ae

 

 

 

   
 

 

 

PIR REA
|

ECs

» =

 

 
 
  
 
   
   
  
  

LTE TAT (A TN TA

WN

Ren

FZ
Bo Ae Be
et

 

SRILA]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“g
\

th < v

 

 

 

 

 
 
 
Cnalish Wen of Letters
Eprrep By J. C. SQUIRE

HORACE WALPOLE
®
THX Eo-
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

NEW YORK . BOSTON . CHICAGO . DALLAS
ATLANTA . SAN FRANCISCO

MACMILLAN & CO., LiMITED
LONDON . BOMBAY . CALCUTTA
MELBOURNE

THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Lm,
TORONTO
HORACE WALPOLE

. * °
oe? mn Pew Tay

BY
DOROTHY MARGARET STUART

Rew Pork
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1927

AN rights veserved
aie
oe €
« a? 9
C co 2c e
wipes el guile
« ¢ € « t

CoryricHT, 1927,
By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY,

 

Set up and electrotyped.
Published October, 1927.

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
BY THE CORNWALL PRESS
PREFACE

Since Austin Dobsen’s graceful monograph on Horace
Walpole appeared in the year 1893, the successive
volumes and supplements of the Paget Toynbee edition
of the Letters have placed within the reach of the
would-be biographer an enormous mass of new material.
Eliot Warburton, who produced two tomes of
ponderous and discursive Memoirs in 1852, was handi-
capped by the comparative meagreness of the then-
available Walpole dossier; and even Dobson was
compelled to use the inaccurate and incomplete
Cunningham edition of the Letters. To Warburton,
his subject was interesting rather as a man of fashion
and a politician than as a Littérateur; and neither
in Dobson’s study, nor in Seeley’s of four years
earlier, was there any attempt—or any desire—to con-

centrate upon Walpole’s literary activities. In Horace

Walpole’s World (1913) Miss Alice Greenwood, as her
sub-title indicates, has traced A Sketch of Whig Society
under George III.; and in his monumental Vie d'un
Dilettante M. Paul Yvon has conceded only one out
of six Livres to Walpole auteur. On the other hand, it
is as a versifier only that he estimates him in another,
and much smaller, book; and Mr. J. H. LE Z C.

Mrmr aa i

646355
vi HORACE WALPOLE

considers only “the Great Letter-Writer” in the lively
paper read by him before a Dublin literary society
in 1913. From these facts emerges the astonishing
realisation that no single book has yet been dedicated
to a critical appreciation of Horace Walpole as a man
of letters, :

"This does not mean that “Horry” has been suffering
from neglect. Distinguished critics have dealt with him
of late years in no grudging manner, though always
either in detached essays, or in subsections of works on
the Augustan age or on the letter-writer’ s craft. In
that craft his supremacy has never been more widely
acknowledged ; and there is also a general recognition
of the importance of The Castle of Otranto, though in
this case the interest may be extrinsic rather than
inherent in “the thing itself”. What has been lacking
is a study of Walpole in his literary character, a survey
‘and a critique raisonnée of the whole corpus of his
available writings in verse and prose..

"Some of his early political satires, such as the anti-
Bath skit which I have unearthed from Old England or
the Constitutional Journal, are of the true “Horatian”
quality; but all have been left unsummarised and
unquoted till now. Even his essays in the Museum and
the World have been passed somewhat too lightly by;
and nobody seems to have taken the trouble to ascertain
whether he had, or had not, great cause to blush for
Richard Whiteliver. The reluctance of his critics to
grapple with the Mysterious Mother is rather more
excusable.

In my closing pages I have deliberately rejected
Joseph Farington’s evidence regarding Walpole’s last
PREFACE vii

moments in favour of Miss Berry’s. Farington writes
that he died “with apparent pain”; but I believe that
his pen slipped, and that the preposition should have
been “without”,

My very grateful thanks are due to Professor
Saintsbury, Dr. Paget Toynbee, and Mr. J. C. Squire,
for their kindness in placing at my disposal books,
documents, and information to which I should other-
wise have gained access only with difficulty, if at
all; and to the Rev. Father Hastings, Principal of
St. Mary’s Training College, Twickenham, for most
courteously throwing open to me the portals of
Walpole’s “plaything house”, and of his almost
unaltered gardens, at Strawberry Hill.

DMS,

1927.
 
CONTENTS

PAGE
CHAPTER IT
EARLY YEARS—ETON AND CAMBRIDGE oi bleii I
CHAPTER 11
“VERSES IN MEMORY oF HENRY VI.”—CONTINENTAL
WANDERINGS—T HE “EPISTLE TO ASHTON ’—THE
Ouarew. wre Gray, pd ao nia J 2s
CHAPTER 111
RETURN To ENcLAND—PoLITICAL SKITS AND PARO-
DIES—“A SERMON ON PAINTING’ —“ZADES WAL-
POLIAND 0 Ln a Ga ds
CHAPTER IV
THE ’45—RECONCILIATION WITH GRAY—PAPERS IN
DobsLEY’S “Museum” . . 66
CHAPTER V
“Tue Breauties”—THE JacoBiTE Lorps—THE Epi-
LOGUE TO “TAMERLANE’—STRAWBERRY HirL . 88
CHAPTER VI

“DeLENDA EST OxONIA”—THE “MEMOIRS —“THE
FUNERAL oF THE LioNess’—THE “MEMOIRS”
RESUMED—PAPERS IN THE ‘“WorRLD’—“THE
ENTAIL” - ; y 5 : . L110

ix
x CONTENTS

PAGE
CHAPTER VII
TrE “LETTER OF X0 H0”—THE OFFICINA ARBU-
TEANA— ‘RovyAL AND NOBLE AUTHORS — ‘ANEC-
DPOTES OF PainTiNG IN ENcrano”  . .  . 133
CHAPTER VIII
FuciTive VERSE—“THE CASTLE oF OTRANTO’—
Mapawe ply Derpann oo 0 0p aL Ed
CHAPTER IX
“AN Account oF THE Giants’—“Historic Dousrts”
—“THE Mysterious MOTHER" —“NATURE WILL
Prevanyl LL Do an yeh
CHAPTER X
Last YEARS—HORACE WALPOLE AND HIS CRITICS . 197

INDEX 0, 0, see ea DT
HORACE WALPOLE
 
COAPTER 1
EARLY YEARS—ETON AND CAMBRIDGE

Tue fourth son and youngest child of Sir Robert
Walpole and Catherine his wife was born on September
24, 1717 (N.S.) in a high, brick-built house on the
Green Park side of Arlington Street, Piccadilly.
Three sons and two daughters had already been born
of the marriage between the great Whig statesman and
the well-favoured grand-daughter of Sir John Shorter,
importer of Baltic timber and one-time Lord Mayor
of London. The third son, Edward, was eleven years
old when the fourth, Horace, appeared upon the
scene.

In the previous April, Sir Robert, as the result of a
split in his party, and to mark his dissent from the
belligerent anti-Swedish policy of George I. had
tendered his resignation to that disconcerted monarch,
by whom the seals of office were replaced no less than
ten times in the retiring minister’s hat. The royal
reluctance availed nothing. Sir Robert knew that his
eclipse could not be of long duration, and his
“partiality to the solum natale”, noted by Hervey,
probably made him well-pleased to win a little leisure
for fox-hunting, tree-planting, and jovial company on

1
2 HORACE WALPOLE CHAP.

those Norfolk estates which had been held by his
family since the reign of King John.

In this biography it is neither necessary to consider
at length, nor possitle to pass by in silence, the rumour,
set afloat by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and revived
{by her ‘grand- daughter, Lady Louisa Stuart, to the
effect that Sir Robert was not the father of the fragile,
dark-eyed elf of a child born at his London house in
1717, and baptized Horatio, after the slovenly, boorish,
but not unintelligent Horatio Walpole of Wolterton.
Lady Mary, the admiring friend and ally of Maria
Skerrett, the statesman’s maitresse en chef, was the last
woman in the world to be over-sensitive about the
reputation of the lawful wife, more especially as the

. . . lively eyes and rosy hue
Of Robin's face

seem to have made a dint upon her own impressionable
heart “when Robin first she knew”. Good easy man
though Sir Robert may have been, and abundant cause
though he may have given Lady Walpole for jealousy,
it is hardly conceivable that he would have requested
his brother Horatio, and his sister, Dorothy, Lady
Townshend, to stand sponsors for a child of whom he
suspected the actual father to be Carr, Lord Hervey,
the elder brother of Pope’s Sporus. Moreover, though
facial resemblances are not admissible as evidence
in a court of law, and though they are usually incon-
clusive and often illusory, it is at least worthy of
mention that between Eckhardt’s portrait of Lady Mary
Churchill, Sir Robert’s daughter by Maria Skerrett,
and the portraits of Horace Walpole by Hone and by
Rosalba there is a distinct and unmistakable affinity of
feature and expression. Whatever the truth may have
I EARLY YEARS 3

been, it is in the highest degree improbable that
the Wortley Montagu legend ever reached Horace
Walpole’s ears. Devotion to his mother’s memory was
one of the most enduring sentiments of his long life;
and, even in a cynical age, his ostentatious loyalty to
Sir Robert, his implacable wrath against his foes, his
glorification of the Walpole lineage in the carved and
painted heraldry of his Gothic villa, would surely, had
the legend been widely known and generally credited,
have evoked so much ironical laughter that the rever-
berations would be audible even now.

Beyond doubt Lady Walpole’s last-born child was
her favourite, and bore the impress of her personality
more distinctly than any of the others. In the
inscription which he composed for her monument in
Henry the Seventh’s Chapel he declared that she had
“Beauty and Wit without Vice or Vanity and cultivated
the arts without affectation”. Indeed, she seems to
have possessed both the will and the power to please,
and to have been endowed with good looks, good
humour, and a somewhat robust sense of the ridiculous.
It may well be that Horace inherited from her both his
garden-planning and his curio-collecting tendencies.
She had a “grotto of exotics” at Chelsea, and in the
dressing-room at Houghton there stood, years after her
death, a glass case enshrining “a large collection of
silver Pheligree” which had been hers.

Gloomy prophets, gazing upon the infant Horace,
assured Lady Walpole with profound conviction,
“That child cannot possibly live”, Such predictions
served only to intensify her love for the engaging,
precocious little boy. “Compassion and tenderness”,
he loved to write many years later, “soon became
4 HORACE WALPOLE CHAP.

extreme fondness; and as the infinite good nature of
my father never thwarted any of his children, he
suffered me to be too much indulged.” For the
greater part of Horace’s childhood that infinitely good-
natured but not remarkably attentive parent was pre-
occupied with affairs of state, with political —and other
—intrigues. His frequent absences, his sojourns with
Miss Skerrett at Houghton or at his thatched hunting-
lodge in Richmond Park, left him little leisure to
bestow upon his wife, and little interest to bestow upon
her favourite child.

In 1721, when trade was paralysed and national
credit tottering as the result of the South Sea scandal,
the Whigs returned to power, and Sir Robert entered
upon a term of office destined to last for twenty years,
and to end only with his downfall. The prudent sale
of his own South Sea shares, when such stock was at
the top of the market and brought him a neat profit of
a thousand per cent, enabled him to set about building
at Houghton that vast Italianate palace which took
thirteen years to complete, and which Hervey, on
account of the jealousy which it aroused in the breast
of Sir Robert’s neighbour and brother-in-law, Lord
Townshend, called “this fabric of fraternal discord”.

George I. had observed of his greatest minister that
he turned stones into gold. That process was reversed
in 1722, when Ripley the architect began to pile up
masses of tawny-hued Whitby stone upon the defence-
less soil of Norfolk. Before the grandiose scheme was
more than three parts executed, it became obvious that
its execution would ruin its creator. In 1731 Pope’s
shrill voice was heard, demanding:

What brought Sir Visto’s ill-got wealth to waste?
I EARLY YEARS 5
and immediately explaining that:

Some demon whispered, “Visto! have a taste!”
Heaven visits with a taste the wealthy fool,
And needs no rod but Ripley with a rule.

In the same year the Walpoles moved into that
“house next the college at Chelsea” where they were
visited by Voltaire, and where little Horace had a
fleeting, long-remembered glimpse of the once-lovely
Frances Jennings, Duchess of Tyrconnel, and heard
her praise the beauty of the prospect when her dim
eyes were actually looking forth upon the garden wall.
Three years later Lady Walpole decided that her
youngest son was now sufficiently robust to be sent to
share with his Townshend cousins, first at Bexley and
later at Twickenham, the instruction of their tutor
Edward Weston, son of Stephen Weston, Bishop of
Exeter. From Bexley he despatched to her the first
letters traced by his inexpert quill. These are very
shakily written, and even more shakily spelt, and the
earliest of all gives evidence of that love for pet
animals which was later to find expression in a veri-
table menagerie of cats, dogs, goldfish, squirrels, and
perroquets at Strawberry Hill. “I am glad”, remarks
the small boy in a postscript, “to hear by Tom that all
my cruatuars are all wall.” In another Bexley epistle
he says that he wants “the Yearl of Assax and Jan
Shor”—presumably the plays by John Banks and
Nicholas Rowe dealing with those ill-starred victims of
royal caprice—and his concluding request that “Mr.
Jankins”, Sir Robert’s steward, should send him
“som more paper” suggests that he himself “com-
menced author” at the early age of eight. It is
evident from the signatures attached to these childish
6 HORACE WALPOLE CHAP.

missives that the English form of the boy’s Christian
name, as distinct from the one bestowed upon him by
his godfathers and godmothers in his baptism, was
adopted betimes, though on the book-plate which
he used at Eton in 1733, and on the title-page of
his posthumous Works, he appears as “Horatio”.
To Pinkerton he observed, in his old age, “The
name Horatio 1 dislike. It is theatrical; and not
English. I have, ever since I was a youth, written
and subscribed Horace, an English name for an
Englishman.”

In April 1727 the Prime Minister’s youngest son
entered Eton, his father’s old school, where Sir Robert
had mastered just as much Latin as afterwards enabled
him to converse haltingly though energetically with a
King of England who had no English. Like the most
ililustrious of his contemporaries, Thomas Gray,
Horace Walpole was an oppidan, not a colleger, and
thus escaped the harshest rigours of scholastic
discipline. From a distance his perturbed mother
tried to watch over his still precarious health, sending
him fearful concoctions mixed by her own hands. We
find him writing somewhat ruefully to his “dearest,
dear Mama” from school, “I was in hopes I had
finish’d my Physick, but since my dear Mama desires
it, to be sure I will take it again”.

It must have been during his first holidays from
Eton that the famous interview took place between the
nine-year-old Horace and King George I. The great
Whig families of that period professed—and may have
felt—for the Hanoverian dynasty a devotion almost as
perfervid as that of the Jacobites for the House of
Stuart, though rather less comprehensible. This
I ETON AND CAMBRIDGE 7

loyal enthusiasm seems to have penetrated even to the
servants’ hall at Chelsea, for Horace Walpole after-
wards attributed to the influence of his mother’s
waiting-women the strong desire which seized him, in
the early summer of 1727, to behold with his own eyes
the person of his sovereign lord the King. So
earnestly did he importune his mother to that effect,
she sought and obtained permission through the
Duchess of Kendal (alias Madame Schulemberg) for
the small boy to be received in private audience by his
Majesty at St. James’s Palace. The “elderly man, not
tall, of an aspect rather good than august, with a dark
tie-wig and a plain coat, waistcoat and breeches of
snuff-coloured cloth”, whom he there beheld, left
England the next day for Hanover, whence he was
fated never to return. Later, that small boy, walking
in procession with his fellow-Etonians to hear George
II. proclaimed king, paid to the memory of the dead
monarch the startling tribute of a sudden burst of
tears,

Horace Walpole’s tutor at Eton was the son of the
headmaster of the day, Dr. Bland. Keenly sensible of
the honour which would accrue to him if he made a
brilliant scholar of the Prime Minister’s son, Mr.
Henry Bland demanded from his pupil exertions which
the boy himself considered excessive.

“I remember”, Walpole wrote to his cousin, Henry
Seymour Conway, in after years, “when I was at Eton
and Mr. Bland had set me some extraordinary task, I
used sometimes to pique myself on not getting it, because
it was not immediately school-business. What! learn
more than I was absolutely forced to learn! I felt the
weight of learning that; for I was a blockhead, and
pushed up above my parts.”
8 HORACE WALPOLE CHAP.

At no time of his life is it conceivable that Horace
Walpole either was a blockhead or unfeignedly believed
himself to be one. If he disappointed the brighter
expectations of Mr. Henry Bland, it was rather from
want of application than from lack of natural ability.
Drudgery did not appeal to him. And he soon found
a pleasant counterpoise to “school-business” in the
society of a group of boys as quaintly unboyish as
himself, Thomas Gray, Thomas Ashton, and Richard
West. These constituted the inner circle of his Eton
acquaintance, and it was with them that he formed the
“ Quadruple Alliance” of his early letters. With two
more strenuous and robust boys, George Montagu and
Charles Lyttleton, he formed a Triumvirate of which
he retained happy recollections when he had left
Eton for Cambridge. Other contemporaries were his
Conway cousins, Charles Hanbury (Williams), and
George Augustus Selwyn. To yet another school-
fellow, William Cole, the son of a Fenland farmer, may
belong the credit of having turned Walpole’s attention
to medieval archzology, for this unaccountable youth
loved to spend his half-holidays copying heraldic
devices and black-letter epitaphs in country church-
yards. Charles Lyttleton, also, may have evinced
betimes those tastes which led him finally to the
episcopal throne of Carlisle and the presidential chair
of the Society of Antiquaries.

With all these boys Walpole had ties of sympathy,
but with none was he upon terms of such close and
happy friendship as he was with Ashton, West and
Gray. Together the four devoured the novels of
Mademoiselle de Scudéry, the plays of Dryden, and
an unconscionable amount of romantic and pastoral
1 ETON AND CAMBRIDGE 0

poetry, both French and English, most of it belonging
to the tinsel and stucco school. We can readily
believe Walpole’s own assertion that he was “never
quite a school-boy”. It would indeed be difficult to
imagine him joining in an expedition against pugilistic
bargemen; and “to chase the rolling circle’s speed and
urge the flying ball” would probably have given him
little delight. In Gray and West his receptive intelli-
gence and his somewhat fantastic mentality met their
perfect complement. Gray was a precocious boy,
perhaps a trifle top-heavy, and prone already to the
surging fluctuations of mood inseparable from the
truly poetic temperament. About West, delicate,
sensitive, unusually gifted, there was more than a touch
of the “ineffectual angel”, though, happily for his
friends and for himself, he had not Shelley’s sustained
and disconcerting seriousness of mind. Ashton does
not seem to fit quite harmoniously into the group. His
wit, like his person, was ungainly, and the nickname of
“Almanzor”, bestowed upon him by his three com-
panions, suggests that they perceived more than one
point of similarity between him and the bombastic,
arrogant hero of The Conquest of Granada. It seems
not impossible that a very unattractive streak of
personal ambition may have prompted Ashton to push
his way into the little circle in which the central figure
was the Prime Minister’s son. He certainly owed later
to Walpole’s good offices the post of tutor to Lord
Plymouth’s heir, which he obtained on leaving Cam-
bridge, the Crown living of Aldingham, and also the
Fellowship of Eton to which he was appointed in
1745. When, five years after that appointment was
made, a rupture took place, Walpole wrote to Mann:
10 HORACE WALPOLE CHAP.

I believe you have often heard me mention a Mr. Ash-
ton, a clergyman, who, in one word, has great preferments
and owes everything upon earth to me. I have long had
reason to complain of his behaviour; in short, my father
is dead, and I can make no more bishops.

So much for Almanzor. Gray, the most highly
gifted member of the Quadruple Alliance, was dubbed
“Orozmades” (i.e. Oromazdes, the First Person of the
Zoroastrian Trinity) in allusion to his frileusx habit of
body. There is some uncertainty as to the origin of
Walpole’s own sobriquet of “Celadon”. Dr. Paget
Toynbee, who in The Correspondence of Gray, Walpole,
West, and Ashton has finally solved the problem of the
right allocation of the {four nicknames, cites the
Celadon in Honoré d’Urfé’s Astrée and also him in
Thomson’s “Summer” as possible originals. Very
diffidently the present writer would suggest a third
alternative ; that is, the witty, flighty, fantastic shepherd
in Dryden’s Secret Love or the Maiden Queen. Dryden
seems to have been a favourite with the Quadruple
Alliance—and he was Lady Walpole’s great-uncle into
the bargain. Concerning the source of West's alias
we are left in no doubt; his friends called him
“Zephyrus” or “Favonius”, the West Wind. By
all three it appears that he was regarded with some-
thing of that half-playful, half-wistful affection which
people of maturer years often concentrate upon children
more charming than robust.

Despite the hopeful and unremitting activities of
Mr. Henry Bland, Horace Walpole’s years at Eton
were singularly happy, and no Etonian ever cherished
for his old school a more whimsically fervent love.
“Gray is at Burnham”, he wrote to West from Cam-
I ETON AND CAMBRIDGE 11

bridge in 1736, “ and, what is surprising, has not been
at Eton. Could you live so near it without seeing it? ”
And writing to George Montagu a few months later he
exclaims:

DEAR GeorcE—Were not the playing-fields of Eton food
for all manner of flights? No old maid’s gown, though it
had been tormented into all the fashions from King James
to King George, ever underwent so many transformations
as those plains have in my idea. At first I was contented
with tending a visionary flock, and sighing some pastoral
name to the echo of the cascade under the bridge. ... As
I got further into Virgil and Clelia, I found myself trans-
ported from Arcadia to the garden of Italy, and saw Wind-
sor Castle in no other view than the capitoli immobile
saxum.

Revisiting Eton ten years later, he sent a letter from
the Christopher Inn to the same correspondent, a letter
sprinkled with Etonian slang and enriched by an
example of that rare knack, possessed by none of his
contemporaries (except, perhaps, Smollett), of sug-
gesting backgrounds and interiors in a few brief but
vivid phrases.

Here I am, like Noah just returned to his old world
again, with all sorts of queer feels about me. By the way,
the clock strikes the old cracked sound. . . . I recollect so
much, and remember so little—and want to play about—
and am so afraid of my playfellows—and am ready to
shirk Ashton—and can’t help making fun of myself—and
envy a dame over the way, that has just locked in her
boarders, and is going to sit down in a little hot parlour to
a very bad supper, so comfortably! . . . In short, I should
be out of all bounds if I was to tell you half I feel, how
young again I am in one minute, and how old the next.

The group of boyish boys which had sauntered
so happily under the shadow of the capitoli immobile
saxum, while their more strenuous contemporaries
i2 HORACE WALPOLE CHAP.

amused themselves “thumping and pummelling King
Amulius’s herdsmen”, began to disperse in 1733, when
Almanzor was elected to King’s College, Cambridge.
Orozmades went into residence at Peterhouse in
October 1734, and Celadon, after a brief interval,
entered his father’s old college, King’s, in March 1735.
Two months later Favonius, who would fain have
followed his friends, matriculated with reluctance at
Christ Church, Oxford.

In the Short Notes of My Life, written for the
enlightenment of the editor of his posthumously
collected works, Walpole acknowledges that his
residence at the University was intermittent. He says
that he “continued” there, “though with long intervals,
till towards the end of 1738”. As early as 1731,
when he was still at Eton, he had been entered at
Lincoln’s Inn by Sir Robert, who intended him to keep
his terms in due course, but in the event he “never
went there, not caring for the profession”.

Young Mr. Walpole does not seem to have found
the air of Cambridge very easy to breathe. Only the
presence of Gray and Ashton, his Conway cousins and
William Cole, made is’ endurable to him. With fellow-
undergraduates whose principal diversions were badger-
baiting and cock-fighting, and among whom he and
Gray were almost alone in preferring tea to beer as a
breakfast beverage, he could never have found much in
common. Writing to West in 1735 he alludes to
Oxford and Cambridge as “two barbarous towns o’er-
run with rusticity and mathematics”, and to George
Montagu he unburdens himself in this strain:

I have been so used to the delicate food of Parnassus
that I can never condescend to apply to the grosser studies
! ETON AND CAMBRIDGE 13

of the Alma Mater. Sober cloth of syllogism colour suits
me ill; or, what's worse, I hate clothes that one must prove
to be of no colour at all. . . . I am not against cultivating
these studies, as they are certainly useful, but then they
quite neglect all polite literature, all knowledge of this
world.

There we catch the authentic accents of Mr.
Walpole of King’s. Polite literature, knowledge of
this world, are they not more profitable, as well as more
pleasant, than a whole universe of syllogisms?

In the Short Notes we are told:

My public tutor was Mr. John Smith; my private, Mr.
Anstey; afterwards Mr. John Whaley was my tutor. I
went to lectures in Civil law to Dr. Dickens of Trinity
Hall; to mathematical lectures to blind Professor Sander-
son for a short time; afterwards Mr. Trevigar read lec-
tures to me in mathematics and philosophy. I heard Dr.
Battie’s anatomical lectures. I had learned French at
Eton. I learnt Italian at Cambridge of Signor Piazza. At
home I learned to dance and fence, and to draw of
Bernard Lens, master of the Duke and Princesses.

“The Duke” was he of Cumberland who after-
wards, as the Brobdingnagian ‘“Nollkejumskoi”, made
the flimsy towers of Strawberry Hill vibrate at his
tread. During one of these drawing-lessons Monsieur
Lens made of his small pupil a sketch which still exists.
“Master Horace Walpole” there appears as a rather
prim and plaintive-looking boy, with unexpectedly
chubby cheeks and calves. Still earlier portraits,
notably the two miniatures now in the possession of
Mr. Ralph Nevill, show a fragile, intelligent child with
very dark eyes and a disproportionately long nose, To
the Cambridge period belongs the painting by Jonathan
Richardson, curiously stiff and unpleasing, with its
14 HORACE WALPOLE CHAP.

elongated, inscrutable face, resembling that of one of
Orcagna’s narrow-cheeked, narrow-eyed Saints, and
its bottle-shaped body, dwindling at the shoulders and
broadening below the waist.

It was for a very short time indeed that “blind
Professor Sanderson” numbered the Prime Minister’s
son among his students. The story is best told in
Walpole’s own words to Mann.

When I first went to Cambridge I was to learn mathe-
matics of the famous blind Professor Sanderson. I had
not frequented him a fortnight before he said to me,
“Young man, it is cheating you to take your money ; believe
me, you can never learn these things, you have no capacity
for them”. I can smile now, but I cried then with morti-
fication. The next step, in order to comfort myself, was
not to believe him: I could not conceive that I had not
talents for anything in the world. I took at my own
expense a private instructor, who came to me once a day
for a year. Nay, I took infinite pains, but had so little
capacity, and so little attention (as I have always had to
anything that did not immediately strike my inclinations)
that after mastering any proposition, when the man came
the next day, it was as new to me as if I had never heard
of it.

It may have been during a transient mood of mortifi-
cation, following upon the discovery that he had not,
after all, “talents for anything in the world”, that
Walpole fell under the influence of an evangelical
undergraduate with a dynamic personality, Henry
Coventry by name. Fired by Coventry's enthusiasm,
he became suddenly pious. Together they invaded
the dolorous precincts of Cambridge gaol in order to
read passages from the Bible to the captives then
languishing there. It is an almost incredible vision
this, of the long, lank, lackadaisical Horace treading the
prison flags, with that characteristic gait of his, which
I ETON AND CAMBRIDGE 15

one observer compared to a peewit’s and he himself to
“the march of a dabchick”; it is an almost stupefying
thought that he actually sat, enunciating scriptural
phrases in his low-pitched, drawling voice, surrounded
by listeners bearing a strong physical affinity to the
tatterdemalion chorus in the Beggar's Opera.

The phase was as brief as it was fantastic. Like
many another white-hot enthusiast, Coventry lived to
cool and harden into an adamantine state of heterodoxy.
Walpole’s own views upon religion underwent a less
painful transformation. What he himself might have
called his “old-fashioned breeding” kept him tolerant
and temperate in these matters, after the first vehe-
mence of his youthful Protestantism had spent its
force, and it was his good fortune never to lose the last
vestiges of his belief in that Power which the eighteenth
century so politely denominated the Supreme Being.

During one of his frequent absences from the
University in 1735 Walpole sent Gray a light-hearted
jew d’esprit in the form of a parody of Addison’s
Remarks on Several Parts of Italy, describing a journey
from London to Cambridge. Whitechapel figures as
“Tempialbulo” and Newmarket as “Nuovo Foro”,
and stray lines from Virgil, Horace, and Juvenal are
ingeniously distorted so as to apply to the places passed
on the way. This epistle is interesting, chiefly on
account of the evidence it gives of the writer's first
vague leanings towards medizvalism—witness the
mock-medizval legend woven around Bournbridge—
and of his dislike for Cambridge (Pavia).

Though Walpole was no more industrious as an
undergraduate than he had been as an oppidan, his
knowledge of the classics seems to have been at least
16 HORACE WALPOLE CHAP.

respectable. His early letters, especially those to Gray
and West, show that, despite a streak of callow pedan-
try, he was master of something more than a collection
of serviceable “tags”. Advancing years sensibly
diminished his enthusiasm for Virgil, of whom he was
apt to write a little peevishly at times, but for Horace
his affection never waned. For the Roman Horace
had claims upon “Albion’s old Horace” that Virgil
could never have. Both were wits, both were flaneurs,
well-versed in “polite letters and a knowledge of this
world”: to both

Purae rivus aquae, silvaque iugerum
Paucorum, et segetis certa fides meae

were dear. It always pleased Walpole to recollect that
he was the namesake of the Latin poet whom he loved
best, and to find analogies between Tibur and Twicken-
ham, the Sabine Hills and Strawberry Hill.

At Cambridge, as at Eton, much of Horace Wal-
pole’s reading seems to have been of a desultory and
capricious kind. Already the quaint and the out-
landish appealed to his imagination. In 1735 we see
him deep in a history of China, and storing his memory
with impressions afterwards to be revived in the
Letter of Xo Ho and Hieroglyphic Tales, and in the
name of “Poyang” bestowed upon the goldfish-pond
at Strawberry Hill. Fragments and phrases from
English, French, and Italian writers, not all of the first
eminence, jostle each other in his correspondence at
this time, Shakespeare and Milton, Tasso and Boileau,
alternate with Shadwell and Rowe and Lee. He was
not—he never aspired to be—a profound scholar, and
“Fiddling Conyers” Middleton’s tribute to him as
~ “Iuvenis non tam generis nobilitate ac paterni nominis
1 ETON AND CAMBRIDGE 17

gloria, quam ingenio, doctrina et virtuti propria illu-
stris” was probably written with one eye upon Sir
Robert (then Lord Orford) and the other upon the
truth. Ingemium was a quality which Mr. Walpole
would always have rated high, whether ascribed to
himself or discerned in others; in his eyes doctrina—
and perhaps even wvitrus—might have seemed much
less admirable.

Between 1735 and 1737 many influences combined
to draw the young man away from the barbarous town
of “Pavia”. Sir Robert, as First Commissioner of the
Treasury, had taken possession, in September 173s,
of “the new house in St. James’s Park”, destined to
be the official residence of all his successors to the
present day, where he remained until his final fall from
power in 1742. There was much to divert the Prime
Minister’s youngest son in a social London dominated
by his father’s party and his father’s partisans; there
was hardly less to interest him at Houghton, where
Ripley’s labours had reached completion in the same
year that saw Sir Robert’s installation at Downing
Street. Among walls panelled with tenebrous ma-
hogany and under ceilings thickly encrusted with
medallions and amorini, torches and garlands, Sir
Robert’s great collection of paintings was then in
process of accumulation. Anything less * Gothic ”
than Houghton it would be impossible to conceive;
but Horace Walpole’s medizval tendencies were still
more or less dormant, and his fast-developing dilet-
tantism, joined to his filial pride in the visible and
tangible achievements of Houghton’s creator, made
him prefer the “noble edifice and spacious planta-
tions” in Norfolk to the ill-paved streets of Cambridge.
18 HORACE WALPOLE CHAP.

Deep in his heart, and clean against his Whiggist
principles, he may have felt that he would have been
more at home in that other barbarous town, Oxford,
whither he went on a visit to West in the summer of
1736. He seems to have praised Oxford quite im-
moderately to his Cambridge friends on his return, for
Almanzor wrote to Favonius that from the descriptions
they heard they could “imagine nothing less than
Heaven-top’d Towers, Hesperian groves and Gates of
Chrysolite.”

The sight of the spot where John and Thomas
Lyttleton had been drowned in the Cherwell just a
hundred years earlier inspired Walpole to compose a
set of heroic couplets in the very worst style of the
eighteenth-century monumental mason. The “poet”
himself was sufficiently well pleased with them to send
a copy to his friend Charles Lyttleton, to whom he
had paid a high-flown compliment in the closing lines,
which tell how the River God

In bubbling murmurs told his grief till here

He saw another Lyttleton appear;

No more a double loss he could bemoan,

Finding the worth of two compris’d in one.

A few days later he was sending to George Montagu

a deft and not unpleasing English version of a French
lyrical dialogue between an inquiring passer-by and a
disconsolate dove. It was probably the recollection of
these or similar ventures into verse on the part of his
quondam pupil which prompted the fatuous and
servile John Whaley, shortly after Walpole had left
Cambridge, to ask anxiously:

Flows from thy pen the sweet spontaneous line?

“Spontaneous” is good!
I ETON AND CAMBRIDGE 19

The frequent absences of Celadon from Cambridge
provoked Orozmades to whimsical letters of protest.

“Ashton terrifies me,” he writes, in March 1736, “with
telling me that according to his latest Advices we are to
remain in a State of Separation from you the Lord knows
how much longer; we are inconsolable at the News, and
weep our half-pint a-piece every day about it; if you don’t
make haste you may chance to find a couple of Fountains
by your fireside.”

The Horace Walpole whom we encounter in the
early letters to Gray, Lyttleton, and West is already,
and quite recognisably, the Horace of a thousand later
letters, the possessor of an intellect agile and alert
rather than profound, of a sense of humour light,
resilient, fantastic, delighting in whimsical exaggera-
tions and quaintly incongruous images, of a literary
style at once flexible and compact, lucid and precise,
The gallicising process, which was afterwards to
crystallise these qualities of lucidity and precision with
results unpleasing to Macaulay, had not at this time
seriously begun. The letter-writer is, perhaps, a little
foppish, a little finicking, more than a little affected.
But there are moments when one cannot avoid the
conclusion that he is striving to mask, perhaps even to
moderate, a nervous sensibility of temperament by an
assumption of well-bred cynicism and unconcern.

Despite his artless conviction that he had “talents for
anything in the world”, Mr. Walpole of King’s seems
to have nourished few illusions as to his poetical faculty.
The marriage of Frederick, Prince of Wales, with
Augusta of Saxe-Gotha in the summer of 1736 was the
occasion for an outburst of congratulatory Latin verse
at Cambridge, and Sir Robert’s son could not well have
20 HORACE WALPOLE CHAP.

held aloof. Together with Ashton and Gray, he
contributed to the frigid, pompous, and disingenuous
Gratulatio laid by their University at the feet of Prince
Titi and his not-remarkably-beautiful bride. A year
later Walpole was giving West a taste of his quality as a
writer of English verse.

“I assure you,” he wrote, “I don’t think I am at all a
Poet, but from loving verses try to make some now and
then. There are few but try in their lives, and most of
us succeed alike.”

In these words he introduces a set of nine sextets,
beginning,
Seeds of Poetry and Rhime
Nature in my soul implanted.

This trifle was formerly attributed to Gray, and a
copy exists in his handwriting, but it is distinctly in
the vein of Celadon, which sobriquet Gray himself
appended to the manuscript. The fifth stanza is
especially “Horatian.”

Battles, Sieges, Men at Arms,
In Heroick Verse I'm reading,
I burn to write with Myra’s charms
In Episode, to show my breeding;
But if my Myra cruel be,
I tell her so in Elegy.

The slackness of the prosody is a little curious, when
we consider how faithful an admirer Walpole was of
Pope’s style, and how admirable are the structure
and cadence of his own prose.

It was seven months after he had perpetrated this
piece of metrical fatuity that the heaviest sorrow of his
life befell Horace Walpole. On August 20, 1737, Lady
Walpole died, and her evanishment left a blank in his
I ETON AND CAMBRIDGE 21

heart that never was filled. Gray, closing a letter to
West three days later, says,

While I write to you I hear the bad news of Lady
Walpole’s death, on Saturday night last. Forgive me if
the thought of what my poor Horace must feel on that
account obliges me to have done.

Poor Horace’s need of fortitude was indeed very
great. Before the first Lady Walpole had been dead
for a year, Sir Robert led Maria Skerrett to the altar.

“His wedding”, wrote Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough,
“was celebrated as if he had been King of France . . .
crowds of people of the first quality being presented to the
bride, who is the daughter of a clerk that sung the psalms
in a church where Dr. Sacheverell was.”

It is difficult to conceive how Horace Walpole could
well have found any semblance of a home either at
Houghton or at Downing Street while his mother’s
supplanter reigned. But before the first anniversary
of her predecessor’s death came round the second Lady
Walpole was laid at her side in the family vault.
Towards the end of the year 1738 the Prime Minister’s
youngest son left Cambridge, without taking a degree.
“And after this”, as Sir Edmund Gosse observes,
“he was a kind of waif and stray”, until he set out on
his continental wanderings in the spring of 1739.
CHAPTER 11

THE “VERSES IN MEMORY OF KING HENRY THE SIXTH’
—CONTINENTAL WANDERINGS—THE “EPISTLE TO
ASHTON” ’—THE QUARREL WITH GRAY.

WitH the laudable object of providing for his youngest
son without, at the same time, diminishing his own
revenues, Sir Robert Walpole obtained for him in 1737
the post as Inspector of Imports and Exports at the
Custom House. His eldest son he had already made
Auditor of the Exchequer, his second—and favourite—
was Clerk of the Pells; and the income from a collector-
ship of the Customs which had been granted to him
for three lives was to be divided between the second
and the third sons. In 1738 Horace relinquished
his first sinecure on being appointed Usher of the
Exchequer; and, as he himself tells us, as soon as he
came of age he took possession of two other little
patent places in the Exchequer called the Comp-
troller of the Pipe and the Clerk of the Estreats.
There is a pleasant feudal smack about all these things.
The office of Comptroller of the Pipe, instituted under
Henry II., was not abolished till the reign of William
IV.; its holder, or his deputy, had to deal with leases
of Crown lands. The Estreats were transcripts of the
original records of fines and amercements leviable
22
ca. “IN MEMORY OF KING HENRY VI” 23

by bailiffs and other myrmidons of the law. The
nominal duties of the Usher of the Exchequer included
shutting the gates of the Exchequer building, and
providing its clerks with paper, pens, ink, wax, sand,
tape, penknives, scissors, and parchment. A scale
fixed in the reign of Edward III. regulated the emolu-
ments of this post, and—what must have irked the
more scrupulous Ushers a little—these were payable
only under warrants signed by the First Lord of the
Treasury for the time being.

Here we are— happily — concerned rather with
Horace Walpole’s attitude towards the system of
“places” than with the ethics of the system itself.
From first to last it was an attitude of conscious, and
even aggressive, innocence and virtue. When, in
1782, a commission was set up to investigate the whole
complicated question, he did not cling indecently to
his perquisites; but he did draw up an Account of My
Conduct relative to the Places I hold under Government
which is at once an Apologia and a Confession of Faith,
and vibrates with breathless—and, it would seem,

honest—indignation in every line. He declares roundly
that:

Patent places for life have existed from time immemo-
rial, by law, and under all changes of Government. He
who holds an ancient patent place enjoys it as much by
law as any gentleman holds his estate . . . nor can I think
myself, as a patent placeman, a more useless or less legal

engrosser of part of the wealth of the nation than deans
and prebendaries.

And, indeed, he always regarded himself quite
seriously as a model of disinterestedness and probity
in these matters. He truckled to none of the successive
24 HORACE WALPOLE CHAP.

ministers upon whose will or whim the payment of his
salary depended. Neither Grenville’s attempt to con-
ciliate him by expediting certain over-due payments,
nor Henry Fox’s postponement of certain others,
had the slightest effect. It is true that he employed
the Exchequer porters to bear his anonymous alms to
poor prisoners, and that he drew upon official stores
when he needed fresh supplies of gilt-edged paper for
his correspondence, but neither of these proceedings
was highly reprehensible.

Paternal anxiety about the young man’s revenues
being thus happily assuaged, Sir Robert’s next pro-
ceeding was to look about him in quest of some
borough which Horace might represent in Parliament
—a quest which promised no difficulties. Early in
1738, however, the subject of “his wonted equity and
tenderness” was interested in nothing so little as in the
Exchequer and the Pipe Office, the Estreats and the
House of Commons. At that time he was, as far as in
him lay, writing poetry and falling in love. The more
perturbing of these two pursuits is not reflected in the
poetry, which is dedicated not to a living lady but to a
dead king. These heroic couplets In Memory of King
Henry the Sixth are, beyond doubt or question, very
sorry stuff indeed. Dryden and Pope are obviously
the writer's models, but in his earnest efforts to
reproduce the methods of those supreme couplet-
fashioners Walpole has merely produced something
akin to the least felicitous achievements of John
Philips and Thomas Tickell. Clipped words occur
in almost every line, and the casura comes clumping
down steadily after the second beat. Yet the thing
itself is not devoid of interest as an indication of
II “IN MEMORY OF KING HENRY VI” 25

Walpole’s intellectual orientation at the age of twenty-
one. It breathes a spirit of uncompromising and
almost truculent Protestantism, striking this note at the
outset, and suffering its reverberations to die down only
at the very end,

While superstition teaches to revere

The sainted calendar and lettered year;
While bigots joy in canonising shades
Fictitious martyrs, visionary maids;
Haste, Gratitude, and hail this better day,
At Henry's shrine present thy votive lay.

It is soon made clear that in the eyes of the poet
“Henry’s shrine” compared very unfavourably with
Houghton. The future apostle of medievalism,
though he vouchsafes a passing allusion to the
“grandeur of the Gothic isle” (sic), has not yet
extricated himself from the fetters of Augustan taste,

for he remarks regretfully that when Eton College
Chapel was built

Art and Palladio had not reach’d the land
Nor methodis’d the Vandal builder’s hand.
“The Vandal builder”—Shades of “Strawberry”!

In his closing apostrophe to the king Walpole
betrays a disconcerting and incomprehensible lack of
humour, as well as an absence of the historic sense that
leaves the reader gasping.

O Henry! from thy lucid orb regard

How purer hands thy pious cares reward;

Now Heav’n illuminates thy god-like mind
From Superstition’s papal gloom refin’d;
Behold thy sons with that religion blest

Which thou wouw'dst own and Caroline profess’d.

The writer's own views of “Superstition’s papal
gloom”, as well as his ideas about architecture, were
26 HORACE WALPOLE CHAP,

destined to undergo considerable modifications within
the next decade. For the moment his thoughts were
fixed elsewhere.

“My best Horace,” Gray wrote to him in February 1738,
“I confess I am amazed; of all likely things this is the last
I should have believed would come to pass. . .. I don’t
wonder at the new study you have taken a liking to; first,
because it diverts your thoughts from disagreeable objects;
next, because it particularly suits your genius; and lastly
because I believe it to be the most excellent of all sciences.”

This is the first faint, fugitive glimpse that we
catch of Horace Walpole’s first romance; but who the
lady was, whether—as seems most probable—his
cousin Anne Seymour Conway, or another, we have no
certain knowledge. Gray writes of the admiration
felt by Ashton and himself for their friend’s “judg-
ment and conduct”, from which it would appear that
some barrier of prudence, honour, or duty, stood
between Celadon and his shepherdess, West, on the
other hand, cannot have been taken so early into
Walpole’s confidence. In the verses which he sent
to him after a visit to Sir Robert’s “moss-grown shed”
in Richmond Park during the summer of 1738, we find
no hint of any knowledge of this new enthusiasm for
“the most excellent of all sciences”. Two years later
there is little or no doubt as to the identity of Celadon’s
most admired shepherdess with Miss Conway. “It
seems”, writes Dr. Paget Toynbee, “to have been an
open secret that he was attached to her”; and she is
alluded to by name both by Whaley and by West.

As early as the month of October 1735, a rumour had
been current to the effect that “Horatio Walpole Esq.”
was “setting out to make the Tour of Italy”, and it is
I CONTINENTAL WANDERINGS 27

probable that he and Gray had often talked over the
possibility of a continental ramble together before
they should settle down, the younger man to a pre-
destined Parliamentary career, the elder to a life of
academic stagnation at Cambridge. This fruitless
and inconclusive infatuation for Anne Seymour Conway
may have been one of the strongest of the various
motives which induced Walpole to revert to this idea
early in 1739. He then sought and obtained Sir
Robert’s leave to spend a year or two in France and
Italy, with Gray as his travelling companion. Before
they departed, on March 10th of that year, Walpole,
unknown to Gray, made a will bequeathing all his
property to him in the event of his dying during their
travels.

