* There is one of these labels in the Dyce Collection at
South Kensington.
Once more under Bentley's japanned tin lantern in the gloomy little hall, your host, pending the scribbling of half-a-dozen pressing letters' to Lady Ossory, Mr. Pinkerton, or one or other of his many correspondents, would beg you to await him in the Picture Gallery. Here, long before you had exhausted your admiration of the Emperor Vespasian in basalt, or the incomparable Greek Eagle from the baths of Caracalla, he would resume his post of cicerone, leading you almost at once to the portraits of his three beautiful nieces, Edward Walpole's daughters, one of whom, painted by Reynolds, had been fortunate enough to marry King George's own brother, William Henry, Duke of Gloucester (a fact of which her uncle Horace is ill-disguisedly proud). From the Gallery you would pass to the Round Drawing-Room, whose chief glory was Vasari's 'Bianca Capello;' and thence to the adjoining Tribune, a curious yellow-lit chamber, with semicircular recesses, in which were accumulated most of the choicest treasures of Strawberry,—miniatures by Cooper and the Olivers, enamels by Petitot and Zincke, gems from Italy, bas-reliefs in ivory, coins and seal-rings and reliquaries and filigree work, in the dispersed profusion of which you would afterwards dimly recall such items as a silver bell carved with masks and insects by Benvenuto Cellini, a missal attributed to Raphael, a bronze Caligula with silver eyes, and a white snuff-box with a portrait purporting to be a gift from Madame de Sévigné in the Elysian Fields, but sent in reality by the faithful Madame du Deffand. Each object would bring its train of associations and traditions; and the fading of the 'all-golden afternoon' would find your companion still promising fresh marvels in the yet unexplored rooms beyond, where are the speculum of cannel coal once used by the notorious starmonger, Dr. John Dee; the red hat of his Eminence Cardinal Wolsey; and the very spurs worn by King William the Third, of immortal memory, at the ever-glorious Battle of the Boyne.
With four o'clock would come dinner, eaten probably in the Refectory, a room consecrated chiefly to the family portraits, conspicuous among which, in blue velvet, was your host by Richardson. The repast was 'of Attic taste,' but with very little wine, as Walpole himself drank nothing but iced water, and 'coffee upstairs' was ordered with such promptitude as to afford the visitor but scanty leisure for lingering over the bottle. About five you migrated to the Round Drawing-Room, where your entertainer, after recommending you to replenish your box with Fribourg's snuff from a canister of which the hiding-place was an ancient marble urn in the window-seat, would take up his station on the sofa, and resume his inexhaustible flood of memories and reflections, always bright, often striking, and never wearisome. Once, perhaps, he would rise to exhibit the closet he had built for Lady Di. Beauclerk's seven drawings in soot-water to his own tragedy of the 'Mysterious Mother;' or he would adjourn for an hour to the Library, to turn over his unrivalled collection of Hogarth's prints; or to show you Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's 'Milton,' or the identical 'Iliad' and 'Odyssey' from which Pope made his translations, or the long row of books printed at the 'Officina Arbuteana.' But he would gravitate sooner or later to his old vantage-ground on the sofa, whence, unhasting, unresting, he would discourse most excellent anecdote into the small hours, when the chintz curtains of the Red Bedchamber would again receive his bewitched and bewildered, but still unsatiated, visitor. And so would end your day at Horace Walpole's Gothic Castle of Strawberry Hill.
