Pictures, lining the walls from top to bottom of the staircase, represented a medley of date and association. Byng's Fleet at Naples on August 1st, 1718, with Sir Thomas Dilkes second in command, hung next to a view of the Château de la Garde, near Toulon. This picturesque ruin rose clear in the view from Sir Charles's house at Cap Brun, 'La Sainte Campagne,' and figures as an illustration in one of Lady Dilke's stories; 'Reeds and Umbrella Pines' at Carqueiranne, by Pownoll Williams, kept another memory of Provence. Next to a painting, by Horace Vernet, of a scene on the Mediterranean coast, little Anne Fisher, born 1588, exhibited herself in hooped and embroidered petticoat, quaint cap and costly laces, a person of great dignity at six years old. She was to be Lady Dilke of Maxstoke Castle and a shrewd termagant, mother of two sons who sided, one with the Commonwealth, the other with the King. The Royalist Sir Peter Wentworth was a great friend of Milton, with whom he came in contact on the Committee of State when Milton was Secretary for the Council of Foreign Tongues. But Cromwell turned him off the Council, and he was arrested and brought to London for abetting his Warwickshire tenantry in refusal to pay the Protector's war-taxes. Her Puritan son, Fisher Dilke, followed, with a sour-faced Puritan divine, and then came a group of water-colours by Thomas Hood, the author of 'The Song of the Shirt,' and an intimate friend of the Dilkes. One of the ancestors, an earlier Peter Wentworth, son of Sir Nicholas Wentworth (who was Chief Porter of Calais, and knighted by Henry VIII. at the siege of Boulogne), bore the distinction of having been three times sent to the Tower. The first was for a memorable speech on behalf of the liberties of the House of Commons, in 1575. Imprisonment does not seem to have taught him caution, for he was last imprisoned in 1593, because he had 'offended Her Majesty,' and a prisoner he remained till his death in 1596, occupying the period by writing a _Pithie Exhortation to Her Majesty for Establishing her Successor to the Crowne_.