at my Lord
Carteret's."--"Oh!" said I, "then let them alone; may be, he does not
dislike the noise!" I pity the poor porter, who sees all his old
customers going over the way too.'

The retirement of Sir Robert from office had an important effect on the
tastes and future life of his son Horace. The minister had been
occupying his later years in pulling down his old ancestral house at
Houghton, and in building an enormous mansion, which has since his time
been, in its turn, partially demolished. When Harley, Earl of Orford,
was known to be erecting a great house for himself, Sir Robert had
remarked that a minister who did so committed a great imprudence. When
Houghton was begun, Sir Hynde Aston reminded Sir Robert of this speech.
'You ought to have recalled it to me before,' was the reply; 'for before
I began building, it might have been of use to me.'

This famous memorial of Walpolean greatness, this splendid folly,
constructed, it is generally supposed, on public money, was inhabited by
Sir Robert only ten days in summer, and twenty days in winter; in the
autumn, during the shooting season, two months. It became almost an
eyesore to the quiet gentry, who viewed the palace with a feeling of
their own inferiority. People as good as the Walpoles lived in their
gable-ended, moderate-sized mansions; and who was Sir Robert, to set
them at so immense a distance?

To the vulgar comprehension of the Premier, Houghton, gigantic in its
proportions, had its purposes. He there assembled his supporters; there,
for a short time, he entertained his constituents and coadjutors with a
magnificent, jovial hospitality, of which he, with his gay spirits, his
humourous, indelicate jokes, and his unbounded good-nature, was the very
soul. Free conversation, hard-drinking, were the features of every day's
feast. Pope thus describes him:--

'Seen him, I have, but in his happier hour,
Of social pleasure, ill exchanged for power;
Seen him uncumbered with the venal tribe,
Smile without art, and win without a bribe.'

Amid the coarse taste one gentle refinement existed: this was the love
of gardening, both in its smaller compass and it its nobler sense of
landscape gardening. 'This place,' Sir Robert, in 1743, wrote to General
Churchill, from Houghton, 'affords no news, no subject of entertainment
or amusement; for fine men of wit and pleasure about town understand
neither the language and taste, nor the pleasure of the inanimate wor