The choice of Orozmades as his companion was a
natural but, as the sequel proved, hardly a happy one.
The poet was a man of moods, of an uneven and
occasionally atrabilious temperament; he had none of
the suppleness and little of the philosophy necessary
in the réle for which he was now cast. “Bear I was
born”, he wrote of himself once, “and Bear I believe
I'm like to remain.” Yet the fact that these queerly-
matched yoke-fellows should have jogged along
together for two years and three months suggests that
Walpole was less of a coxcomb than he seemed, and
Gray less of a bear than he believed himself to be.

At the outset, the travellers proceeded in a very
leisurely manner, making their way to Paris through
Montreuil, Abbéville, and Amiens, and revelling in the
sight of unfamiliar landscapes and figures, the pleasant
meadows of Picardy, the strolling friars, the muff-
carrying peasants, the blue-blooded women bestriding
28 HORACE WALPOLE CHAP.

diminutive donkeys. Gray's early letters are almost as
light-hearted as his companion’s, but in his first to
West from Paris there is a faint hint of trouble in store.
“Mr. Walpole is gone out to supper at Lord Conway's,”
he writes, “and here I remain alone, though invited
too.” That first experience was later to be repeated
at frequent intervals. Walpole was constantly flitting
away to a supper, a masquerade, or a féte-champétre,
and Gray as constantly remaining alone, though almost
always “invited too”. Even more illuminating is the
closing paragraph in a letter to Ashton, in which Gray
observes:

We are exceedingly unsettled and irresolute, don’t know
our own Minds for two Moments together. . . . In short,
I think the greatest evil that could have happen’d to us is
our liberty, for we are not at all capable to determine our
own actions.

West, pursuing the tedious study of the law within
the precincts of the Temple, was the recipient of most
of Walpole’s surviving letters from France. In the
earliest of these it is clear that the letter-writer had
already evolved his peculiar conversational style, with
its pauses and accelerations, its subtle changes of
tempo, suggestive of the cadences of a living voice.

Stand by, clear the way, make room for the pompous
appearance of Versailles de grand! But no; it fell so short
of my idea of it—mine—that I have resigned to Gray the
office of writing its panegyric. He likes it. They say I
am to like it better next Sunday, when the sun is to shine,
the king is to be fine, the water-works are to play, and the
new Knights of the Holy Ghost are to be installed. Ever
since Wednesday, the day we were there, we have done
nothing but dispute about it. They say we did not see it
to advantage. . . . I say we saw nothing. However, we
II CONTINENTAL WANDERINGS 29

had time to see that the great front is a lumber of little-
nesses, composed of black brick, stuck full of bad old
busts, and fringed with gold rails.

Lord Holdernesse, the English Ambassador, be-
stirred himself—and not in vain—to make the sojourn
of the Prime Minister's son in Paris agreeable. Of
Parisian society under Louis XV. Sir Edmund Gosse
says, “It was a charming world of fancy and caprice,
a world of milky clouds floating in an infinite azure,
and bearing a mundane Venus to her throne in a
Frenchified Cythera”. Its somewhat tawdry and
fantastic graces found an instant response in the
lightly-poised mind of Horace Walpole, while even
Gray threw off, for the moment, his congenital tendency
to “allicholy and musing”, ordered resplendent new
suits of clothes, and plunged with ardour into the
hectic dramas of M. Crébillon and the flimsy, whimsical
comedies of M. Marivaux.

It was not long before Walpole became conscious
that the amount of French he had acquired at Eton
was quite inadequate. He therefore formed the
heroic resolve to spend three months studying the
language intensively with Gray and Conway at Rheims,
where it was arranged that George Selwyn and George
Montagu should join them. “You must not wonder”,
he wrote thence to West, “if all my letters resemble
dictionaries with English on one side and French on
t'other; I deal in nothing else at present, and talk a
couple of words alternately in each language from
morning till night”,

Gray had previously informed Ashton that he and
Walpole expected “to be very dull” at Rheims, and in
his own case the expectation would appear to have
30 HORACE WALPOLE CHAP.

been fulfilled. Selwyn and Montagu, too, were
“pretty heartily tired” of the place, after a sojourn of
three weeks. Walpole, on the other hand, found the
life rather agreeable. It was largely la vie en pan-
toufles, casual and inconsequent, but enlivened by
various “parties of quadrille” in the houses of the local
“quality”, by at least one joyous al fresco supper, and
by the irruption of a comic Irishman, who burst in
upon Walpole, Gray, and Conway as they were “loung-
ing half-dressed round a littered table and in a crumby
room”.

Towards the end of September the three travellers
left Rheims for Dijon, whence they proceeded to
Lyons, whose environs they found “beautiful beyond
expression”; Conway was bound for Geneva, and
Gray and Walpole escorted him thither, making a
détour by the way in order to visit the monastery of the
Grande Chartreuse. The “abundance and volu-
bility” of Mr. Walpole were much increased by the
spectacle of “the mountains of Savoy”, and it may be
that some first faint stirrings of romantic enthusiasm
gave a keener edge to his delight. Under Gray's
influence he had already advanced some way ahead of
their generation, for the mid-eighteenth century had
no use for mountain scenery, and vastly preferred
parterres.

Writing to West, Walpole unburdens himself in
this fervent strain:

Precipices, mountains, torrents, wolves, rumblings,
Salvator Rosa . .. here we are, the lonely lords of
glorious desolate prospects. I begin this letter among the

clouds; where I shall finish it my neighbour heaven
probably knows; ’tis an odd wish in a mortal letter to hope
II CONTINENTAL WANDERINGS 31

not to finish it on this side the atmosphere. You will have
a billet tumble to you from the stars when least you think
of it; and that I should write it, too! Lord, how potent
that sounds! But I am to undergo many transmigrations
before I come to “yours ever”. Yesterday I was a shepherd
of Dauphiné; to-day, an Alpine savage; to-morrow a
Carthusian monk; and Friday a Swiss Calvinist.

Each stage of the journey was marked by a fresh
access of enthusiasm. Two days later he was writing
from Aix-en-Savoie:

But the road, West, the road! Winding round a
prodigious mountain, and surrounded with others, all
shagged with hanging woods, obscured with pines, or lost
in clouds! Below, a torrent breaking through cliffs, and
tumbling through fragments of rocks! Sheets of cascades
forcing their silver speed down channelled precipices, and
hasting into the roughened river at the bottom! . . .

“Your description of the Alps made me shudder,”
said Favonius, in his reply.

The year was now waning fast, and Walpole and
Gray were still on the French side of the Alps, those
Alps which frowned down upon them more grimly
with every dwindling day that passed. Upon their
return from Geneva to Lyons the two procrastinators
found letters waiting from Sir Robert, who urged them
to make no longer tarrying, but to push on to Italy
with the least possible delay.

Even so, it was not until the end of October that
the travellers set out.

“At the foot of Mount Cenis”, wrote Walpole to West,
“we were obliged to quit our chaise, which was taken all
to pieces and loaded upon mules; and we were carried in
low arm-chairs on poles, swathed in beaver bonnets, beaver
gloves, beaver stockings, muffs and bear-skins. When
32 HORACE WALPOLE CHAP.

we came to the top, behold the snows fallen! and such
quantities, and conducted by such heavy clouds that hung
glouting, that I thought we could never have waded
through them.”

Walpole would never stir very far afield without
taking a small dog with him. During his sojourn in
Paris Lord Conway had given him “a little black
spaniel of King Charles’s breed; but the prettiest,
fattest, dearest creature!” A tragic fate awaited poor
Tory—as it was christened—‘“on the top of one of the
highest Alps”, where, while “waddling along close to
the head of the horses”, it was pounced upon and
carried off by a wolf. “It was shocking”, wrote Tory’s
master to West, “to see anything one loved run away
with to so horrid a death.” There spoke the boy who
had been so much relieved to learn “by Tom” that all
his “cruatuars” were “wall”!

The first halt was made at Turin, which Walpole
thought “by far one of the prettiest cities” he had
seen, but which Gray found rather ramshackle and
unconvincing. Ten days were spent at Genoa, than
which the poet “never beheld anything more amiable”.
Thence, by way of a “mountain all of green marble,
called Buchetto”, in the Ligurian Apennines, they
passed through Piacenza, Parma (where the Correggios
in the cathedral stirred their enthusiasm), and Modena
to Bologna, “the third city in Italy for pictures”.
Thence Walpole writes to West:

Except pictures and statues we are not very fond of
sights; don’t go a-staring after crooked towers and con-
undrum staircases. Now and then we drop in at a pro-
cession or a high mass, hear the music, enjoy a strange
attire, and hate the foul monkhood.
II CONTINENTAL WANDERINGS 33

At Bologna the younger pilgrim had felt the lack
of social introductions, and had shivered a little to find
himself left bleakly to his own devices. The case was
altered when they reached Florence at the end of the
year. There they encountered a person whose supreme
and overmastering desire it was to make himself service-
able to the son of his patron, Sir Robert. This was
Horace Mann, appointed secretary of the English
legation two years previously, and marked out already
as the successor of the futile and fainéant English
envoy, Mr. (afterwards Lord) Fane. The Manns,
who belonged to the small squirearchy, were distant
connections of the Walpoles, but had themselves such
slender pretensions to patrician descent that Mann's
position among the supercilious Florentines was occa-
sionally one of some difficulty. This person, destined
to loom so large in the literary life of Horace Walpole,
remains a somewhat indistinct and baffling figure.
Perhaps it is not easy at this distance to detect those
qualities in him which caught at once, and held for
forty-five years, the regard of a creature so capricious
as Celadon, and which drew from a creature as morose
as Orozmades the affirmation that he was “the best
and most obliging person in the world”. To us the
obliging “Miny”, as Walpole nicknamed him, appears
timid, pompous and self-seeking ; but Sir Robert never
had any reason to doubt the sincerity of his professed
devotion to the Walpole dynasty, and the English
Government found him a useful servant, vigilant in
reporting every movement of the Old Pretender’s faded
and forlorn court at Rome.

In his first Florentine letter to West Walpole con-
fesses that, though he had seen several things ‘that
34 HORACE WALPOLE CHAP.

pleased him calmly, he had “left off screaming Lord
this! and Lord that!” During the first weeks of their
sojourn in Florence, he and Gray seem to have gone
their several ways by mutual consent, and in all good
fellowship. While the poet plunged with rapture into
the unfamiliar domain of Italian music, his companion,
who was congenitally incapable of distinguishing one
tune from another, threw himself with ardour into the
more frivolous pursuits of the high-born Florentines.

The death of Pope Clement XII., in February 1740,
suggested to the travellers that the coronation of his
successor would be a spectacle worth seeing.

“Harry,” writes Walpole to Conway, “art thou so
indifferent as to have a cousin at the election without
courting him for news? ... Popes, Cardinals, adorations,
coronations, St. Peter's! oh, what costly sounds! And
don’t you write to one yet?”

In some haste, lest the conclave should make up
its mind with a precipitancy contrary to all precedent,
the travellers set off for Rome by way of Siena, the
journey occupying four days. Their ascent of Mount
Radicofani was enlivened by a passing encounter with
a corpulent, shrill-voiced, red-cloaked person, whom
they discover to be none other than Senesino the
opera-singer. In a dilapidated hostelry on the top of
the mountain they spent a cheerless night, and thence
Walpole writes to West:

RE p1 Corrano, March 23,
where lived one of the three kings.

The King of Coffano carried presents of gold, myrrh,
and frankincense; I don’t know where the devil he found
them for in all his dominions we have not seen the value
of a shrub. We have the honour of lodging under his roof
to-night. Lord! such a place, such an extent of ugliness!
II CONTINENTAL WANDERINGS 35

A lone inn upon a black mountain by the side of an old
fortress! No curtains or windows, only shutters! No
testers to the beds! No earthly thing to eat but some
eggs and a few little fishes.

As they came downhill from Viterbo, the pilgrims
caught a glimpse of St. Peter’s dome. “The first
entrance to Rome is prodigiously striking,” Gray
informed his mother. Walpole, however, seems to
have suffered from that queer sense of disillusionment
which many people experience on being confronted
with a reality that has long been an idea. To him
the Cassian and Flaminian Ways were “terrible dis-
appointments”, and he was disconcerted to observe
that the ruins were “very ruined”. Rather ruefully
he tells West that he is glad to see Rome, “while it yet
exists”, and indeed the picture that he draws is the
reverse of inspiring. The Romans he finds shabby,
avaricious, and unlettered, the villas “entirely out of
repair”, half the pictures in the palaces mouldering
away, the famous gardens encumbered with forlorn
fragments of antiquity. That the city should be
“littered with French and German Abbés” during the
conclave was hardly strange, but the reiterated spectacle
of these ecclesiastics seems to have ruffled Mr. Walpole’s
Protestant feelings. The pervasion of Rome Ly the
Jacobites was also perturbing to him. All these things
were very distracting. “Papists” and Jacobites—
were they not equally obnoxious to all right-minded
persons? And where were they more likely to be
numerous and active than in Rome?

Frascati, Tivoli, and the Alban hills left the pilgrims
comparatively cold. Gray informs West, “Mr. Wal-
pole says our memory sees more than our eyes in this
36 HORACE WALPOLE CHAP.

country”, and Gray's mind was the more richly
furnished. The conclave dragged on inconclusively,
the weather was dull and bleak. Before June was
half spent they decided to betake themselves to Naples.
“You know,” exclaims Walpole to Ashton, “’twould
be provoking to have a Pope chosen just as one’s back
is turned.” He need have felt no such misgivings.
When, after having visited (and described at great
length to West) the “subterraneous town of
Herculaneum”, and having, in Gray’s words, “sailed
in the bay of Baie, sweated in the Solfatura, and died
in the Grotta del Cane, as all travellers do”, the two
returned to Rome at the end of June, the Cardinals
seemed as far as ever from reaching a decision. So
Walpole and Gray gravitated back to Florence, to
the riverside palace of the complaisant and obliging
Mann,

“You will wonder, my dear Hal,” Walpole writes to
Conway, early in July, “to find me on my road from Rome:
why, I did intend to stay for a new popedom, but the old
eminences are cross and obstinate, and will not choose
one, the Holy Ghost knows when.”

Though Gray could not quit “Rome’s azure sky,
flowers, ruins, statues, music”, without a certain sense
of regret, it is clear that his fellow-traveller was
delighted to find himself by the Arno once more, to
muffle his attenuated form in his discarded domino
again, and to renew his gossamer flirtation with the
reigning toast of Florence, Madame Grifoni.

Florentine society in the winter of 1740-41 was
distracting to Horace Walpole in more ways than one.
There were elements in it that diverted him vastly,
and others that disquieted and perturbed. To this
II CONTINENTAL WANDERINGS 37

second category belonged the pervasion of Florence
by a triad of fantastic English précieuses, Lady Pom-
fret, a “she-meteor”, Lady Walpole, the erratic absen-
tee wife of Sir Robert’s eldest son, and, crowning source
of annoyance and derision, Lady Mary Wortley
Montagu. For the “old, foul, tawdry, painted,
plastered personage” of Lady Mary, alias “Moll
Worthless”, Walpole nourished an inextinguishable
aversion, though that he treated her with outward
civility she herself later bore witness. He might have
pardoned her for her affectations, he who had so
many; he might have pardoned her for her wit, he
who had so much; but for her unforgotten and
aggressive devotion to Maria Skerrett he could by no
means find it in his heart to pardon her. Only a little
less unwelcome was the apparition of his preposterous
sister-in-law. Lady Pomf{ret’s presence was made more
tolerable by the charms of her two daughters, the
Ladies Fermor. A faint, floating legend has persisted
to the effect that Walpole’s feu-follet of a heart flickered
for a moment in the direction of one of these graceful
sisters,

One of his less frivolous diversions during the year
1740 was the composition of an Inscription for the
Neglected Column in the Place of St. Mark at Florence,
afterwards printed in his Fugitive Pieces. It is a frigid
and pompous piece of rhetoric, full of anti-popish zeal,
and thickly studded with biographical allusions to the
less reputable scions of the House of Medici. Early
in the following year his pen was more seriously and
more laboriously employed, inditing a long, closely-
packed, didactic poem in the form of an Epistle to
Thomas Ashton, Esq., Tutor to the Earl of Plimouth.
38 HORACE WALPOLE CHAP.

The purpose of the Epistle is to exhort Ashton to
implant sound Protestant and Whiggish—not to say
Republican—sentiments in the mind of his pupil,
and incidentally to convince him that

"Tis not a slavish senate, fawning, base,

Can stamp with honest fame a worthless race;
Though the false coin proclaim him great and wise,
The tyrant’s life shall tell that coin it lyes.

Young Mr. Walpole, in a fine frenzy of anti-Popery
and anti-tyranny, is a fearful fellow. That subtly-
tempered and delicately-poised sense of humour
which pervades even his undergraduate prose is, as
it were, suspended for the time being. He stamps
and rages like some unperfect actor on the stage;
and there is indeed a strong suggestion of the alle-
gorical drop-scene, the emblematic “transparency”, in
some of his images. He bids Ashton lead his young
charge

where Dover’s rugged cliff resounds
With dashing seas, fair Freedom's honest bounds,
Point to yon azure Car bedrop’d with gold
Whose weight the necks of Gallia’s son’s uphold,
Where proudly sits an iron-sceptred queen
And fondly triumphs o’er the prostrate scene;
Say “That is empire! shun her baleful breath,
Her words are slavery, her touch is death,
Through wounds and blood the fury drives her way.
And murthers half to make the rest her prey.”

From this otherwise arid and stilted Epistle one
passage detaches itself by virtue of a certain energy of
imagination, one passage in which there is a certain
Guido-esque richness of colour. Its content was
derived largely from Dr. Conyers Middleton’s
pamphlet, 4 Letter from Rome showing the Exact
Conformity between Popery and Paganism.
II “THE EPISTLE TO ASHTON” 39

No pagan object, nothing too profane

To aid the Romish zeal for Christian gain;
Each temple with new weight of idols nods,
And borrow’d altars smoke to other gods.
Prometheus’ vulture Matthew's eagle proves,
And heavenly cherubs sprout from heathen loves;
Young Ganymede a wingéd angel stands

By holy Luke, and dictates God’s commands;
Apollo, though degraded, still can bless,
Rewarded with a sainthood and an S.

Each convert godhead is apostolis’d,

And Jove himself by Peter’s name baptiz’'d.

Here it is just possible to discern those qualities of
“spirit and thought”, though hardly original thought,
which Gray generously declared that he found in the
poem. Where he found “a good deal of poetic fire”
must for ever remain a mystery. Breathless, the
reader is swept through six centuries of English history,
the various monarchs being sketched in more or less
unflattering outlines by the way. The Plantagenets
arouse the writer’s ire by their quite unaccountable
adhesion to “Popery”, and the earlier Tudors fare
little better at his hands, though one suspects him of
harbouring a vague sympathy for that “reveller
profuse”, Henry VIII. His most unrelenting malice
is of course reserved for the already luckless House
of Stuart. Touched, perhaps, by a remembrance
of their common enthusiasm for medals and pictures,
he is comparatively gentle with Charles I., boldly
ascribing all his “acts of lawless pow’r” to the baleful
influence of Henrietta Maria and Archbishop Laud.
When he comes to Charles I1., who “liv’d an atheist
and a bigot dy’d”, and to James II., “meditating to
subvert the laws”, he feels no such compunctious
visitings. The final, and somewhat obscure, vision
is one where
40 HORACE WALPOLE CHAP.

. victor George thunders o'er either Spain,
Revenges Britain and asserts the main.
By far the most interesting passage is that in which
Walpole gives us a sudden glimpse of himself:

What time fair Florence, on her peaceful shore
Free from the din of war and battle’s roar.
Has lap’d me trifler in inglorious ease,
Modelling precepts that may serve and please.

It was about this time that Gray was writing to
West of “fair Florence” as “an excellent place to
employ all one’s animal sensations in, but utterly
contrary to one’s rational powers”, and remarking,
“I have struck a medal upon myself: the device is
thus—O, and the motto, Nihilissimo, which I take
in the most concise manner to contain a full account
of my person, sentiments, occupations and late
glorious successes”.

It cannot be doubted that when those words were
written Orozmades had already begun to drag at the
chain attaching him to Celadon. Before the ensuing
year was half-spent, the over-strained link had given
way.

Among the English sojourners in Florence with
whom both Walpole and Gray found most in common
was John Chute, the suavissime Chuti of the poet's
later apostrophe. Though born a younger son, Chute
lived to inherit The Vyne, a delightful old Tudor
house four miles from Basingstoke; but between 1740
and 1746 he resided chiefly on the continent, much of
his time being passed at Mann’s house, the Casa
Manetti, on the brink of the Arno, Chute was a
pleasant person to know ; he was witty, good-humoured,
infinitely well-bred; he collected medals and suffered

 
II *THE EPISTLE TO ASHTON” 41

from gout, as a gentleman should. With him in
Florence was his somewhat dandified young kinsman,
Francis Thistlethwayte, who had recently, under the
will of an uncle whose estate he had inherited, assumed
the name of Whitehead. “The Chuteheds”, as Walpole
nicknamed them, were soon on terms of close and
happy friendship with their two fellow-countrymen.
The ever-gloomier Gray no less than the ever-flightier
Walpole felt the steadying and mollifying influence
of John Chute’s personality. Indeed, it seems not
unlikely that but for his unobtrusive mediation between
them, the now inevitable clash would have come
sooner than it actually came.

During the summer of 1740 the Conclave had
elected a new Pope, Benedict XIV. but Walpole’s
eagerness to behold a pontifical coronation seems to
have been blunted by long delays, or perhaps he had
grown too indolent to satisfy it. In any case, he was
not present at the ceremony, and, though probably
more than “a little tired of seeing sights”, his in-
tentions did not turn homeward definitely and actively
until April 1741. Political events in England may
then have jogged his elbow. Sir Robert was tottering
to his fall—so often predicted, so often deferred—
at last. His stubbornly pacific policy had exasperated
a populace clamouring for war with Spain, and when
war was actually declared in October 1739 this
exasperation did not subside, as it was only too well
known that the minister’s heart was against the
declaration. A hard winter followed, the first for
several years, and Sir Robert was on that account the
object of widespread though somewhat unreasonable
resentment. Contrary winds hampered Admiral
42 HORACE WALPOLE CHAP.

Haddock in the Mediterranean, and Spanish privateers
were able to harass English shipping. The Prime
Minister’s faint-heartedness appeared to encourage
the very elements to array themselves against England.
On February 13, 1741, it was moved, by Mr. Sandys
in the Commons and by Lord Carteret in the Lords,
that Sir Robert Walpole be removed “from his
Majesty's presence and counsels for ever”. Though
the motion was defeated, its repercussions were far-
reaching and prolonged. Yet not until April did
Horace Walpole and Gray leave Florence and proceed,
by way of Bologna, to Reggio.

Gray’s last Florentine letter to West suggests that
the poet’s nerves were now frayed almost to snapping-
point. He emphasizes his “want of love for general
society”, and his enthusiasm for the projected trip
to Reggio does not appear to be great. Even Walpole,
writing from Reggio itself, describes it as “a dirty
little place”, but he finds the fair, the object of their
visit, wholly delightful. “All the morning one goes
to the fair undressed, as to the walks of Tonbridge;
’tis just in that manner, with lotteries, raffles, etc.”
This fair seems to have had a peculiar attraction for
English visitors. Lord Lincoln and his travelling
tutor, Joseph Spence, Professor of Poetry at Oxford,
whom Walpole and Gray had already encountered at
Turin, now reappeared at Reggio. The Chuteheds,
too, were there.

It was in this place, and at this juncture, that
Gray’s temper reached breaking-point, and that he and
his fellow-traveller parted. The exact cause of their
sudden separation remains obscure, nor is it clear
whether they took leave of one another in blazing
1 THE QUARREL WITH GRAY 43

wrath or with frigid and bitter politeness. In 1799 a
certain Mr, Roberts of the Pell office (Edward Walpole
had been Clerk of the Pells, one remembers), trans-
mitted to Isaac Reed a vague legend that Gray had
caught Walpole tampering with his private correspond-
ence. If this were so, it is improbable that the breach
would ever have been healed. Tovey discerns the
ungainly figure of Almanzor in the background, and a
letter from Gray to Wharton, written five years later,
certainly lends colour to this theory. More illuminat-
ing are the poet’s remarks to Walpole himself, in 1747.

It is a tenet with me (a simple one, you'll perhaps say)
that if ever two people who love one another come to
breaking, it is for want of a timely éclaircissement, a full
and precise one, without witnesses or mediators, and
without reserving any one disagreeable circumstance
for the mind to brood over in silence.

Perhaps it was just the presence at Reggio of
witnesses who were amiably anxious to act as mediators
which rendered such an éclaircissement impossible.
Thirty-two years later Walpole wrote to Gray's

biographer, the enthusiastic though not over-scrupulous
William Mason:

I am conscious that in the beginning of the differences
between me and Gray the fault was mine. I was too
young, too fond of my own diversions, nay, I do not doubt,
too much intoxicated by indulgence, vanity, and the in-
solence of my situation as Prime Minister's son, not to
have been inattentive and insensible to the feelings of one
I thought below me; of one, I blush to say it, that I knew
was obliged to me; of one whom presumption and folly,
perhaps, made me deem not my superior then in parts,
though I have since felt my infinite inferiority to him. I
treated him insolently; he loved me and I did not think
he did. I reproached him with the difference between
44 HORACE WALPOLE CHAP. IT

“us, when he acted from convictions of knowing he was
my superior. I often disregarded his wishes of seeing
places, which I would not quit other amusements to visit,
though I offered to send him to them without me. Forgive
me if I say that his temper was not conciliating; at the
same time that I will confess to you that he acted a more
friendly part, had I had the sense to take advantage of
it. He freely told me of my faults. I declared I did not
desire to hear them, nor would correct them.

This explanation must always remain a document
of singular interest to all students of Walpole’s life and
of Gray’s. It throws much light upon the character
of each in early manhood, and of that of Walpole in
middle age. It is, as Sir Edmund Gosse says,
“generous, frank and lucid”; and it has certainly
left in the minds of many readers a sense of sympathy
with the younger traveller.

Whatever the cause, and whatever the circumstances,
of the severance may have been, it was as complete as
it was abrupt. Gray pressed on to Venice in the
company of the Chuteheds, and Walpole, already
sickening for an attack of tonsilitis, remained behind at
Reggio with Lord Lincoln and Joseph Spence.
CHAPTER 111

RETURN TO ENGLAND—POLITICAL SKITS AND PARODIES
—“A SERMON ON PAINTING —“ZEDES WALPOLIANZE

In writing to West from Reggio Walpole made no
mention of the rupture between himself and Gray.
Probably he hoped to make his peace with his old
friend when he rejoined him and their new friends in
Venice. This hope, however, was frustrated, perhaps
by the sudden severe illness which delayed his departure.
Either from an instinctive distrust of the local prac-
titioners or from a half-childish reluctance to own that
he was ill, he persisted in doctoring himself until, upon
the verge of collapse, he had perforce to send in haste
for Joseph Spence. What {followed the worthy
Professor of Poetry may be allowed to relate in his
own words.

About three or four in the morning I was surprised with
a message saying that Mr. Walpole was very much worse,
and desired to see me: I went and found him scarce able
to speak. I soon learned from his servant that he had
been all the while without a physician . . . so I immedi-
ately sent for the best aid that the place would afford,
and despatched a messenger to the minister at Florence
desiring him to send my friend Dr. Cocchi. In about
twenty-four hours I had the satisfaction to find Mr. Wal-
pole better. We left him in a fair way of recovery, and
we hope to see him next week at Venice.

45
46 HORACE WALPOLE CHAP.

Before quitting Reggio Walpole had written to
Mann, “I will not mention any more the affair that has
happened”, and his attitude to all the friends whom he
and Gray possessed in common seems to have been
one of admirable restraint. If—as it would appear—
Gray was still at Venice when Walpole rejoined Lord
Lincoln and Joseph Spence there in June, the position
of the Chuteheds must have been a little difficult,

In the Short Notes Walpole records that he spent a
month at Venice with Lincoln and Spence. From
the few letters belonging to this period which have
survived, he does not seem to have enjoyed his Venetian
experiences greatly. Probably he missed Gray more
than he would have owned either to himself or to any
one else. The gaiety of his letters to Mann rings a little
false, even when he characteristically proposes that his
new dog Patapan should be “naturalised and created
a peer by the title of Viscount Callington”. Upon
May 14 the voters of the Cornish borough of that
name had elected young Mr. Walpole to represent them
in Parliament, but as the House was not due to reas-
semble until the month of November at the earliest, the
new member did not think it necessary to hasten the
wheels of his homeward chariot. The Short Notes tell
us that he returned with Lincoln and Spence by sea
from Genoa to Antibes, and travelled with them as far
as Paris. It was not until September 12, 1741, O.S,,
that he landed at Dover, his mind overflowing with
Italian memories, his trunks well stuffed with busts and
medals, and Patapan under his arm.

When Horace Walpole reached London he found
the fortunes of his father’s party ebbing apace, and his
father visibly shaken in health. Seven years earlier
11 RETURN TO ENGLAND 47

Caroline of Anspach had spoken of Sir Robert as
“that poor man, avec ce gros corps, ces james enflées,
et ce vilain ventre”; and all his hard physical exercise
had not availed to avert—but only to retard—the
final penalties of the flesh.

Neither family nor political portents disconcerted
Mr. Walpole perceptibly at first, however. He was
“up to his ears in dirt, straw, and unpacking”.

“The Parliament”, he writes to Mann, “does not meet
till the first of December, which relieves me into a little
happiness and gives me a little time to settle myself. . . .
I am now only in a fright about my birthday clothes which
I bespoke in Paris; Friday is the day, and this is Monday
without any news of them.”

It is a relief to know that the tardy garments arrived
in the nick of time.

On the less frivolous side he was not slow to give
Sir Robert the benefit of his new-fledged virtuosity, and
he was soon bestirring himself to procure through the
complaisant Mann a Domenichino and a Correggio
for the collection at Houghton. Yet notwithstanding
these varied interests and pursuits, the young man
was at this time restless, vacillating, perhaps rather
lonely, in spirit. To Conway he writes, towards the
end of the year:

. . . impatience to see a few friends has drawn me out
of Italy; and Italy, Harry, is pleasanter than London.
As T do not love living en famille as much as you (but then
indeed my family is not like yours) I am hurried about
getting myself a house; for I have so long lived single, I
do not much take to being confined with my own family.

You won’t find me much altered, I believe; at least
outwardly. I am not grown a bit shorter, or a bit fatter,
but am just the same long lean creature as usual. . . , What
48 HORACE WALPOLE CHAP.

inward alterations may have happened to me you will
discover best; for you know ’tis said one never knows that
oneself. I will answer, that that part that belong to you
has not suffered the least change—I took care of that.

The “family” in whose society Horace Walpole
found so little delight did, indeed, present a very
striking contrast to that of the happy, well-behaved and
mutually-appreciative Conways. Sir Robert, on the
verge both of a physical and a political dégringolade,
looms largest in the landscape, whether the background
be Houghton or Whitehall. His eldest son, Robert, a
rather shadowy, dissolute figure, was living apart from
his preposterous wife, and seeking solace in company
the reverse of edifying; his elder daughter, Mary,
Countess of Cholmondeley, being dead, the feminine
element was represented by a second Mary, Maria
Skerrett’s daughter. To her, more than to any other
member of the group, Horace seems to have felt himself
drawn, and she was indeed a modest, unassuming and
inoffensive person. But here he found himself headed
off by Edward Walpole, the comely, irascible, ’cello-
playing Edward, recognised as Sir Robert’s favourite,
and jealous of any possible pretender near his throne.
Small wonder that upon his return from Italy young
Mr. Walpole should have been hurried about getting
himself a house! And yet the months slipped by, and
he remained under Sir Robert’s roof, either in Norfolk
or in London.

The Parliament to which Callington had elected the
Whig Premier’s son did not actually assemble till the
last month of the year 1741. With Horace Walpole’s
career as a legislator and a politician we are not greatly
concerned here, except in so far as it coloured his
III RETURN TO ENGLAND 49

literary activities. “About politics, in the high sense
of the word,” remarks Macaulay severely, “he knew
nothing and cared nothing”; and it may well be that
the same critic is not over-severe when he accuses him
of keeping his Whiggism, “as he kept the old spears
and helmets at Strawberry Hill, merely for show”.
Yet, despite many pre-occupations, he was tolerably
regular in his attendances at St. Stephen’s for twenty-
six years. There, from his chosen perch under one of
the round-headed, square-paned, colourless windows,
he watched, with amused and frequently malicious
eyes, the political tragi-comedy enacted by the bewigged
mummers beneath the great brazen chandelier. For
personal as well as for political reasons, his first session
was probably the most distressful in his whole parlia-
mentary career. The Opposition, it is true, was a
singularly incohesive and ill-disciplined body, com-
posed of the irreconcilable Jacobites, the die-hard
Tories, “the Prince of Wales’ group”, and those anti-
Walpolian Whigs who rallied round the banner of
Pulteney. But that preposterous mountebank, the
Duke of Newcastle, and his Pelham cohorts formed
within the Whig party itself a bloc upon which it was
inevitable that the Walpolians should stumble and fall.

None the less, the parliamentary horizon was not
wholly overcast when it was first scanned by the new
member for Callington. His party began the session
with a majority of forty—“a vast number for the
outset”. The “vast number” dwindled promptly to
the exiguous one of seven, in a debate upon a Cornish
election petition, and Mr. Walpole then unburdens
himself to Mr. Mann in this rather disquieted, though
hectically facetious, strain:
50 HORACE WALPOLE CHAP.

I look upon it now that the question is Downing Street
or the Tower; will you come and see a body, if one should
happen to lodge at the latter? There are a thousand
pretty things to amuse you; the lions, the armoury, the
crown, King Harry’s cod-piece, and the axe that beheaded
Anna Bullen. ... If I die there, and have my body
thrown into a wood, I am too old to be buried by Robin
Redbreasts, am not I?

The Opposition was steadily gathering force and
momentum, and, though Sir Robert was “still
sanguine”, his youngest son soon perceived with how
little cause. When the House reassembled after
Christmas, the “vast number” of forty had shrunk to
the almost imperceptible number of three. In
January it was converted into a hostile majority of
sixteen. Then at last, urged thereto by his sons—
Horace among them—his brother and his friends, the
Prime Minister tendered his resignation. Early in
February the earldom of Orford crowned a not in-
glorious career, and Maria Skerrett’s daughter received
the courtesy rank of the daughter of an earl,

The unrelenting pursuit of Lord Orford by
Pulteney was, in the ensuing month, the occasion of the
Honourable Horace Walpole’s maiden speech in
Parliament. In the debate upon the motion that a
select Committee be set up to inquire into the last ten
years of Sir Robert’s administration, the member for
Callington so far overcame his natural shyness as to
address the House. As he was careful to send a copy
of his speech to dear “Miny” we remain in no un-
certainty as to the actual terms in which he expressed
himself, and cannot ascribe their colourlessness and
tepidity to the malice of some Tory gazetteer.

The House, however, listened good-naturedly to
III RETURN TO ENGLAND 51

the diffident little discourse, and William Pitt, the
“terrible cornet of horse”, contrived to pay the
speaker a compliment and to further the case against
his father in one breath. “If”, he said, “it was
becoming in young Walpole to remember that he was
the child of the accused, the House ought not to forget
that they were the children of their country”. The
House demonstrated its sense of that profound truth
by carrying the motion with a majority of seven.

Horace Walpole took—or affected to take—his
father’s fall from power en philosophe. “Trust me,”
he had written to Mann, when the storm was brewing,
“if we fall, all the grandeur, the envied grandeur, of
our house will cost me not a sigh; it has given me no
pleasure while we have it, and will give me no pain
when I part with it.” That neither political vicissi-
tudes nor imperfect family affinities had the power to
quench his gaiety at this time is clear from the closing
sentences of the very letter in which he sends Mann
the text of his maiden speech,

Good night, my dear child. I am just going out to

the ridotto. One hates those places, comes away out of
humour, and yet one goes again.

For masquerades he had really lost none of his old
enthusiasm, “one of my ancient passions” he called it
thirty years later, and he showed a fine catholicity of
taste in his choice of costume. To one such revel he
went in the garb of Aurungzebe; to another he betook
himself dressed like an old woman, when he demurely
whispered to the irrepressible old General Churchill
that he was quite ashamed of being there till he met
him, but was comforted with finding one person in the
room older than himself,
52 HORACE WALPOLE CHAP.

The Quadruple Alliance, partially dissolved by
Walpole’s quarrel with Gray, was broken for the first
time by death when the “ineffectual angel”, Richard
West, gave up the ghost at Hatfield, in June 1742.
We might have known more about the reactions of
this event upon Walpole’s mind had Henry Conway
succeeded in his good-natured attempt to reconcile
Gray and his cousin on the occasion of the death of
the poet’s singularly unsatisfactory father a year earlier.
In July Mann received from Downing Street two
“copies of verses”, an elegy On the Death of Richard
West, Esquire, and a squib evoked by the rumour that
Horatio Walpole of Wolterton had been raised to the
peerage. “The former copy”, writes Walpole, “I
think you will like; it was written by one Mr. Ashton
on Mr. West, two friends of mine whom you have
often heard me mention.” Later in the month of July
he sent to Florence an acidulous little skit entitled
The Lesson for the Day. Lest posterity should imagine
that he had either desired or contrived that it should
be published, Walpole is careful to record in his Short
Notes that “Mr. Coke, son of Lord Lovel, coming in
while I was writing it, took a copy and dispersed it till
it got into print, but with many additions”; and he
adds, not without complacency, that it was “the
original of a great number of things of that sort”.
The comic force of these biblical pastiches began to
diminish almost at once, but this pioneer effort is
amusing enough, and no doubt Mann and the Chute-
heds were enchanted. It begins:

! Another, and slightly different, version of the Lesson exists
in Walpole’s handwriting, jotted on the blank leaf of a letter
from Henry Pelham.
III POLITICAL SKITS AND PARODIES 53

(1) Now these are the Generations of Them that
sought preferment.

(2) Twenty years they sought preferment and found
it not; yea, twenty years they wandered in the wilderness.

(3) Twenty years they sought them places, but they
found no resting-place for the sole of their foot.

(4) And lo! it came to pass in the days of George the
King that these men said, Go to, let us make ourselves
places.

(5) And they took a man named William, and they
made him King over them, and he made them places.

“The man named William” was the unpardonable
Pulteney, in that year created Earl of Bath, and the
remaining twelve verses of the Lesson chronicle the
various appointments distributed by him among the
anti-Walpolian cohorts after Sir Robert’s downfall.

During the summer of 1742 Almanzor Ashton was
a guest at Downing Street. He had newly taken
Holy Orders, and he cadged perseveringly for a Crown
living until in July his former schoolfellow obtained
him that of Aldingham. It may have been Almanzor’s
company and conversation which turned Celadon’s
mind at that time towards the biblical parody and the
mock sermon as vehicles for propaganda. Floating
recollections of Henry Coventry may also have fur-
nished some raw material. At all events, his next
jeud d’esprit was A Sermon on Painting, which Lord
Orford’s domestic chaplain actually preached before
his noble patron at Houghton.

Until a new town house could be found for his
lordship, the whole family and their belongings, after
a brief sojourn at Chelsea, were transferred bodily to
Norfolk. “I am writing to you up to my ears in pack-
ing,” Horace Walpole tells Mann on July 14, and he
54 HORACE WALPOLE CHAP.

adds a characteristically whimsical little sketch of
himself and his four-legged familiars.

I look like St. John in the Isle of Patmos, writing
revelations and prophesying “Woe! woe! woe! The
kingdom of desolation is at hand”! Indeed I have prettier
animals about me than he ever dreamt of; here is dear
Patapan and a little Vandyke cat with black whiskers and
boots; you would swear it was of a very ancient family
in the west of England, famous for their loyalty.

Walpole viewed the prospect of a sojourn in Norfolk
with undisguised consternation. “I beg,” he urges
Mann, “that you will write constantly to me; it will
be my only entertainment, for I neither hunt, brew,
drink nor reap.” And from Houghton itself he was
fain to send to Florence despatches stuffed with copies
of the anti-Pulteneyite doggerel of Edgcumbe and
Hanbury Williams. “You must take them as the
plump part of a long letter,” he tells Mann. “Con-
sider, I am in the barren land of Norfolk, where news
grows more slowly than anything green; and, besides,
I am in the house of a fallen minister.”

It was at this time, and in this environment, that
A Sermon on Painting was written.

The text of the sermon is taken from the hundred
and fifteenth Psalm, “They have Mouths, but they
speak not; Eyes have they, but they see not; neither
is there any breath in their nostrils”, and its ostensible
theme is “modern idolatry” as exemplified in “the
pictures of the Romish Church”. Mr. Walpole, still
resentful of “superstition’s papal gloom”, borrows a
fresh heap of faggots from Conyers Middleton and
consigns to the flames, not, indeed, the pictures them-
selves—he is no Savonarola—nor even “the poor
III “A SERMON ON PAINTING” 55

vulgar” who bow down before them, but “those
ministers of idolatry who, calling themselves the
servants of the living God, transfer his service to
inanimate images”. Very obligingly he sets forth
some hints for the guidance of these deluded Levites,
showing them how they might “lead the poor un-
practised soul through the paths of religion, and by
familiar images mould his ductile imagination to a
knowledge of his maker”, and illustrating his various
contentions with the aid of sacred pictures in Lord
Orford’s collection. A poem, he observes, not without
truth, “is almost confined to the nation where it was
written. . . . But Painting is a language every eye
can read; the pictured passions speak the tongue of
every country”; and he adds, with rising enthusiasm:

The continence of Scipio shines with all its lustre when
told by the hand of a Poussin; while all the imagination
of the poet or eloquence of the historian can cast no beauty
on the virtuous act in the eye of an illiterate reader.

When such benefits flow from this glorious art, how
impious it is to corrupt its uses, and to employ the noblest
science to the mercenary purpose of priestly ambition.

Up to this point the “preacher” has dealt chiefly
with the ethics of sacred art, but in all his early writings
politics “keep breaking in”, and we are not long
suffered to forget that the sermon is being delivered
“in the house of a fallen minister”, and he a pillar of
the Hanoverian dynasty.

This is indeed not one of the least merits of this, I may
say, heavenly art—its power to preserve the form of a
departed friend, or dear relation dead! To show how
severely just looked the good legislator! how awfully
serene the humane, the true patriot! It shows us with
what fire, what love of mankind, WiLLiam flew to save
56 HORACE WALPOLE CHAP.

religion and liberty! It expresses how honest, how be-
nign, the line of HANOVER.

No doubt the “preacher” was quite unconscious
of the ironic fact that he himself was offering garlands
to gods as incongruous and as uncouth as any before
whom “the poor vulgar” ever bent the knee. The
idolater condemning idolatry is, naturally, full of zeal.
“One really knows not how to account for the pre-
valence of this sin”. And, a little later, he exclaims:

View but the tabernacle of the saint in vogue! How
offerings pour in! ... How great is one’s surprise, on
coming to inquire into the merits that are the foundation
of this universe! . . .

A morose Carthusian or bloody Dominican are invested
with robes of glory . . . while a Curtius or a Cocles are
left to the chance of fame which a private pencil can
bestow upon them!

But it is not necessary to dive into profane history for
examples of unregarded merit.

Obviously not. Lord Orford, who must at once
have recognised his own rubicund lineaments under
the Roman casques of Curtius and Cocles, now enjoyed
the exquisite sensation of hearing his character and his
career compared, point by point, with those of “the
great Moses himself, the law-giver, the defender, the
preserver of Israel”! The analogies are, indeed,
striking. “Examine but the life of that slighted
patriot”, and they will leap to view. For example,
Moses “saved his countrymen from the hand of
tyranny and from the dominion of an idolatrous king”;
and Lord Orford ranged himself on the winning side
when George in pudding-time came o'er. Con-
template Moses and his followers “in the barren
desert, where sands and wilds overspread the dreary
III “A SERMON ON PAINTING” 57

scene, where no hopes of moisture, no prospect of
undiscovered springs, could flatter their parching
thirst”. Mark what followed. In the words of
Abraham Cowley:

He struck the rock, and strait the waters flow’d.

Then turn to the not less wild and sandy desert
of Norfolk, and behold the ornamental waters, the
conduits, the fish-ponds, called into being by the more
than mortal genius of Robert, first Earl of Orford!

Regarded as literature, the Sermon on Painting is of
no account. Its interest is entirely psychological and
historical. In the stilted, pseudo-scriptural diction
there may, perhaps, live some lingering echoes of
Henry Coventry’s conversation, and the bible-readings
in Cambridge gaol. That Horace Walpole should have
embraced this means of airing his anti-Popish senti-
ments, his admiration for the honesty and benignity of
the House of Hanover, his fire-new familiarity with
Italian art, and his loyalty to his father in the hour of
eclipse, is hardly surprising; but that he could—and
did—sustain from first to last a pompous and in-
sufferable seriousness of both mood and manner would
be comprehensible only if his sense of humour had
been a plant of feeble and tardy growth.

