STRAWBERRY HILL.

Lord Byron has somewhere observed, that it has long been the fashion for the canaille of literary criticism to vituperate Horace Walpole, “because he was a gentleman.” An unfounded observation, which the “Edinburgh Review” has successfully refuted,—and refuted upon the testimony of a deeper experience, and more intimate knowledge of the science of literary economy (if the phrase may be allowed,) than could have been attained by one, whose high rank, and high genius, alike placed him far beyond the dabblings of literary intrigue, or the possibility of intellectual subserviency.

If ministers of state best know every man’s price in the political market, if they are best acquainted with the inherent littleness of that “poor human nature,” to the corruptibility of which they have the means of applying such powerful stimulants, such resistless temptations,—the editors of an influential party and periodical work best know of what stuff those “Swiss of the press” are made, who deal out opinion according “to the measure that is measured unto them” by their taskers,—of what mixed metal the current coin of literary criticism is composed, which ductile, though base, takes the mark of any dye impressed on it by the master-worker of the mint. The Edinburgh Reviewers, therefore, told Lord Byron, and told him truly, that, as a body, the periodical critics of the day bore no malice against Lord Orford, because he was “a gentleman,” and that, far from rank being injurious to literary fame, even he, Lord Byron, the star of the ascendant, stood indebted for the lenity with which the author of “Don Juan” was treated by the most orthodox reviewers in England, at least as much to the elevation of his rank, as to the loftiness of his genius—to his “gentle blood,” as to his splendid talents. The fact is, that if

an author in a coronet has twice the chance of obtaining a favourable judgment, that can be expected by mere plebeian talent, which has only its original merits to plead for those “sins” which all literary “flesh is heir to.”

With what indulgence has not the accomplished, but titled Author of “Matilda” been treated by the reviewing hierarchy of the day, even in spite of the little faux-pas which forms the ground-work of his catastrophe,—in spite of the vertu de moins of his bon-ton heroine,—in spite of a moral produced by a cold in the head (when a more legitimate source of poetical justice was at hand, in the fate and story of many fair contemporary délaissées in real life and living frailty)—nay, in spite even of his whiggism, his liberalism, and his anti-Austrianism; and when rebuked, how gently and with what a patte de velours has this lordly author been treated by the great conservators of public and literary morals. What honours indeed have not been done to the light and pleasant pages of one, who has so agreeably added to the daily increasing list of noble authors,⁠[48] and who is certainly something more than “a wit among lords, and a lord among wits.” But who among the literary toparchs, who are so ready to bring mediocrity into fashion, and to patronize the usurpations that can never interfere with their own acknowledged supremacy—who among the great fame-bestowing reviewers, that “give and take away” the bubble reputation, or try to do it, have turned out the author of “Crohoore of the Bill Hook,” and “John Doe,” for public admiration? And yet in these two great pictures of an unopened vein of national manners, there is as bold etching, and as fine masses of chiaro oscuro, as were ever produced even by the exquisite burin of the Scottish Rembrandt. It was not, then, the gentility of Horace Walpole, that stood in the way of his preferment in reviews, and his popularity with the members of literary coteries. Yet that he has been borne down, from his own to the present time, both by the corporate bodies, and by the honorary members of criticism, is quite true—his claims to genius denied, his pretensions to taste ridiculed, his style termed “slip-slop,” his “Historic Doubts” doubted, and his villa at Strawberry Hill, which he himself has named “a paper fabric to hold an assemblage of curious trifles,” selected as a damning proof against his antiquarianism, by the learned young gentlemen of the “old lady’s logic”⁠[49]⁠—(the learning which draws fools from their obscurity)—who have always affected to consider it as a “Gothic Vatican of Greece and Rome,” and a standing monument of his ignorance of all true virtù. And yet Horace Walpole has established his claims to genius by its own highest prerogative—original invention! His “Castle of Otranto” is the first of its genus,⁠[50] and has consecrated him the founder of that delightful school of literary fiction, of which Radcliffe, Scott, and a host of far inferior spirits, are but the disciples;⁠[51] while his “Correspondence” has supplied to British literature that elegant branch of familiar composition, so long a desideratum. The letters of Horace Walpole have almost the merit of original inventions, compared with all the printed collections which preceded his own, (with the sole exception of those of his contemporary, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu.⁠[52]⁠) The letters of Howell (deemed models in their time) had long been condemned by the standard simplicity of modern taste, which loves epigrams, and hates essays; and had already taken their places on the dusty shelves

