the inanimate world.  My flatterers here are all mutes:  the oaks, the beeches, the chestnuts, seem to contend which best shall please the lord of the manor.  They cannot deceive; they will not lie.  I in sincerity admire them, and have as many beauties about me as fill up all my hours of dangling, and no disgrace attending me, from sixty-seven years of age.  Within doors we come a little nearer to real life, and admire, upon the almost speaking canvas, all the airs and graces the proudest ladies can boast.’

In these pursuits Horace cordially shared.  Through his agency, Horace Mann, still in the diplomatic service, at Florence, selected and purchased works of art, which were sent either to Arlington Street, or to form the famous Houghton Collection, to which Horace so often refers in that delightful work, his ‘Anecdotes of Painting.’

Amongst the embellishments of Houghton, the gardens were the most expensive.

‘Sir Robert has pleased himself,’ Pulteney, Earl of Bath, wrote, ’with erecting palaces and extending parks, planting gardens in places to which the very earth was to be transported in carriages, and embracing cascades and fountains whose water was only to be obtained by aqueducts and machines, and imitating the extravagance of Oriental monarchs, at the expense of a free people whom he has at once impoverished and betrayed.’

The ex-minister went to a great expense in the cultivation of plants, bought Uvedale’s ‘Hortus Siccus;’ and received from Bradley, the Professor of Botany at Cambridge, the tribute of a dedication, in which it was said that ’Sir Robert had purchased one of the finest collections of plants in the kingdom.’

What was more to his honour still, was Sir Robert’s preservation of St. James’s Park for the people.  Fond of outdoor amusements himself, the Premier heard, with dismay, a proposal on the part of Queen Caroline to convert that ancient park into a palace garden.  ‘She asked my father,’ Horace Walpole relates, ’what the alteration might possibly cost?’—­Only three crowns’ was the civil, witty, candid answer.  The queen was wise enough to take the hint.  It is possible she meant to convert the park into gardens that should be open to the public as at Berlin, Mannheim, and even the Tuileries.  Still it would not have been ours.

Horace Walpole owed, perhaps, his love of architecture and his taste for gardening, partly to the early companionship of Gray, who delighted in those pursuits.  Walpole’s estimation of pictures, medals, and statues, was however the fruit of a long residence abroad.  We are apt to rail at continental nations; yet had it not been for the occasional intercourse with foreign nations, art would have altogether died out among us.  To the ‘Grandes Tours,’ performed as a matter of course by our young nobility in the most impressionable period of their lives we owe most of our noble private collections.  Charles I. and Buckingham, renewed,