Any affection which young Mr. Walpole had learnt
to feel for Houghton in his undergraduate days now
evaporated with speed. Time hung heavy on his
hands. It was, as he wrote to Mann, “very unpleasant
. . . to be prisoner in a melancholy, barren province,
which would put one in mind of the deluge, only that
we have no water”. The mornings he spent chiefly
in the library, with only “his Patapanic majesty” for
58 HORACE WALPOLE CHAP.

company; then until dusk, he had to walk, with the
other members of the shrunken house-party, in the
somewhat bleak pleasaunces where the trees were still
too young to crowd into a shade—and walking, as he
remarked ruefully in after years, was never one of his
excellences,

This temporary banishment came to an end when
Parliament reassembled in November. In that month
Lord Orford moved into the red brick house on the
east side of Arlington Street upon whose dusky wall a
commemorative disc now bears his name in both its
earlier and its later form. It is a rather diminutive
house, outwardly demure. Within, it has a grey-
flagged hall, a narrow, sharply-curving staircase
under a pallid oval sky-light, and certain unmodern-
ised rooms with low ceilings, chequered windows,
and panelled walls. No lover of the less robust and
colourful aspect of eighteenth-century literature could
pass that house without a lingering glance if he remem-
bered at the moment that here for thirty-seven years
was the London home of Horace Walpole.

The beginning of the year 1743 found him installed
there, surrounded by all his “baubles and Patapans and
cats”, cheered by signs of a reaction in his father’s
favour, but otherwise a prey to ennui. “We are in
such a state of sameness”, he tells Mann, “that I shall
begin to wonder at the change in the seasons, and to
talk of the Spring as a strange accident”, and he was
disconcerted rather than charmed by the amiable
constancy of the Countess Grifoni. “Alas! I owe
her two letters, but where to find a beau sentiment 1
cannot tell! I believe I may have some by me in an
old chest of drawers, with some exploded red-heel
II “A SERMON ON PAINTING” 59

shoes and full-bottom wigs; but they would come
out so yellow and moth-eaten!” he ruefully exclaims.

The “state of sameness” was soon broken by the
news of an Austrian victory over the Spaniards, news
which drew forth the typically “Horatian” remark,
“We talk of this battle as of a comet; have you heard
of the battle? is it so strange a thing that numbers
imagine you may go and see it at Charing Cross”.
There is also evidence in the letters of this period that
an odd sort of camaraderie was growing up between the
writer and his father. We catch glimpses of “Sir
Robert” or “my lord”, as he is indifferently called,
making much of Patapan, sharing Horace’s impatience
for the arrival of “the Dominichin” purchased by
Mann at the Zambeccari sale, and vaguely planning a
tour through Italy with his youngest son as his guide.

It was upon August 20 of this year that the famous
and oft-quoted description of country-house existence
in Norfolk was penned, in a letter to John Chute.
Nothing could be more characteristic than its whimsical
and conscious petulance and exaggeration; and the
prose has the true “Horatian” cadence, easy, pleasant,
conversational.

Indeed, my dear Sir, you certainly did not use to be
stupid, and till you give me more substantial proof that
you are so, I shall not believe it. As for your temperate
diet and milk bringing about such a metamorphosis, I
hold it impossible. I have such lamentable proofs every
day before my eyes of the stupefying qualities of beef, ale,
and wine, that I have contracted a most religious venera-
tion for your spiritual nouriture. Only imagine that I here
every day see men who are mountains of roast beef, and
only seem just roughly hewn out into the outlines of
human form, like the giant rock at Pratolino! I shudder

when I see them brandish their knives in act to carve, and
look on them as savages that devour one another. I should
60 HORACE WALPOLE CHAP.

not stare at all more than I do, if yonder Alderman at the

lower end of the table was to stick his fork into his neigh-

hose jolly cheek, and cut a brave slice of brown and
af...

Oh, my dear Sir, don’t you find that nine parts in ten
of the world are of no use but to make you wish yourself
with that tenth part? I am so far from growing used to
mankind by living amongst them, that my natural ferocity
and wildness does but every day grow worse. They tire
me, they fatigue me; I don’t know what to do with them;
I don’t know what to say to them; I fling open the windows
and fancy I want air; and when I get by myself, I undress
myself, and seem to have had people in my pockets, in my
plaits, and on my shoulders. I indeed find this fatigue
worse in the country than in town, because one can avoid
it there and has more resources; but it is there too. I fear
’tis growing old; but I literally seem to have murdered a
man whose name was Ennui, for his ghost is ever before
me.

From the tenour of this epistile it would seem as
though the writer had made no very determined efforts
to grapple with the ghost, and as though the greater
part of his time were spent either groaning inwardly
in the company of “un-idea’d” Norfolk squires or
groaning audibly at the recollection of it. Actually
he was engaged in compiling a very full and elaborate
catalogue of the art treasures of Houghton, the Zdes
Walpoliane, the title and plan of which were probably
suggested by the Zdes Barberini. The dedication of
this work of Lord Orford is dated “August 24, 1743”;
three weeks later the obsequious Whaley had heard of
its existence; but it was not published “in form” till
the year 1747, the memorable year that witnessed the
purchase of Strawberry Hill.

It is interesting to compare the text and the tone
of the ZEdes Walpoliane with those of the Description
of the Villa of Mr. Horace Walpole at Strawberry Hill,
hii ZDES WALPOLIANAE 61

written more than thirty years later, and to observe
with what conscious pride the Houghton Catalogue is
unrolled, with what artless delight the “baubles” of the
villa are passed in review, The scribe of 1774 may be
the more engaging person of the two, but there is a cer-
tain naiveté about him of 1743, despite the seriousness
of his youthful dogmatism; otherwise he could hardly
have closed his dedicatory epistle in this extraordinary
strain:

Could those virtuous men, your father and grandfather,
arise from yonder church, how would they be amazed to
see this noble edifice and spacious plantations where once
stood their plain homely dwelling! How would they be
satisfied to find only the mansion-house, not the morals of
the family altered! May it be long, Sir, ere you join
them! And oh! as you wear no stain from them, may you
receive no disgrace from

Your dutiful and affectionate son
Horace WALPOLE.

In the general Introduction the author sets forth his
views upon art in considerable detail, and with an
occasional and refreshing lightness of touch. Para-
doxically enough, he delights in twitting those insuffer-
able fellows, “the virtuosi”, with their affectation, their
ignorance, and their vanity. He complacently refutes
their allegation that “the antients knew little or nothing
of perspective” by citing certain “very fine pieces of
painting dug out of the newly-discovered underground
town at Portici, near Naples”. But of contemporary art
he takes a gloomy view. “There seems”, he observes,
“to be a stop to any further improvement”; and he will
accord the name of “artist” only to Rosalba and Zink.

According to Horace Walpole, the art of painting
which had “expired about the year 580”, revived “in
62 HORACE WALPOLE CHAP.

the person of Cimabue”; but, alas! his “perform-
ances” and those of his immediate successors “are only
curious for their antiquity, not for their excellence”.
The birth of Mantegna heralded the dawn—so curiously
identified by modern criticism with the sunset—of
Italian art, and the splendour of noon came with such
‘masters as Guido Reni and Salvator Rosa, Correggio
and Caracci. Michaelangelo is rebuked because he
“followed nature too closely” and was “much too fond
of muscles”; but, on the other hand, Parmegiano is
extolled for “the majesty of his airs”. A word of
praise is conceded to that “universal genius, Lionardo
da Vinci”, though of the Florentine school we are told
that “their drawing was hard, and their colouring
gaudy and gothic”, The disdainful conjunction of
these two epithets is exquisite.

In the closing passage, after a modest meed of
praise has been accorded to the French and Flemish
schools, and Dominichino has been unexpectedly
chidden for his “raw colouring” and “faulty chiara
oscuro”, the author tells us, what we have long since
divined, that, in his opinion, “all the qualities of a
perfect painter never met but in Raphael, Guido, and
Annibal Caracci”. Then comes the actual catalogue
of the Houghton treasures, and we follow our guide
with flagging footsteps from the Embroidered Bed
Chamber to the Supping Parlour, from the Gallery to
the Hunting Hall. We are not spared the exact
dimensions of each room, and of every picture in it:
we are constrained to contemplate chimney-pieces of
black and gold, panels of “yellow cassoy”, bed-hangings
of “Indian needle-work”, until “the sense faints
picturing them”. It was not necessary for Walpole
III ZDES WALPOLIANAE 63

to read Chinese history in order to understand the cult
of the ancestor.

“In the house of a fallen minister” it was inevitable
that politics should take precedence over the fine arts
as a theme for meditation and debate; nor could young
Mr. Walpole avert his mind’s eye very long from the
hated image of the Earl of Bath. In June 1743,
presumably while collecting and arranging the materials
for the Zdes, he had contributed to an impudent little
Whig organ, Old England or the Constitutional Journal,
“a parody of some scenes in Macbeth, called The Dear
Witches—a ridicule of the new ministry”. In October
of the same year another anti-Pulteneyite political skit
appeared in the same quarter, and from the same noble
pen.

In London the summer of 1743 had been enlivened
by the famous revolt of the Drury Lane players,
including Garrick, Macklin, Mrs. Pritchard, and Kitty
Clive, against the manager of the theatre, the crafty
and elusive Fleetwood. Walpole makes adroit use of
this topical theme to introduce his satire, and peculiar
point is given to the first paragraph by its allusion to
his future crony “the Clive” as “that second Queen of
Hungary”, making a brave stand for “theatric Liberty”.
It is clear that the dilatory and ineffectual proceedings
of the English troops on the Rhine were causing the
satirist more pleasure as an anti-Pulteneyite than pain
as an Englishman. It was Pulteney’s army, and not
“my lord’s”, that was giving so poor an account of
itself, and he exclaims ironically—

Blest be the Heroes who give Politicians time to stir
their Coffee, and weigh their Exploits at Leisure, without
heaping Battle on Battle and Siege on Siege! . .. They
64 HORACE WALPOLE CHAP.

do not lump half a Dozen Victories as that hasty Fellow,
the Duke of Marlborough, did. Before a grave Citizen
had trac’d out Schellenbergh in the Map, he was con-
founded with the Victory of Blenheim.

The main body of the Old England skit consists of
an imaginary interview between Steele and a tatter-
demalion group of Irish players newly arrived from
Dublin “to ’list under Sir Richard”. Not the idea
alone, but the form and fabric, are unblushingly
borrowed from the recruiting scene in 2 Henry IV.,
and the implication seems to be that somewhat after
this fashion did the seceding Whigs seek service with
Lord Bath. Poney, the leader of the Irish volunteers,
passes his troupe in review, and we are introduced to
John Limekiln, who “shone particularly in the Whisper,
where the fellow tells Macbeth he hath dispatch’d
Banquo”; Simon Shadow, a linen-draper turned actor,
whose chief merit was that he “us’d to swear Mr.
Poney spoke like an angel”; Mr. Hill, who could
undertake any part that did not “require Speaking”;
and Bullcalf, “a young Beginner”, who, having per-
formed no rdle but that of the monster in Perseus and
Andromeda, was capable only of wordless roars. Mr.
Poney, being requested to give a taste of his quality,
can recite nothing but passages from Almanzor’s part
in The Conquest of Granada, though prompted by the
impresario with cues from Cato, Julius Cesar, and
Tamerlane. The composition ends lightly, if some-
what irrelevantly, with an anecdote of a painter whose
sole idea of a subject for a large picture in a hall, a
small one for a chimney-piece, or a “gay little history”
for the ceiling of a summer-house, was the Judgment
of Solomon.
III ZAZDES WALPOLIANAE 65

By the time that this number of Old England
appeared, Horace Walpole’s summer exile had ended,
and he was back again in town. Halting at New-
market on his way thither, he wrote enthusiastically
to Mann, “Were I a physician, I would prescribe noth-
ing but recipe ccclxv drachm. Londin.”, and it is clear
that he was delighted to find himself once more in
Arlington Street, with his Patapans and his cats.
Patapan looms large in the correspondence of 1743.
Chute, still lingering at the Casa Manetti, composed
in his honour an imitation of the 110th epigram of the
first Book of Martial, and Patapan’s master was
charmed.

My dear Sir, your translation shall stand foremost in
the Patapaniana: I hope in time to have poems upon him,
and sayings of his own, enough to make a notable book.

Among the “poems upon him” was one from Wal-
pole’s own hand, Patapan or the Little White Dog,
imitated from La Fontaine, but, as the Short Notes
inform us, it was never published.
CHAPTER 1V

THE ’'45—RECONCILIATION WITH GRAY—PAPERS IN
DODSLEY’S “MUSEUM”

IN November 1743 Parliament reassembled, and the
ire of the Member for Callington was kindled first by
a motion against the further employment of the
Hanoverian troops then actually in British pay, and
secondly by the elevation of Sandys to the peerage.
What he described as the first-fruits of his indignation
at the latter event was a set of Verses addressed to the
House of Lords on its receiving a new peer. The
elisions are now less frequent, and the ceesura, instead
of haunting the second beat, is occasionally pushed back
to the first or forward to the third. Personal pique
lends to this composition a pithiness which no merely
theoretical objection to Romish “idolatry” had ever lent
to Walpole’s earlier verse, but the energy of the ten
opening lines has spent itself long before the thirty-
fifth and last is reached. Those ten may be quoted
here, mere Pope-and-water though they be:

Thou senseless Hall, whose injudicious space

Like Death, confounds a various mismatch’d race,
Where kings and clowns, th’ ambitious and the mean,
Compose th’ inactive, soporific scene,

Unfold thy doors !—and a promotion see

That must amaze e'vn prostituted thee!

66
CHAP. IV THE 45 67

Shall not thy sons, incurious as they are,

Raise their dull lids and meditate a stare?

Thy sons who sleep in monumental state

To show the spot where their great fathers sate.

The question of the Hanoverian troops, the signifi-
cance of the movements of the Brest and Toulon
squadrons, and the Treaty of Worms, combined to
convince Horace Walpole that the first session of 1744
was “like to turn out as laborious a session as ever
was”. Nor did the event belie the prediction. Charles
Edward had reached Paris on January 2oth, and a
descent by the French upon Ireland seemed imminent.
His plans were the subject of much uneasy speculation
in London, more especially when it became known that
an army under Marshal Saxe was getting ready for
embarkation. And now this menace to the House of
Hanover roused the old lion in Lord Orford. ‘His
zeal, his courage, his attention, are indefatigable and
inconceivable,” writes his son. But the blow was not
fated to fall till the year following, nor was he fated to
see it fall, falter and glance aside. The squadron
which was to have convoyed Saxe’s transports to the
Kentish coast was driven off by the British Fleet, the
transports themselves were dispersed by a storm, the
fifteen thousand troops they carried were compelled to
disembark, and Charles Edward was kept fretting his
heart out in Paris, while anti-Jacobite London breathed
again.

As soon as it became manifest that all immediate
peril was averted, Lord Orford’s energies sagged and
sank low. Meanwhile the vogue for tar-water and the
demise of Mr. Pope provided the fashionable world
with some topics of conversation less distressful than
68 HORACE WALPOLE CHAP.

the declaration of war by England and Holland against
France, and the proceedings of the Pretenders, pere
et fils.

Always easily alarmed and as easily diverted from
alarms, Horace at one moment imagines himself and
his family as “refugee heretics” at Florence, and the
next is telling Conway, “every night I go constantly
to Ranelagh, which has totally beat Vauxhall. Nobody
goes anywhere else—everybody goes there. My lord
Chesterfield is so fond of it that he says he has ordered
all his letters to be directed thither.”

In the early summer of 1744 he “made a great
antique purchase of all Dr. Middleton’s collection
which he brought from Italy”—a purchase which he
had deferred until the Doctor's Germana quaedam
Antiquitatis eruditae Monumenta should be at least half
printed, “for fear of an é museo Walpoliano”. Appre-
hensions of this kind had ceased to beset him when
Middleton’s spoils had reposed for a year or two at
Strawberry Hill.

Lord Orford’s health, shaken by a chill caught when
fishing with the stalwart Princess Emily at New Park
in the month of May, continued to decline through
the summer months, though in July “my lord” was
sending cheerful accounts of himself from Houghton
to his youngest son. He thanks “dear Horace” for
the news he had sent him of the busy world, and adds,
a little satirically, “I must be in your debt from hence,
where nothing occurs worthy of a fine Gentleman.”
None the less, he hints that he would be glad if the
young man could persuade himself to “sacrifice the Joys
of the Beau Monde to ye amusements of a dull rurall
life”, and exchange Arlington Street for Houghton.
v THE 45 69

In his famous—indeed, almost too famous—review
of Lord Dover's edition of the Letters to Mann,
Macaulay observes of Conway that he was the only
friend to whom Walpole “appears to have been sincerely
attached”, In many letters which Macaulay did not
live to see published there is much that might have
caused him to modify that sweeping observation; but
it cannot be denied that Walpole’s attachment to his
cousin had something of the blind and solemn fervour
of a cult. During the summer of 1744 the younger
man was able to offer very convincing proofs of his
sincerity, when Conway actually condescended to write
him a “letter of confidence”, asking his advice upon a
decidedly difficult subject. It seems that “dearest
Harry” had fallen—or half-fallen—in love with Lady
Caroline Fitzroy, and of the various obstacles between
them not the least formidable was the smallness of
his revenues, and the fact that these had recently shrunk
still further. His cousin was obviously flattered—
not to say fluttered. To the request for advice he
was reluctant to respond; but it gave him an oppor-
tunity which he declares he had long wanted. “Noth-
ing”, he says, “could prevent my being unhappy at
the smallness of your fortune, but its throwing it into
my way to offer you to share mine.” The offer is
made in terms of transparent sincerity, in a letter which
contains as many flashes of self-revelation and—it may
be added—of self-knowledge as any that Walpole ever
wrote. Of his own income of “near two thousand
pounds a year”, he writes:

I have always flung it away all in the most idle manner;
but, my dear Harry, idle as I am, and thoughtless, I have
sense enough to have real pleasure in denying myself
70 HORACE WALPOLE CHAP.

baubles, and in saving a very good income to make a man
happy for whom I have a just esteem and most sincere
friendship. . . . I must talk of myself to prove to you that
it will be right for you to accept it. I am sensible of hav-
ing more follies and weaknesses, and fewer real good
qualities than most men. I sometimes reflect on this,
though I own, too seldom. I always want to begin acting
like a man, and a sensible one, which I think I might be if
I. would. Can I begin better than by taking care of my
fortune for one I love? You have seen (I have seen you
have) that I am fickle, and foolishly fond of twenty new
people; but I don’t really love them—I have always loved
you constantly. ... If I ever felt much for anything
(which I know may be questioned) it was certainly for my
mother. I look on you as my nearest relation by her. . .

Conway did not accept the offer thus earnestly
pressed upon him; nor did he wed Lady Caroline, fate
having in store for him an altogether delightful wife in
the widowed Lady Ailesbury.

A certain restlessness and a nervous dissatisfaction
with his environment are discernible in Walpole’s
letters about this time, After assuring Mann that he
“will be civil” to the Abbé Durazzo, “a little, pert,
petit-maitre figure”, who had claimed acquaintance with
him on the strength of some casual Florentine encoun-
ter, he explains, “I never lose opportunities of paving
myself an agreeable passage back to Florence”: and he
adds, only half in jest, “My dear Chutes, stay for me;
I think the first gale of peace will carry me to you”.
By the middle of August he was on the wing, not for
Florence but for Norfolk, travelling, as was his wont,
with a minimum of luggage, and with no companions
but Patapan and a couple of books. The late summer
was rendered more tolerable at Houghton by a brief
visit from Dr. Conyers Middleton.

Another visitor to Houghton about this time was
Iv THE ’45 71

Mr. Richard Rigby, destined in the following year to
succeed old General Churchill in the representation
of Castle Rising.

“I believe he will do extremely well here,” Walpole
writes to Charles Hanbury Williams, “for he talks all the
language of turneps and foxhounds, only with an accent a
little too distinct; but he will soon grow more inarticulate,
and consequently more understood.”

By the end of October Horace was back in London,
with little to show for his two months’ exile beyond
a parody of a scene in Corneille’s Cinna introducing
Pelham, Arundel, and Selwyn.

Granville’s resignation in November gave rise to a
rumour of Lord Orford’s imminent return to power,
and, much to his son’s malicious amusement, various
hopeful place-hunters, including three prelates, hastened
to Arlington Street to pay their respects to “my lord”.
But “my lord” was a dying man. Reluctant to face
this fact, Horace reminded himself and his Florentine
friends that it was “common for people to live many
years in his situation”. At the moment the political
position was sufficiently intriguing, and the theatrical
war still raged at Drury Lane, where the anti-Fleetwood
riots seem to have interested Walpole fully as much as
the comings and goings at Westminster and Whitehall.
He sends Mann a gleeful account of his own unpre-
meditated intervention in one uproarious episode. In
order to intimidate the audience and suppress demon-
strations against the management, Fleetwood had hired
a gang of “Bear-garden bruisers”, who filled the stage,
“armed with bludgeons and clubs”. Whereupon the
indignant audience:
72 HORACE WALPOLE CHAP.

raised the greatest uproar; and amongst the rest, who flew
into a passion but your friend the philosopher? In short,
one of the actors advancing to the front of the stage to
make an apology for the manager, he had scarce begun to
say, “Mr. Fleetwood”—when your friend with a most
audible voice and dignity of anger, called out, “He is an
impudent rascal!” The whole pit huzzaed, and repeated
the words. Only think of my being a popular orator! But
what was still better, while my shadow of a person was
dilating to the consistence of a hero, one of the chief ring-
leaders of the riot, coming under the box where I sat and
pulling off his hat, said, “Mr. W., what would you please
to have us to do next?”

“Mr. W.” was not of that stuff of which popular
orators are made. Disconcerted and abashed, he con-
fesses that he “sunk down into the box”, and that ten
days later he had not mustered sufficient courage to
set foot in the playhouse again. “In short,” he con-
cludes, half-ruefully, “the whole town has been enter-
tained by my prowess, and Mr. Conway has given me
the nickname of Wat Tyler.”

At the close of February 1745 it seemed as though
“the struggles of his own good temperament” might
save Lord Orford from immediate danger of dissolu-
tion. Walpole relates that during that month he him-
self was “out but twice”, and that he had been in
constant attendance on his father “or obliged to see
multitudes of people”: but when, early in March, it
became evident that all hopes were vain, he was “forced
to go out and thank those that had come and sent”.
The end came on March 18th, but not until nearly
four weeks later did he feel disposed to write in any
detail of the event. His first letter to Mann—dated
March 2gth—opens with the appeal, “Don’t expect
me to enter at all upon the subject”, and is chiefly con-
w THE 45 73

cerned, for the rest, with gossip about Sandys and
Granville, Mr. Pitt and my Lord Coke, the dullness of
Thomson and Glover, and the “present fashion” of mak-
ing conundrums. By the 15th of April he had com-
posed his spirits and collected his thoughts sufficiently
to set about the writing of a formal panegyric,
obviously planned with care, and transcribed from a
draft.

However irreparable his personal loss may be to his
friends, he certainly died critically well for himself: he
had lived to stand the rudest trials with honour, to see
his character universally cleared, his enemies brought to
infamy for their ignorance or villainy, and the world
allowing him to be the only man in England fit to be what
he had been; and he died at a time when his age and
infirmities prevented his again undertaking the support
of a government which engrossed his whole care, and
which he foresaw was falling into the last confusion. In
this I hope his judgement failed! His fortune attended
him to the last; for he died of the most painful of dis-
tempers with little or no pain.

All very “becoming in young Walpole”, as Pitt
might have said, but not all in strict accordance with
historic truth!

Lord Orford died a comparatively poor man, leaving
an estate much encumbered by debt, and having by
“his fondness for Houghton—endangered Houghton”.
“He left me”, Walpole records in the Short Notes,
“the house in Arlington Street in which he died, 5000.
in money and 1000l. a year from the Collector’s place
in the Custom House, and the surplus to be divided
between my brother Edward and me.” Actually it
was the lease, and not the freehold, of the Arlington
Street house which formed part of the legacy,
74 HORACE WALPOLE CHAP.

and it was the expiration of the lease in 1779
which compelled Walpole to move to 11 Berkeley
Square.

Mindful of favours past, and perhaps not unhope-
ful of further favours to come, Ashton proceeded to
compose upon Lord Orford’s death “a fine piece”,
which was duly “printed in the public papers”. He
does not appear to have risen to the occasion, however,
when four weeks later his friend was again bereaved
—this time by the loss of Patapan. The early summer
of this year was, indeed, rendered distressful to Wal-
pole in divers ways; by the death of a brother of
George Montagu’s, and also of a brother of “poor
Mr. Chute’s”, and by the disconcerting news of the
English defeat at Fontenoy, as well as by the demise
of the silver-fleeced Patapan. It was in May that the
long-threatened storm broke between his brother
Edward and himself. Nominally the cause of their
clash was a difference of opinion about the “family
borough” of Castle Rising. Horace had put forward
his friend Richard Rigby as a candidate, with the
approval of the new Earl of Orford, and for some
obscure reason this proceeding kindled the wrath of
Edward, who developed his views in a letter of ex-
traordinary vehemence, in the course of which he in-
formed his youngest brother that it was the most pain-
ful thing in the world to have any commerce with him,
and accused him of assuming a pre-eminence from an
imaginary disparity between them “in point of abilities
and character”. Horace drafted a long and energetic
rejoinder, expostulating against these accusations: but
prudence—or, perhaps, timidity—prevailed, and, after
carefully stowing the draft away, he wrote a much
v THE 45 75

more brief and temperate reply, informing his “dear
brother” that he had used him very ill “without any
provocation or any pretence”, but that he was still
ready to live with him “upon terms of friendship
and equality”. The passing of years, and the in-
fluence of Edward’s charming daughters and grand-
daughters, healed the breach between the irascible
elder and the hypersensitive younger brother, but
Horace neither destroyed the draft of his rejected
letter, nor allowed it passively to perish. In the event
Rigby sat for Castle Rising only from October 1745
till June 1747, and in 1754 Horace Walpole himself
was returned for that borough of contention, which
he continued to represent until in 1757 he exchanged it
for King’s Lynn.

In June 1745 Walpole left London for a three weeks’
sojourn at Rigby’s Essex seat, Mistley Hall, near
Manningtree.

“I like Mistley prodigiously,” he wrote to Hanbury
Williams, “if it were not for the house, and the walks, and
the avenues, which are all bad and déplacées, it would be
a delightful place. I have built Roman porticos, Gothic
spires, and Chinese galleries in plentiful ideas there.”

In July the belligerent intentions of France became
sufficiently obvious to alarm him extremely. He tells
Mann that, with all the reasons that he has for not
loving “great part of” England, it “is impossible not
to feel the shock of living at the period of all its great-
ness! to be one of the Ultimi Romanorum”! He
actually conceived a wild project, which never even
approached execution, of betaking himself to The
Hague, where he would “at least hear sooner from
the army—and know better what is likely to happen”
76 HORACE WALPOLE CHAP.

at home. In his réle of “one of the Ultimi Roma-
norum” it was, perhaps, natural that Walpole should
be attracted by Chute’s offer to purchase on his behalf
the marble eagle “found in the gardens of Bocca-
padugli, within the precinct of Caracalla’s bath”. Yet
he hesitates,

Would it not be folly to be buying curiosities now?
how can I tell that I shall have anything in the world to
pay for it by the time it is bought? You may present
these reasons to Mr. Chute; and if he laughs at them, why
then he will buy the eagle for me; if he thinks them of
weight, not.

Apparently Mr. Chute laughed, for the purchase
was concluded in due course. This was the famous
eagle destined to share with the busts of Vespasian
and Caligula the place of pre-eminence among the
treasures of the museo Walpoliano at Strawberry Hill.
An engraving of it may be seen depending from the
table upon which Walpole’s elbow rests in his portrait
by Sir Joshua Reynolds.

The late summer of 1745 was full of rumours and
perturbations, and the flicker of distant lightning
against a sullen sky. Walpole, often quivering with
ill-dissembled . alarm, comments somewhat peevishly
upon the imperturbality of the citizens of London.
That “the disposition of the drama” should be in the
hands of the Duke of Newcastle, “those hands that
are always groping and sprawling, and fluttering, and
hurrying on the rest of his precipitate person” was
hardly reassuring; but what seems to have irked the
chronicler even more at this moment was the inveterate
English habit “to take dangers for sights, and evils
for curiosities”. His next letter records the issue of
1v THE 45 77

a proclamation “for apprehending the Pretender’s son”,
who, unknown to those who issued it, had already
landed at Eriska, in the Hebrides.

On August 8 Walpole left London in company with
Rigby, on a jaunt to Portsmouth, Wilton, and Mount
Edgecumbe, from which he did not return till the fifth
of the month following. Mount Edgecumbe, of course,
was the seat of old Lord Edgecumbe, father of the
light-hearted Richard Edgecumbe whose portrait, in
a “conversation piece”, together with George Selwyn
and “Gilly” Williams, Sir Joshua was afterwards com-
missioned to paint for the Refectory at Strawberry
Hill.

When he reached town on September 5 Walpole
found it ringing with the news from Scotland.

The young Pretender, at the head of three thousand
men, has got a march on General Cope, who is not eight-
een hundred strong; and when the last accounts came
away, was fifty miles nearer Edinburgh than Cope, and by
this time is there.

The strange reluctance of the clans to rise in de-
fence of the honest and benign House of Hanover,
the ill-success of the Dukes of Atholl and Argyll in
their efforts to raise troops to stem the advance of the
“rebels”, the fact that though they had been “very
zealous”, Lords Loudon, Fortrose, and Panmure had
been able to muster only “some men”, all combine
to appal Walpole, who ejaculates despairingly, “I look
upon Scotland as gone”!

It would be an unprofitable exercise to follow the
course of “the ’45” in Horace Walpole’s letters, though
while it was in progress he wrote hardly any uncoloured
by news from the North. That news was always
78 HORACE WALPOLE CHAP,

belated, and often inaccurate. Hopes and fears alike
were liable to be belied by the event before they had
been set down in writing. One can only watch, as with
Walpole’s eyes, the Jacobite wave gather and move for-
ward, break, disperse, and recede.

His tone in speaking of “the boy,” Charles Edward,
is rather surprisingly tolerant and good-humoured.

“Every now and then,” he tells Mann, “a Scotchman
comes and pulls the boy by the sleeve; ‘Preence, here is
another mon taken!’ then with all the dignity in the world
the boy hopes nobody was killed in the action!”

Indeed, it is clear that the greater part of Walpole’s
apprehensions are purely selfish. Should the honest
and benign House of Hanover be cast down, what
would happen to him? “A question to be asked!”
So he thus unburdens himself to the imperturbable
Montagu:

The moment I have snugged up a closet or a dressing-
room, I have always warning given me that my lease is
out. Four years ago I was mightily at my ease in Down-
ing Street, and then the good woman, Sandys, took my
lodgings over my head, and was in such a hurry to junket
her neighbours, that I had scarce time allowed me to wrap
up my old china in a little hay. Now comes the Pre-
tender’s boy, and promises all my comfortable apartments
in the Exchequer and Custom House to some forlorn Irish
peer, who chooses to remove his pride and poverty out of
some large old unfurnished gallery at St. Germain’s. Why
really, Mr. Montagu, this is not pleasant!

The defeat of Cope at Prestonpans on September
21 rekindled Walpole’s liveliest apprehensions, and
drew from him the rueful acknowledgement that the
Highlanders were “not such raw ragamuffins” as
report had called them, By October 4, however, his
iv THE ’45 79

fears ebb once more; “the good people of England
have at last rubbed their eyes and looked about them”;
Mann is urged to dry his wet-brown-paperness, and
“be in spirits again”. A month later “the Rebellion
has made no progress, nor produced any incidents
worth mentioning”. On November 15 even the news
that “the rebels are come into England” scarce sends
a tremor down the chronicling quill.

By their marching westward to avoid Wade it is evident
they are not strong enough to fight him. They may yet
retire back into their mountains, but if once they get to
Lancaster their retreat is cut off; for Wade will not stir
from Newcastle till he has embarked them deep into
England, and then he will be behind them.

It was not long before Horace Walpole was suffi-
ciently reassured to conclude the purchase not only of
the Boccapadugli eagle, but of a Roman altar as well.
“I even begin,” he adds, hopefully, “to believe that I
shall be able to pay for them.”

On November 29, only five days before the High-
landers reached Derby, he writes to Mann,

My fears have been very great, for the greatness of our
stake; but I now write in the greatest confidence of our
getting over this ugly business.

Cumberland, the “Nollkejumskoi” of later derision,
was marching north, and Conway was on his staff.
What chance had Charles and his uncouth levies
against such a conjunction of valour and virtue? The
news of the fall of Derby caused, it is true, a brief
panic in London, but on December 9, only three days
after the Highland retreat had begun, Walpole declares,
“We fear them no longer”, and on the 20th he exclaims
8o HORACE WALPOLE CHAP.

exultantly, “We have at last got a Spring tide of good
luck”. It was true. They had. The new year, 1746,
was ushered in by joy-bells, celebrating the surrender
of Carlisle to Cumberland, and before it was a fort-
night old all projects of invasion on the part of France
were seen to have been “laid aside”. After that, the
fleeting success of the clansmen against Hawley at
Falkirk on January 17 might startle but could not
astound the mind of Walpole. “The very same
dragoons ran away at Falkirk that ran away at Preston
Pans,” he observes with scorn. Fears he still harbours,
but they are now for Conway, not for England or
for himself. Less than a month later he can say
“pho!” at the very word “Rebellion”, and is dedicating
as much paper to recording resignations and counter-
resignations in the Cabinet as he would shortly before
have been filling with the deeds of invading and defend-
ing armies.

Before the year 1745 closed there occurred an event
far more momentous in the life of Horace Walpole
than any of the national or political crises which, up to
that point, he had traversed. This was his reconciliation
with Gray,

The exact manner of this reconciliation, like the
exact matter of the quarrel, remains obscure. We
have two accounts of the attendant circumstances from
Gray’s hand, none from Walpole’s. After Conway's
ineffectual démarche in 1741, four years passed before
another attempt, from another quarter, was crowned
with success. If—as it would appear—the happy
mediatrix was the second Mrs. Conyers Middleton,
some credit may also be due to that most amiable of
iconoclasts, “Fiddling Conyers”. After certain pre-
v RECONCILIATION WITH GRAY 81

liminary manceuvres, with which Gray kept his “dear,
dear Wharton” au courant, it was arranged that when
crossing London on his way from Cambridge to Stoke
Poges in November 1745, the poet should inform
Walpole of his presence in town. Divining that
Wharton would be “curious to know what had passed”,
Gray despatched to that sympathetic person a graphic
description of the interview:

I wrote a Note the Night I came, & immediately received
a very civil Answer. I went the following evening to see
the Party (as Mrs. Foible says) was something abash’d at
his Confidence: he came to meet me, kiss’d me on both
Sides with all the East of one who receives an Acquaintance
just come out of the Country, squatted me into a Fauteuil :
begun to talk of the Town & this & that & t’other, &
continued with little Interruption for three Hours, when I
took my Leave very indifferently pleased, but treated with
wondrous Good-breeding. I supped with him next night
(as he desired) Ashton was there, whose Formalities tickled
me inwardly, for he I found was to be angry about the letter
I had wrote him. however in going home together in our
Hackney Coach jumbled us into a Sort of Reconciliation:
he hammer’d out somewhat like an Excuse; & I received it
very readily, because I cared not two pence whither it were
true or not. . . . next morning I breakfasted alone with
Mr. W.: when we had all the Eclaircissement I ever
expected, & I left him far better satisfied than I had been
hitherto. when I return, I shall see him again.

It is safe to hazard a guess that the confidence, the
ease, and even the garrulity, which so abashed Gray
at the first interview were assumed, not without an
effort, by Walpole, in order to mitigate the inevitable
thorniness of the occasion. Why the poet should have
departed ‘very indifferently pleased” is not quite
clear. Surely he knew his Celadon too well to have
expected him to approach draped in metaphorical
82 HORACE WALPOLE CHAP.

sackcloth, and ingeminating Mea culpa! After an
interval of a year, during which the progressive thaw-
ing of the frosty atmosphere in Gray's letters to
Walpole bears witness to the tact and patience of
the younger man, Gray cannot find it in him to act a
generous part. In a letter to John Chute, dated
October 12, 1746, he assumes a coy, cautious, and
slightly cynical pose:

I find Mr. Walpole then made some mention of me to
you: yes, we are together again. It is about a year, I
believe, since he wrote to me to offer it, and there has been
(particularly of late) in appearance, the same kindness and
confidence almost as of old. What were his motives I
cannot yet guess. What were mine you will imagine, and
perhaps blame me. However as yet I neither repent, nor
rejoice over-much, but I am pleased.

Can Gray really have been in any uncertainty as to
Walpole’s motives in seeking a reconciliation? Could
they conceivably have been other than a sincere desire
to make his peace with an old friend, coupled with an
inextinguishable sense that in the beginning he—
Walpole—had been in the wrong?

Towards the end of March Walpole was half-
apologising to Mann for the lack of matter in his
epistles: he had no new triumphs of the Duke to
chronicle, Pope and Poetry were dead, the Ladies
Orford and Townshend had “exhausted scandal both
in their persons and conversation”. This dearth,
however, was not of long duration. By the middle of
April his quill had once more quelque chose & mettre
sous la dent; and on the twenty-fifth he sends to Flor-
ence the joyful news of Cumberland’s “total victory
over the rebels” at Culloden.
wv PAPERS IN DODSLEY’S “MUSEUM” 83

During the spring and summer of the year 1746

that indefatigable quill found some lighter employments
than the chronicling of an abortive “rebellion” and the
fate of certain of the “rebels”. In March the energetic
and resourceful Robert Dodsley launched the first
number of a small fortnightly periodical, The Museum,
which, though it survived only till the September of the
year following, was the begetter of the more robust
World, and the ancestor of the still existing Annual
Register. In the second issue, that of April 12,
appeared an article which, as a footnote informs us,
was “designed to have been inserted in the First
Number, but came too late”. It is entitled A Scheme
for raising a large Sum of Money for the Use of the
Government by laying a Tax on Message Cards and
Notes, and is signed “Descartes”. The issue of
May 24 contained a further contribution from the
same hand, “An Advertisement of a pretended new
book”, The History of Good Breeding, and the hand
was Horace Walpole’s. Writing to Wharton on
August 13 Gray says,
you remember a paper in the Museum on Message Cards,
wch he [i.e. Walpole] told me was Fielding’s, & asked my
Opinion about: it was his own, and so was the Advertise-
ment on Good Breeding that made us laugh so.
From this it is clear that if Walpole’s statement in the
Short Notes, to the effect that the latter paper was
“written in Florence in 1741”, be accurate, he must
have refrained from either showing or mentioning the
whimsical fragment to his travelling-companion at that
time,

It is from Addison rather than from Fielding that
the form and colour of the Scheme are derived, and
84 HORACE WALPOLE CHAP.

there is in it much more of “Mr. Spectator” than of
“Scriblerus Secundus”. Even the lightest of Field-
ing’s Miscellanies has not the same airy urbanity. The
writer, after defining a museum as “an Hospital for
everything that is singular”, claims a place there for
his Scheme, first because it had never been ‘thought of
by any other Person, and secondly as it will give
Posterity some light into the Customs of the Present
Age”, Of these “one of the latest and most accepted”
was ‘the sending of Cards and Notes”. Descartes
is pleased to observe that

“ladies, by giving themselves the Trouble to transmit
their Commands to Cards and Paper” are “at once improv-
ing themselves in Spelling and adjusting the whole cere-
monial of Engagements without the Possibility of Errors,
not to mention the great Encouragement given to the
Stationery Trade by the large Demands for Crowquills,
Paper, Wafers, etc.,, Commodities that are all the natural
Produce of our Country”.

Such messages were at first sent upon the backs of
playing-cards, but the extravagance and fastidiousness
of womankind had led to the introduction of “Cards
without Pips”. Descartes makes a grave calculation
to demonstrate that in the course of one month each
lady of fashion would require at least 1240 of such
cards. He has much to say on the difference between
cards and notes,

the latter of which are only a more voluminous Kind of
Cards, and more sacred; because a Footman is allowed
to read the former, but is depended upon for never opening
the latter. Indeed, if the Party-colour’d Gentry’s Honour
were not to be trusted, what fatal Accidents might arise
to Families! for there is not a young Lady in London
under Five and twenty who does not transact all her most
important Concerns in this Way. She does not fall in

 
v PAPERS IN DODSLEY’'S “MUSEUM” 85

Love, she does not change her Lover or her Fan, her Party
or her Staymaker, but she notifies it to twenty particular
Friends by a Note.

He is of opinion that of the total number—800,000 at
lowest—of inhabitants of I.ondon,

not above twenty thousand are obliged to send Cards,
because I really have not yet heard that this Fashion has
spread much among the Lower Sort of People; at least I
know that my own Fishmonger’s Wife was extremely
surprized last week at receiving an Invitation to an Assem-
bly at Billingsgate, wrote on a very dirty Queen of Clubs.

Here is a touch that might have led some of the
readers of The Museum to conclude that Fielding, then
busy with his own journalistic venture, the True
Patriot, had strayed for a moment into ‘“Doddy’s”
domain. The ingenious Descartes thus proceeds to
the development of his idea. Supposing the duty to
amount to 1d. per card, the annual gain to the Treasury
would be £1,343.333, 6s. 8d., “for the Cities of
London and Westminster only”. Evidently he intends
that the cards thus taxed should be transmissible
through the post, for he inserts a proviso that “Mem-
bers of either House” shall not be suffered to frank
their wives’ cards. It will be time enough, he thinks,
to consider notes, as distinct from cards, “when the
Bill is brought in”. In the course of his intensive
studies at the British Museum it is improbable that
Dickens ever turned up the bound volumes of Dodsley’s
Museum. The resemblance between Walpole’s lacqueys
and the friends of Mr. John Smawker therefore leads
to the conclusion that in its essentials English lacquey-

dom had altered little—if at all—in nine decades.
Descartes writes :
86 HORACE WALPOLE CHAP.

I have a secret Satisfaction in thinking how Popular I
shall be with the Gentlemen of the Upper Gallery, who,
by this Establishment of Posts for Cards and Notes, will
get all their mornings to themselves, and have Time to
dress themselves for the Play, or even to read the Play on
which they are to pass their Judgment in the Evening.

He ends on a topical note, with a bouquet flung
sideways at the victorious Cumberland. After con-
senting to the possible exemption of the corps diplo-
matique from the proposed tax, he concludes thus:

But I am entirely against any other Exceptions, unless
of some fair and noble Ladies who I hear intend giving
balls on the approaching Birthday of the Royal Youth
who has so gloriously deliver’d his country and beauteous
Countrywomen from their Apprehensions of a Race of
barbarous Mountaineers, and who is now extirpating
Rebellion in the very Heart of those Inhospitable Mountains.

The ‘ Advertisement on Good Breeding” that
made Gray and Wharton “laugh so” is a slight enough
thing in itself, but has more than one satiric touch
which inspires a certain regret that none of the chapters
whose headings are set forth was ever written in full.
The materials for these ten imaginary folio-volumes
have been, the grandiose title-page informs us, “Col-
lected from the Best Authors, as Baker’s Chronicle,
the Compleat Dancing Master, the Law of Nations,
the Margrave’s Monitor, the Constable’s Guide,
Picart’s Religious Ceremonies, etc.”; yet the whole is
“adapted to the meanest Capacities, whether Peeresses,
Lord Chamberlains, Embassadors, Bishops, Justices of
the Peace, Gentlemen-Ushers, Barbers or Chamber-
maids.” The publisher of the work is “Clement
Quoteherald, at the sign of Champion Dimmock in
Ave Mary Lane”. Several of the chapter-headings
v PAPERS IN DODSLEY’S “MUSEUM” 8

are exceedingly “ Horatian”. Such are: Book I.
Chapter IV. of Brutality; Why sometimes taken for
Wit; Some Endeavours to prove that Bluntness and
Beastliness are no Marks of Courage: Chapter IX.
Enquiry whether Adam called Eve Madam or My Dear
before Company; the latter Opinion condemned by the
Council of Nice. The irony grows more bitter in the
Second Book, of which the seventh chapter deals with
the Folly of Being well-bred to Persons in Want or
Affliction; while the ninth chapter of the Third
touches, amongst other matters, upon Widows, Hoops,
Fans, Wigs, Snuff-boxes, Entertainments, etc.; As Also
Directions for forgetting one’s Friends, etc. etc. Wal-
pole was no fierce denunciator of the foibles of man-
kind. His good breeding and his hatred of excess
taught him a philosophy of life more comfortable, if
less profound, than that evolved by the Dean of St.
Patrick’s. Yet the saeva indignatio of Swift seems to
leap up here and there in these ironical phrases, and
to touch them with a faint and brief reflection of its
own livid flame.
CHAPTER V

“THE BEAUTIES ’—THE JACOBITE LORDS—THE EPILOGUE
TO “TAMERLANE —STRAWBERRY HILL

“AFTER all your goodness to me”, Walpole writes to
Montagu, on his return from a visit to his old school-
fellow at Windsor in May 1746, “don’t be angry that
I am glad I am got into brave old London again.”
He adds that he is deep in the newly-published Sidney
Papers, and that “a little pamphlet of Sir Philip’s in
defence of his Uncle Leicester” has given him “a much
better opinion of his parts than his dolorous Arcadia”.

