quick and delicate perception of the truth of things, moral and material,
in nature and art. The true and unerring tact, that innate endowment by
which the ridiculous as well as the false (and the ridiculous is but an
amusing set-off of the false) is always rapidly got at, lost nothing
of its perfection by his education having been begun and finished in
the closet of one of the shrewdest and cleverest ministers that England
ever possessed. Shut up with old Sir Robert, _tête-à-tête_,[65] he
learned “to laugh at the madness of political ambition,” and discovered
that “happiness did not depend on administration and victories.” In
the galleries of Houghton, amidst the trophies of a palace, his early
taste for the arts was developed, which testified its exquisite justness
in the learned and clever preface, written almost in boyhood, to his
“_Ædes Walpolianæ_.”[66] It was there too he learnt “what a monarch a
man was, who wanted nothing;”[67] and, governed by a conviction which
would have best become a stoic, and by a taste and contempt which were
evidently those of an epicurean, he settled down in early life an
intellectual voluptuary, preferring enjoyment to fame, yet acquiring the
latter, which he so well deserved, while simply occupied in pursuit of
the former. So early as his return from Italy, and during his travels,
his vocation to _virtù_, or “_l’amour pour l’enquitaille_,” as Rabelais
terms it, unequivocally declared itself; but his floating capital of
taste, which was for a time devoted to the classic antique, properly
so called, was soon thrown, for want of a “quick return” in England
(where Roman antiquities are few and bad), into that fund, so rich and
yielding in Great Britain, the antiquities of the middle ages. England
then abounded in relics of the times of the Chaucers, the Spensers, the
Sidneys, and the Shakspeares, relics then neglected and unappreciated.
The “betweenity” which occurred in the interval when the charming Gothic
had declined, and the Palladian had not crept in, was in every respect a
Bœotian age. Then gardens were built, not planted; and the disciples of
Kent, Brown, and Southcote, were still struggling through “clipt hedges
and cockle-shell avenues:” while Sir William Temple’s “natural walls” and
lead-covered grottos, were not yet quite out of fashion, and wildernesses
were still composed of straight walks, and caverns were lined with
looking-glasses.[68] The furniture of aristocratic mansions was then half
German, half French; cumbrous, not venerable—with all the inconveniences
of the antique, without its picturesqueness. While ponderous stuffed
chairs and china monsters filled the apartments of the descendants of
the worthies of Elizabeth’s court, carvings by Gibbons, and portraits by
Holbein, were consigned to lumber-rooms; beds embroidered by the Queen
of Scots, and sweet-bags worked by her maids, were left to moulder,
while a stiff-backed _bergère_, from some _miroitier’s_ shop in the
Rue de Bac, or a china sconce from Sevres, brought any price. Such
were the neglected treasures, which discovered themselves to the most
ardent of antiquarians and collectors, in his various and delightfully
recorded “pilgrimages to the holy lands of Gothic castles and abbeys,”
the hereditary seats of the Byrons, the Howards, the Seymours, the
Russels, the Cavendishes, the Rutlands, the mansions of “Old Bess of
Hardwicke,”[69] and the palace-prisons of captive royalty. It was in
the low-roofed chambers, and nests of closets of Monceaux, Haddon,
Hatfield, Newstead,[70] Althorpe, Hinchinbrook, and Chatsworth, that
Walpole drew “deeper and deeper still” from the stream of antiquarianism,
and was led to unearth those tangible records of past times, which fill
up the blanks in history, with details of society, infinitely more
interesting than any thing the scene-painting pencil of the historian
can preserve: for it is curious to think what a _philosophie des mœurs_
may be drawn from an inquiry into a china-closet, or an inquisition
held on a lumber-room!—what epochs in commerce and manufactures may
be fixed by the dimensions of a coffee-can, or by the fragments of a
suit of hangings!—what traits of manners and morals may be furnished
by hoops of whalebone and bodices of buckram, by the low-cut stomacher
of a Cleveland, or the _négligé_ of a Pompadour—and what lights and
illustrations may be thrown on such works as Grammont, Pepys, and Evelyn,
by the plunder of a Dowager Duchess’s tall-boy, or the _exploitation_ of
the coffers and clothes-presses, the cupboards and dark-closets, in which
the old mansions of old families always abound.
