'J- 0- V V ^ v* ^> vO C> a* "* -0 ^' V HORACE WALPOLE AND HIS WORLD 1 ,^m. ■ ■■'. nee* zfivrpcs I".,,... ..■;/ ,Jt/>l'fKC lift/// /'// HORACE WALPOLE AND HIS WORLD SELECT PASSAGES FROM HIS LETTERS EDITED BY L. B. SEELEY, M.A. Sometime Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge author of "fanny burnky and her friends" NEW EDITION NEW YORK CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 1895 V*: Gift W. L- Shoemaker 1 5 '06 CONTENTS. CHAPTER I. VACUC Introduction — Birth and Parentage — Education — Appoint- ments — Travels — Parliamentary Career — Retirement — Fortune — Strawberry Hill — Collections — Writings — Print- ing Press — Accession to Title— Death — Character — Poli- tical Conduct and Opinions — The Slave Trade — Strikes — Views of Literature — Friendships — Charities — Chatterton — Letters I CHAPTER II. Country Life— Ranelagh Gardens — The Rebel Lords — The Earthquake — A Frolic at Vauxhall — Capture of a House- breaker — Strawberry Hill — The Beautiful Gunnings — Sterne 33 CHAPTER III. A new Reign — Funeral of the late King — Houghton revisited — Election at Lynn — Marriage of George III. — His Coro- nation 62 CHAPTER IV. General Taste for Pleasure— Entertainments at Twickenham and Esher— Miss Chudleigh's Ball — Masquerade at Rich- mond House — The Gallery at Strawberry Hill — Balls — The Duchess of Queensberry — Petition of the Periwig-makers — Ladies' Head-gear — Almack's — "The Castle of Otranto" — Plans for a Bower — A late Dinner — Walpole's Idle Life — Social Usages 78 vi Contents, CHAPTER V. FAGB The Gout — Visits to Paris — Bath — John Wesley — Bad Weather — English Summers — Quitting Parliament — Madame du Deffand — Human Vanity — The Banks of the Thames — A Subscription Masquerade— Extravagance of the Age — The Pantheon — Visiting Stowe with Princess Amelia — George Montagu — The Countess of Ossory — Powder- Mills Blown up at Hounslow — Distractions of Business and Pleasure 99 CHAPTER VI. Lord Nuneham — Madame de Sevigne - — Charles Fox — Mrs. Clive and Cliveden — Goldsmith and Garrick — Dearth of News — Madame de Trop— A Bunch of Grapes — General Election — Perils by Land and Water — Sir Horace Mann — Lord Clive — The History of Manners — A Traveller from Lima — The Scavoir Vivre Club — Reflections on Life — The Pretender's Happiness — Paris Fashions — Madame du Def- fand ill — Growth of London — Sir Joshua Reynolds — Change in Manners — Our Climate 124 CHAPTER VII. The American War — Irish Discontent — Want of Money — The Houghton Pictures sold — Removal to Berkeley Square— Ill- health — A Painting by Zoffani — The Rage for News — The Duke of Gloucester — Wilkes — Fashions, Old and New — Mackerel News — Pretty Stories — Madame de Se"vigne"'s Cabinet — Picture of his Waldegrave Nieces — The Gordon Riots — Death of Madame du Deffand — The Blue Stockings 151 CHAPTER VIII. Walpole in his Sixty-fourth Year — The Royal Academy — Tonton— Charles Fox — William Pitt — Mrs. Hobart's Sans Souci — Improvements at Florence — Walpole's Dancing Feats — No Feathers at Court — Highwaymen — Loss of the Royal George — Mrs. Siddons — Peace — Its Social Conse- quences—The Coalition — The Rivals — Political Excitement — The Westminster Election — Political Caricatures — Con- way's Retirement — Lady Harrington — Balloons — Illness — Recovery i83 Contents. vii CHAPTER IX. PAOB Lady Correspondents --Madame de Genlis — Miss Burney and Hannah More — Deaths of Mrs. Clive and Sir Horace Mann — Story of Madame de Choiseul — Richmond — Queensberry House — Warren Hastings — Genteel Comedy — St. Swithin — Riverside Conceits — Lord North — The Theatre again — Gibbon's History — Sheridan — Conway's comedy — A Turkish War — Society Newspapers — The Misses Berry — Bonner's Ghost — The Arabian Nights — King's College Chapel — Richmond Society — New Arrivals — The Berrys' visit Italy — A Farewell Letter ... ... 221 CHAPTER X. Walpole's Love of English Scenery — Richmond Hill — Burke on the French Revolution — The Berrys at Florence — Death of George Selwyn — London Solitude — Repairs at Cliveden — Burke and Fox — The Countess of Albany — Journal of a Day — Mrs. Hobart's Party — Ancient Trade with India — Lady Hamilton — A Boat Race — Return of the Berrys — Horace succeeds to the Peerage — Epitaphium Vivi Auctoris — His Wives — Mary Berry — Closing Years — Love of Mov- ing Objects — Visit from Queen Charlotte — Death of Conway — Final Illness of Horace — His last Letter , . . .262 HORACE WALPOLE AND HIS WORLD., CHAPTER I, Introduction. — Birth and Parentage. — Education. — Appointments. — Travels. — Parliamentary Career. — Retirement. — Fortune. — Strawberry Hill. — Collections. — Writings. — Printing Press. — Accession to Title. — Death. — Character. — Political Conduct and Opinions. — The Slave-Trade. — Strikes. — Views of Literature. — Friendships. — Charities. — Chatterton. — Letters. We offer to the general reader some specimens of Horace Walpole's correspondence. Students of history and students of literature are familiar with this great mine of facts and fancies, but it is too extensive to be fully explored by those who have not both ample leisure and strong inclination for such employment. Yet most persons, we imagine, would be glad to have some ac- quaintance with the prince of English letter-writers. Many years have passed since Walter Scott pronounced Walpole's letters to be the best in our language, and since Lord Byron declared them to be incomparable. The fashion in style and composition has changed during the interval almost as often as the fashion in I 2 Introduction. dress : other candidates, too, for fame in the same depart- ment have come forward ; but no one, we think, has succeeded in setting aside the verdict given, in the early part of our century, by the two most famous writers of their time. Meanwhile, to the collections of letters by Walpole that were known to Scott and Byron have been added several others, no way inferior to the first, which have been published at different periods ; besides numerous detached letters, which have come to light from various quarters. In the years 1857-9, appeared a complete edition of Walpole's letters in nine large octavo volumes.* The editor of this expressed his confidence that no additions of moment would afterwards be made to the mass of correspondence which his industry had brought together. Yet he proved to be mistaken. In 1865 came out Miss Berry's Journals and Correspondence, t containing a large quantity of letters and parts of letters addressed to her and her sister by Walpole, which had not previously been given to the world, as well as several interesting letters to other persons, the manuscripts of which had passed into and remained in Miss Berry's possession. Other letters, too, have made their ap- pearance, singly and incidentally, in more recent publi- cations. $ The total number of Walpole's published letters cannot now fall much short of three thousand ; * " The Letters of Horace Walpole, Earl of Orford, edited by Peter Cunningham." j A second edition was published in 1866. * E.g., in Jesse's " Memoirs of George III.' Birth and Parentage. 3 the earliest of these is dated in November, 1735,* the latest in January, 1797. Throughout the intervening sixty years, the writer, to use his own phrase, lived always in the big busy world ; and whatever there passed before him, his restless fingers, restless even when stiffened by the gout, recorded and commented on for the amusement of his correspondents and the benefit of posterity. The extant results of his dili- gence display a full picture of the period, distorted indeed in many places by the prejudices of the artist, but truthful on the whole, and enlivened everywhere by touches of genius. From this mass of narratives and descriptions, anecdotes and good-sayings, criti- cisms, reflections and raillery, we shall endeavour to make as representative a selection as our limits will permit. It is hardly necessary to say that Horace Walpole entered life as the son of the foremost Englishman ol his time. He was born on the 24th of September, 1717, O.S., and was the youngest of the six children whom Sir Robert Walpole's first wife, Catherine Shorter, brought to her illustrious husband. This family in- cluded two other sons, Robert and Edward, and two daughters, besides a fourth son, William, who died in infancy. Horace, whose birth took place * Or in 1732, if the dates of some letters published in Notes and Queries, 4th Series, vol. iii., p. 2, can be trusted. But as the second of these letters, the date of which is given as Sep. 18, 1732, refers to the death of Walpole's mother, and as we know, from his own statement, that Lady Walpole died Aug. 20, 1737, there seems \o be an error. I — 2 4 Birth and Parentage. eleven years after that of the fifth child, bore no resemblance, either in body or mind, to the robust and hearty Sir Robert. He was of slight figure and feeble constitution ; his features lacked the comeliness of the Walpole race ; and his tempera- ment was of that fastidious, self-conscious, impression- able cast which generally causes a man or boy to be called affected. The scandalous, noting these things, and comparing the person and character of Horace Walpole with those of the Herveys, remembered that Sir Robert and his first wife had been estranged from one another in the later years of their union, and that the lady had been supposed to be intimate with Carr Lord Hervey, elder brother of Pope's Sporus. Horace himself has mentioned that this Carr was reckoned of superior parts to the more known John Lord Hervey, but nowhere in our author's writings does it appear that the least suspicion of spurious parentage* had entered his thoughts. Everywhere he exults in being sprung from the great Prime Minister; everywhere he is de- voted to the memory of his mother, to whom he raised a monument in Westminster Abbey, with an inscription * The story that Horace was of Hervey blood was first published in some Introductory Anecdotes prefixed to the later editions of the works of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. These anecdotes were contributed by Lady Louisa Stuart, daughter of Lord Bute, the Prime Minister, and grand-daughter of Lady Mary. Her statement about Walpole, though generally accepted, has perhaps received more credit than it deserves, but se non e vero, e ben trovato. The similarity, both in matter and composition, between the memoirs of Lord Hervey and those of Horace Walpole is certainly remark- able- Education and Appointments. 5 from his own pen celebrating her virtue. And in the concluding words of this epigraph, he repeated a saying, which he has elsewhere recorded, of the poet Pope, that Lady Walpole was " untainted by a Court." Walpole tells us that, in the first years of his life, being an extremely delicate child, he was much indulged both by his mother and Sir Robert ; and as an instance of this, he relates the well-known story, how his longing to see the King was gratified by his mother carrying him to St. James's to kiss the hand of George I. just before his Majesty began his last journey to Hanover. Shortly after this, the boy was sent to Eton, from which period we hear no more of Lady Walpole, though she survived till August, 1737. In 1735, young Horace proceeded from Eton to King's College, Cambridge, where he resided, though with long intervals of absence, until after he came of age. On quitting the University, he was in possession of a handsome income arising from the patent place of Usher of the Exchequer, to which he had recently been appointed, and which was then reckoned worth £900 a year, and from two other small patent places in the Exchequer, those of Clerk of the Escheats and Controller of the Pipe, producing together about £300 a year, which had been held for him during his minority. All these offices had been procured for him by Sir Robert Walpole, and were sinecures, or capable of being executed by deputy. Finding himself thus provided for and at leisure, the fortunate youth set out on the continental tour which was considered indispensable for a man of fashion. 6 Travels. He travelled, as he tells us, at his own expense ; and being well able to afford the luxury of a companion, he took with him Thomas Gray the poet, who had been his associate at Eton and Cambridge. The pair visited together various parts of France and Italy, making a stay of some duration at several places. After a few weeks spent in Paris, they settled at Rheims for three months to study French. They lived here with their former school-mate, Henry Seymour Conway,* Walpole's maternal cousin ; and here appears to have been cemented the lifelong friend- ship between Conway and Walpole which forms perhaps the most honourable feature in the history of the latter. At Florence, Walpole resided for more than twelve months in the house of Horace Mann, British Envoy to the Court of Tuscany, with whom he formed an intimacy, which was maintained, from the time of his leaving Italy until the death of Mann forty-five years after, by correspondence only, without the parties ever meeting again. Gray remained with Walpole at Florence, and accompanied him in visits which he made thence to Rome, Naples, and other places ; but e Born in July, 1719. He was second son of the first Lord Conway by his third wife, Charlotte Shorter, sister of Lady Wal- pole. He was Secretary in Ireland during the vice-royalty of William, fourth Duke of Devonshire ; then Groom of the Bed- chamber to George II. and to George III. ; became Secretary of State in 1765 ; Lieutenant-General of the Ordnance in 1770 ; Commander-in-Chief in 1782 ; and was created a Field-Marshal in 1793. He married the Dowager Countess of Aylesbury, by whom he had an only child, Mrs. Darner, the sculptor, to whom Walpol • left Strawberry Hill. Parliamentary Career. J at Reggio a dissension arose between thein, and they parted to return home by different routes. Walpole subsequently took the blame of this dispute upon him- self. " It arose," he says, " from Gray being too serious a companion. Gray was for antiquities, I was for per- petual balls and plays ; the fault was mine." According to another account, Walpole had opened a letter ad- dressed to Gray. Whatever was the cause of the breach, it was repaired three years later, and during the rest of the poet's life he continued on friendly terms with his early companion. Walpole reached England in September, 1741, just before the meeting of a new Parliament, and at the commencement of the Session took his seat as member for Callington, in Cornwall, for which place he had been elected during his absence. Sir Robert's Govern- ment was at that time in the midst of the difficulties which soon afterwards caused its downfall. In February, 1742, the defeated Minister resigned, and was created Earl of Orford. Horace, as was to be expected, took no prominent part in the struggle. His maiden speech was delivered in March, 1742, on a motion for an inquiry into the conduct of Sir Robert Walpole during the last ten years of his administration. The young orator was received with favour by the House, and obtained a com- pliment from the great William Pitt ; but the success of his effort, which is preserved in one of his letters to Mann, must be attributed entirely to the circumstances under which it was uttered. It does not appear that he afterwards acquired any reputation in debate. Indeed, 8 Parliamentary Career. he was generally content to be a listener. That he was a constant attendant at the House, his correspon- dence sufficiently proves, but he rarely took an active part in its proceedings. He has recorded a dispute he had with Speaker Onslow in his second Parliament. In 175 1 he moved the address to the King at the open- ing of the Session, and five years later we find him speaking on a question of employing Swiss troops in the Colonies. In 1757 he exerted himself with much zeal in favour of the unfortunate Admiral Byng. This, how- ever, was by argument and solicitation outside the House. In like