is fine palace, is a
nobleman of great personal merit many other ways, so he is a man of
learning and reading beyond most men of his lordship's high rank in this
nation, if not in the world; and as his reading has made him a master of
antiquity, and judge of such pieces of antiquity as he has had
opportunity to meet with in his own travels and otherwise in the world,
so it has given him a love of the study, and made him a collector of
valuable things, as well in painting as in sculpture, and other
excellences of art, as also of nature; insomuch that Wilton House is now
a mere museum or a chamber of rarities, and we meet with several things
there which are to be found nowhere else in the world.

As his lordship is a great collector of fine paintings, so I know no
nobleman's house in England so prepared, as if built on purpose, to
receive them; the largest and the finest pieces that can be imagined
extant in the world might have found a place here capable to receive
them. I say, they "might have found," as if they could not now, which is
in part true; for at present the whole house is so completely filled that
I see no room for any new piece to crowd in without displacing some other
fine piece that hung there before. As for the value of the piece that
might so offer to succeed the displaced, that the great judge of the
whole collection, the earl himself, must determine; and as his judgment
is perfectly good, the best picture would be sure to possess the place.
In a word, here is without doubt the best, if not the greatest,
collection of rarities and paintings that are to be seen together in any
one nobleman's or gentleman's house in England. The piece of our Saviour
washing His disciples' feet, which they show you in one of the first
rooms you go into, must be spoken of by everybody that has any knowledge
of painting, and is an admirable piece indeed.

You ascend the great staircase at the upper end of the hall, which is
very large; at the foot of the staircase you have a Bacchus as large as
life, done in fine Peloponnesian marble, carrying a young Bacchus on his
arm, the young one eating grapes, and letting you see by his countenance
that he is pleased with the taste of them. Nothing can be done finer, or
more lively represent the thing intended--namely, the gust of the
appetite, which if it be not a passion, it is an affection which is as
much seen in the countenance, perhaps more than any other. One ought to
stop