all around, and
Pope's ghost is just now skimming under my window by a most poetical
moonlight. I have about land enough to keep such a farm as Noah's
when he set up in the Ark with a pair of each kind.

It is in the spirit of a child throwing its whole imagination into playing
with a Noah's Ark that he describes his queer house. It is in this spirit
that he sees the fields around his house "speckled with cows, horses and
sheep." The very phrase suggests toy animals. Walpole himself declared at
the age of seventy-three: "My best wisdom has consisted in forming a
baby-house full of playthings for my second childhood." That explains why
one almost loves the creature. Macaulay has severely censured him for
devoting himself to the collection of knick-knacks, such as King William
III.'s spurs, and it is apparently impossible to defend Walpole as a
collector to be taken seriously. Walpole, however, collected things in a
mood of fantasy as much as of connoisseurship. He did not take himself
quite seriously. It was fancy, not connoisseurship, that made him hang up
Magna Charta beside his bed and, opposite it, the warrant for the
execution of King Charles I., on which he had written "Major Charta." Who
can question the fantastic quality of the mind that wrote to Conway:
"Remember, neither Lady Salisbury nor you, nor Mrs. Damer, have seen my
new divine closet, nor the billiard-sticks with which the Countess of
Pembroke and Arcadia used to play with her brother, Sir Philip," and
ended: "I never did see Cotchel, and am sorry. Is not the old ward-robe
there still? There was one from the time of Cain, but Adam's breeches and
Eve's under-petticoat were eaten by a goat in the ark. Good-night." He
laughed over the knick-knacks he collected for himself and his friends.
"As to snuff-boxes and toothpick cases," he wrote to the Countess of
Ossory from Paris in 1771, "the vintage has entirely failed this year."
Everything that he turned his mind to in Strawberry Hill he regarded in
the same spirit of comic delight. He stood outside himself, like a
spectator, and nothing gave him more pleasure than to figure himself as a
master of the ceremonies among the bantams, and the squirrels and the
goldfish. In one of his letters he describes himself and Bentley fishing
in the pond for goldfish with "nothing but a pail and a basin and a
tea-strainer, which I persuade my neighbours is the Chinese method." This
was in order to capture some of the f