At this time the friendship between Montagu and
himself was of the warmest, but when “dear George”

commends “dear Horry’s” letters, his praises are
hastily shrugged aside.

“Don’t commend me,” urges Walpole, “you don’t
know what harm it will do me: you will make me a pains-
taking man, and I had rather be dull without any trouble.
From partiality to me you will not allow my letters to be
letters. Jesus! it sounds as if I wrote them to be fine,
and to have them printed, which might be very well for
Mr. Pope 2

 

. . . but not for Mr. Walpole, who, of course, never

at any time jotted down a preliminary draft, or re-

trieved his letters from his correspondents in order to
&
CHAP. V “THE BEAUTIES” 89

annotate and amend them! He is probably less dis-
ingenuous when, writing to the same friend, he pro-
fesses comparative ignorance of current politics, and
vows that his books, his wirt#, and his “other {follies
and amusements” take up too much of his time to
leave him leisure to attend to the affairs of the public.
Among these “other follies” he would probably have
counted—and a severe critic might still count—his
poem The Beauties, an Epistle addressed to Mr. Eck-
hardt the Painter, concerning which he remarked to
Mann, “I never wrote anything that I esteemed less”.
Eckhardt, a German by birth, then enjoyed something
of a vogue in London, and painted, among other well-
known people, Conyers Middleton, Gray, Lady Mary
Churchill, and Walpole himself. Towards the end of
June 1746 Walpole was evidently “roughing out”
this work, for he then wrote to Montagu that he wished
he could “meet with any man that could copy the
Beauties in the Castle”. Three weeks later he was
with Rigby at Mistley, whence—at the instigation of
his host—he sent a draft of the poetical epistle to Henry
Fox, whose sister-in-law figured among the ladies
whom Eckhardt was urged to paint. Fox was at that
time in high favour. It was only two years since he
had intervened on Sir Robert’s side in the debate on
Pulteney’s Secret Committee motion, and the day was
still distant when his treatment of Conway should
estrange him from Conway’s loyal cousin. Yet even
in the height of their friendship one notices in his
letters to Walpole a touch of that mingled méfiance and
assurance which upstarts not infrequently betray in
their dealings with people of established rank and
station. The manuscript, however, he received with
90 HORACE WALPOLE CHAP.

enthusiasm. “As many thanks as I have to give you,”
he writes, “I think more are due to Rigby, for I have
long known that it is much easyer for you to write
good verses than to show them when you have done.”
And he exclaims, with rising fervour, “Upon my word,
I never read anything more poetical and pretty than
many parts of this, especially that on Fanny”. This
particular Beauty, Fanny Greville, née Maccartney,
was the godmother of another Fanny far better known
to fame—to wit, Fanny Burney.

The lines “on Fanny” singled out by Fox may be
quoted as a fair example of the tints and texture of the
whole composition:

How pretty Flora, wanton maid,

By Zephyr woo’d in noon-tide shade,
With rosy hand coquetly throwing
Pansies beneath her sweet touch blowing,

How blithe she look’d let Fanny tell,
Let Zephyr own if half so well.

Fox was no bad critic. These six lines—despite
the iambic quantity given to “pansies” in the fourth—
remain among the most pleasing of all the couplets
addressed to “Friend Eckhardt”, and the image of
Fanny remains among the most attractive of the
subjects there proffered to his brush The painter is
first urged to disregard the goddesses of antiquity, the
writings of Pliny, and the opinions of MM. “Félibien
and Fresnoy "—i.e. André Félibien, sometimes called
the “French Vasari”, and that Dufresnoy whose
De Arte Graphica was translated into English by
Dryden. Then he is thus exhorted:

In Britain's isle observe the fair,
And curious chuse your models there;

for, if he follows this advice:
v “THE BEAUTIES”? 91

On your each canvas we'll admire
The charms of the whole heav’nly choir.

Soon the poet imagines himself in a more harrow-
ing predicament than that of Paris:

Ten Queens of Beauty sure I see!

The resemblance between these voluptuous and yet
monotonous figures and those painted by Lely and
Kneller was perfectly obvious to Walpole, who, indeed,
drew much of his inspiration from those languishing
and smirking dames, and observes that:

. . . George's age beholds restor’d
What William boasted, Charles ador’d.

To two, at least, of the earlier Beauties he alludes
by name—Lely’s Duchess of Cleveland and Kneller’s
Duchess of Grafton.

He is frightened out of his wits by Fox’s encomiums
on his verses. “But, seriously, my dear Sir,” he
writes in reply, “you alarm me, with talking of making
those I sent you public.” And, after a few more

protestations, he proceeds to analyse his sentiments in
some detail :

You think me modest, but all my modesty is pride;
while I am unknown, I am as great as my own imagination
pleases to make me: the instant I get into that dreadful
Court of Requests you talk of, I am as silly a fellow as
Thomson or Glover—you even reduce me to plead that
foolish excuse against being published, which authors make
to excuse themselves when they have published—that
their compositions were made in a hurry, or extempore.
Rigby will assure you that what I sent you was literally
wrote in less than three hours; and, my dear Harry, I am
not vain enough to think that I can write in three hours
what would deserve to live three days.
92 HORACE WALPOLE CHAP.

The inclusion of the Beauties both in Dodsley’s
Collection of 1748, and Walpole’s own Fugitive Pieces
of 1758 is an amusing commentary upon that last
assertion. But then, as the Short Notes inform us, the
poem had already been “handed about till it got into
print, very incorrectly”.

On August 1, 1746, Walpole sent to Mann one of
the most frequently-quoted and the most deservedly-
admired letters of their whole correspondence—the
description of the trial of the Jacobite lords in West-
minster Hall. There is little need for the chronicler
to tell us that the sight at once “ feasted one’s eyes and
engaged all one’s passions”. From the opening
passages, when the stage is set in the scarlet-hung hall
and the dramatic personae are introduced, Kilmarnock,
“tall and slender, with an extreme fine person”,
Cromartie, dejected and sullen, Balmerino, “the most
natural brave old fellow I ever saw”, it is evident that
here Walpole’s eyes were fed, and his imagination
kindled, as never in his life before. The account of
the trial is admirably planned. Action, dialogue, and
narrative are balanced and alternated with judgement
and skill, and the comic element, so necessary in order
to give full weight to the tragic, emerges at exactly the
right moments, and in exactly the right way. The
painful tension is relieved with an almost Shakes-
pearean drop into farce when “old Norsa, . . . an old
Jew that kept a tavern”, hearing Walpole remark,
“I really feel for the prisoners”, exclaims in a burst
of righteous indignation, “Feel for them! pray, if they
had succeeded, what would have become of all us?”
That Walpole, despite his Whiggish and anti-Popish
upbringing, his admiration for Cumberland, and his
v THE JACOBITE LORDS 93

zeal for the House of Hanover, did feel for the prison-
ers, and with ever-increasing warmth, cannot be doubted
for one moment. Oddly enough, it is not on behalf
of the elegant Kilmarnock, with his drooping shoulders
and his “too exactly dressed hair” that his sympathies
are most generously engaged, but on behalf of the
uncouth, dauntless and jocular Balmerino. He writes
on the same theme, though more briefly, to George
Montagu on August 2, and is charmed that on the
way from Westminster to the Tower “poor brave old
Balmerino” should have “stopped the coach at Charing
Cross to buy honey-blobs, as the Scotch call goose-
berries”. Three days later he is still harping on “old
Balmerino”. He is growing weary of a London thick
with dust, encumbered with sightseers, heavy with the
imagined reek of rebel blood. “If”, he writes to
Montagu, “you can find me out any clean, little house
in Windsor, ready furnished, that is not absolutely in
the middle of the town, but near you, I shall be glad
to take it for three or four months.”

To such good purpose did Montagu bestir himself,
the clean little house was promptly found, “within the
precincts of the Castle at Windsor”, and as promptly
rented from the owner, Mr. Jordan, at forty guineas
a year.

Walpole remained in London till the day following
the execution of the Jacobite lords, but the very full and
vivid description of the scene which he wrote to Mann
was derived from “two persons . . . who were at the
house next the scaffold”, and a third “who was upon
it”. He himself prudently abstained from “assisting”
at.a ceremony so trying to sensitive nerves; had he not
fainted three times at the sight of a flagellant’s bleeding
94 HORACE WALPOLE CHAP.

shoulders in Rome? To the last, all his enthusiasm is
for Balmerino, who gave the signal to the executioner
“by tossing up his arm as if he were giving the signal
for battle”.
In September Walpole’s tranquillity was shattered
by the arrival in London of a certain Marquis Rinun-
cini whom, at Mann’s request, he took under his wing,
and to whom he did the honours of “the palaces, and
Richmond Gardens and Park, and ®henevix’s shop”.
Rinuncini did not prove grateful either to his sponsor
in Florence or his cicerone in England, but the letter
recording his visit is memorable as containing one of
Walpole’s earliest allusions to Mrs. Chenevix, “the
noted toy-woman”, from whom he was destined to
buy one of the most famous playthings of the century,
to wit, Strawberry Hill. It was probably a con-
solation for all the ardours and endurances of the
Rinuncini corvée when, less than a month later, two
very different travellers arrived from the same pleasant
strand—“the dear Chutes”, and nothing less.

“I strolled to town one day last week”, writes Walpole
to Mann, “and there I found them! Poor creatures!
there they were! wondering at everything they saw, but
with the difference from Englishmen that go abroad of
keeping their amazement to themselves.”

Before the year waned, Gray had completed the
group thus happily reunited, and was “flaunting about
at Publick Places of all kinds” with his—and Walpole’s
— “two Italianised friends”.

1746 had been a rather good vintage year for Gray,
who did not fail to keep Walpole advised of the re-
newed activities of his Muse. Both the Eton Ode
and the Ode on Spring found their way from Cam-
v THE EPILOGUE TO “TAMERLANE” 95

bridge to Arlington Street, or to the “little tub” on
Windsor Hill, and both were received with enthusiasm.
Writing to Conway on October 3, Walpole encloses
a copy of the former poem, which he desires him “to
like excessively”, and of which he modestly hastens
to disclaim the authorship:

You will immediately conclude, out of good breeding,
that it is mine, and that it is charming. I shall be much
obliged to you for the first thought, but desire you will
retain only the second; for it is Mr. Gray’s, and not your
humble servant’s.

In every recurring month of November between
1702 and 1815, the anniversary of the birth of William
III. and of his disembarkation at Torbay was cele-
brated by a pompful performance of Rowe’s Tamerlane.
This celebration was awaited with more than usual
interest in 1746, for it was felt that the recent drastic
suppression of the last flicker of Jacobite activity gave
an additional point and force to the play, and a topical
epilogue was confidently anticipated. Nor were these
loyal anticipations left unsatisfied. On November 3
Walpole is writing to Montagu from Arlington Street:

I shall be with you by the end of the week: but just now
I am under the maidenhead-palpitation of an author.
My epilogue will, I believe, be spoken to-morrow night:
and I flatter myself I shall have no faults to answer for
but what are in it, for I have kept secret whose it is.

This epilogue was spoken by Mrs. Pritchard in the
character of the Comic Muse, but of its reception all
that Walpole says, in sending the manuscript to Mann,
is, “it succeeded to flatter me”. Surely the laughing
lips of the Comic Muse were never compelled to frame
96 HORACE WALPOLE CHAP.

more ponderously solemn couplets than these! True,
she begins by reminding her audience that
. once more in annual joy we meet
This genial night in freedom’s fay'rite seat;

And o'er the two great empires still I reign
Of Covent Garden and of Drury Lane;

but she proceeds to remind them also that recently
. .. clouds o'er all our realm impended!
instead of the pleasing prospect of “annual joy”,

Chains, real chains, our heroes had in view,
And scenes of mimic dungeons chang’d to true:
An equal fate the stage and Britain dreaded
Had Rome’s young missionary spark succeeded.
But laws and liberties are trifling treasures;
He threaten’d that grave property, your pleasures!
The first, and almost the only, touch of comedy
is provided by a vision of the Tragic Muse, who had
shared the general perturbation:
To eyes well tutor’d in the trade of grief
She rais’d a small and well-lac’d handkerchief,
before informing her “buskin’d progeny” of the
imminent arrival of “a bloody chief”

Big with the work of slav’ry and of Rome.
His coming, she declared, must infallibly prove
Fatal alike to audience and to play’rs.

Why either the Comic or the Tragic Muse should
have feared eclipse under the sway of a scion of the
House of Stuart it is not very easy to understand; but
the epilogue makes it clear that both Muses were
greatly alarmed, and that their relief was proportion-
ately great when the peril was averted. The sound
v THE EPILOGUE TO “TAMERLANE” 97

of the name “William” inspires the author to a glow-
ing passage of rhetorical interrogation.

What golden vision’s this I see arise?

What youth is he with comeliest conquest crown’d,
His warlike brow with full-blown laurels bound?
What wreaths are these that Vict’ry dares to join
And blend with trophies of my fav'rite Boyne?

This particular year ended cheerfully enough for
Horace Walpole. “The Chutes and I deal extremely
together,” he writes to Mann in December, “ but they
abuse me, and tell me I am grown so English! lack-a-
day, so I am.” Despite this not undeserved reproach,
the society of the uncle and nephew must have been
very agreeable to him at this time. Gray, too, had
thrown off the last traces of his reserve, and was
writing to him quite in the old vein. From the
following letter, sent in the last days of the year, it is
plain that Walpole had already begun to plan, if not
to write, his Memoirs, though in the Short Notes he
himself gives the date of their commencement as 1751.

This comes du fond de ma cellule to salute Mr. H. W. not
so much him that visits and votes, and goes to White’s and
to Court, as the H. W. in his rural capacity, snug in his
tub on Windsor Hill, and brooding over folios of his own
creation. . . . Among the little folks, my godsons and
daughters, I cannot choose but enquire more particularly
after the health of one; I mean, without a figure, the
Memoirs. Do they grow?

Walpole’s answer to this letter does not appear to
have been preserved, but we know from the Short Notes
that “about the same time” he paraphrased some
lines from the first book of Lucan. His enthusiasm
for this poet did not diminish as years passed, and
98 HORACE WALPOLE CHAP.

was augmented by the decision of the Jesuit fathers
in 1758 that the works of the “brave and honest”
Roman should not be included in the curriculum of
the Dauphin.

During the month of February 1747 members
of the House of Commons had what Horace Walpole
described to Mann as “a warm day on a motion for
inquiring into useless places and quarterings”, and
Mr. Pitt, erewhile Sir Robert’s “terrible cornet of
horse” but now Paymaster-General under an ascendant
star, speaking of the Secret Committee—of which he
had been one—was “so well advised” as to acquit
Sir Robert “pretty amply”. Horace Walpole was
pleased, but he did not see “the so vast merit” in
Pitt’s owning now “for his interest what for his honour
he should have owned five years ago”, and he thought
that Uncle Horace and brother Ned demonstrated
their pleasure with rather too much empressement.
Lovat’s last buffooneries, and the not altogether ignoble
closing scenes of his career, provided the material for
two further letters that must have been read and
retailed with great interest at the Casa Manetti; but
the early spring of 1747 is memorable for students of
Walpole’s life chiefly on account of the watery demise
of the pensive Selima, and its sequel. The election of
Selima’s master to a Fellowship of the Royal Society,
which occurred about the same time, seems by con-
trast an event of small moment. When the Ode on
the death of a favourite Cat was written, Celadon and
Orozmades must surely have felt that the last phantom
of their quarrel had been drowned with her in that
famous “tub of gold fishes”.

May was, on the whole, a month of pleasing news.
v STRAWBERRY HILL 99

Sir William Yonge’s “good-natured bill” to allow
prisoners charged with treason to have the assistance
of counsel engaged Walpole’s humanitarian sympathies
at once; for, pace Macaulay, those sympathies were
not of that capricious kind always either absent entirely
or present in excess. Mr. Fox’s great ball at Holland
House and Admiral Anson’s neat little victory over
the French off Cape Finisterre, were also agreeable
items for a Florentine gazette, though the gazetteer
seems conscious of a certain dearth of solid material.
The next letter, though he apologises for its extreme
brevity, is actually of extreme interest, for it contains
the first mention of the “little new farm” which he
had “just taken out at Twickenham”. There he
was glad to seek refuge from the pother of the im-
pending elections. He had declined to stand for
King’s Lynn, preferring his safe Cornish seat, and
leaving the field in Norfolk free for “Prince Pig-
wiggin”, Uncle Horace’s unimpressive eldest son.
“He is to be chosen for Lynn,” writes Walpole,
“because I must have gone; I go to Callington again,
whither I don’t go.” Of the “little new farm” he
tells Mann “the house is so small that I can send it
you in a letter to look at”—a pleasantry to be revived
more than once, after the house had doubled and
trebled its original dimensions—and he is sure that,
with his two or three little meadows, and his “Turkish
sheep and two cows, all studied in their colours for
becoming the view”, he will “grow as much a shepherd
as any swain in the Astrea”. It was to Conway,
however, that he wrote the most characteristic and,
perhaps, the best known, of all the many letters which
that “little plaything-house” inspired:
100 HORACE WALPOLE CHAP.

TWICKENHAM, June 8, 1747.

You will perceive by my date that I am got into a new
camp, and have left my tub at Windsor. It is a little play-
thing-house that I got out of Mrs. Chenvix’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 roll’d,
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 predecessed me
here, and instituted certain games called cricketalia, which
have been celebrated this very evening in honour of him
in a neighbouring meadow.

On June 26 Walpole reports the safe arrival of the
Boccapadugli eagle, destined to be one of the chief
glories of the plaything-house. Despite the fact that
its beak was damaged in transit, its joyful owner
describes it as “a glorious fowl”, and declares, when he
has placed it opposite the Vespasian, “there are no two
such morsels in England!”

During the greater part of July and August Wal-
pole remained in London, where there were “not ten
people” besides the Chuteheds and himself, and whence
v STRAWBERRY HILL 101

he sent notes upon the successive stages of the: futile
war, such as the fall of Bergen-op-Zoomi,-or the capture
of “two-and forty sail of:the: Domirigo dset”. by .the
English. In September he was back at Twickenham,
where Chute and Montagu visited him, and where he
began to cultivate the acquaintance of Mann's brother,
Galfridus, with results highly advantageous to that
amiable army-clothier,

In the Short Notes it is recorded that during 1747,
1748, and 1749, Horace Walpole “wrote thirteen
numbers of a weekly paper called Old England or the
Broad-bottom Journal, but being sent to the printer
without a name, they were published horribly de-
formed and spoiled”. Believing his father’s ancient
foe, George Lyttleton, to be the author of the Letter
to the Tories that caused some stir in 1747, he indited
a Letter to the Whigs, “a careless performance, and
written in five days”, which, with two others, was
printed in the ensuing Spring. A somewhat imperfect
edition of the Zdes Walpoliane, limited to two hundred
copies, and intended for distribution among friends,
was struck off in 1747, the revised and corrected
edition appearing five years later.

From the letters of 1747 it is evident that “the
little new farm”, though an agreeable retreat, has not
yet become an absorbing interest. The property
belonged to three minors, and when Mrs. Chenevix’s
lease expired, and Walpole had determined to acquire
the place in perpetuity—that is to say, in 1749 *—it

* In Short Notes Walpole himself gives the date as 1748, but
a letter to Montagu of May 18, 1749, proves that the bill legal-
ising the purchase was not introduced before that month and
year. The purchase-money amounted to £776: 10s.
102 HORACE WALPOLE CHAP.

had to be bought “by act of Parliament”. In the
first autumn of his tendncy he was still “casting many
a: southern: ool | towards Florence”, and declaring,
“I never was happy but there; have a million of times
repented of returning to England, where I never was
happy nor expect to be”. This Horace had not then
realised that his Tibur was to be Twickenham.

It was inevitable that Walpole should buy a little
house somewhere, and make a plaything of it, and
cram it with bric-d-brac. That he should have con-
ceived the idea of making its roof bristle with many
pinnacles and its ceilings unfurl much fan-tracery is,
perhaps, no matter for wonder, but it is matter for
thankfulness, since this conception of his was destined
to exert a singular influence upon the most salutary of
all the intellectual movements that marked the second
half of his century—the Return to Romance. When,
in 1750, Walpole avowed his intention to build “a
little Gothic castle at Strawberry Hill”, the polite
world still regarded the terms Gothic and barbarous
as more or less synonymous. Taste—that sort of taste
with which heaven was wont to visit wealthy fools—
had, it is true, begun to weary of Palladian severity, and
stucco “ruins” were arising here and there for the
beautification of parks already “embellished” with
bridges in the Chinese manner. But the proposition
that Gothic art could be applied successfully to
domestic architecture was one both to startle and to
astound. As Professor Ker pointed out, the first
appeal of the Romantic Revival was architectural
rather than literary. People tired of parterres and
pediments before they tired of the heroic couplet; and
landscape gardeners were making trees “hang over
v STRAWBERRY HILL 103

somewhat poetical’—to borrow a phrase from one of
them whom both Pope and Walpole patronsied—
before the colourless and rigid conventions of the Pope-
Boileau school in England had been touched by the
genius of Gray and by the talent—to call it nothing
higher—of Macpherson, Chatterton, and the two
Wartons.

On the literary and historical side also Walpole was
no trail-blazing pioneer, no lonely Baptist ululating in
an unexcited wilderness. The romantic spirit was
already shining faintly when Addison extolled Chevy
Chase and Lady Wardlaw indited the mock-archaic
ballad of Hardyknut. It may, however, be considered
a little curious that so potent a spirit should later have
moved upon the face of waters so shallow as the whims
and fancies of Horace Walpole. He was certainly never
an antiquary in the sense that Leland and Camden,
Dugdale and Selden, were antiquaries; and his
astonishing description of the Canterbury Tales as “a
lump of mineral from which Dryden has extracted
all the gold” goes far to support Professor Saintsbury’s
view that he had “no real love for mediaeval things in
general, and no real understanding of Romance in
particular”, and that “there is hardly a genuine and
unguarded expression of taste, throughout his immense
body of writing, which is sincerely Romantic when he
is not ‘speaking in character’ —talking ‘Strawberry’.”
The superficial quality of his antiquarianism is demon-
strated in his addenda to Baker's Chromicle, and in
his researches into the career of the many-wintered
Countess of Desmond. Of genuine archzologists he
was, indeed, a little contemptuous and a little afraid—
unless, like Cole and Pinkerton, Lysons and Zouch,
104 HORACE WALPOLE CHAP.

they were willing to revolve as distant satellites within
the orbit of Strawberry Hill. Yet Strawberry’s creator
did much to rend asunder the cold cerecloths that
muffled the still breathing, though long sepultured,
form of Romance. His social prestige, his not incon-
siderable wealth—think of the contrast between his
income and poor Shenstone’s £300 a year—the
- curiosity which his fads aroused in circles that
might not otherwise have cared two flirts of a fan or
two pinches of snuff whether pinnacles were more to
be admired than colonnades, or the Black Prince’s
hauberk than the cuirass of Hannibal, all contributed
to fortify and accelerate a movement of which he him-
self was very far from foreseeing the full results. The
spiritual descendants of Walpole are many, and not a
few of them reflect credit upon the forebear whom they
resemble so little. Setting aside mere imitators, such
as Clara Reeve, Mrs. Radcliffe, and “Monk” Lewis,
and parodists, conscious or unconscious, such as
Peacock, Barham, and Miss Austen, there are sealed of
the tribe of Horace writers as vivid and as picturesque
as Byron and Keats, Birger and Victor Hugo, Scott,
Dumas, and Alfred de Vigny. Their true ancestral
halls are in the Castle of Atranto. On the other hand,
the architectural “ children” of Strawberry itself are a
rather less impressive family. They include Fonthill,
Lee Priory, and Abbotsford, to which were added—
after the movement had got its second wind in the
first half of the nineteenth century—such erections as
St. Luke's Church, Chelsea, the Assize Courts at
Manchester, and, strangest of all, the rectory where
Tennyson was born.

Gray, who reacted quickly to the stimulus of the
v STRAWBERRY HILL 105

Strawberry idea, would fain have seen it carried out
with stern consistency, and was inclined to regret that
the windows were glazed. He should have known that
Walpole loved snugness and neatness almost as dearly
as he loved pinnacles. “In truth,” confesses the
Preface to the final edition of the Description of the
Villa, “I did not mean to make my house so Gothic
as to exclude convenience, and modern refinements in
luxury”: and he was very far from echoing Shenstone’s
exhortation to the winds to bear him “near some sad
ruin’s ghastly shade to dwell”, in order that he might
“fondly eye the rude remains” and “from the moulder-
ing refuse build his cell”. Mould would have been
exceedingly inimical to the damascened armour, the
marble emperors and eagles, the medals, enamels,
paintings, and bronzes which formed the museo Wal-
poliano. Many years later Selwyn, very ill-naturedly,
wrote of Strawberry as “a catacomb, or, at best, a
museum, rather than a habitation”, and of its owner
as “one of the most carefully finished miniatures and
best-preserved mummies in the whole collection”,

The site of this fantastic, incongruous, and yet
oddly engaging toy-castle was occupied in 1747 by a
modest house built fifty years earlier by Lord Brad-
ford’s coachman, and “called by the common people
Chopped-straw-hall, they supposing that by feeding
his lordship’s horses with chopped straw he had saved
enough money to build the house”. The name
Strawberry Hill, however, appeared in the old leases,
and by that pleasing name Walpole soon christened
his diminutive estate. The original building—never
demolished, but gradually incorporated in the “Gothic
castle’—had been “let as a lodging house” to a
106 HORACE WALPOLE CHAP.

succession of not undistinguished tenants, including
Colley Cibber, who wrote The Refusal or the Lady's
Philosophy under its modest roof. Walpole, as has
been recorded, took over the remainder of a lease from
the persuasive and rapacious Mrs. Chenevix, in whose
famous toy-shop bergamot tooth-pick-cases and papier-
mdché snuff-boxes, and other pretty baubles, as well
as children’s playthings, could be bought for many
times their fair price.

Though the resolution to Gothicise the little house
must have been taken as early as September 1749,
when he wrote to Montagu that he had found a text
in Deuteronomy to authorise his “future battlements”,
it was not until 1753 that Walpole began to build the
Refectory or Great Parlour, with its truly terrible
chimney-piece designed by the younger Bentley, and
the library, where the books were ultimately ranged
within Gothic arches and pierced work. 1760-63
saw the addition of the picture gallery, with a ceiling
copied from that of Henry VII.’s chapel, the round
tower, the great cloister and the tribune. In 1770
the great north bedchamber was built followed in
1776 by the Flemish tower, Beauclerk tower (built
to contain Lady Di Beauclerk’s soot-water illustrations
to The Mysterious Mother), and the hexagon closet.
After that, few additions, or none, were made to the
fabric until, in 1842, Frances, Lady Waldegrave,
inherited the empty shell of the “castle” from her
husband, the seventh Earl, and set to work, with better
intentions than results, to enlarge and improve it,

1 Walpole gives the dates 1760-61 for the earlier stages of the
construction, but M. Paul Yvon (in La Vie d’un Dilettante)

following Austin Dobson, considers this an understatement, and
that the dates given above are correct.
v STRAWBERRY HILL 107

In quest of designs Walpole not only ransacked
Dugdale and Hollar, and enlisted the aid of Chute
and Bentley, but went upon a sequence of antiquarian
tours through various parts of rural England. In the
little plantation, called, by courtesy, “the wood”, was
built a little edifice called, by courtesy, ‘the chapel”,
which had a ceiling designed by Chute, an oaken
Gothic bench designed by Bentley, and, among other
more sumptuous objects associated with “super-
stition’s papal gloom”, an earthenware holy water
stoup presented by Selwyn. On the “castle” itself
stucco pinnacles sprang up like fast-growing plants
and lath-and-plaster parapets rose—though to no very
great height—against the horizon. Small wonder that
a disconcerted Frenchwoman should describe the
effect as pas digne de la solidité anglaise!

It is very easy to smile compassionately at these
follies, and at the suggestion that Aymer de Valence,
threatened with ejection from the Abbey, should find a
resting-place in the grounds of Strawberry Hill. Before
our compassionate smile changes to one of disdain,
it might be well for us to recall that only thirty-two
years before the Refectory was begun, Strype, himself
an antiquary, as the term was then understood, wrote
of a “number of rude Gothic monuments” in the
Abbey, “which instead of adorning really encumber
the church”, and remarked scornfully that the effigy
on the Vere monument “is in the old Gothic taste,
flat on his Back and therefore not to be Relished”.
To Horace Walpole, more than to any other single
Englishman, belongs the credit for having, before the
half-spent century closed, reversed the conception
popularly attached to the word “Gothic”, and changed
108 HORACE WALPOLE CHAP.

it from an adjective of opprobrium into an epithet of
praise.

On his side, the Lord of Strawberry Hill smiled
compassionately at the Squire of The Leasowes.
“Poor man! he wanted to have all the world talk of
him for the pretty place he had made, and which he
seems to have made only that it might be talked of.”
Yet when the public insisted on making a show of his
house, he was flattered as well as harassed by their
importunity ; nor can it be doubted that he got a good
deal of amusement out of his dle of showman, played
from behind the scenes, while Margaret, his house-
keeper-curatrix, or one of her successors, sustained
the principal speaking-part in the centre of the stage.

The year 1748 witnessed the expansion of the Straw-
berry estate from five acres to fourteen, and much
planting of trees—though none, as yet, of pinnacles—
thereon. In January the publication of Admiral
Vernon's papers gave Walpole a sense of impish
triumph, as they included documents highly damaging
to the reputation of Lord Bath. A month later
occurred the peculiar “breeze” between himself and
Mr. Speaker Onslow. A proposal by the Grenvilles
to shift the Assizes from Ailesbury to Buckingham
displeased Walpole, as the interests of the Chief
Justice, Willes, an old partisan of Sir Robert’s, were,
or it seemed to be, involved. His anxiety to “second
Mr. Potter” in a debate upon the question was frus-
trated by Onslow, who also cut short a half-spoken
anti-Grenvillite oration by Sir William Stanhope.
Walpole promptly published his own abortive speech
in Sir William's name. An obvious “blind” as to
the identity of the speaker is the remark that Bucking-
v STRAWBERRY HILL 100

ham being a county town for the last forty years was
a “reason fit only to capture the imagination of an
antiquarian”.  Grenvillites rushed into print, and
Walpole answered them in The Speech of Richard
W hiteliver spoken to the most August Mob in Rag Fair.
“All these things”, he admits, in the Short Notes,
“were only excusable by the lengths to which party
feeling had been carried against my father; or rather
were not excusable even then.” Richard Whiteliver
is certainly an energetic orator. “Wou'd you know”,
he asked the most August Mob, “for what all men
esteem us? Why, for the whole tenour of our conduct.
For our virulence in opposition and our insolence in
power; . . . and for our steadiness of character in
being the same noisy, intriguing, buzzing, senseless
demagogues in a court party that we were in a faction.”
The Grenvilles and their friends were not pleased.
CHAPTER VI

“DELENDA EST OXONIA”—THE “MEMOIRS” —“‘THE
FUNERAL OF THE LIONESS—THE ‘MEMOIRS’
RESUMED—PAPERS IN “THE WORLD ’—“THE
ENTAIL”

Towarps the middle of the year 1748 Walpole’s
enthusiasm for “brave old London” waned apace,
and he was off in Essex again, staying with Rigby,
whose society would appear to have been as inspiriting
as his political morality—or lack of it—was deplorable.
Thence he betook himself to the house of that odd crea-
ture Robert Nugent, poetaster, adventurer, happy wooer
of wealthy widows, at Gosfield, and thence was “car-
ried to see the last remains of the glory of the old
Aubrey de Veres, Earls of Oxford”. It was on his
return to Strawberry Hill in the August of this year
that the vast and rubicund countenance of Kitty Clive
dawned upon those pleasant scenes which it was after-
wards to illuminate so often and so long. Together
with Mrs. Pritchard, Pritchard fils, and Mrs. Metheglin,
she dined at the still unbattlemented villa, and was, her
host records, “very good company”. From this dinner
we may date the beginning of her friendship with
Walpole, who, in 1755, assigned to her the pretty
cottage, Little Strawberry Hill, where she lived as his
110
CHAP. VI “DELENDA EST OXONIA” 11r

guest and neighbour till her death thirty years later.
A very different August visitor of 1748 was Gray.

“He is”, wrote Walpole to Montagu, “the worst com-
pany in the world—from a melancholy turn, from living
reclusely, and from a little too much dignity, he never
converses easily.”

To Conway he confessed about this time:

My present and sole occupation is planting, in which I
have made great progress, and talk very learnedly with
the nurserymen, except that now and then a lettuce run
to seed overturns all my botany, for I have more than once
taken it for a curious West Indian flowering shrub.

The character-cketch of Henry Fox which was
printed as an extraordinary number of the World in
1756 was actually written in the form of a letter to
Lady Caroline, during the second year of Walpole’s
tenancy of Strawberry Hill. Here the wit of the writer
is manifestly shackled by the fact that he is attempting a
portrait of an individual, not the delineation of a type;
his desire to please automatically excludes that touch
of malice without which a composition of this kind
is apt to be somewhat flat and tame. In the allusions
to Fox’s gift of “being more agreeably good-natured,
and idle with more ease than other people” the curious
may discern a hint of certain social qualities—and
defects—inherited by the more famous Charles James.

It is perhaps a little strange that Walpole’s pub-
lished correspondence for the year 1748 should contain
no allusion to Dodsley’s Collection of Poems by Various
Hands, that very interesting though disconcertingly
unequal miscellany, the nearest approach ever made by
the Augustan age to England’s Helicon and the other
great Elizabethan anthologies. Three of his own com-
112 HORACE WALPOLE CHAP.

positions—the Epistle to Ashton, The Beauties, and the
Epilogue to Tamerlane—were included, and three of
Gray’s. The tactful anthologist must have sought, or
affected to seek, Walpole’s assistance in the selection
of certain of these “pieces”, for Gray remarks in a
letter to Wharton, “Dodsley is publishing three
Miscellaneous Volumes: some new, many that have
been printed ... Mr. W. has given him three Odes
of mine”; the three being the Eton Ode, the Ode to
Spring, and Selima.

As the year waned, his plantations absorbed Wal-
pole’s attention almost to the exclusion of literature and
politics. The signing of peace between England,
Holland, France and Spain, hardly makes a ripple
upon the surface of his correspondence. “Lord
Leicester told me the other day”, he wrote to Mann
not long afterwards, “that he heard I would not buy
some old china because I was laying out all my money
in trees: ‘Yes’, said I, ‘my Lord, I used to love blue
trees, but now I like green ones.” With 1749, how-
ever, there comes a revival of his old interest in politics,
and early in March he reports that he has been “shut
up in the House of Commons for the last fortnight or
three weeks”. In June Gray was at Stoke, whence he
wrote to Walpole, “having put an end to a thing whose
beginning you have seen long ago, I immediately send
it to you”. The “thing” was the Elegy in a Country
Churchyard.

Despite the strong anti-monarchical bias of the
Epistle to Ashton, its author could hardly dissemble his
pleasure when early in July 1749 Frederick, Prince of
Wales, conveyed to him through Sir Luke Schaub his
desire to possess a copy of the ZEdes Walpoliane. “I
VI “DELENDA EST OXONIA” 113

sent him one bound quite in coronation robes”, he tells
Montagu, “and went last Sunday to thank him for the
honour.” He would have Montagu believe that they
spoke only of painting and painters, more especially of
the Prince's favourite, Andrea del Sarto; and it is
possible that they did. Yet it is, to say the least of it,
a curious coincidence that in 1748 and in 1749 Walpole
should have been one of the anonymous contributors
to the Remembrancer. This paper, he informed Mann,
was “the Craftsman of the present age, and generally
levelled at the Duke”, that is to say, at him of Cumber-
land. In his own manuscript notes, preserved among
the Waldegrave papers at Chewton Priory, he records
that it was published “for the Prince’s party”, and
dropped on the Prince’s death in 1751. It is certain
that Nollkejumskoi’s “known brutality” (to borrow a
phrase later applied by Walpole to Dr. Johnson) had
rendered him highly obnoxious to Walpole just about
the time that Prince Titi was plying his music in order
to win his allegiance,

In the Short Notes Walpole has left it on record that
he wrote in 1749 “a copy of verses on the fireworks for
the Peace”, never printed; also that about the same
time he wrote a pamphlet called Delenda est Oxonia,
which he thought one of his best, and which was seized
at the printer’s and suppressed. As Dr. Paget Toynbee
has discovered an annotated copy of the pamphlet in
Walpole’s own hand among the Waldegrave papers,
and has given it to the world, it is now possible to
measure the pamphleteer’s own opinion against “the
thing itself”. Certain Jacobite demonstrations on the
part of a handful of Oxford undergraduates in 1749 had
intensified Hanoverian distrust of the older University,
114 HORACE WALPOLE CHAP.

and the Government resolved that the nomination to
the Chancellorship should henceforth be vested in the
Crown. The immediate result of this proceeding
would have been the election of Nollkejumskoi, but
the proposition aroused such a storm in the anti-
Cumberland camp that it had to be abandoned. Wal-
pole’s pamphlet was, he explains, “designedly colour’d
very strongly in order to pass the better for an Oxford
performance”, and he introduces a bold splash of
Oxford colour in the opening paragraph, where James
I1., whom we saw in the Epistle to Ashton “meditating
to subvert the laws”, is credited with “many great and
noble Qualities.”

As the pamphleteer warms to his work, one pauses
to wonder what can have been the underlying motive
which lent so mordant an edge to his ironic weapon.
Recollections of Prince Titi’s urbanity and of Cumber-
land’s bloodthirstiness probably enhanced a quite
sincere prejudice against the violation of ancient rights
and privileges; and then Walpole always loved an
ambush; or, as Macaulay puts it, “he loved mischief;
but he loved quiet; and he was constantly on the watch
for opportunities of gratifying both his tastes at once”.
The allusion is, of course, to the finicking political
intrigues of Walpole’s middle age, but it is relevant
here, for the affair of the Oxford Chancellorship gave
him just such an opportunity, and he seized it with
alacrity. After a sly hit at “the late Patriots”, he aims
one at the Grenvilles, and another at the Pelhams.
Then precedents are invoked—Henry IV.’s Lack-
Learning Parliament, Bishop Gardiner’s obstruction
of Sir John Cheke. One hears Whig laughter behind
the Tory mask when the author declares that (Robert)
VI “DELENDA EST OXONIA” 115

“Walpole himself, whose head was always full of plots
and visions of the Pretender . .. and who was by
no means remarkable for his patronage of Learning,
never attempted anything like this for the security of
his Masters”. Near the close a more cogent argument
emerges. “Other countries, who look on Oxford as
the Athens of the modern world”, when they see her
chastised for disaffection, “will examine what errors
in our Government have made so learned a body cast
off all respect for their Governors.”

On his way back from Mistley to Strawberry Hill
in the summer of this year Walpole had been “ex-
tremely entertained with some excursions . . . made
out of the road in search of antiquities”; and before
his young trees began to turn yellow he went on a
pilgrimage to Sussex, pursuing the same quest. This
time he had Chute as a fellow-pilgrim. “We thought
ourselves in the northest part of England”, he writes
to Montagu, “the whole country has a Saxon air, and
the inhabitants are as savage as if King George the
Second was first monarch of the East Angles.”

This year, which saw the Elegy completed, saw also
a steady increase of cordiality in the tone of Gray’s
letters to Walpole. His concern is transparently
genuine when he hears in November that, coming
home by moonlight from Holland House, his friend
has been attacked by two highwaymen in Hyde Park,
and all but slain by the pistol of one of them.

“I sincerely rejoice at your Deliverance”, writes the
poet, “and hope soon to tell you so in town; but in the
meantime should be glad to know from Yourself how it
happened, and how it feels when one returns back from
the very Brink of Destruction.”
116 HORACE WALPOLE CHAP.

This last phrase is hardly a hyperbole, for Walpole had
been stunned by the discharge of the pistol, and his
face marked with shot. “The ball”, he says in the
Short Notes, “went through the top of the chariot, and
had I sat an inch nearer to the left side must have gone
through my head.” His assailant was the notorious
James M‘Lean or Maclaine, “the Ladies’ Hero”, a
sort of “pinchbeck Macheath”. Five years later the
victim of the robbery made it the basis of a paragraph
in an essay on Politeness which he then contributed to
the World. “The whole affair”, he vows, “was con-
ducted with the greatest good breeding on both sides.”
It was characteristic of Walpole that when Maclaine
had to stand his trial in 1750 he not only refrained from
giving evidence against him—ifor which abstention he
was “honourably mentioned in a Grub ballad”—but
stood aside while the fashionable world, male and
female, thronged to Newgate. “As I conclude he will
suffer”, he wrote to Mann, “and wish him no ill, I
don’t care to have his idea, and am almost single in
not having been to see him.”

Walpole began this year—i1750—with a burst of
enthusiasm for L’Esprit des Lois, which he thought
“the best book that ever was written”. More especi-
ally did “that glorious chapter” on the African slave
trade appeal to him at a moment when “the British
Senate, that temple of liberty”, had been engaged in
“pondering methods to make more effectual that
horrid traffic of selling negroes”. He despises the
literati of Florence, “enormously, for their opinion of
Montesquieu’s book”; and he is chilled and dis-
concerted by Miny’s unresponsiveness to his “Gothic
castle” project. Grecian architecture, he protests,
VI “DELENDA EST OXONIA” 117

“is only proper for magnificent and public buildings.
Columns and all their beautiful ornaments look ridicu-
lous when crowded into a closet or a cheesecake house.”
As the year advances his spirits seem to rise. Neither
the mild earthquake in February nor the more energetic
one in March perturbed him greatly, though he watched
with rather malicious amusement the hasty exodus
from London of people more apprehensive than him-
self. Chute, already appointed Strawberry King-at-
Arms, was at this time occupied in concocting a
resplendent pedigree for Mann, expressly devised to
confound the sceptical and supercilious Florentines.
Provoked thereto “by the most impertinent usage”,
he also composed two somewhat caustic epigrams upon
the two delinquent ladies, Lady Caroline Petersham
and Miss Ashe. This proceeding on his part inspired
Walpole to string together ten pairs of scampering
anapastic lines upon Lady Bingley, a fast-fading
beauty who had sent her maid to “every glassman in
the town” in quest of a mirror which should give back
a pleasing image of herself. She is made to exclaim
ruefully:

One us’d to have mirrors so smooth and so bright

They did one’s eyes justice, they heightened one’s white,
And fresh roses diffus’d o'er one’s bloom—but alas!

In the glasses made now one detests one’s own face!

To the same year belongs the Epigram on Admiral
Vernon presiding over the Herring-fishery, a neat little
thrust at an uncouth old object,

A somewhat brilliant though erratic new planet
swam into Walpole’s ken this summer in the person of
Richard Bentley, the youngest son of the famous Master
of Trinity. “He has”, declared his new friend, “more
118 HORACE WALPOLE CHAP.

sense, judgement, and wit, more taste and more mis-
fortunes than sure ever met in any man.” This
“taste” of Bentley’s, coupled with his skill as a drafts-
man, made him a very acceptable addition to the
Gotbhicising group at Strawberry. Not until 1761 did
his “sense and judgment” so far fail him that his
wit ceased to atone for their failure. Cumberland,
Bentley’s nephew, gives as the reason for the ultimate
breach, a noble reluctance on his uncle’s part to endure
Walpole’s “patronage”; Walpole himself confided to
Cole that a contributory cause had been the ill-timed
and persistent intrusions of Mrs. Bentley at Strawberry
Hill. But indeed, the friendship had in it few elements
of permanence, Walpole’s “spirit of whim and folly”
being met and equalled by that of Bentley. It says
much for the magnanimity of the rejected “patron”
that twenty years later he was giving secret financial
assistance to his quondam crony, and that for the
benefit of Bentley’s orphan children he placed a sum
of money “in the funds”.

Their “impertinent usage” of his friend Chute did
not deter Walpole from frequenting the society of that
fastastic pair, Lady Caroline Petersham and “the little
Ashe”; and few passages in his letters have been more
often or more appreciatively quoted than his descrip-
tion of the visit he paid to Vauxhall in their train. To
that haunt of mirth they proceeded by barge, “with a
boat of French horns attending and little Ashe singing”.
After divers skirmishes and encounters,

At last we assembled in our booth, Lady Caroline in
the front, with the vizor of her hat erect, and looking
gloriously jolly and handsome. She had fetched my
brother Orford from the next box, where he was enjoying
VI “DELENDA EST OXONIA” 119

himself with his Norsa' and petite partie, to help us mince
chickens. We minced seven chickens into a china dish,
which Lady C. stewed over a lamp with three parts of
butter and a flagon of water, stirring, and rattling, and
laughing, and we every moment expecting to have the
dish fly about our ears.

