We pass (the roads hereabout are flat as the sands of the sea, the land about them richly timbered, and there is nothing else to be said of them) from the ruins of a religious house to one indissolubly associated with the names of two men, each exceptionally worldly, each in his own singular way, and with that of one remarkably eccentric. Houghton Hall was built by Sir Robert Walpole from the designs of Colin Campbell, while the former was Prime Minister, and Ripley, say Messrs. Timbs and Gunn (who speak with authority), undoubtedly improved on Colin Campbell. Pope, it is true, wrote:-- Heaven visits with a taste the wealthy fool, And needs no rod but Ripley with a rule. *...*...*...* So Ripley, till his destined space is filled, Heaps bricks on bricks and fancies 'tis to build. Pope, always bitter and not a little of a snob, was hardly likely to have a good word to say for an architect who had been a working carpenter. It is true, too, that Lady Hervey wrote in 1765: "I saw Houghton, which is the most triste, melancholy, fine place I ever beheld. 'Tis a heavy, ugly, black building, with an ugly black stone. The Hall, saloon, and gallery very fine; the rest not in the least so." Time, it may be, has given the stone mellowness; certain it is that Houghton now, in spite of a certain pretentiousness of Ionic columns, is really pleasing. Of Houghton's most noted masters, the Walpoles, a few words must be said, but of two of them not many, for they are well known to all. The first Lord Orford was Sir Robert Walpole, the great Prime Minister who believed in letting well alone, in corruption as a method of Government, in the venality of all men, and in the collection of pictures. It is curious, but true, that this most sagacious statesman was, in a scholarly age, no scholar, and that this fastidious connoisseur of Art was, in a coarse age, exceptionally plain spoken and free-living. When the then Lord Townshend heard that Lord Orford was at Houghton he made a rule of leaving Rainham and Norfolk himself. The second Lord Orford was of no account. Of the third I shall write a little more here than of the fourth, because the eccentricities of the third are not so well known as are many of the details, whimsical rather than eccentric, of Horace Walpole, the fourth and last Lord Orford.