manner, some years afterwards, he made strenuous, though vain, endeavours, at the con- ferences of his party, to persuade them not to support the exclusion of the King's mother from the Regency which was provided for on the first serious illness of George III. These are the chief incidents of Walpole's public career, although he remained in the House of Commons for twenty-seven years. At the General Election of 1754 he was chosen for the family borough of Castle Rising in Norfolk, but vacated this seat soon after- wards in order to be a candidate for the town of King's Lynn, which had for many years returned his father to Parliament. Horace continued to represent Lynn until the Dissolution of 1768, when he took leave of his constituents, and was no longer seen in Westminster Hall. Perhaps the final reason for his retirement was the failure of his friend Conway to retain a foremost position in politics. After serving as Secretary of State Retirement, 9 an J Leader of the House of Commons under three suc- cessive Premiers, Conway, through feebleness of purpose, lost his hold upon office, and fell for some years into the background. But with disappointment for his friend, there must have mingled in Walpole's mind a feeling of dissatisfaction with himself. Few men acquire much weight in Parliament who do not at least occasionally take a share in its discussions ; and Horace had more than once found that his influence in the House was by no means proportioned to his general reputation for ability. He was therefore quite ready to withdraw when Conway could no longer profit by his vote. Though at all times a keen politician, and extremely social in his habits, he was unfitted by nature for the conflicts of the Parliamentary arena. Desultory skirmishing with the pen was more to his taste than the close fighting of debate. During more than half his life, the war of parties was largely carried on by anonymous pamphlets, and Walpole gave powerful help in this way to his side ; afterwards, when letters and articles in news- papers took the place of pamphlets, he became an occasional contributor to the public journals. But Walpole found in art and literature the chief employment of his serious hours. His reading was ex- tensive, the most solid portion of it being in the regions of history and archaeology. More engrossing than his love of books was his passion for collecting and imitating antiquities and curiosities of all kinds. His ample fortune furnished him with the means of in- dulging these expensive pursuits. The emoluments io Fortune. of the Usher of the Exchequer greatly increased during his tenure of that post : in time of war — and England was often at war in those days — they were sometimes very large. Walpole admits that in one year he received as much as £4,200 from this source ; and the Commis- sioners of Accounts in 1782 thought that the annual value of the place might fairly be stated at that sum. There was an antique flavour about these gains which gave Walpole almost as much pleasure as the money itself. The duties of the Usher were to shut the gates of the Exchequer, and to provide the Exchequer and Treasury with the paper, parchment, pens, ink, sand, wax, tape, and other articles of a similar nature used in those departments. The latter of these duties, which was said to be as old as the reign of Edward III. at least, formed the lucrative part of the Usher's employment, as he was allowed large profits on the goods he thus purveyed to the Crown. Obviously the income of such an office, while varying with the financial business of each year, must have steadily advanced on the whole with the progress of the nation. Besides this place, and the two other patent places before mentioned, in all of which he continued until his death, Walpole enjoyed for many years a principal share in the income of the Collectorship of the Customs. Sir Robert Walpole held the last appointment under a patent which entitled him to dispose as he pleased of the reversion during the lives of his two eldest sons, Robert and Edward. Accordingly, he appointed that, after his death, £1,000 a year of the income should be paid to Fortune. 1 1 his youngest son Horace during the subsistence of the patent, and that the remainder should be divided equally between Horace and Edward. By this arrange- ment, Horace at the age of twenty-seven — for his father died in March, 1745 — stepped into another income of about £1,400 a year, which lasted until the death of his brother Sir Edward Walpole in 1784. In his writings he speaks, with becoming gratitude, of the places and emo- luments bestowed on him by his father as being a noble provision for a third son. Having thus nobly provided at the public expense for a child who had not yet shown any merit or capacity, Sir Robert did not find it need- ful to do much for him out of his private property. By his will, he bequeathed Horace only a sum of £5,000 charged on his Norfolk estate, and a leasehold house in Arlington Street. The greater part of the legacy re- mained unpaid for forty years ; the house Horace occu- pied until the term expired in 1781, when he bought a residence in Berkeley Square. As Walpole was never married, it is not surprising that he died worth ninety- one thousand pounds in the funds, besides other pro- perty, including his town house just mentioned, and his villa at Twickenham with its collection of pictures and other works of art. The fantastic little pile of buildings which he raised on the margin of the Thames engaged his chief attention for many years. He purchased the site of this in 1748, there being nothing then on the land but a cottage, and called it Strawberry Hill, a name which he found in one of the title-deeds. He had taken a lease the year 12 Strawberry Hill. before of the cottage, with part of the land, from Mrs. Chenevix, a fashionable toy-dealer, and thus describes his acquisition in a letter to Conway : " It is a little plaything-house that I got out of Mrs. Chenevix's shop, and is the prettiest bauble you ever saw. It is set in enamelled meadows, with filigree hedges : '"A small Euphrates through the piece is rolled, And little finches wave their wings in gold." Two delightful roads, that you would call dusty, supply me continually with coaches and chaises : barges as solemn as Barons of the Exchequer move under my window; Richmond Hill and Ham walks bound my prospect ; but thank God ! the Thames is between me and the Duchess of Queensberry. Dowagers as plenty as flounders inhabit all around, and Pope's ghost is just now skimming under my window by a most poetical moonlight. I have about land enough to keep such a farm as Noah's, when he set up in the Ark with a pair of each kind ; but my cottage is rather cleaner than I believe his was after they had been cooped up together forty days. The Chenevixes had tricked it out for themselves : up two pair of stairs is what they call Mr. Chenevix's library, furnished with three maps, one shelf, a bust of Sir Isaac Newton, and a lame telescope without any glasses. Lord John Sackville predeceased me here, and instituted certain games called cricketalia, which have been celebrated this very evening in honour of him in a neighbouring meadow." Having completed his purchase, Walpole proceeded to make improvements. His antiquarian studies Strawberry Hill. 13 had inspired him with a fondness for Gothic archi- tecture. But his zeal was not according to much knowledge, nor guided by a very pure taste. Gra- dually the little cottage became merged in a strange nondescript edifice, half castle, half cloister, with all kinds of grotesque decorations. "The Castle," so Walpole called it, " was," he tells us, " not entirely built from the ground, but formed at different times, by alterations of, and additions to, the old small house. The Library and Refectory, or Great Parlour, was entirely new-built in 1753 ; the Gallery, Round Tower, Great Cloister, and Cabinet, in 1760 and 1761 ; the Great North Bed-chamber in 1770; and the Beauclerk Tower with the Hexagon Closet in 1776." In a small cloister, outside the house, stood the blue and white china bowl, commemorated by Gray, in which Walpole's cat was drowned. On the staircase was the famous armour of Francis I. In the Gallery, among many other trea- sures, were placed the Roman eagle and the bust of Vespasian, so often mentioned in their owner's corres- pondence. The buildings were no more substantial in structure than they were correct in style. Much cheap ridicule has been poured upon "the Castle," as " a most trumpery piece of ginger-bread Gothic," with "pie-crust battlements," and "pinnacles of lath and plaster." Many of its faults and absur- dities must injustice be referred to the novelty of the attempt to apply a disused style to the requirements of a modern domestic residence. Walpole him- self was by no means blind to the flimsiness and 1 4 Collections. incongruities of his creation. He was rather indignant, indeed, when a French visitor censured it as " non digne de la solidite Anglaise ;" but in his own descrip- tion of it he calls it " a paper fabric," and speaks of the house and its decorations as " a mixture which may be denominated, in some words of Pope : ' A Gothic Vatican of Greece and Rome.' " With the help of Mr. Essex, who assisted him in de- signing the later portions, he gradually learned the depth of the architectural ignorance in which he and the " Committee," who were his first advisers, had been involved at the commencement of his work. In short, Strawberry Hill, child's baby-house as it was, proved the first step in the renascence of Gothic art. As chamber after chamber was added to the Castle, it became Walpole's next care to fill them with fresh antiques in furniture, pictures, bronzes, armour, painted glass, and other like articles. "In his villa," says Lord Macaulay, " every apartment is a museum, every piece of furniture is a curiosity; there is something strange in the form of the shovel ; there is a long story belonging to the bell-rope. We wander among a profusion of rarities, of trifling intrinsic value, but so quaint in fashion, or connected with such remarkable names and events, that they may well detain our attention for a moment. A moment is enough. Some new relic, some new unique, some new carved work, some new enamel, is forthcoming in an instant. One cabinet of trinkets is no sooner closed than another is opened." Of Walpole's writings other than his letters, we df Writings. 1 5 not propose to offer any detailed account or criticism. His earliest work, "iEdes Walpolianse," was published as early as 1747; it was merely a description of his father's pictures at Houghton Hall, the family seat in Norfolk. Among his next efforts were some papers contributed in 1753 and following years to a periodical work of the day, called The World * Most persons have read the " Castle of Otranto," so warmly ap- plauded by the author of " Ivanhoe." Most students of art, we suppose, are acquainted with Walpole's " Anecdotes of Painting," and his " Catalogue of Engravers." His " Catalogue of Noble and Royal Authors," though abounding in agreeable anecdotes, is probably now consulted by few ; and his " Historic Doubts on the Life and Reign of Richard III.," acute and ingenious as it was, cannot detain anyone who is aware of the recent researches on the same subject. His " Reminiscences of the Courts of George I. and George II.," and his "Memoirs" and "Journals" relating to the reigns of George II. and George III., are, and must ever remain, among the most valuable historical documents of the eighteenth century. The Reminiscences were written for the amusement of the Misses Berry, and have been extolled with justice as being, both in manner and matter, the very perfection * One of his papers in The World contains an account of an escape which he had, in 1749, of being shot by highwaymen in Hyde Park. His face was grazed by a ball from the pistol of one of his assailants, which went off accidentally before aim had been taken. An allusion to this adventure will be found in one of our extracts. 1 6 Accession to Title. of anecdote writing. The rest of Walpole's works, including his tragedy of " The Mysterious Mother " — the merits of which, whatever they may be, are cancelled by the atrocity of the fable — are as nearly as possible forgotten. Not content with writing and collecting books, Horace in 1757 established a printing press in the grounds of Strawberry Hill. The first printer employed by him was William Robinson; the last, Thomas Kirgate, whose name will often be found in the following ex- tracts. The first work printed at this press was Gray's "Odes," with Bentley's Illustrations. Its other pro- ductions include Walpole's own Royal and Noble Authors, Anecdotes of Painting, Engravers, and Tragedy; his " Description of Strawberry Hill," and " Fugitive Pieces ;" besides several works by other authors, such as Bentley's " Lucan," Lord Herbert's Life, a trans- lation of Hentzner's "Travels," and Lord Whitworth's "Account of Russia;" as well as small collections of verses by sundry friends. These " Strawberry Hill " editions are now scarce, and command high prices. The rest of our author's career may be summed up in a few words. His eldest brother had died early, and had been succeeded by an only son, whose profligacy and occasional fits of insanity caused much trouble. In December, 1791, when seventy-four years of age, Horace became, by the death of this nephew, Earl of Orford, which made little addition to his income, the family estate being heavily incumbered. The in- heritance was far from welcome. In a letter to a Death and Ckai'acter. 17 friend, he says he does not understand the management of such an estate, and is too old to learn. "A source of lawsuits among my near relations, endless conversa- tions with lawyers, and packets of letters to read every day and answer — all this weight of new business is too much for the rag of life that yet hangs about me.* He never took his seat in the House of Lords. He lived for upwards of five years longer, in the full possession of all his faculties, though suffering great bodily infirmity from the effects of gout, to which he was long a martyr. He died at his house, No. 11, Berkeley Square, on the 2nd of March, 1797, in his eightieth year, and was buried at the family seat of Houghton. With him the male line of Sir Robert Walpole and the title of Orford became extinct. The estate of Houghton descended to the fourth Earl of Cholmondeley, grandson of Horace Walpole's younger sister Mary, who married the third earl of that ilk. Strawberry Hill was at its founder's absolute disposal, and he left it, as already mentioned, to Mrs. Darner, Conway's daughter, but for life only, with limitations over in strict settlement. " It is somewhat curious," says his biographer, " as a proof of the inconsistency of the human mind, that, having built his Castle with so little view to durability, Walpole entailed the perishable possession with a degree of strictness which would have been more fit- ting for a baronial estate. And that, too, after having written a fable entitled ' The Entail,' in consequence of some one having asked him whether he did not intend * Letter to John Pinkerton, Dec. 26, 1791. 