of the examples have fallen down, but a few, such as that terrible "restoration" of Windsor Castle, still remain. In literary and personal memories Strawberry Hill is far richer than many houses of greater antiquity and of real historical interest. Horace Walpole gathered all "the town" around him in these "enamelled meadows with filigree hedges;" and few are the great names of the last century and a quarter which have not some connection with "the castle," as its builder loved to call it. All the world's familiarity with this _chic_ abode of Walpoles, Damers, and Waldegraves excuses me from dwelling lengthily upon its peculiar but undoubted charm. Frances, Countess Waldegrave, made it almost as fashionable as it had been in Walpolean times; and although the bulk of the contents of the house were sold after her death, it is pleasant to know that Baron de Stern, who became the proprietor in 1883, purchased much of the furniture, and that, to some extent at least, the historic continuity of olden associations has not been broken. [Illustration: TWICKENHAM FERRY.] A little nearer to Richmond, and so happily placed that it commands the river from below Richmond Hill to Teddington Lock, is the modern and very _bizarre_ successor of Pope's Villa. Only a specialist in architectural mania, or a member of the Société des Incoherents, could attempt a description of this astonishing building. It is said to have been erected by a tea merchant, and it certainly looks very much like a cross between a Chinese pagoda and a house of cards. Its lawns and shrubberies are very pretty, and after all there is something to be said for having all the river-side monstrosities gathered into one parish. The house does not occupy the exact site of the original Pope's Villa which, thanks to a too common lack of sentiment, was demolished long ago. The famous Grotto, one of the works of embellishment of the "little crooked thing that asks questions," still remains, but in a damp and mouldy condition, and despoiled of all that rendered it interesting. Pope had no great love for gimcrackeries, and we can in some measure imagine the tenor of the lines in which he would have immortalised the tea merchant could he have foreseen the change a century would bring about. The associations of Pope's Villa and gardens are primarily literary, even as those of Strawberry Hill, at a later day, were fashionable, frivolous, and dilettante. In Pope's time Twickenham was the centre of literary interest in England, and if the Jove who dwelt in this Olympus was querulous and stinging, his genius went a long way towards making lustrous an age in which taste and manners slept. Taste, at least, was still slumbering when Lady Howe considered herself justified in demolishing one of the most famous abodes that have ever been connected with our literary history. It is in the neighbourhood of Pope's Villa that the injury which has been done to the Thames by the mass of sewage sludge that