feature of the chapel wing. The north wing, says Mr. Jones, "was rather more ruinous," and the same thoroughgoing methods were applied to it both in "the Garrets " and in "the one pair of stair rooms,' "which" entirely new fitted up; all Sashed, with an arch turned over every window; the windows constructed to a proper size."

were

The record of the alterations made downstairs really disguises by its brevity the large extent of the outlay :

Upon the ground floor; new Windows and Doors to the Hall. The whole inside of the Dining Room new. In the Drawing Room windows and shutters. In the Breakfast Room, new windows and shutters; and a half window made up; a chimney piece and marble slab. The floor of the passage by the Breakfast Room, new; there being before only old Bricks. In the Gallery, new windows.

The same process was applied to the chaplain's room, steward's room, kitchen (which received also stoves, grate, oven, boiler, closet lined with tin "), servants' hall, housekeeper's room, larder, laundry, washhouse, "the little room under the stairs," the bakehouse ("intirely new "), and "the places for coals, wood, ashes, etc., built new."

There survives a "Plan of Principal Floor of the Rt Revd the Lord Bishop of Worcester's Palace at Hartlebury, June 1760," which must, I think, represent the arrangement of the ground floor as Johnson found it, and before he had developed all these generous projects. The plan has received some slight additions on the west front from the careful hand of young Richard Hurd. Except that it does not show us which was the "chaplain's room," it will serve as a guide to Johnson's thoroughgoing tour of restoration through the ground floor.

The whole extent of the front is given as 231 ft. 11 in. The first room on the north wing-we now call it the "ball court"-was known to Bishop Johnson as the granery"; in Bishop Perowne's time its remote

1 This is mysterious; there is no sign of any bedroom having ever had arched windows except one over the servants' hall.

position was permitted to excuse its appropriation to tobacco. Johnson (or was it his predecessor, Maddox ?), more tolerantly, includes in his plan a “smoaking room on the west front; to-day the " granery" has returned to its earlier association with the fruits of the earth in their season. The next room, westwards, on that wing is called the washhouse, and still contains an old well, some three-and-thirty feet deep, the machinery of which was only removed by my immediate predecessor.1 The next room, again westwards, now a huge and rather derelict apartment, was then divided and in part served as a laundry. Flanking this, the first room on the recessed front was assigned to the housekeeper, but in our less exclusive days makes an excellent day-room for the staff. The servants' hall of Johnson's time was next to the housekeeper's room southwards, so that the great lady might have control of her satellites, though living herself apart.

That brings us to the hall. The uses to which Johnson put it are not clear.2 Bishop Hough had erected the great fire-place, but no fire-place by itself would make it a genial living-room in winter, and it probably served in general the purposes, not of effective occupation, but rather of what the Vatican would call passeggiatura. Johnson enlarged and pointed its windows, as he did throughout the front; but he also addressed himself to its uses as a viaduct to the different parts of the house. The north wing possesses a seventeenth-century wooden staircase of great beauty. The 1760 plan shows that it was double, running up each side of the spacious lobby at the far north entrance, and you must needs go right outside the hall to approach it. Johnson arranged for a stair-way en suite with the old one, to be used by the

1 Bishop Yeatman-Biggs recorded that he turned the said "Wash-house" into an office in 1910. The pump, which could not be used, was connected with the old castle well below the floor. The well-head was 8 ft. by 8 ft., and was walled with square stone quoining for 10 feet downwards, the well being thereafter hewn out of the solid rock; measured from the floor, the depth is 33 feet. The bishop added: "Attached to an oak upright beam in this room is a large iron ring. . . . In Bishop Pepys' time the room was used as a slaughter house, and the animals were fastened to this ring."

2 Francis Hopkinson records having breakfast in it.

retinue, and provided another for the family, leading off the hall. Mr. Jones's words are as follows:

The Stair Case at that end of the House taken down, which was placed very inconveniently; and a new one made from the Hall.

We may therefore ascribe to Johnson the stone staircase, geometrical" and unsupported, which is the feature of the north end of the hall.1 In modern times the installation of central heating has brought the hall into daily use for its original purposes.

But Johnson's meals were mostly taken in the noble apartment which opens out of the south end of the hall and is not the least of the castle's glories. It measures 37 ft. 5 in. by 26 ft., and has three of his tall, "Gothic" windows. Chaplain Jones's modest phrase, "the whole inside of the Dining Room new," conceals a vast expenditure alike of taste and of money. There are rooms at Hagley and at Croome-si parua licet componere magniswhich on a grander scale reflect the same type of Italian plaster-work on ceiling and wall. Johnson's scheme of decoration, which there is no documentary reason to associate with Robert Adam, includes six large wall panels framed in plaster; two of them look as if they were originally fashioned to contain the large presentation portraits of George III and Queen Charlotte, which the king gave to Hurd for the palace in Worcester, and which only came to Hartlebury in or about 1840, being then hung in the hall. So Johnson, who, as we have seen, "kept a good table," certainly made sure that its surroundings should be worthy of it.

And when his guests were refreshed, they could pass with him southwards into the drawing-room, where again he enlarged and pointed the windows and provided shutters. When he came, the room was shorter by nearly nine feet than it now is, its back part being then

1 The Victoria Co. Hist., Worcs., iii. 382, describes this as of the early nineteenth century. This is true, I think, only of the iron balustrade.

2 This is what to-day we call the Blue Room, to distinguish it from the Green Room, in which Johnson dined.

walled off as a butler's pantry, with a staircase which perhaps led down to the cellars. The drawing-room had a door, now blocked up, which gave access on the south side to the breakfast-room beyond; and in its turn the breakfast-room had a door, still existent, leading into the chapel passage; so that, if all the aligned doors were opened, there was a vista towards the north entrance of more than 162 feet in length. It is hard to say what changes Johnson afterwards made in this room. Someone (and I suspect that it was Johnson) threw into it the butler's pantry, blocked up the door into the breakfastroom, moved the fire-place into the centre of the south wall, and added its present mantel and frieze and mirror.

It is fair to say that, when Mr. Jones comes to the "Breakfast Room," he not only mentions "new windows and shutters, and a half-window made up " (as now), but adds "a chimney piece and marble slab.' But I still think that we owe to Bishop Johnson the much nobler chimney-pieces of his dining-room and his drawing-room.

It does not appear that Johnson found the chapel a cause of expense, probably because the work of Bishop Maddox there was still fresh; but he found the passage to it floored with old bricks, and substituted timber. So we pass behind the chapel to what is now the study. The plan of 1760 calls it the "Dressing Room," and it has always had two windows, whereas Mr. Jones gives the improvements to the "Chaplain's Room as floor, cieling, and window " (as if it had but one); the plan also describes the little closet beyond the present study as

The Study." It would therefore seem as if the present study and closet were used by the bishop and the chaplain jointly and that the business of the diocese was centred there, as it was in mediaeval times and as it is to-day.

But on the western side of the castle Johnson has left still greater marks of his generosity. He found the long passage floored with "an old brick pavement" and substituted "oak "2; "the walls made good and papered; new sashes, shutters, skirting board, painting etc.' Off

1 It is now the Brown Room and is furnished for business.

2 I am assured that the "oak " is not without its elements of elm.