With all its defects, the little ‘plaything house’ as Horace Walpole called it, must have been a charming house to visit in.  First, there was the host.  ‘His engaging manners,’ writes the editor of Walpoliana, ’and gentle, endearing affability to his friends, exceed all praise.  Not the smallest hauteur, or consciousness of rank or talent, appeared in his familiar conferences; and he was ever eager to dissipate any constraint that might occur, as imposing a constraint upon himself, and knowing that any such chain enfeebles and almost annihilates the mental powers.  Endued with exquisite sensibility, his wit never gave the smallest wound, even to the grossest ignorance of the world, or the most morbid hypochondriac bashfulness.’

He had, in fact, no excuse for being doleful or morbid.  How many resources were his! what an even destiny! what prosperous fortunes!  What learned luxury he revelled in! he was enabled to ’pick up all the roses of science, and to leave the thorns behind.’  To how few of the gifted have the means of gratification been permitted! to how many has hard work been allotted!  Then, when genius has been endowed with rank, with wealth, how often it has been degraded by excess!  Rochester’s passions ran riot in one century:  Beckford’s gifts were polluted by his vices in another—­signal landmarks of each age.  But Horace Walpole was prudent, decorous, even respectable:  no elevated aspirations, no benevolent views ennobled under the petitesse of his nature.  He had neither genius nor romance:  he was even devoid of sentiment; but he was social to all, neighbourly to many, and attached to some of his fellow-creatures.

The ‘prettiest bauble’ possible, as he called Strawberry Hill, ’set in enamelled meadows in filigree hedges,’ was surrounded by ’dowagers as plenty as flounders;’ such was Walpole’s assertion.  As he sat in his library, scented by caraway, heliotropes, or pots of tuberose, or orange-trees in flower, certain dames would look in upon him, sometimes malgre lui, sometimes to his bachelor heart’s content.

‘Thank God!’ he wrote to his cousin Conway, ’the Thames is between me and the Duchess of Queensberry!’ Walpole’s dislike to his fair neighbour may partly have originated in the circumstance of her birth, and her grace’s presuming to plume herself on what he deemed an unimportant distinction.  Catherine Hyde, Duchess of Queensberry, was the great-granddaughter of the famous Lord Clarendon, and the great-niece of Anne, Duchess of York.  Prior had in her youth celebrated her in the ‘Female Phaeton,’ as ‘Kitty:’  in his verse he begs Phaeton to give Kitty the chariot, if but for a day.

In reference to this, Horace Walpole, in the days of his admiration of her grace, had made the following impromptu:—­

’On seeing the Duchess of Queensberry walk at the funeral of the Princess Dowager of Wales,—­

  ’To many a Kitty, Love his car
  Would for a day engage;
  But Prior’s Kitty, ever fair,
  Obtained it for an age.’