'Adieu, ce mot est bien triste; souvenez-vous que vous laissez ici la personne dont vous êtes le plus aimé, et dont le bonheur et le malheur consistent dans ce que vous pensez pour elle. Donnez-moi de vos nouvelles le plus tôt qu'il sera possible.
'Je me porte bien, j'ai un peu dormi, ma nuit n'est pas finie; je serai très-exacte au régime, et j'aurai soin de moi puisque vous vous y intéressez.'
The correspondence thus resumed was continued for five years more. Walpole does not seem to have visited Paris again, and the references to Madame du Deffand in his general correspondence are not very frequent. Towards the middle of 1780, her life was plainly closing in. In July and August, she complained of being more than usually languid, and in a letter of the 22nd of the latter month intimates that it may be her last, as dictation grows painful to her. 'Ne vous devant revoir de ma vie,'—she says pathetically,—'je n'ai rien à regretter.' From this time she kept her bed, and in September Walpole tells Lady Ossory that he is trembling at every letter he gets from Paris. 'My dear old friend, I fear, is going!... To have struggled twenty days at eighty-four shows such stamina that I have not totally lost hopes.' On the 24th, however, after a lethargy of several days, she died quietly, 'without effort or struggle.' 'Elle a eu la mort la plus douce,'—says her faithful and attached secretary, Wiart,—'quoique la maladie ait été longue.' She was buried, at her own wish, in the parish church of St. Sulpice. By her will she made her nephew, the Marquis d'Aulan, her heir. Long since, she had wished Walpole to accept this character. Thereupon he had threatened that he would never set foot in Paris again if she carried out her intention; and it was abandoned. But she left him the whole of her manuscripts[183] and books.
As his own letters to her have not been printed, her death makes no difference in the amount of his correspondence. The war with the American Colonies, of which he foresaw the disastrous results, and the course of which he follows to Mann with the greatest keenness, fully absorbs as much of his time as he can spare from the vagaries of the Duchess of Kingston and the doings of the Duchess of Gloucester. Not many months before Madame du Deffand died had occurred the famous Gordon Riots, which, as he was in London most of the time, naturally occupy his pen. It was General Conway who, as the author of Barnaby Rudge has not forgotten, so effectively remonstrated with Lord George upon the occasion of the visit of the mob to the House of Commons; and four days later Walpole chronicles from Berkeley Square the events of the terrible 'Black Wednesday.' From the roof of Gloucester House he sees the blazing prisons,—a sight he shall not soon forget. Other subjects for which one dips in the lucky bag of his records are the defence of Gibraltar, the trial of Warren Hastings, the loss of the Royal George. But it is generally in the minor chronicle that he is most diverting. The last bon mot of George Selwyn or Lady Townshend, the newest 'royal pregnancy,' the details of court ceremonial, the most recent addition to Strawberry, the endless stream of anecdote and tittle-tattle which runs dimpling all the way,—these are the themes he loves best; this is the element in which his easy persiflage delights to disport itself. He is, above all, a rieur. About his serious passages there is generally a false ring, but never when he pours out the gossip that he loves, and of which he has so inexhaustible a supply. 'I can sit and amuse myself with my own memory,' he says to Mann in February, 1785, 'and yet find new stores at every audience that I give to it. Then, for private episodes [he has been speaking of his knowledge of public events], varieties of characters, political intrigues, literary anecdotes, etc., the profusion that I remember is endless; in short, when I reflect on all I have seen, heard, read, written, the many idle hours I have passed, the nights I have wasted playing at faro, the weeks, nay months, I have spent in pain, you will not wonder that I almost think I have, like Pythagoras, been Panthoides Euphorbus, and have retained one memory in at least two bodies.'
