who then lived on Twickenham Common. Hickey, a jovial Irish attorney, was the legal adviser of Burke and Reynolds, and the 'blunt, pleasant creature' of Goldsmith's 'Retaliation.' Scott was Samuel Scott, the 'English Canaletto;' Hudson, Sir Joshua's master, who had a house on the river near Lord Radnor's. But Walpole's best allies were two of the other sex. One was Lady Suffolk, the whilom friend (as Mrs. Howard) of Pope and Swift and Gay, whose home at Marble Hill is celebrated in the Walpole-cum-Pulteney poem; the other was red-faced Mrs. Clive, who occupied a house known familiarly as 'Clive-den,' and officially as Little Strawberry. She had not yet retired from the stage. Lady Suffolk's stories of the Georgian Court and its scandals, and Mrs. Clive's anecdotes of the green-room, and of their common neighbour at Hampton, the great 'Roscius' himself (with whom she was always at war), must have furnished Walpole with an inexhaustible supply of just the particular description of gossip which he most appreciated.
CHAPTER VI.
Gleanings from the Short Notes.—Letter from Xo Ho.—The Strawberry Hill Press.—Robinson the Printer.—Gray's Odes.—Other Works.—Catalogue of Royal and Noble Authors.—Anecdotes of Painting.—Humours of the Press.—The Parish Register of Twickenham.—Lady Fanny Shirley.—Fielding.—The Castle of Otranto.
In order to take up the little-variegated thread of Walpole's life, we must again resort to the Short Notes, in which, as already stated, he has recorded what he considered to be its most important occurrences. In 1754, he had been chosen member, in the new Parliament of that year, for Castle Rising, in Norfolk. In March, 1755, he says, he was very ill-used by his nephew, Lord Orford [i. e., the son of his eldest brother, Robert], upon a contested election in the House of Commons, 'on which I wrote him a long letter, with an account of my own conduct in politics.' This letter does not seem to have been preserved, and it is difficult to conceive that its theme could have involved very lengthy explanations. In February, 1757, he vacated his Castle Rising seat for that of Lynn, and about the same time, he tells us, used his best endeavours, although in vain, to save the unfortunate Admiral Byng, who was executed, pour encourager les autres, in the following March. But with the exception of his erection of a tablet to Theodore of Corsica, and the dismissal, in 1759, of Mr. Müntz, with whom his connection seems to have been exceptionally prolonged, his record for the next decade, or until the publication of the Castle of Otranto, is almost exclusively literary, and deals with the establishment of his private printing press at Strawberry Hill, his publication thereat of Gray's Odes and other works, his Catalogue of Royal and Noble Authors, his Anecdotes of Painting, and his above-mentioned romance. This accidental absorption of his chronicle by literary production will serve as a sufficient reason for devoting this chapter to those efforts of his pen which, from the outset, were destined to the permanence of type.
Already, as far back as March, 1751, he had begun the work afterwards known as the Memoires of the last Ten Years of the Reign of George II., to the progress of which there are scattered references in the Short Notes. He had intended at first to confine them to the history of one year, but they grew under his hand. His first definite literary effort in 1757, however, was the clever little squib, after the model of Montesquieu's Lettres Persanes, entitled A Letter from Xo Ho, a Chinese Philosopher at London, to his Friend Lien Chi, at Peking, in which he ingeniously satirizes the 'late political revolutions' and the inconstant disposition of the English nation, not forgetting to fire off a few sarcasms à propos of the Byng tragedy. The piece, he tells Mann, was written 'in an hour and a half' (there is always a little of Oronte's Je n'ai demeuré qu'un quart d'heure à le faire about Walpole's literary efforts), was sent to press next day, and ran through five editions in a fortnight.[88] Mrs. Clive was of opinion that the rash satirist would be sent to the Tower; but he himself regarded it as 'perhaps the only political paper ever written, in which no man of any party could dislike or deny a single fact;' and Henry Fox, to whom he sent a copy, may be held to confirm this view, since his only objection seems to have been that it did not hit some of the other side a little harder. It would be difficult now without long notes to make it intelligible to modern readers; but the following outburst of the Chinese philosopher respecting the variations of the English climate has the merit of enduring applicability. 'The English have no sun, no summer, as we have, at least their sun does not scorch like ours. They content themselves with names: at a certain time of the year they leave their capital, and that makes summer; they go out of the city, and that makes the country. Their monarch, when he goes into the country, passes in his calash[89] by a row of high trees, goes along a gravel walk, crosses one of the chief streets, is driven by the side of a canal between two rows of lamps, at the end of which he has a small house [Kensington Palace], and then he is supposed to be in the country. I saw this ceremony yesterday: as soon as he was gone the men put on under vestments of white linen, and the women left off those vast draperies, which they call hoops, and which I have described to thee; and then all the men and all the women said it was hot. If thou wilt believe me, I am now [in May] writing to thee before a fire.'[90]
In the following June Walpole had betaken himself to the place he 'loved best of all,' and was amusing himself at Strawberry with his pen. The next work which he records is the publication of a Catalogue of the Collection of Pictures, etc., of [i. e., belonging to] Charles the First, for which he prepared 'a little introduction.' This, and the subsequent 'prefaces or advertisements' to the Catalogues of the Collections of James the Second, and the Duke of Buckingham, are to be found in vol. i., pp. 234-41, of his works. But the great event of 1757 is the establishment of the Officina Arbuteana, or private printing press, of Strawberry Hill. 'Elzevir, Aldus, and Stephens,' he tells Chute in July, 'are the freshest personages in his memory,' and he jestingly threatens to assume as his motto (with a slight variation) Pope's couplet:—
'Some have at first for wits, then poets pass'd;
Turn'd printers next, and proved plain fools at last.'