as they passed by the portraits of the Duchess de la Valliere, and of Ninon de l’Enclos, and remarked, or at all events they might have remarked, that the company on the floor was scarcely much more respectable than the company on the walls—­the fashionables, who herded together, impelled by caste, that free-masonry of social life, enter the Beauclerk closet to look over Lady Di’s scenes from the ’Mysterious Mother’—­the players and dramatists, finally, who crowded round Hogarth’s sketch of his ‘Beggars’ Opera,’ with portraits, and gazed on Davison’s likeness of Mrs. Clive:—­how could poor Horace have tolerated the sound of their irreverent remarks, the dust of their shoes, the degradation of their fancying that they might doubt his spurious-looking antiquities, or condemn his improper-looking ladies on their canvas?  How, indeed, could he?  For those parlours, that library, were peopled in his days with all those who could enhance his pleasures, or add to their own, by their presence.  When Poverty stole in there, it was irradiated by Genius.  When painters hovered beneath the fretted ceiling of that library, it was to thank the oracle of the day, not always for large orders, but for powerful recommendations.  When actresses trod the Star Chamber, it was as modest friends, not as audacious critics on Horace, his house, and his pictures.

Before we call up the spirits that were familiar at Strawberry—­ere we pass through the garden-gate, the piers of which were copied from the tomb of Bishop William de Luda, in Ely Cathedral—­let us glance at the chapel, and then a word or two about Walpole’s neighbours and anent Twickenham.

The front of the chapel was copied from Bishop Audley’s tomb at Salisbury.  Four panels of wood, taken from the Abbey of St. Edmund’s Bury, displayed the portraits of Cardinal Beaufort, of Humphrey Duke of Gloucester, and of Archbishop Kemp.  So much for the English church.

Next was seen a magnificent shrine in mosaic, from the church of St. Mary Maggiore, in Rome.  This was the work of the noted Peter Cavalini, who constructed the tomb of Edward the Confessor in Westminster Abbey.  The shrine had figured over the sepulchre of four martyrs, who rested between it in 1257:  then the principal window in the chapel was brought from Bexhill in Sussex; and displayed portraits of Henry III. and his queen.

It was not every day that gay visitors travelled down the dusty roads from London to visit the recluse at Strawberry:  but Horace wanted them not, for he had neighbours.  In his youth he had owned for his playfellow the ever witty, the precocious, the all-fascinating Lady Mary Wortley Montagu.  ‘She was,’ he wrote, ’a playfellow of mine when we were children.  She was always a dirty little thing.  This habit continued with her.  When at Florence, the Grand Duke gave her apartments in his palace.  One room sufficed for everything; and when she went away, the stench was so strong that they were obliged to fumigate the chamber with vinegar for a week.’