On the 5th of June, 1747, Walpole announces to Mann that he has taken a little new farm, just out of Twickenham. 'The house is so small that I can send it to you in a letter to look at: the prospect is as delightful as possible, commanding the river, the town [Twickenham], and Richmond Park; and, being situated on a hill, descends to the Thames through two or three little meadows, where I have some Turkish sheep and two cows, all studied in their colours for becoming the view. This little rural bijou was Mrs. Chenevix's, the toy woman À la mode,[70] who in every dry season is to furnish me with the best rain water from Paris, and now and then with some Dresden-china cows, who are to figure like wooden classics in a library; so I shall grow as much a shepherd as any swain in the AstrÆa.' Three days later, further details are added in a letter to Conway, then in Flanders with the Duke of Cumberland: 'You perceive by my date [Twickenham, 8 June] that I am got into a new camp, and have left my tub at Windsor. It is a little play-thing-house, that I got out of Mrs. Chenevix's shop, and is the prettiest bauble you ever saw. It is set in enamelled meadows, with filagree hedges:

'Two delightful roads, that you would call dusty, supply me continually with coaches and chaises; barges as solemn as Barons of the Exchequer move under my window; Richmond Hill and Ham Walks bound my prospect; ... Dowagers as plenty as flounders inhabit all around, and Pope's ghost is just now skimming under my window by a most poetical moonlight. I have about land enough to keep such a farm as Noah's, when he set up in the ark with a pair of each kind; but my cottage is rather cleaner than I believe his was after they had been cooped up together forty days. The Chenevixes had tricked it out for themselves: up two pair of stairs is what they call Mr. Chenevix's library, furnished with three maps, one shelf, a bust of Sir Isaac Newton, and a lame telescope without any glasses. Lord John Sackville predecessed me here, and instituted certain games called cricketalia, which have been celebrated this very evening in honour of him in a neighbouring meadow.'[72]

The house thus whimsically described, which grew into the Gothic structure afterwards so closely associated with its owner's name, was not, even at this date, without its history. It stood on the left bank of the Thames, at the corner of the Upper Road to Teddington, not very far from Twickenham itself. It had been built about 1698 as a 'country box' by a retired coachman of the Earl of Bradford, and, from the fact that he was supposed to have acquired his means by starving his master's horses, was known popularly as Chopped-Straw Hall. Its earliest possessor not long afterwards let it out as a lodging-house, and finally, after several improvements, sub-let it altogether. One of its first tenants was Colley Cibber, who found it convenient when he was in attendance for acting at Hampton Court; and he is said to have written in it the comedy called The Refusal; or, the Ladies' Philosophy, produced at Drury Lane in 1721. Then, for eight years, it was rented by the Bishop of Durham, Dr. Talbot, who was reported to have kept in it a better table than the extent of its kitchen seemed, in Walpole's judgement, to justify. After the Bishop came a Marquis, Henry Bridges, son of the Duke of Chandos; after the Marquis, Mrs. Chenevix, the toy-woman, who, upon her husband's death, let it for two years to the nobleman who predecessed Walpole, Lord John Philip Sackville. Before this, Mrs. Chenevix had taken lodgers, one of whom was the celebrated theologian, PÈre Le Courrayer. At the expiration of Lord John Sackville's tenancy, Walpole took the remainder of Mrs. Chenevix's lease; and in 1748 had grown to like the situation so much that he obtained a special act to purchase the fee simple from the existing possessors, three minors of the name of Mortimer. The price he paid was £1356 10s. Nothing was then wanting but the name, and in looking over some old deeds this was supplied. He found that the ground on which it stood had been known originally as 'Strawberry-Hill-Shot.' 'You shall hear from me,' he tells Mann in June, 1748, 'from Strawberry Hill, which I have found out in my lease is the old name of my house; so pray, never call it Twickenham again.'

