n stripes adorned with festoons, and a thousand plump
chairs, couches, and luxurious settees covered with linen of the same
pattern, and with a bow-window commanding the prospect, and gloomed
with limes that shade half each window, already darkened with painted
glass in chiaroscuro, set in deep blue glass. Under this room is a cool
little hall, where we generally dine, hung with paper to imitate Dutch
tiles.

I have described so much, that you will begin to think that all the
accounts I used to give you of the diminutiveness of our habitation were
fabulous; but it is really incredible how small most of the rooms are.
The only two good chambers I shall have are not yet built: they will be
an eating-room and a library, each twenty by thirty, and the latter
fifteen feet high. For the rest of the house I could send it you in this
letter as easily as the drawing, only that I should have nowhere to live
till the return of the post. The Chinese summer-house, which you may
distinguish in the distant landscape, belongs to my Lord Radnor. We
pique ourselves upon nothing but simplicity, and have no carvings,
gildings, paintings, inlayings, or tawdry businesses.

You will not be sorry, I believe, by this time to have done with
Strawberry Hill, and to hear a little news. The end of a very dreaming
session has been extremely enlivened by an accidental bill which has
opened great quarrels, and those not unlikely to be attended with
interesting circumstances. A bill to prevent clandestine marriages,[1]
so drawn by the Judges as to clog all matrimony in general, was
inadvertently espoused by the Chancellor; and having been strongly
attacked in the House of Commons by Nugent, the Speaker, Mr. Fox, and
others, the last went very great lengths of severity on the whole body
of the law, and on its chieftain in particular, which, however, at the
last reading, he softened and explained off extremely. This did not
appease: but on the return of the bill to the House of Lords, where our
amendments were to be read, the Chancellor in the most personal terms
harangued against Fox, and concluded with saying that "he despised his
scurrility as much as his adulation and recantation." As Christian
charity is not one of the oaths taken by privy-counsellors, and as it is
not the most eminent virtue in either of the champions, this quarrel is
not likely to be soon reconciled. There are natures whose disposition it
is to patch up political breaches, but wh