In a postscript to this same letter Walpole tells
Montagu that Dr. Middleton had come to town, “to
consult his physician for a jaundice and swelled legs”.
It was at this juncture that Almanzor Ashton launched
an attack upon the dying man in a pamphlet entitled
A Dissertation on 2 Peter i. 19. “ He (Ashton) has at
last quite thrown off the mask,” writes Walpole to
Mann, “and in the most direct manner, against my
will, has written against my friend Dr. Middleton.”
Less than a week later Middleton was dead, and the
old friendship between Celadon and Almanzor was as
dead as he.

At the opening of the first parliamentary session of
1751 the Address to the King was moved by the mem-
ber for Callington, who has taken no pains to inform
posterity in what manner he acquitted himself of the
task. It was a delicate task, for it implied a full and
formal endorsement of the policy and conduct of the
two ministers whom he most heartily abhorred—
Pelham and Newcastle, The business before the
House was the winding-up (this commercial phrase
may well apply to a transaction so deeply tinged with
commerce) of the war with Spain, and piquancy was
lent to the debate by the unblushing recantation of

* “My brother Oxford's” mistress was the daughter of that
Jewish tavern-keeper who had resented Horace Walpole’s sym-
pathy with the Jacobite lords. See ante, p. 92.
120 HORACE WALPOLE CHAP.

Pitt, “who now exploded his own conduct in attempt-
ing to kindle the Spanish war”.

It is with this session that Walpole’s Memoirs of the
Last Ten Years of the Reign of King George 11. begin.
The Short Notes inform us that his original intention
had been to write the history of one year only, and
Gray’s letter of December 1746 proves that he had
played with the idea four years before putting it seri-
ously into execution. Characteristically enough, no
instructions as to the disposition of this somewhat
explosive MS. were left in Walpole’s will. Together
with the Memoirs of the Reign of King George III. it
was, in accordance with a detached Memorandum found
loose among his papers, placed by his executors in a
sealed box, and delivered to Lord Hugh Seymour,
through whose hands it passed to those of the writer's
great-grand-nephew, Lord Waldegrave, when his lord-
ship reached the age of twenty-five. In 1822 the earlier
Memoirs were prepared for the press and published
by Henry Fox’s grandson, Lord Holland ; twenty-three
years later Sir Denis Le Marchant brought out those
dealing with the reign of George IIL

Despite the malicious art of the portraits and the
occasional liveliness of the narrative, Walpole’s
Memoirs do not satisfy those of his readers who find
an incomparable charm in his more gracious and
whimsical prose. They lack perceptive. At times they
almost justify Macaulay’s assertion that the con-
formation of the writer’s mind “was such that whatever
was little seemed to him great, and whatever was great
seemed to him little”. The pervading atmosphere of
malice, self-seeking, and chicane detracts much from
the pleasure which the best-knit and best-balanced
VI THE “MEMOIRS” 121

scenes and characters might otherwise afford. Writing
in the Quarterly Review, John Wilson Croker declares
that the George II. Memoirs were “written under all
the excitements of party feeling, offended vanity, and
personal disgust”, and describes them as “a party
pamphlet in two quarto volumes”. There is, perhaps,
some tinct of truth in his contention that towards all
his fellow-creatures except Conway “Walpole seems
to have had the feelings of a tiger-cat, now sportive,
now cruel”, This stainless critic is shocked at the
gross and fulsome flattery of the Character of Henry
Fox, which he imagines to have been written shortly
before it was published in an “extraordinary number”
of the World; that is to say, at a time when the panegy-
rist was confiding to the unborn readers of his Memoirs
a view of Fox startlingly at variance with that expressed
in the Character. We now know that the more pleasing
portraits was written, and sent to Lady Caroline, eight
years before. In 1756 it was a resuscitation, though
not, perhaps, a particularly creditable one, under the
circumstances.

In March 1751 died Frederick, Prince of Wales,
of whom the Memoirs say that “he resembled his pat-
tern the Black Prince in nothing but in dying before
his father”. In March, too, died the second Earl of
Orford, leaving an erratic but not altogether unattrac-
tive son, that third Earl who, whether in his wits or
out of them, was fated to be so great a problem and
anxiety to his youngest uncle. The same doomful
month saw the untimely demise of Chute’s nephew,
Francis Whitehed ; and then arose what the Short Notes
describe as a “great family quarrel”. Poor Whitehed
had been betrothed to an heiress, Margaret Nicoll, and
122 HORACE WALPOLE CHAP.

Chute had “engaged” her “to run away from her
guardians, who had used her very ill”, and had “pro-
posed to marry her” to Lord Orford, “who refused
her, though she had above 150,000”. This refusal
appalled Walpole, who had dreamed of retrieving the
family fortunes in this sublimely simple manner, of
saving the precarious splendours of Houghton, and of
restoring and establishing “all our glory”.

Apart from the Memoirs, Walpole’s literary activities
were not extensive during 1751. In the late summer
of that year he submitted to Gray the first draft of a
fable “imitated from La Fontaine”, The Funeral of
the Lioness, afterwards retouched in accordance with
the poet’s criticisms. Even then, the captious Gray
found that there was “still something a little embar-
rassed here and there in the expression”. His verdict
suggests that as a standard of comparison he was using
La Fontaine himself, for Walpole was responsible
for many less effective jeux d’esprit than this, though
he lacks the limpid lyrical grace wherein lies the chief
charm of his French model, and has not the art to
combine irony of concept with bland simplicity of
phrase.

The “gracious tawny queen” of the jungle being
dead, we are told that

The widow’d monarch much was grieved;

and

A solemn pomp of funeral rites

He orders, and his peers invites,

By sound of trump and heralds grave
To meet at Te cupsdmbeers

Each sy Seon at his dane
From distant wood and highland came;
VI THE “FUNERAL OF THE LIONESS” 123

And much they gossip of the queen,

Of tickets, places, bombazeen,

And much they press and crowd to show
At once their dignity and woe.

These are surely the accents of Gray rather than of
La Fontaine!

With admirable unanimity and decorum, the “savage
nation” lamented. Only the stag, whose wife and
son had fallen a prey “to her imperial highness’ claws”
held aloof and “joy’d for what the public groan’d”.
This being reported to the royal widower, he
exclaims :—

Boh! What, not sorrow for a queen!
Was ever such a traitor seen?

Call all my guards, my grenadiers,
Call my own regiment of bears!

He dies this hour, and piece-meal torn
Shall teach rebellion how to mourn.

The resourceful stag, however, has an answer
ready of such extravagant softness that even royal
wrath is not proof against it. He declares that he has
been vouchsafed a vision of the dead lioness:

. . . to my enraptured sight
Her mane and whiskers streaming light,
Like sainted Francis, late appear’d
Your gracious spouse, our queen reverd.
Her flapping tail and purr sedate
Bespoke her soul's Elysian state;
When thus she said: My friend, beware,
Lest what the king’s connubial care
Of pomp intends betray thy eye
To drop the tear, or breast to sigh
‘While my ecstatic soul refin’d
From grosser cares of mortal kind,
Nor meditates the Libyan chase,
Nor mourns to leave my orphan race;
But where Elysian waters glide,
With Clarke and Newton by my side,
 

124 HORACE WALPOLE CHAP.

Purrs o'er the metaphysic page,

Or ponders the prophetic rage

Of Merlin, who mysterious sings
Of men and lions, beasts and kings.

The ingenious apologia was received with acclama-
tion by the crowd and with favour by the king, who

i

Stood on four tiptoes, grasp’d his sword,
Strutted, prepar’d to be ador’d,

And gave the stag to kiss the paw

He fancied held the world in awe.

Did Gray detect in the image of Walpole’s lioness
a vague and indistinct reflection of his own Selima?

~~ For the two are assuredly “sib”.

In the same letter that praises and yet censures the
final form of this fable, Gray has much to say concern-
ing his friend’s project that Dodsley should publish
half a dozen of the Odes, with illustrations by Bentley.
“Our charming Mr. Bentley”, Walpole tells Montagu,
is “drawing vignettes for his (Gray's) Odes. What
a valuable MS. I shall have”! Gray himself remon-
strated half-playfully with him for his excess of zeal:

8

“I do not wonder at Dodsley,” he wrote later. “You

have talked to him of six Odes, for so you are pleased to

call everything I write, though it be but a receipt to make

apple-dumplings. He has reason to gulp when he finds
one of them only a Long Story.”

In July Walpole tore himself away from the delights
of Strawberry Hill in order to visit his Hertford cousins
at Ragley, taking Warwick and Stratford-on-Avon in
his stride, “The glorious chapel of the Beauchamps”
set his Gothic pulses thrilling; but Stratford left him
cold; it was “the wretchedest old town” he had ever
seen. Moreover, a “bountiful corporation” had “exceed-
VI THE “MEMOIRS” RESUMED 125

ingly bepainted” Shakespeare’s bust. “Lady Caroline
Petersham is not more vermilion”!

“I sit down”, wrote Walpole in his Memoirs at the
outset of 1752, “to resume a task for which I fear
posterity will condemn the author at the same time
that they feel their curiosity gratified.” He is afraid
of being thought over-censorious; he imagines ironic-
ally in what terms he might write George II., of
Pelham, of Newcastle, were he to “comply with this
indulgent taste” for idealised portraits. ‘“Avaunt,
Flattery !” he ejaculates, “tell the truth, my pen!” His
pen found the task of truth-telling so laborious that it
had little leisure for lighter employments, and did not
trip again in rhyme until, in 1753, he wrote a burlesque
poem, The Judgment of Solomon, which was never
printed. 1752 was a year of politics and prose. It
brought Walpole a new responsibility, however. By
Sir Hans Sloane’s action in making him a trustee under
his will, he became one of the guardian-god-fathers of
the British Museum,

A burglary at Arlington Street—vividly described
in a letter to George Montagu—lent excitement to the
month of June 1752, and for the greater part of the
summer Walpole’s bachelor establishment was un-
wontedly enlivened by the presence of a three-year-old
child, Anne, the daughter of Conway and his charm-
ing Countess, and the future inheritrix of Strawberry
Hill. In August he again dared the barbarous wilds of
Kent and Sussex in Chute’s company, visiting Knowle
(where he found both the park and the embroidered
bags lying on velvet tables “sweet”), Tonbridge,
Bayham Abbey, Hurstmonceaux, and Penshurst. At
Hurstmonceaux “we walked up a brave old avenue to
126 HORACE WALPOLE CHAP.

the church”, he tells Bentley, “with ships sailing on
our left hand the whole way”; the castle pleased them,
even to its “long, lean Saints” in painted glass, but
Penshurst spelt disillusionment: “The park seems
never to have answered to its character; at present it
is forlorn; and instead of Sacharissa’s cypher carved
on the beeches I should sooner have expected to have
found the milk-woman’s score.”

One of the main charges in Macaulay’s indictment
of Horace Walpole is to the effect that “his judgment
of literature, of contemporary literature especially, was
altogether perverted by his aristocratical feelings”.
He was certainly lacking in appreciation for those of
his coevals whom posterity has most delighted to
honour ; and it was certainly unfortunate that so many
of them should have represented in themselves one
or more of the four things which he most intensely
disliked—bad manners, Toryism, noise, and grime.
(In his eyes it is obvious that Johnson embodied all
four.) Macaulay, who belongs to that school of
criticism which cannot set up one image without in-
continently knocking down another, waxes very wroth
because Walpole ranks among the “first writers” of
his day that little company of more or less well-bred
wits who, between 1753 and 1756, contributed to
Edward Moore's periodical The World. Cambridge,
Coventry, Whitehed, and Lord Bath may have faded
into the shadows now; Soame Jenyns, despite the
agreeable quality of his verse and of his lighter prose,
may be remembered only as the butt of Johnson’s dis-
dainful rhetoric; but it is surely a strange proposition
that Chesterfield “stands much lower in the estimation
of posterity than if his letters had never been pub-
VI “THE WORLD” 127

lished”; and Chesterfield, together with Walpole him-
self, was the brightest star in Moore’s somewhat tinselly
constellation.

Between February 1753 and September 1756 Wal-
pole contributed eight essays to the World; to these
must be added two, printed in his collected Works,
which were still in manuscript when the paper ceased
to exist, and the separately-published World Extraor-
dinary containing the character of Henry Fox. The
earliest, signed “Julio”, deals very pleasantly with
the reviving taste for nature and realism. Real water-
falls appear now on the stage; “real monsters from
Afric” will doubtless replace the counterfeit serpent
and ostrich in Orpheus and Eurydice and The Sorcerer;
“the fair part of creation” is moved “to display their
unveiled charming tresses, and, if I may say so, are
daily moulting the rest of their cloaths.” Gardens and
dinner-tables alike reflect the fashionable whim; “there
is not a citizen who does not take more pains to torture
his acre and half into irregularities than he formerly
would have employed to make it regular as his cravat”,
while at dessert one sees “cottages and temples arise
in barley-sugar”—a somewhat peculiar example of
realism! That moth-eaten roi en exil, Theodore of
Corsica, over whose grave in St. Anne’s Churchyard,
Soho, Walpole afterwards erected a monument, is the
theme of the second World essay. The third—a charm-
ing one—deals with the revision of the calendar, and
is fragrant with the breath of that Glastonbury thorn
which blossoms anew in so many of the Letters. “Had
I been consulted”, says the essayist, gravely “(and
mathematical studies have not been the least part of
my speculations) instead of turning the calendar

®

Be ow
128 HORACE WALPOLE CHAP.

topsy-turvy by fantastic calculations, I should have
proposed to regulate the year by the infallible Somerset-
shire thorn.” He is perturbed at the possible effects
of the change upon such national festivals as All Fools’
Day and St. Swithin’s. “Were our astronomers so
ignorant as to think that the old proverbs would serve
for their new-fangled calendar?” he asks, “Could
they imagine that St. Swithin would accommodate his
rainy planet to the convenience of their calculations?”
In the graceful little discourses upon letter-writing,
and upon the inflated wealth of the age, Walpole the
antiquary makes his presence known, citing examples,
colourful or grotesque, from Froissart and Dugdale,
and even quoting a delectable letter from Maximilian I.
to his daughter Margaret in the original archaic French.
The slightly less pleasing essay on the superior charms
of ladies of mature years is interesting chiefly as having
provoked a boutade from the Clive, which is thus
recorded by the essayist.

I met Mrs. Clive two nights ago, and told her I had
been in the meadows, but would walk no more there, for
there was all the world. “Well,” says she, “and don’t you
like the World? 1 hear it was very clever last Thursday.”

The airy lightness of Walpole’s touch, the delicate,
dry sparkle of his wit, lend to these papers in the
World a peculiar and very characteristic “bouquet”.
It is never in his power to be impersonal for long, not
even when he travesties himself by writing now as a
mathematical expert, now as a man ill-versed in the
epistolary art. The last published essay, on Suicide,
is distinctly Addisonian in form and colour; the two
published only in the Works, and dealing with the
VI “THE WORLD” 129

superfluity of books in existence, tend to be a trifle
heavy, and the second is interesting mainly as affording
evidence that Walpole’s love of Chinese history, which
afterwards found expression in the Letter of Xo Ho
and certain of the Hieroglyphic Tales, was alive and
active at the time when the I# orld was in the throes of
dissolution.

The choice of tutors and governors for the young
Prince of Wales, the future George III., had been the
occasion of much political manceuvring, and towards
the end of 1753 occurred the so-called “Ravensworth
affair”, Lord Ravensworth, among other persons
likely to be alarmed, received a memorial, “pretended
to have been signed by several Noblemen and Gentle-
men of the first rank and fortune”, implying, if not
explicitly alleging, that three men in the Prince’s
entourage, Andrew Stone, the Honourable William
Murray, and Johnson, Bishop of Gloucester, were
nothing better than crypto-Jacobites. Thirty-eight
pages of the Memoirs are devoted to this fabrication
and to its various repercussions, but only in a laconic
footnote does Walpole reveal that the fabricator was
himself. One is tempted to regret that he should have
given the secret away, though in his own circle it may
have been a secret de Polichinelle. Bubb Dodington
knew it, and he was not notably taciturn.

After a brief glance at this distinctly discreditable
episode, it is pleasant to breathe again the clearer air
of Strawberry Hill. Thither, in the spring of 1754,
Nollkejumskoi betook his ponderous self. “I can’t
conceive how he entered it,” Walpole told Bentley.
“I should have figured him like Gulliver, cutting down
some of the largest oaks in Windsor Forest to make
130 HORACE WALPOLE CHAP.

joint-stools in order to straddle over the battlements
and peep in at the windows of Lilliput.” The pond,
Poyang, was already gay with goldfish, and in the
summer of the same year, Walpole was sending some
of these to Conway. Concerning them he says, in an
engagingly “Horatian” passage:

The fish are apprised that they are to ride over to Park
Place, and are ready booted and spurred; and the moment
their pad arrives they shall set forth. I would accompany
them on a pillion if I were not waiting for Lady Mary,
who has desired to bring her poor little sick girl here for
a few days to try the air. You know how courteous a
knight I am to distressed virgins of five years old, and that
my castle-gates are always open to them.

Under the date 1754, the Short Notes record that
Walpole was “chosen for Castle Rising in Norfolk in
the new Parliament’; that “about the same time” he
erected in Westminster Abbey the monument to the
memory of his mother for which he had had the statue
carved in Rome; and that in July of that year he “wrote
The Entail, a fable in verse”. It is to this last com-
position that Macaulay alludes, when he rebukes
Walpole for having first scoffed “at the practice of
entail”, and then “tasked the ingenuity of conveyancers
to tie up his will in the strictest settlement”. The
consistency thus inferentially demanded would have
been superhuman indeed. Walpole’s love for “Straw-
berry” became by degrees the ruling passion of his life,
replacing long before he died all the “old loves with
wearier wings” that had once been able to catch, if
not to hold, his fugitive heart. He called it “a play-
thing, a vision that has amused a poor, transitory mortal
for a few hours, and that will pass away like its mas-
VI “THE ENTAIL” 131

ter” ; he saw, with a prophetic eye, its towers abandoned,
its treasures dispersed,” its cloisters trodden by the feet
of strangers. Yet he would neither have been more
convincing as a philosopher nor more likeable as a man
if he had acquiesced in these things, and if he had
inertly relinquished “Strawberry”, and all that it had
meant to him, and all that he had made it, to oblitera-
tion. Macaulay’s view seems to be that he should have
died intestate for no other reason than that he had
composed, more than forty years before his death, this
pretty, flimsy “fable in verse”.

The “hero” of The Entail is a “butterfly divinely
born” who establishes himself very comfortably on
“the rich bosom of a rose”.

The palace pleas’d the lordly guest;
What insect own’d a prouder nest?

He thinks the thorns embattled round
To guard his castle’s lovely mound,
And all the bush’s wide domain
Subservient to his fancied reign.

This “lordly guest” was, however, not a little per-
turbed when
. in his mind’s capacious eye

He roll'd the change of mortal things,
The common fate of flies and kings.

and bethought him that “these roofs” might pass to
inheritors not of his own race. In light verse of this
whimsical order Walpole excelled, and if he had worked
the vein to better purpose, he might have written an
elfin epic fully as charming as Nymphidia. That love

1 These treasures were sold by auction in 1842, when the

contents of the villa realised £29,615, 8s. od., and the prints
disposed of separately, £3,837, 15s. 6d.
132 HORACE WALPOLE CHAP. VI

of the fantastic which emerges in so many of the best-
known letters here finds expression in the lines describ-
ing how the butterfly proceeded to tie up his property.

A caterpillar grovel’d near,

A subtle slow conveyancer,

Who summon’d, waddles with his quill
To draw the haughty insect’s will.
None but his heirs must own the spot,
Begotten or to be begot;

Each leaf he binds, each bud he ties,
To eggs of eggs of butterflies.

At this juncture there appears upon the scene that
interloper beloved of the fabulist, “a wanton boy”,
who not only, after the manner of his kind, pounced
upon the hapless butterfly, but incidentally

Swept away the mansion-flow’r.

During the spring and summer of this year, the
Walpole butterfly at Twickenham had been beset with
difficulties concerning his “mansion-flow’r”. In April
he told Chute, “that last time I went to Strawberry I
found the stucco men as busy as so many Irish bees
. . . but I soon made them undo all they had done”.
In November he had abandoned his castle for his
eminently un-Gothic abode in Arlington Street, and
was in politics up to his chin. Trouble was brewing,
antagonisms were emerging; “these are greater storms
than perhaps you expected”, he writes gleefully to
Bentley, “they have occasioned mighty bustle, and
whisper, and speculation”, Decidedly Horace the
Politician was a less likeable fellow than Horace the
Butterfly!
CHAPTER VII

THE “LETTER OF XO HO'’—THE OFFICINA ARBUTEANA
— “ROYAL AND NOBLE AUTHORS —‘ ANECDOTES
OF PAINTING IN ENGLAND”

WaLroLE’s friends during his lifetime, and his critics
since his death, seem to have accepted with little, if
any, demur his estimate of himself as a fickle creature
of a very uncertain temper. Yet in his dealings with
Gray after their reconciliation, and with Bentley
almost up to their severance, he showed extraordinary
patience. Though Bentley began almost at once to
disconcert and disappoint him, he was still, when 1755
dawned, eager for letters from Jersey, whither that
erratic person had sought refuge from his creditors.
For the moment Walpole was torn asunder by politics
and frivolity, and he watched with a sort of amused
detachment his own oscillations between these opposite
poles.

In short, the true definition of me is that I am a dancing
senator—not that I do dance, or do anything by being a
senator: but I go to balls, and to the House of Commons
—to look on: and you will believe me when I tell you that
I really think the former the more serious occupation of
the two: at least the performers are more in earnest.

He was at Strawberry Hill in April, “alone, out of
133
134 HORACE WALPOLE CHAP.

spirits and not well”. A slow fever devoured him,
he was worn to a skeleton—he who already looked so
startlingly like one. But, of course, this was only
because he had taken so little care of himself during
the winter, and had “kept such bad hours”. Secure
in this comforting conviction, and recking nothing
of the Via Dolorosa of gout that now stretched before
him, he soon recovered his spirits, cracked jokes about
the imminent prospect of war with France, and—as
the world of fashion was beginning to cast curious
eyes at the Gothic castle—bestirred himself to entertain
the Duke and Duchess of Bedford, and a large and
admiring party, who breakfasted there to the music
of Mrs. Anne Pitt’s French horns “placed in the corner
of the wood”,

In June a strange face appeared among the Twicken-
ham pinnacles, and an alien voice was heard. “Mr.
Mintz”, writes Walpole to Bentley, “is arrived.”

Mintz was a German-Swiss artist whose acquaint-
ance Bentley had made in Jersey, and of whom he had
written with enthusiasm to Walpole at the end of the
previous year. “Can he paint perspectives?” wrote
Walpole in reply, “and cathedral-aisles, and holy
glooms?” If he could, why, then, peradventure he
might come to “Strawberry”, and re-touch or complete
Bentley’s sketches, and depict the beauties of the
vicinity. It was a little disconcerting when Mr. Miintz
suddenly arrived, before any formal contract or agree-
ment had been made between him and his employer,
and with ten guineas in his pocket advanced to him
by Bentley in the name of the unwitting Walpole.
Actually, this ingenious though indolent limner hung
about Strawberry Hill until November 1759, when his
vi THE “LETTER OF XO HO” 135

dismissal is recorded in the Short Notes. He had
enjoyed, Walpole tells Montagu in a letter written
on the morrow of the episode, “100. a year, my house,
table, and utmost countenance, In short, I turned
his head, and was forced to turn him out of doors.”
Miintz had been busy perfecting the Comte de Caylus’s
“new discovery of painting upon wax”, and Walpole
had not only written an account of it, but had held
over the Strawberry Hill edition of Lucan’s Pharsalia
in order to begin the printing of his manuscript. A
year later the ungrateful Miintz published his own
description of the process under the title of Encaustic,
or Count Caylus’s Method of Painting in the Manner
of the Ancients.

Another new planet in the summer sky of 1755 was
Garrick, whose acquaintance Walpole professed to be
willing to cultivate for the sake of his “poor neighbour”
Kitty Clive. Kitty, one would have imagined, was
quite capable of fighting her own battles, and, despite
their bickerings, it does not seem that the friendship
between her and Garrick required to be buttressed
from without. In August Walpole was at Mistley
again, in September he was Chute’s guest at The Vyne,
whence he went with his host on a jaunt to Winchester
and Netley. The “smugness” of the cathedral pleased
him only a little less than did “the beautiful fretted
roofs” of the ruined Abbey. Of both he writes to
Bentley with enthusiasm, In the same letter he
remarks,

Gray has lately been here. He has begun an ode which
if he finishes equally will inspirit all your drawing again.
It is founded on an old tradition of Edward I. putting to
death the Welsh bards.
136 HORACE WALPOLE CHAP.

For the remainder of the year his heart is rather
unequally divided between Parliament and his planta-
tions, Already his erratic nephew was giving him
trouble, and had made it necessary for him to write
a strong remonstrance concerning a matter in which
he considered himself to have been “very ill used”
by him—the matter of a contested election in the
Commons. The petty side of politics remains oddly
fascinating to him; but in November he is writing
very learnedly to George Montagu of Weymouth pines,
Carolina cherries, Virginia cedars, and Spanish brooms.
A week later he was one of the auditors in the House
when “Single Speech” Hamilton “spoke for the first
time and was at once perfection”. Before the year
closed his mortal enemy had come into the open and
declared itself. “Alack! I have had the gout!” he
exclaims ruefully, in a letter to Bentley. “I would
fain have persuaded myself that it was a sprain; and,
then, that it was only the gout come to look for Mr.
Chute at Strawberry Hill; but none of my evasions
will do.”

From a literary point of view the year that followed
was singularly barren. Any time which he could spare
from politics Walpole spent chiefly in hovering round
the death-bed of Mann’s amiable brother “Gal”, at
Richmond. Even his collecting zeal ebbed a little,
though he wrote to Conway early in 1756:

You would laugh if you saw in the midst of what
trumpery I am writing. Two porters have just brought
home my purchases from Mrs. Kennon the midwife’s sale:
Brobdinang combs, old broken pots, pans and pipkins, a
lantern of scraped oyster-shells, Turkish pipes, Chinese
baskets, etc. My servants think my head is turned. . . .
VII THE “LETTER OF. XO HO” 137

In August, the gossip-mart at Westminster being
closed, he went northward on “a journey of amuse-
ment” which proved “very amusing”, as “sights”, that
is to say, country seats, ruined Abbeys, and “savage
scenes” are “thick sown in the counties of York and
Nottingham”. Two months later, when Montagu bade
him give an account of himself, he wrote from Straw-
berry Hill:

I am quite alone; in the morning I view a new pond
I am making for goldfish, and stick in a few shrubs or
trees wherever I can find a space, which is very rare: in
the evening I scribble a little: all this mixed with reading:
that is, I can’t say I read much, but I pick up a good deal
of reading.

Newcastle resigned in October, and Pitt, having
rejected the royal suggestion of a Pelham-Fox coalition,
took office under the figure-head premiership of the
Duke of Devonshire. The first problem with which
the new administration found itself confronted in
1757 was incarnate in the perturbing person of Admiral
Byng. Seven months earlier Byng’s failure to relieve
Minorca had roused the nation at large to unreasoning
fury. The court-martial, which sentenced him to death
for negligence but acquitted him of the cognate
charges of disaffection and cowardice, added to their
sentence a strong recommendation to mercy, but the
people turned their thumbs down, and George II., at
one with them for once in a way, turned down his.
In the Short Notes it is recorded “In Feb. 1757, 1
vacated my seat for Castlerising in order to be elected
for Lynn”: (this step was necessitated by the death
of the recently-ennobled “Uncle Horace”) “and
about the same time used my best endeavours,
138 HORACE WALPOLE CHAP.

but in vain, to save the unfortunate Admiral
Byng”.

Croker, in the Quarterly Review article referred to
above, remarks that Walpole’s conduct in this affair
“is perhaps the most admired, if not the only admired,
portion of his life”, and, almost in the same breath,
suggests that his motive might have been hatred of
Byng’s accusers rather than tenderness towards Byng.
At the critical moment Walpole, having relinquished
Castle Rising without having yet taken his seat for
King’s Lynn, was not a Member of Parliament.
But, either by chance or design, he happened to be
within the precincts of the House when the news
circulated among the Admiral’s friends that two
members of the court-martial, Keppel and Norris,
desired to be absolved from their oath of secrecy. The
Memoirs describe vividly the episodes that followed,
Walpole’s breathless dash “up into the gallery” to ask
Keppel if this were true, his hasty and vain appeal
to Fox, his flight “down from the gallery” to urge
Sir Francis Dashwood to intervene. In the event,
Dashwood did intervene, and a bill designed to attain
the desired result was passed by the Commons, only
to be thrown out by the Lords. Well might Walpole
write to Mann that in this “most complicated affair”
he had been a “most unfortunate actor”, having pro-
tracted the Admiral’s misery for a fortnight by what
he had “meant as the kindest thing” he could do!
Pour encourager les autres, poor Byng was duly shot,
on the quarter-deck of the Monarque: and his would-be
rescuer, after paying a slightly rhetorical tribute to
his shade, plunged again into the narrow by-paths of
politics which his soul loved best.
vit THE “LETTER OF XO HO” 139

That curious predilection for Chinese history, first
manifested when he was at Cambridge, now prompted
Walpole to write—in an hour and a half, he said—A4
Letter from Xo Ho, a Chinese Philosopher at London,
to his Friend Lien Chi, at Peking. Five editions of this
clever piece of satire were exhausted in a fortnight.
Xo Ho is equally respectable as a child and as a parent,
for it was beyond doubt begotten by Montesquieu’s
Lettres persanes, and, almost beyond doubt, it begot in
turn The Citizen of the World. Many footnotes are
needed to make the text of the Letter comprehensible
to-day: the opening paragraph, however, deals in
generalisations, and is quite in the manner of “Des-
cartes” and “Julio”:

I have told thee, these people are incomprehensible;
not only they differ from us; they are unlike the rest of
the western world: a Frenchman has prejudices, has
caprices; but they are the prejudices of his nation, they
are the caprices of his age. A Frenchman has settled
ideas, though built on false foundations: an Englishman
has no fixed ideas, his prejudices are not of his country,
but against some particular parts or maxims of his coun-
try: his caprices are his own: they are the essential proofs
of his liberty.

During the early summer of 1757 Walpole found
time to write introductions to the Catalogues of the
picture-collections of Charles I. James II., and George,
Duke of Buckingham, “transcribed by the late curious
and industrious Mr. Vertue”. Then, under “June 25”
comes this memorable entry in the Short Notes, “I
erected a printing-press at my house at Strawberry
Hill”. To Chute he wrote on July 12:

On Monday next the Officina Arbuteana opens in
form. The Stationers’ Company, that is, Mr. Dodsley,
140 HORACE WALPOLE CHAP.

Mr. Tonson, etc, are summoned to meet here on
Sunday night. And with what do you think we open?
Cedite, Romani Impressores—with nothing under Graii
Carmina.

The Carmina in question were The Progress of Poesy
and The Bard. One thousand copies (Gray speaks of
two thousand in a letter to “little Brown”) were
“Printed at Strawberry Hill for R. and J. Dodsley in
Pall Mall”, at one shilling each. Beneath the Pindaric
motto PQNANTA ZYNETOIZI on the title-page
appears a somewhat indistinct engraving of the Gothic
castle. The Odes being Gray’s and the press his own,
Walpole naturally looked with an indulgent eye upon
the attenuated quarto volume. These poems, he told
Mann, “are Greek, they are Pindaric, they are sublime!
Consequently I fear a little obscure”. The public per-
ceived the obscurity without at the same time perceiving
the sublimity, and the book hung fire. Gray, however,
was the richer and “Doddy” the poorer by the sum
of forty guineas, and Walpole’s transparent delight
in his newest hobby drew from the poet a slightly
patronising word of congratulation. “The receipt is
obvious; it is only Have something to do; but how
few can apply it.”

If Walpole had been the capricious creature that
he—and his friends—half-believed he was, the Caslon
type-metal would have been allowed to rust in the
ponderous oaken hand-press of the Officina Arbuteana
whenever the first excitement of the unfamiliar pursuit
had spent itself. Actually the press continued to
function in its tree-shaded wooden cot until 1790,
when some complimentary verses were struck off in
honour of the Duke of Clarence, “young royal tarry-
VII THE OFFICINA ARBUTEANA 141

breeks” being then moved to pay a visit to Strawberry
Hill. It had long been the habit of “Elzevir Horace”,
as Conway nicknamed his cousin, to arrange that gay
or gallant trifles in verse should be printed under the
wondering eyes of his visitors, and delivered all hot
from the press into their delighted hands. Much of
this activity was puerile enough, and many of the
pamphlets and booklets printed at Strawberry Hill
had hardly more intrinsic value than the tradesmen’s
cards, and miscellaneous leaflets and labels, which
Kirgate, the last printer, was suffered to produce there.
Yet Walpole did good service to scholarship and
archzology by printing the Pharsalia with Bentley
Senior’s notes, the two volumes of Miscellaneous Anti-
quities, the Life of Lord Herbert of Cherbury by him-
self, and Hentzner’s Journey into England; nor can we
dismiss as negligible, however crude they may now
appear, his own antiquarian collections such as the
Catalogue of Royal and Noble Authors and Anecdotes
of Painting in England.

Walpole’s first printer was a fantastic Irishman,
Robinson by name, with “eyes more Richard the
Third’s than Garrick’s own”. After a brief reign of
two years he was succeeded by one Farmer and he, in
turn, by one Pratt. Finally, in 1765, Thomas Kirgate
took charge of the press, and, more fortunate or more
prudent than his predecessors, rooted himself firmly
in the soil of Strawberry Hill. Walpole has been
freely and frequently charged with culpable ingratitude
towards this man because in his will he left him a
legacy of one hundred pounds only. Kirgate himself
posed as a much-injured person, and Septimus Harding
the Pall Mall miniaturist, “dropping into poetry” on
142 HORACE WALPOLE CHAP.

his behalf, makes him take leave of the Officina Arbu-
teana in these touching terms:
On thee, my fellow Lab’rour dear,
My Press, I drop the silent Tear
Of Pity for thy Lot.

“Silent” is excessive. And Dr. Paget Toynbee, in
his notes to the Journal of the Printing Office at Straw-
berry Hill, has effectively disposed of Kirgate’s claims
on our compassion. The printer did not die a poor
man. And he was certainly unworthy of the con-
fidence reposed in him by his master during the years
when he acted as his amanuensis. Indeed, he made
and preserved copies of certain passages in the letters
to Mann which he knew that the letter-writer had
desired and intended to suppress. An attempt to black-
mail Walpole himself, or his executors, may have been
contemplated—and even made. It was not until 1810
that his daughter surrendered the transcripts to Mrs.
Damer, in whose presence they were destroyed.

The war of the Austrian Succession had been
lumbering along in a desultory manner for about a
year when, in September 1757, the futile and ignom-
inious English raid upon Rochefort took place. That
the raid itself was a fiasco Walpole could not deny; but
he was very wroth when a Commission of Inquiry was
set up to investigate the causes of the failure. The
Commission was “most unconstitutional and dangerous;
nay, absurd”—for was not Conway one of the officers
upon the staff of Sir John Mordaunt, the leader of
the expedition? “Between Hammersmith and Hyde
Park Corner” Conway's indignant kinsman dashed
off five quatrains, which through medium of his deputy
at the Exchequer he was able to insert anonymously
VII “ROYAL AND NOBLE AUTHORS” 143

in the Public Advertiser. Of this “most hasty per-
formance” the second is the worst stanza:

While hostile squadrons round thee stood
On Laffelt’s unsuccessful field

Thy captive sabre, drench’d in blood,
The vaunting victor’s triumph seal’d.

In October Hentzner’s Journal was printed at the
Officina Arbuteana, and the manuscript of Royal and
Noble Authors completed. Small wonder that Wal-
pole’s over-taxed eyes gave him trouble about this
time, and that he suffered a brief panic lest they should
fail him altogether! Chute’s ministrations with a
mixture of spirit of lavender and Hungary water gave
him temporary relief, but a few weeks later he was
writing dejectedly to Mann “everything makes me
think myself old since I have worn out my eyes”.
Whatever the nature of this recurrent eye-trouble may
have been, it left his sight unimpaired, and, according
to the testimony of Madame du Deffand’s informants,
had no effect upon the brilliance of his eyes. Early
in 1758 he records an improvement, following upon
a régime of old rum and elderflower-water, and the
immersion of his head every morning in a pail of cold
water. For cold water, applied both without and
within, Walpole had a passion which his contempor-
aries regarded as little less than insane.

When the New Year dawned, preparations for the
printing of Royal and Noble Authors were well under
way. In April the book appeared, and Walpole tells
Montagu a month later that it is “marvellously in
fashion”, to his “great astonishment”. To Dr. Birch,
secretary of the Royal Society, he wrote, “The hurry
in which it was written, my natural carelessness and
144 HORACE WALPOLE CHAP.

insufficiency, must have produced many faults and
mistakes.” Thus early in his career as an author did
Walpole assume that pose which annoyed Macaulay
so much—the light and airy pose of a mere amateur
who amuses himself with first one literary or anti-
quarian pursuit and then another, but is willing to
devote time, care, and labour to none. Actually he
was the most indefatigable and industrious of men.
The sum of his tangible achievement is astonishing,
and he crammed into his “busy, hurried, amused, irregu-
lar way of life” an amount of solid hard work to
which many a more serious and purposeful person
might have pointed with conscious pride.

In the Advertisement prefixed to the Royal and
Noble Authors Walpole “flatters himself that he offers
to the public a present of some curiosity, though per-
haps of no great value”. It was not an exaggerated
claim, nor can we regret that inconsistency, so severely
condemned by Macaulay, which made it possible for
him to nourish anti-monarchical and Republican senti-
ments, and at the same time to undertake researches
into the history of crowned and coroneted scribblers.
The pageant which he calls up is neither tawdry nor
tedious, though some of the personages are dragged
into it upon somewhat flimsy pretexts. In the van-
guard marches Caur de Lion, whose sonnets in the
Vatican and Laurentian libraries Joseph Spence had
helped Walpole to trace; Henry VIII. comes third, on
the strength of his polemical pamphlets; it would
appear that his joyous ditty Pastime with Good Com-
pany was unknown to his sponsor. Elizabeth and James
I. and VI. are inevitable examples, as is Mary, Queen
of Scots, whose misfortune it was “to be born in the
vii “ROYAL AND NOBLE AUTHORS” 145

same age, in the same island with, and to be handsomer
than, Elizabeth”, To Frederick, Prince of Wales, only
a line and a half is conceded: “he wrote French songs
in imitation of the Regent, and did not miscarry solely
by writing in a language not his own”. The Noble,
as distinct from the Royal, authors are a picturesque
company, though Walpole pauses all too seldom to
exercise his admirable gift for word-painting. Digby,
Earl of Bristol, is the model of one of his most neatly
pointed and balanced portraits:

A Singular person, whose life was one contradiction.
He wrote against popery and embraced it; he was a zeal-
ous opposer of the court, and a sacrifice for it; was con-
scientiously converted in the midst of his persecution of
Lord Strafford, and was most unconscientiously a pursuer
of Lord Clarendon. With great parts, he always hurt
himself and his friends; with romantic bravery, he was
always an unsuccessful commander. He spoke for the
test-act, though a Roman Catholic, and addicted himself
to astrology on the birthday of true philosophy.

The press was kept busy during the summer of
1758. Under the title of Fugitive Pieces in Verse and
Prose Walpole printed a collection of his own scattered
works, and dedicated it to Conway. “I only desire”,
wrote “Elzevir Horace”, closing the dedicatory epistle,
“if I should be remembered by these idlenesses, that
it may be known at the same time that you did not
dislike them, and (which will do me still more honour)
that our FRIENDSHIP was as great as our AFFINITY.”
An Account of Russia as it was in the Year 1710 by
Charles, Lord Whitworth, followed in October of the
same year. A month later Bentley produced a pamph-
let, Reflections on the Different Ideas of the French
146 HORACE WALPOLE CHAP.

and English in regard to Cruelty,’ “designed”, writes
Walpole, who supplied the dedication, “to promote a
bill (that I meditated) of perpetual insolvency”. This
bill never found its way into the Statute-book, but
Walpole’s pity for “all prisoners and captives” remained
active long after his project had been shelved. Before
the year closed a second edition of Royal and Noble
Authors was published,” and the slightly disconcerted
compiler had to endure for the first time the quill-
pricks of professional reviewers. While the Critical
Review blamed his bias against the Stuarts, the Monthly
Review blamed his bias in favour of his father, and
the Gentleman's Magazine called the book “unintelligi-
ble” because, among other things, no mention was made
of the fact that Francis I. was King of France.

All these experiments and experiences were made
and endured against a constantly shifting background
of political marches and counter-marches at home, and
naval and military gains and losses abroad.

In the late summer of 1758 Walpole was again at
Ragley, where he had the good fortune to unearth a
quantity of forgotten Conway papers of much historical
interest, and where he encountered Mr. Seward of
Lichfield, whose Swan was then but a cygnet. This
excellent man was profoundly mystified when he saw
his fellow-guest first in the lumber-room “all over
cobwebs, and dirt, and mortar”; then “on a ladder,
writing on a picture”; then “lying on the grass in the
court with the dogs and the children”; and, finally, in
the place of honour beside their hostess at the dinner-
table.

! Not printed at Strawberry Hills
2 Not at Strawberry Hill.
VII “ROYAL AND NOBLE AUTHORS” 147

"A letter written to Conway on his return from this
sojourn in Warwickshire contains a sort of rehearsal
of the first act of that little private comedy of which
Walpole and Lady Mary Coke were the hero and
heroine. While the friendship between himself and
this fantastic gentlewoman lasted—and that was until
1773—he diverted himself by paying court to her with
a whimsical excess of homage and adulation which no
woman with a sense of humour or a sense of pro-
portion could possibly have taken au sérieux, but which
she accepted with unsmiling complacency. With her,
as with Mistress Anne Pitt, Walpole was able to carry
on this sort of pastoral-historical-tragical-comical flirta-
tion quite safely, just because whatever absurdities the
shepherd said or wrote were negatived by the eccentric
gravity of the shepherdess.

“I find my little stock of reputation very tiresome, both
to maintain and to undergo the consequences”, Walpole
writes to Montagu in October, “it has dipped me in erudite
correspondences—I receive letters every week that com-
pliment me on my learning—now, as there is nothing
I hold so cheap as a learned man, except an unlearned
one, the title is insupportable to me.”

He is tired of everything: “pleasure, virtl, politics,
and literature, I have tried them all, and have had
enough of them”. That, of course, was only his fun.
At the moment he was busy with the account of Count
Caylus’s encaustic and with Bentley’s Pharsalia, and
the year that followed was one of great activity, politi-
cal, literary, social, and antiquarian.

Dr. Spence comes on the scene in February 17509,
when, with the amiable object of raising “a little sum
of money” for one Hill, a tailor who had abandoned
148 HORACE WALPOLE CHAP.

his needle for a Greek lexicon and had lost heavily by
the exchange, he wrote, and Walpole printed, A4
Parallel of Magliabecchi and Mr. Hill. The parallel
is not striking, but the “sum of money” was duly
forthcoming. It was about this time that Walpole
confided to Gray how ‘childishly unhappy” he had
been about a little pamphlet defending Royal and
Noble Authors from the onslaught of the Critical
Review with such a superfluity of encomium, and such
an audacious assumption of personal friendship, that
his unhappiness seems neither discreditable nor strange.
Three months later he had vexations of a different
colour to endure, when “one Carter, who had been
bred a surgeon”, attacked him in a pamphlet where,
according to the title-page, his “censures and argu-
ments” were “examined and disproved; his false
principles confuted and true ones established”. At
the moment Mr. Carter’s victim happened to be in a
great flurry over the wedding of his favourite niece,
Maria, and Lord Waldegrave. He had—or wished
to think that he had—not a little to do both with
the arranging of this alliance and the fixing of the
settlements,

“TI have”, he writes to Montagu, “quite reconciled my
Lady Townshend to the match . .. by desiring her to
choose my wedding clothes, but I am to pay the additional
price of being ridiculous, to which I submit; she has
chosen me a white ground with purple and green flowers.”

The 1797 edition of Walpole’s Works states that
the Parish Register of Twickenham was written “about
1758”, but he himself fixes the date as August 1759.
It is an agreeable trifle, and the list of “remarkable
persons” who at various times had lived at
VII “ANECDOTES OF PAINTING” 149

Twit'nam, the Muses’ fav’rite seat,
Twit'nam, the Graces’ lov'd retreat,

is set forth with a light and deft hand. That light
hand, however, was soon busy with heavier employ-
ments, In the summer of the previous year Walpole
had purchased from George Vertue’s widow for £100
forty volumes of the engraver’s confused and un-
grammatical, but none the less valuable, “MS. col-
lections relating to English painters, sculptors, gravers,
and architects”. It was upon these notes that the
Anecdotes of Painting in England and the Catalogue of
Engravers who have been born or resided in England
were based. Between January 1 and August 14, 1760,
the first volume of the Anecdotes was completed ; seven
weeks sufficed for the second volume; but the third,
begun in January 1761 dragged on, owing to various
preoccupations, until August of that year. These
three, dedicated to Lady Hervey, were printed at
Strawberry Hill in 1762-63, and the Catalogue in 1763.
The fourth volume of the Anecdotes did not emerge till
1780, and, “sweet Molly Lepel” having long passed
into the shades, the dedication is to Conway’s stepson-
in-law, the Duke of Richmond. Neither the Anecdotes
nor the Catalogue of Engravers can be said to possess
the quaint colour of the Royal and Noble Authors, but
the former augmented and annotated by the Rev. P.
Dallaway, and the latter by Ralph Wornum, have been
a veritable mine of picturesque and useful information
to connoisseurs since they were re-published in 1876.

