long, 17 high, and 13 wide; yet was neither long enough, high enough,
nor wide enough to inspire the indefinable sentiment by which we
acknowledge vastness. We beheld it the scene of George Robins's
triumphs--crowded to excess. Here strolled Lord John Russell; there,
with heavy tread, walked Daniel O'Connell. Hallam, placid, kindly,
gentle--the prince of book-worms--moved quickly through the rooms,
pausing to raise a glance to the ceiling--copied from one of the side
aisles of Henry VII.'s Chapel--but the fretwork is gilt, and there is
_petitesse_ about the Gothic which disappoints all good judges.

But when Horace conducted his courtly guests into this his mind-vaunted
vaulted gallery, he had sometimes George Selwyn at his side; or
Gray--or, in his old age, 'my niece, the Duchess of Gloucester,' leaned
on his arm. What strange associations, what brilliant company!--the
associations can never be recalled there again; nor the company
reassembled. The gallery, like everything else, has perished under the
pressure of debt. He who was so particular, too, as to the number of
those who were admitted to see his house--he who stipulated that four
persons only should compose a party, and one party alone be shown over
each day--how would he have borne the crisis, could he have foreseen it,
when Robins became, for the time, his successor, and was the temporary
lord of Strawberry; the dusty, ruthless, wondering, depreciating mob of
brokers--the respectable host of publishers--the starving army of
martyrs, the authors--the fine ladies, who saw nothing there comparable
to Howell and James's--the antiquaries, fishing out suspicious
antiquities--the painters, clamorous over Kneller's profile of Mrs.
Barry--the virtuous indignant mothers, as they passed by the portraits
of the Duchess de la Valliere, and of Ninon de l'Enclos, and remarked,
or at all events they _might_ have remarked, that the company on the
floor was scarcely much more respectable than the company on the