2 1 8 Political Conduct and Opinions. to entail Strawberry Hill, and in ridicule of such a pro- ceeding." Inconsistency, caprice, eccentricity, affectation, are faults which have been freely charged against the character of Horace Walpole. His strong prejudices and antipathies, his pride of rank, his propensity to satire, even his sensitive temperament, made him many enemies, who not only exaggerated his failings, but succeeded, in some instances at least, in transmitting their personal resentments to men of the present century. As a politician, especially, Walpole has received rather hard measure from the partisan critics on both sides. A generation back, Whig Reviewers and Tory Reviewers vied with each other in defaming his memory. Macaulay and Croker, who seldom agreed in anything, were of one accord in this. To Croker, of course, Horace was just a place-holder who furnished a telling example of Whig jobbery. To rake up all the details of his places in the Exchequer, and his " rider," or charge, on the place in the Customs, to compute and exaggerate his gains from each of these sources, to track him in dark intrigues for extending his tenure of one appoint- ment and bettering his position in another; all this was congenial employment for the Rigby of the nineteenth century, as it would have been for his prototype in the eighteenth. The motive of Macaulay's deadly attack is not quite so obvious. Walpole's politics were those of his father and of the old Whigs generally. While in theory inclined to Republicanism — though he was Political Conduct and Opinions 19 never, as he tells us, quite a Republican* — it was his habit, on practical questions, to consider what course the great Sir Robert would have taken under similar circumstances. There seems nothing in all this to excite the wrath of the most atrabilious Liberal. The truth appears to be that, in the Whig circles of Macaulay's time, there existed a traditional grudge against Horace Walpole. In the " Memorials of Charles James Fox," which were arranged by Lord Vassall- Holland, and edited by Lord John Russell, both the noble commentators speak of Horace in terms of undis- guised bitterness. Nor is the cause very far to seek. In politics, Conway was under the dominion of Walpole ; and Conway, on more than one critical occasion, dis- obliged the Rockingham faction, from which the modern Whigs deduce their origin. " Conway," says Lord John Russell, writing of the events of 1766, " had been made Secretary of State by Lord Rockingham, and ought to have resigned when Lord Rockingham left office ; but Mr. Walpole did not choose that this should be so." Sixteen years later, Conway sat again in a Cabinet presided over by Lord Rockingham, and when that nobleman died, he again refused to resign. It will be remembered that, on this occasion, the Cavendishes and Fox quitted their places when the Treasury was given to Lord Shelburne, instead of their own nominee, the Duke of Portland, whose only recommendations were that he was Lord of Welbeck, and had married a daughter of the House of Devonshire. " I have been called a Republican ; I never was quite that." — Walpole to Lady Ossory, July 7, 1782. a — 2 20 Political Conduct and Opinions. In 1782, the Duke of Richmond, Conway's son-in-law, concurred with Conway in declining to desert the new Premier ; and we know that Walpole stoutly supported, if he did not dictate, the joint resolution of his two friends. Lord Holland tells us that Fox did not like Walpole at all, and accounts for this dislike by sug- gesting that his uncle may have imbibed some pre- judice against Walpole for unkindness shown to the first Lord Holland. But this seems going needlessly far back for an explanation. There can be no doubt that Fox looked on Walpole as having assisted to thwart his design of governing England in the name of the insignificant Duke of Portland, and detested him ac- cordingly. Nor did subsequent events tend to soften Fox's recollection of this passage in his life, or of the persons concerned in it. Had he overcome his jealousy of Lord Shelburne, or had he succeeded in compelling his rival to bow before the "wooden idol" — so Lord John Russell himself calls Portland — which he had set up, he would probably, in either case, have avoided the ill-famed coalition with Lord North, which was the main cause of his long-continued exclusion from power. Walpole had spoken his mind very plainly on the subject. "It is very entertaining," he wrote, "that two or three great families should persuade themselves that they have an hereditary and exclusive right of giving us a head without a tongue."* And he told Fox himself: " My Whiggism is not confined to the Peak of Derbyshire. "t We can imagine with what * Letter to Mann, July 10, 1782. t Letter to Lady Ossory, July 7, 1782. Political Conduct and Opinions. 21 horror such utterances as these were received by the believers in the Whig doctrine of divine right. No wonder that Mr. Fox did not like Walpole. And what Mr. Fox disliked was, of course, anathema to every true Whig, and especially to an Edinburgh Reviewer of 1833. What do the complaints of Walpole's political tergiversation amount to ? It was certainly not a wise act of Horace to hang up in his bedroom an engraving of the death warrant of Charles I. with the inscription " Major Charta." But the Whig essayist, while reproving Walpole's strange fancy that, without the instrument in question, the Great Charter would have become of little importance, might have recollected that he had himself professed his inability to see any essential distinction between the execution of the Royal Martyr and the deposition of his son. Again, there was inconsistency, no doubt, between Walpole's admiration of the Long Parliament, and his detes- tation of the National Assembly ; yet it should be borne in mind that, in the midst of his disgust at the excesses of the French Revolution, he protested that he was very far from subscribing to the whole of Burke's " Reflections." Why then should we be told that " he was frightened into a fanatical royalist, and became one of the most extravagant alarmists of those wretched times?" We may surely ask on his behalf the question which Macaulay put when the consistency of his own master, Sir James Mackintosh, was impugned : " Why is one person to be singled out from among 22 Political Opinions. millions, and arraigned before posterity as a traitor to his opinions, only because events produced on him the effect which they produced on a whole generation ?" When the critic tells us that Walpole was a mischief- maker who " sometimes contrived, without showing himself, to disturb the course of Ministerial negotia- tions, and to spread confusion through the political circles," we cannot avoid seeing in these words a resentful reference to the part taken by Conway on the occasions above referred to. It was not Walpole's fault that the party conflicts of his time were mainly about persons. We have seen the importance which Fox attached to these personal questions. We may safely say that this great man's disapproval of Walpole's conduct did not spring from any difference on matters of principle. If Horace was an opponent of Parliamentary Reform, this was an open question among Fox's most intimate associates. If he objected to the enfranchisement of the Roman Catholics, most Whigs of his time did the same. In the dispute with America, as we shall see, he main- tained, from the first, the right of the Colonies to liberty and independence. Nor did he retract his expressions of sympathy with the American Republic when the horrors of the French Revolution made him a supporter of Tory policy in England and on the Con- tinent. He always lamented as one of the worst effects of the French excesses that they must neces- sarily retard the progress and establishment of civil liberty.* * Miss Berry. The Slave Trade. 23 There were questions of social politics on which he was far in advance of his times. " We have been sitting," he wrote, on the 25th of February, 1750, " this fortnight on the African Company. We, the British Senate, that temple of liberty, and bulwark of Protestant Christianity, have, this fortnight, been con- sidering methods to make more effectual that horrid traffic of selling negroes. It has appeared to us that six-and-forty thousand of these wretches are sold every year to our plantations alone ! It chills one's blood — I would not have to say I voted for it for the Continent of America ! The destruction of the miserable in- habitants by the Spaniards was but a momentary misfortune that followed from the discovery of the New World, compared with the lasting havoc which it brought upon Africa. We reproach Spain, and yet do not even pretend the nonsense of butchering these poor creatures for the good of their souls."* The sentiments thus declared by Walpole nine years before Wilberforce was born, he steadily adhered to through life. On this point, at least, no one has ever charged him with any wavering or inconsistency. W 7 e will mention, before passing on to different topics, one other matter on which Walpole shows a liberality of feeling quite unusual at any period of his life. In the summer of 1762, he writes : ' I am in dis- tress about my Gallery and Cabinet : the latter was on the point of being completed, and is really striking beyond description. Last Saturday night my work- * Letter to Sir Horace Mann. 24 Views of Literature. men took their leave, made their bow, and left me up to the knees in shavings. In short, the journeymen carpenters, like the cabinet-makers, have entered into an association not to work unless their wages are raised ; and how can one complain ? The poor fellows, whose all the labour is, see their masters advance their prices every day, and think it reasonable to touch their share."* In the domain of literature, Walpole's opinions were largely influenced by his social position and personal connexions. He rated the class of professional writers as much below as they have ever been rated above their real deserts ; and this may perhaps help to explain the rancour with which he has been pursued by some critics. He could see nothing wonderful in the art of stringing sentences together. He met famous authors daily in society, and did not find that they were wiser or more accomplished than their neighbours. Most of them showed to little advantage in the drawing-rooms in which he felt his own life completest. Gray seldom opened his lips; Goldsmith "talked like poor poll"; Johnson was Ursa Major — a brute with whom Horace declined to be acquainted ; Hume's powers of mind did not appear in his broad unmeaning face, nor animate his awkward conversation ; even Gibbon made a bad figure as often as any doubt was hinted as to the trans- cendent importance of his luminous or voluminous history. As for the novelists, neither Fielding nor Richardson ever ascended to the sublime heights in * Letter to Sir Horace Mann, July i, 1762. Views of Literature. 25 which Horace dwelt at ease. Stories circulated there of vulgar orgies amidst which the biographer of Tom Jones performed his police functions, and of requests made by the author of " Clarissa " to his female admirers for information as to the manners of polite life. Walpole shrank from the coarseness of the one, and smiled at the attempts of the other to describe a sphere which he had never entered. We are not to suppose, however, that Horace was as blind to the gradations of literary rank as some would have us be- lieve. When he told Mann that The World was the work of "our first writers," instancing Lord Chester- field, Sir Charles Hanbury Williams, and other well-born dilettanti whose names have now sunk into oblivion or neglect, it is clear that he was speaking with refer- ence to the matter in hand. It did not occur to him that great historians and poets would be likely or suitable contributors to a series of light papers intended for the macaronis of the hour. What he regarded as the chief qualification of himself and his friends who wrote for this fashionable journal was their familiarity with the tone of the best society. For himself, Wal- pole constantly disclaimed all pretence to learning or exact knowledge of any kind, and, due allowance made for the vanity of which undoubtedly he owned an ample share, there seems no reason to question his sincerity. We conceive, indeed, that his estimate of his own talents and acquirements was much more accurate than it has usually been considered. In all that related to literary fame, his vanity showed itself 26 Views of Literature. rather in depreciating the advantages which he had not, than in exalting those which he possessed. If he did not worship style, still less was he disposed to bow down before study and research. Hence the low esteem in which he held authors of all kinds. Some excuses may be made for his disparaging criticisms. The literati of his day were certainly eclipsed by the contemporary orators. What writer was left in prose or verse, on the death of Swift, who could compare with Mansfield or the first William Pitt? Which of the poets or historians of the next generation won the applause which was called forth by the speeches of Fox or Sheridan or the younger Pitt ? If Fox and Sheridan could obtain their greatest triumphs in the midst of gambling and dissipation, and apparently without pains or application, there was some apology for slighting the labours of Robertson and the carefully polished verses of Goldsmith. With the exception of Lord Chatham, whom he strongly disliked, Walpole generally does justice to the great speakers of his time, on whichever side in politics they were ranged ; if he gives no credit for genius to the writers of the age, this was partly at least because their genius was of no striking or signal order. Judgment, sense, and spirit were Pope's three marks for distinguishing a great writer from an inferior one, and these continued to be the criteria applicable, even in the department of so-called works of imagina- tion, down to the end of the century. Walpole, as in duty bound, was a professed worshipper of Shakespeare and Milton, but we suspect that his Friendships. 2 7 worship was not very hearty. It is clear that Pope was the poet of his choice ; and he seems to have known every line of his favourite by heart. He ad- mired also the exquisite poetry of Gray, and this admiration was no doubt sincere; but we are dis- posed to think that it arose entirely from the early connexion between Horace and the author, and from the feeling that Gray, in some sort, belonged to him. Gray was Walpole's poet, as Conway was his statesman ; and the sense of ownership, which converted his cousinly regard for Conway into a species of idolatry, turned to enthusiasm for Gray's " Odes " the critical estimate which would otherwise, we feel sure, have ended in a pretty strong aversion. What Walpole said, rather uncharitably, of Sir Joshua Reynolds, may, we fear, be applied with more justice to Walpole himself. All his geese were swans, as the swans of others were geese in his eyes. Conway was a man of integrity and honour, an excellent soldier, a fluent speaker, but he was a timid and vacillating politician. That phase of their weakness which makes the vainglorious pique themselves on having remark- able friends, is certainly not unamiable, though it is sometimes fatiguing. We all know the man who con- gratulates himself on his good fortune in being the associate of the versatile Dr. A., the high-souled Mr. B., the original Mr. C, and so on. Had Horace possessed a wife, he would have wearied all his acquaintance with encomiums on her beauty, wit, wis- dom, and other matchless perfections. Having no wife 28 Friendships. to celebrate, he chose to sing the praises of General Conway, and sang them lustily, and with good courage. This was the more disinterested, as Conway appears to have been distinctly one of those persons who allow themselves to be loved. There is no questioning the genuineness of a devotion which un- doubtedly entailed on Walpole great sacrifices. The time and labour which Horace bestowed in the service of his friend's ambition entitle him to full credit for honesty in the offer which he made to share his fortune with the latter, when, at an early stage of his career, he was dismissed from his employments for opposing the Ministry of the day. This was not the only occasion on which Walpole showed himself capable of uncommon generosity. He made a similar offer to Madame du Deffand, when she was threatened with the loss of her pension. That clever leader of French society was not, like Conway, a connexion of long standing, but a mere recent acquaintance of Horace, who had no claim on him beyond the pleasure she had shown in his company, and the pity which her blind and helpless old age de- manded. In the event, the lady did not require his assistance, but her letters prove that she had full con- fidence in his intentions, notwithstanding the harshness with which he sometimes repressed her expressions of affection. The same temperament which made him fond of displaying his intimacy with Conway, caused him to dread the ridicule of being supposed to have an attachment for the poor old Marquise. Hence arose Charities. 