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deny a single fact;' and Henry Fox, to whom he sent a copy, may be held to confirm this view, since his only objection seems to have been that it did not hit some of the other side a little harder. It would be difficult now without long notes to make it intelligible to modern readers; but the following outburst of the Chinese philosopher respecting the variations of the English climate has the merit of enduring applicability. The English have no sun, no summer, as we have, at least their sun does not scorch like ours. They content themselves with names at a certain time of the year they leave their capital, and that makes summer ; they go out of the city, and that makes the country. Their monarch, when he goes into the country, passes in his calash1 by a row of high trees, goes along a gravel walk, crosses one of the chief streets, is driven by the side of a canal between two rows of lamps, at the end of which he has a small house [Kensington Palace], and then he is supposed to be in the country. I saw this ceremony yesterday: as soon as he was gone the men put on under vest

1 A four-wheeled carriage with a movable hood. Cf. Prior's Down Hall: Then answer'd Squire Morley: Pray get a calash, That in summer may burn, and in winter may splash,' etc.

ments of white linen, and the women left off those vast draperies, which they call hoops, and which I have described to thee; and then all the men and all the women said it was hot. If thou wilt believe me, I am now [in May] writing to thee before a fire.' 1

In the following June Walpole had betaken. himself to the place he loved best of all,' and was amusing himself at Strawberry with his pen. The next work which he records is the publication of a Catalogue of the Collection of Pictures, etc., of [i. e., belonging to] Charles the First, for which he prepared a little introduction.' This, and the subsequent prefaces or advertisements' to the Catalogues of the Collections of James the Second, and the Duke of Buckingham, are to be found in vol. i., pp. 234-41, of his works. But the great event of 1757 is the establishment of the Officina Arbuteana, or private printing press, of Strawberry Hill. 6 Elzevir, Aldus, and Stephens,' he tells Chute in July, are the freshest personages in his memory,' and he jestingly threatens to assume as his motto (with a slight variation) Pope's couplet :

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'Some have at first for wits, then poets pass'd;

Turn'd printers next, and proved plain fools at last.' 1 Works, 1798, i. 208.

I am turned printer,' he writes somewhat later, and have converted a little cottage into a printing-office. My abbey is a perfect college or academy. I keep a painter [Müntz] in the house, and a printer, not to mention Mr. Bentley, who is an academy himself.'. William Robinson, the printer, an Irishman with noticeable eyes which Garrick envied (• they are more Richard the Third's than Garrick's own,' says Walpole), must have been a rather original personage, to judge by a copy of one of his letters which his patron incloses to Mann. He says he found it in a drawer where it had evidently been placed to attract his attention. After telling his correspondent in bad blank verse that he dates from the shady bowers, nodding groves, and amaranthine shades (?)' of Twickenham,—' Richmond's near neighbour, where great George the King resides,' — Robinson proceeds to describe his employer as 'the Hon. Horatio Walpole, son to the late great Sir Robert Walpole, who is very studious, and an admirer of all the liberal arts and sciences; amongst the rest he admires printing. He has fitted out a complete printing-house at this his country seat, and has done me the favour to make me sole manager and operator (there being no one but myself). All men of genius resorts his house,

courts his company, and admires his understanding what with his own and their writings, I believe I shall be pretty well employed. I have pleased him, and I hope to continue so to do.' Then, after reference to the extreme heat, a heat by which fowls and quarters of lamb have been roasted in the London Artillery grounds 'by the help of glasses,' so capricious was the climate over which Walpole had made merry in May, he proceeds to describe Strawberry. 'The place I am now in is all my comfort from the heat; the situation of it is close to the Thames, and is Richmond Gardens (if you were ever in them) in miniature, surrounded by bowers, groves, cascades, and ponds, and on a rising ground not very common in this part of the country; the building elegant, and the furniture of a peculiar taste, magnificent and superb.' At this date poor Robinson seems to have been delighted with the place and the fastidious master whom he hoped to continue to please.' But Walpole was nothing if not mutable, and two years later he had found out that Robinson of the remarkable eyes was ‘a foolish Irishman who took himself for a genius,' and they parted, with the result that the Officina Arbuteana was temporarily at a standstill.

For the moment, however, things went

smoothly enough. It had been intended that the maiden effort of the Strawberry types should have been a translation by Bentley of Paul Hentzner's curious account of England in 1598. But Walpole suddenly became aware that Gray had put the penultimate, if not the final, touches to his painfully elaborated Pindaric Odes, the Bard and the Progress of Poesy, and he pounced upon them forthwith; Gray, as usual, half expostulating, half overborne. 'You will dislike this as much as I do,' — he writes to Mason, 'but there is no help.' 'You understand, he adds, with the air of one resigning himself to the inevitable, it is he that prints them, not for me, but for Dodsley.' However, he persisted in refusing Walpole's not entirely unreasonable request for notes. If a thing cannot be understood without them,' he said characteristically, it had better not be understood at all.' Consequently, while describing them as Greek, Pindaric, sublime,' Walpole confesses under his breath that they are a little obscure. Dodsley paid Gray forty guineas for the book, which was a large, thin quarto, entitled Odes by Mr. Gray; Printed, at Strawberry Hill, for R. and J. Dodsley in Pall-Mall. was published in August, and the price was a shilling. On the title-page was a vignette of

It