But the company are hurrying into a little ante-room, the ceiling of which is studded with stars in mosaic; it is therefore called jocularly, the ‘Star Chamber;’ and here stands a cast of the famous bust of Henry VII., by Torregiano, intended for the tomb of that sad-faced, long-visaged monarch, who always looks as if royalty had disagreed with him.

Next we enter the Holbein Chamber.  Horace hated bishops and archbishops, and all the hierarchy; yet here again we behold another prelatical chimneypiece—­a frieze taken from the tomb of Archbishop Warham, at Canterbury.  And here, in addition to Holbein’s picture of Mary Tudor, Duchess of Suffolk, and of her third husband Adrian Stokes, are Vertue’s copies of Holbein, drawings of that great master’s pictures in Buckingham House:  enough—­let us hasten into the Long Gallery.  Those who remember Sir Samuel Merrick and his Gallery at Goodrich Court will have traced in his curious, somewhat gew gaw collections of armour, antiquities, faded portraits, and mock horses, much of the taste and turn of mind that existed in Horace Walpole.

The gallery, which all who recollect the sale at Strawberry Hill must remember with peculiar interest, sounded well on paper.  It was 56 feet long, 17 high, and 13 wide; yet was neither long enough, high enough, nor wide enough to inspire the indefinable sentiment by which we acknowledge vastness.  We beheld it the scene of George Robins’s triumphs—­crowded to excess.  Here strolled Lord John Russell; there, with heavy tread, walked Daniel O’Connell.  Hallam, placid, kindly, gentle—­the prince of book-worms—­moved quickly through the rooms, pausing to raise a glance to the ceiling—­copied from one of the side aisles of Henry VII.’s Chapel—­but the fretwork is gilt, and there is petitesse about the Gothic which disappoints all good judges.

But when Horace conducted his courtly guests into this his mind-vaunted vaulted gallery, he had sometimes George Selwyn at his side; or Gray—­or, in his old age, ‘my niece, the Duchess of Gloucester,’ leaned on his arm.  What strange associations, what brilliant company!—­the associations can never be recalled there again; nor the company reassembled.  The gallery, like everything else, has perished under the pressure of debt.  He who was so particular, too, as to the number of those who were admitted to see his house—­he who stipulated that four persons only should compose a party, and one party alone be shown over each day—­how would he have borne the crisis, could he have foreseen it, when Robins became, for the time, his successor, and was the temporary lord of Strawberry; the dusty, ruthless, wondering, depreciating mob of brokers—­the respectable host of publishers—­the starving army of martyrs, the authors—­the fine ladies, who saw nothing there comparable to Howell and James’s—­the antiquaries, fishing out suspicious antiquities—­the painters, clamorous over Kneller’s profile of Mrs. Barry—­the virtuous indignant mothers,