But Prior's Kitty, ever fair,
Obtained it for an age!'
She was then seventy-one. In later life she was often at her seat of Drumlanrig, in Dumfriesshire (where she was visited by Mr. Matthew Bramble and his party *); and Scott in his 'Journal,' under date of August, 1826, speaks of the 'Walk' by the river Nith which she had formed, and which still went by her name. Her peculiarities, over which her friend Mrs. Delany sighs plaintively, did not abate with age; but her kind heart remained. She died in Savile Row in 1777, of a surfeit of cherries, and was buried at Durrisdeer.
* 'Expedition of Humphrey Clinker' (Letter to Dr. Lewis,
September 15).
III. SPENCE'S 'ANECDOTES.'
WHEN, in the year 1741, after his quarrel with Gray, Horace Walpole lay sick of a quinsy at Reggio, the shearing of his thin-spun life was only postponed by the opportune intervention of a passing acquaintance. The Rev. Joseph Spence, Fellow of New College, Oxford, and Professor of Poetry to that University, then travelling in Italy as Governor to Henry Clinton, Earl of Lincoln, promptly arrived to his aid, summoned Dr. Cocchi posthaste from Florence, and thus became instrumental in enabling the Prince of Letter-Writers to expand the thirty or forty epistles he had already produced into that magnificent correspondence which, incomplete even now, * fills no fewer than nine closely printed volumes.
* For example, a number of new letters are included in vol.
iii. of the privately-printed 'Letters and Journals of Lady
Mary Coke,' 1889-92.
Spence, to whom all Walpole's admirers owe a lasting debt of gratitude, was one of the fortunate men of a fortunate literary age. In 1726 he had published a 'genteel' critique of Pope's 'Odyssey,' conspicuous for its courteous mingling of praise and blame, and not the less grateful to the person criticised because—as Bennot Langton said, and as good luck would have it—ten out of the twelve objections fell, upon the labours of Pope's luckless coadjutors, Broome and Fenton. The book made Pope his friend, and himself Professor of Poetry, in which capacity he patronised Thomson, and protected Queen Caroline's thresher-laureate, Stephen Duck. During the continental tours which he undertook in 1730 and 1737, and in that above referred to, he collected the material for his 'Polymetis,' a tall folio on classical mythology, the earlier editions of which are now chiefly sought after for their irreverent vignette of Dr. Cooke, propositor of Eton, in the disguise of 'an ass's nowl.' Spence continued to dally lightly with letters, editing Sackville's 'Gorboduc,' annotating Virgil, writing a life of the blind poet Blacklock, and comparing (after the manner of Plutarch), for Walpole's private press at Strawberry, Mr. Robert Hill, the 'learned tailor' of Buckingham, with that Florentine helluo librorum, Signor Antonio Magliabecchi. He lived the mildly studious life of a quiet, easy-going clergyman of the eighteenth century, nursing a widowed mother like Pope, and declining to disturb the placid ripple of his days by the 'violent delights' of matrimony. He is 'the completest scholar,' 'the sweetest tempered gentleman breathing,' cries his enthusiastic friend, Mr. Christopher Pitt, himself a virtuoso and a translator of Homer. He is 'extremely' polite, friendly, cheerful, and master of an infinite fund of subjects for agreeable conversation,' says Mr. Shenstone of the Leasowes. 'He was a good-natured, harmless little soul, but more like a silver penny than a genius,' says ungrateful Mr. Walpole. 'He was a poor creature, though a very worthy man,' says clever Mr. Cambridge of the 'World' and the 'Scribleriad.' To strike an average between these varying estimates is not a difficult task. It gives us a character amiable rather than strong, finical rather than earnest, well-informed and ingenious rather than positively learned. For the rest, 'Polymetis' has been supplanted by Lempriere, and is as dead as Stephen Duck; and its author now lives mainly by the 'priefs' which, like Sir Hugh Evans, he made in his notebook,—in other words, by the Anecdotes of the Literary Men of his age, which, when occasion offered, he jotted down from the conversation of Pope, Young, Dean Lockier, and other notabilities into whose company he came from time to time.