that endless stream of admirably told stories, of recollections graphic and humorous, of sallies and _bons mots_, of which Horace Walpole's extraordinary correspondence is the _cooled_ expression, but of the vivacity and variety of which, enhanced as they were by the changes in the speaker's voice and look, and emphasized by his semi-French gesticulation, it is impossible to give any adequate idea. A glance across the river would suggest an anecdote of her Grace the Duchess of Queensberry: a falling spoon, a _mot_ by Lady Townshend. Upon yesterday's execution at Tyburn would follow a vivid picture of the deaths of Balmerino and Kilmarnock; or a reference to your ride from London of the night before, would usher in a full and particular account how the voluble and fascinating gentleman before you, with the great chalk stones in his fingers, was once all but shot through the head by the highwayman James Maclean. Breakfast over, and a liberal bowl of bread-and-milk tossed out of window to the troops of squirrels that come flocking in from the high trees round the lawn, your host would invite you to make the tour of the grounds, adding (if it were May) that his favourite lilacs were well worth the effort. He would astonish you by going out in his slippers and without a hat; and, in reply to your ill-concealed astonishment, would laughingly compare himself to the Indian in the 'Spectator' who said he was 'all face.' Passing by the Abbot's garden, with its bright parterres, he would lead you to the pretty cottage he had built on the site of the old residence of his deceased tenant Richard Francklin, once printer of that scurrilous 'Craftsman' in which Pulteney and Bolingbroke had so persistently assailed his father. In its sunny, print-hung tea-room, with the 'Little Library' at the side, he would show you the picture of his friend Lady Hervey, once the 'beautiful Molly Lepel' of Pulteney and Chesterfield's ballad, and would tell you that the frame was carved by the same Grinling Gibbons to whom we owe the bronze statue of King James the Second in the Privy Garden at Whitehall. Thence you would pass to the chapel in the wood, with its stained-glass pictures of Henry the Third and his Queen from Bexhill Church, and its shrine from Santa Maria Maggiore at Rome; and he would explain that the roof was designed by that unimpeachable authority in Gothic, Mr. Chute of the Vyne, in Hampshire; that George Augustus Selwyn had given him the great earthen pot at the door; and that the carved bench in the ante-chapel had been contrived by no less a person than the son of the famous 'Ricardus Aristarchus,' Master of Trinity, the--= ```'mighty Scholiast, whose unwearied pains ``Made Horace dull, and humbled Milton's strains--'=