British and Irish country houses have long been seductive and fruitful sources of literary inspiration, functioning variously as realisations of an earthly paradise, or of a corrupted paradise lost (either presenting a glittering surface or an appropriately dilapidated one), or used as a picturesque, spacious, but conveniently confined setting for a group of characters. A specific literary manifestation was the English country house poem of the seventeenth century, being typically verse written in praise of the country estate of the poet’s patron and in praise of that patron’s virtues, usually expanding into more general philosophical reflections. Two of the most…