the house of
Herbert (not then Earls of Pembroke) and his lady, sitting, and as big as
life; there are about them their own five sons and one daughter, and
their daughter-in-law, who was daughter of the Duke of Buckingham,
married to the elder Lord Herbert, their eldest son. It is enough to say
of this piece, it is worth the labour of any lover of art to go five
hundred miles to see it; and I am informed several gentlemen of quality
have come from France almost on purpose. It would be endless to describe
the whole set of the family pictures which take up this room, unless we
would enter into the roof-tree of the family