TO the rigorous exactitudes of modern realism it may seem an almost hopeless task to revive the details of a day in a Twickenham Villa when George the Third was King. And yet, with the aid of Horace Walpole's letters, of the 'Walpoliana' of Pinkerton, and, above all, of the catalogue of Strawberry Hill printed by its owner in 1774, there is no insurmountable difficulty in deciding what must probably have been the customary course of events. Nothing is needed at the outset but to assume that you had arrived, late on the previous night, at the embattled Gothic building on the Teddington Road, and that the fatigues of your journey had left you little more than a vague notion of your host, and a fixed idea that the breakfast hour was nine. Then, after carrying with you into the chintz curtains of the Red Bedchamber an indistinct recollection of Richardson's drawings of Pope and his mother, and of Bermingham's 'owl cut in paper,' which you dimly make out with your candle on the walls, you would be waked at eight next morning by Colomb, the Swiss valet (as great a tyrant over his master as his compatriot Canton in the 'Clandestine Marriage'), and in due time would repair to the blue-papered and blue-furnished Breakfast Room, looking pleasantly on the Thames. Here, coasting leisurely round the apartment, you would probably pause before M. de Carmontel's double picture of your host's dead friend, Madame du Deffand, and her relative the Duchesse de Choiseul, or you would peer curiously at the view of Madame de SevignÉ's hotel in the 'Rue Coulture St. Catherine.' Presently would come a patter of tiny feet, and a fat, and not very sociable, little dog, which had once belonged to the said Madame du Deffand, would precede its master, whom you would hear walking, with the stiff tread of an infirm person, from his bedroom on the floor above. Shortly afterwards would enter a tall, slim, frail-looking figure in a morning-gown, with a high, pallid forehead, dark brilliant eyes under drooping lids, and a friendly, but forced and rather unprepossessing smile. Tonton (as the little dog was called), after being cajoled into a semblance of cordiality, would be lifted upon a small sofa at his master's side, the teakettle and heater would arrive, and tea would be served in cups of fine old white embossed Japanese china. And then, the customary salutations exchanged and over, would gradually begin, in a slightly affected fashion, to which you speedily grow accustomed, that wonderful flow of talk which (like Praed's Vicar's)

'Slipped from politics to puns,

And passed from Mahomet to Moses,'—

that endless stream of admirably told stories, of recollections graphic and humorous, of sallies and bons mots, of which Horace Walpole's extraordinary correspondence is the cooled expression, but of the vivacity and variety of which, enhanced as they were by the changes in the speaker's voice and look, and emphasized by his semi-French gesticulation, it is impossible to give any adequate idea. A glance across the river would suggest an anecdote of her Grace the Duchess of Queensberry: a falling spoon, a mot by Lady Townshend. Upon yesterday's execution at Tyburn would follow a vivid picture of the deaths of Balmerino and Kilmarnock; or a reference to your ride from London of the night before, would usher in a full and particular account how the voluble and fascinating gentleman before you, with the great chalk stones in his fingers, was once all but shot through the head by the highwayman James Maclean.

Breakfast over, and a liberal bowl of bread-and-milk tossed out of window to the troops of squirrels that come flocking in from the high trees round the lawn, your host would invite you to make the tour of the grounds, adding (if it were May) that his favourite lilacs were well worth the effort. He would astonish you by going out in his slippers and without a hat; and, in reply to your ill-concealed astonishment, would laughingly compare himself to the Indian in the 'Spectator' who said he was 'all face.' Passing by the Abbot's garden, with its bright parterres, he would lead you to the pretty cottage he had built on the site of the old residence of his deceased tenant Richard Francklin, once printer of that scurrilous 'Craftsman' in which Pulteney and Bolingbroke had so persistently assailed his father. In its sunny, print-hung tea-room, with the 'Little Library' at the side, he would show you the picture of his friend Lady Hervey, once the 'beautiful Molly Lepel' of Pulteney and Chesterfield's ballad, and would tell you that the frame was carved by the same Grinling Gibbons to whom we owe the bronze statue of King James the Second in the Privy Garden at Whitehall. Thence you would pass to the chapel in the wood, with its stained-glass pictures of Henry the Third and his Queen from Bexhill Church, and its shrine from Santa Maria Maggiore at Rome; and he would explain that the roof was designed by that unimpeachable authority in Gothic, Mr. Chute of the Vyne, in Hampshire; that George Augustus Selwyn had given him the great earthen pot at the door; and that the carved bench in the ante-chapel had been contrived by no less a person than the son of the famous 'Ricardus Aristarchus,' Master of Trinity, the—