The transformation of the toy-woman's 'villakin' into a Gothic residence was not, however, the operation of a day. Indeed, at first, the idea of rebuilding does not seem to have entered its new owner's mind. But he speedily set about extending his boundaries, for before 26 December, 1748, he has added nine acres to his original five, making fourteen in all,—a 'territory prodigious in a situation where land is so scarce.' Among the tenants of some of the buildings which he acquired in making these additions was Richard Francklin, the printer of the Craftsman, who, during Sir Robert Walpole's administration, had been taken up for printing that paper. He occupied a small house in what was afterwards known as the Flower Garden, and Walpole permitted him to retain it during his lifetime. Walpole's letters towards the close of 1748 contain numerous references to his assiduity in planting. 'My present and sole occupation' he says in August, 'is planting, in which I have made great progress, and talk very learnedly with the nurserymen, except that now and then a lettuce run to seed overturns all my botany, as I have more than once taken it for a curious West Indian flowering shrub. Then the deliberation with which trees grow is extremely inconvenient to my natural impatience.' Two months later he is 'all plantation, and sprouts away like any chaste nymph in the Metamorphosis.' In December, we begin to hear of that famous lawn so well known in the later history of the house. He is 'making a terrace the whole breadth of his garden on the brow of a natural hill, with meadows at the foot, and commanding the river, the village [Twickenham], Richmond-hill, and the park, and part of Kingston' A year after this (September, 1749), while he is still 'digging and planting till it is dark,' come the first dreams of building. At Cheney's, in Buckinghamshire, he has seen some old stained glass, in the windows of an ancient house which had been degraded into a farm, and he thinks he will beg it of the Duke of Bedford (to whom the farm belongs), as it would be 'magnificent for Strawberry-castle.' Evidently he has discussed this (as yet) chÂteau en Espagne with Montagu. 'Did I tell you [he says] that I have found a text in Deuteronomy to authorise my future battlements? "When thou buildest a new house, then shalt thou make a battlement for thy roof, that thou bring not blood upon thy house, if any man fall from thence."' In January, the new building is an established fact, as far as purpose is concerned. In a postscript to Mann he writes: 'I must trouble you with a commission, which I don't know whether you can execute. I am going to build a little gothic castle at Strawberry Hill. If you can pick me up any fragments of old painted glass, arms, or anything, I shall be excessively obliged to you. I can't say I remember any such things in Italy; but out of old chateaus, I imagine, one might get it cheap, if there is any.'

