STRAWBERRY HILL ACCOUNTS. Now first printed with. Notes. by Paget
Toynbee. (Clarendon Press. 84s.)— Dr. Toynbee, whose knowledge of Horace Walpole is unrivalled, has lighted upon a little pocket-book in which Walpole noted his expenditure on Strawberry Hill from 1747 to 1795. The accounts fill only twenty pages.; the rest of this substantial and beautiful quarto contains the editor's elaborate commentary, which tells the whole story of Walpole's `! Gothick " hobby and is uncommonly interesting. It was the fashion, both in Walpole's time and later, to ridicule his country house. But the numerous prints here admirably reproduced show that the exterior had dignity even if the ecclesiastical interior, of the library for example, looks Early Victorian and very uncomfortable. The most astonishing feature of the book, to our eye, is the cheapness of Walpole's architectural recreations. For all the land that he bought and for all the building, decoration and furniture with which he amused himself for half-a-century he paid in all £20,720 10s. ld. Even if we allow for the fall in the value of money since then, we must conclude that Walpole had no little of the financial genius of his father, the first Prime Minister.
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