'An estate and an earldom at seventy-four!
Had I sought them or wished them, 'twould add one fear more,—
That of making a countess when almost four-score.
But Fortune, who scatters her gifts out of season,
Though unkind to my limbs, has still left me my reason;
And whether she lowers or lifts me, I'll try,
In the plain simple style I have lived in, to die:
For ambition too humble, for manners too high.'
The last line seems like another of the many echoes of Goldsmith's Retaliation. As for the fear indicated in the third, it is hinted that this at one time bade fair to be something more than a poetical apprehension. If we are to credit a tradition handed down by Lord Lansdowne, he had been willing to go through the form of marriage with either of the Berrys, merely to secure their society, and to enrich them, as he had the power of charging the Orford estate with a jointure of £2000 per annum. But this can only have been a passing thought at some moment when their absence, in Italy or elsewhere, left him more sensitive to the loss of their gracious and stimulating presence. He himself was far too keenly alive to ridicule, and too much in bondage to les bienséances, to take a step which could scarcely escape ill-natured comment; and Mary Berry, who would certainly have been his preference, was not only as fully alive as was he to the shafts of the censorious, but, during the greater part of her acquaintanceship with him, was, apparently with his knowledge, warmly attached to a certain good-looking General O'Hara, who, a year before Walpole's death, in November, 1796, definitely proposed. He had just been appointed Governor of Gibraltar, and he wished Miss Berry to marry him at once, and go out with him. This, 'out of consideration for others,' she declined to do. A few months later the engagement was broken off, and she never again saw her soldier admirer. Whether Lord Orford's comfort went for anything in this adjournment of her happiness, does not clearly appear; but it is only reasonable to suppose that his tenacious desire for her companionship had its influence in a decision which, however much it may have been for the best (and there were those of her friends who regarded it as a providential escape), was nevertheless a lifelong source of regret to herself. When, in 1802, she heard suddenly at the Opera of O'Hara's death, she fell senseless to the floor.
The 'late Horace Walpole' never took his seat in the House of Lords. He continued, as before, to divide his time between Berkeley Square and Strawberry, to eulogize his 'wives' to Lady Ossory, and to watch life from his beloved Blue Room. Now and then he did the rare honours of his home to a distinguished guest,—in 1793, it was the Duchess of York; in 1795, Queen Charlotte herself. In the latter year died his old friend Conway, by this time a Field-Marshal; and it was evident at the close of 1796 that his faithful correspondent would not long survive him. His ailments had increased, and in the following January, he wrote his last letter to Lady Ossory:—