The local historians are certain that Sir Joshua must necessarily have brought down wits, poets, and painters from London, and very probably he did, but no record of their proceedings remains. It is indeed probable that his sojourns at Richmond mostly took place when town was empty, for a portrait painter of his eminence could not have afforded to be out of the way of his sitters during the London season. We give a reproduction of his curiously idealised but beautiful "View from Richmond The View from Richmond Hill. By Sir Joshua Reynolds. Hill." It is just such as an Italian artist might have painted at home from recollection of the scene. Another important inhabitant of Richmond, whose connection with the place probably commenced during the time of Reynolds, was indeed a man of a different class. The Duke of Queensberry exemplifies the truth of Goethe's saying, that the final judgment of the world on any person depends greatly upon the character in which he last presents himself to its observation. In the popular estimate Queensberry is the "Old Q." of the first decade of the nineteenth century, familiar to London loungers as he sat in his balcony in Piccadilly, ogling pretty passers-by with the only eye available for this purpose, and, as was generally believed, with a saddled horse and a messenger in readiness to pursue any woman or any horse so fortunate as to attract his Grace's especial notice. It is surprising to be assured that in the opinion of those who knew him best the duke surpassed most men in shrewd common-sense; and his correspondence with George Selwyn exhibits him in the light of a kind, staunch, and self-sacrificing friend. The key to the infirmities of his character seems to be that, like Charles II., he had an excess of common-sense unassociated with any ideal or patriotic aspiration which would have pointed out a befitting employment of his vast wealth and remarkable abilities. The consequent course of selfish dissipation, relieved only by charities which, although munificent, imposed no trouble upon the benefactor, gradually wore down an originally buoyant nature until the spirited youth became the sated voluptuary, one of whose sayings is almost the most impressive warning on record of the Nemesis which awaits those who live solely for pleasure. "The dinner," Wilberforce records of an occasion when he enjoyed the duke's hospitality, was sumptuous, the views from the villa quite enchanting, and the Thames in all its glory; but the duke looked on with indifference. What is there,' he said, 'to make so much of in the Thames? I am quite weary of it; there it goes, flow, flow, flow, always the same." The villa where this tragic confession of mental decrepitude was uttered had been built in 1708 by the Earl of Cholmondeley on the site of the old Palace, and greatly improved by the Duke of Queensberry, who filled it with choice statues and paintings, and one of the finest collections of shells then extant. Among its curiosities was said to be the identical tapestry which had decorated the Court of Chancery during Clarendon's chancellorship. It was abandoned by the duke about the end of the eighteenth century out of resentment for a lawsuit instituted against him by the inhabitants of Richmond for an illegal enclosure of public land. The townsmen were quite right in protecting their property, even at the risk of alienating a wealthy benefactor, but the duke seems to have been unconscious of offence, and perhaps a little diplomacy might not have been out of place. At his death he bequeathed it to Maria Fagniani, a young lady of ambiguous paternity, whom the duke, who had no legitimate issue, chose to consider in the light of a daughter. Lord Yarmouth complaisantly made her his wife, and was rewarded by a residuary legateeship under the duke's will equivalent to £200,000. Maria thus ultimately became Marchioness of Hertford, but for excellent reasons always resided in Paris, and the unoccupied mansion was pulled down in 1829. Very different associations are connected with the names of Horace Walpole's friends, the fascinating and accomplished Misses Berry, who did so much to brighten the last years of the veteran wit and virtuoso. His first acquaintance with them was made in 1787; they soon became indispensable to him, and never strayed far from the spot where they had known him. When, at length, in 1852, they were laid to rest in Petersham Churchyard, their epitaph, written by the Earl of Carlisle, could say that they reposed "amidst scenes which in life they had frequented and loved, followed by the tender regret of those who close the unbroken succession of friends devoted to them with fond affection during every step of their long career." "Few women at eighty-two,” the elder Miss Berry had written in 1845, "have so little to complain of." Another aged lady connected alike with Richmond and with the literary history of the eighteenth century was Miss Mary Langton, daughter of Johnson's friend Bennet Langton and his own godchild, to whom, in her seventh year, he being himself in the last year of his life, he addressed the pretty letter preserved by Boswell, commencing, "My dearest Miss Jenny." When, nearly seventy years afterwards, Mr. Crisp, the historian of Richmond, called upon Miss Langton by her invitation, he found her surrounded by Johnsonian relics, the letter, above all things, framed and glazed, "the cup and saucer out of which he last drank his favourite beverage, the chair on which he usually sat, the table at which he generally wrote, a few of the pictures which had originally ornamented the walls of his dwelling." Where are they now? Yet another interesting female inhabitant of Richmond may be mentioned in the person of Barbara Hofland, who died here in November 1844. Mrs. Hofland's name is still preserved by her affecting story, The Son of a Genius; and her reputation would stand high if she had refused to defer to what now seems the intolerably artificial and stilted style prescribed by the taste of her day for juvenile fiction. Such was not |