The quaint and peremptory style of Swift’s never very familiar epistles (his Journal to Stella excepted), though certainly a pure and sterling specimen of the English language of the Augustan day, wanted that laissez-aller charm, which is the perfection of letter-writing; and Pope’s Voiture-like and spirituel epistles, have all the air of being got up for print, and were evidently as much intended for the public and his publisher, as for his mistress or his friend.⁠[53] Even Addison’s “Letters,” (to whose style and “study” we are ordered by the once colossal dictator of literature—ponderous but not powerful—already a Hercules without his club—to “give up our days and nights,”—a false and despotic counsel! as if every age has not necessarily its own style, dependent upon the progress of society and the development of human intellect and science)—even Addison’s “Letters,” cold, formal, and studied, are as devoid of originality as the travels of which they are supposed to be a journal;⁠[54] while Richardson’s epistles to his literary ladies are tiresome as the homilies of his own “good Mrs. Norton.” Gay (and perhaps Arbuthnot sometimes) has alone given to his letters the charm of that exquisite simplicity, which was the characteristic feature of the talent of the English La Fontaine; and Sterne, whose letters, though witty and agreeable, are affected, came rather too late to be offered as an exception to the studied and pedantic style, which left England without a good letter-writer, while France justly boasted so many.

Good letter-writing is but good conversation carried on by the pen, a familiar talking upon paper, the intimate chit-chat of the fire-side on its travels by post, not invented solely for some “wretch’s aid,” but resorted to by the fond and the feeling to cheat absence of its pang; or by the intellectual, and the social, “for the better carrying on” of that intercourse of mind and imagination, without which life is a blank; or by the gay, and the gossiping, for the circulation of those petty interests and every-day incidents and events, which, if important to none, are resources to all, which prevent time from stagnating, and which originate ideas, the lightness of which gives temporary relief from the great penalties of existence, deep thinking and deep feeling. The best letter, therefore, is that which makes the least demand upon the mind, and the most upon the fancy and the heart. He who writes to be studied, rarely writes to be read; he who writes to be admired, rarely writes to please. Ye Sévignés, and ye Ninons,⁠[55] to whom l’esprit Rambouillet was a source of perpetual ridicule, I invoke the careless spirit that pervades your delightful letters to attest the truth of the observation, and to bear witness in favour of the only letter-writer in the English language, who resembles or who rivals you! The letters of Horace Walpole were written evidently à trait de plume,⁠[56] carelessly and playfully, and yet, like those of the goddess of his idolatry, they are eminently “propres à faire connaître les mœurs, le ton, l’esprit, les usages de son tems;” indeed he himself confesses, in one of his sketching details of the day, thrown off at a heat for the amusement of George Montague, and of his hero Harry Conway, (whose character and adventures, by the by, give a sort of epic interest to his correspondence) that he was “collecting the follies of the age for the benefit of posterity.” He was in fact, and often unconsciously, the Dangeau of his times and class; and in the course of his agreeable and epistolary gossiping, “enshrined in amber” the ephemeral “flies” of fashion, the autocrats of high society, who, insignificant in themselves, illustrate by their reigning manners and vices the history of the age in which they flourish, as “Kitcats” and “schemers,” the despots of Cornelis or Almack’s.⁠[57] He has also left some characters of men, whose names belong to history, finer and truer than history herself could delineate. The true secret of Horace Walpole’s unpopularity with a large class of professional and amateur literati, who deny his claims to that reputation which genius alone can give, is the unmitigated war, the guerre à la mort, which he waged, almost from the go-cart to the tomb, against all pretension, and against all unfounded and self-sufficient claims to distinction. He not only attacked those influential bodies corporate, who have obtained authority over public opinion, merely by assuming it,⁠[58] but with daring scepticism, and moral courage, he attacked the false gods of the popular worship of his day, set up by bad taste, or imposed on credulity by audacious talent.⁠[59] He attacked the cant of Warburton,⁠[60] and the affectation of Rousseau. He attacked the buckram heroes and heroines of Richardson, when it was “religion to adore them,”⁠[61] and declared Sir Charles a bore, and Clarissa a quiz! He attacked the authenticity of Ossian, when it was deemed heresy to doubt it. He attacked the most imposing historical fallacies, which ages had consecrated through party prejudice down to the present times. He attacked scientific pedantry in the “old lady’s logic,” and detected literary imposition in the person of Chatterton. He attacked those solemn and sentimental vices of high society, which were then beginning to make their way to England,—from the voluptuous bowers of the Medici, to the sober mansions of the stern and rigid English gentry:⁠[62] and lastly, and worst, the head and front of his offence, he attacked that loyalty which he himself terms “the loyalty to Kings in possession,”—he attacked its alma mater, Oxford, as a “nursery of bigotry and nonsense;”⁠[63] and made war upon Toryism in its strongest hold—divine-righted prerogative, and royal infallibility and martyrdom.⁠[64] For such an assailant there could be point de salut, and there was none. The blockheads of pretension, more particularly, flew to arms,—a powerful body in all times, “car l’empire des bêtes est un fait constaté dans l’histoire:” and though two generations have nearly passed away since the first blow was struck, still the rancour of assuming mediocrity, wounded in its life-nerve, is a bequest that descends from generation to generation:

The leading trait of Walpole’s intellectual temperament was evidently a 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:

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!

The Star-Chamber! with its horrible name of fearful associations (the boudoir of the Stuarts, where, alas, their subjects boudoient beaucoup)—the Star-Chamber of Strawberry is only an innocent little room, with green walls powdered with little stars, like a modern French paper. Its treasures consist of a fine collection of medals, and it leads by a “trunked ailed” passage to the Holbein Chamber, which looks like a pet-room of Catherine of Arragon; small, gloomy, and magnificent, with chairs from Glastonbury Abbey, and the red hat of her great enemy Wolsey, lying beside that royal-looking bed, whose velvet hangings and waving plumes put one in mind of the restless nights and uneasy dreams which the crowned heads who slept on such couches were wont to endure, when the heads themselves were never very sure upon the shoulders of the despots who bore them. There are too few pictures of the “great original” whose name gives interest to this room to entitle it to such a distinction; what there are, however, are fine, and all the historical pictures are curious and interesting.

The Gallery, long and narrow, in spite of its ceiling from Henry the Eighth’s Chapel, will remind the Italian traveller of the gallery in the royal palace at Turin. Its hangings of crimson damask have no better effect than the crimson damask paper of the present day. It has doors from the Abbey at St. Albans, and recesses from the tomb of Archbishop Bourchier at Canterbury, and yet it is a light, splendid, and cheerful apartment. Its pictures, busts, &c. would fill a tolerably sized catalogue; and besides “Mrs. Keppel in white,” and “Lady Dysart in pink,” and a hundred other such rainbow-dressed “Cynthias of the minute,”⁠[81] there are a number of the works of the best masters, particularly of Zucchero, Vandyke, Jansen, Poussin, &c.; but here, as in the whole collection, the pictures are more interesting as historical portraits, than rare or valuable as paintings, and many of them would curl the critical nose of the modern virtuosi, who, having posted through Italy, return to buy Rembrandts and Raphaels, manufactured for the markets at Amsterdam or the fairs of Leipsic.

The Round Room, which leads to the sanctum sanctorum of the edifice, (the Tribune,) is not to be passed through with careless glance or rapid step, like an ordinary antechamber. It has the merit of all the apartments of Strawberry, in offering an ample study to the antiquarian, or to the curious in the economy of furniture. Its chairs of Aubusson tapestry, its chimney-piece from the tomb of Edward the Confessor, its ceiling from old St. Paul’s, and surbases from the monument of Queen Eleanor in Westminster Abbey, have each their specific merit and interest; while the wreck of Lady Betty Germaine’s collection, and the plunder of Penshurst (from the apartments of Sidney “and Sidney’s sister”) have contributed largely to enrich and adorn it, and to awaken pleasant associations by its inspection. From the former, are the silver chenets, vases, and sconces, which ornament the chimney-piece; from the latter is the fine portrait, by Vandyke, of Lady Dorothy Percy, Countess of Carlisle, and others.

Over the door is a most characteristic picture of Vandyke’s celebrated love, “Mistress Lemon,” painted con amore by the enamoured artist; she represents Judith, and brandishes a sword, but

