'I am turned printer,' he writes somewhat later, 'and have converted a little cottage into a printing-office. My abbey is a perfect college or academy. I keep a painter [Müntz] in the house, and a printer,—not to mention Mr. Bentley, who is an academy himself.' William Robinson, the printer, an Irishman with noticeable eyes which Garrick envied ('they are more Richard the Third's than Garrick's own,' says Walpole), must have been a rather original personage, to judge by a copy of one of his letters which his patron incloses to Mann. He says he found it in a drawer where it had evidently been placed to attract his attention. After telling his correspondent in bad blank verse that he dates from the 'shady bowers, nodding groves, and amaranthine shades (?)' of Twickenham,—'Richmond's near neighbour, where great George the King resides,'—Robinson proceeds to describe his employer as 'the Hon. Horatio Walpole, son to the late great Sir Robert Walpole, who is very studious, and an admirer of all the liberal arts and sciences; amongst the rest he admires printing. He has fitted out a complete printing-house at this his country seat, and has done me the favour to make me sole manager and operator (there being no one but myself). All men of genius resorts his house, courts his company, and admires his understanding: what with his own and their writings, I believe I shall be pretty well employed. I have pleased him, and I hope to continue so to do.' Then, after reference to the extreme heat,—a heat by which fowls and quarters of lamb have been roasted in the London Artillery grounds 'by the help of glasses,' so capricious was the climate over which Walpole had made merry in May,—he proceeds to describe Strawberry. 'The place I am now in is all my comfort from the heat; the situation of it is close to the Thames, and is Richmond Gardens (if you were ever in them) in miniature, surrounded by bowers, groves, cascades, and ponds, and on a rising ground not very common in this part of the country; the building elegant, and the furniture of a peculiar taste, magnificent and superb.' At this date poor Robinson seems to have been delighted with the place and the fastidious master whom he hoped 'to continue to please.' But Walpole was nothing if not mutable, and two years later he had found out that Robinson of the remarkable eyes was 'a foolish Irishman who took himself for a genius,' and they parted, with the result that the Officina Arbuteana was temporarily at a standstill.
For the moment, however, things went smoothly enough. It had been intended that the maiden effort of the Strawberry types should have been a translation by Bentley of Paul Hentzner's curious account of England in 1598. But Walpole suddenly became aware that Gray had put the penultimate, if not the final, touches to his painfully elaborated Pindaric Odes, the Bard and the Progress of Poesy, and he pounced upon them forthwith; Gray, as usual, half expostulating, half overborne. 'You will dislike this as much as I do,'—he writes to Mason,—'but there is no help.' 'You understand,' he adds, with the air of one resigning himself to the inevitable, 'it is he that prints them, not for me, but for Dodsley.' However, he persisted in refusing Walpole's not entirely unreasonable request for notes. 'If a thing cannot be understood without them,' he said characteristically, 'it had better not be understood at all.' Consequently, while describing them as 'Greek, Pindaric, sublime,' Walpole confesses under his breath that they are a little obscure. Dodsley paid Gray forty guineas for the book, which was a large, thin quarto, entitled Odes by Mr. Gray; Printed, at Strawberry Hill, for R. and J. Dodsley in Pall-Mall. It was published in August, and the price was a shilling. On the title-page was a vignette of the Gothic castle at Twickenham. From a letter of Walpole to Lyttelton it would seem that his apprehensions as to the poems being 'understanded of the people' proved well founded. 'They [the age] have cast their eyes over them, found them obscure, and looked no further; yet perhaps no compositions ever had more sublime beauties than are in each,'—and he goes on to criticise them minutely in a fashion which shows that his own appreciation of them was by no means unqualified. But Warburton and Garrick and the 'word-picker' Hurd were enthusiastic. Lyttelton and Shenstone followed more moderately. Upon the whole, the success of the first venture was encouraging, and the share in it of 'Elzevir Horace,' as Conway called his friend, was not forgotten.
Gray's Odes were succeeded by Hentzner's Travels, or, to speak more accurately, by that portion of Hentzner's Travels which refers to England. In England Hentzner was little known, and the 220 copies which Walpole printed in October, 1757, were prefaced by an Advertisement from his pen, and a dedication to the Society of Antiquaries, of which he was a member. After this came, in 1758, his Catalogue of Royal and Noble Authors; a collection of Fugitive Pieces (which included his essays in the World), dedicated to Conway;[91] and seven hundred copies of Lord Whitworth's Account of Russia. Then followed a book by Joseph Spence, the Parallel of Magliabecchi and Mr. [Robert] Hill, a learned tailor of Buckingham, the object of which was to benefit Hill,—an end which must have been attained, as six out of seven hundred copies were sold in a fortnight, and the book was reprinted in London. Bentley's Lucan, a quarto of five hundred copies, succeeded Spence, and then came three other quartos of Anecdotes of Painting, by Walpole himself. The only other notable products of the press during this period are the Autobiography of Lord Herbert of Cherbury, quarto, 1764, and one hundred copies of the Poems of Lady Temple. This, however, is a very fair record for seven years' work, when it is remembered that the Strawberry Hill staff never exceeded a man and a boy. As already stated, the first printer, Robinson, was dismissed in 1759. His place, after a short interval of 'occasional hands,' was taken by Thomas Kirgate, whose name thenceforth appears on all the Twickenham issues, with which it is indissolubly connected. Kirgate continued, with greater good fortune than his predecessors, to perform his duties until Walpole's death.
