|TO the rigorous exactitudes of modern realism it may seem an almost
hopeless task to revive the details of a day in a Twickenham Villa when
George the Third was King. And yet, with the aid of Horace Walpole's
letters, of the 'Walpoliana' of Pinkerton, and, above all, of the
catalogue of Strawberry Hill printed by its owner in 1774, there is no
insurmountable difficulty in deciding what must probably have been the
customary course of events. Nothing is needed at the outset but
to assume that you had arrived, late on the previous night, at the
embattled Gothic building on the Teddington Road, and that the fatigues
of your journey had left you little more than a vague notion of your
host, and a fixed idea that the breakfast hour was nine. Then, after
carrying with you into the chintz curtains of the Red Bedchamber an
indistinct recollection of Richardson's drawings of Pope and his mother,
and of Bermingham's 'owl cut in paper,' which you dimly make out with
your candle on the walls, you would be waked at eight next morning
by Colomb, the Swiss valet (as great a tyrant over his master as his
compatriot Canton in the 'Clandestine Marriage'), and in due time would
repair to the blue-papered and blue-furnished Breakfast Room, looking
pleasantly on the Thames. Here, coasting leisurely round the apartment,
you would probably pause before M. de Carmontel's double picture of your
host's dead friend, Madame du Deffand, and her relative the Duchesse de
Choiseul, or you would peer curiously at the view of Madame de Sevigné's
hotel in the 'Rue Coulture St. Catherine.' Presently would come a patter
of tiny feet, and a fat, and not very sociable, little dog, which had
once belonged to the said Madame du Deffand, would precede its master,
whom you would hear walking, with the stiff tread of an infirm person,
from his bedroom on the floor above. Shortly afterwards would enter a
tall, slim, frail-looking figure in a morning-gown, with a high, pallid
forehead, dark brilliant eyes under drooping lids, and a friendly, but
forced and rather unprepossessing smile. Tonton (as the little dog was
called), after being cajoled into a semblance of cordiality, would be
lifted upon a small sofa at his master's side, the teakettle and heater
would arrive, and tea would be served in cups of fine old white embossed
Japanese china. And then, the customary salutations exchanged and over,
would gradually begin, in a slightly affected fashion, to which you
speedily grow accustomed, that wonderful flow of talk which (like
Praed's Vicar's)=
```'Slipped from politics to puns,
````And passed from Mahomet to Moses,'--=
that endless stream of admirably told stories, of recollections graphic
and humorous, of sallies and _bons mots_, of which Horace Walpole's
extraordinary correspondence is the _cooled_ expression, but of the
vivacity and variety of which, enhanced as they were by the changes
in the speaker's voice and look, and emphasized by his semi-French
gesticulation, it is impossible to give any adequate idea. A glance
across the river would suggest an anecdote of her Grace the Duchess
of Queensberry: a falling spoon, a _mot_ by Lady Townshend. Upon
yesterday's execution at Tyburn would follow a vivid picture of the
deaths of Balmerino and Kilmarnock; or a reference to your ride from
London of the night before, would usher in a full and particular account
how the voluble and fascinating gentleman before you, with the great
chalk stones in his fingers, was once all but shot through the head by
the highwayman James Maclean.
Breakfast over, and a liberal bowl of bread-and-milk tossed out of window
to the troops of squirrels that come flocking in from the high trees
round the lawn, your host would invite you to make the tour of the
grounds, adding (if it were May) that his favourite lilacs were well
worth the effort. He would astonish you by going out in his slippers and
without a hat; and, in reply to your ill-concealed astonishment, would
laughingly compare himself to the Indian in the 'Spectator' who said
he was 'all face.' Passing by the Abbot's garden, with its bright
parterres, he would lead you to the pretty cottage he had built on the
site of the old residence of his deceased tenant Richard Francklin, once
printer of that scurrilous 'Craftsman' in which Pulteney and Bolingbroke
had so persistently assailed his father. In its sunny, print-hung
tea-room, with the 'Little Library' at the side, he would show you the
picture of his friend Lady Hervey, once the 'beautiful Molly Lepel' of
Pulteney and Chesterfield's ballad, and would tell you that the frame
was carved by the same Grinling Gibbons to whom we owe the bronze statue
of King James the Second in the Privy Garden at Whitehall. Thence you
would pass to the chapel in the wood, with its stained-glass pictures of
Henry the Third and his Queen from Bexhill Church, and its shrine from
Santa Maria Maggiore at Rome; and he would explain that the roof was
designed by that unimpeachable authority in Gothic, Mr. Chute of the
Vyne, in Hampshire; that George Augustus Selwyn had given him the great
earthen pot at the door; and that the carved bench in the ante-chapel
had been contrived by no less a person than the son of the famous
'Ricardus Aristarchus,' Master of Trinity, the--=
```'mighty Scholiast, whose unwearied pains
``Made Horace dull, and humbled Milton's strains--'=
as he would quote from the 'Dunciad' of the late lamented Mr. Pope.