It was in such pictorial and historical mansions that Horace Walpole
imbibed the desire of having a Gothic castle of his own; and, with his
imagination full of the proportions and traceries of Winchester, the
fretted roofs of Netley, the cross-legged knights and the piked-horn
dames, that started from tombs, or walked out of picture frames,[71]
he began to look out for a spot, where he might found a new school for
old things, and arrange around him those objects so early associated in
his mind,—relics, which the arts and history of ages had contributed to
fill his crowded cabinet. He at last found a site whereon to place this
long-built “castle in the air” of his antiquarian dreams; but he neither
sought nor found it amidst the romantic shades of Cumberland, nor the old
feudal territory of Yorkshire; he simply picked it up, accidentally, with
other _bijoux_, at Mrs. Chenevix’s toy-shop, then the _petit Dunkirk_ of
London. His own account of the acquisition is too pleasant to need an
apology for quoting it:—
“You perceive by my date that I am got into a new camp, and have left my
tub at Windsor. It is a little plaything house, that I got out of Mrs.
Chenevix’s shop, and is the prettiest bauble you ever saw. It is set in
enamelled meadows, with filigree hedges:
‘A small Euphrates through the piece is roll’d,
And little fishes wave their wings in gold.’
Two delightful roads, that you would call dusty, supply me continually
with coaches and chaises: barges, as solemn as Barons of the Exchequer,
move under my window: Richmond Hill and Ham walks bound my prospect;
but, thank God! the Thames is between me and the Duchess of Queensberry.
Dowagers as plenty as flounders inhabit all around; and Pope’s ghost
is just now skimming under my window by a most poetical moonlight. I
have about land enough to keep such a farm as Noah’s, when he set up in
the ark with a pair of each kind; but my cottage is rather cleaner than
I believe his was, after they had been cooped up together forty days.
The Chenevixes had tricked it out for themselves; up two pair of stairs
is what they call Mr. Chenevix’s library, furnished with three maps,
one shelf, a bust of Sir Isaac Newton, and a lame telescope without any
glasses. Lord John Sackville predecessed me here, and instituted certain
games called Cricketalia, which have been celebrated this very evening,
in honour of him, in a neighbouring meadow. You will think I have removed
my philosophy from Windsor, with my tea-things, hither; for I am writing
to you in all this tranquillity while a parliament is bursting about my
ears.”
The little tenement so playfully described, had already a fine antique
cast of character, and was rich in all the advantages of dark closets,
and “passages that led to nothing.” It had been built in 1698, had been
tenanted alternately by a profane comedian and a reverend divine—for
there Talbot, Bishop of Durham, had written his Homilies, and Cibber his
play of “The Refusal, or Lady’s Philosophy.” The site, too, abounded in
agreeable associations, consonant to the habits and tastes of the elegant
proprietor—the air still breathed of Pope, Swift, and Gay; the villas
still bloomed where the witty Lady Mary, the charming Lady Hervey, and
“Grammont’s daughter,”[72] had recently resided. Still it must be owned,
that, judged by modern ideas of the picturesque in villas, by the dictum
of Price or Knight, “the capabilities” of Strawberry were few. It wanted
space and prospect, and sometimes made its Gothic reformer sigh “with
Chute, that Battel Abbey had not been to be sold at Mrs. Chenevix’s
toy-shop, as Strawberry was.” Yet its defects, such as they were,
harmonized with the style of the old-English villa or country-house,
whose high walls, deep moats, and dismal clipt hedges excluded all view
but of their own dreariness. Even the narrow dusty avenues, and little
green lanes, that led to Strawberry, both from Twickenham and the Thames,
were all in keeping; for such were “the crack-skull roads” leading to
the rural residences of the great, in former times—by-ways which obliged
_La superbe Hamilton_ and _La belle Muskerry_ to mount their palfreys,
and jog on behind their gentlemen ushers on pillions, when they left
the court at Whitehall, to visit their friends in the country, or to
participate in the gaieties of Newmarket and “the Wells.”
Many Palladian palaces, even of a more recent day, were chosen with
a view to security and shelter, rather than to taste and views. The
spacious and splendid Mereworth, “though it had some prospect, was built
in the centre of a moat, and sprinkled with little ponds.” The shades
of Strawberry, however, soon began to extend beyond their original five
acres. The square-built little toy-house swelled out more nearly to
the dimensions of a feudal mansion, and was angled into cabinets, and
rounded into towers, lengthened by galleries, and raised by battlements;
and finally became the repertory of all those treasures that the taste,
learning, and research of its owner could rescue from the depredations of
time, and the neglect of tasteless and high-born ignorance.
