It is in the spirit of a child throwing its whole imagination into playing with a Noah's Ark that he describes his queer house. It is in this spirit that he sees the fields around his house "speckled with cows, horses, and sheep." The very phrase suggests toy animals. Walpole himself declared at the age of seventy-three: "My best wisdom has consisted in forming a baby-house full of playthings for my second childhood." That explains why one almost loves the creature. Macaulay has severely censured him for devoting himself to the collection of knick-knacks, such as King William III.'s spurs, and it is apparently impossible to defend Walpole as a collector to be taken seriously. Walpole, however, collected things in a mood of fantasy as much as of connoisseurship. He did not take himself quite seriously. It was fancy, not connoisseurship, that made him hang up Magna Charta beside his bed and, opposite it, the Warrant for the execution of King Charles I., on which he had written "Major Charta." Who can question the fantastic quality of the mind that wrote to Conway: "Remember, neither Lady Salisbury nor you, nor Mrs. Damer, have seen my new divine closet, nor the billiard-sticks with which the Countess of Pembroke and Arcadia used to play with her brother, Sir Philip," and ended: "I never did see Cotchel, and am sorry. Is not the old wardrobe there still? There was one from the time of Cain, but Adam's breeches and Eve's under-petticoat were eaten by a goat in the ark. Good night." He laughed over the knick-knacks he collected for himself and his friends. "As to snuff-boxes and tooth-pick cases," he wrote to the Countess of Ossory from Paris in 1771, "the vintage has entirely failed this year." Everything that he turned his mind to in Strawberry Hill he regarded in the same spirit of comic delight. He stood outside himself, like a spectator, and nothing gave him more pleasure than to figure himself as a master of the ceremonies among the bantams, and the squirrels and the goldfish. In one of his letters he describes himself and Bentley fishing in the pond for goldfish with "nothing but a pail and a basin and a tea-strainer, which I persuade my neighbours is the Chinese method." This was in order to capture some of the fish for Bentley, who "carried a dozen to town t'other day in a decanter."