"And by the end of April we had completely metamorphosed Gore House. I am sure that poor Lady Blessington would not have known her coquettish villa again had she visited it; and I am afraid she would not have been much gratified to see that which the upholsterers, the whitewashers, the hangers of calico, and your humble servant, had wrought. As for the venerable Mr. Wilberforce, who, I believe, occupied Gore House some years before Lady Blessington's tenancy, he would have held up his hands in pious horror to see the changes we had made. A madcap masquerade of bizarre taste and queer fancies had turned Gore House completely inside out. In honest truth, we had played the very dickens with it. The gardens were certainly magnificent; and there was a sloping terrace of flowers in the form of a gigantic shell, and literally crammed with the choicest roses, which has seldom, I believe, been rivalled in ornamental gardening. But the house itself! The library had been kindly dealt by, save that from the ceiling were suspended a crowd of quicksilvered glass globes, which bobbed about like the pendent ostrich-eggs in an Eastern mosque. There was a room called the 'Floriana,' with walls and ceiling fluted with blue and white calico, and stuck all over with spangles. There was the 'Doriana,' also in calico, pink and white, and approached by a portal called the 'door of the dungeon of mystery,' which was studded with huge nails, and garnished with fetters in the well-known Newgate fashion. Looking towards the garden were the Alhambra Terrace and the Venetian Bridge. The back drawing-room was the Night of Stars, or the _Rêverie de l'Etoile polaire_; the night being represented by a cerulean ceiling painted over with fleecy clouds, and the firmament by hangings of blue gauze spangled with stars cut out of silver-foil paper! Then there was the vestibule of Jupiter Tonans, the walls covered with a salmagundi of the architecture of all nations, from the Acropolis to the Pyramids of Egypt, from Temple Bar to the Tower of Babel. The dining-room became the Hall of Jewels, or the _Salon des Larmes de Danaë_, and the 'Shower of Gems,' with a grand arabesque perforated ceiling, gaudy in gilding and distemper colours. Upstairs there was a room fitted up as a Chinese pagoda, another as an Italian cottage overlooking a vineyard and the Lake of Como; another as a cavern of ice in the Arctic regions, with sham columns imitating icebergs, and a stuffed white fox--bought cheap at a sale--in the chimney. The grand staircase belonged to me, and I painted its walls with a grotesque nightmare of portraits of people I had never seen, and hundreds more upon whom I had never set eyes save in the print-shops, till I