“Here is Richmond Park, where Jeanie Deans and the Duke of Argyle met Queen Caroline; it has been improved, unluckily, and the walk where the interview took place no longer exists. To make some amends, however, for this disappointment, [we are told that] in removing some furniture from an old house in the town three portraits were discovered in the wainscot, George the Second, a staring likeness, between Lady Suffolk and Queen Caroline. The paintings were the worst of that bad era, but the position of the three and the recollection of Jeanie Deans was irresistible; those pictures ought never to be separated.” “The principal charm of this smiling landscape,” she continues, “is the river, the beautiful river. Brimming to its very banks of meadow or of garden; clear, pure and calm as the bright sky which is reflected in clearer brightness from its bosom.” As her boat glides along its smooth surface amid scenes of ever-changing beauty and interest, Miss Mitford’s thoughts turn to Sir Joshua Reynolds. “His villa is here,” she exclaims, “rich in remembrances of Johnson and Boswell and Goldsmith and Burke; here again the elegant house of Owen Cambridge; close by the celebrated villa of Pope, where one seems to see again Swift and Gay, St. John and Arbuthnot. A stone’s-throw off the still more celebrated Gothic toy-shop, Strawberry Hill, which we all know so well from the minute and vivid descriptions of its master, the most amusing of letter-writers, the most fashionable of antiquaries, the most learned of _petit-maîtres_, the cynical, finical, delightful Horace Walpole.” Then Miss Mitford tells us of “the landing at Hampton Court, the palace of the cartoons and of the ‘Rape of the Lock,’ and lastly of her coming home with her mind full of the divine Raphael ... strangely chequered and intersected by vivid images of the fair Belinda, and of that inimitable game at ombre which will live longer than any painting, and can only die with the language.” Here we would venture to give some passages from the “Rape of the Lock” for the benefit of those who may not as yet have made the acquaintance of the “fair Belinda.” This poem, so full of wit and fairy fancy, was written by Pope to commemorate an event which had actually occurred. It happened when a party of noble friends had met together in a stately room in Hampton Court Palace and were gathered around a table prepared for a game at ombre.