Here then was food for the eye and for the memory--for sweet and bitter fancy--for the amateur, and for the connoisseur--for antiquary, historian, painter, and poet. Well might Horace Walpole say that the gallery at Althorpe was "endeared to the pensive spectator." He tells us in his letters, that when here, (about seventy years since,) he surprised the housekeeper by "his intimate acquaintance with all the faces in the gallery." I was amused at the thought that we caused a similar surprise in our day. I hope his female cicerone was as civil and intelligent as ours; as worthy to be the keeper of the pictorial treasures of Althorpe. When we lingered and lingered, spell-bound, and apologized for making such unconscionable demands on her patience, she replied, "that she was flattered; that she felt affronted when any visitor hurried through the apartments." Old Horace would have been delighted with her; and not less with the biblical enthusiasm of a village glazier, whom we found dusting the books in the library, and who had such a sublime reverence for old editions, unique copies, illuminated MSS., and rare bindings, that it was quite edifying. * * * * * [Illustration] END OF VOL. II. LONDON: IBOTSON AND PALMER, PRINTERS, SAVOY STREET, STRAND. * * * * * FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 1: In the throne-room at the Buckingham Palace the idea of grandeur is suggested by a vile heraldic crown, stuck on the capitals of the columns. Conceive the flagrant, the vulgar barbarity of taste!! It cannot surely be attributed to the architect?] [Footnote 2: There is a very pretty little edition of his lyrical poems, rendered into the modern German by Karl Simrock, and published at Berlin in 1833.] [Footnote 3: See a very interesting account of Walther von der Vogelweide, with translations of some of his poems in "The Lays of the Minnesingers," published in 1825.] [Footnote 4: See a very learned and well-written article on the ancient German and northern poetry in the Edinburgh Review, vol. 26.]