Truly, I believe, the one will as much as t'other. My buildings are paper, like my writings, and both will be blown away in ten years after I am dead: if they had not the substantial use of amusing me while I live, they would be worth little indeed." Horace Walpole himself prevented the realisation of his own prophecy. It was said of him, even during his lifetime, "that he had outlived three sets of his own battlements;" but he nevertheless contrived, by tying up his toy-warehouse and its moveables with entails and jointures through several generations, to keep the thing tolerably entire for nearly half a century after he had left that state of being where "moth and dust do corrupt." And though the paper portion of his "works"-his 'Royal and Noble Authors,' his Anecdotes of Painting,' his Historic Doubts,' &c. -are formed of materials not much more durable than his battlements, he was during a long life scattering about the world an abundance of other paper fragments, that have not only lasted ten, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty years after he was dead, but which aftertimes will not willingly let die. It was in Strawberry Hill that the every-day thoughts and experiences for the most part centred that have made the letters of Horace Walpole the best record of the manners of the upper ranks during half a century, when very great social changes were working all around. Strawberry Hill and Horace Walpole are inseparably associated in our minds. The

*Horace Walpole to Conway, August 5, 1761.

house in Arlington Street, from which he sometimes dates, is, like most other West-end houses, a thing distinguished only by its number; and which has no more abiding associations than the chariot which rolled on from its first drawing-room through the necessary decay of cracked varnish and split panells, until its steps displayed the nakedness of their original iron, and the dirty rag that was once a carpet was finally succeeded by the luxury of clean straw once a-week. We cannot conceive Horace Walpole in a house with three windows upon a floor, in a formal row of ugly brick brethren. It is in Strawberry Hill, in the "little parlour hung with a stone-colour Gothic paper, and Jackson's Venetian prints"—or in the "charming closet hung with green paper, and water-colour pictures "or in "the room where we always live, hung with a blue and white paper in stripes, adorned with festoons" -that we fancy him writing to Montagu, Mann, Chute, and Conway, in the days when "we pique ourselves upon nothing but simplicity," and Lady Townshend exclaimed of the house, "It is just such a house as a parson's, where the children lie at the foot of the bed." In a few years the owner had visions of galleries, and round towers, and cloisters, and chapels; and then the house became filled with kingly armour, and rare pictures, and cabinets of miniatures by Oliver and Petitot, and Raffaelle china. Then, when Strawberry Hill came to the height of its glory, the owner kept "an inn, the sign the Gothic Castle," and his whole time was

passed in giving tickets for seeing it, and hiding himself while it was seen. * Lastly came the time when the old man was laid up for weeks with the gout, and the building and curiosity-buying was at an end; and after the Duchess of York had come to see his house in 1793, when he put a carpet on the step of his gate, and matted his court, and presented chocolate upon a salver, he says, here "will end my connexions with courts, beginning with George the First, great-great-great-grandfather to the Duchess of York! It sounds as if there could not have been above three generations more before Adam." There never was a place so associated with the memory of one man as Strawberry Hill is with Horace Walpole.

The letters of Horace Walpole cannot at all be regarded as a picture of society in general. He has no distinct notion whatever of the habits of the middle classes. Society with him is divided into two great sections-the aristocracy and the mob. He was made by his times; and this is one of the remarkable features of his times. With all his sympathy for literature, he has a decided hatred for authors that are out of the pale of fashion. Fielding, Johnson, Sterne, Goldsmith, the greatest names of his day, are with him ridiculous and contemptible. He cannot be regarded therefore as a representative of the literary classes of his times. As the son of a great minister he was petted and flattered till his father fell from his power; he says

*Horace Walpole to Montagu, Sept. 3, 1763.

himself he had then enough of flattery. When he mixed among his equals in the political intrigues of the time, he displayed no talent for business or oratory. His feeble constitution compelled him to seek amusement instead of dissipation; and his great amusement was to look upon the follies of his associates and to laugh at them. He was not at bottom an ill-natured man, or one without feeling. He affected that insensibility which is the exclusive privilege of high life-and long may it continue so. When Lord Mountford shot himself, and another Lord rejoiced that his friend's death would allow him to hire the best cook in England, the selfish indifference was probably more affected than real. Walpole himself takes off his own mask on one occasion. When he heard of Gray's death, in writing to Chute he apologises for the concern he feels, and adds, "I thought that what I had seen of the world had hardened my heart; but I find that it had formed my language, not extinguished my tenderness." When he speaks of individuals we may occasionally think that the world had formed his language; he is too often spiteful and malicious: but when he describes a class he is not likely much to exaggerate. The esprit de corps would render him somewhat charitable: if he did not extenuate" he would not set down "in malice," when he was holding up a mirror of himself and of the very people with whom he was corresponding.

In the early part of the last century London saw less of the wealth and splendour of the aristocracy

than previous to the Revolution. The great political divisions of the kingdom kept many families away from the Court; and the habits of the first Elector of Hanover who walked into the ownership of St. James's, and of his son and successor, were not very likely to attract the proud and the discontented from the scenes of their own proper greatness. Walpole, writing from Newmarket in 1743, says, "How dismal, how solitary, how scrub does this town look; and yet it has actually a street of houses better than Parma or Modena! Nay, the houses of the people of fashion, who come hither for the races, are palaces to what houses in London itself were fifteen years ago. People do begin to live again now; and I suppose in a term we shall revert to York Houses, Clarendon Houses, &c. But from that grandeur all the nobility had contracted themselves to live in coops of a diningroom, a dark back room, with one eye in a corner, and a closet. Think what London would be if the chief houses were in it, as in the cities in other countries, and not dispersed like great rarity-plums in a vast pudding of country." It was some time before the large houses of the nobility once more made London the magnificent capital which it subsequently became. In the mean time the lordly tenants of the "coops" above described spent a vast deal of their time in places of public resort. Let us cast a rapid glance at the fashionable amusements of the second half of the last century.

The year 1741 presents to us a curious spectacle