“My collection” (says Walpole, in excuse for his passion for building
and Gothicism) “is too great to be humbly lodged.” The castle, however,
as now existing, did not raise its towers all of a sudden, like those
of Bagatelle. It was reformed, at different times, by alterations and
additions “to the old small house.” The library, and refectory, or great
parlour, were entirely new-built in 1753; the gallery, round tower, great
cloister, and cabinet, in 1760 and 1761; the north bed-chamber in 1770;
and the Beauclerc tower, with the hexagon closet, in 1776.
The greatest hold over the imagination, the most powerful tie which time
in its course lets fall upon the feelings and the mind, is that which
comes of early associations; and even the book read, the picture gazed
on, in that epoch of life when all is seen decked in prismatic hues,
are never forgotten, and are always over-rated in the fondness of old
recollections. It happened that at such an epoch, Strawberry Hill and
the “Walpoliana” were the picture and the book, to which the writer of
this rapid sketch was indebted for some of those new and delightful
impressions, which such objects are calculated to make on the young
and the imaginative, to whom pictures and books are such novelties and
such enjoyments; and being then the resident of an Irish country-house,
where a blind Irish harper was her _Magnus Apollo_, and the _fadaises_
of Della Crusca her _ne plus ultra_ of literary acquirement, Strawberry
Hill and the “Walpoliana” became her Mecca and her Talmud. To visit
Strawberry Hill was a vow, made rather in devotion than in hope; while to
peruse the works of its master was a desire, which time, and an intimate
acquaintance with their delightful pages, has rather sharpened than
diminished. Years swept on, some feathered with bird of paradise wings,
and others heavily and slowly, like the sailing flight of birds of less
happy omen; but still they swept on: and scenes far more distant and
sites far more remote than the “show-box of Twickenham” were visited.
“The Alps, the Apennines, and river Po,” and other lands and streams
as classic, were traversed and navigated, till they had become as
familiarized to the Irish wanderer’s mind as her own native Howth
or Liffey,—the Tiber and Soracte of her national partiality in less
travelled days; and yet the vow to visit Strawberry, though not
accomplished, was not forgotten, and it still held its place, while
other vows had faded away, with the airy nothings of which they were
the objects. The day, however, at last arrived,[73] when Strawberry was
visited, and with an interest as intense as the Vatican ever excited
in the breast of some long-vowed pilgrim to St. Peter’s shrine. It
was just such a day as the founder himself would have selected for
“showing off” to the “Bedford court,” and “Princess Emily,” or the “De
Bouffiers and De Beaumonts,” when the noble host was wont to draw his
bed-curtains, and ask “Harry if the sun shone?”[74] and beheld with a
rapture he so pleasantly ridiculed himself (as indeed he did all his
own peculiarities), that Strawberry was all “green and gold.” Who ever
has left England to visit the finest scenery in the finest climes, and
returned to glide along the shores of the Thames on such a day (days in
England “few and far between,”) will scarcely hesitate to admit, what
it is impossible not to feel, that, compared to those shores, there is
nothing equal in beauty and richness in the river scenery of any other
country in Europe. The pilgrimage to Strawberry was performed by water,
in preference “to one of those two delightful roads that might be called
dusty;” and the barge was anchored in one of those little creeks, where,
after “holding a chapter with Chute,” the antiquarian and his friend
were wont to watch the arrival of the boat, which was “freighted with
old window-frames, old tombs, and old chairs, of the time of Edward the
Sixth.” A freight was expected with an interest as intense as any Antonio
of the Rialto ever felt as he watched the entrance of “his argosie” into
the Lagunas of Venice: for the passion, not the object, is the thing,
and there is a fanaticism in collecting, which “none but collectors
know,” or can appreciate. From this little creek and its stepping-stone
landing-place, a scrubby sort of a bank on one side, a high dull wall