From a subsequent letter it would seem that Mann, as a resident in Italy, had rather expostulated against the style of architecture which his friend was about to adopt, and had suggested the Grecian. But Walpole, rightly or wrongly, knew what he intended. 'The Grecian,' he said, was 'only proper for magnificent and public buildings. Columns and all their beautiful ornaments look ridiculous when crowded into a closet or a cheesecake-house. The variety is little, and admits no charming irregularities. I am almost as fond of the Sharawaggi, or Chinese want of symmetry, in buildings, as in grounds or gardens. I am sure, whenever you come to England, you will be pleased with the liberty of taste into which we are struck, and of which you can have no idea.' The passage shows that he himself anticipated some of the ridicule which was levelled by unsympathetic people at the 'oyster-grotto-like profanation' which he gradually erected by the Thames. In the mean time it went on progressing slowly, as its progress was entirely dependent on his savings out of income; and the references to it in his letters, perhaps because Mann was doubtful, are not abundant. 'The library and refectory, or great parlour,' he says in his description, 'were entirely new built in 1753; the gallery, round tower, great cloyster, and cabinet, in 1760 and 1761; and the great north bedchamber in 1770.' To speak of these later alterations would be to anticipate too much, and the further description of Strawberry Hill will be best deferred until his own account of the house and contents was printed in 1774, four years after the last addition above recorded. But even before he made the earliest of them, he must have done much to alter and improve the aspect of the place, for Gray, more admiring than Mann, praises what has been done. 'I am glad,' he tells Wharton, 'that you enter into the spirit of Strawberry-castle. It has a purity and propriety of Gothicism in it (with very few exceptions) that I have not seen elsewhere;' and in an earlier letter he implies that its 'extreme littleness' is its chief defect. But here, before for the moment leaving the subject, it is only fair to give the proprietor's own description of Strawberry Hill at this date, i. e., in June, 1753. After telling Mann that it is 'so monastic' that he has 'a little hall decked with long saints in lean arched windows and with taper columns, which we call the Paraclete, in memory of Eloisa's cloister,'[73] he sends him a sketch of it, and goes on: 'The enclosed enchanted little landscape, then, is Strawberry Hill.... This view of the castle is what I have just finished [it was a view of the south side, towards the north-east], and is the only side that will be at all regular. Directly before it is an open grove, through which you see a field, which is bounded by a serpentine wood of all kind of trees, and flowering shrubs, and flowers. The lawn before the house is situated on the top of a small hill, from whence to the left you see the town and church of Twickenham encircling a turn of the river, that looks exactly like a sea-port in miniature. The opposite shore is a most delicious meadow, bounded by Richmond Hill, which loses itself in the noble woods of the park to the end of the prospect on the right, where is another turn of the river, and the suburbs of Kingston as luckily placed as Twickenham is on the left: and a natural terrace on the brow of my hill, with meadows of my own down to the river, commands both extremities. Is not this a tolerable prospect? You must figure that all this is perpetually enlivened by a navigation of boats and barges, and by a road below my terrace, with coaches, post-chaises, waggons, and horsemen constantly in motion, and the fields speckled with cows, horses, and sheep. Now you shall walk into the house. The bow window below leads into a little parlour hung with a stone-colour Gothic paper and Jackson's Venetian prints,[74] which I could never endure while they pretended, infamous as they are, to be after Titian, etc., but when I gave them this air of barbarous bas-reliefs, they succeeded to a miracle: it is impossible at first sight not to conclude that they contain the history of Attila or Tottila done about the very Æra. From hence, under two gloomy arches, you come to the hall and staircase, which it is impossible to describe to you, as it is the most particular and chief beauty of the castle. Imagine the walls covered with (I call it paper, but it is really paper painted in perspective to represent) Gothic fretwork: the lightest Gothic balustrade to the staircase, adorned with antelopes (our supporters) bearing shields; lean windows fattened with rich saints in painted glass, and a vestibule open with three arches on the landing place, and niches full of trophies of old coats of mail, Indian shields made of rhinoceros's hides, broadswords, quivers, long-bows, arrows, and spears,—all supposed to be taken by Sir Terry Robsart [an ancestor of Sir Robert Walpole] in the holy wars. But as none of this regards the enclosed drawing, I will pass to that. The room on the ground floor nearest to you is a bedchamber, hung with yellow paper and prints, framed in a new manner, invented by Lord Cardigan; that is, with black and white borders printed. Over this is Mr. Chute's bed-chamber, hung with red in the same manner. The bow-window room one pair of stairs is not yet finished; but in the tower beyond it is the charming closet where I am now writing to you. It is hung with green paper and water-colour pictures; has two windows: the one in the drawing looks to the garden, the other to the beautiful prospect; and the top of each glutted with the richest painted glass of the arms of England, crimson roses, and twenty other pieces of green, purple, and historic bits. I must tell you, by the way, that the castle, when finished, will have two-and-thirty windows enriched with painted glass. In this closet, which is Mr. Chute's College of Arms, are two presses of books of heraldry and antiquities, Madame SÉvignÉ's Letters, and any French books that relate to her and her acquaintance. Out of this closet is the room where we always live, hung with a blue and white paper in stripes adorned with festoons, and a thousand plump chairs, couches, and luxurious settees covered with linen of the same pattern, and with a bow window commanding the prospect, and gloomed with limes that shade half each window, already darkened with painted glass in chiaroscuro, set in deep blue glass. Under this room is a cool little hall, where we generally dine, hung with paper to imitate Dutch tiles.

'I have described so much that you will begin to think that all the accounts I used to give you of the diminutiveness of our habitation were fabulous; but it is really incredible how small most of the rooms are. The only two good chambers I shall have are not yet built: they will be an eating-room and a library, each twenty by thirty, and the latter fifteen feet high. For the rest of the house, I could send it to you in this letter as easily as the drawing, only that I should have nowhere to live until the return of the post. The Chinese summer-house, which you may distinguish in the distant landscape, belongs to my Lord Radnor.[75] We pique ourselves upon nothing but simplicity, and have no carvings, gildings, paintings, inlayings, or tawdry businesses.'[76]

From this it will appear that in June, 1753, the library and refectory were not yet built, so that when he says, in the printed description, that they were new built in 1753, he must mean no more than that they had been begun. In a later letter, of May, 1754, they were still unfinished. Meanwhile the house is gradually attracting more and more attention. George Montagu comes, and is 'in raptures and screams, and hoops, and hollas, and dances, and crosses himself a thousand times over.' The next visitor is 'Nolkejumskoi,'—otherwise the Duke of Cumberland,—who inspects it much after the fashion of a gracious Gulliver surveying a castle in Lilliput. Afterwards, attracted by the reports of Lady Hervey and Mr. Bristow (brother of the Countess of Buckingham), arrives my Lord Bath, who is stirred into celebrating it to the tune of a song of Bubb Dodington on Mrs. Strawbridge. His Lordship does not seem to have got further than two stanzas; but Walpole, not to leave so complimentary a tribute in the depressed condition of a fragment, discreetly revised and completed it himself. The lines may fairly find a place here as an example of his lighter muse. The first and third verses are Lord Bath's, the rest being obviously written in order to bring in 'Nolkejumskoi' and some personal friends:—

