'His walk was enfeebled by the gout; which, if the editor's memory do not deceive, he mentioned that he had been tormented with since the age of twenty-five; adding, at the same time, that it was no hereditary complaint, his father, Sir Robert Walpole, who always drank ale, never having known that disorder, and far less his other parent. This painful complaint not only affected his feet, but attacked his hands to such a degree that his fingers were always swelled and deformed, and discharged large chalk-stones once or twice a year; upon which occasions he would observe, with a smile, that he must set up an inn, for he could chalk up a score with more ease and rapidity than any man in England.'
After referring to the strict temperance of his life, Pinkerton goes on:—
'Though he sat up very late, either writing or conversing, he generally rose about nine o'clock, and appeared in the breakfast room, his constant and chosen apartment, with fine vistos towards the Thames. His approach was proclaimed, and attended, by a favourite little dog, the legacy of the Marquise du Deffand,[199] and which ease and attention had rendered so fat that it could hardly move. This was placed beside him on a small sofa; the tea-kettle, stand, and heater were brought in, and he drank two or three cups of that liquor out of most rare and precious ancient porcelain of Japan, of a fine white, embossed with large leaves. The account of his china cabinet, in his description of his villa, will show how rich he was in that elegant luxury.... The loaf and butter were not spared, ... and the dog and the squirrels had a liberal share of his repast.[200]
'Dinner [his hour for which was four] was served up in the small parlour, or large dining room, as it happened: in winter generally the former. His valet supported him downstairs;[201] and he ate most moderately of chicken, pheasant, or any light food. Pastry he disliked, as difficult of digestion, though he would taste a morsel of venison pye. Never, but once that he drank two glasses of white-wine, did the editor see him taste any liquor, except ice-water. A pail of ice was placed under the table, in which stood a decanter of water, from which he supplied himself with his favourite beverage....
'If his guest liked even a moderate quantity of wine, he must have called for it during dinner, for almost instantly after he rang the bell to order coffee upstairs. Thither he would pass about five o'clock; and generally resuming his place on the sofa, would sit till two o'clock in the morning, in miscellaneous chit-chat, full of singular anecdotes, strokes of wit, and acute observations, occasionally sending for books or curiosities, or passing to the library, as any reference happened to arise in conversation. After his coffee he tasted nothing; but the snuff box of tabac d'étrennes from Fribourg's was not forgotten, and was replenished from a canister lodged in an ancient marble urn of great thickness, which stood in the window seat, and served to secure its moisture and rich flavour.
'Such was a private rainy day of Horace Walpole. The forenoon quickly passed in roaming through the numerous apartments of the house, in which, after twenty visits, still something new would occur; and he was indeed constantly adding fresh acquisitions. Sometimes a walk in the grounds would intervene, on which occasions he would go out in his slippers through a thick dew; and he never wore a hat. He said that, on his first visit to Paris, he was ashamed of his effeminacy, when he saw every little meagre Frenchman, whom even he could have thrown down with a breath, walking without a hat, which he could not do, without a certainty of that disease, which the Germans say is endemial in England, and is termed by the natives le-catch-cold.[202] The first trial cost him a slight fever, but he got over it, and never caught cold afterwards: draughts of air, damp rooms, windows open at his back, all situations were alike to him in this respect. He would even show some little offence at any solicitude, expressed by his guests on such an occasion, as an idea arising from the seeming tenderness of his frame; and would say, with a half smile of good-humoured crossness, "My back is the same with my face, and my neck is like my nose."[203] His iced water he not only regarded as a preservative from such an accident, but he would sometimes observe that he thought his stomach and bowels would last longer than his bones; such conscious vigour and strength in those parts did he feel from the use of that beverage.'[204]
The only particular that Cunningham adds to this chronicle of his habits is one too characteristic of the man to be omitted. After dinner at Strawberry, he says, the smell was removed by 'a censer or pot of frankincense.' According to the Description, etc., there was a tripod of ormolu kept in the Breakfast Room for this purpose. It is difficult to identify the 'ancient marble urn of great thickness' in which the snuff was stored; but it may have been that 'of granite, brought from one of the Greek Islands, and given to Sir Robert Walpole by Sir Charles Wager,' which also figures in the Catalogue.
