Courayer-he who vainly endeavoured to effect an union between the English and the Gallican churches-lodged here some time. Horace Walpole bought up Mrs. Chenevix's lease, and afterwards the fee-simple; and henceforth became the busiest, if not the happiest, man in a small way in existence.

We now despise the poor, over-ornate miniature Gothic style of Strawberry Hill; we do not consider with what infinite pains the structure was enlarged into its final and well-known form. In the first place, Horace made a tour to collect models from the chief cathedral cities in England; but the building required twenty-three years to complete it. It was begun in 1753, and finished in 1776. Strawberry Hill had one merit, everything was in keeping: the internal decorations, the screens, the niches, the chimney-pieces, the book-shelves, were all Gothic; and most of these were designed by Horace himself; and, indeed, the description of Strawberry Hill is too closely connected with the annals of his life to be dissevered from his biography. Here he gathered up his mental forces to support and amuse himself during a long life, sometimes darkened by spleen, but rarely by solitude; for Horace, with much isolation of the heart, was, to the world, a social being.

What scandal, what trifles, what important events, what littleness of mind, yet what stretch of intellect were henceforth issued by the recluse of Strawberry, as he plumed himself on being styled, from that library of 'Strawberry! Let us picture to ourselves the place, the persons-put on, if we can, the sentiments and habits of the retreat; look through its loopholes, not only on the wide world beyond, but into the small world within; and face the fine gentleman author in every. period of his varied life.

'The Strawberry Gazette,' Horace once wrote to a fine and titled lady, 'is very barren of weeds.' Such, however, was rarely the case. Peers, and still better, peeresses,-politicians, actors, actresses, the poor poet who knew not where to dine, the Mæcenas who was 'fed with dedications'-the belle of the season, the demirep of many, the antiquary, and the dilettanti, -painters, sculptors, engravers, all brought news to the 'Strawberry Gazette;' and incense, sometimes wrung from aching

28

The Recluse of Strawberry.

hearts, to the fastidious wit who professed to be a judge of all material and immaterial things-from a burlesque to an Essay on history or Philosophy-from the construction of Mrs. Che nevix's last new toy to the mechanism of a clock made in the sixteenth century, was lavished there.

Suppose that it is noon-day: Horace is showing a party of guests from London over Strawberry :-enter we with him, and let us stand in the great parlour before a portrait by Wright of the Minister to whom all courts bowed. That is my father, Sir Robert, in profile,' and a vulgar face in profile is always seen at its vulgarest; and the nex-retroussé, the coarse mouth, the double chin, are most forcibly exhibited in this limning by Wright; who did not, like Reynolds, or like Lawrence, cast a nuance of gentility over every subject of his pencil. Horace— can we not hear him in imagination ?-is telling his friends how Sir Robert used to celebrate the day on which he sent in his resignation, as a fête; then he would point out to his visitors a Conversation-piece, one of Reynolds's earliest efforts in small life, representing the second Earl of Edgecumbe, Selwyn, and Williams - all wits and beaux, and habitués of Strawberry. Colley Cibber, however, was put in cold marble in the anteroom; a respect very Horatian, for no man knew better how to rank his friends than the recluse of Strawberry. He hurries the lingering guests through the little parlour, the chimneypiece of which was copied from the tomb of Ruthall, Bishop of Durham, in Westminster Abbey. Yet how he pauses complacently to enumerate what has been done for him by titled belles: how these dogs, modelled in terra-cotta, are the production of Anne Damer; a water-colour drawing by Agnes Berry; a landscape with gipsies by Lady Di Beauclerk;-all platonically devoted to our Horace; but he dwells long, and his bright eyes are lighted up as he pauses before a case, looking as if it contained only a few apparently faded, of no-one-knows-who (or by whom) miniatures; this is a collection of Peter Oliver's best worksportraits of the Digby family.

How sadly, in referring to these invaluable pictures, does one's mind revert to the day when, before the hammer of Robins had resounded in these rooms-before his transcendent

cloquence had been heard at Strawberry-Agnes Strickland, followed by all eyes, pondered over that group of portraits: how, as she slowly withdrew, we of the commonalty scarce worthy to look, gathered around the spot again, and wondered at the perfect life, the perfect colouring, proportion, and keeping of those tiny vestiges of a bygone generation!

Then Horace we fear it was not till his prime was past, and a touch of gout crippled his once active limbs-points to a picture of Rose, the gardener (well named), presenting Charles II. with a pine-apple. Some may murmur a doubt whether pine-apples were cultivated in cold Britain so long since. But Horace enforces the fact; 'the likeness of the king,' quoth he, 'is too marked, and his features are too well known to doubt the fact;' and then he tells 'how he had received a present the last Sunday of fruit-and from whom.'

They pause next on Sir Peter Lely's portrait of Cowleynext on Hogarth's Sarah Malcolm, the murderess of her mistress; then-and doubtless, the spinster ladies are in fault here for the delay,-on Mrs. Damer's model of two kittens, pets, though, of Horace Walpole's-for he who loved few human beings was, after the fashion of bachelors, fond of cats.