The otherwise delectable summer of 1759 was marred
for Walpole by the long-drawn-out death-struggle of
his left-handed kinswoman Mrs. Leneve. When the
end came, he was “worn out”, and glad to seek refuge
150 HORACE WALPOLE CHAP.

first at Chalfont, at the house of his sister, Lady Mary
Churchill, whither Bentley accompanied him, and then
at Park Place, Henley, the home of Conway and his
Countess.

Pitt’s towering genius had now begun to exercise its
influence upon the fortunes of England on land and
sea. Victories had come tumbling upon each other’s
heels, Lagos and Quiberon, Minden and Quebec. “Mr.
Pitt”, says Walpole, in his Memoirs at this period,
“had done for Britain more than any orator for Rome.
Our three last campaigns have over-run more world
than they conquered in a century.” On the eve of the
battle of Quiberon Bay he was moved to compose a
carefully-thought-out epistle congratulating the minister
on the lustre he had “thrown on this country”, It is
not quite superfluously that he adds,

Sir, do not take this for flattery; there is nothing in your
power to give that I would accept; nay, there is nothing
I could envy but what I believe you would scarce offer
me—your glory.

Not to be outdone in politeness, Pitt promises in his
reply that Walpole’s letter shall take its place in his
library “between Pliny and Voiture, to the no small
Jealousy of Both”.

During the rigorous winter which followed the
delectable summer of 1759 Walpole was—or professed
to be—mildly perturbed by the increasing favour
manifested towards him by Prince Edward, Duke of
York, erewhile the “very plain boy with strange loose
eyes” who had shone as the most original and intelligent
of poor Titi’s sons. “He makes everybody make
suppers for him to meet me,” Walpole tells Montagu,
VII “ANECDOTES OF PAINTING” 151

“for I still hold out against going to Court.” The
rigours of the winter were no check to the night-long
frivolities of himself and his loo-playing feminine
friends, but it is to the “violent, bitter weather” and
not to these dissipations that he ascribes the severe fit
of gout which laid him low early in 1760, when “he took
enough bark to have made a rind for Daphne”. The
trial of Lord Ferrers for murder and the court-martial
upon Lord George Sackville for cowardice in the field
loom large in the letters of this period, and in March a
recurrence of his rhyming humour prompted a Dialogue
between two Great Ladies. In April he is informing
Sir David Dalrymple (afterwards Lord Hailes) of the
enthusiastic interest felt by Gray, Mason, and Lord
Lyttleton in certain examples of “Erse elegies” which
were, in fact, the first instalments of Macpherson’s
Ossian. July found him again at Chalfont, whence he
went to Oxford with Conway, and spent four days
“most agreeably”. That “strong young lad”, Lord
Beauchamp, who acted as their cicerone, was worn
almost to tatters by their tireless zeal. The result of
all this trotting and tripping was another attack of
gout, “You see,” writes the victim ruefully to Lord
Strafford, “leanness and virtue are no preservatives!”
Yet such was the indomitability of the spirit pent in
that attenuated frame, no sooner had he cast off his
flannel wrappings than he was again flitting from one
country house to another, and sighing, groaning, and
exulting in turn over Wentworth, Chatsworth, New-
stead, Hardwick, and Althorp. At Hardwick the
portrait and the history of the famous Bess drew from
him an unremarkable set of couples, in which he
records how
152 HORACE WALPOLE CHAP.

. . . when death spoil’d each husband’s billing
He left the widow every shilling.

“For the house,” he tells Strafford, “it did not please
me at all; there is no grace, no ornament, no Gothic
ini”

Princely condescension confounded Walpole still
further before he had been re-established for many days
at “Strawberry”. It is to George Montagu that he
relates what he qualifies as nothing less than a calamity:

Last Friday morning, I was very tranquilly writing
my Anecdotes of Painting: 1 heard the bell at the gate
ring—I called out, as usual, “Not at home”; but Harry,
who thought it would be treason to tell a lie, when he saw
red liveries, owned I was, and came running up, “Sir, the
Prince of Wales is at the door, and says he is come on
purpose to make you a visit!” There was I, in the utmost
confusion, undressed, in my slippers, and with my hair
about my ears; there was no help, insanum vatem aspiciet
—and down I went to receive him—him was the Duke of
York. Behold my breeding of the old court; at the foot
of the stairs I kneeled down and kissed his hand. I beg
your uncle Algernon Sidney’s pardon, but I could not let
the second prince of the blood kiss my hand first.

The dismay into which this royal visit threw Walpole
would be amusing if it were not absurd. The author
of the Epistle to Ashton, the demi-Republican who
ranked the death-warrant of Charles I. above Magna
Charta, knew not which way to turn. He “had not
been in a Court these ten years”, and consequently had
“never kissed hands in the next reign”; yet, being
neither a great poet nor one of the late Patriots, he
could neither “tell the world in rhyme that rudeness
was a virtue”, nor, “after laughing at kings and
princes for twenty years, catch at the first opening of
VII “ANECDOTES OF PAINTING” 153

favour and beg a place”. Besides, as he “never dressed
in summer”, he had “nothing on earth but a frock”,
unless he went to Leicester House “in black, like a
poet, and pretended that a cousin was dead, one of the
Muses”. The problem, of course, was not sartorial,
but political and social. Suspicion and derision must
not be awakened in the Newcastle camp; the Prince
of Wales must not be slighted when due courtesy was
rendered to the Duke of York. Through all this
anxious babbling one detects a note of suppressed satis-
faction; a note that becomes clearly audible in the
postscript to the letter quoted above:

If IT had been told in June that I should have the gout
and kiss hands before November, I don’t think I should
have given much credit to the prophet.

Much credit would not have been due to him. The
gout was ungainsayable. But on October 26 Walpole
was writing again to Montagu, a letter whose opening
cadences sound as if they were broken by a long sigh
of relief:

Was ever so agreeable a man as King George the Sec-
ond, to die the very day it was necessary to save me from
a ridicule? I was to have kissed hands to-morrow

 
CHAPTER VIII

FUGITIVE VERSE— ‘THE CASTLE OF OTRANTO”’
MADAME DU DEFFAND

THE debt of Horace Walpole to George II. was a
double one. By his death the monarch not only
extricated the subject from a position of some delicacy,
but provided him with the material for one of the most
—and most justly—admired letters that he ever wrote.
The description of the obsequies of the second
Hanoverian king deserves to rank with that of the
trial of the Jacobite lords. Here, as there, characters
and background, gloom and comedy, are touched with
an unerring hand. When the ponderous purple-
covered coffin has moved slowly under the torchlit
arches to the chapel of Henry VII, we are allowed a
glimpse of Nollkejumskoi’s unwieldy figure looming
over the open vault, and of the grotesque form of
Newcastle, first shuffling to and fro, an eye-glass held
to one eye and a handkerchief to the other, and then
planting itself upon Nollkejumskoi’s train “to avoid
the chill of the marble”. And all the time a beat of
muffled drums and a tolling of bells are audible.

The beginning of the new reign gave Walpole an
opportunity for a display of characteristic incon-
sistency. He, who had loudly proclaimed himself to

154
CHAP. VIII FUGITIVE VERSE 155

be a disinterested and unambitious man, a detached
spectator of the human comedy, hastened to offer,
through Bute, his services as a “virtuoso and anti-
quarian” to the young king. What visions he may
have had of himself as a sort of hind let loose among
the royal libraries and picture-galleries we cannot tell.
There was no depth of earth either in Bute’s mind or
in his master’s; the seed did not germinate, and the
suggestion came to naught.

A contested election at King’s Lynn made it neces-
sary for Walpole to betake himself to Norfolk in March
1761. He stayed at Houghton, haunted incessantly
by memories, and harassed for a space by the irruption
of a party of sight-seers who “rode post through the
apartments”, whence he could hardly flee fast enough
before them. At Lynn itself he had strange and
arduous experiences to undergo, a mob to harangue,
banquets and balls, with bumpers, huzzas, country
dances, and sixpenny whist, to endure, aldermen and
their womenkind to talk to, and—worst of all—the
ordeal of being chaired and borne in triumph through
the town.

Walpole’s relief must have been great when he
found himself back at “Strawberry”, with leisure to
concoct pretty trifles in verse and prose for the delecta-
tion of his favourite ladies. To Lady Mary Coke he
wrote a mock sermon to dissuade her from going to
the king’s birthday, “as she had lately been ill”. The
departure for Italy of the Duchess of Grafton (after-
wards the Countess of Upper Ossory of his later
letters, and of the last he ever wrote), following hard
upon a transit of Venus, suggested a happy trifle in
which he declares that
156 HORACE WALPOLE CHAP.

The seer who foretold it mistook or deceives us,
For Venus’s transit is when Grafton leaves us.

Some seventy-five years since there was discovered
among Grosvenor Bedford's papers, and published
in the Quarterly Review, the original manuscript of
The Garland, a “poem” concerning which the Short
Notes say that it was sent to Lady Bute “but not in my
own hand, nor with my name, nor did I ever own it.”
The Quarterly “has no doubt that this was another of
Walpole’s devices to facilitate the comfortable arrange-
ment of his sinecures”, though if this were so it seems
strange that he should have been so secretive about
it. The figurative flowers composing The Garland
include:

Friendship that yields its fragrance but to those
That near approach it, like the tender rose,

As royal amaranths, unchanging truth

And violet-like the bashful blush of youth.

It is therefore not a little disconcerting to find that,
in the opening pages of the new series of Memoirs
which Walpole began with the new reign, the king
appears in anything but an amiable light, and the first
anecdote related of him illustrates “that cool dissimula-
tion in which he had been so well initiated by his
mother, and which comprehended almost the whole of
what she taught him”.

Neither the coronation nor the wedding of the
heavy-jowled, rose-and-azure young king proved very
inspiring to Walpole’s quill. He recorded his impres-
sions of what he saw of each, and recorded them well,
but that is all. Already the gossip of the last reign had
acquired a peculiar charm for him, and when the air
was thick with babbling about Queen Charlotte’s
VIII FUGITIVE VERSE 157

stomacher, he “flew to my Lady Suffolk and heard her
talk with great satisfaction of the late Queen’s corona-
tion petticoat”. The society of this most colourless
and inoffensive of George II.’s mistresses was very
congenial to Walpole at this time, and he kept careful
notes, for future use, of his conversations with her.
Between Lady Suffolk at Marble Hill, and Kitty Clive
at Little Strawberry, he had no lack of that sort of tea-
table tattle in which he delighted as much as any
Dowager of Augustan comedy or fiction.

Pitt’s wholly indefensible conduct in accepting a
pension for himself and a peerage for his wife drew
from the scandalised Walpole a flat little epigram in
verse, as did also Lady Mary Coke’s attack of St.
Antony’s fire on her cheek. Much more pleasing is
the Portrait of John, Earl Granville, of whom we are
told that, wiser than Pyrrhus who

. . . bade await
His revels till his conquests were compleat,
Our jovial statesman either sail unfurl’d,
And drank his bottle though he missed the world.

The testimony of the Short Notes suggests that the
ensuing year—I762—was a singularly barren one,
though the testimony of the correspondence proves
it to have been by no means inactive. The com-
pletion of only one undertaking—the Catalogue of
Engravers—is recorded; but the summer and autumn
were enlivened by two literary squalls. In June
Wilkes, writing in his impudent anti-Bute organ, the
North Briton, accused Walpole—on the slenderest
evidence or none—of having flattered the Scots in
Royal and Noble Authors. Four months later a
rumour reached Strawberry Hill to the effect that
158 HORACE WALPOLE CHAP.

Bishop Warburton, resentful of “something in the
chapter of Architecture in the second volume of
Anecdotes of Painting”, proposed to demonstrate his
resentment in his forthcoming edition of Pope. “On
looking over the chapter”, says Walpole, “I concluded
he had writ some nonsense about the Phenicians”;
but the bellicose bishop, being interrogated at Walpole’s
request by Charles Lyttleton, now a brother-prelate,
replied, “The Phenicians no, no. He alluded to
my note in the edition of Pope, in which I have spoken
of Gothic architecture. I have exhausted the subject.”
Obviously there was nothing more to be said.

Walpole’s incredible physical activity was somewhat
impeded by recurring attacks of gout during this year,
as was his elasticity of mind by occasional fits of de-
pression. In February Lady Mary Wortley Montagu,
then newly returned to England, and the Cock Lane
Ghost, then the “reigning fashion”, divide his
attention. Of the lady he notes that “her avarice,
her dirt, and her vivacity are all increased”; of the
ghost, that “it would not pass muster in the paltriest
convent in the Apennine”. It was in the summer
of 1762 that a renewal occurred of the acquaintance
—begun at Eton—between himself and the Fenland
antiquary, William Cole. This learned, gout-ridden,
slightly eccentric, and oddly obsequious parson never
entered the innermost circle of Walpole’s friends,
but contrived to hover on the outer margin until his
death in 1782. With his prodigious knowledge of
English antiquities and his readiness to oblige, he
was a useful liegeman to Walpole, who frequently
urged him to “quit Marshland” and “come to shore”
—in the “county of Twicks” for choice.
VIII FUGITIVE VERSE 159

Neither gout not politics—his two chief ties—
deterred Walpole from paying his usual sequence of
country house visits this year. With the Ilchesters
he made a “Gothic” tour in Dorset and Somerset;
later he was at Park Place with the Conways, and then
with the Waldegraves at Navestock. When Parlia-
ment reassembled, the desire of the Court for peace—
i.e. for a majority in favour of the termination of the
already languishing Seven Years’ War—and the desire
of Henry Fox for power led to a working agreement
between that unblushing arriviste and Bute. Under
this agreement Fox was to lead the Commons, and,
looking about for allies, he could not fail to perceive
that the once enthusiastic “Horry” was holding aloof.
Thereupon he wrote to him, offering the Rangership
of St. James’ Park and Hyde Park to the young Earl
of Orford, whose “ruin” he thought the emoluments
of the post “might, if not prevent, at least, pro-
crastinate”. That it was a bribe he frankly admitted;
and that it placed the recipient in a singularly awkward
position he was well aware. Very discreetly Walpole
replied that he could not “flatter himself with having
the least weight with my Lord Orford”, and that he
did not mean to be “involved in this affair, otherwise
than as a messenger”. The sequel was piquant.
My Lord Orford “accepted the place, and never gave
that ministry one vote afterwards”. Fox retaliated
by delaying the payment of certain sums due from
the Treasury to the Usher of the Exchequer. It was
on this occasion that the intervention of Bute himself
was sought—successfully—by Walpole.

Political complications and family troubles left
Horace Walpole little leisure for his literary dabblings
160 HORACE WALPOLE CHAP.

during 1763, and in the Short Notes he claims credit
only for the “Dedication and Preface to Lord Herbert's
Life” printed at Strawberry Hill a year later. Lord
Waldegrave died in April, and it was at her uncle’s
house, not at her father’s, that his young widow sought
rest and seclusion in the first bitterness of her loss.
If, however, the date given in the Works of Lord
Orford be correct, it was upon the third day of this
year that, at the request of Lady Suffolk, the delightful
verses appointing the Countess Temple Poet Laureate
to the King of the Fairies were written. (One of the
productions of the Officina Arbuteana in 1764 was a
slender volume of Lady Temple's pleasing but un-
remarkable lyrics.) It is impossible to read Walpole’s
verses in this kind without regretting that he did not
write more of them, and without marvelling how he
ever came to describe 4 Midsummer Night's Dream
as “forty times more nonsensical than the worst
translation of any Italian opera-books”. Here he dips
his own quill in moonlit dew, and himself usurps the
very functions he allots to another. There is nothing
“Gothic” about these leaves and flowers, no suggestion
either of purbeck or of plaster. They are touched
—though faintly—by the fresh wind that blows
upon the meadows where Shakespeare and Herrick
strayed.
The proclamation is made by

. . . Oberon the grand,
Emperor of Fairy-land,
King of moonshine, prince of dreams,
Lord of Aganippe’s streams . . .
Defender of the sylphic faith:

and he promises that when the lady whom he himself
VIII FUGITIVE VERSE 161

has initiated into the ‘‘ choicest secrets ? of his art flls
the “laureate’s vacant seat”:

A chaplet of immortal bays

Shall crown her brows and guard her lays;

Of nectar-sack an acorn cup

Be at her board each year filled up;

And as each quarter-feast comes round

A silver penny shall be found

Within the compass of her shoe;

And so we bid you all adieu.
Given at our palace of Cowslip-
Castle, the shortest night of the
year.

When summer came, Walpole took the road again,
this time with Cole as his companion. Their itinerary,
which lay through Fenland, was modified by stress
~ of weather, but they reached Peterborough, with
which they were “not much pleased”, and Cambridge,
where they dined and drank tea with Gray. The
completion of the Great Gallery at Strawberry Hill
in September coincided with an influx of curious and
—for the most part—uncomprehending sightseers.
“Since my gallery was finished”, writes Walpole
ruefully to Montagu, “I have not been in it a quarter
of an hour together; my whole time is passed in
giving tickets for seeing it, and hiding myself while
it is seen.”

The grotesque and sinister figure of Wilkes loomed
large as the year waned. To Walpole the demagogue
was personally abhorrent; “abominable in private
life, dull in Parliament”. Yet suggestions that the
rogue should have his ears cropped savoured a little
too much of Tudor tyranny. The privileges of
Parliament and the liberty of the press were involved.
Wilkes alone was no name to conjure with, but to the
162 HORACE WALPOLE CHAP.

cry of “Wilkes and Liberty!” neither Walpole nor
Conway could be deaf. Accordingly the cousins voted
against the Court party, both in the November debates
of 1763, and in the debates upon the legality of general
warrants which convulsed the House in the early
weeks of 1764. It was in April of the latter year,
when the choleric young king had dismissed Conway
from his military command and from his post as
Groom of the Bedchamber, that Horace Walpole for
the second time urged his cousin to share his fortune
—or, at least, as much of it as he was free to alienate
from himself. “I have six thousand pounds in the
funds,” he wrote, “accept all, or what part you want.
Do not imagine I will be put off with a refusal.”
Conway, however, refused. And he was so little
sensible of his kinsman’s generosity—or, as he might
himself have said, so far above considerations of that
kind—that when the whirligig of time brought him and
his party into power a year later he refrained from
offering Walpole even the poorest simulacrum of office.

Conway’s disgrace called into being a flood of
pamphlets for and against him. To one of the second
category his cousin replied in 4 Counter Address to
the Public on the late Dismissal of a General Officer,
written in May, but not published until August 2.
Four days after its publication Walpole completed
another and a very different undertaking. He wrote
the closing lines of his “Gothic story”, The Castle
of Otranto. What was “the origin of this romance”
he afterwards confessed in a letter to Cole.

I waked one morning in the beginning of last June from
a dream, of which all I could recover was that I had thought
myself in an ancient castle (a very natural dream for a head
VIII “THE CASTLE OF OTRANTO” 163

filled like mine with Gothic story) and that on the uppermost
bannister of a great staircase I saw a gigantic hand in
armour. In the evening I sat down and began to write,
without knowing in the least what I intended to say or re-
late. The work grew on my hands, and I grew fond of it
—add that I was very glad to think of anything rather
than politics—in short, I was so engrossed with my tale,
which I completed in less than two months, that one eve-
ning I wrote from the time I had drunk my tea, about six
o'clock, till half an hour after one in the morning, when
my hand and fingers were so weary that I could not hold
the pen to finish the sentence, but left Matilda and Isa-
bella talking in the middle of a paragraph.

It would be easier to underestimate than to ex-
aggerate the importance of this “historical novel with
the history left out”; and to judge it fairly is im-
possible unless we realise that it was a bold and
amazingly successful experiment in an absolutely
untried medium. Other and far greater hands than
Walpole’s sowed the furrows he had driven; yet to his
credit be it recorded that it was he who broke the first
clod. If his castle, to our eyes, seems as insubstantial
as any fastness of painted canvas wavering behind the
stage of a village theatre, if his weapons and costumes
suggest modern Wardour Street rather than mediaeval
Calabria, that is a trick of perspective. Otranto is
dwarfed by Torquilstone and the Chateau d’If, and by
the Notre Dame of Victor Hugo. To the dazzled eyes
of Walpole’s contemporaries it was an abode of terror,
and wonderment, and beauty. .A bardlet in the St.
James's Chronicle, addressing the “honourable and
ingenious author”, exclaimed:

 

By thee decoy’d, with curious Fear

We tread thy Castle’s dreary Round;
Though horrid all we see and hear,

Thy Horrors charm while they confound!
164 HORACE WALPOLE CHAP.

Walpole himself loved Otranto. “Je vous avoue, ma
petite”, he wrote to Madame du Deffand . . . “que
de tous mes ouvrages c’est 'unique oi je me sois plu”,
and this probably remained true. It was his spiritual
Strawberry Hill.

What are the main lines of the “Gothic story?”
The exact date is left vague, but one or other of the
Crusades is in progress when it begins. Manfred,
Prince of Otranto, is enamoured of Isabella, the be-
trothed of his son Conrad. An ancient prophecy that
“the castle and lordship of Otranto shall pass from the
present family whenever the real owner should be
grown too large to inhabit it” lends sinister signifi-
cance to the sudden and fatal descent of a gigantic,
black-plumed helmet upon Conrad. A young peasant
who points out that the helmet resembles that of
Alfonso the Good, “one of their former princes”, as
represented on his tomb, is promptly clapped into a
dungeon. Manfred now determines to confine his
wife, Hippolita, in a convent, and himself wed Isabella.
Appalled, the damsel takes to flight, by way of “a
subterraneous passage” communicating with the vaults
of St. Nicholas’ Church. Portents multiply. The
plumes on the giant helmet wave. The portrait of
Alfonso the Good sighs, descends from its frame, and
vanishes into an upper chamber. Meanwhile Isabella,
wandering underground, meets the young peasant, who
has escaped from his dungeon. He helps her to
descend through a trap-door, but is himself caught by
the pursuing Manfred, who is about to deal with him
summarily when two servitors rush in. They have
seen a gigantic, armour-clad foot and leg in the upper
chamber. To divert Manfred’s ardour from Isabella,
VIII “THE CASTLE OF OTRANTO” 165

the priest of St. Nicholas, Father Jerome, very un-
wisely encourages the tyrants jealous suspicions of the
young peasant. Being summoned to perform his
ghostly office for the doomed youth, he catches sight
of a “bloody arrow” on his shoulder, and hails him
as his son. In his unregenerate days it appears that
Jerome was a Sicilian noble, the Count of Falconara.
Manfred offers him his son’s life as a bribe—and the

plumes on the helmet nod disapprovingly. A chal-
lenger now arrives, attended by one hundred gentlemen
bearing, with difficulty, an immense sword. Isabella’s
father, Frederic of Vicenza, is presumed to have
perished in the Holy Land, but the newcomer claims
to represent him, demands that she shall be delivered
up, and brands Manfred as a usurper—which, indeed,
he is. Isabella, who in the interim has fled’ again,
encounters Theodore, the young peasant, who has
been set at liberty by Matilda, Manfred’s daughter,
wandering among gloomy lakes and caves. They are
pursued by a knight whom they take to be a myrmidon
of Manfred’s and whom Theodore wounds severely
before it transpires that he is Isabella’s champion.
The wounded man now reveals that he is also Isabella’s
father, and how, in Palestine, he had encountered a
dying hermit, in digging whose grave—at a spot
indicated by himself—he had unearthed the gigantic

sword. On the blade were engraved these cryptic
lines:

Where e’er the casque that suits this sword is found
With perils is thy daughter compassed round;
Alfonso’s blood alone can save the maid

And quiet a long-restless prince's shade.

They all return to the Castle, and Theodore relates
166 HORACE WALPOLE CHAP.

how he and his mother were carried away from Sicily
by Algiers pirates, and how, after many hardships, he
made his way to the coast of Calabria. Both damsels
are now in love with Theodore, but each is generously
willing to surrender him to the other. The curious
suggestion of Hippolita that Frederic should marry
Matilda is welcomed by nobody but Frederic himself.
Following his wife to the church of St. Nicholas,
whither she has gone to consult Jerome, Manfred is
appalled to see three drops of blood fall from the
carven nose of Alfonso the Good. Bianca, the sharp-
tongued waiting-woman of Matilda, next startles
Frederic and Manfred by informing them that she has
beheld a gigantic hand in armour “on the uppermost
bannister of the great stairs”. When Frederic goes to
seek speech with Hippolita, he is confronted by a
skeleton wrapped in a hermit’s cowl—his old acquaint-
ance of Palestine. “What is thy errand to me?” asks
Frederic, “What remains to be done?” “To forget
Matilda,” replies the apparition. Matilda having
stolen away to pray in the church meets Theodore
there, and they being surprised by the jealous Manfred,
who takes her for Isabella, a terrible tragedy occurs.
Manfred plunges the dagger into the breast of his own
child. The way is now clear for the union of Theodore
and Isabella. The gigantic phantom of Alfonso the
Good rises from the cracking walls of the castle. It
is he who has been growing too large for his environ-
ment, after the fashion of Alice in Wonderland when
she had drunk from the bottle labelled “Drink Me”,
and before disappearing into the blue he cries aloud,
“Behold in Theodore the true heir of Alfonso!”
Jerome explains. His wife, Theodore’s mother, was
VIII “THE CASTLE OF OTRANTO” 167

actually a daughter of Alfonso the Good, who, during
a brief sojourn in Sicily on his way to the Crusade
whence he never returned, had married “a fair virgin
named Victoria.” It is impossible to withhold one’s
sympathy from Isabella, whom Theodore, all along
épris with Matilda, marries only when he becomes
convinced “that he could know no happiness but in
the society of one with whom he could for ever indulge
the melancholy that had taken possession of his soul”.

Such, in its main outlines, is the story described by
Lowndes, the publisher, to Fanny Burney as “snug”,
the story of which Macaulay says that “no reader
probably ever thought the book dull”, and which
Scott ranked as “one of the standard works of our
lighter literature”. It was published in December
1764, but not as an original composition, or under the
author’s own name.

“The following work”, declares the preface, “was
found in the library of an ancient catholic family in the
north of England. It was printed at Naples, in the black
letter, in the year 1520.”

On the title-page we read that it has been translated
by William Marshal, Gent, from the original Italian of
Onuphiro Muralto, Canon of the Church of St. Nicho-
las, Otranto. Not until a second edition was called for,
in April 1765, did Walpole emerge. The preface to
this edition is one of the best he ever wrote, and
contains a spirited defence of the Shakespearean trick
of relieving tragic scenes with flashes of farce. He
even dares cross swords with Voltaire himself, and to
combat the Frenchman’s opinion that “this mixture of
buffoonery and solemnity is intolerable”. “Voltaire”,
says Walpole, hardily, “is a genius . . . but not of
168 HORACE WALPOLE CHAP.

Shakespeare’s magnitude.” It was this second edition
which her faithful swain dedicated in verse to Lady
Mary Coke.

When Lady Craven sent Walpole a sketch of the
existing Castle of Otranto, he was fain to confess that
he did not know it had ever existed. He had “looked
into the map of the kingdom of Naples for a well-
sounding name, and that of Otranto was very sonor-
ous”. It was; and its reverberations are faintly audible
even now.

At Marble Hill, with her aunt, Lady Suffolk, lived
a ten-year-old child, Henrietta Hotham, who seems to
have been a favourite with Walpole. For her amuse-
ment he wrote, in October 1764, the fable of The
Magpie and her Brood, “taken from Les Nouwelles
Récréations de Bonaventure des Periers, valet-de-
chambre to the Queen of Navarre”. It is a pleasing
trifle, and the irregularity in the metre, and in the
grouping of the rhymes, suggests the fluttering and
twittering of the magpie and her argumentative young
family. As his saplings yellowed, Walpole’s health
declined : “little fevers every night” and pains in his
“heart and stomach” were warning him to “repair to
a more flannel climate”. He planned a trip to Paris
in the early weeks of the New Year, but in the event
he did not set out till September 9, 1765. This
journey was, he declared, “the last colt’s tooth” he
intended to cut. Before it came about, he underwent
an ordeal of disillusionment whose reactions upon his
feelings his contemporaries were not suffered to discern.
Only to ears unborn would Walpole unburden himself ;
but he does it freely in the second volume of the
Memoirs of the Reign of King George II.
VIII “THE CASTILE OF OTRANTO” 169

On July 8, 1765, a new Whig ministry was formed,
with Rockingham as first Lord of the Treasury, and
Conway, the incomparable Conway, as one of the two
Secretaries of State. It was natural—according to the
standards of the time, it was by no means reprehensible
—that Walpole should expect his cousin to be mindful
of him in his hour of victory. In his hour of defeat he
had been his fearless champion with tongue and pen,
regardless of any possible revenge on the part of Con-
way’s foes in office. And he had hoped that if the
Whigs should some day return to power the payments
of his place might be “settled on some foundation”
that would not expose him to “the caprice or the
wanton tyranny of every succeeding minister”. This
hope he had confided to Conway, when their party
was in opposition. “He received it with silence,”
Walpole records, and he adds, no doubt sincerely,
“It was not in my nature to repeat such a hint”.
When the ministry was in process of formation, Wal-
pole chanced to be “in bed with the gout”. It was
Conway who reported to him “the proposed arrange-
ment of places”, and it was a bitter blow to him to find
that his own name “had not been so much as men-
tioned”. He would not have accepted a place—he had
“frequently declared it”—but it would have been
pleasant to have an opportunity to prove it.

How thoroughly soever he [Conway] knew my senti-
ments, was a compliment at least not due to me? What-
ever was due to me, much or little, he totally forgot it; and
so far from once endeavouring to secure my independence,
in his whole life after he never once mentioned it.

All the king’s horses and all the king’s men could not
set Harry Conway up again. “Such failure of friend-
170 HORACE WALPOLE CHAP.

ship, or, to call it by its truer name, such insensibility,
could not but shock a heart at once so tender and so
proud as mine!” says Walpole. And, when he has
marked how rewards have fallen thick upon men who
had abandoned Conway to persecution “without a
pang”, he thinks he understands.

He thought it noble, he thought it would be fame, to
pardon the neglect he had met with; and that the world
would applaud his generous return of their ungenerous
behaviour. No glory would have accrued from his serving
me, as it would have been natural, and no more than was
expected. His heart was so cold that it wanted all the
beams of popular applause to kindle it into action.

Small wonder that Walpole, humiliated, disillu-
sioned, yet wearing a gay mask before Conway and the
world, should have been glad to escape from England.
To Lady Harvey, who had given him letters of intro-
duction to friends in Paris, he writes, “Alas, I am
nothing but a poor, worn-out rag, and fear . . . that
I shall be forced to pretend I have had the gout in my
understanding”. Two days after his arrival he tells
the same charming correspondent that the “gout is
going off in minuet-step”. And he relates how Lady
Hertford, the English Ambassadress, has cut him to
pieces and thrown him into a cauldron “with tailors,
periwig-makers, snuff-box-wrights, milliners, etc.” and
how he has “come out quite new, with everything but
youth”.

Walpole’s Parisian friends, both old and new, were
fully as pleased with him as he with them.

“Tt is very charming”, he remarks, “to totter into vogue;
. . . they humour me and fondle me so, and are so good-
natured, and make me keep my armed chair and rise for
VIII MADAME DU DEFFAND 171

nobody, and hand out nobody, and don’t stare at one’s
being a skeleton, that I grow to like them exceedingly.”

His success swelled into a triumph a few weeks later
when it became known that he was the author of a
certain letter, purporting to be written by Frederick,
King of Prussia, to Jean Jacques Rousseau, which had
intrigued and diverted Parisian society as it circulated
from hand to hand. In this letter Frederick invites
his “cher Jean Jacques” to come to Prussia ; “mes états”,
he says, “vous offrent une rétraite paisible” ; and, by an
admirable ironic touch, he adds, “St vous persistez a
vous creuser Uesprit pour trouver de nouveaux mal-
heurs, choisissez les tels que vous voudrez. Je suis roi,
je puis vous en procurer au gré de vos souhaits.” This,
the Princess de Ligne informed Walpole, “was plainly
the stroke of an English pen”.

Among the introductions with which Walpole came
armed were one to Madame Geoffrin from Lady Hert-
ford, and one to Madame du Deffand from George
Selwyn. As between these two rival salonniéres his
choice was soon made; he had only to weigh against
the coarse good sense, shrewdness and vitality of
Madame Geoffrin the wundimmed “vivacity, wit,
memory, judgment, passions, and agreeableness” of
Madame du Deffand. When he first swam into her
ken, Marie de Vichy-Chamrond, Marquise du Deffand,
was sixty-eight, just twenty years his senior. For
twelve years she had been blind. But the patrician
grace, the finely-poised, ironical, sophisticated intelli-
gence that charmed him in her lost nothing by this
affliction. The fact that she had been for a brief space
the mistress of the Regent, and could re-tell all the
most piquant legends of a bygone reign, gave her the
172 HORACE WALPOLE CHAP.

aspect of a second—and a far more delightful—Lady
Suffolk. Despite a slight recoil at first—when he
described her as “an old blind débauchée of wit’—
he appreciated and enjoyed in her certain qualities
which were best calculated to please Aim of all imagin-
able men and Englishmen. In a letter to Gray he has
traced a portrait of her as she was at the outset of their
strange, distressful, and tenacious friendship.

She goes to operas, plays, suppers, Versailles; gives
suppers twice a week; has everything read to her; makes
new songs and epigrams, ay, admirably, and remembers
every one that has been made these fourscore years. She
corresponds with Voltaire, dictates charming letters to him,
contradicts him, is no bigot to him or anybody, and laughs
both at the clergy and the philosophers. In a dispute, into
which she easily falls, she is very warm,and yet scarce ever
in the wrong; her judgment on every subject is as just as
possible; on every point of conduct as wrong as possible;
for she is all love and hatred, passionate for her friends to
enthusiasm, still anxious to be loved, I don’t mean by
lovers, and a vehement enemy, but openly.

Passionate for her friends to enthusiasm, still
anxious to be loved—poor woman, she was both those
things, and thence flowed all the corroding bitterness,
as well as the unimagined sweetness, of her friendship
with Horace Walpole. On her side it was no ordinary
friendship. Its enduring quality, its half-fierce, half-
wistful intensity, invest it with a queer pathos, and
raise it above the level of a mere infatuation. And to
Walpole, quivering with wounded pride, this ardent,
enfolding affection must have brought a sense of solace
and appeasement. Yet from the moment that he
quitted Paris for London he was in a state of incessant
apprehension lest he should thereby be made to look
VIII MADAME DU DEFFAND 173

ridiculous. For this he has been chastised with
scorpions by Mr. Lytton Strachey. On the other
hand, these tremors may not have been wholly selfish.
There lay between him and Madame du Deffand not
only the English Channel, but the highly-organised
espionage system of the French and English Post
Offices. It was well that she should curb her en-
thusiasm; she must beware of golden phrases, of
emportements romanesques,; prudence must be her mot
d’ordre, and she accepts it with touching docility in her
first letter to him after that first return: “personne ne
sera au fait de notre correspondance, et je swivrai ex-
actement tout ce que vous me prescrires”’.

Throughout the whole course of this correspond-
ence, which lasted till her death in 1780, the
struggle continues between her ardour and his appre-
hensions. She protests, laments, implores, denies,
but ends always by submitting. “Ne m’inspirez pas
tant de crainte, ni de respect,” she pleads; but he
pitilessly invokes both whenever her emportements
romanesques become alarming. Yet, after his fashion,
Walpole was fond of his “dear old blind woman”,
and grateful to her. It is true that even the verses
which he wrote on receiving her portrait in 1766
emphasise the strictly philosophic character of their
friendship. On the other hand, it was for her sake
that he returned four times to Paris—in 1767, 1769,
1771, and 1775. Then to feel again his quick little
handshake, to hear his drawling “po-int du tout, au
con-tr-aire”, must have consoled the poor old lady for
many snubs; then she would plan little surprises for
him, a drawing-room recital by the Clarion, a peep
through a borrowed telescope at an elusive comet, or
174 HORACE WALPOLE CHAP.

they would drive about the boulevards together in the
grey of dawn.

The total number of letters exchanged between
them amounted to upwards of sixteen hundred. Wal-
pole’s anxiety that his should be destroyed was extreme.
He pleaded his imperfect French, and the indiscretions
in which he had indulged, and such of his letters as he
did not personally retrieve he either persuaded Madame
to burn, or recovered through Conway, when the in-
comparable Harry visited Paris. Her letters to him
were preserved at Strawberry Hill, and a selection of
them, made by Miss Berry and rather energetically
“edited”, appeared in 1810. Owing to a misappre-
hension on the part of a French editor, an impression
prevailed that the original manuscripts had been
destroyed, but this was not the case. They were dis-
covered by the late Mrs. Paget Toynbee in a Stafford-
shire country-house, and published by her, in three
volumes, with most admirable notes, in 1912. Fifteen
of Walpole’s letters to Madame du Deffand escaped
the destruction to which he desired that they should
all be consigned. Of these eleven are transcripts,
made by the French Post Office spies whom he dreaded
so much, and preserved, more or less by chance, in
French official archives. The French is passably
good, considering that it was written by an English-
man, and the gossip is by no means sensational;
but there is no “Horatian” charm of form or colour.
His wit, as he himself divined, would not survive
translation.

Horace Walpole, as Charles de Rémusat has well
said, “aima Madame du Deffand comme on pouvait
Paimer, et comme il pouvait aimer”. To his other
VIII MADAME DU DEFFAND 175

friends he spoke of her with affection, though always
in phrases that appear to emphasise the discrepancy
between her years and his. When political events in
France seemed to threaten her pension of three
thousand livres, he besought her most earnestly to
suffer him to make good the loss. When she lay dying,
he was genuinely concerned, and deplored that there
was no possibility of sending her James’s Powder in
time to save ber life, though he did not rush to her side,
as Mr. Lytton Strachey thinks he ought to have done.
Her dog, Tonton, was an irascible little beast, but he
kept with alacrity the promise he had made to take
charge of it in the event of her death. And, when she
died, he regretted her, as she had told him that he
would, and for the reason that she gave in her vale-
dictory letter. “Vous me regretterez”, she had written,
“parce qu'on est bien aise de se savoir aimé.”
CHAPTER 1X

‘AN ACCOUNT OF THE GIANTS —“HISTORIC DOUBTS”
— THE MYSTERIOUS MOTHER’ —‘' NATURE WILL
PREVAIL”

For a time it was amusing, and even agreeable, to
Horace Walpole to be “sent for about, like an African
prince or a learned canary-bird”, in consequence of his
faked letter to Rousseau; but as the year (1760)
advanced, the thought of “Strawberry” in lilac-time
began to tug at his heart-strings. A pilgrimage to
Livry in April, though it satisfied his enthusiasm for
Madame de Sévigné, only served to remind him that
he was in a land to whose mutilated groves the spring
would bring scant glory. “Strawberry alone”, he
wrote to Cole, on his return early in May, “contains
more verdure than the whole of France.”

The fascination which the idea of giants exercised
over Walpole’s imagination did not exhaust itself in the
massy phantom of Alfonso the Good. One of the
most mordant of his satires, written in July 1766, was
suggested by the reported discovery by Captain Byron
of a race of gigantic men in Patagonia. In An Account
of the Giants lately Discovered he satirised everything,
and almost everybody, that he disliked—Methodism

176
co.1x “AN ACCOUNT OF THE GIANTS? 177

and pedantry, Slavery and the Stamp Act, Whitefield
and the Grenvilles. The machinery is unblushingly
borrowed from Gulliver, yet here is none of the grim
driving-force of Swift's irony; Walpole’s remains airy
and urbane, and is not malignant even when it is most
malicious. With delightful gravity he discusses the
possible origin of these Patagonian prodigies:

. . . are we to believe that tribes of giants sailed from
Africa to America? What vessels wafted them? was
navigation so perfected in the infant world that fleets
enormously larger than any now existing were constructed
for a race of Polyphemes? Or, .. . is it the climate that
has ripened them, as Jamaica swells oranges into shad-
docks, to this prodigious volume? . .. Natural philoso-
phers cannot account for it, therefore divines certainly can.

In the penultimate paragraph he gives a sly dig
at himself, but it is in the manner of Moliére in
L’Impromptu de Versailles, rather than in that of
Swift’s verses on his own death.

Oh, if we could come at an heroic poem penned by a
giant! We should see other images than our puny writers
of romance have conceived; and a little different from the
cold tale of a late notable author, who did not know better
what to do with his giant than to make him grow till he
shook his own castle about his own ears.

Madame du Deffand amused herself by playing a
very pretty little trick on Walpole in the month of June,
when she sent him a snuff-box ornamented with a
miniature of Madame de Sévigné and accompanied by
a letter purporting to be written by the shade of Notre
Dame des Rochers herself. The recipient, as the
sender had intended that he should, jumped to the
conclusion that the actual donor was the charming
178 HORACE WALPOLE CHAP.

Duchesse de Choiseul. When he discovered his error,
he felt a little foolish, and, as he confessed to Lady
Hervey, “scolded Madame du Deffand black and
blue”. In the same letter he sends her ladyship a
neat, flippant set of verses, inspired by a tale in the
Dictionnaire des Anecdotes “taken from a German
author”.

Meanwhile the reverberations of the famous faked
epistle had not died down, and the perpetrator of the
hoax was fain to come to the rescue of David Hume,
suspected by Jean Jacques of complicity. “I should
be very sorry to have you blamed on my account,”
Walpole writes to the historian, in a letter which he
explicitly authorises him to cite, “I have a hearty
contempt for Rousseau; and am perfectly indifferent
what the literati of Paris think of the matter.” Yet
when Hume printed the letter, he was both disconcerted
and annoyed.

A violent attack of gout in the late summer drove
Walpole to “the Bath”, a town which he disliked
“exceedingly”, perhaps on account of the pervading
Pulteney atmosphere. The waters did him good
almost in his own despite; and he heard Wesley,
“wondrous clean, but as evidently an actor as Garrick”,
preach in a neat chapel “with true Gothic windows”,
and had speech with Chatham, who asked him to move
the Address in the Commons. This request he received
without enthusiasm. He had determined to give effect
at last to his oft-proclaimed intention of retiring from
Parliament. On March 13, 1767, he wrote to the Mayor
of Lynn tendering his resignation. He had heard that
“a warm contest” was expected; he thought it his
duty “by an early declaration to endeavour to preserve
IX “AN ACCOUNT OF THE GIANTS” 179

the integrity and peace of so great, so respectable, so
unblemished a borough”,

If the date given in the Short Notes be correct it
‘was on December 25, 1766, and, therefore, during his
sojourn in Paris, that Walpole embarked upon his one
and only attempt at blank verse and at tragedy, The
Mysterious Mother. The idea attracted but could not
hold him: it was worked out intermittently, with long
pauses, and not brought to a conclusion till March
1768. In the interim he had written much prose,
both political and archaological. Early in 1767 a
French fabrication entitled Le Testament Politique du
Chevalier Robert Walpole had seemed to him suffi-
ciently dangerous to require a rejoinder, but as no
English translation appeared, his repudiation was pub-
lished only among his posthumous Works.

