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Lady Betty Germaine, Swift’s friend and correspondent, connects the place with all the celebrities of the reign of Queen Anne. On emerging from the building we view the magnificent groves of the park, fit haunt for nightingales, though Becket is said to have driven them by an anathema from the neighborhood, because their songs interrupted his nocturnal meditations. But the memory of Thomas Sackville, Lord Buckhurst, (once proprietor of Knole,) the best poet of his time, and ‘the immediate father-in-verse of Spenser,’ sufficiently redresses the stigma of so churlish a proscription, and the nightingales may well claim perpetual franchise under sanction of a name to which the ancient inscription would apply:

Λί δὲ τεαὶ ζώουσιν ἀηδονες, ἡσιν ὁ παντωνἁρπακτὴρ Αὶδης ουκ επὶ χεῖρα βαλεὶ.Yet live thy nightingales of song: on thoseForgetfulness her hand shall ne’er impose.

2

Dunum or Duna, sigifieth a hill or higher ground, whence Downs, which cometh of the old French word dun. Coke Lit. 235.