English literature -- 18th century -- History and criticism; Great Britain -- Intellectual life -- 18th century
With four o'clock would come dinner, eaten probably in the Refectory,
a room consecrated chiefly to the family portraits, conspicuous among
which, in blue velvet, was your host by Richardson. The repast was
'of Attic taste,' but with very little wine, as Walpole himself drank
nothing but iced water, and 'coffee upstairs' was ordered with such
promptitude as to afford the visitor but scanty leisure for lingering
over the bottle. About five you migrated to the Round Drawing-Room,
where your entertainer, after recommending you to replenish your box
with Fribourg's snuff from a canister of which the hiding-place was an
ancient marble urn in the window-seat, would take up his station on the
sofa, and resume his inexhaustible flood of memories and reflections,
always bright, often striking, and never wearisome. Once, perhaps, he
would rise to exhibit the closet he had built for Lady Di. Beauclerk's
seven drawings in soot-water to his own tragedy of the 'Mysterious
Mother;' or he would adjourn for an hour to the Library, to turn over
his unrivalled collection of Hogarth's prints; or to show you Lady Mary
Wortley Montagu's 'Milton,' or the identical 'Iliad' and 'Odyssey' from
which Pope made his translations, or the long row of books printed at
the 'Officina Arbuteana.' But he would gravitate sooner or later to his
old vantage-ground on the sofa, whence, unhasting, unresting, he would
discourse most excellent anecdote into the small hours, when the chintz
curtains of the Red Bedchamber would again receive his bewitched and
bewildered, but still unsatiated, visitor. And so would end your day at
Horace Walpole's Gothic Castle of Strawberry Hill.
XV. GOLDSMITH'S LIBRARY.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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