On the eve of his withdrawal from the parliamentary
arena the member for Lynn could not resist the
temptation to thrust a finger into the political pie once
more. This was when he busied himself in patching
up a truce between Conway, then sulking in his tent,
and the Rockingham party, notably the Duke of
Grafton. His intervention was successful—one hazards
the guess that the incomparable Conway had not really
desired to lay down his arms at all—yet he must have
been glad to find himself back in Paris in September
sitting again by Madame du Deffand’s tonneau chair,
with her dog, Tulipe, on his knee, and bandying epi-
grams with her and Madame de Choiseul. During his
absence there appeared in the Public Advertiser two
letters of his “on political abuse in newspapers” signed
respectively Toby and A Constant Correspondent.
When this, the briefest of his Paris sojourns, was over,
180 HORACE WALPOLE CHAP.

and he found himself once more under the gilded fan-
tracery of Strawberry Hill, Walpole settled down to his
new task—nothing less than the rehabilitation of that
bogey-man among monarchs, Richard III. Of his
own works at this date he wrote to the ever-censorious
Gray, “the greater part are mere compilations; and no
wonder they are, as you say, incorrect, when they are
commonly written with people in the room, as Richard
and the Noble Authors were”. The Historic Doubts
on the Life and Reign of King Richard the Third must
rank, however, as something more than a “mere com-
pilation”. It was received with such excitement that
the first edition of twelve hundred copies was exhausted
in one day, and Selwyn wrote to Lord Carlisle that
“Horry seemed mightily pleased with the success his
new book had met with”. The gentle art of being
tedious was one which “Horry” never practised,
whatever his theme. Historic Doubts may be only
an ingenious piece of special pleading, less amply
and less convincingly documented than Sir Clement
Markham’s apologia of 1907, but it is readable even
now ; and the Preface shows that the “historic doubter”,
as Selwyn called him, had grasped the two fundamental
points in Richard’s favour; i.e. the fact that few of
his alleged crimes would have profited him anything,
and the fact that the bulk of our information about
this, the last of the Plantagenets, has been transmitted
to us by the hirelings of the first of the Tudors. When,
in due course, the professional critics and historians,
including David Hume and Milles, Dean of Exeter,
girt up their loins and fell upon the book, Walpole
began to wish that he had left poor Richard’s memory
undefended. In 1769 he was fain to draw up a reply
IX “THE MYSTERIOUS MOTHER” 181

to certain criticisms, notably to those of Hume
incorporated in an article by one Diverdun which
had appeared in Mémoires littéraries de la Grande-
Bretagne; a year later he found himself in conflict
with Dr. Milles, who had made ‘certain observations”
in the organ of the Society of Antiquaries; and finally,
in 1772, hearing that the Society “intended printing
some more foolish notes” upon a subject of which he
had grown heartily weary, he decided to put himself
beyond the reach of Messieurs les assassins by resigning
his membership.

It was within a few days of the original publication
of the Historic Doubts that Walpole received the por-
trait of Madame du Deffand which afterwards hung
in the breakfast-room at “Strawberry”. “Vous étes ici
en personne”, he wrote to her, “je vous parle; il ne
manque que votre impatience a répondre.” In the fol-
lowing month, March 1768, he finished The Mysterious
Mother, concerning which he had dropped to his “dear
old blind woman” hints that she found unfathomable.
Montagu, to whom he had been more explicit, “would
not bear the subject”; and neither Chute’s approval
nor Gray’s blinded Walpole to the fact that the play
was fundamentally unsuited for representation on the
stage. It is, indeed, a little curious that his imagina-
tion—though in the Castle of Otranto it had toyed
with the theme of incest—should have been allured
by a story so sombre and so revolting. He himself
knew it, and he wrote to Mason that he believed he
had been pleased with what ought to have prevented
his “attempting the subject, which was the singularity
of it”. This “singularity” proved highly disconcert-
ing to his more squeamish admirers, when he had
182 HORACE WALPOLE CHAP.

printed and privately circulated the work. Fanny
Burney had “long desired to read it, from so well
knowing and so much liking the author”; but in 1786,
when it fell into her hands, her horror was extreme.
She “felt a sort of indignant aversion rise fast and
warm” in her mind “against the wilful author of a
story so horrible”; the “lecture” almost made her
regard Mr. Walpole “as the patron of the vices he had
been pleased to record”: and it took her some time to
recover her equanimity. Without falling into Fanny’s
error, and confounding the creator with his creatures—
always bad criticism as well as bad theology—we may
permit ourselves to regret that Walpole’s unsuspected
talent for blank verse and for tragic drama did not
find some other outlet. In a postscript to an edition
which he authorised James Dodsley to publish in 1781
he himself says that he considered the subject “so truly
tragic in the two essential springs of terror and pity”
that he “could not resist the impulse of adapting it to
the scene”. If he had left us in any doubt as to his
“sources”, it might appear that he had anticipated
some of Charles Lamb’s wanderings into Elizabethan
by-paths, and that The Mysterious Mother was the
spiritual descendant of The Maide’s Tragedy or ’Tis
Pity She’s a Whore. We know, however, that he had
heard, “when very young”, of “a gentlewoman under
uncommon agonies of mind” who had sought ghostly
counsel of Archbishop Tillotson; her story was, in
effect, that of The Mysterious Mother.

The heroine, and the dominating figure, of the
tragedy is the widowed Countess of Narbonne, whose
alms and austerities are both so excessive as to lead
her chaplain, Father Benedict, to suspect that her soul
IX “THE MYSTERIOUS MOTHER” 183

is burdened with a more than common load of remorse.
She has been a widow for sixteen years, and her only
son Edmund, Count of Narbonne, had been exiled
for as long, and charged by her never to return while
she lives. For her implacable wrath against him she
will give only one reason; the fact that on the very
night when his father was brought home dead from
a hunting accident the young man kept a secret tryst
in the castle with a certain Beatrice, then the object
of his youthful love. Edmund, at the beginning of
the play, has returned in disguise to Narbonne, accom-
panied by a light-hearted friend called Florian, and
is lodged “hard by St. Bridget’s nunnery”, In a
chance encounter with the gloomy Countess Florian
makes an impression so favourable that when he,
thinking to plead his friend’s cause, craves further
speech with her, she agrees to meet him at St. Bridget’s.
In that nunnery dwells a young protégée of hers, the
sixteen-year-old Adelizia, whose destiny is to the
Countess a source of strangely poignant perplexity.
The girl now confesses, in answer to some questions
from her protectress, that she has ‘“convers’d with a
young knight”, and that he has “talk’d of love”. The
knight is Edmund, but the Countess believes him to
be Florian, and determines to sanction—and even to
expedite—the marriage. Meanwhile Edmund has
informed Benedict that the Count—that is, himself
—is dead, and that he saw him die. When, however,
the priest introduces him into his mother’s presence
as a witness of her son’s death, she swoons. As she
recovers consciousness, Edmund impetuously declares
himself. The declaration serves only to heighten
the mysterious anguish of the Countess, which vergés
184 HORACE WALPOLE CHAP.

upon frenzy. With an effort she masters herself.
The marriage of Adelizia must be celebrated without
deloy. Benedict, thinking to obey her behest, joins
the hands of Edmund and Adelizia, who, emerging
from the chapel, beseech the blessing of the Countess
upon “her children”. Then the terrible truth blazes
out, like a sudden, blinding flash of purple lightning.
Ere she stabs herself with her son’s dagger the
Countess has revealed to him that it was not—as he
had believed—the wanton Beatrice who had kept the
midnight tryst with him sixteen years before, and that
he and Adelizia are kin in a double and unspeakable
kinship of blood. Before this climax is reached,
Adelizia has been borne off fainting, and we are left
to imagine that to her the horror remained unrevealed.
The ill-starred Edmund rushes away to seek death on
the field of battle; but first he charges the faithful
Florian to bear his bride
to the holy sisters,
Say ’twas my mother’s will she take the veil.

The gruesomeness of this plot is regrettable, for
it obscures the very real excellences of the play. These
excellences are recognised by Professor Allardyce
Nicholl, when he says that “the blank verse shows
Walpole’s power over a lower kind of poetry, and the
last scenes have a nervous intensity which marks him
out as something of a true dramatist”: and that “judged
by the highest standards, of course, the play is ridiculous
and weak, but tested by the drama of its time, it is by
way of being a masterpiece”. Indeed, if the action,
the dialogue, and the texture of the verse be balanced
against those of Jephson’s Braganza or Mason's
Elfrida, Walpole’s virtuosity—to call it nothing higher
IX “THE MYSTERIOUS MOTHER” 185

—will appear remarkable. In their calmer moments
his characters exhibit a tendency to verbosity; but
when the crises comes, the word of the Countess clang
with half-remembered cadences that are almost authen-
tic Elizabethan:

. . . Globe of the world,
If thy frame split not with such crimes as these
It is immortal !

A faint and fugitive element of comedy is intro-
duced in the person of Florian, whose remarks at his
first entrance, though the blank verse is not particularly
successful, have a touch of the bluff wit of the Bastard
in King John.

What precious mummery! Her son in exile,
She wastes on monks and beggars his inheritance,
For his soul's health! I never knew a woman
But loved our bodies or our souls too well.

Each master-whim maintains its hour of empire,
And obstinately faithful to its dictates,

With equal ardour, equal importunity,

They teaze us to be damn’d or be sav'd.

Here the excess of weak terminations and redundant
syllables has a curious dragging effect upon the rhythm,
but that same excess proves that Walpole had now
escaped from the thraldom of Augustan prosody, with
its meticulously measured stresses and its careful
elisions at every second word. More characteristic
in concept, and more felicitous in form, is the reply
of a brother-priest to Benedict’s misgivings about the
spread of heresy and the cult of “reason”.

. . . each chieftain that attacks us
Must grow the pope of his own heresy.
E’en stern philosophy, if once triumphant,
Shall frame some jargon and exact obedience
To metaphysic nonsense worse than ours.
186 HORACE WALPOLE CHAP.

The church is but a specious name for empire,
And will exist wherever fools have fears.
Rome is no city; ’tis the human heart,

And there suffice it if we plant our banners.

Hardly had Walpole put the finishing touches to
his tragedy than he found himself involved in a paper
argument with Voltaire. The Wicked Wasp of
Ferney had asked for a copy of Historic Doubts and
had received, into the bargain, one of Otranto, together
with a letter which, though it described him as “the
first genius in Europe”, also drew his attention to the
fact that the writer had taken the liberty “to find fault
in print” with his criticisms of “our Shakespeare”.
“He did not like it”, the Short Notes record. Walpole
prudently dropped the correspondence, only to find
a year later that Voltaire had revived the subject of
their controversy in the Mercure de France, and, what
was worse, had written to the Duchesse de Choiseul
accusing him of “officiously” sending his works, and
of “declaring war” in defence of “ce buffon Shake-
speare”.

Walpole’s usual summer jaunt took him this year
(1768) to Warwickshire, Yorkshire, and Derbyshire.
About this time the equivocal position of his niece, the
widowed Maria Waldegrave, disquieted him a little.
Not until 1772 was the well-kept secret divulged to
him and to the world that she had been lawfully mar-
ried in 1766 to the prince—William Henry, Duke of
Gloucester—with whom her close association had been
a source of so much uncharitable surmise.

In the month of March 1769 Mr. Bathoe the book-
seller, handed to his distinguished patron, Mr. Walpole,
a packet addressed to him from Bristol. It con-
Ix THE CHATTERTON EPISODE 187

tained “a very curious and kind letter”, together
with some even more curious documents. Walpole
responded with eager precipitancy. The vision of
an untapped horde of ancient manuscripts, thus
dangled before his eyes, excited him so much that
he had hardly enough presence of mind left to ask
leave to inquire “where Rowley’s poems are to be
found?” For his unknown correspondent was Thomas
Chatterton.

Admirers of the “Wonderful Boy” have been
exceeding wroth with Walpole for the part which they
believe him to have played in the tragedy of that
thwarted spirit. Yet they over-reach themselves.
The allegation of the editor of Chatterton’s Miscellanies
in 1778 (which drew forth a public démenti from
Walpole) that the youth had “met with a very cold
reception” was grotesquely untrue. The “reception”
was, as the event proved, only too encouraging. Even
the preposterous history of “Peynctynge” was hailed
with joy at Strawberry Hill; and not until the superior
knowledge and acumen of Gray and Mason had
detected the imposition did Walpole change his tune.
He took the trouble to inform himself, through “a
relation at Bath”, of Chatterton’s actual circumstances,
and, in the same letter in which he confessed that
better judges than he “were by no means satisfied
with the authenticity” of his “supposed MSS.”, he
urged him “in duty and gratitude to his mother” to
labour industriously in his profession (of attorney’s
clerk), adding that “when he should have made a
fortune he might unbend himself in the studies
consonant to his inclinations”. Though this excellent
advice must have sounded in Chatterton’s ears much
188 HORACE WALPOLE CHAP.

as the Quarterly’s counsel to ‘“‘stick to his gallipots”
sounded in the ears of John Keats, it was surely
unwise of the “Wonderful Boy” to adopt a hectoring
and defiant tone, to reiterate that the Rowley MSS.
were “an authentic piece of antiquity”, and to write
to Walpole as if he, Chatterton, and not his intended
dupe, were the party aggrieved. The height and
front of Walpole’s offending seems to have been that
he made Chatterton wait some weeks before he sent
his forgeries back to Bristol. The episode occurred
on the eve of his departure for a six weeks’ sojourn
in France, and he did not take the trouble to deal with
the matter until his return. Then he dispatched the
documents without comment, repressing but—char-
acteristically—preserving the draft of a covering letter
couched in decidedly energetic terms, It cannot be
doubted that when he heard of Chatterton’s suicide
Walpole was genuinely shocked. The intelligence
was imparted to him at a Royal Academy banquet by
Goldsmith, whose loudly-proclaimed belief in the
authenticity of the Rowley MSS. had been received
with laughter by Dr. Johnson, who was of the com-
pany. When, in 1778, the controversy was revived, he
was at great pains to defend himself, and his defence
is neither unconvincing nor insincere.

The Parisian visit of 1769 was almost uniformly
delightful. Of Madame du Deffand Walpole then wrote
to Montagu:

she makes songs, sings them, remembers all that ever were
made; and having lived from the most agreeable to the
most reasoning age, has all that was amiable in the last,
all that is sensible in this, without the vanity of the former
or the pedant impertinence of the latter.
1X TOPICAL VERSE 189

In April of this year Kitty Clive had quitted the stage
for good. That Walpole should ever have imagined
his rubicund old friend in the réle of the Countess of
Narbonne is distinctly curious; and that he should
have written a flippant epilogue for her in that char-
acter is stranger still. On the other hand, it was obvious
that she would turn to him for a set of valedictory
verses, and he wrote them with grace and skill, though
the analogy between the evanishment of Kitty to
“private shades” and the withdrawal of Charles V. into
the cloister, seems somewhat far-fetched. Still, it
struck a topical note. Robertson’s Life of the heavy-
chinned Habsburg was the literary sensation of the hour.

The year that followed was singularly uneventful.
Beyond continuing of his Memoirs and tinkering with
the fourth volume of “my Painters’, Walpole seems to
have written little. Masquerades and the later scenes
of the Wilkes and Liberty farce, monopolised the
world’s attention—and his. The chief incident of the
summer was a visit to Earl and Countess Temple at
Stowe, where the guest of honour was the stalwart
Princess Emily, and where an attempt at a féte cham-
pétre was frustrated by the coolness of the weather, the
meagreness of the illuminations, and the inadequacy of
the music, supplied by “an ancient militia-man” with
“a squeaking tabor and pipe”. Walpole “could not
help laughing” as he surveyed his fellow-revellers, who,
“instead of tripping lightly to such an Arcadian enter-
tainment, were hobbling down the balustrades, wrapped
up in cloaks and great-coats for fear of catching cold”.
But he did not fail to “drop into poetry” of a highly
Arcadian and pastoral complexion in honour of the
princess.
190 HORACE WALPOLE CHAP.

As the year waned, the gout waxed. “I fancy”,
writes the poor victim to Lady Ossory in September,
“I look very like the mummy of some sacred crane
which Egyptian piety bundled up in cered cloths and
called preserving.” With the return of summer, his
thoughts veered toward Paris. For Madame du
Deffand’s sake—he stresses the motive in a letter to
Lord Strafford—he will “leave groves and lawns and
rivers for a dirty town, with a dirtier ditch calling
itself the Seine”. It was in Paris, in August 1771, that
the news reached him of Gray's death. “I wish to
God you may be able to tell me it is not true!” he wrote
to Cole; and he concludes, rather touchingly, “Me-
thinks, as we grow old, our only business here is to
adorn the graves of our friends or to dig our own”.
To Mason he wrote in the same strain on his return,
enclosing some lines on the dead poet which “suppose
him buried among his real predecessors” and conclude,
with more enthusiasm than lucidity:

Aloft let pomp her Edwards, Henrys, keep;
Near Homer’s dust should Pindar’s ashes sleep.

The death of Gray—who left all his papers to
Mason—served to cement the alliance between his
two surviving friends. During the three years which
the legatee devoted to the compiliation of the poet’s
Life and Letters, Walpole helped him constantly with
information and advice, never once allowing his per-
sonal feelings to get the better of his loyalty to the
memory of Gray and West. “I had rather”, he wrote
in 1773, “be mortified than subtract a little from the
honour your pen is conferring on my two dead friends.
It would be base to rob their graves to save my own
1x “HIEROGLYPHIC TALES” 101

vanity.” The friendship between him and Mason
was interrupted in 1784, when—perhaps not without
reason—he suspected “Scroddles” of trimming his
Whig principles with an eye to a bishopric. A some-
what tepid reconciliation took place in 1796, when
neither of the two quondam cronies had a year to live.

The preference exhibited by Walpole in his old
age for the society of ladies had its corollary in his
life-long preference for little girls over little boys. He
was always a courteous knight to virgins of five; and
for the delectation of one of them, Lady Anne Fitz-
patrick, he wrote in 1771 the fable of the Peach in
Brandy. This fable formed one of a series of five
Hieroglyphic Tales, with which he had amused himself
at intervals between 1770 and 1772, and which, accord-
ing to the Preface, “were undoubtedly written a little
before the creation of the world, and have ever since
been preserved by oral tradition in the mountains of
Crampcraggiri, an uninhabited island, not yet dis-
covered”. The whimsicality of these tales is such that
the intended parable or satire sometimes becomes a
little difficult of detection. The design has the incon-
sequence, the quaintness, the gaiety of colour and the
lack of perspective, of a scene painted on a piece of
Chinese porcelain. Perhaps the best is the story of
Mi Li, with its delicate undercurrent of irony, and its
deft introduction of real scenes—the grotto and bridge
at Park Place—and living characters—Lady Ailes-
bury’s niece, Caroline Campbell, and her spaniels with
their “ruby eyes”.

Like the verses appointing the Countess Temple
Oberon’s Laureate, those To Lady——,' when about

* Lady Anne Fitzpatrick.
192 HORACE WALPOLE CHAP.

Five Years Old, with a Present of Shells, written in
1772, inspire regret that Walpole wrote so few in this
kind. The tints are as luminous as those of the shells
themselves: the cadence is that of the Restoration
lyricists. It is as if—fantastic thought !—Sedley or
Rochester were gambolling upon a nursery-floor.

O nymph, compar’d with whose young bloom
Hebe’s herself an ancient fright;
May these gay shells find grace and room
Both in your baby-house and sight!
Shells! What are shells? you ask, admiring,
With stare half pleasure, half surprise;
And, sly with nature’s art, enquiring
At dear Mamma'’s all-speaking eyes.
Shells, fairest Anne, are playthings made
By a brave god call’d Father Ocean,
Whose frown, from pole to pole obey’d,
Commands the waves and stills their motion
From that old sire a daughter came
As like Mamma as blue to blue;
And, like Mamma, the sea-born dame,
An urchin bore, not unlike you.
For him fond Grandpapa compels
The floods to furnish such a state.
Of corals and of cockle-shells
‘Would turn a little lady’s pate.
The chit has tons of baubles more;
His nurs’ry’s stuff’d with doves and sparrows;
And littered is its azure floor
With painted quivers, bows and arrows.
Spread, spread your frock; you must be friends;
His toys shall fill your lap and breast;
To-day the boy this sample sends,
. « . And some years hence he'll send the rest.

Faerie and farce certainly usurped Walpole’s mind
during the year 1773, fusing and crystallising in his
“Moral Entertainment”, Nature Will Prevail. Of
this flimsy trifle Mr. Austin Dobson has said that it
“has something of the character of such earlier pro-
ductions of Mr. W. S. Gilbert as the Palace of Truth”.
IX “NATURE WILL PREVAIL” 193

It has also something of Iolanthe, and a fugitive touch
of The Tempest. The scene is laid on a “Desart Isle”,
and of the four dramatis personae, two are mortal men,
one is a mortal maiden, and one the fairy of the island.
In order to cure Current of his loquacity and Padlock
of his suspicious reserve, Almadine has caused them to
be wrecked on the shores of her domain, whither she
has likewise transported the country damsel, Finette.
Current’s struggles with his inclination to disobey her
behest that he shall not tell Padlock of her existence,
the intervention of an echo, his loss of hearing as the
penalty of his disobedience, the wooing of Finette and
the discomfiture of Padlock, all make excellent fooling.
The dialogue is light to the point of frothiness, but not
uniformly artificial, and its delicate vein of “riskiness”
probably pleased the public when, in 1778, it was “acted
at the little theatre in the Haymarket with success”.
To his dear Lady Ossory Walpole wrote in June
1774, “You yourself owned, Madam, that I am grown
quite lifeless. I am none of your Glastonbury thorns
that blow at Christmas”; yet this attenuated tree in
that same year put forth at least two buds. The parody
of Lord Chesterfield’s Letters to his Son, in the form of
three letters from a woman of fashion to her daughter,
has the essential quality of a good parody—it distorts
its model without thereby rendering it unrecognisable.

“It is a charming thing,” says Mamma, “to make visits
and verses, and I hope you will have a talent for both. It
is harder to make verses than visits; but the more difficult
a thing is, the better; consequently, if you could do any-
thing that is impossible, it would be still more glorious.”

As for the other “bud”, the verses to the three Vernons,
it is mere clinquant, but it is facile and felicitous, and
104 HORACE WALPOLE CHAP.

betrays no decline of invention. This and the preced-
ing year had been full of distresses for the versemonger.
Early in 1773 his nephew, Lord Orford, became insane,
and a sudden burden: of unfamiliar and bewildering
responsibilities was thereby laid upon his meagre
shoulders. An unsuspected vein of practical good
sense revealed itself in Walpole at this juncture, and
his adaptability must have been surprising to himself
and his friends. He, whose earlier trafficking had
been all with bibelots, and whose knowledge of animals
was confined to pet dogs of diminutive proportions,
now had to supervise the sale of his unhappy nephew’s
stud, and to “give orders about game, dispark Hough-
ton, have plans for farming, vend colts, fillies, bullocks,
and sheep”. He tells Mann with pride that he “has not
yet confounded terms, nor ordered pointers to be
turned to grass”. In the midst of these arduous activi-
ties he had little leisure to spin verse. The lines written
in 1773 to Walter Clark, Lord Nuneham’s gardener,
suggest an instinctive attempt to escape from bucolic
realities into a walled and formal garden, as when he
declares that:

The lilies of the field that shone

With brighter blaze than Solomon

Shall beg to quit their rural stations
And mix with Walter Clark’s carnations.

Well might poor Walpole lament that all his amuse-
ments were at an end. Yet it was not so. In 1773-
1774, at the height of his distresses, he found—or
made—time to annotate six rather ponderous satires of
Mason, and to spin a web of mystification round the
fact that he had done so. The secret of the authorship
of the first three—two were anonymous, and one pub-
IX NOTES TO MASON’S SATIRES 195

lished as “by Malcolm M’Griggor Esq. of Knights-
bridge”—was well kept, and gave rise to much specula-
tion. Walpole, anxious lest the revelation of his share
might cause embarrassment to his niece, the Duchess
of Gloucester, half-regretted that Mason had shown
him some of his manuscripts before publication. “I
never could tell a lie without colouring,” he remarks
ruefully. His notes are racy and piquant, but at this
distance Sir William Chambers, architect of the Kew
pagoda, Pinchbeck, son of the inventor of the alloy
which still bears his name, Fletcher Norton, lawyer and
rascal, and Shebbeare, Jacobite turncoat, look hardly
larger than a group of marionettes, and not much more
life-like. To forge his miniature bolts probably gave
Walpole a little badly-needed distraction during the
weary months when the partial recovery of his nephew
seemed almost as great a calamity as his continued
insanity. The satires are spread over a period of six
years—1773-1779—and synchronise almost exactly
with the illness of Lord Orford. The luckless young
lord recovered his sanity in 1774, only to relapse in
1777; but his second attack, though it imposed certain
distressful duties on his uncle, did not mean a renewal
of the servitude of 1773-1774.

“I now declared”, writes Walpole to Mann, “I would
take on me the care of his person and his health, but never
of his fortune. ... My own peace, at the end of my life,
and broken as I am, must weigh something.”

A year later Lord Orford recovered again, and the
last of his many acts of ingratitude to a most exemplary
uncle was his death in 1791, by which Horace Walpole
found himself the disconcerted inheritor of an un-
196 HORACE WALPOLE CHAP, IX

wanted earldom and a debt-encumbered estate.
During an interval of alleged sanity in 1779, the
wretched young man had almost broken that uncle’s
heart by selling to Catherine the Great the entire
collection of pictures at Houghton. Thus were
dispersed the ZEdes Walpoliane of Horace’s youthful
pride.

Such intervals of release as the course of his nephew's
illness allowed him were spent by Walpole in the some-
what half-hearted pursuit of his old hobbies. As the
American war developed, his bias in favour of the
insurgent Colonials revealed itself more and more
clearly. “Our conduct”, he wrote, in 1774, “has been
that of pert children; we have thrown a pebble at a
mastiff, and are surprised it was not frightened.” There
is a note of profound lassitude in his remark to Lady
Ossory a year later, “when one has lived a good while,
events strike one less”. Even so, the vision of Marie
Antoinette, “dressed in silver, scattered over with
laurier-roses”, roused him to almost lyric enthusiasm
during his last sojourn in Paris, in the summer of
1775. From this journey he returned, as George
Selwyn told Lord Carlisle, “as peevish as a monkey”.
He was, indeed, at the turn of the road. There re-
mained before him more than two decades of life, but
it was a life that grew ever less eventful, narrowing
at last to the boundaries of Twickenham and the com-
pass of a card-table or a tea-tray. The epilogue to
Robert Jephson’s bombastic tragedy of Braganza, writ-
ten in 1775, is the last thing of its kind recorded in
the Short Notes, and one of the least worth recording.
Henceforth the painted windows of Strawberry Hill
darken with the slow setting of the sun.
CHAPTER X
LAST YEARS—HORACE WALPOLE AND HIS CRITICS

WHEN Horace Walpole was born, in 1717, the first
Hanoverian King had sat only three years on the Eng-
lish throne, Marlborough, Bolingbroke, and Isaac
Newton still lived, Pope’s Iliad was in course of pub-
lication, and full-bottomed wigs were born; when, in
1797, he died, George III. had reigned for thirty-
seven years, Wellington held a Colonelcy in the 33rd
Regiment of Foot, Melbourne was an Undergraduate,
Wordsworth had solemnly dedicated himself to the
poetic vocation, and gentlemen had begun, not only to
“wear their own hair”, but to crop it en Brutus.

So violent and so profound were the social and
political changes that marked his last two decades,
Walpole took refuge, as in a fortress, within the
embattled walls of “Strawberry”, and felt himself
beleaguered there by uncouth people, and ideas even
more uncouth, As the troubled years passed, his
emergences became less and less frequent. In the
summer of 1780 the Gordon Riots had perturbed him
to the bones, though he rallied sufficiently to write to
Lady Ossory that he was “decking himself with blue
ribbons like a May-day garland”, and that he regretted
he had not brought the armour of Francis I. from

197
198 HORACE WALPOLE CHAP.

Twickenham to London. After 1789 he could not bear
to look at the livid crimson glare over France unless
through his traceried windows—and even then he made
haste to avert his eyes.

“My dear Sir,” he wrote to Mann, in 1784, “life is like
a chess-board; the white spaces and the black are close
together; it does not signify of what colour the last square
is; the border closes all.”

When those words were written, and for some time
afterwards, it seemed as if he had made his own last
move on to a square of the darker colour. Death was
thinning the ranks of his friends with steady, relentless
strokes of the scythe. Chute, his neighbour, “the
genius that presided over poor ‘Strawberry’ ”, had died
in 1776; in 1780 the estranged Montague departed,
and Madame du Deffand followed; Cole succumbed
to the Fenland fogs in 1782; brother Ned gave up the
ghost in 1784, and a year later the rubicund counten-
ance of the Clive shone at Little Strawberry no more.
The death of Mann in 1786 left almost as great a
blank as if he had been one of the Twit'nam circle,
and Selwyn’s lugubrious figure vanished from the scene
in 1791. True, the incomparable Conway survived
till 1795, but he loved the seclusion of Park Place so
well that it was left for his sculptress daughter, the
widowed Mrs. Damer, to form a connecting link
between the cousins. It was in the year of “Miny’s”
demise that Dr. Burney and Fanny visited the Gothic
castle, and recorded how

Strawberry Hill . . . with all its chequered and interesting
varieties of detail, had a something in its whole of monot-
ony, that cast, insensibly, over its visitors an indefinable
x LAST YEARS 199

species of secret constraint, and made cheerfulness rather
the effect of effort than the spring of pleasure.

Added to this growing sense of isolation there was
for Walpole the increasing burden of ill-health. Robert
Jephson, to whom, between 1774 and 1776, he had
addressed six admirably lucid and “Horatian” papers,
Thoughts on Tragedy and Thoughts on Comedy, pro-
duced in 1781, The Count of Narbonne, a dramatised
adaptation of The Castle of Otranto. Selwyn then
noted that “Mr. Walpole”, who attended the first per-
formance, was “more défait, more perclus de ses
membres, than I ever yet saw any poor wretch”. Wal-
pole’s spirits flagged sometimes, but never his sense
of humour. And his quill, faithful in the service of
his favourite correspondents even when it was driven
with difficulty by a lame and muffled hand, lost noth-
ing of its liveliness. The epitaph which he devised
in 1783 for Lady Ossory’s bullfinch drew a grave
remonstrance from Mason, who found it fantastic to
the verge of impiety. A year later he sent,

From a castle as vast—as the castles on signs,

six gay and gallant couplets to the Dowager Lady
Lyttleton. The Officina Arbuteana was still function-
ing, though rather languidly, and it is worthy of note
that the majority of its later productions were written
by, to, or about ladies. Kirgate printed in 1785 six
copies of the Hieroglyphic Tales and four hundred of
Walpole’s essay On Modern Gardening (written in
1770), interleaved with a French translation by the
Duc de Nivernois. Though the essayist protests that
it is not his business to lay down rules for gardens, but
to give the history of them, the work amounts to a
200 HORACE WALPOLE CHAP.

defence of what might be called the “romantic” school
of gardening, as opposed to that which delighted in
“parterres embroidered like a petticoat” and “a tire-
some uniformity”.

It was a year later—in the summer of 1786—that
Princess Emily demanded from him “some verses on
Gunnersbury”, and received in return three stanzas
comparing her to the Emperor Augustus and the writer
to “Flaccus”. The third declares:

As warm as his my zeal for you,
Great Princess, could I show it;
But though you have a Horace too,
Ah! Madam, he’s no poet!
Most assuredly he was none.

More and more, as the shadows lengthened, did
Walpole seek solace in feminine society, lacking which
his last years would have been desolate indeed. Pinker-
ton, the pushful Scottish antiquary, who thrust his
sallow and diminutive person upon Walpole’s notice
in 1784, has recorded how in that society “he would
exceed his usual powers in conversation; his spirits
were animated, as if by a cordial, and he would scatter
his wit and petits mots with dazzling profusion”.
(“Polite, ingenious, entertaining and original”, Miss
Burney wrote of him in 1790.) But it was something
more engaging than a love for tea-table amenities
which prompted him to spend so many hours with
Mrs. Vesey, when that poor lady’s company was cheer-
ful neither to herself nor to others, and with Mrs.
Delany, when that venerable dame was in her less
jocund moods. We catch pleasant glimpses of him
in the correspondence of Hannah More (who dedi-
cated to him her didactic Florio, and whose “very
x LAST YEARS 201

pretty, novel poem, Bonner’s Ghost”, was printed at
the Officina Arbuteana), Fanny Burney, and Mary
Hamilton, and there we see him delighting old ladies
with his courtly prévenances and young ones with his
gallant raillery. The half-sprightly, half-sanctimonious
Hannah and the warm-hearted Mary contend play-
fully for his smiles. In her journal for 1785 Mary
notes:

At ¥ past 10 Mr. W. brought me home. Poor Miss
More, she certainly will not sleep to-night; before we
parted she looked as yellow as saffron. Do you not think
Mr. Walpole is a happy man to have two such paragons
of perfection in love with him?

Three years later there swam into his ken two other
“paragons of perfection”—or such he accounted them
—who were to be the “sweet consolation” of his last
days. These were the Berry sisters, Mary and Agnes,
“the two pearls that I found in my path”, as he wrote
to Lady Ossory after their first encounter at the house
of Mann’s niece, Lady Herries. He was, perhaps,
guilty of a certain degree of ingratitude to his older
friends when he declared that he had been ‘three-
score and ten years looking for a society” that he
“perfectly liked”; but he spoke truly when he said,
“I soon found that the charming Berrys were pre-
cisely ce qu'il me fallait”. His affection for them was
as impetuous in its onset as it was unchangeable in its
quality. Before long, he fretted and pined when he
was deprived of the company of the dark-eyed, some-
what précieuse Mary, and the gentler, less regularly
beautiful Agnes. Their project of spending the year
1790-1791 on the Continent, in the midst of the
revolutionary tumults, appalled him. When Mary
202 HORACE WALPOLE CHAP.

relentlessly put it into execution, and they left England
with their unobtrusive and obedient widowed father,
his distress was pitiful, and his voluminous letters to
them have a cadence that resembles the clucking of a
distracted hen. No doubt it was very good for Horace
Walpole’s soul to be thus vigorously shaken out of his
egotism in his old age; but the shaking process must
sometimes have been decidedly painful. When, at
last, all three returned, nothing would satisfy him but
that they should take up their abode in Kitty Clive’s
old cottage—and there the sisters remained until in
1852, within a few months of each other, they died.
This friendship which, in the words of Mr. J. C.
Squire, “gave to his last years at Strawberry Hill the
aspect of an Indian summer”, invested life with a new
interest even when “the Berrys” were absent, visiting
their grandmother in the north, or taking the waters
at Cheltenham, or bathing on the coast of Kent. Then
he had no other occupation that he “liked a quarter
so well” as chatting to them on paper. They found
his old stories entertaining; therefore for their delec-
tation he jotted down, in 1788, a desultory, conver-
sational, but remarkably pithy and clear-cut sequence
of Reminiscences. His narrative, he warns them, “will
probably resemble siege-pieces, which are struck of
promiscuous metals” . Though, in effect, the metal he
uses is neither pure nor heavy, the impression could not
well be more distinct. It belies the Voltairean motto
with which he prefixed the manuscript, “il ne faut point
d’esprit pour soccuper des vieux événemens”.

With one exception Walpole’s friends and kins-
folk extended a generous welcome to his “dear Both”.
That exception was his niece, the Duchess of Glou-
Xx LAST YEARS 203

cester, who, goaded thereto by newspaper innuendoes,
asked bluntly whether it was her uncle’s intention to
marry Miss Berry. “That”, replied Walpole, “is as
Miss Berry pleases.” Did he ever propose to her “in
form”? Pinkerton states that “he offered his hand suc-
cessively to two most amiable and interesting sisters”,
and he is corroborated by their personal maid, who lived
into the ’nineties of the nineteenth century. In her
old age Mary was pointed out to Lady Dorothy Nevill
(née Walpole) as the lady who had refused to marry
her kinsman Horace: and there seems to have been a
general concensus of opinion that the elder was the
favourite sister. But Mary—to use the gipsy sibyl’s
phrase—had been “crossed in love”, Her betrothed,
the irascible General O'Hara, broke off their engage-
ment on account of her refusal to marry him and leave
England in Walpole’s lifetime, and they never met
again. Many years later the news of his death, too
abruptly communicated, caused her to faint away. It
is probably true that she could have been Countess of
Orford had she so willed. Her old admirer was not a
little in awe of her; and had she objected to the ex-
aggerated and almost maudlin phraseology of some of
his letters to his “dear Wives”, his “ribs” his “Amours”,
it is beyond doubt that he would have abandoned
that tone. Apparently she neither objected nor desired
that in her own case this language should cease to be
metaphorical.

At this distance it is almost impossible for us to
see Mary Berry as she was seen in her youth by Horace
Walpole. Most of the existing descriptions of her
were written long after his death, when she had de-
veloped into a deep-voiced, corpulent, matronly gentle-
204 HORACE WALPOLE CHAP.

woman, one in whose company such men as Macaulay,
Monckton Milnes, and Thackeray found some—to us
—incomprehensible charm. The image of Agnes,
though indistinct, is much more engaging. Thackeray's
daughter, Lady Ritchie, remembered her as “a little
grey lady, a tiny woman, daintily dressed in grey”,
who had a “gentle, confident glance, and a certain
expression of arch composure”. And Agnes, though
less of a bluestocking than Mary, was not without gifts.
Did she not “copy admirably” Lady Di Beauclerk’s
gipsies, “though for the first time of her attempting
colours”?

Mr. Berry, that “little merry man with a round face”,
was designated by Walpole his literary executor, but
it was well understood that the duty of selecting and
arranging the manuscripts and other materials for
ultimate publication should be performed by his elder
daughter. With such energy did she pursue her task,
the five-volume folio edition of the Works of Horatio
Walpole, Earl of Orford, appeared in the year follow-
ing his death; to wit, in 1798. Miss Berry, as an
editor, showed both tact and skill. And she possessed
courage, too. For when Macaulay, in the famous
review, “dusted the jacket” of her old friend and
benefactor, she came forward in defence of Walpole,
not, perhaps, very conclusively, but with a touch of
generous sentiment. It would have been strange, indeed,
if the queer, wistful, intense affection that she inspired
had left her wholly unresponsive. Yet M. Paul Yvon
descries in her the avenger of all Madame de Deffand’s
wrongs!

As the end of Walpole’s life approaches, the years
tend more and more to merge into each other. His
x LAST YEARS 208

intellect remained as alert and his humour as quaintly
whimsical as of old, and the letters of these sunset days
have as much charm of form and colour as any he ever
wrote. But he had lost certain illusions, personal and
political, that once he had held dear. The French
Revolution brought his Whiggery, still intact when his
Last Journals ended in September 1783, tumbling in
fragments round his ears. And concerning his own
works he now wrote with sincerity what he had for-
merly written with affectation. To the royal book-
seller, George Nicol, who in 1792 desired to publish an
édition de luxe of his works, he declared, “I would no
more hear of a splendid and ornamental edition of my
trifling writings than I would dress my old, emaciated,
infirm person in rich and gaudy clothes”. It may be
that he had spoken truly when he told Madame du
Deffand, “Je suis bien petit & mes propres yeux”. Not
even to please Mrs. Elizabeth Carter would he dress
his “old, emaciated infirm person” in scarlet and ermine,
though when he succeeded to the Earldom of Orford
in 1791 she had hoped that he would immediately
“get an Act of Parliament to put down faro”. It seems
sometimes as if he were more than a little out of love
with life. “My being”, he wrote to Mann in 1776,
“is so isolé and insignificant, that I shall go out like a
lamp in an illumination that cannot be missed.” And
this mood recurs at intervals until the end. His dic-
tum, that “the world is a comedy to those who think,
a tragedy to those who feel”, had a double application
to himself, for he had both thought and felt much,
and thoughts yielded the first place to feelings as the
years passed.

The rumour, repeated to Hannah More by Dr.
206 HORACE WALPOLE CHAP.

Warton in 1788, that he was writing Walpoliana drew
from him a comically vehement protest:

No, in truth, nor anything else; nor shall—nor will
I go out in a jest-book. Age has not only made me prudent
but, luckily, lazy; and without that latter extinguisher I
do not know but that farthing candle, my discretion, would
let my snuff of life flit to the last sparkle of folly, like what
children call the parson and clerk in a burnt bit of paper.

His “snuff of life” flickered into some very gay little
sparks before it fell into a film of grey ash. The gift
of a bunch of knotted silks, the Peruvian Quipos alpha-
bet, from Lady Ossory in 1781, fired a whole train of
such sparks in his mind. He is baffled by the Quipos,
and “would as soon be able to hold a dialogue with
a rainbow, by the help of its grammar, a prism”; but
another idea soon occurs to him.

The Peruvian Quipos adapted a language to the eyes
rather than to the ears. Why should not there be one for
the nose? ... A rose, a jessamine, a pink, a jonquil and a
honeysuckle might signify the vowels. The Cape jessa-
mine which has two smells, was born a diphthong. How
charming it would be to smell an ode from a nosegay, and
to scent one’s handkerchief with a favourite song!

This fantastic quality of mind served to lessen the
impact of certain strange and disquieting developments
in his last years. The immensity of the stellar spaces
revealed by “Mr. Herschel’s giant telescope” daunts
him less when he has imagined, as an analogy, himself
trying to unfold to a pismire in his garden “an account
of the vast Empire of China”. A glimpse of Blan-
chard’s balloon over the tree-tops of Sunbury gives
him a prophetic vision of “the change that would be
made in the world by the substitution of balloons to
X LAST YEARS 207

ships”, and when there should be “fights in the air
with wind-guns”. Yet behind these “fooleries”, as he
calls them, there is a note of dismay. One feels that
he was not altogether loth to leave an earth already
trembling with the first dull vibrations of the Age of
Steam.

For “Strawberry” his love never waned. As late as
1793 he received Joseph Farington and George Dance
there, and showed them some of his heterogeneous,
heaped-up treasures. It was on this occasion that
Dance drew the pencil profile of him now in the
National Portrait Gallery. Farington vouches for the
excellence of the likeness, and there is probably more
of the quintessential “Horry” in that alert, amused,
mundane old mask than in Reynolds’ rather pompous,
self-conscious presentment of him, or Eckhardt’s, wig-
less and bland, or Rosalba’s, with pouting lips, or
Hone’s, with the oddly distended rose. Apart from
paintings and drawings there remain two admirable
portraits of Walpole, word-portraits of him in middle
life, and in old age, the first traced by Mary Letitia
Hawkins, daughter of Dr. Johnsons Sir John, and the
second by Pinkerton.

Writing of “Mr. Walpole” as she remembered him
before 1773, Mary Letitia says:

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
remarkably bright and penetrating, very dark and lively;
his voice was not strong, but his tones were extremely
pleasant, and, if I may say so, gentlemanly. 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; chapeau bras between his hands, as if he
208 HORACE WALPOLE CHAP.

wished to compress 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; partridge
silk stockings and gold buckles, ruffles and frill generally
lace. I remember when a child thinking him very much
underdressed if at any time except in mourning he wore
hemmed cambric. In summer no powder, but his wig
combed straight, and showing his very smooth, pale fore-
head, and queued behind; in winter, powder.

Pinkerton’s portrait belongs t> a later date, when
Walpole was so perclus de ses membres that his tyran-
nical Swiss valet, Philip Columb, had to half-carry him
up and down stairs.

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
to the form of his person, and the simplicity of his dress.
His features may be seen in many portraits; but none can
express the placid goodness of his eyes, which would often
sparkle with sudden rays of wit, or dart forth flashes of
the most keen and intuitive intelligence. His laugh was
forced and uncouth, and even his smile not the most
pleasing.

Later there follow two touches which call to life the
small boy of seventy years before who had loved his
“cruatuars” so well.

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. This was placed beside him on a small
sofa; the téa-kettle, stand and heater were brought in, and
he drank two or three cups of that liquor out of most rare
and precious ancient porcelain of Japan, of a fine white

* Apparently his stature had shrunk by the time Pinkerton
made his acquaintance,
Xx HORACE WALPOLE AND HIS CRITICS 209

embossed with large leaves. ... The loaf and butter were
not spared . . . and the dog and the squirrels had a liberal
share of his repast.

In both these pictures the background is Twicken-
ham. Against no other background has that odd,
attenuated figure so engaging a mien.

It is only of recent years that this engaging quality
in Horace of “Strawberry” has become visible, and that
he has found good friends among the critics of England
and France. Between the average reader and any just
conception of his personality Macaulay’s essay long
interposed the image of an exasperated dominie with a
bunch of birch-twigs in his fist. The source of this
exasperation was partly political and partly tempera-
mental. Macaulay admired earnestness, he extolled
consistency ; it amused Walpole to pretend to be even
more flighty than he actually was. Macaulay found it
easier to conceive that a Tory might be saved than that
a lukewarm Whig could escape damnation; and of the
ardour of Walpole’s Whiggery he was never satisfied.
With infinite contempt he remarks that “he called him-
self a Whig”. What Mr. Robert Lynd sees clearly
in Walpole, his warmth as a friend, his sincere hatred
of tyranny and intolerance, his almost childish craving
for the affection of those for whom he really cared,
was all hidden from his earlier commentators. Even
Barbey d’Aurevilly, who admired his letters whole-
heartedly, said of him, with an almost audible shudder,
“il est étincelant et coupant comme un glagon”. Old
Isaac D’Israeli, between whose fantastic young Ben-
jamin and Walpole there was a sort of queer affinity,
dealt somewhat harshly with him; and Sir Leslie
Stephen, appreciative though he is of the “Gothiciser”
210 HORACE WALPOLE CHAP.

and the épistolier, seems slightly intolerant of the
man.

In extenuation of Macaulay, and of those who
endorsed or shared his views, it may be recalled that
the revelation of Walpole’s rather complicated and
elusive ego has been progressive and intermittent, and
remains incomplete even now. There was once some
excuse for the critics who beheld in “Horry” only an
affected, malicious little fop, with an inordinate passion
for pinnacles and an undeniable knack of writing
letters. None of the various editions of the letters
published prior to 1903, when the late Mrs. Paget
Toynbee’s heroic venture was launched, could be
called accurate or representative, and all of them
grouped together do not cover as much ground as hers.
Since her death the task has been carried forward by
Dr. Puget Toynbee with an enthusiasm and a fidelity
equal to her own. In 1926 he issued the third of three
additional volumes, supplementary to the first fifteen.
It is in these eighteen volumes that Walpole should
be sought by those who wish to enjoy the keenest
pleasure that his company can give. Down those
broad avenues, and along those winding by-paths, we
must pursue that tricksy sprite, who will elude us if
we grow weary in the pursuit. But weariness is not
commonly felt by the pursuers of “Horry”.

