ld.
My flatterers here are all mutes: the oaks, the beeches, the chestnuts,
seem to contend which best shall please the lord of the manor. They
cannot deceive; they will not lie. I in sincerity admire them, and have
as many beauties about me as fill up all my hours of dangling, and no
disgrace attending me, from sixty-seven years of age. Within doors we
come a little nearer to real life, and admire, upon the almost speaking
canvas, all the airs and graces the proudest ladies can boast.'

In these pursuits Horace cordially shared. Through his agency, Horace
Mann, still in the diplomatic service, at Florence, selected and
purchased works of art, which were sent either to Arlington Street, or
to form the famous Houghton Collection, to which Horace so often refers
in that delightful work, his 'Anecdotes of Painting.'

Amongst the embellishments of Houghton, the gardens were the most
expensive.

'Sir Robert has pleased himself,' Pulteney, Earl of Bath, wrote, 'with
erecting palaces and extending parks, planting gardens in places to
which the very earth was to be transported in carriages, and embracing
cascades and fountains whose water was only to be obtained by aqueducts
and machines, and imitating the extravagance of Oriental monarchs, at
the expense of a free people whom he has at once impoverished and
betrayed.'

The ex-minister went to a great expense in the cultivation of plants,
bought Uvedale's 'Hortus Siccus;' and received from Bradley, the
Professor of Botany at Cambridge, the tribute of a dedication, in which
it was said that 'Sir Robert had purchased one of the finest collections
of plants in the kingdom.'

What was more to his honour still, was Sir Robert's preservation of St.
James's Park for the people. Fond of outdoor amusements himself, the
Premier heard, with dismay, a proposal on the part of Queen Caroline to
convert that ancient park into a palace garden. 'She asked my father,'
Horace Walpole relates, 'what the alteration might possibly
cost?'--_Only three crowns_' was the civil, witty, candid answer. The
queen was wise enough to take the hint. It is possible she meant to
convert the park into gardens that should be open to the public as at
Berlin, Mannheim, and even the Tuileries. Still it would not have been
ours.

Horace Walpole owed, perhaps, his love of architecture and his taste for
gardening, partly to the early companionship of Gray, who delighted in
those pursuits. Walpole's estimation of