102 To MONTAGU 28 SEPTEMBER 1749 him?1 Sir Philip Hobby seems to be the only person likely to be bene­ fited by this new extravagance. I have just seen a collection of tombs like those you describe; the house of Russel, robed in alabaster and painted; there are seven monuments in all; one is immense, flaunting in marble, cherubim'd and seraphim'd, crusted with bas reliefs and titles, for the first of and his Duchess.2 All these are in a chapel of the church at Cheyneys,3 the seat of the first Earls. There are but piteous fragments of the house remaining, now a farm, built round three sides of a court. It is dropping down, in several places without a roof, but in half the windows are beautiful arms in painted glass. As these are so totally neglected, I propose making a push and begging them of the : they would be magnificent for Strawberry Castle.* Did I tell you that I have found a text in Deuteronomy,* to authorize my future battlements? When thou buildest a new house, then shalt thou make a battlement for thy roof, that thou bring not blood upon thy house, if any man fall from thence. I saw Cheyneys at a visit I have been making to Harry Con­ way at Latimers.6 This house which they have hired is large and bad, old but of a bad age;7 finely situated on a hill in a beech wood, with a river at the bottom, and a range of hills and woods on the opposite side belonging to the Bedford. They are fond of it; the view is melan­ choly. In the church at Cheyneys, Mr Conway put on an old helmet we found there; you can't imagine how it suited him, how antique and handsome he looked, you would have taken him for Rinaldo.8 Now I have dipped you so deep in heraldry and genealogies, I shall beg you to step into the church of Stoke, I know it is not asking you

1. The sarcasm of 'wise' is not alto- house at Chenies, as well as some of the gether clear. Perhaps HW is reflecting on glass, is still in existence (ibid. 90, 92). the sagacity of the people who lent Lord 5. xxii. 8. This is the earliest known Cholmondeley money to build with; cf. reference to HW's intention of Gothicis- his efforts to pay for his "new room' ante ing SH. 24 June 1746. 6. Near , Bucks; the house was 2. William Russell (1616-1700), 5th E. entirely rebuilt in the 19th century (Vict. of Bedford, cr. (1694) 1st D. of Bedford; Co. Hist. Bucks iii. 204). m. (1637) Lady Anne Carr (1615-84). 7. Probably Elizabethan or Jacobean 3. Chenies, Bucks, 4 miles east of Amer- which HW disliked; see ante 25 July 1748, sham; for a list of the monuments in the n. 15. In George Lipscomb, History . . . Bedford chapel of the church there, see of , 1847, iii. 268-9, is a Vict. Co. Hist. Bucks iii. 202; Royal Com- plate of Latimer's showing a large Eliza- mission on Historical Monuments . . . bethan house; but it is not clear whether Buckinghamshire, 1912-13, i. 88-90. the illustration is of the original building 4. It does not appear that HW ever ac- or the 19th-century alterations. quired this glass. One wing of the old 8. A chivalric character in Orlando Fu- rioso, Jerusalem Delivered, etc.