29 the occasional semblance of unkindness, which was contradicted by substantial proofs of regard, and which must be set down to undue sensitiveness on the gentleman's side rather than to want of consideration. The coldness of heart with which Walpole is reproached has, we think, been exaggerated. "His affections were bestowed on few; for in early life they had never been cultivated." So much is admitted by Miss Berry, a most favourable witness. But in society generally, Horace appears to have shown himself friendly and obliging. His aristocratic pride did not prevent him from mixing freely with persons much his inferiors in station. Miss Hawkins, daughter of the historian of music, who for many years lived near him at Twickenham, testifies to his sociable and liberal temper ; and Walpole's own letters show that he was at some trouble to assist Sir John Hawkins in col- lecting materials for his work. The correspondence between Horace and his deputies in the Exchequer proves the kindly feeling that subsisted between him and them ; and also reveals the fact that he employed them from time to time in dispensing charities which he did not wish to have disclosed. And Miss Berry records that, during his later life, although no ostenta- tious contributor to public charities and schemes of improvement, the friends in whose opinion he could confide had always more difficulty to repress than to excite his liberality. His temper, says Sir Walter Scott, was precarious. Walpole, we believe, would readily have pleaded guilty 3 youth feel with poetic limbs, as well as see with poetic eyes? In one respect I am very young, I cannot satiate myself with looking : an incident contributed to make me feel this more strongly. A party arrived, just as I did, to see the house, a man and three women in riding-dresses, and they rode post through the apart- ments. I could not hurry before them fast enough ; they were not so long in seeing for the first time, as I could have been in one room, to examine what I knew by heart. I remember formerly being often diverted with this kind of seers; they come, ask what such a room is called, in which Sir Robert lay, write it down, admire a lobster or a cabbage in a market-piece, dis- pute whether the last room was green or purple, and then hurry to the inn for fear the fish should be over- dressed. How different my sensations ! not a picture here but recalls a history ; not one, but I remember in Downing-street or Chelsea, where queens and crowds admired them, though seeing them as little as these travellers ! " When I had drunk tea, I strolled into the garden ; they told me it was now called the pleasure-ground. What a dissonant idea of pleasure ! those groves, those allies, where I have passed so many charming moments, are now stripped up or overgrown — many fond paths I could not unravel, though with a very exact clew in my memory : I met two gamekeepers, and a thousand hares ! In the days when all my soul was tuned to pleasure and vivacity (and you will think, perhaps, it is far from being out of tune yet), I hated Houghton and Houghton Revisited. 69 its solitude ; yet I loved this garden, as now, with many regrets, I love Houghton ; Houghton, I know not what to call it, a monument of grandeur or ruin ! How I have wished this evening for Lord Bute ! how I could preach to him ! For myself, I do not want to be preached to ; I have long considered, how every Balbec must wait for the chance of a Mr. Wood. The ser- vants wanted to lay me in the great apartment — what, to make me pass my night as I have done my evening ! It were like proposing to Margaret Roper to be a duchess in the court that cut off her father's head, and imagining it would please her. I have chosen to sit in my father's little dressing-room, and am now by his scrutoire, where, in the height of his fortune, he used to receive the accounts of his farmers, and deceive himself, or us, with the thoughts of his economy. How wise a man at once, and how weak ! For what has he built Houghton ? for his grandson to annihilate, or for his son to mourn over. If Lord Burleigh could rise and view his representative driving the Hatfield stage, he would feel as I feel now. Poor little Strawberry ! at least, it will not be stripped to pieces by a descendant ! You will find all these fine meditations dictated by pride, not by philosophy. Pray consider through how many mediums philosophy must pass, before it is puri- fied— " ' how often must it weep, how often burn !' " My mind was extremely prepared for all this gloom by parting with Mr. Conway yesterday morning ; moral reflections or commonplaces are the livery one likes to jo Election at Lynn. wear, when one has just had a real misfortune. He is going to Germany : I was glad to dress myself up in transitory Houghton, in lieu of very sensible concern. To-morrow I shall be distracted with thoughts, at least images of very different complexion. I go to Lynn, and am to be elected on Friday. I shall return hither on Saturday, again alone, to expect Burleighides on Sunday, whom I left at Newmarket. I must once in my life see him on his grandfather's throne. " Epping, Monday night, thirty -first. — No, I have not seen him ; he loitered on the road, and I was kept at Lynn till yesterday morning. It is plain I never knew for how many trades I was formed, when at this time of day I can begin electioneering, and succeed in my new vocation. Think of me, the subject of a mob, who was scarce ever before in a mob, addressing them in the town-hall, riding at the head of two thousand people through such a town as Lynn, dining with above two hundred of them, amid bumpers, huzzas, songs, and tobacco, and finishing with country dancing at a ball and sixpenny whist ! I have borne it all cheerfully ; nay, have sat hours in conversation, the thing upon earth that I hate ; have been to hear misses play on the harpsichord, and to see an alderman's copies of Rubens and Carlo Marat. Yet to do the folks justice, they are sensible, and reasonable, and civilised ; their very lan- guage is polished since I lived among them. I attri- bute this to their more frequent intercourse with the world and the capital, by the help of good roads and postchaises, which, if they have abridged the King's Election at Lynn. ji dominions, have at least tamed his subjects. Well, how comfortable it will be to-morrow, to see my parroquet, to play at loo, and not be obliged to talk seriously ! The T Ieraclitus of the beginning of this letter will be overjoyed on finishing it to sign himself your old friend, " Democritus. " P.S. I forgot to tell you that my ancient aunt Hammond came over to Lynn to see me ; not from any affection, but curiosity. The first thing she said to me, though we have not met these sixteen years, was, ' Child, you have done a thing to-day, that your father never did in all his life ; you sat as they carried you, — he always stood the whole time.' ' Madam,' said I, ' when I am placed in a chair, I conclude I am to sit in it ; besides, as I cannot imitate my father in great things, I am not at all ambitious of mimicking him in little ones.' I am sure she proposes to tell her remarks to my uncle Horace's ghost, the instant they meet." The King's marriage followed a few months later : "Arlington Street, Sept. 10, 1761. " When we least expected the Queen, she came, after being ten days at sea, but without sickness for above half-an-hour. She was gay the whole voyage, sung to her harpsichord, and left the door of her cabin open. They made the coast of Suffolk last Saturday, and on Monday morning she landed at Harwich ; so prosperously has Lord Anson executed his com- J 2 The Royal Marriage. mission. She lay that night at your old friend Lord Abercorn's, at Witham in Essex ; and, if she judged by her host, must have thought she was coming to reign in the realm of taciturnity. She arrived at St. James's a quarter after three on Tuesday the 8th. When she first saw the Palace she turned pale : the Duchess of Hamilton smiled. ' My dear Duchess,' said the Prin- cess, 'you may laugh; you have been married twice ; but it is no joke to me.' Is this a bad proof of her sense ? On the journey they wanted her to curl her toupet. ' No, indeed,' said she, ' I think it looks as well as those of the ladies who have been sent for me : if the King would have me wear a periwig, I will ; other- wise I shall let myself alone.' The Duke of York gave her his hand at the garden-gate : her lips trembled, but she jumped out with spirit. In the garden the King met her ; she would have fallen at his feet ; he pre- vented and embraced her, and led her into the apart- ments, where she was received by the Princess of Wales and Lady Augusta : these three princesses only dined with the King. At ten the procession went to chapel, preceded by unmarried daughters of peers, and peeresses in plenty. The new Princess was led by the Duke of York and Prince William ; the Archbishop married them ; the King talked to her the whole time with great good humour, and the Duke of Cumberland have her away. She is not tall, nor a beauty ; pale, and very thin ; but looks sensible, and is genteel. Her hair is darkish and fine ; her forehead low, her nose very well, except the nostrils spreading too wide ; her The Royal Marriage. 73 mouth has the same fault, but her teeth are good.* She talks a good deal, and French tolerably ; possesses herself, is frank, but with great respect to the King. After the ceremony, the whole company came into the drawing-room for about ten minutes, but nobody was presented that night. The Queen was in white and silver ; an endless mantle of violet-coloured velvet, lined with ermine, and attempted to be fastened on her shoulder by a bunch of large pearls, dragged itself and almost the rest of her clothes halfway down her waist. On her head was a beautiful little tiara of diamonds ; a diamond necklace, and a stomacher of diamonds, worth three score thousand pounds, which she is to wear at the Coronation too. Her train was borne by the ten bridesmaids, Lady Sarah Lenox, Lady Caroline Russell, Lady Caroline Montagu, Lady Har- riot Bentinck, Lady Anne Hamilton, Lady Essex Kerr (daughters of Dukes of Richmond, Bedford, Manches- ter, Portland, Hamilton, and Roxburgh) ; and four daughters of the Earls of Albemarle, Brook, Harcourt, and Ilchester, — Lady Elizabeth Keppel, Louisa Gre- ville, Elizabeth Harcourt, and Susan Fox Strangways : their heads crowned with diamonds, and in robes of white and silver. Lady Caroline Russell is extremely * " Queen Charlotte had always been if not ugly, at least ordinary, but in her later years her want of personal charms became of course less observable, and it used to be said that she was grown better looking. I one day said something to this effect tc Colonel Dis- browe, her Chamberlain. ' Yes,' replied he, ' I do think that the bloom of her ugliness is going off.'"— CROKER. 74 The Royal Marriage. handsome; Lady Elizabeth Keppel very pretty; bull with neither features nor air, nothing ever looked sti charming as Lady Sarah Lenox ; she has all the glow of beauty peculiar to her family. As supper was not ready, the Queen sat down, sung, and played on the harpsichord to the Royal Family, who all supped with her in private. They talked of the different German dialects ; the King asked if the Hanoverian was not pure — ' Oh, no, sir,' said the Queen ; ' it is the worst of all.' — She will not be unpopular. " The Duke of Cumberland told the King that himself and Lady Augusta were sleepy. The Queen was very averse to leave the company, and at last articled that nobody should accompany her but the Princess of Wales and her own two German women, and that nobody should be admitted afterwards but the King — they did not retire till between two and three. " The next morning the King had a Levee. After the Levee there was a Drawing- Room ; the Queen stood under the throne : the women were presented to her by the Duchess of Hamilton, and then the men by the Duke of Manchester ; but as she knew nobody, she was not to speak. At night there was a ball, drawing-rooms yesterday and to-day, and then a cessa- tion of ceremony till the Coronation, except next Monday, when she is to receive the address of the Lord Mayor and Aldermen, sitting on the throne attended by the bridesmaids. A ridiculous circum- stance happened yesterday; Lord Westmoreland, not very young nor clear-sighted, mistook Lady Sarah The Coronation. 75 Lenox for the Queen, kneeled to her, and would have kissed her hand if she had not prevented him. People think that a Chancellor of Oxford was naturally attracted by the blood of Stuart. It is is comical to see Kitty Dashwood, the famous old beauty of the Oxfordshire Jacobites, living in the palace as Duenna to the Queen. She and Mrs. Broughton, Lord Lyttelton's ancient Delia, are revived again in a 3'oung court that never heard of them. There, I think you could not have had a more circumstantial account of a royal wedding from the Heralds' Office. Adieu ! " Yours to serve you, " Horace Sandford, " Mecklenburgh King-at-Arms." The Coronation of the King and Queen took place on the 22nd of September, 1761, a fortnight after their marriage. Walpole writes to Mann : " Strawberry Hill, Sept. 28, 1 761. " What is the finest sight in the world ? A Corona- tion. What do people talk most about ? A Coronation. Indeed, one had need be a handsome young peeress not to be fatigued to death with it. After being exhausted with hearing of nothing else for six weeks, and having every cranny of my ideas stuffed with velvet and ermine, and tresses, and jewels, I thought I was very cunning in going to lie in Palace-yard, that I might not sit up all night in order to seize a place. The consequence of this wise scheme was, that I did not get a wink of sleep all night ; hammering of scaffolds, shouting of people, 76 The Coronation relieving guards, and jangling of bells, was the concert I heard from twelve to six, when I rose ; and it was noon before the procession was ready to set forth, and night before it returned from the Abbey. I then saw the Hall, the dinner, and the champion, a gloriously illuminated chamber, a wretched banquet, and a foolish puppet-show. A Trial of a peer, though by no means so sumptuous, is a preferable sight, for the latter is interesting. At a Coronation one sees the peerage as exalted as they like to be, and at a Trial as much humbled as a plebeian wishes them. I tell you nothing of who looked well ; you know them no more than if I told you of the next Coronation. Yes, two ancient dames whom you remember, were still ornaments of the show, — the Duchess of Queensberry and Lady West- moreland. Some of the peeresses were so fond of their robes, that they graciously exhibited themselves for a whole day before to all the company their servants could invite to see them. A maid from Richmond begged leave to stay in town because the Duchess of Montrose was only to be seen from two to four. The Heralds were so ignorant of their business, that, though pensioned for nothing but to register lords and ladies, and what belongs to them, they advertised in the news- paper for the Christian names and places of abode of the peeresses. The King complained of such omissions and of the want of precedent ; Lord Effingham, the Earl Marshal, told him, it was true there had been great neglect in that office, but he had now taken such care of registering directions, that next coronation would The Coronation. 