ose.

After ascending the outer steps, you entered an antique hall of vast
dimensions, wainscoted with black carved oak, and ornamented with
portraits of our ancestors: from the square beard of Brook Lyndon, the
great lawyer in Queen Bess's time, to the loose stomacher and ringlets
of Lady Saccharissa Lyndon, whom Vandyck painted when she was a maid of
honour to Queen Henrietta Maria, and down to Sir Charles Lyndon, with
his riband as a knight of the Bath; and my Lady, painted by Hudson, in
a white satin sack and the family diamonds, as she was presented to
the old King George II. These diamonds were very fine: I first had
them reset by Boehmer when we appeared before their French Majesties at
Versailles; and finally raised L18,000 upon them, after that infernal
run of ill luck at 'Goosetree's,' when Jemmy Twitcher (as we called
my Lord Sandwich), Carlisle, Charley Fox, and I played hombre for
four-and-forty hours SANS DESEMPARER. Bows and pikes, huge stag-heads
and hunting implements, and rusty old suits of armour, that may have
been worn in the days of Gog and Magog for what I know, formed the other
old ornaments of this huge apartment; and were ranged round a fireplace
where you might have turned a coach-and-six. This I kept pretty much in
its antique condition, but had the old armour eventually turned out
and consigned to the lumber-rooms upstairs; replacing it with china
monsters, gilded settees from France, and elegant marbles, of which the
broken noses and limbs, and ugliness, undeniably proved their antiquity:
and which an agent purchased for me at Rome. But such was the taste
of the times (and, perhaps, the rascality of my agent), that thirty
thousand pounds' worth of these gems of art only went for three hundred
guineas at a subsequent period, when I found it necessary to raise money
on my collections.

From this main hall branched off on either side the long series of
state-rooms, poorly furnished with high-backed chairs and long queer
Venice glasses, when first I came to the property; but afterwards
rendered so splendid by me, with the gold damasks of Lyons and the
magnificent Gobelin tapestries I won from Richelieu at play. There
were thirty-six bedrooms DE MAITRE, of which I only kept three in their
antique condition,--the haunted room as it was called, where the murder
was done in James II.'s time, the bed where William slept after
landing at Torbay, and Queen Elizabeth's state-room. All the rest were
r