Page:Last Will and Testament of Cecil Rhodes.djvu/30

16 of South Africa to which I have referred in clause 6 hereof my intention being to provide a suitable official residence for the First Minister in that Government befitting the dignity of his position and until there shall be such a Federal Government may be used as a park for the people ( Writing in the Times on the artistic side of Mr. Rhodes, Mr. Herbert Baker, his architect, says:—“Artistic problems first presented themselves to his mind when, as Premier of Cape Colony, he made his home in the Cape Peninsula. His intense and genuine love of the big and beautiful in natural scenery prompted him to buy as much as he could of the forest slopes of Table Mountain, so that it might be saved for ever from the hands of the builder, and the people, attracted to it by gardens, wild animals, and stately architecture, might be educated and ennobled by the contemplation of what he thought one of the finest views in the world. This love of mountain and distant view—the peaks of the South African plateaux are seen 100 miles away across the Cape flats—was deep-seated in his nature, and he would sit or ride silently for hours at a time, dreaming and looking at the views he loved—a political poet.

There are many stories of him telling worried and disputing politicians to turn from their "trouble of ants" to the Mountain for calm, and in the same spirit he placed the stone Phœnician hawk, found at Zimbabye, in the Cabinet Councilroom, that the emblem of time might preside over their deliberations. The ennobling influence of natural scenery was present in his mind in connection with every site he chose and every building he contemplated; such as a cottage he built, where poets or artists could live and look across to the blue mountain distance; a University, where young men could be surrounded with the best of nature and of art; a lion-house, a feature of which was to have been a long open colonnade, where the people could at once see the king of beasts and the lordliest of mountains; the Kimberley “Bath,” with its white marble colonnades embedded in a green oasis of orange grove and vine trellis, looking to the north over illimitable desert. Such things would perhaps occur to most men, but with him ).