77 be conducted with the greatest order imaginable. The King was so diverted with this flattering speech that he made the earl repeat it several times. " On this occasion one saw to how high-water-mark extravagance is risen in England. At the Coronation of George II. my mother gave forty guineas for a dining- room, scaffold, and bedchamber. An exactly parallel apartment, only with rather a worse view, was this time set at three hundred and fifty guineas — a tolerable rise in thirty-three years ! The platform from St. Margaret's Round-house to the church-door, which formerly let for forty pounds, went this time for two thousand four hundred pounds. Still more was given for the inside of the Abbey. The prebends would like a Coronation every year. The King paid nine thousand pounds for the hire of jewels ; indeed, last time, it cost my father fourteen hundred to bejewel my Lady Orford. A single shop now sold six hundred pounds' sterling worth of nails — but nails are risen — so is everything, and every- thing adulterated. If we conquer Spain, as we have done France, I expect to be poisoned." An observation as awkward as that of Lord Effing- ham had been made by the beautiful Lady Coventry to George II. " She was tired of sights," she said ; "there was only one left that she wanted to see, and that was a coronation." The old man, says Walpole, told the story himself at supper to his family with great good humour. As it happened, he outlived Lady Coventry by a few days. yS General Taste for Pleasure. CHAPTER IV. General Taste for Pleasure. — Entertainments at Twickenham and Esher. — Miss Chudleigh's Ball. — Masquerade at Richmond House. — The Gallery at Strawberry Hill. — Balls. — The Duchess of Oueensberry. — Petition of the Periwig-makers. — Ladies' Head- gear. — Almack's. — The Castle of Otranto. — Plans for a Bower. — A Late Dinner. — Walpole's Idle Life. — Social usages. For some years after the arrival of the Queen, the enlivening influence of a new reign is clearly traceable in Walpole's letters. The Court, indeed, did not willingly contribute much to the national gaiety. Its plainness and economy soon incurred reproach ;* while there were intervals in which the first uncertain signs of mental derangement caused the young King to be withdrawn from public observation. Still there were christenings and birthdays, with now and then a wedding, to be celebrated in the royal family ; and the State festivities, unavoidable on these occasions, were eagerly emulated by the nobility. The Peace of Paris, too, was not only welcomed with popular rejoicings, * " The recluse life led here at Richmond, which is carried to such an excess of privacy and economy, that the Queen's friseur waits on them at dinner, and that four pounds only of beef are allowed for their soup, disgusts all sorts of people." — Walpole to Lord Hertford^ Sep. 9, 1764. General Taste for Pleasure. 79 but produced a general stir in society by the renewed intercourse which it brought about between France and England. " The two nations," writes Horace, " are crossing over and figuring-in." A trifle restrained by the example of the Court and the presence of foreign visitors, the appetite for pleasure became universal among the English higher classes. Lord Bute and the Princess of Wales, Wilkes and the North Briton, the debates on privilege and on general warrants, divided the attention of Walpole's world with the last entertain- ment at the Duke of Richmond's or Northumberland House, with Miss Chudleigh's last ball, with the riots at Drury Lane Theatre, with the fetes in honour of the marriage of the Princess Augusta and the Prince of Brunswick, or, somewhat later, of the ill-starred union between the Princess Caroline and the King of Denmark. We hear no more of frolics at Vauxhall, but we find galas, masquerades, ridottos, festinos, dis- plays of fireworks following each other in rapid succes- sion through our author's pages ; sometimes several such scenes are described in the same letter. There is, of course, much sameness in these descriptions, but some passages serve to illustrate the tastes of the age. We will make three or four brief extracts. Our first choice is an account of two entertainments given to French guests of rank, one by Horace himself at Strawberry Hill, the other by Miss Pelham at the country seat celebrated by Pope and Thomson. The whole story is contained in a letter to George Montagu, written in May, 1763 : " ' On vient de nous donner une tres jolie fete au 80 Fete at Strawberry Hitt. chateau de Straberri : tout etoit tapiss6 de narcisses, de tulipes, et de lilacs : des cors de chasse, des clarionettes; des petits vers galants faits par des fees, et qui se trou- voient sous la presse; des fruits a la glace, du the, du caffe, des biscuits, et force hot-rolls.'* — This is not the beginning of a letter to you, but of one that I might suppose sets out to-night for Paris, or rather, which I do not suppose will set out thither ; for though the narrative is circumstantially true, I don't believe the actors were pleased enough with the scene, to give so favourable an account of it. "The French do not come hither to see. A VAnglaise happened to be the word in fashion ; and half a dozen of the most fashionable people have been the dupes of it. I take for granted that their next mode will be a Vlroquaise, that they may be under no obligation of realising their pretensions. Madame de Boufflers I think will die a martyr to a taste, which she fancied she had, and finds she has not. Never having stirred ten miles from Paris, and having only rolled in an easy coach from one hotel to another on a gliding pavement, she is already worn out with being hurried from morn- ing till night from one sight to another. She rises every morning so fatigued with the toils of the preceding day, that she has not strength, if she had inclination, to * Walpole was thinking of an anecdote he had told in a pre- vious letter. " The old Mardchale de Villars gave a vast dinner [at Paris] to the Duchess of Bedford. In the middle of the dessert, Madame de Villars called out, ' Oh dear ! they have forgot ! yet I bespoke them, and I am sure they are ready ; you English love hot rolls — bring the rolls.' There arrived a huge dish of hot rolls, anH a sauce-boat of melted butter." Fete at Strawberry Hill. 81 observe the least, or the finest thing she sees ! She came hither to-day to a great breakfast I made for her, with her eyes a foot deep in her head, her hands dangling, and scarce able to support her knitting-bag. She had been yesterday to see a ship launched, and went from Greenwich by water to Ranelagh. Madame Dusson, who is Dutch-built, and whose muscles are pleasure-proof, came with her; there were besides, Lady Mary Coke, Lord and Lady Holdernesse, the Duke and Duchess of Grafton, Lord Hertford, Lord Villiers, Offley, Messieurs de Fleury, D'Eon, et Duclos. The latter is author of the Life of Louis Onze ; dresses like a dissenting minister, which I suppose is the livery of a bel esprit, and is much more impetuous than agreeable. We breakfasted in the great parlour, and I had filled the hall and large cloister by turns with French horns and clarionettes. As the French ladies had never seen a printing-house, I carried them into mine ; they found something ready set, and desiring to see what it was, it proved as follows : ie The Press speaks — "For Madame De Boufflers. i: ' The graceful fair, who loves to know, Nor dreads the north's inclement snow ; Who bids her polish'd accent wear The British diction's harsher air ; Shall read her praise in every clime Where types can speak or poets rhyme. 82 Fete at Strawberry Hill. "For Madame Dusson. " Feign not an ignorance of what I speak ; You could not miss my meaning were it Greek : 'Tis the same language Belgium utter'd first, The same which from admiring Gallia burst. True sentiment a like expression pours ; Each country says the same to eyes like yours. " You will comprehend that the first speaks English, and that the second does not ; that the second is hand- some, and the first not ; and that the second was born in Holland. This little gentilesse pleased, and atoned for the popery* of my house, which was not serious enough for Madame de Boufflers, who is Montmorency, et du sang du premier Chretien ; and too serious for Madame Dusson, who is a Dutch Calvinist. . . . The Gallery is not advanced enough to give them any idea at all, as they are not apt to go out of their way for one ; but the Cabinet, and the glory of yellow glass at top, which had a charming sun for a foil, did surmount their indifference, especially as they were animated by the Duchess of Grafton, who had never happened to be here before, and who perfectly entered into the air of * " The Due de Nivernois [the French ambassador] called here the other day in his way from Hampton Court ; but, as the most sensible French never have eyes to see anything, unless they see it every day and see it in fashion, I cannot say he flattered me much, or was much struck with Strawberry. When I carried him into the Cabinet, which I have told you is formed upon the idea of a Catho- lic chapel, he pulled off his hat, but perceiving his error, he said, ' Ce n'est pas line chapclle pourtant] and seemed a little displeased.'' — Walpole to Mann, AprU 30, 1763. Entertainment at Esher. 83 enchantment and fairyism, which is the tone of the place, and was peculiarly so to-day. " Thursday. " I am ashamed of myself to have nothing but a journal of pleasures to send you ; I never passed a more agreeable day than yesterday. Miss Pelham gave the French an entertainment at Esher ; but they have been so feasted and amused, that none of them were well enough, or reposed enough, to come, but Nivernois and Madame Dusson. The rest of the com- pany were, the Graftons, Lady Rockingham, Lord and Lady Pembroke. . . . The day was delightful, the scene transporting ; the trees, lawns, concaves, all in the per- fection in which the ghost of Kent* would joy to see them. At twelve we made the tour of the farm in eight chaises and calashes, horsemen, and footmen, setting out like a picture of Wouverman's. My lot fell in the lap of Mrs. Anne Pitt,t which I could have excused, as she was not at all in the style of the day, romantic, but political. We had a magnificent dinner, cloaked in the modesty of earthenware ; French horns and hautboys on the lawn. We walked to the Belvi- dere on the summit of the hill, where a theatrical * " Esher's peaceful grove Where Kent and Nature vie for Pelham's love." — Pope. " Esher's groves, Where, in the sweetest solitude, embraced By the soft windings of the silent Mole, From courts and senates Pelham finds repose."— Thomson. f Mrs. Anne Pitt, sister of Lord Chatham. 6—2 84 Entertainment at Esher. storm only served to heighten the beauty of the land- scape, a rainbow on a dark cloud falling precisely behind the tower of a neighbouring church, between another tower and the building at Claremont. Mon- sieur de Nivernois, who had been absorbed all day, and lagging behind, translating my verses, was delivered of his version, and of some more lines which he wrote on Miss Pelham in the Belvidere, while we drank tea and coffee. From thence we passed into the wood, and the ladies formed a circle on chairs before the mouth of the cave, which was overhung to a vast height with woodbines, lilacs, and laburnums, and dignified by the tall shapely cypresses. On the descent of the hill were placed the French horns ; the abigails, servants, and neighbours wandering below by the river ; in short, it was Parnassus, as Watteau would have painted it. Here we had a rural syllabub, and part of the company returned to town ; but were replaced by Giardini and Onofrio, who with Nivernois on the violin, and Lord Pembroke on the base, accompanied Miss Pelham, Lady Rockingham, and the Duchess of Grafton, who sang. This little concert lasted till past ten ; then there were minuets, and as we had several couples left, it concluded with a country dance. I blush again, for I danced, but was kept in countenance by Nivernois, who has one wrinkle more than I have. A quarter after twelve they sat down to supper, and I came home by a charming moonlight. I am going to dine in town, and to a great ball with fireworks at Miss Chudleigh's, but I return hither on Sunday, to bid adieu to this Miss Chudleigti s Ball. 85 abominable Arcadian life ; for really when one is not young, one ought to do nothing but s'ennuyer; I will try, but I always go about it awkwardly." Two days later this indefatigable chronicler of trifles describes to Conway the fete given by Miss Chudleigh, afterwards known as the Duchess of Kingston, but at that time a maid of honour to the Princess-Dowager of Wales : "Oh, that you had been at her ball t'other night! History could never describe it and keep its counte- nance. The Queen's real birthday, you know, is not kept : this Maid of Honour kept it — nay, while the Court is in mourning, expected people to be out of mourning; the Queen's family really was so, Lady Northumberland having desired leave for them. A scaffold was erected in Hyde-park for fireworks. To show the illuminations without to more advantage, the company were received in an apartment totally dark, where they remained for two hours. . . . The fireworks were fine, and succeeded well. On each side of the court were two large scaffolds for the Virgin's* trades- people. When the fireworks ceased, a large scene was lighted in the court, representing their Majesties ; on each side of which were six obelisks, painted with emblems, and illuminated ; mottoes beneath in Latin and English. . . . The lady of the house made many apologies for the poorness of the performance, which Miss Chudleigh. 86 Masquerade at Richmond House. she said was only oil-paper, painted by one of her servants ; but it really was fine and pretty. Behind the house was a cenotaph for the Princess Elizabeth, a kind of illuminated cradle ; the motto, A 11 the honours the dead can receive. This burying-ground was a strange codicil to a festival ; and, what was more strange, about one in the morning, this sarcophagus burst out into crackers and guns. The Margrave of Anspach began the ball with the Virgin. The supper was most sump- tuous." A fortnight afterwards he writes : " June 7th. " Last night we had a magnificent entertainment at Richmond House, a masquerade and fireworks. A masquerade was a new sight to the young people, who had dressed themselves charmingly, without having the fear of an earthquake before their eyes, though Prince William and Prince Henry* were not suffered to be there. The Duchesses of Richmond and Grafton, the first as a Persian Sultana, the latter as Cleopatra, — and such a Cleopatra ! were glorious figures, in very different styles. Mrs. Fitzroy in a Turkish dress, Lady George Lenox and Lady Bolingbroke as Grecian girls, Lady Mary Coke as Imoinda, and Lady Pembroke as a pil- grim, were the principal beauties of the night. The whole garden was illuminated, and the apartments. An encampment of barges decked with streamers in the middle of the Thames, kept the people from danger, * Afterwards Dukes of Gloucester and Cumberland. The Gallery at Strawberry Hill. 87 and formed a stage for the fireworks, which were placed, too, along the rails of the garden. The ground rooms lighted, with suppers spread, the houses covered and filled with people, the bridge, the garden full of masks, Whitehall crowded with spectators to see the dresses pass, and the multitude of heads on the river who came to light by the splendour of the fire-wheels, composed the gayest and richest scene imaginable, not to men- tion the diamonds and sumptuousness of the habits. The Dukes of York and Cumberland, and the Mar- grave of Anspach, were there, and about six hundred masks." In the intervals of these engagements, he is busy at Strawberry Hill. Thus, in arranging a short visit to George Montagu, he says (July 1) : "The journey you must accept as a great sacrifice either to you or to my promise, for I quit the Gallery almost in the critical minute of consummation. Gilders, carvers, upholsterers, and picture-cleaners are labouring at their several forges, and I do not love to trust a hammer or a brush without my own supervisal. This will make my stay very short, but it is a greater compli- ment than a month would be at another season ; and yet I am not profuse of months. Well, but I begin to be ashamed of my magnificence ; Strawberry is growing sumptuous in its latter day ; it will scarce be any longer like the fruit of its name, or the modesty of its ancient demeanour, both which seem to have been in Spenser's prophetic eye, when he sung of 88 Balls. "' the blushing strawberries Which lurk, close-shrouded from high-looking eyes, Showing that sweetness low and hidden lies.' " In truth, my collection was too great already to be lodged humbly ; it has extended my walls, and pomp followed. It was a neat, small house ; it now will be a comfortable one, and, except one fine apartment, does not deviate from its simplicity. Adieu ! I know nothing about the world, and am only Strawberry's and yours sincerely." Our next extract shows that, however fond of fre- quenting large parties, the writer had little inclination to give them, at any rate, in his toy-house : " We had, last Monday, the prettiest ball that ever was seen, at Mrs. Anne Pitt's, in the compass of a silver penny. There were one hundred and four per- sons, of which number fifty-five supped. The supper- room was disposed with tables and benches back to back, in the manner of an ale-house. The idea sounds ill; but the fairies had so improved upon it, had so be- garlanded, so sweetmeated, and so desserted it, that it looked like a vision. I told her she could only have fed and stowed so much company by a miracle, and that, when we were gone, she would take up twelve baskets- full of people. The Duchess of Bedford asked me before Madame de Guerchy, if I would not give them a ball at Strawberry? Not for the universe! What, turn a ball, and dust, and dirt, and a million of candles, into my charming new gallery ! I said, I could not Balls. 