Cumberland Lodge, where, say the old guide-books, the hero of Culloden 'reposed after victory,' still stands on the hill at the end of the Long Walk at Windsor; and at 'Gunnersbury' lived the Princess Amelia. All the other houses referred to are in existence. 'Sweet Marble-hill,' which, like Strawberry, was not long ago put up for sale, had at this date for mistress the Countess Dowager of Suffolk (Mrs. Howard), for whom it had been built by her royal lover, George II.; and Chiswick House, (now the Marquis of Bute's), that famous structure of Kent which Lord Hervey said was 'too small to inhabit, and too large to hang to one's watch,' was the residence of Richard, Earl of Burlington. Claremont 'kept so jim' [neat], was the seat of the Duke of Newcastle at Esher; Oatlands, near Weybridge, belonged to the Duke of York, and Sion House, on the Thames, to the Duke of Northumberland. Walpole and his friends, it will be perceived, did not shrink from comparing small things with great. But perhaps the most notable circumstance about this glorification of Strawberry is that it should have originated with its reputed author. 'Can there be,' says Walpole, 'an odder revolution of things, than that the printer of the Craftsman should live in a house of mine, and that the author of the Craftsman should write a panegyric on a house of mine?' The printer was Richard Francklin, already mentioned as his tenant; and Lord Bath, if not the actual, was at least the putative, writer of most of the Craftsman's attacks upon Sir Robert Walpole. It is possible, however, that, as with the poem, part only of this honour really belonged to him.

Strawberry Hill and its improvements have, however, carried us far from the date at which this chapter begins, and we must return to 1747. Happily the life of Walpole, though voluminously chronicled in his correspondence, is not so crowded with personal incident as to make a space of six years a serious matter to recover, especially when tested by the brief but still very detailed record in the Short Notes of what he held to be its conspicuous occurrences. In 1747-49 his zeal for his father's memory involved him in a good deal of party pamphleteering, and in 1749, he had what he styles 'a remarkable quarrel' with the Speaker, of which one may say that, in these days, it would scarcely deserve its qualifying epithet, although it produced more paper war. 'These things [he says himself] were only excusable by the lengths to which party had been carried against my father; or rather, were not excusable even then.' For this reason it is needless to dwell upon them here, as well as upon certain other papers in The Remembrancer for 1749, and a tract called Delenda est Oxonia, prompted by a heinous scheme, which was meditated by the Ministry, of attacking the liberties of that University by vesting in the Crown the nomination of the Chancellor. This piece [he says], which I think one of my best, was seized at the printer's and suppressed.' Then in November, 1749, comes something like a really 'moving incident,'—he is robbed in Hyde Park. He was returning by moonlight to Arlington Street from Lord Holland's, when his coach was stopped by two of the most notorious of 'Diana's foresters,'—Plunket and James Maclean; and the adventure had all but a tragic termination. Maclean's pistol went off by accident, sending a bullet so nearly through Walpole's head that it grazed the skin under his eye, stunned him, and passed through the roof of the chariot. His correspondence contains no more than a passing reference to this narrow escape,—probably because it was amply reported (and expanded) in the public prints. But in a paper which he contributed to the World a year or two later, under guise of relating what had happened to one of his acquaintance, he reverts to this experience. 'The whole affair [he says] was conducted with the greatest good-breeding on both sides. The robber, who had only taken a purse this way, because he had that morning been disappointed of marrying a great fortune, no sooner returned to his lodgings, than he sent the gentleman [i. e., Walpole himself] two letters of excuses, which, with less wit than the epistles of Voiture, had ten times more natural and easy politeness in the turn of their expression. In the postscript, he appointed a meeting at Tyburn at twelve at night, where the gentleman might purchase again any trifles he had lost; and my friend has been blamed for not accepting the rendezvous, as it seemed liable to be construed by ill-natured people into a doubt of the honour of a man who had given him all the satisfaction in his power for having unluckily been near shooting him through the head.'[78]