XV. GOLDSMITH'S LIBRARY.
AN auctioneer's catalogue—and particularly an auctioneer's catalogue more than a hundred years old—is not, at first sight, the most suggestive of subjects. And yet that issued in July, 1774, by Mr. Good, of 121 Fleet Street, still possesses considerable interest. For it is nothing less than an account, bald, indeed, and only moderately literary, of the 'Household [sic] Furniture, with the Select Collection of Scarce, Curious and Valuable Books, in English, Latin, Greek, French, Italian and other Languages, late the Library of Dr. Goldsmith, Deceased.' As one runs over the items, one seems to realize the circumstances. One seems almost to see Mr. Good's unemotional assistants, with their pens behind their ears, and their ink-bottles 'upon the excise principle' dangling from their button-holes, as they peer about the dingy Chambers at Brick Court, with the dark little closet of a bedroom at the back where the poor Doctor lay and died. We can imagine them sniffing superciliously at the chief pictorial adornment, 'The Tragic Muse, in a gold frame;' or drawing from its sheath, with an air of 'prentice connoisseurship, 'the steel-hilted sword, inlaid with gold,' or 'the black-hilted ditto,' not without speculations as to how those weapons would adorn their own ungainly persons in a holiday jaunt to White Conduit House or Marybone Gardens. We see them professionally prodding the faded mahogany sofa 'covered with blue morine' which had so often vibrated under the nervous twitchings of Johnson; appraising the 'compass card-tables' over which Boswell had dealt trumps to Reynolds; or critically weighing the teapot in which the 'Jessamy Bride' had more than once made tea. Their sordid commercial figures must have crossed and re-crossed before 'the very large dressing-glass' with 'mahogany frame,' which only a few weeks past had reflected the 'blue velvet,' and the 'straw-coloured' and 'silver-grey tamboured waistcoats' for which honest Mr. William Filby, at the sign of the Harrow in Water Lane, was never now to see the money. No doubt, too, they desecrated, with their Fleet Street mud, that famous Wilton carpet which had looked so sumptuous when it was first laid down but half-a-dozen years ago; and, if they were at all like their brethren of these days, they must have pished generally over the rest of those modest properties which, in the golden epoch when the 'Good Natur'd Man' seemed to promise perpetual prosperity, had excited so much awe and admiration among Goldsmith's humbler friends. 'Not much to tot up here, Docket!'—says Mr. Good's young man to his fellow. And we may fancy Mr. Docket assenting with a contemptuous extension of his under lip, enforced by the supplementary proposition that they should at once moisten their unpromising labours by adjourning to a pot of 'Parsons' Black Champagne' at the Tavern by the Temple Gates.
As for the books, the 'Select Collection' that the unsympathetic stock-takers turned over so irreverently with their feet as they lay in dusty ranges on the floor, it must be feared that worthy Mr. Good's description of them as 'Scarce, Curious and Valuable' is more creditable to his business traditions than his literary insight. Goldsmith was scarcely a book-lover in the sense in which that term is now used. The man who, as Hawkins relates, could tear half-a-dozen leaves out of a volume to save himself the trouble of transcription,—the man who underscored objectionable passages with his thumb-nail, as he once did to a new poem that belonged to Reynolds—was not a genuine amateur du livre. They were a 'speculative lot' in all probability, the 'Brick Court Library;' and no doubt bore about them visibly the bumps and bruises of their transit 'in two returned post chaises' to the remote farm at Hyde, where their owner laboured at his vast 'Animated Nature.' Many of them had manifestly been collected to that end. Hill's 'Fossils,' 1748; Pliny's 'Historia Naturalis,' 1752; Gessner and Aldrovandus 'De Quadrupedibus;' Gouan's 'Histoire des Poissons,' 1770; Bohadsch's 'De Animalibus Marinis,' 1761; De Geer's 'Histoire des Insectes,' 1771, must all plainly have belonged to that series of purchases for the nonce which, he says in his preface, had so severely taxed his overburdened resources. In the classics he was fairly well equipped; and, as might be expected, he had many of the British poets, not to mention two copies of that indispensable manual, Mr. Edward Bysshe his treatise of the rhyming art.
But it is in French literature generally, and in French minstrels and playwrights in particular, that his store is richest. He has the 'Encyclopédie,' the 'Dictionnaire' and 'Recueil d'Anecdotes,' the 'Dictionnaire Littéraire,' the 'Dictionnaire Critique, Pittoresque et Sentencieux,' the 'Dictionnaire Gentilhomme;' he has many of the ana—'Parrhasiana,' 'Ducatiana,' 'Nau-deana,' 'Patiniana,' although, oddly enough, there is no copy of the 'Ménagiana,' which not only supplied him with that ancient ballad of 'Monsieur de la Palice' out of which grew 'Madam Blaize,' but also with the little poem of Bernard de la Monnoye, which he paraphrased so brightly in the well-known stanzas beginning:
'Say, cruel Iris, pretty rake,