STRAWBERRY HILL.
STRAWBERRY HILL is almost as much the resurrection of a former age as the so-called house of the Dramatic Poet in Pompeii. Sir EDWARD LYTTON BVLWER, by the simple process of converting Gsm:s work on the disinterred city into the form of question and answer, has made a novel out of it : by all admirers of HORACE WALPOLE it is most devoutly to be wished that he may not take the same liberty with CRUIKSHANE'S and ROBINS'S catalogue. Strawberry Hill has for about half a century been occasionally talked of, rarely visited. Its very owners have neglected it : to judge by appearances, not a shilling has been expended upon it since Lord thiroan's death. The furniture has a faded look : the place feels cold and comfortless. The gulf of the French Revolution and the wars of NAPOLEON yawns between the gene- ration which tenanted and enjoyed the house and that which now lives. The visiters who, at the summons of GEORGE ROBINS, flock to see it before it be broken up to be sold in specimens, have no sympathies—scarcely a traditionary connexion—with the contem- poraries of Hosecs WALPOLE. Strawberry Hill has become a more genuine and interesting antique than ninety-nine in the hundred of those which its lord was so fond of collecting.
It is a more quaint monstrosity than any to be found among all HORACE Wersords old china. He bought it of Mrs. CHEruivix the toy-woman, and he made a toy of it—a Gothic castle, with two cross-roads instead of a moat, between London the home of Cocknies and Hampton Court one of their favourite resorts upon holydays. Within his narrow walls he mixed up the ball of the feudal baron, the refectory of the monastery, the snuggery of a man about town in the time of the Second and Third GEORGES ; and be stuffed them with the most miscellaneous assortment of curiosities— grotesque fragments of Gothic carving, fine specimens of the arts of Italy and the Netherlands, china that excited the envy of all the old women of his age, books that a DIBDIN might kneel and worship, and books prized by those who judge of them by the worth of their contents more than by their age and scarcity. And yet there was a unity in this motley collection ; but it was the unity given to it by the spirit of him who collected it. All these strange nicknacks became part and parcel of HORACE WALPOLE. When we speak of him, we think not of his bodily frame, which he inherited from his father and mother, but of the larger frame which his spirit collected, organized, and animated for itself. The gathering and arranging of the museum of Strawberry Hill was the business of his life— what he came into the world to do. Half a century was spent in putting it together : all the emotions of his soul—his hopes and fears, angers, loves—were called forth in the performance of the task. Till he was forty he amused his leisure hours with political intrigue, and after that age be whiled them away criticizing his contemporaries ; but his hard-working hours were devoted to Strawberry Hill. His mind and his affections animated the place, and still animate it : the house became his body and his mind its living soul. Houses WALPOLE did not die when Lord Oaroan ceased to exist. The dismantling of Strawberry Hill will be his real death—the giving back of his body to the elements—the true " dust to dust."
It is self-deception to speak of regretting the dispersion of the bijouterie of Strawberry Hill, seeing how little we thought of it, or looked at it, while it remained among us. It has for long years stood among a gay and busy crowd in all the loneliness and isola- tion of old age which has seen all its contemporaries die away from its side. It is high time that it too should depart and be at rest. The spirit of the owner, which tenanted it—whose hand was visible to the mental eye on the banisters, like that of the ghost in his own Castle of Otranto—must have been more vexed by the revels of its recent occupants than it will be by the dismantling. Its elements will be reincorporated into other collections. Perfect in its kind, it can never be forgotten : it will live in its author's writings ; there it will be ever fresh—none of the fading and mildew of decay can appear there. The neglect into which Strawberry Hill has fallen might have been a warning to those who conceived the brilliant idea of per petuating Abbotsford, the Strawberry Hill of our day. (To pre vent an explosion of Northern wrath, it may be advisable to say that we do not compare the pen-and-ink romances of these two authors, but only those which they composed in stone and lime.) What the house of HORACE WALPOLE has long been, the house of Sir WALTER SCOTT has already become. When even the sub- stantial structures of Egypt have survived only in mutilated frag- ments, it is a sad though a fond folly to think of giving immortality to the hobby-horses of respectable private gentlemen.
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