In the above list there are two volumes which, in these pages, deserve a more extended notice than the rest. The Catalague of Royal and Noble Authors had at least the merit of novelty, and certainly a better reason for existing than some of the works to which its author refers in his preface. Even the performances of Pulteney, Earl of Bath, and the English rondeaus of Charles of Orleans are more worthy of a chronicler than the lives of physicians who had been poets, of men who had died laughing, or of Frenchmen who had studied Hebrew. Walpole took considerable pains in obtaining information, and his book was exceedingly well received,—indeed, far more favourably than he had any reason to expect. A second edition, which was not printed at Strawberry Hill, speedily followed the first, with no diminution of its prosperity. For an effort which made no pretensions to symmetry, which is often meagre where it might have been expected to be full, and is everywhere prejudiced by a sort of fine-gentleman disdain of exactitude, this was certainly as much as he could anticipate. But he seems to have been more than usually sensitive to criticism, and some of the amplest of his Short Notes are devoted to the discussion of the adverse opinions which were expressed. From these we learn that he was abused by the Critical Review for disliking the Stuarts, and by the Monthly for liking his father. Further, that he found an apologist in Dr. Hill (of the Inspector), whose gross adulation was worse than abuse; and lastly, that he was seriously attacked in a Pamphlet of Remarks on Mr. Walpole's 'Catalogue of Royal and Noble Authors' by a certain Carter, concerning whose antecedents his irritation goes on to bring together all the scandals he can collect. As the Short Notes were written long after the events, it shows how his soreness against his critics continued. What it was when still fresh may be gathered from the following quotation from a letter to Rev. Henry Zouch, to whom he was indebted for many new facts and corrections, especially in the second edition, and who afterwards helped him in the Anecdotes of Painting: 'I am sick of the character of author; I am sick of the consequences of it; I am weary of seeing my name in the newspapers; I am tired with reading foolish criticisms on me, and as foolish defences of me; and I trust my friends will be so good as to let the last abuse of me pass unanswered. It is called "Remarks" on my Catalogue, asperses the Revolution more than it does my book, and, in one word, is written by a non-juring preacher, who was a dog-doctor. Of me, he knows so little that he thinks to punish me by abusing King William!'[92]
In a letter of a few months earlier to the same correspondent, he refers to another task, upon which, in despite of the sentence just quoted, he continued to employ himself. 'Last summer'—he says—'I bought of Vertue's widow forty volumes of his MS. collections relating to English painters, sculptors, gravers, and architects. He had actually begun their lives: unluckily he had not gone far, and could not write grammar. I propose to digest and complete this work.'[93] The purchases referred to had been made subsequent to 1756, when Mrs. Vertue applied to Walpole, as a connoisseur, to buy from her the voluminous notes and memoranda which her husband had accumulated with respect to art and artists in England. Walpole also acquired at Vertue's sale in May, 1757, a number of copies from Holbein and two or three other pictures. He seems to have almost immediately set about arranging and digesting this unwieldy and chaotic heap of material,[94] much of which, besides being illiterate, was also illegible. More than once his patience gave way under the drudgery; but he nevertheless persevered in a way that shows a tenacity of purpose foreign, in this case at all events, to his assumption of dilettante indifference. His progress is thus chronicled. He began in January, 1760, and finished the first volume on 14 August. The second volume was begun in September, and completed on the 23rd October. On the 4th January in the following year he set about the third volume, but laid it aside after the first day, not resuming it until the end of June. In August, however, he finished it. Two volumes were published in 1762, and a third, which is dated 1763, in 1764. As usual, he affected more or less to undervalue his own share in the work; but he very justly laid stress in his 'Preface' upon the fact that he was little more than the arranger of data not collected by his own exertions. 'I would not,' he said to Zouch, 'have the materials of forty years, which was Vertue's case, depreciated in compliment to the work of four months, which is almost my whole merit.' Here, again, the tone is a little in the Oronte manner; but, upon the main point, the interest of the work, his friends did not share his apprehensions, and Gray especially was 'violent about it.' Nor did the public show themselves less appreciative, for there was so much that was new in the dead engraver's memoranda, and so much which was derived from private galleries or drawn from obscure sources, that the work could scarcely have failed of readers even if the style had been hopelessly corrupt, which, under Walpole's revision, it certainly was not. In 1762, he began a Catalogue of Engravers, which he finished in about six weeks as a supplementary volume, and in 1765, still from the Strawberry Press, he issued a second edition of the whole.[95]
After the appearance of the second edition of the Anecdotes of Painting, a silence fell upon the Officina Arbuteana for three years, during the earlier part of which time Walpole was at Paris, as will be narrated in the next chapter. His press, as may be guessed, was one of the sights of his Gothic castle, and there are several anecdotes showing how his ingenious fancy made it the vehicle of adroit compliment. Once, not long after it had been established, my Lady Rochford, Lady Townshend (the witty Ethelreda, or Audrey, Harrison),[96] and Sir John Bland's sister were carried after dinner into the printing-room to see Mr. Robinson at work. He immediately struck off some verse which was already in type, and presented it to Lady Townshend:—
The Press speaks:
From me wits and poets their glory obtain;