326 LEAVES THEY HAVE TOUCHED. 



To thee the gods a form complete, 

 To thee the gods a fair estate, 

 With bounty gave, with art to know 

 How to enjoy what they bestow. 

 Can a fond nurse one blessing more 



E'er for her favourite boy implore, 

 With sense and clem' expression blest, 

 Of friendshijj, honour, health possest, 

 A table elegantly plain. 

 And a poetic, easy vein ? 



The fulfilment of the no7i deficiente crumend part of the prayer w^as 

 secured to Horace Walpole by his father. He held for life, we are 

 told, through the favour of Sir Robert, the following sinecure offices : 

 the Ushership of the Receipt of the Exchequer, the Comptrollership 

 of the Great Roll, and the Keepership of the Foreign Receipts. A 

 third shield of arms appears in my Ferrarius. It has been fastened 

 to the printed title-page of the volume. The possessor who did this 

 seems to have been ofiended at the sight of a staring wood-cut in the 

 middle of the title-page : a coarse rendering of the common badge of 

 the Jesuit Society, displaying huge iron nails, &c., very much out of 

 place on the title-page of such a work as this. He accordingly in- 

 serted, with neatness, his own shield of arms in such a way as to 

 conceal from view the obnoxious ornament. The motto on this plate 

 is Lucent et ornant — the allusion being to the stars on the shield, and 

 to the name, possibly, of the family represented. 



It may be added that Brunet, the great bibliographer, in his notice 

 of the Hesperides of Ferrarius, speaks of a copy of the work which 

 in 1861, at the sale of the Marquis of Pins-Montbrun, at Toulouse, 

 fetched two hundred francs — ^but this was perhaps in some degree 

 on account of the binding. The binding, he says, was lemon-coloured 

 morocco divided into compartments, showing the branches of an 

 orange tree in gold of ^several colours, with the family arms of the 

 Marquis of Pins-Montbrun. Some of the plates were also coloured. 



T show a second relic of Horace Walpole in a copy of his " Fugitive 

 Pieces in Verse and Prose," printed at his own press at Strawberry 

 Hill, in 17o8, bound up with his " Castle of Otranto," from the same 

 press. The Fugitive Pieces have, on the title-page, the motto, Pere- 

 unt et imjyutantur, words aptly seen sometimes on the face of ancient 

 dials.- Below is a copperplate etching of Strawberry Hill ; in the 

 foreground a laurel tree supporting on one of its branches the Wal- 

 pole shield ; on a riband underneath is the " Fari qum se^itiat " 

 already intrepreted. 



Again I produce as a literary relic a volume from the library of 

 a man of letters eminent in the last and present century. It may 

 have been observed that Isaac Disraeli dedicates his Curiosities of 



