‘The Strawberry Gazette,’ Horace once wrote to a fine and titled lady, ‘is very barren of weeds.’  Such, however, was rarely the case.  Peers, and still better, peeresses,—­politicians, actors, actresses,—­the poor poet who knew not where to dine, the Maecenas who was ’fed with dedications’—­the belle of the season, the demirep of many, the antiquary, and the dilettanti,—­painters, sculptors, engravers, all brought news to the ‘Strawberry Gazette;’ and incense, sometimes wrung from aching hearts, to the fastidious wit who professed to be a judge of all material and immaterial things—­from a burlesque to an Essay on history or Philosophy—­from the construction of Mrs. Chenevix’s last new toy to the mechanism of a clock made in the sixteenth century, was lavished there.

Suppose that it is noon-day:  Horace is showing a party of guests from London over Strawberry:—­enter we with him, and let us stand in the great parlour before a portrait by Wright of the Minister to whom all courts bowed.  ‘That is my father, Sir Robert, in profile,’ and a vulgar face in profile is always seen at its vulgarest; and the nex-retrousse, the coarse mouth, the double chin, are most forcibly exhibited in this limning by Wright; who did not, like Reynolds, or like Lawrence, cast a nuance of gentility over every subject of his pencil.  Horace—­can we not hear him in imagination?—­is telling his friends how Sir Robert used to celebrate the day on which he sent in his resignation, as a fete; then he would point out to his visitors a Conversation-piece, one of Reynolds’s earliest efforts in small life, representing the second Earl of Edgecumbe, Selwyn, and Williams—–­all wits and beaux, and habitues of Strawberry.  Colley Cibber, however, was put in cold marble in the anteroom; a respect very Horatian, for no man knew better how to rank his friends than the recluse of Strawberry.  He hurries the lingering guests through the little parlour, the chimneypiece of which was copied from the tomb of Ruthall, Bishop of Durham, in Westminster Abbey.  Yet how he pauses complacently to enumerate what has been done for him by titled belles:  how these dogs, modelled in terra-cotta, are the production of Anne Darner; a water-colour drawing by Agnes Berry; a landscape with gipsies by Lady Di Beauclerk;—­all platonically devoted to our Horace; but he dwells long, and his bright eyes are lighted up as he pauses before a case, looking as if it contained only a few apparently faded, of no-one-knows-who (or by whom) miniatures; this is a collection of Peter Oliver’s best works—­portraits of the Digby family.

How sadly, in referring to these invaluable pictures, does one’s mind revert to the day when, before the hammer of Robins had resounded in these rooms—­before his transcendent eloquence had been heard at Strawberry—­Agnes Strickland, followed by all eyes, pondered over that group of portraits:  how, as she slowly withdrew, we of the commonalty scarce worthy to look, gathered around the spot again, and wondered at the perfect life, the perfect colouring, proportion, and keeping of those tiny vestiges of a bygone generation!