33,4507. We speak within compass when we say that it would now realise three times that sum. When the last blow of the auctioneer's hammer had sounded, the guardian genius of poor, stripped, despoiled, desecrated, degraded Strawberry must have resembled the White Lady of Avenel when her golden zone had dwindled to the fineness of a thread; and only too appropriate in the mouth of the owner, when, as its uncontrolled mistress, she paced the denuded gallery, would have been the words of Moore's song: "I feel like one who treads alone Whose lights are fled, whose garlands dead, But she had head, heart, imagination, energy, and a will as resolute as Warren Hastings when he made it the set purpose of his life to regain and reinstate his ancestral home of Daylesford. Animated instead of depressed by the self-imposed task of repairing what seemed irreparable, with views opening and plans expanding as she went on-she restored, renovated, improved, added, acquired and annexed to give breathing-room, till the villa had grown into a first-class country-house in a land where country-houses are palaces, and this without destroying or materially impairing the distinctive character which the founder had so perseveringly impressed upon it or (what would be still worse) producing inside or outside an impression of incongruity. This is not the place for details. But take up a position on the south-east side so as to command a complete view of the portions constructed at four different periods, and you will find that they slide into each other without a break. Enter the house, pass through the gallery, round-room and anteroom, into the finely-proportioned richly-furnished drawing-room with the famous Reynolds (the three Ladies Waldegrave) confronting you, and you will see nothing to remind you abruptly or disagreeably of the fact that you have been passing from one epoch of internal decoration to another. The transition is softened down and rendered less perceptible by the adoption of a happy thought of the celebrated Marquise de Rambouillet, who had a room devoted to portraits of her friends. The walls of the gallery at Strawberry Hill are now exclusively occupied by portraits of intimate friends and illustrious or distinguished visitors, including the Prince and Princess of Wales, whose grace, affability, and charm of look and manner, faithfully reflected, would most assuredly have cured Walpole, had he fallen beneath their influence, of his dislike to royal visitors. First come, first served. Those to whom places have been assigned form only a section of the illustrious or distinguished visitors and friends. When an increase of the peerage was proposed at the Restoration, Buckingham remarked that, if every Cavalier with a claim were created, the House of Lords must meet on Salisbury Plain. To carry out Lady Waldegrave's original plan, it might have become necessary to extend the gallery by roofing over the lawn.1 1 Besides the portraits of the Prince and Princess of Wales in a single picture, the gallery contains separate portraits of the Duc and Duchesse d'Aumale, the late Earl and Countess of Clarendon, Earl Russell, Earl Grey, Viscount Palmerston, Mr. Gladstone, Viscount Halifax, the Marchioness of Clanricarde, the late Countess of Morley, Lord Lyndhurst, M. Van de Weyer, Bishop Wilberforce, Viscount Stratford de Redcliffe, the Duchess of Sutherland and the late Duchess, the Duchess of Westminster, Lady Churchill, Lady Augusta Sturt, the Countess of Shaftesbury, the Marchioness of Northampton, Madame Alphonse de Rothschild, Lady Selina Hervey, the Hon. Mrs. F. Stonor, Sir Thomas May, the Countess All Walpole's smaller rooms have been preserved pretty nearly as he left them, although their destination has been changed. It was in the narrow passage leading from the hall to the Beauty Room (now a bedroom) that a late Chancellor of Ireland, his thoughts reverting to the natural enemies of his youth, exclaimed: "What a capital place if a man was pursued by bailiffs!" Walpole was constantly haunted by the fear that his creations and collections would not be respected by his successors, whatever indulgent friends might think or say of them : "I wish," he writes to Montague in 1755, "you would visit it (Strawberry Hill) when it is in its beauty, and while it is mine. You will not, I flatter myself, like it so well when it belongs to the Intendant of Twickenham, when a cockle shell walk is made across the lawn, and everything without doors is made regular, and everything within modern and riant; for this must be its fate." "May, 1772. "In short, this old, old, very old castle, as his prints called Old Parr, is so near being perfect, that it will certainly be ready by the time I die to be improved with Indian paper, or to have the windows let down to the ground by some travelled lady." "May 4, 1774. (To Cole.) "Consider, Strawberry is almost the last monastery left, at least in England. Poor Mr. Bateman's is despoiled. Lord Bateman has stripped and plundered it, has advertised the site, and is dirtily selling by auction what he neither would keep nor sell for a sum that is worth while. Surely it is very indecent for a favourite relation, who Spencer, the Countess Somers, and Lady Waldegrave herself. The next addition, we believe, will be the charming habituée (the Duchess of Manchester) who, at a ball given by Lady Waldegrave at the Secretary's Lodge, Dublin, caused an old Irish gentleman to exclaim: "I have come fifty miles to attend this ball, and I would have come a hundred to look at that beautiful Duchess." This compliment may pair off with that of the drayman who asked Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, to let him light his pipe at her eyes. I is rich, to show so little remembrance and affection. suppose Strawberry will share the same fate. It has already happened to two of my friends." His melancholy forebodings have been partly realised: "Jove heard and granted half the suppliants' prayer, The rest the winds dispersed in empty air." His collection has been dispersed through both hemispheres. But the fixed (we can hardly say, solid) fabric of his creation, his monastic castle or castellated monastery, the historic Strawberry Hill, has risen with renovated splendour from its temporary prostration; and-thanks to the taste, spirit, munificence, and cordial graceful abounding hospitality of an accomplished highly gifted woman -has regained and surpassed all the interest, attraction, and celebrity which it possessed in his lifetime and which he sorrowfully foretold would die with him. NOTE. Since this was written, Strawberry Hill has again undergone an eclipse by the untimely loss of the presiding genius, a woman whose true value, admired and esteemed as she was in her lifetime, was not fully felt and recognised till she died. It would be difficult to name a death which has caused so lively and general a sensation of regret, which has created a blank in so many circles, which so frequently elicits the reflection that somebody or something would be different and better had she lived. BYRON AND TENNYSON.1 (From the Quarterly Review, October, 1871.) THE book before us is a biographical and critical essay on the noble poet and his works, containing a conscientiously accurate summary of his life and an impartial estimate of his genius. It will help to correct many erroneous notions, and it offers the opportunity which we have long coveted of analysing and (if possible) fixing the existing state of opinion regarding him, in especial relation to the living poet whose name is most frequently pronounced in rivalry. 'Byron, indisputably the greatest poetical genius that England has produced since Shakespeare and Milton." Such is the commencement of the notice of Byron in the last edition of the "Conversations-Lexicon," and we have ascertained by careful inquiry that it may be accepted as the exact representative of enlightened Germany upon this as upon most other subjects of thought, speculation or philosophy. Herr Elze says, "In the four head-divisions of poetry, English literature has produced four unapproached men of genius: Shakespeare in the dramatic: Milton in the reflecting, so far as this can be regarded as a peculiar 1 Lord Byron. Von Karl Elze. Berlin, 1870. VOL. II. X |