question,’ resumed the scholasticus, ’is this: Have I got any breeches on? You don’t know, but I do; I have not. The second question, the answer to which is known neither to you nor to me, is: Shall I find in this town any draper willing to advance on credit stuff enough to make me a pair? And the third question, the answer to which is known to you only, is: Will any of you pay a tailor’s wages to make me a pair? And now that the argument is clearly before you, we may proceed to the consideration of the parabolic triangulation of the binocular theorem;’ and then he would bewilder them with a lot of jaw-breaking words, which then, as now, passed for learning. This was called the age of scholasticism. It was succeeded by the Renaissance, which, after a good boil-up of its intellectual ingredients, settled down into a literary mud, an Acqui-la-Bollente, a Nile mud, pleasant to the soul, and fertilizing to the mind, the protoplasm of diarists and letter-writers, of whom—to mention but three—Evelyn, Pepys, and Horace Walpole were prominent patterns in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It is with the latter, Horace Walpole, of Strawberry Hill, we are chiefly concerned. Horace Walpole, after enlarging a cottage into a Gothic castle, with lath and plaster, and rough-cast walls, and wooden pinnacles, filled it with literary and artistic treasures. But he also gathered around him a select social circle, which included Garrick, Paul Whitehead, General Conway, George Selwyn, Richard Bentley, the poet Gray, Sir Horace Mann, and Lords Edgcumbe and Strafford. And of ladies there was no lack; there were Mrs. Pritchard, Kitty Clive, Lady Suffolk, the Misses Berry, and—would you believe it?—Hannah More! It was the age for chronicling small-beer and home-made wine, gossip, scandal, and frivolity; and Horace Walpole enjoyed existence as a cynical Seladon or platonic Bluebeard amidst this bevy of lively, gay-minded, frolicsome beauties, young and old. Happily, or unhappily, for him, he did not become acquainted with the Misses Berry before 1788, when he was seventy-one years of age. He took the most extraordinary liking to them, and was never content except when they were with him, or corresponding with him. When they went to Italy, he wrote to them regularly once a week, and on their return he installed them at Little Strawberry Hill, a house close to his own, so that he might daily enjoy their society. He appointed them his literary executors, with the charge of collecting and publishing his writings, which was done under the superintendence of Mr. Berry, their father, who was a Yorkshire gentleman. When Walpole had succeeded to the Earldom of Orford he made Mary, the elder of the two sisters, an offer of his hand. Both sisters survived him upwards of sixty years. Little Strawberry Hill, which we just mentioned as the residence of the Misses Berry, had, before their coming to live in it, been occupied by Kitty Clive, the famous actress.