urner. Hazlitt, in his _Sketches of the Picture Galleries of
England_, says of this collection:--"We wish our readers to go to
Petworth ... where they will find the coolest grottoes and the finest
Vandykes in the world."

[Sidenote: A PICTORAL PARK]

Lord Leconfield's park has not the remarkable natural formation of the
Duke of Norfolk's, nor the superb situation of the Duke of Richmond and
Gordon's, with its Channel prospects, but it is immense and imposing.
Also it is unreal: it is like a park in a picture. This effect may be
largely due to the circumstance that _fetes_ in Petworth Park have been
more than once painted; but it is due also, I think, to the shape and
colour of the house, to the lake, to the extent of the lawn, to the
disposition of the knolls, and to the deer. A scene-painter, bidden to
depict an English park, would produce (though he had never been out of
the Strand) something very like Petworth. It is the normal park of the
average imagination on a large scale.

[Illustration: _Almshouse at Petworth._]

Cobbett wrote thus of Petworth:--"The park is very fine, and consists of
a parcel of those hills and dells which nature formed here when she was
in one of her most sportive moods. I have never seen the earth flung
about in such a wild way as round about Hindhead and Blackdown, and this
park forms a part of this ground. From an elevated part of it, and,
indeed, from each of many parts of it, you see all around the country to
the distance of many miles. From the south-east to the north-west the
hills are so lofty and so near that they cut the view rather short; but
for the rest of the circle you can see to a very great distance. It is,
upon the whole, a most magnificent seat, and the Jews will not be able
to get it from the _present_ owner, though if he live many years they
will give even him a _twist_."

[Sidenote: THE YOUNG RAVENS]

On an eminence in the west is a tower (near a clump where ravens build),
from which the other parks of this wonderful park-district of Sussex may
be seen: Cowdray to the west, the highest points of Goodwood to the
south-west, the highest points of Arundel to the south-east, and
Parham's dark forest more easterly still. Mr. Knox's account of the
vicissitudes of the Petworth ravens sixty years ago is as interesting as
any history of equal length on the misfortunes of man. Their sufferings
at the hands of keepers and schoolboys read like a page of Foxe. The
final disast