|TO the rigorous exactitudes of modern realism it may seem an almost hopeless task to revive the details of a day in a Twickenham Villa when George the Third was King. And yet, with the aid of Horace Walpole's letters, of the 'Walpoliana' of Pinkerton, and, above all, of the catalogue of Strawberry Hill printed by its owner in 1774, there is no insurmountable difficulty in deciding what must probably have been the customary course of events. Nothing is needed at the outset but to assume that you had arrived, late on the previous night, at the embattled Gothic building on the Teddington Road, and that the fatigues of your journey had left you little more than a vague notion of your host, and a fixed idea that the breakfast hour was nine. Then, after carrying with you into the chintz curtains of the Red Bedchamber an indistinct recollection of Richardson's drawings of Pope and his mother, and of Bermingham's 'owl cut in paper,' which you dimly make out with your candle on the walls, you would be waked at eight next morning by Colomb, the Swiss valet (as great a tyrant over his master as his compatriot Canton in the 'Clandestine Marriage'), and in due time would repair to the blue-papered and blue-furnished Breakfast Room, looking pleasantly on the Thames. Here, coasting leisurely round the apartment, you would probably pause before M. de Carmontel's double picture of your host's dead friend, Madame du Deffand, and her relative the Duchesse de Choiseul, or you would peer curiously at the view of Madame de Sevigné's hotel in the 'Rue Coulture St. Catherine.' Presently would come a patter of tiny feet, and a fat, and not very sociable, little dog, which had once belonged to the said Madame du Deffand, would precede its master, whom you would hear walking, with the stiff tread of an infirm person, from his bedroom on the floor above. Shortly afterwards would enter a tall, slim, frail-looking figure in a morning-gown, with a high, pallid forehead, dark brilliant eyes under drooping lids, and a friendly, but forced and rather unprepossessing smile. Tonton (as the little dog was called), after being cajoled into a semblance of cordiality, would be lifted upon a small sofa at his master's side, the teakettle and heater would arrive, and tea would be served in cups of fine old white embossed Japanese china. And then, the customary salutations exchanged and over, would gradually begin, in a slightly affected fashion, to which you speedily grow accustomed, that wonderful flow of talk which (like Praed's Vicar's)= ```'Slipped from politics to puns, ````And passed from Mahomet to Moses,'--=