Our ancestors seem to have been much impressed with the splendour of the London Pantheon. Walpole recurs to the subject: “If we laugh at the French, they stare at us. Our enormous luxury and expense astonish them. I carried their Ambassador and a Comte de Levi the other morning to see the new winter-Ranelagh [the Pantheon] in Oxford Road, which is almost finished. It amazed me myself. Imagine Balbec in all its glory! The pillars are of artificial _giallo antico_. The ceilings, even of the passages, are of the most beautiful stuccos in the best taste of grotesque. The ceilings of the ball-rooms, and the panels, painted like Raphael’s _loggias_ in the Vatican. A dome like the Pantheon, glazed. Monsieur de Guisnes said to me, ‘Ce n’est qu’à Londres qu’on peut faire tout cela.’” What a sermon would our moralist have preached, could he have foreseen that, in the reign of George III’s grand-daughter, this English Balbec would become a repository for cheap wines! In July, 1770, Walpole received a command to attend the Princess Amelia on a visit to Stowe. He describes what occurred to George Montagu: “The party passed off much better than I expected. A Princess at the head of a very small set for five days together did not promise well. However, she was very good-humoured and easy, and dispensed with a large quantity of etiquette. Lady Temple is good-nature itself, my Lord was very civil, Lord Besborough is made to suit all sorts of people, Lady Mary Coke respects royalty too much not to be very condescending, Lady Anne Howard[52] and Mrs. Middleton filled up the drawing-room, or rather made it out, and I was so determined to carry it off as well as I could, and happened to be in such good spirits, and took such care to avoid politics, that we laughed a great deal, and had not a cloud the whole time.