He was sixty-eight when he wrote the above letter. Mann was eighty-four, and the long correspondence—a correspondence 'not to be paralleled in the annals of the Post Office'—was drawing to a close. 'What Orestes and Pylades ever wrote to each other for four-and-forty years without meeting?' Walpole asks. In June, 1786, however, the last letter of the eight hundred and nine specimens printed by Cunningham was despatched to Florence.[184] In the following November, Mann died, after a prolonged illness. He had never visited England, nor had Walpole set eyes upon him since he had left him at Florence in May, 1741. His death followed hard upon that of another faithful friend (whose gifts, perhaps, hardly lay in the epistolary line),—bustling, kindly Kitty Clive. Her cheerful, ruddy face, 'all sun and vermilion,' set peacefully in December, 1785, leaving Cliveden vacant, not, as we shall see, for long.[185] Earlier still had departed another old ally, Cole, the antiquary, and the lapse of time had in other ways contracted Walpole's circle. In 1781, Lady Orford had ended her erratic career at Pisa, leaving her son a fortune so considerable as to make his uncle regret vaguely that the sale of the Houghton pictures had not been delayed for a few months longer. Three years later, she was followed by her brother-in-law, Sir Edward Walpole,—an occurrence which had the effect of leaving between Horace Walpole and his father's title nothing but his lunatic and childless nephew.
If his relatives and friends were falling away, however, their places—the places of the friends, at least—were speedily filled again; and, as a general rule, most of his male favourites were replaced by women. Pinkerton, the antiquary, who afterwards published the Walpoliana, is one of the exceptions; and several of Walpole's letters to him are contained in that book, and in the volumes of Pinkerton's own correspondence published by Dawson Turner in 1830. But Walpole's appetite for correspondence of the purely literary kind had somewhat slackened in his old age, and it was to the other sex that he turned for sympathy and solace. He liked them best; his style suited them; and he wrote to them with most ease. In July, 1785, he was visited at Strawberry by Madame de Genlis, who arrived with her friend Miss Wilkes and the famous Pamela,[186] afterwards Lady Edward Fitzgerald. Madame de Genlis at this date was nearing forty, and had lost much of her good looks. But Walpole seems to have found her less précieuse and affected than he had anticipated, and she was, on this occasion, unaccompanied by the inevitable harp. A later visit was from Dr. Burney and his daughter Fanny,—'Evelina-Cecilia' Walpole calls her,—a young lady for whose good sense and modesty he expresses a genuine admiration. Miss Burney had not as yet entered upon that court bondage which was to be so little to her advantage. Another and more intimate acquaintanceship of this period was with Miss Burney's friend, Hannah More. Hannah More ultimately became one of Walpole's correspondents, although scarcely 'so corresponding' as he wished; and they met frequently in society when she visited London. On her side, she seems to have been wholly fascinated by his wit and conversational powers; he, on his, was attracted by her mingled puritanism and vivacity. He writes to her as 'St. Hannah;' and she, in return, sighs plaintively over his lack of religion. Yet (she adds) she 'must do him the justice to say, that except the delight he has in teasing me for what he calls over-strictness, I have never heard a sentence from him which savoured of infidelity.'[187] He evidently took a great interest in her works, and indeed in 1789 printed at his press one of her poems, Bonner's Ghost.[188] His friendship for her endured for the remainder of his life; and not long before his death he presented her with a richly bound copy of Bishop Wilson's Bible, with a complimentary inscription which may be read in the second volume of her Life and Correspondence.