on the other, (but, still a wall, “castellated after the manner of that
which surrounded Aston House,”) and some thirty or forty yards of a
narrow rutted road, led to one of the gates of the castle, which, truth
to tell, seemed from this point to be built like the towers of Monceaux,
for the purpose of “seeing nothing at all.” All around, the modern
antique had the true characteristic feudal air of loneliness—the silence
(though not the waste) which despotic power ever creates around it, and
which the temporary absenteeism of the great lords of great mansions,
even in England, so well represents in its effects. This, however, but
deepened an illusion, which was soon dispelled by the appearance of the
_custode_ of the castle, who replied to the tolling of the porter’s
bell:—no grim gruff porter of the olden times, with staff and scutcheon,
and beard and belt, and buff coat and bluff air, but a smart, comely,
_rondelette_ little housekeeper, all frills and falbalas, welcomed our
arrival, of which she had been previously forewarned,[75] and playing
with her keys, as the ladies in the Spectator played with their fans,
alertly and civilly proceeded to do the honours of Strawberry—not a
little surprised, from the first starting, to find that one of the
sight-seers at least had a _catalogue raisonné_ in her head, which
superseded the necessity of any other, and who inquired for the “Holbein
chamber,” and the “Star chamber,” and the “Cabinet,” with a familiarity
that astonished the housekeeper of Strawberry, full as much as the lord
of Strawberry himself, on a similar visit, surprised the housekeeper
of Althorpe.[76] On entering the north gate, (to those well read in the
legends of Strawberry,) the “Abbot’s garden” may be at once recognised,
to the right, parted off by an iron skreen-work. The “Abbot’s garden”
has been often sneered at for its miniature dimensions, and, indeed, it
is not much larger than an old lady’s flower-knot in Bloomsbury;[77] but
it is quite as large as St. Francis’s garden in the magnificent abbey
of Ancisa, and larger than the little garden allotted to the friars and
monks of that spacious and beautiful monastery, the Certosa of Pavia. It
is in strict keeping with the order of things it is meant to represent:
some few and fine flowers were struggling through the crusted earth,
covered with dust, probably the _dernier rejetton_ of the “seeds from
Sunbury,” sown by that hand, which, like them, is now itself but dust.
The iron skreen, though so carelessly passed by the uninitiated as an
old gate, is nevertheless a fine copy from the tomb of Roger Niger,
Bishop of London, in old St. Paul’s; even the common-looking blue and
white china vase, in the adjoining little cloister, which looks like an
old cracked foot-pail of a lady’s dressing-room, has its interest, in
being the vase on whose verge the “pensive Selina reclined,” whose death
is immortalized by the muse of Gray;[78] and the half-defaced bas-relief
head in marble, inserted in the wall, though modern sight-seers scarcely
pause to look upon it, once rivetted the enamoured Tasso: it is the
portrait of the object of his love and his misfortune, Eleanor D’Este.
The hall of the castle is small and gloomy, paved with tiles, and
lighted by arched painted-glass windows: its dimensions are in utter
contradiction to the generally received ideas of Gothic halls, as taken
from those described in the romances of Mrs. Radcliffe and her imitators;
but Gothic apartments were not capacious. The royal chamber where the
Queen of Scots took her last supper, was scarcely larger than a modern
clothes-press; and a hall sixty by forty, in one of the finest old
castles in England, “was deemed so spacious that, like a leviathan, it
swallowed up all the other chambers.” Even “the great old gallery at
Woburn” was but a “bad room, powdered with little stars;” and low roofs,
nests of closets, mural cabinets, and slips of galleries, were much more
consonant to the manners of times when society only collected _en petits
pelotons_, under the influence of friendship or fear. In modern days,
on the contrary, every great mansion must have a room large enough, at
least, to hold its five hundred select friends, and halls, for flambeaux
and footmen, of proportionate dimensions.