89 flatter myself that people would give themselves the trouble of going eleven miles for a ball — (though I believe they would go fifty). — 'Well, then,' says she, ' it shall be a dinner.' — ' With all my heart, I have no objection ; but no ball shall set its foot within my doors.' " — Walpole to Lord Hertford, Feb. 24, 1764. The promised dinner was duly given. " Strawberry," we read soon afterwards, "has been more sumptuous to-day than ordinary, and banquetted their representa- tive Majesties of France and Spain. . . . They really seemed quite pleased with the place and the day ; but I must tell you, the treasury of the abbey will feel it, for, without magnificence, all was handsomely done." Mrs. Anne Pitt, the giver of the ball, was present at the banquet. In describing to a foreigner this lady's strong likeness to her famous brother, Walpole once said happily, " Qu'ils se ressemblaient comme deux gouttes de /airs at Cliveden. selves into an embroil with that Ursa-major of the North Pole. What a vixen little island are .we, if we fight with the Aurora Borealis and Tippoo Saib at the end of Asia at the same time ! You, damsels, will be like the end of the conundrum, " ' You've seen the man who saw these wondrous sights.' " I cannot finish this with my own hand, for the gout has returned a little into my right arm and wrist, and I am not quite so well as I was yesterday ; but I had said my say, and have little to add. The Duchess of Gordon, t'other night, coming out of an assembly, said to Dundas, ' Mr. Dundas, you are used to speak in public ; will you call my servant ?' . . . Adieu ! I will begin to write again myself as soon as I can." In the middle of March he wrote from Strawberry Hill to Miss Berry : " As I have mended considerably for the last four days, and as we have had a fortnight of soft warm weather, and a south-west wind to day, I have ventured hither for a change of air, and to give orders about some repairs at Cliveden ; which, by the way, Mr. Henry Bunbury, two days ago, proposed to take off my hands for his life. I really do not think I accepted his offer." All the spring he vibrates between London and Twickenham. He writes again from the latter place to Miss Berry towards the end of April : " To-day, when the town is staring at the sudden resignation of the Duke of Leeds,* asking the reason, Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, He was succeeded in the office by Lord Grenville. Burke and Fox. 269 and gaping to know who will succeed him, I am come hither with an indifference that might pass for philo- sophy ; as the true cause is not known, which it seldom is. Don't tell Europe ; but I really am come to look at the repairs of Cliveden, and how they go on; not with- out an eye to the lilacs and the apple-blossoms : for even self can find a corner to wriggle into, though friendship may fit out the vessel. Mr. Berry may, perhaps, wish I had more political curiosity; but as I must return to town on Monday for Lord Cholmondeley's wedding, I may hear before the departure of the post, if the seals are given." Among the letters written to Miss Berry from town during this season, one gives an account of the famous quarrel between Burke and Fox in the House of Commons : " Mr Fox had most imprudently thrown out a panegyric on the French Revolution. His most con- siderable friends were much hurt, and protested to him against such sentiments. Burke went much farther, and vowed to attack these opinions. Great pains were taken to prevent such altercation, and the Prince of Wales is said to have written a dissuasive letter to Burke ; but he was immovable ; and on Friday, on the Quebec Bill, he broke out, and sounded a trumpet against the plot, which he denounced as carrying on here. Prodigious clamours and interruption arose from Mr. Fox's friends ; but he, though still applauding the French, burst into tears and lamentations on the loss of Burke's friendship, and endeavoured to make atone- 270 Burke and Fox. ment ; but in vain, though Burke wept too. In short, it was the most affecting scene possible ; and un- doubtedly an unique one, for both the commanders were earnest and sincere.* Yesterday, a second act was expected ; but mutual friends prevailed, that the con- test should not be renewed : nay, on the same Bill, Mr. Fox made a profession of his faith, and declared he would venture his life in support of the present constitu- tion by Kings, Lords, and Commons. In short, I never knew a wiser dissertation, if the newspapers deliver it justly ; and I think all the writers in England cannot give more profound sense to Mr. Fox than he possesses. I know no more particulars, having seen nobody this morning yet." Another refers to the trial of Hastings, and sundry matters of public interest : * The following anecdote, connected with this memorable even- ing, is related by Mr. Curwen, at that time member for Carlisle, in his " Travels in Ireland :" — " The most powerful feelings were manifested on the adjournment of the House. While I was wait- ing for my carriage, Mr. Burke came to me and requested, as the night was wet, I would set him down. As soon as the carriage- door was shut, he complimented me on my being no friend to the revolutionary doctrines of the French ; on which he spoke with great warmth for a few minutes, when he paused to afford me an opportunity of approving the view he had taken of those measures in the House. At the moment I could not help feeling disinclined to disguise my sentiments : Mr. Burke, catching hold of the check- string, furiously exclaimed, ' You are one of these people ! set me down !' With some difficulty I restrained him ; — we had then reached Charing Cross : a silence ensued, which was preserved till we reached his house in Gerard Street, when he hurried out of the carriage without speaking." The Countess of Albany. 271 " After several weeks spent in search of precedents for trials* ceasing or not on a dissolution of Parliament, the Peers on Monday sat till three in the morning on the report ; when the Chancellor and Lord Hawkes- bury fought for the cessation, but were beaten by a large majority ; which showed that Mr. Pitt has more weight (at present) in that House too, than — the dia- monds of Bengal. Lord Hawkesbury protested. The trial recommences on Monday next, and has already cost the public fourteen thousand pounds ; the accused, I suppose, much more. " The Countess of Albanyt is not only in England, in London, but at this very moment, I believe, in the palace of St. James's — not restored by as rapid a revolu- tion as the French, but, as was observed last night at supper at Lady Mount-Edgcumbe's, by that topsy- turvy-hood that characterises the present age. Within these two months the Pope has been burnt at Paris ; Madame du Barry, mistress of Louis Quinze, has dined with the Lord Mayor of London, and the Pretender's widow is presented to the Queen of Great Britain ! She is to be introduced by her great-grandfather's niece, the young Countess of Aylesbury. That curiosity should bring her hither, I do not quite wonder — still less, that He means impeachments. Louisa Maximiliana de Stolberg Gcedern, wife of the Pre- tender. After the death of Charles Edward in 1788, she travelled in Italy and France, and lived with her favourite, the celebrated Alfieri, to whom she is stated to have been privateiy married. She continued to reside at Paris, until the progress of the revolution compelled her to take refuge in England. 272 The Countess of Albany. she abhorred her husband ; but methinks it is not very well-bred to his family, nor very sensible ; but a new way of passing eldest.* " Thursday night. " Well ! I have had an exact account of the inter- view of the two Queens, from one who stood close to them. The Dowager was announced as Princess of Stolberg. She was well-dressed, and not at all em- barrassed. The King talked to her a good deal ; but about her passage, the sea, and general topics : the Queen in the same way, but less. Then she stood between the Dukes of Gloucester and Clarence, and had a good deal of conversation with the former ; who, perhaps, may have met her in Italy. Not a word be- tween her and the Princesses ; nor did I hear of the Prince ; but he was there, and probably spoke to her. The Queen looked at her earnestly. To add to the singularity of the day, it is the Queen's birth-day. Another odd accident : at the Opera at the Pantheon, Madame d'Albany was carried into the King's box, and sat there. It is not of a piece with her going to Court, that she seals with the royal arms. . . . " Boswell has at last published his long-promised ' Life of Dr. Johnson,' in two volumes in quarto. I will give you an account of it when I have gone through it. I have already perceived, that in writing the history of Hudibras, Ralpho has not forgot himself — nor will others, I believe, forget him /" The next is also to Miss Berry : * A loo phrase. Journal of a Day. 273 "Berkeley Square, May 26, 1791. " I am rich in letters from you : I received that by Lord Elgin's courier first, as you expected, and its elder the next day. You tell me mine entertain you ; tant mieux. It is my wish, but my wonder ; for I live so little in the world, that I do not know the present generation by sight : for, though I pass by them in the streets, the hats with valences, the folds above the chin of the ladies, and the dirty shirts and shaggy hair of the young men, who have levelled nobility almost as much as the mobility of France have, have confounded all individuality. Besides, if I did go to public places and assemblies, which my going to roost earlier prevents, the bats and owls do not begin to fly abroad till far in the night, when they begin to see and be seen. How- ever, one of the empresses of fashion, the Duchess of Gordon, uses fifteen or sixteen hours of her four-and- twenty. I heard her journal of last Monday. She first went to Handel's music in the Abbey ; she then clambered over the benches, and went to Hastings's trial in the Hall; after dinner, to the play; then to Lady Lucan's assembly ; after that to Ranelagh, and returned to Mrs. Hobart's faro-table ; gave a ball her- self in the evening of that morning, into which she must have got a good way ; and set out for Scotland the next day. Hercules could not have achieved a quarter of her labours in the same space of time." Before the middle of June he is settled at Twicken- ham. He condoles with the Berrys : 18 274 Mrs. Hobarfs Party. "Strawberry Hill, June 14, 1791. " I pity you ! what a dozen or fifteen uninteresting letters are you going to receive ! for here I am, unlikely to have anything to tell you worth sending. You had better come back incontinently — but pray do not pro- phesy any more ; you have been the death of our summer, and we are in close mourning for it in coals and ashes. It froze hard last night : I went out for a moment to look at my haymakers, and was starved. The contents of an English June are, hay and ice, orange-flowers and rheumatisms ! I am now cowering over the fire. Mrs. Hobart had announced a rural breakfast at Sans-Souci last Saturday ; nothing being so pastoral as a fat grandmother in a row of houses on Ham Common. It rained early in the morning : she despatched post-boys, for want of Cupids and zephyrs, to stop the nymphs and shepherds who tend their flocks in Pall Mall and St. James's Street ; but half of them missed the couriers and arrived. Mrs. Montagu was more splendid yesterday morning, and breakfasted seven hundred persons on opening her great room, and the room with the hangings of feathers.* The King and Queen had been with her last week. I should like to have heard the orations she had prepared on the occasion. I was neither City-mouse nor Country- mouse. I did dine at Fulham on Saturday with the Bishop of London [Porteus]. Mrs. Boscawen, Mrs. * " There [at the opening of Hastings's trial] were the members of that brilliant society which quoted, criticised, and exchanged repartees, under the rich peacock-hangings of Mrs. Montagu." — Macanlay's Essay on " Warren Hastings.'* Mrs. Hobart's Party. 275 Garrick, and Hannah More were there ; and Dr. Beattie, whom I had never seen. He is quiet, simple, and cheerful, and pleased me. There ends my tale, this instant Tuesday ! How shall I fill a couple of pages more by Friday morning ! Oh ! ye ladies on the Common, and ye uncommon ladies in London, have pity on a poor gazetteer, and supply me with eclogues or royal panegyrics ! Moreover — or rather more under — I have had no letter from you these ten days, though the east wind has been as constant as Lord Derby.* I say not this in reproach, as you are so kindly punctual ; but as it stints me from having a single paragraph to answer. I do not admire specific responses to every article ; but they are great resources on a dearth. " Madame de Boufflers is ill of a fever, and the Duchesse de Biron goes next week to Switzerland ; — mats qu' est que cela vous fait ?" " June 23, 1791. " Woe is me ! I have not an atom of news to send you, but that the second edition of Mother Hubbard's Tale [Mrs. Hobart's party] was again spoiled on Saturday last by the rain ; yet she had an ample assemblage of company from London and the neighbourhood. The late Queen of France, Madame du Barry, was there; and the late Queen of England, Madame d'Albany, was not. The former, they say, is as much altered as her kingdom, and does not retain a trace of her former * To Miss Farren- 18— a 276 Ancient Trade with India. powers. I saw her on a throne in the chapel of Ver- sailles ; and though then pleasing in face and person, I thought her mi pen passee. " What shall I tell you more ? that Lord Hawkes- bury is added to the Cabinet-Council — que vous importe ? and that Dr. Robertson has published a ' Disquisition into the Trade of the Ancients with India ;' a sensible work — but that will be no news to you till you return. It was a peddling trade in those days. They now and then picked up an elephant's tooth, or a nutmeg, or one pearl, that served Venus for a pair of pendants, when Antony had toasted Cleopatra in a bumper of its fellow ; which shows that a couple was imported : but, alack ! the Romans were so ignorant, that waiters from the Tres Tabernse, in St. Apollo's Street, did not carry home sacks of diamonds enough to pave the Capitol — I hate exaggerations, and therefore I do not say, to pave the Appian Way. One author, I think, does say, that the wife of Fabius Pictor, whom he sold to a Proconsul, did present Livia* with an ivory bed, inlaid with Indian gold ; but, as Dr. Robertson does not mention it, to be sure he does not believe the fact well authenticated/' In one of our last extracts, Walpole refers to some of the French exiles, who were now assembled in large numbers at Richmond. Shortly afterwards came the * This alludes to the stories told at the time of an ivory bed, in- laid with gold, having been presented to Queen Charlotte by Mrs. Hastings, the wife of the Governor-General of India. Lady Hamilton. 