old age, 'my niece, the Duchess of Gloucester,' leaned
on his arm. What strange associations, what brilliant company!--the
associations can never be recalled there again; nor the company
reassembled. The gallery, like everything else, has perished under the
pressure of debt. He who was so particular, too, as to the number of
those who were admitted to see his house--he who stipulated that four
persons only should compose a party, and one party alone be shown over
each day--how would he have borne the crisis, could he have foreseen it,
when Robins became, for the time, his successor, and was the temporary
lord of Strawberry; the dusty, ruthless, wondering, depreciating mob of
brokers--the respectable host of publishers--the starving army of
martyrs, the authors--the fine ladies, who saw nothing there comparable
to Howell and James's--the antiquaries, fishing out suspicious
antiquities--the painters, clamorous over Kneller's profile of Mrs.
Barry--the virtuous indignant mothers, as they passed by the portraits
of the Duchess de la Valliere, and of Ninon de l'Enclos, and remarked,
or at all events they _might_ have remarked, that the company on the
floor was scarcely much more respectable than the company on the
walls--the fashionables, who herded together, impelled by caste, that
free-masonry of social life, enter the Beauclerk closet to look over
Lady Di's scenes from the 'Mysterious Mother'--the players and
dramatists, finally, who crowded round Hogarth's sketch of his 'Beggars'
Opera,' with portraits, and gazed on Davison's likeness of Mrs.
Clive:--how could poor Horace have tolerated the sound of their
irreverent remarks, the dust of their shoes, the degradation of their
fancying that they might doubt his spurious-looking antiquities, or
condemn his improper-looking ladies on their canvas? How, indeed, could
he? For those parlours, that library, were peopled in his days with all
those who could enhance his pleasures, or add to their own, by their
presence. When Poverty stole in there, it was irradiated by Genius. When
painters hovered beneath the fretted ceiling of that library, it was to
thank the oracle of the day, not always for large orders, but for
powerful recommendations. When actresses trod the Star Chamber, it was
as modest friends, not as audacious critics on Horace, his house, and
his pictures.

Before we call up the spirits that were familiar at Strawberry--ere we
pass through the garden-gate, the piers of