During his residence in England, he married Miss Hamilton, a celebrated beauty, daughter of Sir George Hamilton, and niece of the Duke of Ormond but, if truth be told of him, even this lady would have been deserted by him but for the determination of her brothers, Count Anthony and George Hamilton.

They followed and overtook him as he was on the point of leaving the kingdom, and asked him if he had not forgotten something. "Pardon me," he replied, "I have forgotten to marry your sister," and immediately and amicably returned with them.

After an expatriation of about seven years, he was recalled by the French King, whose favour he entirely regained. His beautiful and excellent lady too was greatly admired, and was appointed dame du palais at Versailles. On the death of his brother he succeeded to the title and estates of his family; and it appears from a letter of Madame de Coulanges (5 Aug. 1703), that he and his lady were decidedly the ton at Paris. No wonder they had been so in London. One of their daughters married Lord Stafford, and was the friend and correspondent of a later "star of fashion," Lady Mary Wortley Montagu.

De Grammont returned to France in 1669, and died in 1707 in his eighty-sixth year.

He was not destitute of literary qualifications, and when in England is said to have used his pen as a source of emolument. Amongst other trifles,

a sonnet to Francisco's saraband is attributed to him.*

Hardly less celebrated than himself is his biographer, Count Anthony Hamilton. But he was also his brother-in-law, and passes lightly over those parts of De Grammont's character, his dishonesty, his licentiousness, his irreligion, his vindictiveness, which must ever excite the reprobation of rightly thinking people. As a leader of ton he was perhaps unparalleled, and in that light only is he considered here:

"Et jamais ne sera de vie,

Plus admiré and moins suivie !"

* Francisco the celebrated and fashionable guitar player, who set all the men and women of the Court a thrumming, not even excepting the Duke of York- to the great discomfiture of many husbands blessed with fashionable wives. Ce Francisque venait de faire une sarabande, qui charmoit ou désoloit tout le monde; car toute la guitarerie de la cour se mit à l'apprendre ; et Dieu sait la raclerie universelle que c'étoit.-Chapitre viii.

CHAPTER IV.

HABITATIONS.

THE noble chapel of Henry the Seventh, attached to Westminster Abbey, is usually considered as the last expiring effort in England of that splendid Gothic architecture, which, in its varied moss-grown and shattered remains, appeals so forcibly to the imagination and the feelings. It is supposed also, by qualified judges, to bear even on its own front in its superabundant decoration and minuteness of ornament, the evidence of its decay; even as the exquisitely beautiful tint on the cheek of one smitten with consumption, is only too sure an evidence of internal weakness. Even to an eye not critically scientific, the broad and massive architecture of the Abbey itself has something far more noble and majestic than the florid, elaborate, and exquisitely finished details of Henry the Seventh's chapel. But the taste and will and spirit for the erection of large public edifices were all declining, and domestic architecture was assuming much more importance: naturally and necessarily so. The peaceful reign of Henry the Seventh, the great progress of commerce which he so wisely and undeviatingly sup

ported, and the extinction by his marriage and wise policy of the ancient feuds of the magnates of the land; the rapid advance of the lower orders, the heretofore unheeded "serfs" in the scale of society, and consequent thereon the sensible decline of the tenets of feudality-all these and other causes combined, after the accession of Henry the Seventh, led Englishman of birth and rank to consider their habitations what heretofore in merry England they could not safely be considered homes, domestic homes, retreats of peace and relaxation, instead of strongholds of safety and defence. Hitherto, every man's house - that is, the house of every man who held a responsible position in society had been constructed with a view to defence and warfare: now the domestic castle was no longer known.

Henry the Eighth built, indeed, a line of castles, but those were national works for national defence; and the many beautiful palaces which owe their erection or their completion to him, are unmixed with any of those stern military features which are especially marked in any nobleman's mansion of former times. The 16th century has been called an era of palaces.

The "Tudor Gothic" style of Henry the Eighth and earlier part of Elizabeth's reign, in its most marked features, is familiar to all: a multitude of gables at all heights and in all directions breaking the uniformity of the general mass; the stacks of chimneys of fantastic shapes and profuse ornament,

crowded with decorations which are often clustered there in manifest contrast to the unadorned style of the rest of the building, and the variformed and often beautiful oriel windows are the most marked outward features. Within, the great hall and its dais, with a gallery above extending its whole length, in which the lord and lady of the mansion and their guests assembled to witness the merry-makings of their retainers below. These were indelible features (varied in size, style, and elegance) both of the palace and the manor house of the earlier part of Elizabeth's reign. In mansions of a higher class than the manor house, this gallery was often a most magnificent structure. In Hardwicke Hall (see after) it was so, being 170 feet long; and in Buckhurst House, Sussex, a magnificent erection of the time, it extended over the whole of the apartments in front. At the widely celebrated mansion of Audley Inn,* perhaps the most magnificent structure of the time, and built by the Earl of Suffolk, Lord Treasurer in the reign of James the First, and built, as it was loudly said, with "Spanish gold;+" in this was a gallery ninety-five yards long. After the first adoption of the Italian fashion of using the hall as an entrance, the yet prevailing custom was introduced of placing the principal apartments on the first floor, and, as

*Now called Audley End, the seat of Lord Braybrooke, near Saffron Walden, Essex.

+ Alluding to bribes which it is supposed he, or at least his Countess, did not scruple to receive.