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