Breakfast over, and a liberal bowl of bread-and-milk tossed out of window to the troops of squirrels that come flocking in from the high trees round the lawn, your host would invite you to make the tour of the grounds, adding (if it were May) that his favourite lilacs were well worth the effort. He would astonish you by going out in his slippers and without a hat; and, in reply to your ill-concealed astonishment, would laughingly compare himself to the Indian in the 'Spectator' who said he was 'all face.' Passing by the Abbot's garden, with its bright parterres, he would lead you to the pretty cottage he had built on the site of the old residence of his deceased tenant Richard Francklin, once printer of that scurrilous 'Craftsman' in which Pulteney and Bolingbroke had so persistently assailed his father. In its sunny, print-hung tea-room, with the 'Little Library' at the side, he would show you the picture of his friend Lady Hervey, once the 'beautiful Molly Lepel' of Pulteney and Chesterfield's ballad, and would tell you that the frame was carved by the same Grinling Gibbons to whom we owe the bronze statue of King James the Second in the Privy Garden at Whitehall. Thence you would pass to the chapel in the wood, with its stained-glass pictures of Henry the Third and his Queen from Bexhill Church, and its shrine from Santa Maria Maggiore at Rome; and he would explain that the roof was designed by that unimpeachable authority in Gothic, Mr. Chute of the Vyne, in Hampshire; that George Augustus Selwyn had given him the great earthen pot at the door; and that the carved bench in the ante-chapel had been contrived by no less a person than the son of the famous 'Ricardus Aristarchus,' Master of Trinity, the—
'mighty Scholiast, whose unwearied pains
Made Horace dull, and humbled Milton's strains—'
as he would quote from the 'Dunciad' of the late lamented Mr. Pope. Richard Bentley the younger, he would remind you, had also drawn some excellent illustrations to Gray (the originals of which he will show you later in the library); and meanwhile he invites your attention at the end of the winding walk to another masterpiece from the same ingenious brain—a huge oaken seat shaped like a shell, in which once sat together three of the handsomest women in England—the Duchess of Hamilton, the Duchess of Richmond, and the Countess of Ailesbury. If you were still intelligently interested, and your host still unfatigued (for he is capricious and easily tired), you would pass from the garden to the private printing-press, the 'Officina Arbuteana' as he christens it, next the neighbouring farmyard. Here you would be introduced to the superintendent and occasional secretary, Mr. Thomas Kirgate, who, if so minded, would exhibit to you a proof of Miss Hannah More's poem of 'Bishop Bonner's Ghost' (which his patron is kindly setting up for her), or then and there strike you off a piping-hot 'pull' of the latest quatrain to those charming Miss Berrys who are now inhabiting 'Little Strawberry' hard by, once tenanted by red-faced, good-humoured Mrs. Clive. As you return at last to the house, your guide would almost certainly pause in the Little Cloister at the entrance beside the blue and white china tub for goldfish in which was drowned that favourite cat whose fate was immortalized by Gray; and, lifting the label, he would read the poet's words:
''T was on this lofty Vase's side,
Where China's gayest Art has dy'd
The azure Flow'rs, that blow,
Demurest of the tabby kind,
The pensive Selima reclin'd,
Gaz'd on the Lake below.' *