In a few years almost every great house in the kingdom contained a museum of these grotesque baubles.

Even statesmen and generals were not ashamed to be renowned as judges of teapots and dragons; and satirists long continued to repeat that a fine lady valued her mottled green pottery quite as much as she valued her monkey, and much more than she valued her husband.

[62] But the new palace was embellished with works of art of a very different kind.

A gallery was erected for the cartoons of Raphael.

Those great pictures, then and still the finest on our side of the Alps, had been preserved by Cromwell from the fate which befell most of the other masterpieces in the collection of Charles the First, but had been suffered to lie during many years nailed up in deal boxes.