The 'fashionable highwayman' (as Mr. Maclean was called) was taken soon afterwards, and hanged. 'I am honourably mentioned in a Grub-street ballad [says Walpole] for not having contributed to his sentence;' and he goes on to say that there are as many prints and pamphlets about him as about that other sensation of 1750, the earthquake. Maclean seems nevertheless to have been rather a pinchbeck Macheath; but for the moment, in default of larger lions, he was the rage. After his condemnation, several thousand people visited him in his cell at Newgate where he is stated to have fainted twice from the heat and pressure of the crowd. And his visitors were not all men. In a note to The Modern Fine Lady, Soame Jenyns says that some of the brightest eyes were in tears for him; and Walpole himself tells us that he excited the warmest commiseration in two distinguished beauties of the day, Lady Caroline Petersham and Miss Ashe.[79]

Miss Ashe, of whom we are told mysteriously by the commentators that she 'was said to have been of very high parentage,' and Lady Caroline Petersham, a daughter of the Duke of Grafton, figure more pleasantly in another letter of Walpole, which gives a glimpse of some of those diversions with which he was wont to relieve the gothicising of his villa by the Thames. In a sentence that proves how well he understood his own qualities, he says he tells the story 'to show the manners of the age, which are always as entertaining to a person fifty miles off as to one born an hundred and fifty years after the time.' We have not yet reached the later limit; but there is little doubt as to the interest of Walpole's account of his visit in the month of June, 1750, to the famous gardens of Mr. Jonathan Tyers. He got a card, he says, from Lady Caroline to go with her to Vauxhall. He repairs accordingly to her house, and finds her 'and the little Ashe, or the Pollard Ashe, as they call her,' having 'just finished their last layer of red, and looking as handsome as crimson could make them.' Others of the party are the Duke of Kingston; Lord March, of Thackeray's Virginians; Harry Vane, soon to be Earl of Darlington; Mr. Whitehead; a 'pretty Miss Beauclerc,' and a 'very foolish Miss Sparre.' As they sail up the Mall, they encounter cross-grained Lord Petersham (my lady's husband) shambling along after his wont,[80] and 'as sulky as a ghost that nobody will speak to first.' He declines to accompany his wife and her friends, who, getting into the best order they can, march to their barge, which has a boat of French horns attending, and 'little Ashe' sings. After parading up the river, they 'debark' at Vauxhall, where at the outset they narrowly escape the excitement of a quarrel. For a certain Mrs. Lloyd, of Spring Gardens, afterwards married to Lord Haddington, observing Miss Beauclerc and her companion following Lady Caroline, says audibly, 'Poor girls, I am sorry to see them in such bad company,'—a remark which the 'foolish Miss Sparre' (she is but fifteen), for the fun of witnessing a duel, endeavours to make Lord March resent. But my Lord, who is not only 'very lively and agreeable,' but also of a nice discretion, laughs her out of 'this charming frolic, with a great deal of humour.' Next they pick up Lord Granby, arriving very drunk from 'Jenny's Whim,' at Chelsea, where he has left a mixed gathering of thirteen persons of quality playing at Brag. He is in the sentimental stage of his malady, and makes love to Miss Beauclerc and Miss Sparre alternately, until the tide of champagne turns, and he remembers that he is married. 'At last,' says Walpole,—and at this point the story may be surrendered to him entirely,—'we assembled in our booth, Lady Caroline in the front, with the visor of her hat erect, and looking gloriously jolly and handsome. She had fetched my brother Orford from the next box, where he was enjoying himself with his petite partie, to help us to mince chickens. We minced seven chickens into a china dish, which Lady Caroline stewed over a lamp with three pats of butter and a flagon of water, stirring and rattling and laughing, and we every minute expecting to have the dish fly about our ears. She had brought Betty, the fruit girl,[81] with hampers of strawberries and cherries from Rogers's, and made her wait upon us, and then made her sup by us at a little table. The conversation was no less lively than the whole transaction. There was a Mr. O'Brien arrived from Ireland, who would get the Duchess of Manchester from Mr. Hussey, if she were still at liberty. I took up the biggest hautboy in the dish, and said to Lady Caroline, "Madam, Miss Ashe desires you would eat this O'Brien strawberry;" she replied immediately, "I won't, you hussey." You may imagine the laugh this reply occasioned. After the tempest was a little calmed, the Pollard said, "Now, how anybody would spoil this story that was to repeat it, and say, "I won't, you jade." In short, the whole air of our party was sufficient, as you will easily imagine, to take up the whole attention of the garden; so much so that from eleven o'clock till half an hour after one we had the whole concourse round our booth: at last, they came into the little gardens of each booth on the sides of our's, till Harry Vane took up a bumper, and drank their healths, and was proceeding to treat them with still greater freedom. It was three o'clock before we got home.' He adds a characteristic touch to explain Lord Granby's eccentricities. He had lost eight hundred pounds to the Prince of Wales at Kew the night before, and this had a 'little ruffled' his lordship's temper.[82]

