gardener (well named), presenting Charles II. with a pine-apple. Some
may murmur a doubt whether pine-apples were cultivated in cold Britain
so long since. But Horace enforces the fact; 'the likeness of the king,'
quoth he, 'is too marked, and his features are too well known to doubt
the fact;' and then he tells 'how he had received a present the last
Sunday of fruit--and from whom.'

They pause next on Sir Peter Lely's portrait of Cowley--next on
Hogarth's Sarah Malcolm, the murderess of her mistress; then--and
doubtless, the spinster ladies are in fault here for the delay,--on Mrs.
Damer's model of two kittens, pets, though, of Horace Walpole's--for he
who loved few human beings was, after the fashion of bachelors, fond of
cats.

They ascend the staircase: the domestic adornments merge into the
historic. We have Francis I.--not himself, but his armour: the
chimneypiece, too, is a copy from the tomb-works of John, Earl of
Cornwall, in Westminster Abbey; the stonework from that of Thomas, Duke
of Clarence, at Canterbury.

Stay awhile: we have not done with sacrilege yet; worse things are to be
told, and we walk with consciences not unscathed into the Library,
disapproving in secret but flattering vocally. Here the very spirit of
Horace seemed to those who visited Strawberry before its fall to breathe
in every corner. Alas! when we beheld that library, it was half filled
with chests containing the celebrated MSS. of his letters; which were
bought by that enterprising publisher of learned name, Richard Bentley,
and which have since had adequate justice done them by first-rate
editors. There they were: the 'Strawberry Gazette' in full;--one glanced
merely at the yellow paper, and clear, decisive hand, and then turned to
see what objects he, who loved his books so well, collected for his
especial gratification. Mrs. Damer again! how proud he was of her
genius--her beauty, her cousinly love for himself; the wise way in which
she bound up the wounds of her breaking heart when her profligate
husband shot himself, by taking to occupation--perhaps, too, by liking
cousin Horace indifferently well. He put her models forward in every
place. Here was her Osprey Eagle in terra-cotta, a masterly production;
there a _couvre-fire,_ or _cur-few,_ imitated and modelled by her. Then
the marriage of Henry VI. Figures on the wall; near the fire is a screen
of the first tapestry ever made in England, representing a map of Surrey
and Midd