277 news of the escape and recapture of the French King and Queen. Horace writes, " I have been very much with the wretched fugitives at Richmond. To them it is perfect despair ; besides trembling for their friends at Paris !' Nevertheless, their distresses did not prevent them from taking part in the gaieties of Richmond : " Berkeley Square, Tuesday, Aug. 23, 1791. " On Saturday evening I was at the Duke of Queensberry's (at Richmond, s'entend) with a small company : and there were Sir William Hamilton and Mrs. Harte ;* who, on the 3rd of next month, previous to their departure, is to be made Madame l'Envoyee a Naples, the Neapolitan Queen having pro- mised to receive her in that quality. Here she cannot be presented, where only such over-virtuous wives as the Duchess of Kingston and Mrs. Hastings — who could go with a husband in each hand — are admitted. Why the Margravine of Anspach, with the same pre- tensions, was not, I do not understand ; perhaps she did not attempt it. But I forget to retract, and make amende honorable to Mrs. Harte. I had only heard of her attitudes ; and those, in dumb show, I have not yet seen. Oh ! but she sings admirably ; has a very fine, strong voice ; is an excellent buffa, and an astonishing tragedian. She sung Nina in the highest perfection ; and there her attitudes were a whole theatre of grace and various expressions. * Shortly afterwards Lady Hamilton — Nelson's Lady Hamilton. 278 A Boat Race. " The next evening I was again at Queensberry House, where the Comtesse Emilie de Boufflers played on her harp, and the Princesse di Castelcigala, the Nea- politan minister's wife, danced one of her country dances, with castanets, very prettily, with her husband. Madame du Barry was there too, and I had a good deal of frank conversation with her about Monsieur de Choiseul ; having been at Paris at the end of his reign and at the beginning of hers, and of which I knew so much by my intimacy with the Duchesse de Choiseul. " On Monday was the boat-race. I was in the great room at the Castle, with the Duke of Clarence, Lady Di, Lord Robert Spencer, and the House of Bouverie, to see the boats start from the bridge to Thistleworth, and back to a tent erected on Lord Dysart's meadow, just before Lady Di.'s windows; whither we went to see them arrive, and where we had breakfast. For the second heat, I sat in my coach on the bridge ; and did not stay for the third. The day had been coined on purpose, with my favourite south- east wind. The scene, both up the river and down, was what only Richmond upon earth can exhibit. The crowds on those green velvet meadows and on the shores, the yachts, barges, pleasure and small boats, and the windows and gardens lined with spectators, were so delightful, that when I came home from that vivid show, I thought Strawberry looked as dull and solitary as a hermitage. At night there was a ball at the Castle, and illuminations, with the Duke's cypher, etc., in coloured lamps, as were the houses of Jiis Return of the Berry s. 279 Royal Highness's tradesmen. I went again in the evening to the French ladies on the Green, where there was a bonfire ; but, you may believe, not to the ball." At the end of September, Walpole writes to Hannah More : " I thank you most cordially for your inquiry after my wives. I am in the utmost perplexity of mind about them; torn between hopes and fears. I believe them set out from Florence on their return since yesterday se'ennight, and consequently feel all the joy and im- patience of expecting them in five or six weeks : but then, besides fears of roads, bad inns, accidents, heats and colds, and the sea to cross in November at last, all my satisfaction is dashed by the uncertainty whether they come through Germany or France. I have ad- vised, begged, implored, that it may not be through those Iroquois, Lestryons, Anthropophagi, the Franks and then, hearing passports were abolished, and the roads more secure, I half consented, as they wished it, and the road is much shorter ; and then I repented, and have contradicted myself again. And now I know not which route they wili take ; nor shall enjoy any comfort from the thoughts of their return, till they are returned safe. " I am happy at and honour Miss Burney's resolution in casting away golden, or rather gilt chains : others, out of vanity, would have worn them till they had 280 Return of the Bcrrys. eaten into the bone. On that charming young woman's chapter* I agree with you perfectly." Shortly after the date of the last letter, the Berrys were back in England. Their stay in Italy, which had been determined partly by motives of economy, was shortened in consequence of Walpole's eagerness for their return. In his anxiety, he entreated them to draw on his bankers in case of any financial difficulty ; and in November, 1791, he had the satisfaction of installing them at Little Strawberry Hill. This was not accomplished without some vexation both to him and them. An ill-natured rumour, which found its way * Miss Burney had recently resigned her situation about the Queen's person. Madame d'Arblay (Miss Burney) has entered in her Diary the following portion of a letter addressed to her by Walpole : " As this will come to you by my servant, give me leave to add a word on your most unfounded idea that I can forget you, because it is almost impossible for me ever to meet you. Believe me, I heartily regret that privation, but would not repine, were your situation, either in point of fortune or position, equal in any degree to your merit. But were your talents given to be buried in obscurity ? You have retired from the world to a closet at Court — where, indeed, you will still discover mankind, though not disclose it ; for if you could penetrate its characters, in the earliest glimpse of its superficies, will it escape your piercing eye when it shrinks from your inspection, knowing that you have the mirror of truth in your pocket ? I will not embarrass you by saying more, nor would have you take notice of, or reply to what I have said : judge only, that feeling hearts reflect, not forget. Wishes that are empty look like vanity ; my vanity is to be thought capable of esteeming you as much as you deserve, and to be reckoned, though a very distant, a most sincere friend, — and give me leave to say, dear Madam, your most obedient humble servant, HOR. Walpolk. " Strawberry Hill, October '90." Horace succeeds to the Peerage. 281 into the newspapers, attributing the attachment shown by the Berry family for Walpole to interested motives, aroused the indignation of Miss Berry, and for the moment threatened to produce an estrangement. The cloud, however, blew over : the intimacy was resumed, and in a subsequent letter to the sisters, the old man expresses his gratitude at finding that they could bear to pass half their time with an antediluvian without dis- covering any ennui or disgust. Almost immediately after he had recovered the Berrys, Walpole became Earl of Orford by the death of his nephew. He refers to this event, and his feel- ings respecting it, in the following letter to Lady Ossory : "Berkeley Square, Dec. 10, 1791. " Your Ladyship has so long accustomed me to your goodness and partiality, that I am not surprised at your being kind on an occasion that is generally productive of satisfaction. That is not quite the case with me. Years ago, a title would have given me no pleasure, and at any time the management of a landed estate, which I am too ignorant to manage, would have been a burthen. That I am now to possess, should it prove a considerable acquisition to my fortune, which I much doubt, I would not purchase at the rate of the three weeks of misery which I have suffered, and which made me very ill, though I am now quite recovered. It is a story much too full of circumstances, and too disagreeable to me to be couched in a letter ; some time or other I may perhaps be at leisure and composed 282 Epitaphium Vivi Auctoris. enough to relate in general. — At present I have been so overwhelmed with business that I am now writing these few lines as fast as I can, to save the post, as none goes to-morrow, and I should be vexed not to thank your Ladyship and Lord Ossory by the first that departs. As, however, I owe it to you and to my poor nephew, I will just say that I am perfectly content. He has given me the whole Norfolk estate, heavily charged, I believe, but that is indifferent. I had reason to think that he had disgraced, by totally omitting me — but unhappy as his intellects often were, and beset as he was by mis- creants, he has restored me to my birth-right, and I shall call myself obliged to him, and be grateful to his memory, as I am to your Ladyship, and shall be, as I have so long been, your devoted servant, by whatever name I may be forced to call myself." This letter has no signature. The writer for some time rarely used his new title when he could avoid it. Some of his letters after his succession to the peerage are signed "the late H. W.," and some, " the uncle of the late Earl of Orford." In 1792, he wrote the follow- ing " Epitaphium vivi Auctoris :" " An estate and an earldom at seventy-four ! Had I sought them or wished them 'twould add one fear more. That of making a countess when almost fourscore. But Fortune, who scatters her gifts out of season, Though unkind to my limbs, has still left me my reason, And whether she lowers or lifts me I'll try, In the plain simple style I have lived in, to die : For ambition too humble, for meanness too high." He could not escape the suspicion of having medi- His Wives. 283 tated the folly referred to in these lines. His much talked of devotion to his "sweet damsels" rendered this impossible. There is a tradition, handed down by the Lord Lansdowne of the last generation, that he would have gone through the ceremony of marriage with either sister, to make sure of their society, and confer rank and fortune on the family ; as he had the power of charging the Orford estate with a jointure of £2,000 a year. There is just so much evidence in sup- port of this story that he does appear to have avowed in society his readiness to do this for Mary Berry, who was clearly the object of his preference. But he does not seem to have ever made any such proposal to her, nor even to have spoken to her on the subject. In a letter to a friend written at the time, Miss Berry says : " Although I have no doubt that Lord Orford said to Lady D. every word that she repeated — for last winter, at the time the C's.* talked about the matter, he went about saying all this and more to everybody that would hear him — but I always thought it rather to frighten and punish them than seriously wishing it himself. And why should he ? when, without the ridicule or the trouble of a marriage, he enjoys almost as much of my society, and every comfort from it, that he could in the nearest connexion ?" Walpole was almost cer- tainly of the same opinion as Miss Berry. He would have shrunk from the lasting stigma of a marriage, though he was content to bear passing jests which, perhaps, the attention of his young friends rendered • The Ctiolmondelcys. 284 His Wives. even agreeable. In May, 1792, he writes to Lady Ossory : " I am indeed much obliged for the transcript of the letter on my ' Wives.' Miss Agnes has a finesse in her eyes and countenance that does not propose itself to you, but is very engaging on observation, and has often made herself preferred to her sister, who has the most exactly fine features, and only wants colour to make her face as perfect as her graceful person ; indeed neither has good health nor the air of it. Miss Mary's eyes are grave, but she is not so herself; and, having much more application than her sister, she converses readily, and with great intelligence, on all subjects. Agnes is more reserved, but her compact sense very striking, and always to the purpose. In short, they are extraordinary beings, and I am proud of my partiality for them ; and since the ridicule can only fall on me, and not on them, I care not a straw for its being said that I am in love with one of them — people shall choose which : it is as much with both as either, and I am infinitely too old to regard the qu'cn dit on." Nothing could be more sentimental than Walpole's language to and about these ladies, but his admiration and regard for them were rational enough. There was no dotage in the praises he lavished on their attrac- tions and accomplishments. However much of their first social success may have been due to him, they proved able to perpetuate and extend it by their personal qualities alone, without the aid of large fortune or family connexion. And the tenor of his latest Mary Berry. 285 letters seems to show that this old man of the world derived benefit as well as amusement from their con- versation. Their refinement and unpresuming moral worth were perhaps the highest influences to which his worn brain and heart were susceptible. One cannot help remarking that the respect with which he treats Mary Berry is a much stronger feeling than that which he displays for Hannah More. Though a good deal younger, Miss Berry had travelled more, and seen more of society, than the excellent schoolmistress from the West of England ; and with this more varied ex- perience came wider sympathies and larger toleration. Madam Hannah's fervent desires for the improvement of her friends, though always manifest, were not always accompanied by skill to make her little homilies accept- able. Her letters to Walpole betray some conscious- ness of a deficiency in this respect, and her embarrass- ment was not lost upon " the pleasant Horace," as she called her correspondent. He complained of the too great civility and cold complimentality of her style. The lady of Cowslip Green, who dedicated small poems to him, adorned her letters with literary allu- sions, and dropped occasional hints for his benefit, was always, in his eyes, a blue-stocking ; and this the ladies of Cliveden never were. He was incessantly divided between his wish to treat the elder lady with deference, and a mischievous inclination to startle her notions of propriety. When he is tempted to transgress, he checks himself in some characteristic phrase : " I could titter a plnsieurs reprises; but I am too old to be im- 286 Mary Berry. proper, and you are too modest to be impropcred to." But the temptation presently returns. In short, Wal- pole subscribed to Miss More's charities, echoed her denunciations of the slave-trade, applauded her Cheap Repository Tracts, and was ever Saint Hannah's most sincere friend and humble servant ; but he could not help indemnifying himself now and then by a smile at her effusive piety and bustling benevolence. On the other hand, the entire and unqualified respect which Lord Orford entertained for Miss Berry's abilities and character was shown, not merely by the particular expressions of affection and esteem so profusely scattered through his letters to her, and by the whole tone of the correspondence between them, but still more decisively by the circumstance that he entrusted to her the care of preparing a posthumous edition of his works, and bequeathed to her charge all necessary papers for that purpose. This he did in fact, for though in his will he appointed her father* as his editor, it was well understood that that was merely a device to avoid the publication of her name, and the task was actually performed by her alone. During the rest of Walpole's life, three-fourths of each year were spent by him in constant association with the Berrys either at Twickenham or in London. The months which they employed in visits to other friends or to watering-places, he passed for the most part at Strawberry Hill, sending forth constant letters * The weak and indolent character of Mr. Berry made him always and everywhere a cipher. Closing Years. 