along the river, into the heart of the City. It may be some time before all this can be accomplished; but it would be easy to show that from Chelsea to Millbank, and from Millbank to Blackfriars, it would not be a very difficult or expensive work, that it would not interrupt the trade of the wharfs between Whitehall and Blackfriars, and that the proposed line of embankment would be in furtherance of this object."

LVII. STRAWBERRY HILL.-WALPOLE'S LONDON.

"WHEN I was very young, and in the height of the opposition to my father, my mother wanted a large parcel of bugles; for what use I forget. As they were then out of fashion, she could get none. At last she was told of a quantity in a little shop in an obscure alley in the City. We drove thither; found a great stock; she bought it, and bade the proprietor send it home. He said, ' Whither? To Sir Robert Walpole's.' He asked, coolly, Who is Sir Robert Walpole?'"* "What is Strawberry Hill?" might be a similar question with many persons, were we not living in a somewhat different age from that of Sir Robert Walpole. But it may be asked, with some propriety, "What has Strawberry Hill to do with London?" The maker of Strawberry Hill-the builder-up of its galleries, and tribunes, and Holbein-chambers-the arranger of its "painted glass and gloom" -the collector of its pictures, and books, and bijouterie, says of himself, "I am writing, I am building-both works that will outlast the memory of battles and heroes! Truly, I believe, the one will as much as t'other. My buildings are paper, like my writings, and both will be blown away in ten years after I am dead: if they had not the substantial use of amusing me while I live, they would be worth little indeed." Horace Walpole himself prevented the realization of his own prophecy. It was said of him, even during his lifetime," that he had

* Horace Walpole to the Miss Berrys, March 5, 1791.

+ Horace Walpole to Conway, August 5, 1761.

VOL. III.

H

outlived three sets of his own battlements;" but he nevertheless contrived, by tying up his toy-warehouse and its moveables with entails and jointures through several generations, to keep the thing tolerably entire for nearly half a century after he had left that state of being where "moth and dust do corrupt." And though the paper portion of his "works"-his 'Royal and Noble Authors,' his 'Anecdotes of Painting,' his Historic Doubts,' &c.-are formed of materials not much more durable than his battlements, he was during a long life scattering about the world an abundance of other paper fragments, that have not only lasted ten, twenty, thirty, forty years after he was dead, but which aftertimes will not willingly let die. It was in Strawberry Hill that the everyday thoughts and experiences for the most part centred that have made the letters of Horace Walpole the best record of the manners of the upper ranks during half a century, when very great social changes were working all around. Strawberry Hill and Horace Walpole are inseparably associated in our minds. The house in Arlington Street, from which he sometimes dates, is, like most other West-end houses, a thing distinguished only by its number; and which has no more abiding associations than the chariot which rolls on from its first drawing-room through the necessary decay of cracked varnish and split pannels, until its steps display the nakedness of their original iron, and the dirty rag that was once a carpet is finally succeeded by the luxury of clean straw once a-week. We cannot conceive Horace Walpole in a house with three windows upon a floor, in a formal row of ugly brick brethren. It is in Strawberry Hill, in the "little parlour hung with a stone-colour Gothic paper, and Jackson's Venetian prints "-or in the " charming closet hung with green paper and water-colour pictures"—or in "the room where we always live, hung with a blue and white paper in stripes, adorned with festoons "—that we fancy him writing to Montagu, Mann, Chute, and Conway, in the days when "we pique ourselves upon nothing but simplicity," and Lady Townshend exclaimed of the house, "It is just such a house as a parson's, where the children lie at the foot of the bed." In a few years the owner had visions of galleries, and round towers, and cloisters, and chapels; and then the house became filled with kingly armour, and rare pictures, and cabinets of miniatures by Oliver and Petitot, and Raffaelle china. Then, when Strawberry Hill came to the height of its glory, the owner kept an inn, the sign the Gothic Castle," and his whole time was passed in giving tickets for seeing it, and hiding himself while it was seen.* Lastly came the time when the old man was laid up for weeks with the gout, and the building and curiosity-buying was at an end; and after the Duchess of York had come to see his house in 1793, when he put a carpet on the step of his gate, and matted his court, and presented chocolate upon a salver, he says, here "will end my connexions with courts, beginning with George the First, great-greatgreat-grandfather to the Duchess of York! It sounds as if there could not have been above three generations more before Adam." There never was a place so associated with the memory of one man as Strawberry Hill is with Horace Walpole. There is nothing to confuse us in the recollection. We are not embarrassed with the various branches of the genealogical tree. Horace the first or Horace the second, Horace the great or Horace the little, do not jostle in our memories. Imagination has no great room to play, with a catalogue in hand, and a porter

66

* Horace Walpole to Montagu, Sept. 3, 1763.

watching that no trinkets are stolen, and a mob of people about us, who "admire a lobster or a cabbage in a market-piece, dispute whether the last room was green or purple, and then hurry to the inn for fear the fish should be over-dressed."* Even as the author of The Castle of Otranto' saw the portrait all in white of Lord Deputy Falkland walk out of its frame in the great gallery at Strawberry Hill, so if Mr. Robins had permitted us to wander about the house in the cold twilight, we should most assuredly have seen a dapper little gentleman in embroidered velvet, who would have told us something new worth communicating to our readers. As it is, we must be content without any revelations from Strawberry Hill. The world ought to be content. It possesses some three thousand closely printed pages of private history, gossiped over and committed to paper in great part within those walls. Strawberry Hill has a wonderful resemblance to "the House of Tidings" of Chaucer; and that house

Like each other

"Ne half so quaintly was ywrought."

