Then Horace—­we fear it was not till his prime was past, and a touch of gout crippled his once active limbs—­points to a picture of Rose, the gardener (well named), presenting Charles II. with a pine-apple.  Some may murmur a doubt whether pine-apples were cultivated in cold Britain so long since.  But Horace enforces the fact; ‘the likeness of the king,’ quoth he, ’is too marked, and his features are too well known to doubt the fact;’ and then he tells ’how he had received a present the last Sunday of fruit—­and from whom.’

They pause next on Sir Peter Lely’s portrait of Cowley—­next on Hogarth’s Sarah Malcolm, the murderess of her mistress; then—­and doubtless, the spinster ladies are in fault here for the delay,—­on Mrs. Damer’s model of two kittens, pets, though, of Horace Walpole’s—­for he who loved few human beings was, after the fashion of bachelors, fond of cats.

They ascend the staircase:  the domestic adornments merge into the historic.  We have Francis I.—­not himself, but his armour:  the chimneypiece, too, is a copy from the tomb-works of John, Earl of Cornwall, in Westminster Abbey; the stonework from that of Thomas, Duke of Clarence, at Canterbury.

Stay awhile:  we have not done with sacrilege yet; worse things are to be told, and we walk with consciences not unscathed into the Library, disapproving in secret but flattering vocally.  Here the very spirit of Horace seemed to those who visited Strawberry before its fall to breathe in every corner.  Alas! when we beheld that library, it was half filled with chests containing the celebrated MSS. of his letters; which were bought by that enterprising publisher of learned name, Richard Bentley, and which have since had adequate justice done them by first-rate editors.  There they were:  the ‘Strawberry Gazette’ in full;—­one glanced merely at the yellow paper, and clear, decisive hand, and then turned to see what objects he, who loved his books so well, collected for his especial gratification.  Mrs. Damer again! how proud he was of her genius—­her beauty, her cousinly love for himself; the wise way in which she bound up the wounds of her breaking heart when her profligate husband shot himself, by taking to occupation—­perhaps, too, by liking cousin Horace indifferently well.  He put her models forward in every place.  Here was her Osprey Eagle in terra-cotta, a masterly production; there a couvre-fire, or cur-few, imitated and modelled by her.  Then the marriage of Henry VI.  Figures on the wall; near the fire is a screen of the first tapestry ever made in England, representing a map of Surrey and Middlesex; a notion of utility combined with ornament, which we see still exhibited in the Sampler in old-fashioned, middle-class houses; that poor posthumous, base-born child of the tapestry, almost defunct itself; and a veritable piece of antiquity.

Still more remarkable in this room was a quaint-faced clock, silver gilt, given by Henry VIII. to Anne Boleyn; which perchance, after marking the moments of her festive life, struck unfeelingly the hour of her doom.