Of an evening, in summer-time, trim Horace and portly Clive might be seen walking in the meadows together; or Walpole and a brilliant company, gossiping, laughing, flirting, philandering, might be noted on their way across the grass to Strawberry, after a gay time of it at "_Little_ Strawberry Hill." Not always without mishap, as Walpole himself has recorded in his narrative of his perilous passing of the stile with Miss Rich; and not invariably in the very sunniest of humours, for Miss Pope had seen Horace "gloomy of temper and dryly sarcastic of speech." The place was, perhaps, at its pleasantest, when Walpole, Mrs. Clive, and her brother, sat together in the garden, and conversed playfully of old dramatic glories. _She_ was so joyous, that Lady Townshend said--her face rose on Strawberry and made it sultry. And Walpole himself remarked, in 1766, "Strawberry is in perfection; the verdure has all the bloom of spring; the orange trees are loaded with blossoms; the gallery is all sun and gold; and Mrs. Clive all sun and vermillion." When Hounslow powder mills blew up, Walpole described the terrific power of the explosion, by remarking, that it "almost shook Mrs. Clive!" Only the death of the last Earl of Radnor, of the Robartes line, made her _almost_ look sad. The earl left her £50 as a memorial of his respect; and what with the heat of the summer of 1757, the unexpected legacy, and her assumption of respectful grief, she made up one of the drollest faces imaginable. One of her dear delights was to play quadrille with George Montagu, from dinner to supper, and then to sing Purcell, from supper to breakfast time. She left the place, even for short intervals, with reluctance; but her brilliant face was seen for a whole day in Palace Yard, where she sat to see the coronation procession of George III., with her _great_ friends around her--Lady Hertford, Lady Anne Conway, Lady Hervey, Lady Townshend, Miss Hotham, Mr. Chute, and also her brother. Her only trials were when the tax-gatherer ran off, and she was compelled to pay her rates twice; or when the parish refused to mend her ways, as she said; or her house was broken into by burglars; or when she was robbed in her own lane by footpads. "Have you not heard," she wrote to Garrick, in June 1776, "of your poor Pivy? I have been rob'd and murder'd coming from Kingston. Jimey" (her brother) "and I in a post chey, at half-past nine, just by Teddington church, was stopt. I only lost a little silver and my senses; for one of them came into the carriage with a great horse pistol, to search for my watch, but I had it not with me." And then Garrick and other actors, with Governor Johnstone and his wife, met at Little Strawberry at dinner, and laughed over past perils.