e Great, marching in triumph into Babylon, could not have
desired to have had more said to him."

Topham Beauclerk had two daughters by Lady Diana, one of whom became Lady
Pembroke. He died at his house in Great Russell Street, then a place of
fashion, in 1780, in his 41st year.

Selwyn's seat, Matson, in Gloucestershire, received some pretty historical
reminiscences. One of Walpole's letters to Bentley, thus speaks of a visit
to his friend's villa in the autumn of 1753.

"I staid two days at George Selwyn's house, which lies on Robin Hood's
hill. It is lofty enough for an Alp, yet is a mountain of turf to the very
top, has woods scattered all over it, springs that long to be cascades in
twenty places; and from the summits it beats even Sir George Littleton's
views, by having the city of Gloucester at its foot, and the Severn
widening to the horizon. The house is small but neat; King Charles (the
First,) lay here at the siege, and the Duke of York, with typical fury,
hacked and hewed the windows of his chamber, as a memorandum of his being
there. The fact however being, that both the princes, Charles and James,
who were then mere boys, remained at Matson--a circumstance frequently
mentioned to Selwyn's grandfather by James II., observing:--'My brother
and I were generally shut up in a chamber on the second floor during the
day, where you will find that we have left the marks of our confinement
inscribed with our knives on the ledges of all the windows."'

The house must have been quite a treasure to Walpole, for he found in it a
good picture of the famous Earl of Leicester, which he had given to Sir
Francis Walsingham; and what makes it very curious, Walpole observes his
age is marked on it fifty-four, in 1752. "I had never been able to
discover before in what year he was born, and here is the very flower-pot
and counterfeit association for which Bishop Sprat was taken up, and the
Duke of Marlborough sent to the Tower."

It is, however, by no means clear, that this was a "counterfeit
association," though Walpole abandons his usual scepticism on all
disputable points with such facility. The "association" was a plot to
bring back that miserable blockhead and bigot, James II., said to be
signed by Marlborough, the Bishop of Rochester, Lords Salisbury, Cornberry,
and Sir Basil Firebrace. On the information of one Young, the draft of the
plot was found in a flower-pot in the Bishop's house at Bromley. But
fortunately the