Early in 1753, Edward Moore, the author of some Fables for the Female Sex, once popular enough to figure, between Thomson and Prior, in Goldsmith's Beauties of English Poesy, established the periodical paper called The World, which, to quote a latter-day definition, might fairly claim to be 'written by gentlemen for gentlemen.' Soame Jenyns, Cambridge of the Scribleriad (Walpole's Twickenham neighbour), Hamilton Boyle, Sir Charles Hanbury Williams, and Lord Chesterfield were all contributors. That Walpole should also attempt this 'bow of Ulysses, in which it was the fashion for men of rank and genius to try their strength,' goes without saying. His gifts were exactly suited to the work, and his productions in the new journal are by no means its worst. His first essay was a bright little piece of persiflage upon what he calls the return of nature, and proceeds to illustrate by the introduction of 'real water' on the stage, by Kent's landscape gardening, and by the fauna and flora of the dessert table. A second effort was devoted to that extraordinary adventurer, Baron Neuhoff, otherwise Theodore, King of Corsica, who, with his realm for his only assets, was at this time a tenant of the King's Bench prison. Walpole, with genuine kindness, proposed a subscription for this bankrupt Belisarius, and a sum of fifty pounds was collected. This, however, proved so much below the expectations of His Corsican Majesty that he actually had the effrontery to threaten Dodsley, the printer of the paper, with a prosecution for using his name unjustifiably. 'I have done with countenancing kings,' wrote Walpole to Mann.[83] Others of his World essays are on the Glastonbury Thorn; on Letter-Writing,—a subject of which he might claim to speak with authority; on old women as objects of passion; and on politeness, wherein occurs the already quoted anecdote of Maclean the highwayman. His light hand and lighter humour made him an almost ideal contributor to Moore's pages, and it is not surprising to find that such judges as Lady Mary approved his performances, or that he himself regarded them with a complacency which peeps out now and again in his letters. 'I met Mrs. Clive two nights ago,' he says, 'and told her I had been in the meadows, but would walk no more there, for there was all the world. "Well," says she, "and don't you like The World? I hear it was very clever last Thursday."' 'Last Thursday' had appeared Walpole's paper on elderly 'flames.'

During the period covered by this chapter the redintegratio amoris with Gray, to which reference has been made, became confirmed. Whether the attachment was ever quite on the old basis, may be doubted. Gray always poses a little as the aggrieved person who could not speak first, and to whom unmistakable overtures must be made by the other side. He as yet 'neither repents, nor rejoices over much, but is pleased,'—he tells Chute in 1750. On the other hand, Walpole, though he appears to have proffered his palm-branch with very genuine geniality, and desire to let by-gones be by-gones, was not above very candid criticism of his recovered friend. 'I agree with you most absolutely in your opinion about Gray,' he writes to Montagu in September, 1748: 'he is the worst company in the world. From a melancholy turn, from living reclusely, and from a little too much dignity, he never converses easily; all his words are measured and chosen, and formed into sentences; his writings are admirable; he himself is not agreeable.' Meantime, however, the revived connection went on pleasantly. Gray made flying visits to Strawberry and Arlington Street, and prattled to Walpole from Pembroke between whiles. And certainly, in a measure, it is to Walpole that we owe Gray. It was Walpole who induced Gray to allow Dodsley to print in 1747, as an attenuated folio pamphlet, the Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College; and it was the tragic end of one of Walpole's favourite cats in a china tub of gold-fish (of which, by the way, there was a large pond called Po-yang at Strawberry) which prompted the delightful occasional verses by Gray beginning:—