Here, too, is Salvator Rosa’s fine⁠[82] picture of Jacob travelling from Laban. Whatever was consecrated by the pencil of that great master was precious to the lord of Strawberry, who first acquired a knowledge and professed an adoration of his genius, while yet a boy, in the gallery of his own paternal Houghton.⁠[83] When Lord Orford designed his tribune, he doubtless had the tribune of the Imperial Gallery at Florence in his head. The tribune at Strawberry is, however, of a less simple form. It is a square, with semi-circular recesses in the middle of each side, difficult to describe, but very effective to look at; its sober stone-coloured walls are admirably relieved by its rich gold ornaments, and other splendid decorations of every kind, and every age in the history of the arts. The beautiful Gothic architecture of St. Albans has furnished the models for its windows and niches; and its finely-fretted roof, borrowed from the Chapter-house at York, is terminated by a star of yellow glass, which throws a sort of Claude Lorraine tint over the whole precious apartment. Amidst a number of fine antique busts and statues, is raised a simple Gothic altar of black and gold; it is the tomb of the children of Edward the Third in Westminster Abbey, and its slab of black marble is covered with precious relics and objets d’art of every time and description, silver filigree dishes, vases of amethyst, and sconces of agate, with carved ivory by Verskovis; while a cabinet of rose-wood, with panels and sculpture by Germaine of Paris, curiously carved, rises above it, and contains one of the finest collections of enamels and miniatures perhaps in England: some are by Lens, Carlo Dolce, Boit, Zink, Groth, Isaac Oliver,⁠[84] Petitot, Liotard, &c.;—many are original portraits of the historical characters they represent, and others are fine copies from Luca Giordano, Vanloo, and Holbein; some set in the exquisitely little carved frames of Lejarée, and others mounted in brilliants or precious stones. Here, in the immortal bloom of enamel, still smiles the coarse but beautiful Cleveland, the intriguing but piquante Portsmouth, “Mistress Godfrey, of the York seraglio,” and the lovely Countess d’Olonne (one of the heroines of De Retz’s Memoirs) who had a seraglio of her own, though she is here represented as Diana. Here, too, leers and lours the royal petit-maître of despotism, as he was wont to do at Versailles, in the midst of profligate mistresses and slavish courtiers—Louis the Fourteenth, surrounded by De Fontanges, De la Vallière, et tutte quante; while the wives of England’s Blue Beard are to be found with all their heads on; and the lovely Madame Mazarin, looking as if she had just escaped from St. Evremont’s letters, accounts for the passion of the enamoured philosopher, in loveliness far more bewitching than regular. Vases, cups, and chalices, in gems, jewels, and chrystals, the great seals of great kings, and the pretty bijoux of great ladies, fill up this beautiful répertoire of all that is precious and curious, with rings to satisfy an alderman’s wife, and snuff-boxes in number and beauty à faire crever d’envie Beau B, or Lord P; while vessels of wrought silver, and cups scooped out of amethysts, or set with brilliants, recall the treasures of the guarda roba of the Medici, when Benvenuto Cellini worked for their amusement, and had (as it sometimes fares with talent patronized by grandeur) his labour for his pains. Pictures,⁠[85] lamps, and bronzes, fill up every part of this interesting room, and one leaves it with dazzled eyes, and sated curiosity, by the sombre little passage and small closet adjoining, (full to stuffing, like every other part of the edifice, with objects of curiosity or of art) for that great north bed-chamber, where the readers of French memoirs, and the adorers of Grammont, (or rather of Antoine Hamilton,) may feast their eyes and associations to satiety. The Great North Bed-chamber, considered as a bed-chamber, is en grande tenue, according to the old style of magnificence; its royal canopied bed is plumed with ostrich feathers, and hung with rich tapestry of Aubusson, surrounded by a carpet of curious needlework, and flanked by chairs of ebony and gold, too heavy to move, and too fine to sit in. Its crimsoned damask walls are covered with the most precious portraits. Over the chimney is a great picture of Henry the Eighth, and his children,⁠[86] and a bust of Francis the Second, the boy-husband of the unfortunate Queen of Scots. Immediately opposite to the bed stands that figure, which occasioned so many sleepless nights to the gallants of Whitehall, “La belle Jennings,” afterwards Duchess of Tyrconnel, whose bon mot to James the Second, when, as Lady Lieutenant, she received him at the Castle of Dublin, shows her not to have been of the order of stupid beauties, or like Mademoiselle Stuart, aussi bête que belle; her friend, Mademoiselle Hamilton, (Countess de Grammont,) is placed near her. There is also in this chamber an admirable group, the rehearsal of an opera, with the famous Mrs. Toft, the prima donna of her day, at the harpsichord. Its pendant is a scene from the “Beggar’s Opera,” by Hogarth, with portraits of the original performers.⁠[87] The charming portraits of Ninon de l’Enclos,⁠[88] Hortense Mancini, and Madame de Maintenon, long detain the attention, even from the wonders of the “glass closet,” where a silver perfume box, by Benvenuto Cellini, wedding-gloves of the patriot Hampden’s bride, and the trunked ones of King James, with Von Trump’s tobacco-box, and “a silver-gilt apostle spoon,” belonging to Lord knows who, offer a curious and heterogeneous variety, and mark the successful and arduous researches of the collector after all that was rare and old. The Beauclerc closet, dedicated to the elegant works of the accomplished Lady Diana Beauclerc, the round bed-room, and the great cloister, follow in sight-seeing succession, and each has its separate interest and character. In the second are some fine portraits, and many very pleasing ones: among the latter may be reckoned the portraits of Lady Suffolk, the mistress titré of George the Second, Mrs. Barry and Mrs. Clive, the tragic and comic muses of their time;—there is also a fine head of Oliver Cromwell’s mother. But the Round Bedroom is to Strawberry, what Naples is to the rest of Italy, the ne plus ultra of curiosity: attention is exhausted, eyes are dazzled, and expectation satiated by the time it is reached;⁠[89] and it is with a pleasure unspeakable, that one passes through the great cloister, into the refreshing grounds and gardens, without even stopping to examine those gate-piers, which are taken from the tomb of William de Luda in the cathedral of Ely. The Shell Seat, at the end of the pretty winding shaded walk, which is within view of the Gothic chapel, offers a bel riposo after the fatigue which pleasure ever imposes. This shell seat is a very curious carving in oak, designed by the celebrated Bentley. The shell is a chama. Here the three Graces of the Paphos of Strawberry⁠[90] were wont to repose, to the delight of their flattered and elegant host, who saw even his friends with the eye of an artist. There is but little in the grounds of Strawberry to detain the steps of the visitor, except its beautiful little Chapel in the garden: an edifice of as true Gothic taste and design, as its being copied, à la rigueur, from particular parts of the Cathedral of Salisbury, and the Abbey of St. Edmundsbury, can make it. The interior has all the character of the cells or oratories appertaining to churches or monasteries in Catholic countries:—its altar-piece and altar-picture are curious from their antiquity; the beautiful windows of painted glass are emblazoned with saints and arms and the effigies of kings and queens; a superb shrine faces the door of entrance. In the front stands a superb crucifix, inlaid with mother-of-pearl; on either side, a King of France, and the Virgin Mary, in bronze and faïence, stand upon consoles. The story of the marvellous “trasferimento” of this “holy house” is thus told on a tablet over the door. “The shrine in front was brought, in the year 1768, from the church of Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome, when the new pavement was laid there. This shrine was erected in the year 1256, over the bodies of the holy martyrs, Simplicius, Faustina, and Beatrix, by John James Capoccio and Vinia his wife; and was the work of Peter Cavalini, who made the tomb of Edward the Confessor in Westminster Abbey.”

