Sir Robert only ten days in summer, and twenty days in winter; in the
autumn, during the shooting season, two months. It became almost an
eyesore to the quiet gentry, who viewed the palace with a feeling of
their own inferiority. People as good as the Walpoles lived in their
gable-ended, moderate-sized mansions; and who was Sir Robert, to set
them at so immense a distance?

To the vulgar comprehension of the Premier, Houghton, gigantic in its
proportions, had its purposes. He there assembled his supporters; there,
for a short time, he entertained his constituents and coadjutors with a
magnificent, jovial hospitality, of which he, with his gay spirits, his
humourous, indelicate jokes, and his unbounded good-nature, was the very
soul. Free conversation, hard-drinking, were the features of every day's
feast. Pope thus describes him:--

'Seen him, I have, but in his happier hour,
Of social pleasure, ill exchanged for power;
Seen him uncumbered with the venal tribe,
Smile without art, and win without a bribe.'

Amid the coarse taste one gentle refinement existed: this was the love
of gardening, both in its smaller compass and it its nobler sense of
landscape gardening. 'This place,' Sir Robert, in 1743, wrote to General
Churchill, from Houghton, 'affords no news, no subject of entertainment
or amusement; for fine men of wit and pleasure about town understand
neither the language and taste, nor the pleasure of the inanimate world.
My flatterers here are all mutes: the oaks, the beeches, the chestnuts,
seem to contend which best shall please the lord of the manor. They
cannot deceive; they will not lie. I in sincerity admire them, and have
as many beauties about me as fill up all my hours of dangling, and no