Another characteristic anecdote betrays his ill-suppressed vexation:—­

’I laughed at myself prodigiously the other day for a piece of absence.  I was writing, on the king’s birthday, and being disturbed with the mob in the street, I rang for the porter and with an air of grandeur, as if I was still at Downing Street, cried, “Pray send away those marrow-bones and cleavers.”

The poor fellow, with the most mortified air in the world, replied, “Sir, they are not at our door, but over the way, at my Lord Carteret’s.”—­“Oh!” said I, “then let them alone; may be, he does not dislike the noise!” I pity the poor porter, who sees all his old customers going over the way too.’

The retirement of Sir Robert from office had an important effect on the tastes and future life of his son Horace.  The minister had been occupying his later years in pulling down his old ancestral house at Houghton, and in building an enormous mansion, which has since his time been, in its turn, partially demolished.  When Harley, Earl of Orford, was known to be erecting a great house for himself, Sir Robert had remarked that a minister who did so committed a great imprudence.  When Houghton was begun, Sir Hynde Aston reminded Sir Robert of this speech.  ‘You ought to have recalled it to me before,’ was the reply; ’for before I began building, it might have been of use to me.’

This famous memorial of Walpolean greatness, this splendid folly, constructed, it is generally supposed, on public money, was inhabited by Sir Robert only ten days in summer, and twenty days in winter; in the autumn, during the shooting season, two months.  It became almost an eyesore to the quiet gentry, who viewed the palace with a feeling of their own inferiority.  People as good as the Walpoles lived in their gable-ended, moderate-sized mansions; and who was Sir Robert, to set them at so immense a distance?

To the vulgar comprehension of the Premier, Houghton, gigantic in its proportions, had its purposes.  He there assembled his supporters; there, for a short time, he entertained his constituents and coadjutors with a magnificent, jovial hospitality, of which he, with his gay spirits, his humourous, indelicate jokes, and his unbounded good-nature, was the very soul.  Free conversation, hard-drinking, were the features of every day’s feast.  Pope thus describes him:—­

  ’Seen him, I have, but in his happier hour,
  Of social pleasure, ill exchanged for power;
  Seen him uncumbered with the venal tribe,
  Smile without art, and win without a bribe.’

Amid the coarse taste one gentle refinement existed:  this was the love of gardening, both in its smaller compass and it its nobler sense of landscape gardening.  ‘This place,’ Sir Robert, in 1743, wrote to General Churchill, from Houghton, ’affords no news, no subject of entertainment or amusement; for fine men of wit and pleasure about town understand neither the language and taste, nor the pleasure of