had added to the collection. Many had been accumulated by the last
owner, who slept always in the room that had been his nursery. He
believed he would die, and desired to die, in the house where he was
born. The desire was accomplished, for he died there, on January 26th,
1911, a few months before the long lease expired.

Partly from its dull rich colouring of deep blues and reds and greens,
its old carpets and tapestries, partly from the pictures that crowded
its walls, the interior had the air rather of a family country-house
than of a London dwelling in a busy street.

Pictures, lining the walls from top to bottom of the staircase,
represented a medley of date and association. Byng's Fleet at Naples on
August 1st, 1718, with Sir Thomas Dilkes second in command, hung next to
a view of the Chateau de la Garde, near Toulon. This picturesque ruin
rose clear in the view from Sir Charles's house at Cap Brun, 'La Sainte
Campagne,' and figures as an illustration in one of Lady Dilke's
stories; 'Reeds and Umbrella Pines' at Carqueiranne, by Pownoll
Williams, kept another memory of Provence. Next to a painting, by Horace
Vernet, of a scene on the Mediterranean coast, little Anne Fisher, born
1588, exhibited herself in hooped and embroidered petticoat, quaint cap
and costly laces, a person of great dignity at six years old. She was to
be Lady Dilke of Maxstoke Castle and a shrewd termagant, mother of two
sons who sided, one with the Commonwealth, the other with the King. The
Royalist Sir Peter Wentworth was a great friend of Milton, with whom he
came in contact on the Committee of State when Milton was Secretary for
the Council of Foreign Tongues. But Cromwell turned him off the Council,
and he was arrested and brought to London for abetting his Warwickshire
tenantry in refusal to pay the Protector's war-taxes. Her Puritan son,
Fisher Dilke, followed, with a sour-faced Puritan divine, and then came