287 to Yorkshire, Cheltenham, Broadstairs, or where- ever else his wives might be staying. He laughs at his own assiduity. " I put myself in mind of a scene in one of Lord Lansdowne's plays, where two ladies being on the stage, and one going off, the other says, ' Heaven, she is gone I Well, I must go and write to her.' This was just my case yesterday." The post- man at Cheltenham complained of being broken down by the continual arrival of letters from Twickenham. At other times, Walpole's pen was now comparatively idle. When in town, he beguiled the hours as best he could with the customers who still resorted to his coffee-house to discuss the news of the day. But he generally preferred his villa till quite the end of autumn. " What could I do with myself in London ?" he asks Miss Berry. "All my playthings are here, and I have no playfellows left there ! Reading com- poses little of my pastime either in town or country. A catalogue of books and prints, or a dull history of a county, amuse me sufficiently ; for now I cannot open a French book, as it would keep alive ideas that I want to banish from my thoughts." At Strawberry, accordingly, he remained, trifling with his endless store of medals and engravings, and watching from his windows the traffic up and down the Thames. He has expressed his fondness for moving objects in a passage dated in December, 1793 : " I am glad Lord and Lady Warwick are pleased with their new villa [at Isleworth] : it is a great favourite with me. In my brother's time [Sir Edward 280 Love of Moving Objects. W.'s] I used to sit with delight in the bow-window in the great room, for besides the lovely scene of Rich- mond, with the river, park, and barges, there is an incessant ferry for foot passengers between Richmond and Isleworth, just under the Terrace ; and on Sundays Lord Shrewsbury pays for all the Catholics that come to his chapel from the former to the latter, and Mrs. Keppel has counted an hundred in one day, at a penny each. I have a passion for seeing passengers, provided they do pass ; and though I have the river, the road, and two foot-paths before my Blue Room at Strawberry, I used to think my own house dull whenever I came from my brother's. Such a partiality have I for moving objects, that in advertisements of country- houses I have thought it a recommendation when there was a N.B. of three stage-coaches pass by the door every day. On the contrary, I have an aversion to a park, and especially for a walled park, in which the capital event is the coming of the cows to water. A park-wall with ivy on it and fern near it, and a back parlour in London in summer, with a dead creeper and a couple of sooty sparrows, are my strongest ideas of melancholy solitude. A pleasing melancholy is a very august personage, but not at all good company." This love of life and society clung to him till the end. Notwithstanding his crippled condition, he entertained the Duchess of York at Strawberry Hill in the autumn of 1793, and received a visit from Queen Charlotte there as late as the summer of 1795. He was probably Visit from Queen Charlotte. 289 honest in disclaiming all vanity at being the poorest Earl in England. When pressed by Lady Ossory to take his seat in the House of Peers, he replied : " I know that having determined never to take that unwelcome seat, I should only make myself ridiculous by fancying it could signify a straw whether I take it or not. If I have anything of character, it must dangle on my being consistent. I quitted and abjured Parlia- ment near twenty years ago : I never repented, and I will not contradict myself now." If, however, there was any occasion on which his earldom gave him pleasure, it was undoubtedly when the Seneschal of Strawberry Castle was to do homage to Royal guests. Referring to Macaulay's taunt that Walpole had the soul of a gentleman usher, Miss Berry remarks that the critic only repeated what Lord Orford often said of himself, that from his knowledge of old ceremonials and etiquettes he was sure that in a former state of existence he must have been a gentleman usher about the time of Elizabeth. Walpole sends Conway a brief account of the Queen's visit : ^Strawberry Hill, July 2, 1795. " As you are, or have been, in town, your daughter [Mrs. Darner] will have told you in what a bustle I am, preparing, not to visit, but to receive an invasion of royalties to-morrow ; and cannot even escape them, like Admiral Cornwallis, though seeming to make a semblance ; for I am to wear a sword, and have ap- pointed two aides-de-camp, my nephews, George and 290 Visit from Queen Charlotte. Horace Churchill. If I fall, as ten to one but I do, to be sure it will be a superb tumble, at the feet of a Queen and eight daughters of Kings : for, besides the six Princesses, I am to have the Duchess of York and the Princess of Orange ! Woe is me, at seventy-eight, and with scarce a hand and foot to my back ! Adieu ! " Yours, etc., "A Poor Old Remnant." "July 7, 1795. " I am not dead of fatigue with my Royal visitors, as I expected to be, though I was on my poor lame feet three whole hours. Your daughter, who kindly assisted me in doing the honours, will tell you the particulars, and how prosperously I succeeded. The Queen was uncommonly condescending and gracious, and deigned to drink my health when I presented her with the last glass, and to thank me for all my attentions. Indeed, my memory de la vieille cour was but once in default. As I had been assured that her Majesty would be attended by her Chamberlain, yet was not, I had no glove ready when I received her at the step of her coach ; yet she honoured me with her hand to lead her upstairs ; nor did I recollect my omission when I led her down again. Still, though gloveless, I did not squeeze the royal hand, as Vice- Chamberlain Smith did to Queen Mary."* * Queen Mary asked some of her attendant ladies what a squeeze of the hand was supposed to intimate. They said " Love." " Then," said the Queen, " my vice-chamberlain must be violently in love with me, for he always squeezes my hand." Final Illness. 291 Conway died suddenly two days after the date of the last letter. He had received the truncheon of a Field- Marshal less than two years before. Like his old friend Horace, he attained the last distinction of his life when he was too old to enjoy it. Horace lingered on twenty months longer in constantly increasing debility. In the latter part of December, 1796, he was seen to be sinking, and his friends prevailed on him to remove from Strawberry Hill to Berkeley Square, to be nearer assistance in case of any sudden seizure. The account of his last days is thus given by Miss Berry : " When not immediately suffering from pain, his mind was tranquil and cheerful. He was still capable of being amused, and of taking some part in conversation ; but during the last weeks of his life, when fever was superadded to his other ills, his mind became subject to the cruel hallucination of supposing himself neglected and abandoned by the only persons to whom his memory clung, and whom he always desired to see. In vain they recalled to his recollection how recently they had left him, and how short had been their absence ; it satisfied him for the moment, but the same idea recurred as soon as he had lost sight of them. At last nature, sinking under the exhaustion of weakness, obliterated all ideas but those of mere existence, which ended without a struggle on the 2nd of March, 1797. Horace Walpole's last letter was addressed, as was fitting, to Lady Ossory, then almost the sole survivor of his early friends : 292 Last Letter* "Jan. 15, 1797. " My dear Madam, — " You distress me infinitely by showing my idle notes, which I cannot conceive can amuse anybody. My old-fashioned breeding impels me every now and then to reply to the letters you honour me with writing, but in truth very unwillingly, for I seldom can have anything particular to say ; I scarce go out of my own house, and then only to two or three private places, where I see nobody that really knows anything, and what I learn comes from newspapers, that collect in- telligence from coffee - houses ; consequently what I neither believe nor report. At home I see only a few charitable elders, except about four-score nephews and nieces of various ages, who are each brought to me about once a year, to stare at me as the Methusaleh of the family, and they can only speak of their own con- temporaries, which interest me no more than if they talked of their dolls, or bats and balls. Must not the result of all this, Madam, make me a very entertaining correspondent ? And can such letters be worth show- ing ? or can I have any spirit when so old, and reduced to dictate ? " Oh ! my good Madam, dispense with me from such a task, and think how it must add to it to apprehend such letters being shown. Pray send me no more such laurels, which I desire no more than their leaves when decked with a scrap of tinsel, and stuck on twelfth- cakes that lie on the shop-boards of pastrycooks at Christmas. I shall be quite content with a sprig of Personal Traits. 293 rosemary thrown after me, when the parson of the parish commits my dust to dust. Till then, pray, Madam, accept the resignation of your "Ancient Servant, "Orford." Besides numerous portraits of Horace Walpole, we have two pen-and-ink sketches of him, one by Miss Hawkins, the other by Pinkerton. The lady describes* him as she knew him before 1772 : " His figure was not merely tall, but more properly long and slender to excess ; his complexion, and particularly his hands, of a most unhealthy paleness. His eyes were remark- ably bright and penetrating, very dark and lively ; his voice was not strong, but his tones were extremely pleasant. ... I do not remember his common gait ; he always entered a room in that style of affected delicacy which fashion had then made almost natural : chapcau bas between his hands, as if he wished to com- press it, or under his arm ; knees bent, and feet on tiptoe, as if afraid of a wet floor. His dress in visiting was most usually, in summer, when I most saw him, a lavender suit, the waistcoat embroidered with a little silver, or of white silk worked in the tambour ; par- tridge silk stockings, and gold buckles ; ruffles and frill, generally lace. I remember, when a child, thinking him very much under-dressed, if at any time, except in mourning, he wore hemmed cambric. In summer no powder, but his wig combed straight, and showing his * 'Anecdotes,' etc., by Laetitia Matilda Hawkins, 1822. 294 Personal Traits. very smooth, pale forehead, and queued behind ; in winter, powder." Miss Hawkins, who was recording in her old age the impressions of her girlhood, is clearly mistaken as to the height of Walpole's figure. Pinkerton paints him as he was at a later period, and adds several details of his domestic habits. We give the main part of the antiquary's description,* and generally in his own words : The person of Horace Walpole was short and slender, but compact and neatly formed. When viewed from behind, he had somewhat of a boyish appearance, owing partly to the simplicity of his dress. His laugh was forced and uncouth, and his smile not the most pleasing. His walk was enfeebled by the gout, which not only affected his feet, but attacked his hands to such a degree that his fingers were always swelled and deformed, and discharged large chalk-stones once or twice a year. When at Strawberry Hill, he generally rose about nine o'clock, and appeared in the breakfast- room, his favourite Blue Room overlooking the Thames. His approach was proclaimed, and attended, by a favourite little dog, the legacy of the Marquise du Deffand ; and which ease and attention had rendered so fat that it could hardly move. The dog had a liberal share of his breakfast ; and as soon as the meal was over, Walpole would mix a large basinful of bread and milk, and throw it out of the window for the squirrels, who presently came down from the high trees to enjoy their allowance. Dinner was served in the * ' Walpoliana,' Preface. Personal Traits. 295 small parlour, or large dining-room, as it happened ; in winter, generally the former. His valet supported him downstairs ; and he ate most moderately of chicken, pheasant, or any light food. Pastry he dis- liked, as difficult of digestion, though he would taste a morsel of venison pie. Never but once that he drank two glasses of white wine,* did Pinkerton see him taste any liquor, except ice-water. A pail of ice was placed under the table, in which stood a decanter of water, from which he supplied himself with his favourite beverage. If his guests liked even a moderate quantity of wine, they must have called for it during dinner, for almost instantly after he rang the bell to order coffee upstairs. Thither he would pass about five o'clock ; and generally resuming his place on the sofa, would sit till two o'clock in the morning, in miscellaneous chit-chat, full of singular anecdotes, strokes of wit, and acute observations, occasionally sending for books or curiosities, or passing to the library, as any reference happened to arise in con- versation. After his coffee he tasted nothing ; but the snuff-box of tabac d'etrennes, from Fribourg's, was not forgotten, and was replenished from a canister lodged in an ancient marble urn of great thickness, which stood in the window-seat, and served to secure its moisture and rich flavour. Such was a private rainy day of Horace Walpole. The forenoon quickly passed in roaming through the numerous apartments * As early as 1754 he wrote to Bentley : "You know I never drink three glasses of any wine." 296 Personal Traits. of the house, in which, after twenty visits, still some- thing - new would occur ; and he was indeed constantly adding fresh acquisitions. Sometimes a walk in the grounds would intervene, on which occasions he would go out in his slippers through a thick dew ; and he never wore a hat.* He said that, on his first visit to Paris, he was ashamed of his effeminacy, when he saw every little meagre Frenchman, whom even he could have thrown down with a breath, walking without a hat, which he could not do without a certainty of that disease which the Germans say is endemical in England, and is termed by the nation le catch-cold. The first trial cost him a slight fever, but he got over it, and never caught cold afterwards : draughts of air, damp rooms, windows open at his back, all situa- tions were alike to him in this respect. He would even show some little offence at any solicitude ex- pressed by his guests on such an occasion ; and would say, with a half smile of seeming crossness, " My back is the same with my face, and my neck is like my nose." * " A hat, you know, I never wear my breast I never button, nor wear great coats, etc." — Letter to Cole, Feb. 14, 1782. THE END. BILLING AND SONS, PRINTERS, GUILDFORD. THE 'FANNY BURNEY' SERIES. POPULAR EDITIONS OF THE 'EIGHTEENTH CENTURY' BIOGRAPHICAL SERIES. Each in one volume, crown Svo., cloth, ivith a Portrait, price $1.25. 1. FANNY BURNEY AND HER FRIENDS. Select Passages from her Diary and other Writings. Edited by L. B. Seei "^ %<£ \ - £ '0 -> % ■"f° 0> ^ c>^ 'he. '. A X ^ v* 4 r, \ ^ kV •p A