“My letters”, wrote the shameless fellow to Lady
Ossory in 1789, “are only fit to be seen by those that
have no more rational diversion.” No doubt it was
this conviction which prompted him to retrieve so
many of them, to refashion such as failed to please him,
to annotate any that seemed obscure. The ease and
impetus of his style, the unfailing freshness and flexi-
x HORACE WALPOLE AND HIS CRITICS 211

bility of his fancy, were surely not the result of con-
scious and careful art! And yet—and yet—within six
weeks of his death he asked Lady Ossory to return to
him the last—and not the least delightful—letter he ever
wrote. Did Kirgate, then, make more than one draft
from his dictation before those seemingly artless and
spontaneous phrases of farewell fell softly into place?

Self-knowledge is given to few among the sons of
men, and to few indeed among the drivers of the
quill. Yet there must have been moments when
Walpole knew himself for what he was, a perfect letter-
writer, the triumphant master of one of the most
delectable and the most difficult of all the literary arts.
His cult of Madame de Sévigné, whose pen-case was
preserved as a sacred relic of Strawberry Hill, made it
inevitable that his style should borrow certain tints and
tones from hers. But he is no mere imitator. “With
regard to letter-writing”, he once told Lord Strafford,
“I am firmly persuaded that it is a province in which
women will always shine superiorly: for our sex is too
jealous of the reputation of good sense to condescend
to hazard a thousand trifles and negligences which give
grace, ease, and familiarity to correspondence.” To
write of trifles without being oneself trivial is no
common accomplishment, and both Walpole and his
beloved “Madonna of the Rocks” possessed it in the
highest degree. When Macaulay has asked “what is
the charm, the irresistible charm, of Walpole’s writ-
ings?” he says, answering himself, that it “consists in
the art of amusing without exciting”. This is true,
but it is not all the truth. Walpole is always amusing—
when he wishes to be; to excite is not his rdle. “Avec
de Vapprét”’, write two of his recent critics, MM.
212 HORACE WALPOLE CHAP.

Legouis and Cazamian, “il a une simplicité non feinte,
que va méme parfois a la négligence du grand seigneur
il west jamais ennuyeux ni plat, et déploie un bonheur
d’ex pression souvent original.” Barbey d’Aurevilly who
liked him less and did not understand him so well,
declared, “Les lettres de Horace Walpole vivent encore
et vivront. Le reste de son ceuvre est maintenant a tous
les diables de U'oubli, les seuls diables qui se tiennent
tranquilles.” And in The Peace of the Augustans Pro-
fessor Saintsbury carries us several steps further to-
wards answering Macaulay’s question more effectively
than Macaulay himself could or, at least, did. Speaking
of the letters, he says:

The atmosphere never oppresses, the society never tires
or teases. You do not violently like or dislike anybody,
though any dislike to Horace himself which you may have
begun with will probably dwindle. . . . You have not been
in an Earthly Paradise; there is no Matilda there, and
most certainly no Beatrice. But you have been “in So-
ciety”, society sometimes a little unedifying but never very
bad, and almost always amusing.

It is possible that Walpole, had he cared to make
the attempt, might have written an artificial romance
of some charm, on the lines of the Augustan comedy
of manners. He had all the necessary equipment at
command. Such a proceeding, however, might have
smacked too much of the professional man of letters.
“As for literature”, quoth he, “it is very amusing
when one has nothing else to do.” And one usually
had something else to do— or one wished the world to
think so. Otranto was in another category altogether.
That was a pastime, the sequel to a Gothic dream, the
tour de force of a brilliant amateur, in no wise to be
x HORACE WALPOLE AND HIS CRITICS 213

confounded with such Grub Street wares as The Vicar
of Wakefield or Rasselas.

Walpole, indeed, walked through life as he did into
Sir John Hawkins’ withdrawing-room, “on tip-toe,
as if afraid of a wet floor”. His fragile physique and
his nervous temperament caused him to shirk the
contemplation of distressful or perturbing things. It
would be ungrateful to blame him too severely; for it
is precisely this detachment from the squalid and
humdrum grind of existence, this concentration upon
witty and whimsical, mundane and courtly ideas and
images that makes his society so refreshing. His
daisied meadows, dotted with sheep like toys and ladies
like porcelain shepherdesses, offer a happy way of
escape from the gloom and turmoil of Johnson's
London, or Fielding’s, or Hogarth’s. The trees on
his horizon wave gently, the brocaded figures move
with ease, their distant voices, borne clearly on the
lightly-stirring air, say absurd, or fatuous, or witty
things, but never anything that it wearies us to hear.
And that the spontaniety of the letters cannot be
wholly the result of artifice is proved by the fact that
portraits of personages such as Newcastle, Chatham,
Wilkes, and Rigby are infinitely less vivid in the
Memoirs, where they were painted with care, than in
the correspondence, where they seem to have been
sketched in haste.

The debt of the student of social history to Walpole
is very great, and is too seldom acknowledged. The
elimination of a mere half-dozen of his canvases, the
Norfolk country-house, the Jacobite trials, the funeral
of George II., Wesley at Bath, the bal paré of Marie
Antoinette, the Gordon Riots, would leave gaping
214 - HORACE WALPOLE CHAP.

blanks in any gallery of eighteenth-century scenes
and characters. He is less courageous than Hogarth,
more realistic than Lawrence. Though he does not
see very far into things, he sees with astonishing
clearness all that lies on the surface. And he delights
in drawing what he sees, and in keeping the outlines
precise and the colours true. Strange that this egotist
should have failed to leave a full-length portrait of
himself! He shows us only a cryptic and rather
fascinating profile.

For all his shrugging cynicism, Walpole was, and
remained to the last, an inveterate dreamer of dreams.
“I hold visions to be wisdom,” he wrote, in 1779,
“and would deny them only to ambition, which exists
only by the destruction of the visions of everybody
else.” His own visions were fantastic enough, and
his reach was never—as your true visionary’s should
always be—much greater than his grasp. And,
unfortunately, what he did grasp was not always worth
holding. It is, perhaps, “a sort of wild justice” that
posthumous criticism should have dealt, on the whole,
so severely with one who was himself so indifferent a
critic. The man who descried sublimity in Mason’s
Elfrida and perfection in Darwin’s Botanic Garden,
to whom poor Goldsmith was “an idiot with now
and then a fit of parts”, and Boswell, the “quint-
essence of busybodies”, whose fastidiousness was
affronted by Johnson’s “blind Toryism and known
brutality”, who found Tristram Shandy “a very
insipid and tedious performance”, and wrote of She
Stoops to Conquer “the whole piece is low humour
and no humour is in it”, was ill-fitted to pass that
most testing of all judgments—judgment upon one’s
X HORACE WALPOLE AND HIS CRITICS 213

contemporaries. Nor was he much happier in his
views of the august defunct, he to whom “Dante was
but a Methodist parson in Bedlam and Spenser, John
Bunyan in rhyme”.

It would indeed go hard with Walpole were his own
literary quality gauged either by his verse or his
other-than-epistolary prose. Elsewhere than in his
letters, anything that he did well was done as well
by scores of his fellows, and better by dozens of them.
It is in that field—and it is no narrow one—that he
stands inimitable, incomparable, alone. These epithets
are not excessive. Thackeray's pastiche in The
Virginians, deft and ingenious though it be, would
deceive no reader familiar with the corpus of Walpole’s
letters as we have it to-day. And to compare “Horry”
with that other delightful letter-writer of his age,
Cowper, would be just to neither of them. While
Walpole at his best was often a little eccentric, Cowper
at his best was always sweetly sane; Walpole’s in-
telligence flickers with reflected sparks, Cowper’s
shines quietly from within. It may be that Cowper
is more typically English. The industrious M. Yvon
has assembled a vast array of gallicisms culled from
Walpole’s writings; and yet with what grace, lucidity,
and charm could Walpole write the language that he
thus tricked out with borrowed turns of phrase!

Whether les diables de I'oubli should, or should not,
be left in undisturbed possession of le reste de som
ceuvre Walpole’s most sincerely admiring critic might
hesitate to say. In the mass there is much that is
distressingly mediocre, and though mediocrity is not
among the defects of The Mysterious Mother, that
tragedy has others of a more formidable kind. Certain
oth HORACE WALPOLE CHAP.

of his essays and satires seem to merit a better fate
than perpetual oblivion. He is often malicious, but
seldom malignant; and the salt of malice may preserve
what the acid of malignancy can only corrode. For
this reason, if for no other, the suggestion that he
might conceivably have written the Letters of Junius
answers itself in the negative. Such illusions as he
had about the value of his “trifling writings” did not
last his life-time. He knew what his one golden talent
was, and he did not suffer it to darken underground.

In a single lyric form he shows a gift—and that a
gracious one—to which few, if any, of the Augustans
after Prior could lay claim. His child-songs and his
fairy-verses do not resemble the Songs of Innocence.
He was, perhaps, too sane and too sophisticated to sing
in accents at once so unearthly and so sweet. But the
best of his lyrics in this kind are exquisite little things,
like daisies from the meadow at “Strawberry”, with a
touch of moonlit dew upon them still.

Horace Walpole—he never liked his title of Orford,
and we may release him from it here—ought assuredly
to have died at Strawberry Hill. But in the early weeks
of 1797 the rapid failure of his forces so alarmed
his friends that they persuaded him to move from
Twickenham to his town house, 11 Berkeley Square.
It must have been with a sharp sense of pain that he
turned and looked at his “baby-house”,—his “poor
plaything”—for what he knew would be the last time.
On January 15 he dictated to Kirgate, for the Countess
of Upper Ossory, the last—and not the least charming
—of his letters. Only the signature and the line above
it were written—laboriously—with his own hand. Lady
Ossory had apparently praised his former epistles, and
x ' HORACE WALPOLE AND HIS CRITICS 217

confessed to having shared them with her friends. In
his old half-whimsical, half-wistful vein, he remon-
strates with her:

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 pastry-cooks at Christmas.

I shall be quite content with a sprig of rosemary thrown
after me when the person of the parish commits my dust
to dust. Till then, Madam, pray accept the resignation
of your Ancient Servant,

This was the last flicker of his indomitable gaiety
and courage, his most precious heritage from the mother
he had loved so well, and by whose side he was laid
at Houghton before the trees at Twickenham put forth
their leaves again. Only at the very end was his intel-
lect a little obscured. On February 27, 1797, Mr.
Joseph Farington, R.A., calling at Berkeley Square to
enquire after Lord Orford, was informed by “the sulky
Swiss” that his lordship was dying. Three days later,
very peacefully, the end came.
 
INDEX

Abbotsford, 104

Account of my Conduct, An,
23

Account of Russia as it was in
the Year 1710, An, 145

Account of the Giants lately
discovered, An, 176 sqq.

Addison, Joseph, 15, 83, 103

Ades Walpoliane, 60 sqq.,
101, 106

Ailesbury, Caroline, Countess
of, 70, 125, 101

Alliance, the Quadruple, 8, 52

Anecdotes of Painting im Eng-
land, 141, 149, 152, 158, 189

Anson, Admiral (Lord), 99.

Antiquaries, the Society of, 181

Antiquities, Miscellaneous, 141

Arcadia, 88

Arlington Street, St. James's,
58, 65, 68, 71, 73, 95, 125, 132

Arte Graphica, De, gO

Ashton, Thomas (“Al-
manzor’’), 8, 11, 12, 18, 10,
26, 29, = 37 $qq., 52 sqq.,
7a 81 1

Astrea ri, d’Urfey’s,
10, 99

Austen, Jane, 104

Austrian Succession, the war
of the (Seven Years’ War),

142, 159

Authors, Catalogue of Royal
and Noble, 11, 143 sqq., 146,
148, 157

Baker's Chronicle, 86; Wal-
pole’s additions to, 103

 

Balmerino, Lord, 92 sqq.

Banks, John, 5 0%
Bard, "The, 135, 140

Barham, R. H, 104

Bath, 178; Wesley at, 178, 213

Bath, William Pulteney, Earl
of, 49, 53, 63 599., 89, 108, 126

Beauclerk, Lady Di, 106, 204,

Beauties, The, 89 sqq., 111

Bedford, the Duke
Duchess of, 134

Bedford, Grosvenor, 156

Beggar's Opera, The, 15

Benedict XIV., Pope, 4

Bentley, Richard, i of
Trinity, 117, 141

Bentley, Richard, ie Younger,
106, 107, 117 $qq., 124, 129,
132, 133, 134, 135, 145, 150

Berkeley Square, 74, 216, 217

Berry, Agnes, 201, 204

Berry, Mary, vii, 174, 201 sqq.

Berry, Mr., 202, 204

Bingley, Ly 117

Birch, Dr,

Blanchard’s oon, 206

Bland, Henry, 7, 8

Boccapadugli eagle, the, 76, 79,
100

Boileau, 16, 103

Bologna, 32 sqq.

Bonner’s Ghost, 201

Boswell, James, 214

Botanic Garden, The, 214

Braganza, Jephson’s, 184

Bristol, John Digby, Earl of, 145

Brunswick, The House of.
See under Hanover.

and

9
220

Buckingham, Assizes trans-
ferred to, 108

Be George, Duke
of,

Bo Dn, 215

Burney, Fanny (Madame

d’Arblay), go, i 182, 198,
200, 201

Biirger, G. A, 10

Bute, the Earl of, 155, 150

Bute, Lady, 156

Byng, Admiral, 137

Byron, Captain (afterwards
Vice-Admiral), 176

Byron, Lord, 104

Caligula, bust of, at S. Hill, 76

Callington, 46, 48, 99, 119

Cor hries, town of, 135, 17, 81,
161

Sr University of,
12 sq

TL Tales, The, 103

Caracci, Annibale, 62

Caroline of Anspach, Queen,

47
Carter, Mrs. Elizabeth, 205
Carteret, Lord, 42. See also
under Granville.
Castle of Otranto.
Otranto.
Castle Rising, 74, 130, 137.
ie of Engravers, 149
sqq., 1
Ci Ton Great, 196
Cato, Addison’s, 64
Caylus, the Comte de, 135, 147
Cenis, Mount, 3
Chambers, Sir {Wiltiam, 105
Charles 1., 39, 139, 152
Charles i, 39, OI
Charles V. (Emperor), BS ,
Charles Edward. See und
Pretender, the Young.
Charlotte, Queen, 156
Chartreuse, La Grande, 30
Chatham. See under Pitt
Chatterton, Thomas, 103, 187,

See under

1
Chelsea, 3, 5, 53, 104

 

HORACE WALPOLE

Chenevix, Mrs., 94, 100, 101,

I
Chesterfield, Lord, 68, 126;
Walpole’s parody of, 193

Chevy Chase, 103
China, Walpole's interest in
the history of, 106, 03, 129,

130
Choiseul, the Duchesse de, 178,

179, 186
“Christopher, The” (at Eton),
II
Churchill, General, 51
Churchill, Lady Mary (or
Maria), daughter of Sir R.
Walpole, 2, 48, 50, 89, 129,

150

Chute, John, 40 sqq., 42, 46, 59,
6s, 70, 74, 82, 94, 97, 101, 107,
115, 117, 118 321, 122, 125,
132, 135, 136, 143, 181, 108

Cibber, Colley, 106

Cimabue, 62

Cinna, Corneille’s, 71

Citizen of the World, The, 139

Clairon, Mlle., 173

Clarence, William, Duke of.
See under William IV.

Clerk, Walter (Lord Nune-
ham’s gardener), 104

Clement XII., Pope, 34

Clive, Kitty, 63, 110, 128, 135,
157, 189, 1

Cocchi, Dr., 44

Cock Lane ghost, the, 158

Coke, Lady Mary, 147, 155,
157, 168

Cole, the Rev. William, 8, 103,
158, 161, 162, 190, 108

Collection of Poems by Vari-
ous Hands (Dodsley’s Mis-
cellany), 92, 111

Columb, Philip (“the sulky
Swiss”), 208, 217

Conquest of Granada, The,9,64

Conway, Anne Seymour (the
Field Marshal's sister), 20,27

Conway, Anne Seymour (the
Field Marshal's daughter).
See under Damer.
INDEX

Conway, Henry (Harry) Sey-
mour, Field Marshal, 7, 30,
46, 52, 68, 69 sqq., 72, 79, 80,
89, 95, 99, III, 121, 125, 129,
141, 142, 145, 147, 150, 151.
159, 162, 169, 174, 179, 198

Cope, Sir ym 7

Correggio, 32,

Counter nlf to the Public,
A, 162

Covent Garden, 96

Coventry, Henry, 14, 15, 53

Cowley, Abraham, 57

Cowper, William, 215

Craftsman, The, 113

Crébillon, 29

Croker, John Wilson, 121, 138

Culloden, the battle of, 82

Cumberland, Richard, 118

Cumberland, William Augus-
tus, Duke of (Nollkejum-
skoi), 13, 79, 8o, 82, 86, 92,
97, 113, 114, 129, 154

Dalrymple, Sir David. See
under Hailes.
Damer, the Hon. Mrs. (née

Conway), 125, 142, 108
Dance, George, R.A., 207
Dante, 215
Darwin, Erasmus, 214
Dashwood, Sir Francis, 138
d’Aurevilly, Barbey, 209, 212
Deffand, Madame du, 143, 164,

171 sq9., 177,178, 170, 18),

188, 190, 1083, 204, 205, 208
Delany, Mrs
“Descartes” (pseudonym of

Walpole), 83
Description of the Villa at

Strawberry Hill, 60, 105
Desmond, the Countess of, 103
Derby, the Highlanders at, 79
Dialogue between two Great

Ladies, 151
Dickens, "Charles, 85
Dictionnaire d Anecdotes, le,

178
d’Israeli, Isaac, 209
Diverdun episode, the, 181

 

221

Dobson, Austin, v, 100 n., 192

Dodington, Bubb, 129

Dodsley, James, 182

Dodsley, Robert, 83, 92, 111,
124, 139, 140

Dominichino, 47, 59

Dover, Lord, 6

Downing Street, 17, 21, 78

Dugdale, 103, 107, 128

Desey Lane Theatre, 63,71 sqq.,

9
Dryden, John, 8, 10, 24, 90, 103
Dumas, Alexandre (pére), 104
Dufresnoy, go
d’Ur{é, Honoré, 10

Eckhardt, portrait painter, 2,
8o'%sqq., 207

Edgcumbe, Mount, 77

Edgcumbe, Richard, 54, 77

Elections at Callington, 46;
Castle Rising, 130; King’s
Lynn, 155

Elegy, Gray's, 112, 115

Elfrida, Mason’s, 183, 214

Elizabeth, Queen, 144

Emily (Amelia), Princess, 68,
189, 200

Entail, The, 130 sqq.

Epistle to Ashton, The, 37 sqq.,
ITI, 114

Esprit des Lois, Montesquieu’s,

11
Essay on Modern Gardening,

199
Essays, Walpole’s, in Old Eng-
land, 63; the Museum, 83-
87; the World, 127-129
Eton College, Walpole at,
6 sqq., 158; revisited by, 11;

Gray’s Ode on a Distant
Prospect of, 111

Exchequer, Usher of the,
22 5qq., 159

Falkirk, the battle of, 80

Farington, Joseph, R. A., vi,
vii, 207, 217

Favonius. See under West,
Richard.

Félibien, André, go
222

Fermor, the Ladies, 37

Ferrers, Lord, 151

Fielding, Henry, 83, 213

Fitzpatrick, Lady Anne, 191

Fleetwood, manager of Drury
Lane, 63, 71 sqq.

Florence, 33 sqq., 102

Florio, Hannah More's, 200

Fontaine. See under La Fon-
taine

Fonthill, 104

“Forty-Five,” the, 76 sqq.

Fox, Lady Caroline, 111, 12I

Fox, Charles James. 111

Fox, Henry (1st Lord Hol-
land), 24, 89sqq., 91, 99,
120, 138, 150; character of,
by Walpole, 111, 121, 127

Francis I., 146, 197; armour
of, 97

Frascati, 35

Froissart, 128 :

Frederick the Great, bogus
letter from, to J.-J. Rous-
seau, 171, 176, 178

Frederick, Prince of Wales,
19, 112 sqq., 121, 145

Fugitive Pieces in Verse and
Prose, 145

Funeral of the Lioness, The,
122 sqq.

Garland, The, 156
a David, 63, 135, 141,

17
Gay, John, 123
Geneva, 30
Genoa, 32
Gentleman's Magazine, The, 146
Geoffrin, Madame, 171
George 1, 1, 4, 6, 56, 197
George II. or, 115, 125, 137,
153, 154, 157, 213
George III. 129, 156, 162, 197
Gilbert, W. S., 192
Glastonbury thorn, the, 127,

103

Gloucester, Maria (née Wal-
pole), Duchess of, 148, 160,
186, 202

 

HORACE WALPOLE

Glover, Richard, 73, o1
Goldsmith, Oliver, 183 214
Good Breeding, Advertisement
for a History of, 83
Gordon Riots, the, 197, 213
Gosse, Sir Edmund, 21, 29, 44
Gothic revival, the, 102 sqq.
Grafton, the Duchess of. See
under Upper Ossory.
Grafton, the Duke of, 179
Granville, John Carteret, Earl,
71, 73, 157 2
Granville, Portrait of John,
Earl, 157
Gratulatio, the Cambridge, 20
Gray, Thomas (“Orozmades”),
6, 8sqq., 14, 20, 26sqq.,
32.5q9q., 34 $99., 40, 42, 52, 80,
81 sqq., 86, 89, 94, 97, 103,
104, 110, 112, 115, 120, 122,
124, 133, 135, 148, 151, 161,
172, 180, 181, 187, 100
Greenwood, Miss Alice, v
Grenville, George, 24
“Grenvilles, The,” 109, 114, 177
Grifoni, the Countess, 36, 58
Guido (Guido Reni), 38, 62

Hailes, Lord, 151
Hamilton, Mary, 201
Hamilton, “Single-speech,” 136
Hanover, the “Illustrious
House of”, 6, 56, 67, 77, 93
Harding, Septimus, I4I
Hardwick, Bess of, 151
Hardyknut, 103
Hawkins, Sir John, 207, 213
Hawkins, Mary Letitia, 207
Hawien defeat of at Falkirk,

Henry II, 22
Henry IV. 2, Shakespeare’s,

4
Henry VI., Verses in Memory
of King, 24sqq.
Henry VII., Chapel of, 3, 106,

154
Henry VIII, 39, 144
Hentzner, Journey into Eng-
land. 141, 143
INDEX

Herbert of Cherbury, Lord,
141, 160

Herculaneum, 36, 61

Herschel, Sir William, 206

Hertford, Lady, 170

Hertford, Lord (Walpole’s
cousin), 124

Hervey, Carr, Lord, 2

Hervey, John, Lord (“Sporus’)

I, 4

Hervey, Lady (“Molly Lepel”)
149, 170, 178

Hieroglyphic Tales, 16, 129,
101, 109

Historic Doubts on the Life
and Reign of Richard 111,
180 sqq., 186 |

Hogarth, William, 213, 214

Holland, Lord, 120

Hollar, Wenceslaus, 107

Hone, Nathaniel, 2, 207

Horace (Quintus Horatius
Flaccus), 16, 200

Hotham, Henrietta, 168

Houghton, 3 sqq., 17, 21, 54,
57, 61, 68, 73, 122, 155, 194,
217

Hugo, Victor, 104, 163

Hume, David, 178, 180

Hurstmonceaux, Sussex, 125

Impromptu de Versailles, L’,177

Independence, American War
of, 106

Inscription for a Neglected
Column, 37

Jacobite lords, the trial of the,
92 5q9q., 154, 213

James I. and VI, 144

James II., 39, 114, 139

James Francis Edward. See
under Pretender, the Old.

James's Powder, 175

Jenyns, Soame, 126

Jephson, Robert, 184, 199

Johnson, Bishop of Gloucester,

129
Johnson, Dr. 113, 126, 188,
207, 214

 

223

Journal of the Printing Office
at Strawberry Hill, 142

Journals, Last, of Horace
Walpole, 205

“Julio”, pseudonym of Wal-
pole, 127

Junius, the Letters of, 216

Keats, John, 104, 188

Kendal, the Duchess of, 7

Keppel, Admiral, 138

Ker, Professor, 102

Kilmarnock, Lord, 92, 93

King’s Lynn, 75, 99, 137, 155,
178, 179

Kirgate, Thomas, 141 sqq., 199,
211, 21

Kneller, Sir G., o1

Knowle, 125

La Fontaine, 65, 122
Lamb, Charles, 182

 Leasowes, The, 108

Lee, Nathaniel, 16

Legouis and Cazamian, M. M.,
212

Lely, Sir Peter, o1

Le Marchant, Sir Denis, 120

Lens, Bernard, 13

Lesson for the Day, The,
52 qq.

Lettres persanes, 139

Li one 104 g
incoln, Lord, 42, 44,

Louis XV., 29 angst

Lovat, Lord, 98

Lucan, 97

Lynd, Mr. Robert, 209

Lysons, Daniel, 103

Lyttleton, Charles (afterwards
ep of Carlisle), 8, 18,

15
Lyttleton, the Dowager Lady,
verses addressed to, 199
Lyttletons, verses on the two,
drowned in the Cherwell, 18

Macaulay, Lord, 19, 49, 69, 99,
114, 120, 126, 120, 144, 167,
204, 209 sqq., 211
224
Maclaine (or M‘Lean), James,

I1

Macpherson, “Ossian”,
151

Magliabecchi and Mr. Hill, A
Parallel of, 148

Magpie and her Brood, The,168

Manetti, the Casa, 40, 65, 98

Mann, Galfridus, 101, 136

Mann, Sir Horace (“Miny”),
9, 33, 47, 49, 54, 57, 65, 70,
71, 72 sqq., 79, 82, 89, 93, 97,

, 112, 110, 117, 110, 133,

143, 104, 195, 198, 205

Mantegna, Andrea, 62

Marie Antoinette, Queen of
France, 106, 213

Mary, Queen of Scots, 144

Marivaux, 29

Markham, Sir Clements, 180

Marlborough, John, Duke of,
4, 197

Marlborough, Sarah, Duchess
of, 21

Mason, The Rev. William
(“Scroddles”), 43, 151, 181,
184, 187, 190, 194 $9q., 199

Melbourne, Lord, 197

Mears {Gores 11.), 120sqq.,
125, 1

Vis ® George IIL), 1
168, 189

Mercure France, le, 186

Metheglin, Mrs., 110

Methodism, 176

Michaelangelo, 62

Middleton, Dr. Conyers, 16,
38, 54, 68, 70, 80, 89, 119,
Mrs. Conyers, 80

M id Night's Dream, 4,

I
Milles, Dean, 180, 181
Milnes, = Monckton
Houghton), 204
Mistley Hall, 75, 89, 115, 135
Modern Gardening, 199
Moliére, J. B. P., 177
Montagu, George, 8, 18, 29,
78, 83, 89, 03, 95, 101, 106,
111, 113, 115, 119, 125, 135,

103,

(Lord

 

HORACE WALPOLE

136, 137, 143, 147, 151, 152,
161, 181, 188, I
Montesquieu, 116, 139
Moore, Edward (promoter of
the World), 1
Mordaunt, Sir James, 142
More, Hannah, 200 sgq., 205
Moses, 56
Mother, The Mysterious, vi,
106, 179, 18I 5qq.. 215
Mintz, Mr., 134
Murray, the Hon. William, 129
Museum, The, 83 sqq.
Museum, the Brivis. 8s, 125

Naples, 36
Narbonne, The Count of, 199
Nature will Prevail, 192 sqq.
Nevill, Lady Dorothy, 203
Nevil, Mr. Ralph, 13
Newcastle, the Duke of, 49, 76,
119, 125, 137, 153, 154, 213
Newton, Sir Isaac, 100, 197

Nal, Professor Allardyce,

184

Nicoll, Margaret, 122

Nivernois (Nivernais), the
Duc de, 199

North Briton, The, 157
Norton, Fletcher, 195
Nugent, Robert, 110
Nymphidia, Drayton's, 131

Odes, Gray's: The Bard, 135,
140; On a Distant Prospect
of Eton College, 04, 111; On
the Death of a Favourite
Cat, 08, 111; The Progress
of Poesy, 140; Ode on
Spring, 04, 111

Officina Asbusans) the, 139
$qq., 160, 199

old ; Sadia or ne Broad-
bottom Journal, 101

Old England or the Constitu-
tional Journal, 63

Onslow, Speaker, 108

Orford, Robert, 1st Earl of.
See under Walpole, Sir
Robert.
INDEX

Orford, Robert, and Earl of,
43, 74, 118, 121

Orford, George, 3rd Earl of,
121, 122, 130, 159, 104 sqq.

Ossian, Macpherson’s, 151

Ossory, the Countess of Up-
per, 155, 190, 193, 196, 197,
199, 201, 200, 210, 211, 210

Otranto, The Castle of, vi,
162 544. 181, 186, 109, 212;

Oxford, 12, 18, 113 8qq., 151

Oxonia, Delenda est, 113 sqq.

Pops, A Sermon upon,

Palladio 25

Parliament, Walpole in, 48sqq.,
161, 162

Paris, 27, 168, 173, 170, 158,

100
Patapan, 46, 54, 57, 59, 65,

74

Patent Places. See under
Places

Peach in Brandy, The, 191

Peacock, T. L., 104

Pelham, Henry, 52, 119, 125

Penshurst, 125

Petersham, Lady Caroline,
117, 118 5qq., 125

Peynctynge, The History of,
Chatterton’s, 187

Pharsalia, Lucian’s, 135, 141,
147

“Pigwiggin, Prince” (Wal-
pole’s cousin), 99

Pinchbeck, Christopher, 105

Pinkerton, John, 6, 103, 200,
203, 207 sqq.

Pitt, Mistress Anne, 134, 147

Pitt the Elder (Chatham), 51,
73, ‘08, 120, 337, ‘150, 157,
178, 213

Places, hold by Walpole, 22,
160: his defence of the
sinecure system, 23 sqq.

Pliny, 150

Poet Laureate, Verses Appoint-
ng Countess Temple, 160sqq.

Pomfret, Lady, 37

 

223

Pope, Alexander, 20, 24, 67, 82,
88, 100, 103, 197
Poyang, 16, 130
Press, the Strawberry Hill.
See under Officina Arbuteana
Prior, Matthew, 216
Prestonpans, the battle of, 78
Pretender, the Old, 33, 68
Pretender, the Young (Charles
Edward), 67, 77 sqq.
Pritchard, Mrs., 63, 95, 110
Public Advertiser, The, 179
Pyjisgen, William. See under
ath.

Quarterly Review, The,
138, 156, 188

121,

Radcliffe, Mrs., 104

Radicofani, Mount, 34

Ragley, 124, 146

Ranelagh, 68

Raphael, 62

Rasselas, 213

Ravensworth Affair, the, 129

Reed, Isaac, 43

Reeve, Clara, 104

Refusal, the, or,
Philosophy, 106

Reggio, 42 sqq.

Remarks on Several Parts of
Italy, Addison's, 15

Remembrancer, The, 113

Reminiscences, W alpolé’s, 202

Review, The Critical, 146, 148

Review, The Monthly, 146

Review, The Quarterly, 121,
138, 156, 188

Reynolds, Sir Joshua, 76, 77,

the Lady's

207
Rheims, 29 sqq.
Richard I., 144
Richard III, 180sqq.
Richardson, Jonathan, 13
Rigby, Richard, 71, 74, 89, 110,
213
Rinuncini, the Marquis, 94
Ripley, architect of Houghton,

4, 17
Ritchie, Lady, 204
226

Robertson, Dr., 189
Rochefort, English raid upon,

142
Rickingham ministry, the, 169,

179
Romantic Revival, the, 102 sqq.
Rome, 35 sqq.

Rosa, Salvator, 30

Rosalba, 2, 61, 207

Bm Jean-Jacques, 171,
17

Rowe, Yicholas, 5, 16, 93

Rowley. See under Chatterton.

Royal Society, the, 98, 143

Saintsbury, Professor George,
vii, 103, 212

Sanderson, Professor, 13, 14

Sandys, Lady, 78

Sandys, Mr., afterwards Lord,

42, 66, 73
Shs Marshal, 67
Schaub, Sir Luke, 112
Scheme, A, for raising a Large
Sum of Money, 83 sqq.
Scott, Sir Walter, 104, 167
Scudéry, Mademoiselle de, 8
Secret Love, or the Maiden
Queen, Dryden's, 10
Selwyn, George Augustus, §,
29, 77, 105, 107, 180, 196,
198, 199
Senesino, 34
Sévigné, Madame de, 176, 177,

211
Seward, Mr., 146
Shakespeare, y 125, 160, 167,

186

She Stoops to Gon sver, 214

Shebbeare, Dr.,

Short Notes of — Sete. Wal-
pole’s, 12, 13, 46, 52, 65, 73,
Oz; 07, -101, 113, 116, 7121,
130, 135, 137, 139, 156, 157,
160, 179, 186, I

Sidney, Sir Philip. 88

Skerrett, Maria (2nd wife of
Sir R. "Walpole), 2,4, 21,37,

48
Slave Trade, the, 116, 177

 

HORACE WALPOLE

Sloane, Sir Hans, 125

Smollett, Tobias, 11

Solomon, The Judgment of,
125

Songs of Innocence, 216

South Sea Bubble, the, 4

Spence, Dr. Joseph, 42, 44, 45,
144, 147

Spenser, Edmund, 215

Squire, Mr. J. C, vil, 202

Stamp Act, the, 177

Stanhope, Sir William, 108

Steele, Sir Richard, 24

Stephen, Sir Leslie, 209

Stone, Andrew, 129

Stowe, 189

Strachey, Mr. Lytton, 173, 175

Strafford, Lord, 151, 152, 190,
211

Stratford-on-Avon, 124

Strawberry Hill, 5, 13, 16, 60,
68, 76, 77, 100sqgq., 110, 115,
118, 124, 1258, 120, 130, 133,
137, 130 sqq., 149, 152, 155,
157, 101, 174, 170, 180, 131,
187, 197, 198, 207, 211, 216

Strype, John, 107

Stuart, Lady Louisa, 2

Suffolk, the Countess of, 157,
160, 168, 172

Swift, Dean, 87, 177

Tamerlane, Rowe's 64; Wal-
pole’s Epilogue to, 95sqgq.,
111

Temple, Countess, 160, 189

Testament Politique du Chev-
alier Robert Walpole, Le, 179

Thackeray, W. M., 204, 215

Theodore, King of Corsica,
127

Thomson, James, 73, 9

Thoughts. onC oy y, Thoughts
on Tragedy

Tillotson gC 182

Tivoli, 35

Tonson, Jacob, 140

Tonton, 175

Tories, A Letter to the, 101

Townshend, Dorothy, Lady, 2
INDEX

Townshend, Etheldreda, Lady,
82, 148

Townshend, Lord (brother-in-
law of Sir R. Walpole), 4

Toynbee, Dr. Paget, vii, I0,
26, 113, 142, 210

Toynbee, Mrs. Paget, v, 174,
210

Tristram Shandy, 214

True Patriot, The, 85

Turin, 32

Twickenham, 5, 16, 99, IOI,
132, 196, 197, 216

Twickenham, The Parish
Register of, 148

Tyrconnel, Frances Jennings,
Duchess of, 5

Valence, Aymer de, 107

Vauxhall, 68, 118 sqq.

Venice, 44, 46 ;

Vernon, Admiral, 108; Epi-
gram upon, 117

Vernons, The Three, 193

Versailles, 28

Verses addressed to the House
of Lords, 66 sqq.

Vertue, George, 139, 140

Vesey, Mrs., 200

Vespasian, bust of, at S. Hill,

76, 100
Vie d'un Dilettante, La, v,

106 0.
Vigny, Alfred de, 104
Virgil, 11, 16
Virginians, The, 215
Voiture, 150
Voltaire, 5, 167, 172, 186

Wakefield, The Vicar of, 213

Waldegrave, Frances, Lady, 106

Waldegrave, James, Lord

(Walpole’s nephew-in-law),
148, 159, 160

Woaldegrave, Lord (Walpole’s
great-grand-nephew), 120.
(For Maria, Lady Walde-
grave, see under Gloucester,
Duchess of)

Walpole Catherine, Lady (1st

 

227

wife of Sir R. Walpole), 1,
3, 5, 0,20, 21, 217

Walpole, Sir Edward, 1, 43,
48, 73 sqq., 98, 198

Walpole, Horace, 4th Earl of
Orford; birth and infancy,
I s$gq.; rumours concerning
his origin, 2; at Bexley, 5;
first letters to his mother,

5sqq.; at Eton, 6sqq.; re-
ceived by George I., 7;
Quadruple Alliance with

Gray, Ashton and West, 8;
goes to Cambridge, 12; life
at the University, 12sqq.;
becomes pious, 14; parodies
Addison, 15; visits Oxford
and writes verses on the
Cherwell, 18; contributes to
Gratulatio, 20: early verse,
20; loses his mother, 20 sqq.;
appointed to sinecures in the
Exchequer, 23; Verses in
Memory of King Henry V1I.,
24 sqq.; falls in love, 27;
leaves England with Gray,
27; continental wanderings,
27-46; Paris, 29; Rheims,
29; Switzerland, 30; Italy,
32 sqq.; Bologna, 32; Flor-
ence, 33, 36; Rome, 35;
Naples, 36; Reggio, 42;
Venice, 46; meets Horace
Mann, 33; the Epistle to
Ashton, 38 sqq.; quarrels
with Gray, 42 sqq.; falls ill
at Reggio, 45; elected mem-
ber for Callington, 48; re-
turns to England, 46; his
maiden speech, 50sqq.; The
Lesson for the Day, 52; A
Sermon on Painting, 54 sqq. ;
Zdes Walpoliane, 60 sqq.,
parodies in Old England,
63 sqq.; Verses to the House
of Lords, 66 sqq., offers to
share his fortune with Con-
way, 69 sqq.; is involved in
a Drury Lane riot, 71 sqq.;
loses his father, 72; friction
228

with brother Edward, 74;
visits Mistley, 75; buys the
Boccapadugli eagle, 76; the
’45, 77sqq.; is reconciled
with Gray, 80sqq.; contrib-
utes essays to Dodsley’s
Musewm,  83sqq.; The
Beauties, 89 sqq.,; attends the
trial of the Jacobite lords,
02-93; writes an Epilogue
to Tamerlane, 95; elected

F.R.S, 08; re-elected for
Callington, 99; purchases
and developes estate at

Strawberry Hill, 99-108;
“breeze” with Speaker Ons-
low, 108; Richard White-
liver, 109; entertains Mrs.
Pritchard and Kitty Clive,
110; contributes to Dodsley’s
Miscellany, 111; waits upon
Frederick, Prince of Wales,
111; contributes to Remem=
brancer, 113; Delenda est
Ozonia, 113-115; attacked
by highwaymen, 115; meets
Bentley the Younger, 117;
goes to Vauxhall, 118;
quarrels with Ashton, 119;
moves Address to the King,
119; begins Memoirs, 120
$qq.; The Funeral of the
Lioness, 122-124 ; contributes
to the World, 126-129; the
Ravensworth Affair, 129;
elected for Castle Rising,
130; The Entail, 130-132;
first attack of gout, 134;
visits Chute at The Vine,
135; the case of Admiral
Byng, 137sqq.; the Letter
of Xo Ho, 130; sets up a
printing-press (the Officina
Arbuteana), 139 sqq.; prints
two Odes of Gray, 140;
Royal and Noble Authors,
143-145; Fugitive Pieces,
145; the Parish Register of
Twickenham, 148-149; An-
ecdotes of Painting and Cat=

 

HORACE WALPOLE

alogue of Engravers, 149;
writes a complimentary let=
ter to Pitt, 150; visits Ox-
ford with Conway, 51;
honoured by the Duke of
York, 152sqgq.; present at
funeral of George II., 134;
offers his antiquarian serv-
ices to George III, 155;
elected for King’s Lynn,
155; writes light verse for
great ladies, 155-150; The
Garland, 156; begins new
series of Memoirs, 156; at-
tacked by the North Briton,
157; outmanceuvres Henry
Fox, 150; writes verses to
Countess Temple, 160-161;
votes with Conway against
the Court party, 162; secs
ond offer to share his for-
tune with Conway, 162: 4
Counter Address to the Pub-
le, 162; The Castle of
Otranto, 163- 168; The Mag-
pie and “her Brood, 168; in-
gratitude of Conway, 160;
visit io Paris, 170sqq.,
fakes letter from Frederick
of Prussia to J.-J. Rousseau,
171; meets Madame du Def-
fand, 171; their friendship,
172-175; An Account of the
Giants, 176-177; goes to
“the Bath”, 178; retires
from Parliament, 178; con-
tributes to the Public Ad-
vertiser, 179; Historic
Doubts, 180 sqq.; The Mys-
terious Mother, 181, 186;

defends Shakespeare against
Voltaire, 186; the Chatter-
ton episode, 186- 188 ; re-visits
Paris, 188; writes Kitty
Clive's farewell to the
stage, 189; stays with the
Temples at Stowe, 180;
Paris again, 190; assists
Mason in writing Life and
Letters of Gray, 190 sqq.;
INDEX 229

Hieroglyphic Tales, 101;
verses to Lady Anne Fitz-
patrick, 191-192; Nature
will Prevail, 192-193; par-
odies Chesterfield, 193;
verses to the three Vernons,
193; assumes control of his
insane nephew's affairs, 194;
writes verses to Lord Nune-
ham’s gardener, 194; anno-
tates Mason’s satires, 105;
views of American war, 196;
enthusiasm for Marie Antoin-
ette, 196; last visit to Paris,
106; epilogue to Braganza,
196; the Gordon Riots, 197;
receives Dr. Burney and
Fanny, 198; Thoughts on
Tragedy and Thoughts ow
Comedy, 199; prints Essay
on Modern Gardening, 199;
writes verses for Princess
Emily, 200; the Berrys,
201 $qq.; writes his Remini-
scences, 202; succeeds to the
Earldom of Orford, 205 ; last
days and death, 216-217;
portraits of, 13, 70, 207;
descriptions of, 207-208;
traits and characteristics, 5,
15, 10, 23, 43, 47,81, 57,
63, 00, 72, 78 87, 01, oa,
103, 112, 114, 113 126, 131,
133, 14y, 147, 152, 160, 177,
191, 196, 200, 206, 209,
214; critical estimates, 209-
212

Walpole, Horatio, of Wolter-
ton (brother of Sir a Wal-
pole), 2, 52, 98, 13

Walpole, Margaret Rode, Lady
(daughter-in- law of Sir R.
Walpole), 37, 48, 82

Walpole, Sir Robert, 1st Earl
of Ortford, 1 sqq., 4, 12, 17,
21, 22, 27, 31, 41, 47, 48, 50,

 

56 sqq., 2 67, 68, 71, 72
5qq., 08, 1
Warburton, thon, 158
Warburton, Eliot, v
Wardlaw, Lady, 103
Warton, Joseph, 103, 206
Warwick, 124
Wellington, a Duke of, 197
Wesley, John, 178, 213
West, Richard “Favonius”)
8 sqq., 12, 18, 20, 28, 30, 31
$qq., 35, 44, 190
haley, John, 13, 18, 26, 52
Wharton, Gray’s “dear, dear,”
43, 81,
Whigs, A Letter to the, 177
Whitehed, Francis, 41, 121
Whitefield, George, 127
Whiteliver, The Speech of
Richard, vi, 109
Wil John, 157, 161, 130,

Willzam 111., =5, 01, OS
William Ww, 22, 140
Williams, = C. Hanbury, 8,

54, 71,
Williams.” Gilly”, 77
Windsor, 88, 93, 95, 97
Witches, The Dear, 63
Wordsworth, William 197
Wortley Montagu, Lady Mary,
2, 37, 158
World, The, 83, 111, 116,
126

Xo Ho, The Letter of, 16, 129,
139 sqq.

Yonge, Sir William, 99

York, Edward, Duke of (brother
of George Hn), 150-153

Yvon, M. Paul, v, 106 n., 204,
215

Zink, 61 :
Zouch, Dr. Henry, 103

THE END
RETURN : CIRCULATION DEPARTMENT
TOmmmp 202 Poin Library
LOAN PERIOD 1 3

HOME USE
4 6

 

 

 

 

 

ALL BOOKS MAY BE RECALLED AFTER 7 DAYS
Renewals and Recharges may be made 4 days prior to the due date.
Books may be Renewed by calling 642-3405.

DUE AS STAMPED BELOW
FEB 06 1993

March 3
5

 

 

 

 

Lo

 

 

AUTO DISC CRC a1 593

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY
FORM NO. DDé BERKELEY, CA 94720

 
 

!

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY

ig

646355