Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 59.djvu/178

 correspond regularly with Mann, to whom he had written a first letter on his return journey. He took up his residence at first with his father in Downing Street, and subsequently at No. 5 Arlington Street, to which house Sir Robert Walpole removed after his resignation and elevation to the peerage as Earl of Orford in 1742. No. 5 Arlington Street, now marked by a Society of Arts tablet, long continued to be his residence after his father's death, and here, with intervals of residence at Houghton, the family seat in Norfolk, he continued to live. He hated Norfolk and the Norfolk scenery and products. But there were some compensations for endless doing the honours to uncongenial guests in Lord Orford's great mansion in the fens. The house had a wonderful gallery of pictures, brought together by years of judicious foraging in Italy and England, and far too distinctive in character to be allowed to pass, as it eventually did, into the hands of Catherine of Russia. This collection was to Walpole not only an object of enduring interest, but a prolongation of that education as a connoisseur which the grand tour had begun. One of his cleverest jeux d'esprit, the ‘Sermon on Painting,’ was prompted by the Houghton gallery, and he occupied much of his time about 1742–3 in preparing, upon the model of the ‘Ædes Barberini’ and ‘Giustinianæ,’ an ‘Ædes Walpolianæ,’ which, besides being something more than a mere catalogue, includes an excellent introduction. It was afterwards published in 1747, and is included in vol. ii. of the ‘Works’ of 1798 (pp. 221–78).

Lord Orford died in March 1744–5, leaving his youngest son ‘the house in Arlington Street … 5,000l. in money, and 1,000l. a year from the collector's place in the custom house’ (Corresp. vol. i. p. lxiv). Any surplus of the last item was to be divided with his brother, Sir Edward Walpole. After this, the next notable thing in his uneventful career seems to have been the composition in 1746 of a prologue for Rowe's ‘Tamerlane,’ which it was the custom to play on 4 and 5 Nov., being the anniversaries of King William's birth and landing at Torbay. The subject, as may be guessed, was the ‘suppression of the late rebellion’ (1745). In the same year (1746) he contributed two papers to Nos. 2 and 5 of the ‘Museum,’ and wrote a bright little poem on some court ladies, entitled ‘The Beauties.’ In August he took a country residence at Windsor, and resumed his interrupted intercourse with Gray, who had just completed his ‘Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College.’ In 1747, however, came what must be regarded as the great event of his life—his removal to the neighbourhood of Twickenham. He took the remainder of the lease of a little house which stood on the left bank of the Thames at the corner of the upper road to Teddington. Even then it was not without a history. Originally the ‘country box’ of a retired coachman of the Earl of Bradford, it had been subsequently occupied by Colley Cibber, by Dr. Talbot, bishop of Durham, by a son of the Duke of Chandos, and lastly by Mrs. Chenevix, the toywoman of Suffolk Street, sister to Pope's Mrs. Bertrand of Bath, who sublet it to Lord John Sackville. Walpole took the remainder of Mrs. Chenevix's lease, and by 1748 had grown so attached to the place that he obtained a special act to purchase the fee simple, for which he paid 1,356l. 10s. In some old deeds he found the site described as Strawberry-Hill-Shot, and he accordingly gave the house its now historic name of Strawberry Hill.

Strawberry Hill and its development thenceforth remained for many years his chief occupation in life. Standing originally in some five acres, he speedily extended his territory by fresh purchases to fourteen acres, which he assiduously planted and cultivated, until it ‘sprouted away like any chaste nymph in the Metamorphoses.’ Then he began gradually to enlarge and alter the structure itself. ‘I am going to build a little Gothic castle at Strawberry Hill,’ he says in January 1750 (Corresp. ii. 190). Accordingly, in 1753–4, he constructed a grand parlour or refectory with a library above it, and to these in 1760–1761 he added a picture gallery and cloister, a round-tower and a cabinet or tribune. A great north bedchamber followed in 1770, and other minor additions succeeded these. Having gothicised the place to his heart's content with battlements and arches and painted glass (‘lean windows fattened with rich saints’), he proceeded, or rather continued, to stock it with all the objects most dear to the connoisseur and virtuoso, pictures and statues, books and engravings, enamels by Petitot and Zincke, miniatures by Cooper and the Olivers, old china, snuff-boxes, gems, coins, seal-rings, filigree, cut-paper, and nicknacks of all sorts, which gave it the aspect partly of a museum and partly of a curiosity shop. Finally, after making a tentative catalogue in 1760 of the drawings and pictures in one of the rooms (the Holbein chamber), he printed in 1774 a quarto ‘Description of the Villa of Horace Walpole … at Strawberry Hill, near Twickenham, with an Inventory of the Furniture, Pictures, Curiosities, &c.’ Fresh acquisitions obliged him to add several appendices to this, which