arcely was the tea-urn on the breakfast-table when they began to
pour in--old and young, the halt, the one-eyed, the fat, the thin, the
melancholy, the merry, the dissipated, the dyspeptic, the sentimental,
the jocose, the blunt, the ceremonious, the courtly, the rude, the
critical, and the free and easy. One came forty miles out of his way,
and pronounced the whole thing an imposition, and myself a humbug;
another insisted upon my getting up at dinner, that he might sit down in
my chair, characterised by the confounded guides as "le fauteuil de
Van Dyck"; a third went so far as to propose lying down in our great
four-post bed, just to say he had been there, though my wife was then in
it. I speak not of the miserable practice of cutting slices off all the
furniture as relics. John Murray took an inventory of the whole contents
of the house for a new edition of his guidebook; and Holman, the blind
traveller, _felt_ me all over with his hand as I sat at tea with my
wife; and last of all, a respectable cheesemonger from the Strand, after
inspecting the entire building from the attics to the cellar, pressed
sixpence into my hand at parting, and said, "Happy to see you, Mr. Van
Dyck, if you come into the city!"

'Then the advice and counsel I met with, oral and written, would fill
a volume, and did; for I was compelled to keep an album in the hall for
the visitors' names. One suggested that my desecration of the temple of
genius would be less disgusting if I dined in my kitchen, and left the
ancient dining-room as the great artist had left it. Another hinted that
my presence in my own house destroyed all the illusion of its historic
associations. A third, a young lady--to judge by the writing--proposed
my wearing a point-beard and lace ruffles, with trunk hose and a feather
in my hat, probably to favour the "illusion" so urgently mentioned by
the other writer, and, perhaps, to indulge visitors like my friend the
cheesemonger. Many pitied me--well might they!--as one insensible to
the associations of the spot; while my very servants, regarding me only
as a show part of the establishment, neglected their duties on every
side, and betook themselves to ciceroneship, each allocating his
peculiar territory to himself, like the people who show the lions and
the armour in the Tower.

'No weather was either too hot or too cold, too sultry or too
boisterous; no hour too late or too early; no day was sacred. If the
family were at pray