Such is Strawberry, the cabinet, the toy, the retreat of the gifted son of a great minister, whose talents, intellect, and observation, well fitted him to run the career of his ambitious father: and who, had he been an ambitious or an interested man, had eminent opportunities of indulging either passion to their fullest extent. “I am unambitious, I am disinterested, but I am vain,” observes Mr. Walpole, in a letter to Lord Chatham. Into this frankly acknowledged foible, Strawberry Hill, audits precious collection, entered largely; but the vanity of possessing and showing off this monument of his taste, and knowledge, and industry, and the objects of art they had gathered round him, did not blind Mr. Walpole to the incongruities of the whole, nor to the objections which the pedantry of archi-virtu and the cant of criticism would eventually level at the hochet of one, who had shown so little mercy to the unfounded pretensions and presumptuous mediocrity of that numerically powerful body, in all communities, whose claims to distinction are unsupported by those endowments which should alone command it:—

“In a house, affecting not only obsolete architecture, but pretending to an observance of the custom even in the furniture, the mixture of modern portraits and French porcelaine, and Greek and Roman sculpture, may seem heterogeneous. In truth, I did not mean to make my home so gothic as to exclude convenience and modern luxury. But I do not mean to defend, by argument, a small capricious house. It was built to please my own taste, and realize my own visions. Could I describe the gay but tranquil scene where it stands, and add the beauty of the landscape to the romantic cast of the mansion, it would raise more pleasing sensations than a dry list of curiosities can excite: at least the prospect would recal the good humour of those who might be disposed to condemn the fantastic fabric, and to think it a very proper habitation—as it was the scene that inspired—the author of ‘The Castle of Otranto!’”