Walpole's character may be considered in a fourfold aspect, as a man, a virtuoso, a politician, and an author. The first is the least easy to describe. What strikes one most forcibly is, that he was primarily and before all an aristocrat, or, as in his own day he would have been called, a 'person of quality,' whose warmest sympathies were reserved for those of his own rank. Out of the charmed circle of the peerage and baronetage, he had few strong connections; and although in middle life he corresponded voluminously with antiquaries such as Cole and Zouch, and in the languor of his old age turned eagerly to the renovating society of young women such as Hannah More and the Miss Berrys, however high his heart may have placed them, it may be doubted whether his head ever quite exalted them to the level of Lady Caroline Petersham, or Lady Ossory, or Her Grace of Gloucester. In a measure, this would also account for his unsympathetic attitude to some of the great literati of his day. With Gray he had been at school and college, which made a difference; but he no doubt regarded Fielding and Hogarth and Goldsmith and Johnson, apart from their confessed hostility to 'high life' and his beloved 'genteel comedy,' as gifted but undesirable outsiders,—'horn-handed breakers of the glebe' in Art and Letters,—with whom it would be impossible to be as intimately familiar as one could be with such glorified amateurs as Bunbury and Lady Lucan and Lady Di. Beauclerk, who were all more or less born in the purple. To the friends of his own class he was constant and considerate, and he seems to have cherished a genuine affection for Conway, George Montagu, and Sir Horace Mann. With regard to Gray, his relations, it would seem, were rather those of intellectual affinity and esteem than downright affection. But his closest friends were women. In them, that is, in the women of his time, he found just that atmosphere of sunshine and insouciance,—those conversational 'lilacs and nightingales,'—in which his soul delighted, and which were most congenial to his restless intelligence and easily fatigued temperament. To have seen him at his best, one should have listened to him, not when he was playing the antiquary with Ducarel or Conyers Middleton, but gossipping of ancient green-room scandals at Cliveden, or explaining the mysteries of the 'Officina Arbuteana' to Madame de Boufflers or Lady Townshend, or delighting Mary and Agnes Berry, in the half-light of the Round Drawing Room at Strawberry, with his old stories of Lady Suffolk and Lady Hervey, and of the monstrous raven, under guise of which the disembodied spirit of His Majesty King George the First was supposed to have revisited the disconsolate Duchess of Kendal. Comprehending thoroughly that cardinal precept of conversation,—'never to weary your hearer,'—he was an admirable raconteur; and his excellent memory, shrewd perceptions, and volatile wit—all the more piquant for its never-failing mixture of well-bred malice—must have made him a most captivating companion. If, as Scott says, his temper was 'precarious,' it is more charitable to remember that in middle and later life he was nearly always tormented with a malady seldom favourable to good humour, than to explain the less amiable details of his conduct (as does Mr. Croker) by the hereditary taint of insanity. In a life of eighty years many hot friendships cool, even with tempers not 'precarious.' As regards the charges sometimes made against him of coldness and want of generosity, very good evidence would be required before they could be held to be established; and a man is not necessarily niggardly because his benefactions do not come up to the standard of all the predatory members of the community. It is besides clear, as Conway and Madame du Deffand would have testified, that he could be royally generous when necessity required. That he was careful rather than lavish in his expenditure must be admitted. It may be added that he was very much in bondage to public opinion, and morbidly sensitive to ridicule.
As a virtuoso and amateur, his position is a mixed one. He was certainly widely different from that typical art connoisseur of his day,—the butt of Goldsmith and of Reynolds,—who travelled the Grand Tour to litter a gallery at home with broken-nosed busts and the rubbish of the Roman picture-factories. As the preface to the Ædes Walpolianæ showed, he really knew something about painting, in fact was a capable draughtsman himself; and besides, through Mann and others, had enjoyed exceptional opportunities for procuring genuine antiques. But his collection was not so rich in this way as might have been anticipated; and his portraits, his china, and his miniatures were probably his best possessions. For the rest, he was an indiscriminate rather than an eclectic collector; and there was also considerable truth in that strange 'attraction from the great to the little, and from the useful to the odd,' which Macaulay has noted. Many of the marvels at Strawberry would never have found a place in the treasure-houses—say of Beckford or Samuel Rogers. It is difficult to fancy Bermingham's fables in paper on looking-glass, or Hubert's cardcuttings, or the fragile mosaics of Mrs. Delany either at Fonthill or St. James's Place. At the same time, it should be remembered that several of the most trivial or least defensible objects were presents which possibly reflected rather the charity of the recipient than the good taste of the giver. All the articles over which Macaulay lingers—Wolsey's hat, Van Tromp's pipe-case, and King William's spurs—were obtained in this way; and (with a laugher) Horace Walpole, who laughed a good deal himself, would probably have made as merry as the most mirth-loving spectator could have desired. But such items gave a heterogeneous character to the gathering, and turned what might have been a model museum into an old curiosity-shop. In any case, however, it was a memorable curiosity-shop, and in this modern era of bric-à-brac would probably attract far more serious attention than it did in those practical and pre-æsthetic days of 1842, when it fell under the hammer of George Robins.[205]