Giuseppe Ceracchi, who carved some of the heads of the river gods for the key-stones of the windows of the Strand front of Somerset House, was an Italian, but it is uncertain whether he was born at Rome or in Corsica. He gave the accomplished Mrs. Damer (General Conway’s daughter) her first lessons in sculpture, an art which she afterwards perfected in the studio of the elder Bacon. Ceracchi executed the only bust in marble that Reynolds ever sat for. A statue of Mrs. Damer, from a model by him, is now in the British Museum. This sculptor was guillotined in 1801, for a plot against Napoleon.[120] He is said to have lost his wits in prison, and to have mounted the scaffold dressed as a Roman emperor. It was to Mrs. Damer (the daughter of his old friend) that Horace Walpole, our most French of memoir-writers, bequeathed his fantastic villa at Strawberry Hill, and its incongruous but valuable curiosities. She is said to have sent a bust of Nelson to the Rajah of Tanjore, who wished to spread a taste for English art in India. The rooms round the quadrangle are hives of red-tapists. There are about nine hundred Government clerks nestled away in them, and maintained at an annual cost to us of about £275,000. There is the office of the Duchy of Cornwall, and there are the Legacy Duty, the Stamps, Taxes, and Excise Offices, the Inland Revenue Office, the Registrar General’s Office (created pursuant to 6 and 7 Will. IV., c. 86), part of the Admiralty and the Audit Office, and lastly the Will Office. The east wing of Somerset House, used as King’s College, was built in 1829. The bronze statue of George III., and the fine recumbent figure of Father Thames, in the chief court, were cast by John Bacon, R.A.