SCHEME FOR RESTORING POPE'S VILLA. 289

occurred almost weekly during the summer months: and on the anniversaries of the ever memorable 1st of June, Sir J. Wathen Waller, it is said, was wont to appear decorated with the insignia of his wife's late father-inlaw! On these occasions the Baroness used always to give a silver cup to be rowed for.

In The Times of January 27th, 1840, Pope's villa, as the new structure was wrongly called, was advertised. for sale, and the building materials of the same shortly afterwards. The end of Baroness Howe's house, the site of which was about one hundred yards from Pope's, was that its outside wings were taken down, and its central portion divided into the two houses, of which one was recently inhabited by the late Mr. Thielcke and now by Mr. Stuart, and the other is the residence of Mr. Morley.

About this time there was some talk of building a house on the then unoccupied site, exactly like Pope's, and of restoring, as far as might be possible, the grotto to its original condition. The scheme was ultimately abandoned, and a new house was built by Mr. Thomas Young (not however on the site) "neither like Pope's nor any other." Its style might be pronounced as indescribable, but for a laudable attempt made by the author of Rambles by Rivers, who says, "It is a combination of an Elizabethan half-timber house and a Stuart renaissance, with the addition of Dutch and Swiss, Italian and Chinese features, probably designed when its architect was fresh from a diligent study of the paintings in Lord Kingsborough's work on Mexican Antiquities." Some people have suggested more simply that its design was, in the main, copied by the tea

merchant who built it, from one of his chests. It is, nevertheless, in spite of these criticisms, a very pleasing object when viewed from the river, and one well known to all city dignitaries who always moor their state barge, the "Maria Wood," in front of its beautiful lawn when they come up the river on festive occasions. Its present occupant is Mr. Aird.

All, then, that Twickenham has preserved of her greatest resident is, in the church-a grave wherein his remains rest (and these, Mr. Howitt would say, mutilated and imperfect) impenetrably sealed up, and all traces of its exact site entirely hidden from view; two words on a tablet and a date; and last of all a monument remarkable for the pre-eminent bad taste of its inscription: from this, during the restoration of the church in 1859, the whole of its marble laurel wreath was chipped off bit by bit, by wretches who wanted to possess a piece of " Pope's tomb." Outside the church nothing remains but his grotto now despoiled of most of its former adornments.

CHAPTER XVI.

THE HOUSES-Continued.

MR. HUDSON'S HOUSE-"THE LAWN"-MR. HICKEY'S-MR. LAMING'S RADNOR HOUSE-CROSS DEEP HOUSE-"STRAWBERRY HILL:" FORMER RESIDENTS-HORACE WALPOLEOPINIONS CONCERNING THE EDIFICE-SKETCH OF WALPOLE'S EARLY LIFE-HIS CIRCLE OF FRIENDS AT TWICKENHAM-THE "STRAWBERRY HILL" PRESS AND ITS PUBLICATIONS-WALPOLE'S RANK AS A LITERARY MAN-THE "CASTLE OF OTRANTO" AND OTHER WORKS "THE PARISH REGISTER OF TWICKENHAM "HIS RELATIONS WITH CHATTERTON-Close of WALPOLE'S LIFE "EARL OF ORFORD"-HIS APPEARANCE, HABITS, AND DISPOSITION HIS OWN PICTURE OF HIMSELF-THE ART COLLECTION MADE BY HIM AT STRAWBERRY HILL-THE SALE, 1842-THE PRESENT HOUSE, IMPROVED BY THE COUNTESs of Waldegrave.

NEAR Pope's villa was a house built by Mr. Thomas Hudson, a portrait painter of some celebrity who was born in Devonshire in 1701. He visited Rome in 1752 in company with Roubilliac, the sculptor. His pictures are in Kneller's style but of inferior excellence. Amongst his pupils he included Sir Joshua Reynolds, Mortimer, and Wright of Derby. Hudson is said to have painted the only portrait of Handel ever taken; the picture is now in the National Portrait Gallery. "In this house," says Ironside, "was a small but valuable collection of pictures and drawings; of the latter were several out of the great Arundel collection,

and the greater part from the valuable and celebrated volumes of Father Resta, in the library of Lord Chancellor Somers, after whose death they were dispersed, and many of them purchased by Mr. Richardson, the painter, whose pupil Mr. Hudson was, and whose daughter he married, and from whom he came into possession of them." On Mr. Hudson's death, in 1779, the collection was sold by public auction; and the house became the property of his nephew and heir, Mr. John May.

This house was absorbed into her own premises by Baroness Howe at the time she destroyed Pope's villa. Mr. May lived in a small house, which also belonged to him, on the opposite side of the way; it had been previously in the occupation of Mrs. Lewin and of Captain Robert Carr; he was in the service of the East India Company, brother to the two clergymen of that name living in Twickenham at that time, and son of Mr. Robert Carr, who had been for thirty years curate of the parish.

THE LAWN. In the garden of the new house called the "Lawn," the residence of Captain Turnour, are remains of a structure used by Pope as a wine cellar, the grounds having been originally part of the poet's estate.

On the site of the newly built house, now the residence of Mr. Childs, stood the residence of Mr. Joseph Hickey, an attorney of considerable eminence, but of whom Horace Walpole spoke with little respect as "Mr. H. the impudent lawyer that Tom Hervey

wrote against." Goldsmith, however, in his poem Retaliation, describing the feast to which "each guest brought himself," introduces Hickey as "the Capon," and further mentions him as "a most blunt pleasant creature," and adds—

that slander itself must allow him good nature.
He cherish'd his friend, and he relish'd a bumper
Yet one fault he had and that one was a thumper,
And what was his failing? Come tell it and burn ye,—
He was,could he help it ?-a special attorney.

Ironside says that Hickey built his house himself, and he is probably right; others that Scott the painter built it. It was subsequently the residence of Miss Holden, and of Mr. William Baker.

Next to this is an old house now occupied by Mr. Laming in which once lived Mrs. Gostling, the relict of Mr. George Gostling, a proctor in Doctors' Commons. "This house," says Ironside (and the rate books bear out his statement), “was built by Scott the celebrated painter of landscape and shipping." It was subsequently the residence of Mr. Francis Lind.

RADNOR HOUSE.-Further on is Radnor House, so called from its having been the residence of John, the last Earl of Radnor, of the Robartes family. After him followed John Atherton Hindley, Esq., one of the deputy tellers of the Exchequer, under the Earl of Macclesfield; Sir Francis Basset, Bart., succeeded. The Ladies Murray subsequently occupied it, and after them Mr. Charles Marsh, F.A.S., a gentleman of literary tastes, who possessed a valuable library con