and Lady Fanshawe at Admiralty House, a big, cool roomy mansion like a French château, full of fine old portraits. We went out afterwards on the flag-captain's launch to see the _Victory_, a visit full of interest, though I was unequal to climbing the companions connecting the five decks. A man whom I sat next at tea in the Admiral's garden said he was connected with the Patent Office (I do not think he was actually Comptroller-General, but he was something high up in that rather mysterious department of the Civil Service), and told me some entertaining yarns about early patents and monopolies.[9] One was granted in 1618 to two men called Atkinson and Morgan, "to find out things in monasteries!" Another man, about the same time, secured the exclusive right of importing lobsters, which had hitherto cost a penny; but the patentee bought them out at sea from Dutch fishermen, and {111} sold them at threepence. In Charles I.'s reign a "doctour in phisick" called Grant got a patent for a "fishe-call, or looking-glass for fishes in the sea, very useful for fishermen to call all manner of fishes to their netts, seins, or hooks." In the same reign it was made compulsory to bury the dead in woollen in order to encourage the wool manufacture; and ten years later Widow Amy Potter got a (rather gruesome) patent for the elegant woollen costume she devised for this purpose.[10] I went from Kneller to spend a breezy week at Brighton with Captain Frank Grissell, to whom his brother, my old Oxford friend, had left practically all his possessions and collections, and who had just purchased a pretty villa in Preston Park in which to house them. No brothers were ever more dissimilar or more devoted than Hartwell, whose whole interests in life had been ecclesiastical and Roman, and his brother Frank, ex-cavalry officer, to whom horses and hunting, racing and coaching, were the salt of life. He had arranged his brother's miscellaneous treasures, in one or two spacious rooms, with great care and pains; and it was a curious experience to pass out of an atmosphere and environment of religious paintings, Roman bookbindings, panels from cardinals' coaches, Papal coins and medals, Italian ecclesiological literature, and what the {112} French call _objets de piété_ of every description, to the ex-lancer's own cheerful living-rooms: the walls hung with pictures of hunters, steeplechasers, coaching and sporting scenes; stuffed heads, tiger-skins, and other trophies of the chase everywhere about, and the windows looking out on a pretty garden, in the improvement and cultivation of which the owner was promising himself unfailing interest and occupation.