The blushing lilac's chill perfume.
So loose is flung each bold festoon,
Each bough so breathes the touch of noon,
The happy pencil so deceives,
That Flora, doubly jealous, cries,
'The work's not mine,—yet, trust these eyes,
'T is my own Zephyr waves the leaves.'"[177]
Mention has been made of the intermittent attacks of insanity to which Walpole's nephew, the third Earl of Orford, was subject. At the beginning of 1774, he had returned to his senses, and his uncle, on whom fell the chief care of his affairs during his illnesses, was, for a brief period, freed from the irksome strain of an uncongenial and a thankless duty. In April, 1777, however, Lord Orford's malady broke out again, with redoubled severity. In August, he was still fluctuating 'between violence and stupidity;' but in March, 1778, a lucid interval had once more been reached, and Walpole was relieved of the care of his person. Of his affairs he had declined to take care, as his Lordship had employed a lawyer of whom Walpole had a bad opinion. 'He has resumed the entire dominion of himself,' says a letter to Mann in April, 'and is gone into the country, and intends to command the militia.' One of the earliest results of this 'entire dominion' was a step which filled his relative with the keenest distress. He offered the famous Houghton collection of pictures to Catherine of Russia,—'the most signal mortification to my idolatry for my father's memory that it could receive,' says Walpole to Lady Ossory. By August, 1779, the sale was completed. 'The sum stipulated,' he tells Mann, 'is forty or forty-five thousand pounds,[178] I neither know nor care which; nor whether the picture merchant ever receives the whole sum, which probably he will not do, as I hear it is to be discharged at three payments,—a miserable bargain for a mighty empress!... Well! adieu to Houghton! about its mad master I shall never trouble myself more.... Since he has stript Houghton of its glory, I do not care a straw what he does with the stone or the acres!'[179]
Not very long after the date of the above letter Walpole made what was, for him, an important change of residence. The lease of his house in Arlington Street running out, he fixed upon a larger one in the then very fashionable district of Berkeley Square. The house he selected, now (1892) numbered 11, was then 40,[180] and he had commenced negotiations for its purchase as early as November, 1777, when, he tells Lady Ossory, he had come to town to take possession. But difficulties arose over the sale, and he found himself involved in a Chancery suit. He was too adroit, however, to allow this to degenerate into an additional annoyance, and managed (by his own account) to turn what promised to be a tedious course of litigation into a combat of courtesy. Ultimately, in July, 1779, he had won his cause, and was hurrying from Strawberry to pay his purchase money and close the bargain. Two months later, he is moving in, and is delighted with his acquisition. He would not change his two pretty mansions for any in England, he says. On the 14th October, he took formal possession, upon which day—his 'inauguration day'—he dates his first letter 'Berkeley Square.' 'It is seeming to take a new lease of life,' he tells Mason. 'I was born in Arlington Street, lived there about fourteen years, returned thither, and passed thirty-seven more; but I have sober monitors that warn me not to delude myself.' He had still a decade and a half before him.
Little more than twelve months after he had settled down in his new abode, he lost the faithful friend at Paris, to whom, for the space of fifteen years, he had written nearly once a week. By 1774, he had become somewhat nervous about this accumulated correspondence in a language not his own. For an Englishman, his French was good, and, as might be expected of anything he wrote, characteristic and vivacious. But, almost of necessity, it contained many minor faults of phraseology and arrangement, besides abounding in personal anecdote; and he became apprehensive lest, after Madame du Deffand's death, his utterances should fall into alien hands. General Conway, who visited Paris in October, 1774, had therefore been charged to beg for their return—a request which seems at first to have been met by the reply on the lady's part that sufficient precautions had already been taken for ensuring their restoration. Ultimately, however, they were handed to Conway.[181] It was in all probability under a sense of this concession that Walpole once more risked a tedious journey to visit his blind friend. In the following year he went to Paris, to find her, as usual, impatiently expecting his arrival. She sat with him until half-past two, and before his eyes were open again, he had a letter from her. 'Her soul is immortal, and forces her body to keep it company.' A little later he complains that he never gets to bed from her suppers before two or three o'clock. 'In short,' he says, 'I need have the activity of a squirrel, and the strength of a Hercules, to go through my labours,—not to count how many démêlés I have had to raccommode and how many mémoires to present against Tonton,[182] who grows the greater favourite the more people he devours.' But Tonton's mistress is more worth visiting than ever, he tells Selwyn, and she is apparently as tireless as of yore. 'Madame du Deffand and I [says another letter] set out last Sunday at seven in the evening, to go fifteen miles to a ball, and came back after supper; and another night, because it was but one in the morning when she brought me home, she ordered the coachman to make the tour of the Quais, and drive gently because it was so early.' At last, early in October, he tears himself away, to be followed almost immediately by a letter of farewell. Here it is:—