poet who knew not where to dine, the Maecenas who was 'fed with
dedications'--the belle of the season, the demirep of many, the
antiquary, and the dilettanti,--painters, sculptors, engravers, all
brought news to the 'Strawberry Gazette;' and incense, sometimes wrung
from aching hearts, to the fastidious wit who professed to be a judge of
all material and immaterial things--from a burlesque to an Essay on
history or Philosophy--from the construction of Mrs. Chenevix's last new
toy to the mechanism of a clock made in the sixteenth century, was
lavished there.

Suppose that it is noon-day: Horace is showing a party of guests from
London over Strawberry:--enter we with him, and let us stand in the
great parlour before a portrait by Wright of the Minister to whom all
courts bowed. 'That is my father, Sir Robert, in profile,' and a vulgar
face in profile is always seen at its vulgarest; and the
_nex-retroussé,_ the coarse mouth, the double chin, are most forcibly
exhibited in this limning by Wright; who did not, like Reynolds, or like
Lawrence, cast a _nuance_ of gentility over every subject of his pencil.
Horace--can we not hear him in imagination?--is telling his friends how
Sir Robert used to celebrate the day on which he sent in his
resignation, as a fête; then he would point out to his visitors a
Conversation-piece, one of Reynolds's earliest efforts in small life,
representing the second Earl of Edgecumbe, Selwyn, and Williams---all
wits and beaux, and _habitués_ of Strawberry. Colley Cibber, however,
was put in cold marble in the anteroom; a respect very _Horatian_, for
no man knew better how to rank his friends than the recluse of
Strawberry. He hurries the lingering guests through the little parlour,
the chimneypiece of which was copied from the tomb of Ruthall, Bishop of
Durham, in Westminster Abbey. Yet how he pauses complacently to
enumerate what has been done for him by titled belles: how these dogs,