Richard Bentley the younger, he would remind you, had also drawn some
excellent illustrations to Gray (the originals of which he will show you
later in the library); and meanwhile he invites your attention at the
end of the winding walk to another masterpiece from the same ingenious
brain--a huge oaken seat shaped like a shell, in which once sat together
three of the handsomest women in England--the Duchess of Hamilton, the
Duchess of Richmond, and the Countess of Ailesbury. If you were still
intelligently interested, and your host still unfatigued (for he is
capricious and easily tired), you would pass from the garden to the
private printing-press, the 'Officina Arbuteana' as he christens it,
next the neighbouring farmyard. Here you would be introduced to the
superintendent and occasional secretary, Mr. Thomas Kirgate, who, if
so minded, would exhibit to you a proof of Miss Hannah More's poem of
'Bishop Bonner's Ghost' (which his patron is kindly setting up for
her), or then and there strike you off a piping-hot 'pull' of the latest
quatrain to those charming Miss Berrys who are now inhabiting 'Little
Strawberry' hard by, once tenanted by red-faced, good-humoured Mrs.
Clive. As you return at last to the house, your guide would almost
certainly pause in the Little Cloister at the entrance beside the blue
and white china tub for goldfish in which was drowned that favourite cat
whose fate was immortalized by Gray; and, lifting the label, he would
read the poet's words:=
```''T was on this lofty Vase's side,
````Where China's gayest Art has dy'd
```The azure Flow'rs, that blow,
```Demurest of the tabby kind,
```The pensive Selima reclin'd,
````Gaz'd on the Lake below.' * =
* There is one of these labels in the Dyce Collection at
South Kensington.
Once more under Bentley's japanned tin lantern in the gloomy little
hall, your host, pending the scribbling of half-a-dozen pressing
letters' to Lady Ossory, Mr. Pinkerton, or one or other of his many
correspondents, would beg you to await him in the Picture Gallery. Here,
long before you had exhausted your admiration of the Emperor Vespasian
in basalt, or the incomparable Greek Eagle from the baths of Caracalla,
he would resume his post of _cicerone_, leading you almost at once to
the portraits of his three beautiful nieces, Edward Walpole's daughters,
one of whom, painted by Reynolds, had been fortunate enough to marry
King George's own brother, William Henry, Duke of Gloucester (a fact of
which her uncle Horace is ill-disguisedly proud). From the Gallery you
would pass to the Round Drawing-Room, whose chief glory was Vasari's
'Bianca Capello;' and thence to the adjoining Tribune, a curious
yellow-lit chamber, with semicircular recesses, in which were
accumulated most of the choicest treasures of Strawberry,--miniatures by
Cooper and the Olivers, enamels by Petitot and Zincke, gems from Italy,
bas-reliefs in ivory, coins and seal-rings and reliquaries and filigree
work, in the dispersed profusion of which you would afterwards dimly
recall such items as a silver bell carved with masks and insects by
Benvenuto Cellini, a missal attributed to Raphael, a bronze Caligula
with silver eyes, and a white snuff-box with a portrait purporting to be
a gift from Madame de Sévigné in the Elysian Fields, but sent in reality
by the faithful Madame du Deffand. Each object would bring its train
of associations and traditions; and the fading of the 'all-golden
afternoon' would find your companion still promising fresh marvels in
the yet unexplored rooms beyond, where are the speculum of cannel coal
once used by the notorious starmonger, Dr. John Dee; the red hat of his
Eminence Cardinal Wolsey; and the very spurs worn by King William the
Third, of immortal memory, at the ever-glorious Battle of the Boyne.
With four o'clock would come dinner, eaten probably in the Refectory,
a room consecrated chiefly to the family portraits, conspicuous among
which, in blue velvet, was your host by Richardson. The repast was
'of Attic taste,' but with very little wine, as Walpole himself drank
nothing but iced water, and 'coffee upstairs' was ordered with such
promptitude as to afford the visitor but scanty leisure for lingering
over the bottle. About five you migrated to the Round Drawing-Room,
where your entertainer, after recommending you to replenish your box
with Fribourg's snuff from a canister of which the hiding-place was an
ancient marble urn in the window-seat, would take up his station on the
sofa, and resume his inexhaustible flood of memories and reflections,
always bright, often striking, and never wearisome. Once, perhaps, he
would rise to exhibit the closet he had built for Lady Di. Beauclerk's
seven drawings in soot-water to his own tragedy of the 'Mysterious
Mother;' or he would adjourn for an hour to the Library, to turn over
his unrivalled collection of Hogarth's prints; or to show you Lady Mary
Wortley Montagu's 'Milton,' or the identical 'Iliad' and 'Odyssey' from
which Pope made his translations, or the long row of books printed at
the 'Officina Arbuteana.' But he would gravitate sooner or later to his
old vantage-ground on the sofa, whence, unhasting, unresting, he would
discourse most excellent anecdote into the small hours, when the chintz
curtains of the Red Bedchamber would again receive his bewitched and
bewildered, but still unsatiated, visitor. And so would end your day at
Horace Walpole's Gothic Castle of Strawberry Hill.