'mighty Scholiast, whose unwearied pains

Made Horace dull, and humbled Milton's strains—'

as he would quote from the 'Dunciad' of the late lamented Mr. Pope. Richard Bentley the younger, he would remind you, had also drawn some excellent illustrations to Gray (the originals of which he will show you later in the library); and meanwhile he invites your attention at the end of the winding walk to another masterpiece from the same ingenious brain—a huge oaken seat shaped like a shell, in which once sat together three of the handsomest women in England—the Duchess of Hamilton, the Duchess of Richmond, and the Countess of Ailesbury. If you were still intelligently interested, and your host still unfatigued (for he is capricious and easily tired), you would pass from the garden to the private printing-press, the 'Officina Arbuteana' as he christens it, next the neighbouring farmyard. Here you would be introduced to the superintendent and occasional secretary, Mr. Thomas Kirgate, who, if so minded, would exhibit to you a proof of Miss Hannah More's poem of 'Bishop Bonner's Ghost' (which his patron is kindly setting up for her), or then and there strike you off a piping-hot 'pull' of the latest quatrain to those charming Miss Berrys who are now inhabiting 'Little Strawberry' hard by, once tenanted by red-faced, good-humoured Mrs. Clive. As you return at last to the house, your guide would almost certainly pause in the Little Cloister at the entrance beside the blue and white china tub for goldfish in which was drowned that favourite cat whose fate was immortalized by Gray; and, lifting the label, he would read the poet's words:

''T was on this lofty Vase's side,

Where China's gayest Art has dy'd

The azure Flow'rs, that blow,

Demurest of the tabby kind,

The pensive Selima reclin'd,

Gaz'd on the Lake below.' *

Once more under Bentley's japanned tin lantern in the gloomy little hall, your host, pending the scribbling of half-a-dozen pressing letters' to Lady Ossory, Mr. Pinkerton, or one or other of his many correspondents, would beg you to await him in the Picture Gallery. Here, long before you had exhausted your admiration of the Emperor Vespasian in basalt, or the incomparable Greek Eagle from the baths of Caracalla, he would resume his post of cicerone, leading you almost at once to the portraits of his three beautiful nieces, Edward Walpole's daughters, one of whom, painted by Reynolds, had been fortunate enough to marry King George's own brother, William Henry, Duke of Gloucester (a fact of which her uncle Horace is ill-disguisedly proud). From the Gallery you would pass to the Round Drawing-Room, whose chief glory was Vasari's 'Bianca Capello;' and thence to the adjoining Tribune, a curious yellow-lit chamber, with semicircular recesses, in which were accumulated most of the choicest treasures of Strawberry,—miniatures by Cooper and the Olivers, enamels by Petitot and Zincke, gems from Italy, bas-reliefs in ivory, coins and seal-rings and reliquaries and filigree work, in the dispersed profusion of which you would afterwards dimly recall such items as a silver bell carved with masks and insects by Benvenuto Cellini, a missal attributed to Raphael, a bronze Caligula with silver eyes, and a white snuff-box with a portrait purporting to be a gift from Madame de SÉvignÉ in the Elysian Fields, but sent in reality by the faithful Madame du Deffand. Each object would bring its train of associations and traditions; and the fading of the 'all-golden afternoon' would find your companion still promising fresh marvels in the yet unexplored rooms beyond, where are the speculum of cannel coal once used by the notorious starmonger, Dr. John Dee; the red hat of his Eminence Cardinal Wolsey; and the very spurs worn by King William the Third, of immortal memory, at the ever-glorious Battle of the Boyne.

With four o'clock would come dinner, eaten probably in the Refectory, a room consecrated chiefly to the family portraits, conspicuous among which, in blue velvet, was your host by Richardson. The repast was 'of Attic taste,' but with very little wine, as Walpole himself drank nothing but iced water, and 'coffee upstairs' was ordered with such promptitude as to afford the visitor but scanty leisure for lingering over the bottle. About five you migrated to the Round Drawing-Room, where your entertainer, after recommending you to replenish your box with Fribourg's snuff from a canister of which the hiding-place was an ancient marble urn in the window-seat, would take up his station on the sofa, and resume his inexhaustible flood of memories and reflections, always bright, often striking, and never wearisome. Once, perhaps, he would rise to exhibit the closet he had built for Lady Di. Beauclerk's seven drawings in soot-water to his own tragedy of the 'Mysterious Mother;' or he would adjourn for an hour to the Library, to turn over his unrivalled collection of Hogarth's prints; or to show you Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's 'Milton,' or the identical 'Iliad' and 'Odyssey' from which Pope made his translations, or the long row of books printed at the 'Officina Arbuteana.' But he would gravitate sooner or later to his old vantage-ground on the sofa, whence, unhasting, unresting, he would discourse most excellent anecdote into the small hours, when the chintz curtains of the Red Bedchamber would again receive his bewitched and bewildered, but still unsatiated, visitor. And so would end your day at Horace Walpole's Gothic Castle of Strawberry Hill.