From Teddington Lock until close to Richmond the stream is undeniably less picturesque than in the reaches described earlier in this chapter. The river is less full of water, and when the tide is out the unsightly and unsavoury mud-banks are always in view. The towing-path becomes stony and arid; the hedgerows filled with poppies cease, and a very matter-of-fact embankment on the Surrey shore has to be reckoned with. Yet the reach between the lock and Eel Pie Island has always been popular, and often in the summer one may see here all sorts and conditions of notabilities disporting themselves at a little water-party. The spot is comparatively near to London, and your amateur boatman, with true wisdom, prefers not to get between two locks. We are coming now to classic ground, where wit and letters, fashion and frivolity, long have reigned. There is not another village in England with literary associations so numerous and august as Twickenham. Pope and Walpole are the presiding genii--neither of them, perhaps, the most genial of genii; but the fairy-like element is supplied by the hosts of feminine friends with whom the two bachelors were wont to philander. Whether as a letter-writer or as an architect, Walpole was vastly diverting; and it is a pity that so little of his brown stucco abode can be seen from the river. Strawberry Hill is the kind of place a mad architect might build in a delirium. We have a side not unlike the west front of Westminster Hall might have been had it been built of lath and plaster; then comes the keep of a Norman castle, flanked by a Renaissance _tourelle_ from Chambord; the whole crowned with crow-stepped Flemish gables from Antwerp, and the twisted and fluted chimneys of a Tudor farmhouse. Then there are wings which aim at imitating these imitations; these, it is fair to say, are due to Walpole's successors. But howsoever astounding the exterior of Strawberry Hill, the interior is far more remarkable. Within, as without, the place bears every mark of having been built by a man who learned his architecture as he proceeded. Walpole leaped gaily over an anachronism, and saw nothing unorthodox in copying a mediæval tomb and fashioning it into a chimney-piece, nor in taking the choir stalls of Old St. Paul's as the model for the bookcases in his library. The internal arrangements of Strawberry Hill are as wonderful as the events recounted in that very Gothic story the "Castle of Otranto." It is a mighty maze without a plan. A long, narrow corridor, leading apparently to nothing, debouches upon a door which, when opened, discloses a large and splendid apartment. It is, indeed, a house of after-thoughts; but, whatever be its crudeness, it is not devoid of value as an early forerunner of the real Gothic revival. Pseudo-Gothic of this pattern was almost as popular towards the end of the eighteenth century as houses built in the guise of Greek temples. Happily, most