‘The impulse once given, there was no stopping; the current was irresistible. The double lock on the gate of the avenue, the bulldog at the hall door, the closed shutters, the cut-away bell-rope, announced a firm resolution in the fortress not to surrender; but we were taken by assault, escaladed, and starved out in turns. ‘Scarcely was the tea-urn on the breakfast-table when they began to pour in--old and young, the halt, the one-eyed, the fat, the thin, the melancholy, the merry, the dissipated, the dyspeptic, the sentimental, the jocose, the blunt, the ceremonious, the courtly, the rude, the critical, and the free and easy. One came forty miles out of his way, and pronounced the whole thing an imposition, and myself a humbug; another insisted upon my getting up at dinner, that he might sit down in my chair, characterised by the confounded guides as “le fauteuil de Van Dyck”; a third went so far as to propose lying down in our great four- post bed, just to say he had been there, though my wife was then in it. I speak not of the miserable practice of cutting slices off all the furniture as relics. John Murray took an inventory of the whole contents of the house for a new edition of his guidebook; and Holman, the blind traveller, _felt_ me all over with his hand as I sat at tea with my wife; and last of all, a respectable cheesemonger from the Strand, after inspecting the entire building from the attics to the cellar, pressed sixpence into my hand at parting, and said, “Happy to see you, Mr. Van Dyck, if you come into the city!” ‘Then the advice and counsel I met with, oral and written, would fill a volume, and did; for I was compelled to keep an album in the hall for the visitors’ names. One suggested that my desecration of the temple of genius would be less disgusting if I dined in my kitchen, and left the ancient dining-room as the great artist had left it. Another hinted that my presence in my own house destroyed all the illusion of its historic associations. A third, a young lady--to judge by the writing--proposed my wearing a point-beard and lace ruffles, with trunk hose and a feather in my hat, probably to favour the “illusion” so urgently mentioned by the other writer, and, perhaps, to indulge visitors like my friend the cheesemonger. Many pitied me--well might they!--as one insensible to the associations of the spot; while my very servants, regarding me only as a show part of the establishment, neglected their duties on every side, and betook themselves to ciceroneship, each allocating his peculiar territory to himself, like the people who show the lions and the armour in the Tower.