great-grandfather had brought from Venice when he was ambassador there.  There were china jars of all shapes and sizes round and about the room, and some china monsters, or idols, of which I could never bear the sight, they were so ugly, though I think my lady valued them more than all.  There was a thick carpet on the middle of the floor, which was made of small pieces of rare wood fitted into a pattern; the doors were opposite to each other, and were composed of two heavy tall wings, and opened in the middle, moving on brass grooves inserted into the floor—­they would not have opened over a carpet.  There were two windows reaching up nearly to the ceiling, but very narrow and with deep window-seats in the thickness of the wall.  The room was full of scent, partly from the flowers outside, and partly from the great jars of pot-pourri inside.  The choice of odours was what my lady piqued herself upon, saying nothing showed birth like a keen susceptibility of smell.  We never named musk in her presence, her antipathy to it was so well understood through the household:  her opinion on the subject was believed to be, that no scent derived from an animal could ever be of a sufficiently pure nature to give pleasure to any person of good family, where, of course, the delicate perception of the senses had been cultivated for generations.  She would instance the way in which sportsmen preserve the breed of dogs who have shown keen scent; and how such gifts descend for generations amongst animals, who cannot be supposed to have anything of ancestral pride, or hereditary fancies about them.  Musk, then, was never mentioned at Hanbury Court.  No more were bergamot or southern-wood, although vegetable in their nature.  She considered these two latter as betraying a vulgar taste in the person who chose to gather or wear them.  She was sorry to notice sprigs of them in the button-hole of any young man in whom she took an interest, either because he was engaged to a servant of hers or otherwise, as he came out of church on a Sunday afternoon.  She was afraid that he liked coarse pleasures; and I am not sure if she did not think that his preference for these coarse sweetnesses did not imply a probability that he would take to drinking.  But she distinguished between vulgar and common.  Violets, pinks, and sweetbriar were common enough; roses and mignionette, for those who had gardens, honeysuckle for those who walked along the bowery lanes; but wearing them betrayed no vulgarity of taste:  the queen upon her throne might be glad to smell at a nosegay of the flowers.  A beau-pot (as we called it) of pinks and roses freshly gathered was placed every morning that they were in bloom on my lady’s own particular table.  For lasting vegetable odours she preferred lavender and sweet-woodroof to any extract whatever.  Lavender reminded her of old customs, she said, and of homely cottage-gardens, and many a cottager made his offering to her of a bundle of lavender.  Sweet woodroof, again, grew in wild, woodland places where the soil was fine and the air delicate:  the poor children used to go and gather it for her up in the woods on the higher lands; and for this service she always rewarded them with bright new pennies, of which my lord, her son, used to send her down a bagful fresh from the Mint in London every February.