From a subsequent letter it would seem that Mann, as a resident in Italy, had rather expostulated against the style of architecture which his friend was about to adopt, and had suggested the Grecian. But Walpole, rightly or wrongly, knew what he intended. 'The Grecian,' he said, was 'only proper for magnificent and public buildings. Columns and all their beautiful ornaments look ridiculous when crowded into a closet or a cheesecake-house. The variety is little, and admits no charming irregularities. I am almost as fond of the Sharawaggi, or Chinese want of symmetry, in buildings, as in grounds or gardens. I am sure, whenever you come to England, you will be pleased with the liberty of taste into which we are struck, and of which you can have no idea.' The passage shows that he himself anticipated some of the ridicule which was levelled by unsympathetic people at the 'oyster-grotto-like profanation' which he gradually erected by the Thames. In the mean time it went on progressing slowly, as its progress was entirely dependent on his savings out of income; and the references to it in his letters, perhaps because Mann was doubtful, are not abundant. 'The library and refectory, or great parlour,' he says in his description, 'were entirely new built in 1753; the gallery, round tower, great cloyster, and cabinet, in 1760 and 1761; and the great north bedchamber in 1770.' To speak of these later alterations would be to anticipate too much, and the further description of Strawberry Hill will be best deferred until his own account of the house and contents was printed in 1774, four years after the last addition above recorded. But even before he made the earliest of them, he must have done much to alter and improve the aspect of the place, for Gray, more admiring than Mann, praises what has been done. 'I am glad,' he tells Wharton, 'that you enter into the spirit of Strawberry-castle. It has a purity and propriety of Gothicism in it (with very few exceptions) that I have not seen elsewhere;' and in an earlier letter he implies that its 'extreme littleness' is its chief defect. But here, before for the moment leaving the subject, it is only fair to give the proprietor's own description of Strawberry Hill at this date, i. e., in June, 1753. After telling Mann that it is 'so monastic' that he has 'a little hall decked with long saints in lean arched windows and with taper columns, which we call the Paraclete, in memory of Eloisa's cloister,'[73] he sends him a sketch of it, and goes on: 'The enclosed enchanted little landscape, then, is Strawberry Hill.... This view of the castle is what I have just finished [it was a view of the south side, towards the north-east], and is the only side that will be at all regular. Directly before it is an open grove, through which you see a field, which is bounded by a serpentine wood of all kind of trees, and flowering shrubs, and flowers. The lawn before the house is situated on the top of a small hill, from whence to the left you see the town and church of Twickenham encircling a turn of the river, that looks exactly like a sea-port in miniature. The opposite shore is a most delicious meadow, bounded by Richmond Hill, which loses itself in the noble woods of the park to the end of the prospect on the right, where is another turn of the river, and the suburbs of Kingston as luckily placed as Twickenham is on the left: and a natural terrace on the brow of my hill, with meadows of my own down to the river, commands both extremities. Is not this a tolerable prospect? You must figure that all this is perpetually enlivened by a navigation of boats and barges, and by a road below my terrace, with coaches, post-chaises, waggons, and horsemen constantly in motion, and the fields speckled with cows, horses, and sheep. Now you shall walk into the house. The bow window below leads into a little parlour hung with a stone-colour Gothic paper and Jackson's Venetian prints,[74] which I could never endure while they pretended, infamous as they are, to be after Titian, etc., but when I gave them this air of barbarous bas-reliefs, they succeeded to a miracle: it is impossible at first sight not to conclude that they contain the history of Attila or Tottila done about the very æra. From hence, under two gloomy arches, you come to the hall and staircase, which it is impossible to describe to you, as it is the most particular and chief beauty of the castle. Imagine the walls covered with (I call it paper, but it is really paper painted in perspective to represent) Gothic fretwork: the lightest Gothic balustrade to the staircase, adorned with antelopes (our supporters) bearing shields; lean windows fattened with rich saints in painted glass, and a vestibule open with three arches on the landing place, and niches full of trophies of old coats of mail, Indian shields made of rhinoceros's hides, broadswords, quivers, long-bows, arrows, and spears,—all supposed to be taken by Sir Terry Robsart [an ancestor of Sir Robert Walpole] in the holy wars. But as none of this regards the enclosed drawing, I will pass to that. The room on the ground floor nearest to you is a bedchamber, hung with yellow paper and prints, framed in a new manner, invented by Lord Cardigan; that is, with black and white borders printed. Over this is Mr. Chute's bed-chamber, hung with red in the same manner. The bow-window room one pair of stairs is not yet finished; but in the tower beyond it is the charming closet where I am now writing to you. It is hung with green paper and water-colour pictures; has two windows: the one in the drawing looks to the garden, the other to the beautiful prospect; and the top of each glutted with the richest painted glass of the arms of England, crimson roses, and twenty other pieces of green, purple, and historic bits. I must tell you, by the way, that the castle, when finished, will have two-and-thirty windows enriched with painted glass. In this closet, which is Mr. Chute's College of Arms, are two presses of books of heraldry and antiquities, Madame Sévigné's Letters, and any French books that relate to her and her acquaintance. Out of this closet is the room where we always live, hung with a blue and white paper in stripes adorned with festoons, and a thousand plump chairs, couches, and luxurious settees covered with linen of the same pattern, and with a bow window commanding the prospect, and gloomed with limes that shade half each window, already darkened with painted glass in chiaroscuro, set in deep blue glass. Under this room is a cool little hall, where we generally dine, hung with paper to imitate Dutch tiles.
'I have described so much that you will begin to think that all the accounts I used to give you of the diminutiveness of our habitation were fabulous; but it is really incredible how small most of the rooms are. The only two good chambers I shall have are not yet built: they will be an eating-room and a library, each twenty by thirty, and the latter fifteen feet high. For the rest of the house, I could send it to you in this letter as easily as the drawing, only that I should have nowhere to live until the return of the post. The Chinese summer-house, which you may distinguish in the distant landscape, belongs to my Lord Radnor.[75] We pique ourselves upon nothing but simplicity, and have no carvings, gildings, paintings, inlayings, or tawdry businesses.'[76]
From this it will appear that in June, 1753, the library and refectory were not yet built, so that when he says, in the printed description, that they were new built in 1753, he must mean no more than that they had been begun. In a later letter, of May, 1754, they were still unfinished. Meanwhile the house is gradually attracting more and more attention. George Montagu comes, and is 'in raptures and screams, and hoops, and hollas, and dances, and crosses himself a thousand times over.' The next visitor is 'Nolkejumskoi,'—otherwise the Duke of Cumberland,—who inspects it much after the fashion of a gracious Gulliver surveying a castle in Lilliput. Afterwards, attracted by the reports of Lady Hervey and Mr. Bristow (brother of the Countess of Buckingham), arrives my Lord Bath, who is stirred into celebrating it to the tune of a song of Bubb Dodington on Mrs. Strawbridge. His Lordship does not seem to have got further than two stanzas; but Walpole, not to leave so complimentary a tribute in the depressed condition of a fragment, discreetly revised and completed it himself. The lines may fairly find a place here as an example of his lighter muse. The first and third verses are Lord Bath's, the rest being obviously written in order to bring in 'Nolkejumskoi' and some personal friends:—
'Some cry up Gunnersbury,
For Sion some declare;
And some say that with Chiswick-house
No villa can compare:
But ask the beaux of Middlesex,
Who know the county well,
If Strawb'ry-hill, if Strawb'ry-hill