Surrounded by the portraits of those I have long counted
my friends, I like to chat with the people about me
concerning these pictures, my companions on the wall,
and the men and women they represent. These are
my assembled guests, who dropped in years ago and stayed
with me, without the form of invitation or demand
on my time or thought. They are my eloquent silent
partners for life, and I trust they will dwell here
as long as I do. Some of them I have known intimately;
several of them lived in other times; but they are
all my friends and associates in a certain sense.
To converse with them and of them—
“When to the sessions
of sweet silent thought
I summon up remembrance of
things past”—
is one of the delights of existence, and I am never
tired of answering questions about them, or gossiping
of my own free will as to their every-day life and
manners.
If I were to call the little collection in this diminutive
house a Gallery of Pictures, in the usual sense
of that title, many would smile and remind me of what
Foote said with his characteristic sharpness of David
Garrick, when he joined his brother Peter in the wine
trade: “Davy lived with three quarts of
vinegar in the cellar, calling himself a wine merchant.”
My friends have often heard me in my “garrulous
old age” discourse of things past and gone,
and know what they bring down on their heads when
they request me “to run over,” as they
call it, the faces looking out upon us from these
plain unvarnished frames.
Let us begin, then, with the little man of Twickenham,
for that is his portrait which hangs over the front
fireplace. An original portrait of Alexander
Pope I certainly never expected to possess, and I must
relate how I came by it. Only a year ago I was
strolling in my vagabond way up and down the London
streets, and dropped in to see an old picture-shop,—kept
by a man so thoroughly instructed in his calling that
it is always a pleasure to talk with him and examine
his collection of valuables, albeit his treasures
are of such preciousness as to make the humble purse
of a commoner seem to shrink into a still smaller
compass from sheer inability to respond when prices
are named. At No. 6 Pall Mall one is apt to find
Mr. Graves “clipp’d round about”
by first-rate canvas. When I dropped in upon
him that summer morning he had just returned from
the sale of the Marquis of Hastings’s effects.
The Marquis, it will be remembered, went wrong, and
his debts swallowed up everything. It was a wretched
stormy day when the pictures were sold, and Mr. Graves
secured, at very moderate prices, five original portraits.
All the paintings had suffered more or less decay,
and some of them, with their frames, had fallen to
the floor. One of the best preserved pictures
inherited by the late Marquis was a portrait of Pope,
painted from life by Richardson for the Earl of Burlington,
