ceive by my date that I am got into a new camp, and have left
my tub at Windsor. It is a little plaything-house that I got out of
Mrs Chevenix's shop, and the prettiest bauble you ever saw. It is set
in enamelled meadows with filagree hedges:

A small Euphrates through the place is roll'd,
And little finches wave their wings of gold.

Two delightful roads; that you would call dusty, supply me continually
with coaches and chaises: barges as solemn as Barons of the Exchequer
move under my window; Richmond Hill and Ham Walks bound my prospect;
but, thank God! the Thames is between me and the Duchess of
Queensberry. Dowagers as plenty as flounders inhabit all around, and
Pope's ghost is just now skimming under my window by the most poetical
moonlight.... The Chevenixes had tricked it out for themselves; up two
pairs of stairs is what they call Mr Chevenix's library, furnished
with three maps, one shelf, a bust of Sir Isaac Newton and a lame
telescope without any glasses. Lord John Sackville _predeceased_ me
here and instituted certain games called _cricketalia_, which has been
celebrated this very evening in honour of him in a neighbouring
meadow.

You will think I have removed my philosophy from Windsor with my
tea-things hither; for I am writing to you in all tranquility while a
Parliament is bursting about my ears. You know it is going to be
dissolved.... They say the Prince has taken up two hundred thousand
pounds, to carry elections which he won't carry--he had much better
have saved it to buy the Parliament after it is chosen.

There you have Horatio Walpole, the man-about-town, almost precisely
echoing Horatius Flaccus, the man-about-town; and this (if you will bring
your minds to it) is just the sort of passage a Roman colonist in Britain
would open upon, out of his parcel of new books, and read, _and
understand_, some eighteen hundred years ago.

What became of it all?--of that easy colonial life, of the men and women
who trod those tessellated pavements? 'Wiped out,' say the historians,
knowing nothing, merely guessing: for you may with small trouble assure
yourselves that the fifth and sixth centuries in the story of this island
are a blind spot, concerning which one man's guess may be as good as
another's. 'Wiped out,' they will commonly agree; for while, as I warned
you in another lecture, the pedantic mind, faced with a difficu