"Al was the timber of no strength,

Yet it is founded to endure."

But the uses of the poetical and prosaic "House of Tidings" were identical. "And by day in every tide

Be all the doorés open wide,

And by night each one is unshut;
Ne porter is there none to let
No manner tidings in to pace,‡
Ne never rest is in that place,
That it n' is filled full of tidings,
Either loud or of whisperings,
And ever all the house's angles
Is full of rownings§ and of jangles,
Of wars, of peace, of marriages,
Of rests, of labours, of viages,
Of abode, of deathé, and of life,
Of love, of hate, accord, of strife,
Of loss, of lore, and of winnings,
Of heal, of sickness, or leasings,||
Of fair weather and tempestés,
Of qualm, of folk, and of beastés,
Of divers transmutations,

Of estatés and of regions,
Of trust, of drede,¶ of jealousy,
Of wit, of winning, of folly,
Of plenty and of great famine,
Of cheap, of dearth, and of ruin,
Of good or of misgovernment,
Of fire and divers accident."

Chaucer's house was for all time, but it has left very few minute records: Strawberry Hill has reference to a fraction of existence; but for half a century it can boast of the most delightful historiographer of the London world of fashion—a noisy, busy, glittering world at all periods, but in Walpole's pages something more amusing than the respectable monotony of the same world in our better days of prudence and decorum.

* Horace Walpole to Montagu, March 25, 1761. Al-although. ↑ Pace-pass. § Rownings-mutterings. || Leasings-lyings.

I Drede-doubt.

The letters of Horace Walpole cannot at all be regarded as a picture of society in general. He has no distinct notion whatever of the habits of the middle classes. Society with him is divided into two great sections—the aristocracy and the mob. He was made by his times; and this is one of the remarkable features of his times. With all his sympathy for literature, he has a decided hatred for authors that are out of the pale of fashion. Fielding, Johnson, Sterne, Goldsmith, the greatest names of his day, are with him ridiculous and contemptible. He cannot be regarded therefore as a representative of the literary classes of his times. As the son of a great minister he was petted and flattered till his father fell from his power; he says himself he had then enough of flattery. When he mixed among his equals in the political intrigues of the time, he displayed no talent for business or oratory. His feeble constitution compelled him to seek amusement instead of dissipation; and his great amusement was to look upon the follies of his associates and to laugh at them. He was not at bottom an illnatured man, or one without feeling. He affected that insensibility which is the exclusive privilege of high life-and long may it continue so. When Lord Mountford shot himself, and another Lord rejoiced that his friend's death would allow him to hire the best cook in England, the selfish indifference was probably more affected than real. Walpole himself takes off his own mask on one occasion. When he heard of Gray's death, in writing to Chute he apologises for the concern he feels, and adds, "I thought that what I had seen of the world had hardened my heart; but I find that it had formed my language, not extinguished my tenderness." When he speaks of individuals we may occasionally think that the world had formed his language; he is too often spiteful and malicious: but when he describes a class he is not likely much to exaggerate. The esprit de corps would render him somewhat charitable: if he did not "extenuate" he would not set down "in malice," when he was holding up a mirror of himself and of the very people with whom he was corresponding.

In the early part of the last century London saw less of the wealth and splendour of the aristocracy than previous to the Revolution. The great political divisions of the kingdom kept many families away from the Court; and the habits of the first Elector of Hanover who walked into the ownership of St. James's, and of his son and successor, were not very likely to attract the proud and the discontented from the scenes of their own proper greatness. Walpole, writing from Newmarket in 1743, says, "How dismal, how solitary, how scrub does this town look; and yet it has actually a street of houses better than Parma or Modena! Nay, the houses of the people of fashion, who come hither for the races, are palaces to what houses in London itself were fifteen years ago. People do begin to live again now; and I suppose in a term we shall revert to York Houses, Clarendon Houses, &c. But from that grandeur all the nobility had contracted themselves to live in coops of a dining-room, a dark back room, with one eye in a corner, and a closet. Think what London would be if the chief houses were in it, as in the cities in other countries, and not dispersed like great rarity-plums in a vast pudding of country." It was some time before the large houses of the nobility once more made London the magnificent capital which it subsequently became. In the mean time the lordly tenants of the "coops" above described spent a vast deal of their time in places of public resort. Let us cast