In the course of his business career as auctioneer and broker, he had had many opportunities of collecting ancient furniture and other antiquities, for which he appears to have had a natural taste, and he resolved to build a characteristic mansion to lodge them in. He obtained a lease of twenty years, subject to a fine to the Lord of the Manor, and built this house on the traditionary site of the ancient priory, where Cardinal Wolsey is said to have occasionally lived. Exceedingly rich and ostentatious, Mr. Thompson took pleasure in turning his house into an exhibition, without the rules and order observed in public ones. Visitors were admitted at all times, and a lady who was in the habit of calling on his wife informed Miss Meteyard that no meal was sacred from intrusion, nor were the feminine members of the family secure even when engaged with their toilets, but were frequently obliged to rush out of the way while a company of strangers inspected their bedrooms. The hall and largest room in the house were devoted to the exhibition of medieval furniture, real or spurious. The library, a charming little room, looked into the garden and out away over what were then the Finchley meadows; the light from the square mullioned window was softened with painted glass; the shutters and doorways were to appearance carved, and the panelled ceiling handsomely emblazoned with coats-of-arms; the walls were surrounded with antique book-presses, glazed and guarded with brass nettings, and filled with rare and costly volumes beautifully bound. The whole of this display was a deception. Mr. Memory Corner Thompson had no personal interest in the coats-of-arms; the carving was stucco; the volumes, the titles of which must have awakened sharp longings in the breasts of scholarly visitors—if any such did visit the Priory—were mere shades of books, pasteboard integuments of them with nothing real about them but the titles. The building itself was of the same make-believe character both as to material and workmanship. Plaster-of-Paris mouldings had been made to do duty for carved stone wherever this was characteristically required. The divisional walls were of simple lath and plaster, and the exterior ones not much more solid. They lasted, however, the proprietor’s time, who, having no children living, left it, with part of his large fortune, to his niece, who had married the notorious Gregory, the proprietor of that disgraceful publication called the _Satirist_, and who, it was known, made money by threatening persons of ‘mark and likelihood’ with scandalous libels, unless they would pay smartly to have them suppressed. On one occasion, instead of finding a victim, the miscreant ‘caught a Tartar,’ who prosecuted him, and Gregory was properly sentenced to some months’ imprisonment for his attempted extortion. At this juncture Mr. Thompson died, and on Gregory’s coming out of prison he found himself, through