house; and from two windows in front, and two others at the end, we have a pleasant view of lawns and glades, trees and clumps, and a piece of water full of fish. The borders by the walks, in the pleasure grounds, are full of rare shrubs and trees, to which collection America has furnished her full share. I shall here have a good opportunity to take a list of these trees, shrubs, and flowers. Larches, cypresses, laurels, are here as they are everywhere. Mr. Brand Hollis has planted near the walk, from his door to the road, a large and beautiful fir, in honor of the late Dr. Jebb, his friend. A tall cypress in his pleasure grounds he calls General Washington, and another his aide-de-camp, Colonel Smith.

25. Tuesday. Mr. Brand Hollis and Mr. Brand, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, and Mr. and Mrs. Adams, took a ride to Chelmsford. Stopped at a bookseller's, the printer of a newspaper, in which Mr. B. Hollis had printed the late act of Virginia in favor of equal religious liberty. We then went to Moulsham Hall, built originally by Lord Fitzwalter, but lately owned by Sir William Mildmay, one of the commissioners with Governor Shirley at Paris, in 1754, for settling the boundaries between the French and English in America. Lady Mildmay owns it at present, but is not yet come down from London. Mr. Brand Hollis admires the architecture of this house, because it is according to the principles of Palladio. The apartments are all well proportioned in length, breadth, and height. There is here a Landscape of Rembrandt. The words, halls, parlors, saloons, and drawing rooms, occur upon these occasions; but to describe them would be endless. We returned by another road through the race-grounds to the Hyde; and, after dinner, made a visit to the gardener's house, to see his bees. He is bee mad, Mr. Brand Hollis says. He has a number of glass hives, and has a curious invention to shut out the drones; he has nailed thin and narrow laths at the mouth of the hive, and has left spaces between them barely wide enough for the small bees to creep through; here and there he has made a notch in the lath large enough for a drone to pass; but this notch he has covered with a thin light clapper which turns easily upwards upon a pivot. The drone easily lifts up the clapper and comes out, but as soon as he is out the clapper falls and excludes the drone, who has neither skill nor strength to raise it on the outside; thus shut out from

the hive, the gardener destroys them, because he says they do nothing but eat honey.

The gardener, who is a son of liberty, and was always a friend to America, was delighted with this visit. "Dame," says he to his wife," you have had the greatest honor done you to-day that you ever had in your life." Mr. Brand Hollis says he is a proud Scotchman, but a very honest man and faithful servant.

After tea, Mr. Brand Hollis and I took a circular walk round the farm. He showed us a kind of medallion, on which was curiously wrought a feast of all the heathen gods and goddesses sitting round a table. Jupiter throws down upon the middle of it one of his thunderbolts flaming at each end with lightning, and lights his own pipe at it, and all the others follow his example; Venus is whiffing like a Dutchman; so is Diana and Minerva, as well as Mars, Bacchus, and Apollo.

Mr. Brand Hollis is a great admirer of Marcus Aurelius. He has him in busts and many other shapes. He observed to me, that all the painters of Italy, and from them most others, have taken the face of Marcus Aurelius for a model in painting Jesus Christ. He admires Julian too; and has a great veneration for Dr. Hutcheson, the moral writer, who was his tutor or instructor. He has a number of heads of Hutcheson, of whom he always speaks with affection and veneration. Lord Shaftsbury too is another favorite of his.

In the dining-room are two views of that estate in Dorsetshire, which the late Mr. Hollis gave to Mr. Brand. There is only a farm-house upon it. Here are to be seen Hollis mead and Brand pasture. In Hollis mead Mr. Hollis was buried ten feet deep, and then ploughed over; a whim to be sure; but singularity was his characteristic; he was benevolent and beneficent, however, throughout. In the boudoir is a dagger made of the sword which killed Sir Edmunbury Godfrey. An inscription,Memento Godfrey, proto-martyr. pro religione Protestantium. Mr. Hollis's owl, cap of liberty, and dagger, are to be seen everywhere; in the boudoir, a silver cup with a cover, all in the shape of an owl, with two rubies for eyes. This piece of antiquity was dug up at Canterbury from ten feet depth. It was some monkish conceit.

26. Wednesday. Mr. Brand Hollis, Miss Brand, Mrs. Adams, Mrs. Smith, and I, walked to Mill Green, or Mill Hill, the seat

of a Mr. Allen, a banker of London. We walked over the pleasure grounds and kitchen garden and down to Cocytus,— a canal or pond of water surrounded with wood in such a manner as to make the place gloomy enough for the name. This is a good spot; but Mr. Allen has, for want of taste, spoiled it by new picket fences at a great expense. He has filled up the ditches, and dug up the hedges, and erected wooden fences and brick walls, a folly that I believe in these days is unique. are very good, civil people, but have no taste.