On the left of the hall, (approached by a narrow passage, lighted by a
painted glass window, with the arms of Queen Elizabeth, and the date
1567 carved in wood above it) is the Refectory, or “great parlour”—a
great parlour thirty feet by twenty! Still this great parlour (scarcely
large enough to serve for a _salon-à-boire_ after dinner in a modern
mansion) is quite as large as the _salas_ of the old Lombardy castles,
or as the _sals-à-manger_ of the ancient châteaux of France. It has many
interesting if not precious pictures; such as “the Conversation,” by
Reynolds, which represents the old library at Strawberry, and the group
round the table in its centre, consisting of the witty George Selwyn,
Lord Edgecomb, and Mr. Williams; the second Lady Walpole (the Moll
Skerrett of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu), as a shepherdess, and a group
of the Waldegrave beauties. Here, too, beakers of Indian porcelain,
pails of Chelsea china, and vases of Roman _faïence_ mingle their
remote epochs in amicable confusion, against all rule and chronological
_virtù_; while skreens, worked and embroidered by celebrated coronetted
beauties, (though interesting to the noble owner, to whom so many of
such tributes were presented) now only look like the rubbish furnished
from the looms of the Minervas of a Paddington boarding-school to the
parlours of their parents in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. The ancient bellows
and altar candlestick of the ante-room, have their own charms for the
antiquarian, as Dryden’s head and Cibber’s bust[79] possess for the
dramatic amateur. The china closet, at the first glimpse, looks like
any body’s china-closet, and, to the unlearned, is neither striking
nor interesting; but to those who can trace in its little ceiling
the roof of the pretty room at the Borghese Villa at Frescati, or a
chimney-piece copied from an old window at the ancient seat of the
Grimstones (Broadfield Hall, in Essex), it is not unimportant. Regiments
of Worcester china bowls, phalanxes of Sevres mustard-pots, with cups,
and dishes, and narrow-necked bottles, and wide-mouthed ewers, and
mugs, and jugs, of no very striking appearance, are turned from with a
sneer, by those who know not the history of this frail but venerable
collection. But when cups have been painted by Pietro Cortona, and plates
by Raffael, and dishes by Giulio Romano; when green-glass bottles turn
out to be Roman lacrymatories, and a china figure to be Michael Angelo’s
Bacchus, then the China-closet becomes a precious museum: and one regrets
that its dimmed stained-glass windows do not throw more light upon
treasures consecrated alike by the hand of time and of genius. The Yellow
bed-chamber would be simply a yellow bed-chamber (an unbecoming colour,
_par parenthèse_, for a “sleeping beauty,” if a brunette, who should
always choose _couleur de rose_,) but for its pictures; among which those
always amusing portraits (_pour le moins_) of the heroes and heroines
of the Grammont memoirs, long detain spectators, who, like Walpole, and
the writer of this sketch, have “the Grammont madness upon them.”[80]
The principal of these worthies is that modernly white-washed insolvent
in morals, Charles the Second himself, with some half dozen of his own
and his brother’s sultanas, the Sedley, the Richmond, the Portsmouth,
the Cleveland, the Churchill, and “Mistress Philadelphia Saunders.” This
group, nineteen in number, (Sacharissa excepted) made a part of the
collection of Jervas, the friend and laureate-painter of Pope.
The Breakfast-parlour, with its hangings of blue and white paper,
and its draperies of blue and white linen, has, according to the
sumptuousness of modern furniture, a very ordinary appearance. But when
its interesting miniatures catch the eye, its “Venitia, Lady Digby,
that extraordinary beauty of an extraordinary fame,” its Mary Lepell
(Lady Hervey), its _belle des belles_ (the Duchess de Montbazon), and
its Princess Palatine (of Madame de Sévigné’s letters), its unfortunate
Earl of Essex, and its heroic Charlotte de la Trémouille, with a score
of other historical heads; then the little blue and white breakfast-room
is lingered in with pleasure, and left with regret, even for the green
closet, with its multitude of curious pictures, or for the great
armoury, whose chief relic is the suit of mail worn by the great Earl of
Warwick, when he marched upon Westminster-hall, in that happy epoch when
parliaments were to be awed by a man in armour, and laws submitted to
spears and quivers—the good old times!
The Library has all the antique caste and sombre colouring of a private
room (once called closet) of the great men, and the studious ones of
the middle ages. The books are ranged in pierced Gothic arches; the
chimney-piece a tomb from Westminster Abbey; and shields, arms, and
lozenges, fill up every corner. The pictures are curious and historical,
and the fine old silver-gilt clock, the gift of Henry the Eighth to
Anna Boleyn, presents a piece of ponderous gallantry, very different
from the _bijou_ of _or moulu_ (often a poem in design, a picture in
combination) which a modern _merveilleux_ offers to the object of his
lukewarm devotions, showy and light as the times it represents, and the
hours of her whose actions it does _not_ govern. Among the rare books in
the splendid collection of this fine library, “The Book of the French
Portraits in the Time of Francis the First,” which belonged to Brantome,
who has written in the precious pages, in his own precious autograph, the
names of many of the originals of the pictures, is _the_ book!