Hazlitt, in his _Sketches of the Picture Galleries of England_, says of this collection:--"We wish our readers to go to Petworth ...

where they will find the coolest grottoes and the finest Vandykes in the world." [Sidenote: A PICTORAL PARK] Lord Leconfield's park has not the remarkable natural formation of the Duke of Norfolk's, nor the superb situation of the Duke of Richmond and Gordon's, with its Channel prospects, but it is immense and imposing.
Also it is unreal: it is like a park in a picture.

This effect may be largely due to the circumstance that _fetes_ in Petworth Park have been more than once painted; but it is due also, I think, to the shape and colour of the house, to the lake, to the extent of the lawn, to the disposition of the knolls, and to the deer.

A scene-painter, bidden to depict an English park, would produce (though he had never been out of the Strand) something very like Petworth.

It is the normal park of the average imagination on a large scale.
[Illustration: _Almshouse at Petworth._] Cobbett wrote thus of Petworth:--"The park is very fine, and consists of a parcel of those hills and dells which nature formed here when she was in one of her most sportive moods.