she is doing nothing remarkable? These charming words were the common possession of all. The people were the heirs of poetry as well as of music. They had their own delicious madrigals to sing, in which music was "married to immortal verse,”—and they could sing them. Morley, writing in 1597, says, "Supper being ended, and music-books, according to custom, being brought to the table, the mistress of the house presented me with a part, earnestly requesting me to sing; but when, after many excuses, I protested unfeignedly that I could not, every one began to wonder-yea, some whispered to others, demanding how I was brought up." In a condition of society like this, the street music must have been worth listening to. "A noise of musicians," as a little band was called, was to be found everywhere; and they attended upon the guests in taverns and ordinaries, and at "good men's feasts" in private houses. In 'The Silent Woman,' it is said, "the smell of the venison, going through the streets, will invite one noise of fiddlers or other ;" and again, "They have intelligence of all feasts; there's good correspondence betwixt them and the London cooks." Feasts were then not mere occasions for gluttony and drunkenness, as they became in the next generation. As the drunkenness went on increasing, the taste for music went on diminishing. In the next century, the Tatler' writes, "In Italy nothing is more frequent than to hear a cobbler working to an opera tune; but, on the contrary, our honest

VOL. II.

D

countrymen have so little an inclination to music, that they seldom begin to sing till they are drunk.” Thus we went on till the beginning of the present century, and indeed later. The street music was an indication of the popular taste. Hogarth's blind hautboy-player, and his shrieking ballad-singer, are no caricatures. The execrable sounds which the lame and the blind produced were the mere arts of mendicancy. The principle of extorting money by hideous sounds was carried as far as it could go by a fellow of the name of Keeling, called Blind Jack, who performed on the flageolet with his nose. Every description of street exhibition was accompanied with these terrible noises. The vaulter, and the dancing lass, and the tumbler creeping through a hoop, and the puppet-showman, and the dancing dogs, and the bear and monkey, had each their own peculiar din, whether of drum, fiddle, horn, or bagpipes, compared with which the music of Morose's bear-ward and fencer would have been as the harmony of the spheres.

WALPOLE'S WORLD OF FASHION.

At

"WHEN I was very young, and in the height of the opposition to my father, my mother wanted a large parcel of bugles; for what use I forget. As they were then out of fashion, she could get none. last she was told of a quantity in a little shop in an obscure alley in the City. We drove thither; found a great stock; she bought it, and bade the proprietor send it home. He said, 'Whither?' To Sir Robert Walpole's.' He asked, coolly, 'Who is Sir Robert Walpole ?”*

What was Strawberry Hill?" might be a similar question with many persons, were we not living in a somewhat different age from that of Sir Robert Walpole. Horace Walpole's Strawberry Hill is gone. Its place is being occupied with trim villas, inhabited by a class of whose existence Walpole would have been as ignorant as the city shopkeeper was of the great Sir Robert. The maker of Strawberry Hill—the builder-up of its galleries, and tribunes, and Holbein-chambers-the arranger of its "painted glass and gloom "—the collector of its pictures, and books, and bijouterie, says of himself, "I am writing, I am building-both works that will outlast the memory of battles and heroes!

*Horace Walpole to the Miss Berrys, March 5, 1791.

Truly, I believe, the one will as much as t'other. My buildings are paper, like my writings, and both will be blown away in ten years after I am dead : if they had not the substantial use of amusing me while I live, they would be worth little indeed.”* Horace Walpole himself prevented the realisation of his own prophecy. It was said of him, even during his lifetime, "that he had outlived three sets of his own battlements;" but he nevertheless contrived, by tying up his toy-warehouse and its moveables with entails and jointures through several generations, to keep the thing tolerably entire for nearly half a century after he had left that state of being where "moth and dust do corrupt." And though the paper portion of his "works"-his 'Royal and Noble Authors,' his 'Anecdotes of Painting,' his 'Historic Doubts,' &c.

-are formed of materials not much more durable than his battlements, he was during a long life scattering about the world an abundance of other paper fragments, that have not only lasted ten, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty years after he was dead, but which aftertimes will not willingly let die. It was in Strawberry Hill that the every-day thoughts and experiences for the most part centred that have made the letters of Horace Walpole the best record of the manners of the upper ranks during half a century, when very great social changes were working all around. Strawberry Hill and Horace Walpole are inseparably associated in our minds. The

* Horace Walpole to Conway, August 5, 1761.

house in Arlington Street, from which he sometimes dates, is, like most other West-end houses, a thing distinguished only by its number; and which has no more abiding associations than the chariot which rolled on from its first drawing-room through the necessary decay of cracked varnish and split panells, until its steps displayed the nakedness of their original iron, and the dirty rag that was once a carpet was finally succeeded by the luxury of clean straw once a-week. We cannot conceive Horace Walpole in a house with three windows upon a floor, in a formal row of ugly brick brethren. It is in Strawberry Hill, in the "little parlour hung with a stone-colour Gothic paper, and Jackson's Venetian prints "—or in the "charming closet hung with green paper, and water-colour pictures "—or in "the room where we always live, hung with a blue and white paper in stripes, adorned with festoons" —that we fancy him writing to Montagu, Mann, Chute, and Conway, in the days when "we pique ourselves upon nothing but simplicity," and Lady Townshend exclaimed of the house, "It is just such a house as a parson's, where the children lie at the foot of the bed." In a few years the owner had visions of galleries, and round towers, and cloisters, and chapels; and then the house became filled with kingly armour, and rare pictures, and cabinets of miniatures by Oliver and Petitot, and Raffaelle china. Then, when Strawberry Hill came to the height of its glory, the owner kept “an inn, the sign the Gothic Castle," and his whole time was