They ascend the staircase: the domestic adornments merge into the historic. We have Francis I.-not himself, but his armour: the chimneypiece, too, is a copy from the tomb-works of John, Earl of Cornwall, in Westminster Abbey; the stonework from that of Thomas, Duke of Clarence, at Canterbury.

Stay awhile we have not done with sacrilege yet; worse things are to be told, and we walk with consciences not unscathed into the Library, disapproving in secret but flattering vocally. Here the very spirit of Horace seemed to those who visited Strawberry before its fall to breathe in every corner. Alas! when we beheld that library, it was half filled with chests containing the celebrated MSS. of his letters; which were bought by that enterprising publisher of learned name, Richard Bentley, and which have since had adequate justice done them by first-rate editors. There they were: the 'Strawberry Gazette' in full;-one glanced merely at the yellow paper, and clear, decisive hand, and then turned to see what objects he, who loved

30

Mrs. Damer's Models.

his books so well, collected for his especial gratification. Mrs. Damer again! how proud he was of her genius-her beauty, her cousinly love for himself; the wise way in which she bound up the wounds of her breaking heart when her profligate husband shot himself, by taking to occupation-perhaps, too, by liking cousin Horace indifferently well. He put her models forward in every place. Here was her Osprey Eagle in terra-cotta,

a masterly production; there a couvre-fire, or cur-few, imitated and modelled by her. Then the marriage of Henry VI. figures on the wall near the fire is a screen of the first tapestry ever made in England, representing a map of Surrey and Middlesex; a notion of utility combined with ornament, which we see still exhibited in the Sampler in old-fashioned, middle-class houses; that poor posthumous, base-born child of the tapestry, almost defunct itself; and a veritable piece of antiquity.

Still more remarkable in this room was a quaint-faced clock, silver gilt, given by Henry VIII. to Anne Boleyn; which perchance, after marking the moments of her festive life, struck unfeelingly the hour of her doom.

But the company are hurrying into a little ante-room, the ceiling of which is studded with stars in mosaic; it is therefore called jocularly, the 'Star Chamber;' and here stands a cast of the famous bust of Henry VII., by Torregiano, intended for the tomb of that sad-faced, long-visaged monarch, who always looks as if royalty had disagreed with him.

Next we enter the Holbein Chamber. Horace hated bishops and archbishops, and all the hierarchy; yet here again we behold another prelatical chimneypiece—a frieze taken from the tomb of Archbishop Warham, at Canterbury. And here, in addition to Holbein's picture of Mary Tudor, Duchess of Suffolk, and of her third husband Adrian Stokes, are Vertue's copies of Holbein, drawings of that great master's pictures in Buckingham House: enough-let us hasten into the Long Gallery. Those who remember Sir Samuel Merrick and his Gallery at Goodrich Court will have traced in his curious, somewhat gew-gaw collections of armour, antiquities, faded portraits, and mock horses, much of the taste and turn of mind that ex isted in Horace Walpole.

The Long Gallery at Strawberry.

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The gallery, which all who recollect the sale at Strawberry Hill must remember with peculiar interest, sounded well on paper. It was 56 feet long, 17 high, and 13 wide; yet was neither long enough, high enough, nor wide enough to inspire the indefinable sentiment by which we acknowledge vastness. We beheld it the scene of George Robins's triumphs-crowded to excess. Here strolled Lord John Russell; there, with heavy tread, walked Daniel O'Connell. Hallam, placid, kindly, gentle -the prince of book-worms-moved quickly through the rooms, pausing to raise a glance to the ceiling--copied from one of the side aisles of Henry VII.'s Chapel-but the fretwork is gilt, and there is a petitesse about the Gothic which disappoints all good judges.

But when Horace conducted his courtly guests into this his mind-vaunted vaulted gallery, he had sometimes George Selwyn at his side; or Gray- or, in his old age, 'my niece, the Duchess of Gloucester,' leaned on his arm. What strange associations, what brilliant company!—the associations can never be recalled there again; nor the company reassembled. The gallery, like everything else, has perished under the pressure of debt. He who was so particular, too, as to the number of those who were admitted to see his house-he who stipulated that four persons only should compose a party, and one party alone be shown over each day—how would he have borne the crisis, could he have foreseen it, when Robins became, for the time, his successor, and was the temporary lord of Strawberry; the dusty, ruthless, wondering, depreciating mob of brokers the respectable host of publishers—the starving army of martyrs, the authors-the fine ladies, who saw nothing there comparable to Howell and James's-the antiquaries, fishing out suspicious antiquities the painters, clamorous over Kneller's profile of Mrs. Barry-the virtuous indignant mothers, as they passed by the portraits of the Duchess de la Vallière, and of Ninon de l'Enclos, and remarked, or at all events they might have remarked, that the company on the floor was scarcely much more respectable than the company on the walls-the fashionables, who herded together, impelled by caste, that free-masonry of social life, enter the Beauclerk closet to look over Lady Di's