There are three more names belonging to this period which I shall bring under review, to finish up my day.  These are Horace Walpole, (Lord Orford,) Edmund Burke, and Oliver Goldsmith.  Walpole was the proprietor of Strawberry Hill, and wrote upon gardening:  Burke was the owner of a noble farm at Beaconsfield, which he managed with rare sagacity:  Goldsmith could never claim land enough to dig a grave upon, until the day he was buried; but he wrote the story of “The Vicar of Wakefield,” and the sweet poem of “The Deserted Village.”

I take a huge pleasure in dipping from time to time, into the books of Horace Walpole, and an almost equal pleasure in cherishing a hearty contempt for the man.  With a certain native cleverness, and the tact of a showman, he paraded his resources, whether of garden, or villa, or memory, or ingenuity, so as to carry a reputation for ability that he never has deserved.  His money, and the distinction of his father, gave him an association with cultivated people,—­artists, politicians, poets,—­which the metal of his own mind would never have found by reason of its own gravitating power.  He courted notoriety in a way that would have made him, if a poorer man, the toadying Boswell of some other Johnson giant, and, if very poor, the welcome buffoon of some gossiping journal, who would never weary of contortions, and who would brutify himself at the death, to kindle an admiring smile.

He writes pleasantly about painters, and condescendingly of gardeners and gardening.  Of the special beauties of Strawberry Hill he is himself historiographer; elaborate copper plates, elegant paper, and a particularity that is ludicrous, set forth the charms of a villa which never supplied a single incentive to correct taste, or a single scene that has the embalmment of genius.  He tells us grandly how this room was hung with crimson, and that other with gold; how “the tearoom was adorned with green paper and prints, ...on the hearth, a large green vase of German ware, with a spread eagle, and lizards for handles,”—­which vase (if the observation be not counted disloyal by sensitive gentlemen) must have been a very absurd bit of pottery.  “On a shelf and brackets are two potpourris of Hankin china; two pierced blue and white basons of old Delft; and two sceaus [sic] of coloured Seve; a blue and white vase and cover; and two old Fayence bottles.”

When a man writes about his own furniture in this style for large type and quarto, we pity him more than if he had kept to such fantastic nightmares as the “Castle of Otranto.”  The Earl of Orford speaks in high terms of the literary abilities of the Earl of Bath:  have any of my readers ever chanced to see any literary work of the Earl of Bath?  If not, I will supply the omission, in the shape of a ballad, “to the tune of a former song by George Bubb Doddington.”  It is entitled, “Strawberry Hill.”