They

27. Thursday. Went with Mrs. Adams to Braintree, about eight miles from the Hyde.

As our objects were fresh air, exercise, and the gratification of curiosity, I thought we ought to make a little excursion to the town after which the town in New England where I was born and shall die, was originally named. The country between Chelmsford and Braintree is pleasant and fertile, though less magnificent in buildings and improvements than many other parts of England; but it is generally tillage land, and covered with good crops of barley, oats, rye, wheat, and buckwheat.

Braintree is a market town, and fairs are held here at certain seasons. I went to the church, which stands in the middle of a triangular piece of ground; and there are, parallel to each side of the triangle, double rows of handsome lime trees, which form the walks and avenues to the church. The church is a very old building, of flint stone; workmen were repairing it, and I went all over it; it is not much larger than Mr. Cleverly's church at Braintree, in New England. I examined all the monuments and gravestones in the church and in the churchyard, and found no one name of person or family of any consequence, nor did I find any name of any of our New England families, except Wilson and Joslyn, Hawkins, Griggs, and Webb. I am convinced that none of our Braintree families came from this village, and that the name was given it by Mr. Coddington, in compliment to the Earl of Warwick, who, in the beginning and middle of the seventeenth century had a manor here, which, however, at his death, about 1665, went out of his family. The parish of Bocking has now more good houses. Braintree is at present the residence only of very ordinary people, - manufacturers only of baizes. Chelmsford was probably named in compliment to Mr. Hooker, who was once minister of that town in Essex, but after

wards in Holland, and after that minister at "Newtown" (Cambridge,) and after that at Hartford, in New England.

We returned to dinner, and spent the evening in examining the curiosities of Mr. Thomas Brand Hollis's house. His library, his Miltonian cabinet, his pictures, busts, medals, coins, Greek, Roman, Carthaginian, and Egyptian gods and goddesses, are a selection of the most rare and valuable. It would be endless to go over the whole in description.

We have had with Alderman Bridgen an agreeable tour and an exquisite entertainment.

I should not omit Alderman Bridgen's nuns and verses. About thirty years ago, Mr. Bridgen, in the Austrian Netherlands, purchased a complete collection of the portraits of all the orders of nuns, in small duodecimo prints. These he lately sent as a present to the Hyde; and Mr. Hollis has placed them in what he calls his boudoir, a little room between his library and drawing-room. Mr. Bridgen carried down with him a copy of verses of his own composition to be hung up with them. The idea is, that banished from Germany by the Emperor they were taking an asylum at the Hyde, in sight of the Druid, the portico of Athens, and the venerable remains of Egyptian, Greek, Roman, and Carthaginian antiquities.

28. Friday. Returned to Grosvenor Square to dinner.

1787.

August 5. At Kingsbridge, the southerly point of the county of Devonshire, the birthplace of my brother Cranch.

Went yesterday to church in the morning. Dined with Mr. Burnell. Went to the Presbyterian meeting in the afternoon. Drank tea with Mr. Trathan, and went to the Baptist meeting in the evening. Lord Petre is the lord of this manor. The nephew of my brother Cranch possesses the family estate, which I saw very near the church, four lots of very fine land in high cultivation. The nephews and nieces are married and settled here; all tradesmen and farmers in good business and comfortable circumstances, and live in a harmony with each other that is charming. On Saturday we passed through Plympton and Modbury. From the last town emigrated my brother Cranch

with Mr. Palmer. It is a singular village, at the bottom of a valley formed by four high and steep hills. On Friday, we went out from Plymouth to Horsham to see Mr. Palmer, the nephew of our acquaintance in America. His sister only was at home. This is a pleasant situation. We had before seen Mr. Andrew Cranch at Exeter, the aged brother of my friend, and Mr. William Cranch, another brother, deprived by a paralytic stroke of all his faculties.

Mr. Bowring, at Exeter, went with me to see Mr. Towgood, the author of the dissenting gentlemen's Answer to Mr. Wade's Three Letters, eighty-seven years of age.

Brook is next door to Swainstone and Strachleigh, near Lee Mill Bridge, about two miles from Ivy Bridge. Strachleigh did belong to the Chudleighs, the Duchess of Kingston's family. Haytor Rock is at the summit of the highest mountain in Dartmoor Forest. Bren Tor is said by some to be higher.

6. Monday. Dined at Totness, through which the river Dart runs to Dartmouth. Slept at Newton Bushel.