It was, however, neither the author of Evelina nor the author of The Manners of the Great who was destined to fill the void created by the death of Madame du Deffand. In the winter of 1787-8, he had first seen, and a year later he made the formal acquaintance of, 'two young ladies of the name of Berry.' They had a story. Their father, at this time a widower, had married for love, and had afterwards been supplanted in the good graces of a rich uncle by a younger brother who had the generosity to allow him an annuity of a thousand a year. In 1783, Mr. Berry had taken his daughters abroad to Holland, Switzerland, and Italy, whence, in June, 1785, they had returned, being then highly cultivated and attractive young women of two-and-twenty and one-and-twenty respectively. Three years later, Walpole met them for the second time at the house of a Lady Herries, the wife of a banker in St. James's Street. The first time he saw them he 'would not be acquainted with them, having heard so much in their praise that he concluded they would be all pretension.' But on the second occasion, 'in a very small company,' he sat next the elder, Mary, 'and found her an angel both inside and out.' 'Her face'—he tells Lady Ossory—'is formed for a sentimental novel, but it is ten times fitter for a fifty times better thing, genteel comedy.' The other sister was speedily discovered to be nearly as charming. 'They are exceedingly sensible, entirely natural and unaffected, frank, and, being qualified to talk on any subject, nothing is so easy and agreeable as their conversation, nor more apposite than their answers and observations. The eldest, I discovered by chance, understands Latin, and is a perfect Frenchwoman in her language. The younger draws charmingly, and has copied admirably Lady Di.'s gipsies,[189] which I lent, though for the first time of her attempting colours. They are of pleasing figures: Mary, the eldest, sweet, with fine dark eyes that are very lively when she speaks, with a symmetry of face that is the more interesting from being pale; Agnes, the younger, has an agreeable, sensible countenance, hardly to be called handsome, but almost. She is less animated than Mary, but seems, out of deference to her sister, to speak seldomer; for they dote on each other, and Mary is always praising her sister's talents. I must even tell you they dress within the bounds of fashion, though fashionably; but without the excrescences and balconies with which modern hoydens overwhelm and barricade their persons. In short, good sense, information, simplicity, and ease characterize the Berrys; and this is not particularly mine, who am apt to be prejudiced, but the universal voice of all who know them.'[190]
'This delightful family,' he goes on to say, 'comes to me almost every Sunday evening. [They were at the time living on Twickenham Common.] Of the father not much is recorded beyond the fact that he was 'a little merry man with a round face,' and (as his eldest daughter reports) 'an odd inherent easiness in his disposition,' who seems to have been perfectly contented in his modest and unobtrusive character of paternal appendage to the favourites. Walpole's attachment to his new friends grew rapidly. Only a few days after the date of the foregoing letter, Mr. Kirgate's press was versifying in their honour, and they themselves were already 'his two Straw Berries,' whose praises he sang to all his friends. He delighted in devising new titles for them,—they were his 'twin wives,' his 'dear Both,' his 'Amours.' For them in this year he began writing the charming little volume of Reminiscences of the Courts of George the 1st and 2nd, and in December, 1789, he dedicated to them his Catalogue of Strawberry Hill. It was not long before he had secured them a home at Teddington and finally, when, in 1791, Cliveden became vacant, he prevailed upon them to become his neighbours. He afterwards bequeathed the house to them, and for many years after his death, it was their summer residence. On either side the acquaintance was advantageous. His friendship at once introduced them to the best and most accomplished fashionable society of their day, while the charm of their 'company, conversation and talents' must have inexpressibly sweetened and softened what, on his part, had begun to grow more and more a solitary, joyless, and painful old age.
His establishment of his 'wives' in his immediate vicinity was not, however, accomplished without difficulty. For a moment some ill-natured newspaper gossip, which attributed the attachment of the Berry family to interested motives, so justly aroused the indignation of the elder sister that the whole arrangement threatened to collapse. But the slight estrangement thus caused soon passed away; and at the close of 1791, they took up their abode in Mrs. Clive's old house, now doubly honoured. On the 5th of the December in the same year, after a fresh fit of frenzy, Walpole's nephew died, and he became fourth Earl of Orford. The new dignity was by no means a welcome one, and scarcely compensated for the cares which it entailed. 'A small estate, loaded with debt, and of which I do not understand the management, and am too old to learn; a source of law suits amongst my near relations, though not affecting me; endless conversations with lawyers, and packets of letters to read every day and answer,—all this weight of new business is too much for the rag of life that yet hangs about me, and was preceded by three weeks of anxiety about my unfortunate nephew, and a daily correspondence with physicians and mad-doctors, falling upon me when I had been out of order ever since July.'[191] 'For the other empty metamorphosis,' he writes to Hannah More, 'that has happened to the outward man, you do me justice in concluding that it can do nothing but tease me; it is being called names in one's old age. I had rather be my Lord Mayor, for then I should keep the nickname but a year; and mine I may retain a little longer,—not that at seventy-five I reckon on becoming my Lord Methusalem.' For some time he could scarcely bring himself to use his new signature, and occasionally varied it by describing himself as 'The uncle of the late Earl of Orford.' In 1792, he delivered himself, after the fashion of Cowley, of the following Epitaphium vivi Auctoris:—