a stanza which, with trifling verbal alterations, long served as a label for the 'lofty vase' in the Strawberry Hill collection. To Walpole's officious circulation in manuscript of the famous Elegy written in a Country Church-Yard must indirectly be attributed its publication by Dodsley in February, 1751; to Walpole also is due that typical piece of vers de sociÉtÉ, the Long Story, which originated in the interest in the recluse poet of Stoke Poges with which Walpole's well-meaning (if unwelcome) advocacy had inspired Lady Cobham and some other lion-hunters of the neighbourhood. But his chief enterprise in connection with his friend's productions was the edition of them put forth in March, 1753, with illustrations by Richard Bentley, the youngest child of the famous Master of Trinity. Bentley possessed considerable attainments as an amateur artist, and as a scholar and connoisseur had just that virtuoso finesse of manner which was most attractive to Walpole, whose guest and counsellor he frequently became during the progress of the Strawberry improvements. Out of this connection, which, in its hot fits, was of the most confidential character, grew the suggestion that Bentley should make, at Walpole's expense, a series of designs for Gray's poems. These, which are still in existence,[84] were engraved with great delicacy by two of the best engravers of that time, MÜller and Charles Grignion; and the Poemata-Grayo-Bentleiana, as Walpole christened them, became and remains one of the most remarkable of the illustrated books of the last century. Gray, as may be imagined, could scarcely oppose the compliment; and he seems to have grown minutely interested in the enterprise, rewarding the artist by some commendatory verses, in which he certainly does not deny himself—to use a phrase of Mr. Swinburne—'the noble pleasure of praising.'[85] But even over this book the sensitive ligament that linked him to Walpole was perilously strained. Without consulting him, Walpole had his likeness engraved as a frontispiece,—a step which instantly drew from Gray a wail of nervous expostulation so unmistakably heartfelt that it was impossible to proceed with the plate. Thus it came about that Designs by Mr. R. Bentley for Six Poems by Mr. T. Gray made its appearance without the portrait of the poet.

Bentley's ingenious son was not the only person whom the decoration of Strawberry pressed into the service of its owner. Selwyn, the wit, George James (or 'Gilly') Williams, a connoisseur of considerable ability, and Richard, second Lord Edgecumbe, occasionally sat as a committee of taste,—a function commemorated by Reynolds in a conversation-piece which afterwards formed one of the chief ornaments of the Refectory;[86] and upon Bentley's recommendation Walpole invited from Jersey a humbler guest in the person of a German artist named MÜntz,—'an inoffensive, good creature,' who would 'rather ponder over a foreign gazette than a palette,' but whose services kept him domiciled for some time at the Gothic castle. MÜntz executed many views of the neighbourhood, which are still, like that of Twickenham already referred to,[87] preserved in contemporary engravings. And besides the persons whom Walpole drew into his immediate circle, the 'village,' as he called it, was growing steadily in public favour. 'Mr. MÜntz'—writes Walpole in July, 1755—'says we have more coaches than there are in half France. Mrs. Pritchard has bought Ragman's Castle, for which my Lord Litchfield could not agree. We shall be as celebrated as BaiÆ or Tivoli; and if we have not as sonorous names as they boast, we have very famous people: Clive and Pritchard, actresses; Scott and Hudson, painters; my Lady Suffolk, famous in her time; Mr. H[ickey], the impudent Lawyer, that Tom Hervey wrote against; Whitehead, the poet; and Cambridge, the everything.' Cambridge has already been referred to as a contributor to The World, and the Whitehead was the one mentioned in Churchill's stinging couplet:—

who then lived on Twickenham Common. Hickey, a jovial Irish attorney, was the legal adviser of Burke and Reynolds, and the 'blunt, pleasant creature' of Goldsmith's 'Retaliation.' Scott was Samuel Scott, the 'English Canaletto;' Hudson, Sir Joshua's master, who had a house on the river near Lord Radnor's. But Walpole's best allies were two of the other sex. One was Lady Suffolk, the whilom friend (as Mrs. Howard) of Pope and Swift and Gay, whose home at Marble Hill is celebrated in the Walpole-cum-Pulteney poem; the other was red-faced Mrs. Clive, who occupied a house known familiarly as 'Clive-den,' and officially as Little Strawberry. She had not yet retired from the stage. Lady Suffolk's stories of the Georgian Court and its scandals, and Mrs. Clive's anecdotes of the green-room, and of their common neighbour at Hampton, the great 'Roscius' himself (with whom she was always at war), must have furnished Walpole with an inexhaustible supply of just the particular description of gossip which he most appreciated.