[3] It is also to be found asserted as a current story in the Note Books (unpublished) of the Duchess of Portland, the daughter of Edward Harley, second Earl of Oxford, and the 'noble, lovely little Peggy' of her father's friend and protégé, Matthew Prior.
[4] These, hereafter referred to as the Short Notes, are the chief authority for three parts of Walpole's not very eventful life. They were first published with the concluding series of his Letters to Sir Horace Mann, 2 vols., 1844, and are reprinted in Mr. Peter Cunningham's edition of the Correspondence, vol. i. (1857), pp. lxi-lxxvii.
[5] Martin's Old Chelsea, 1889, p. 82; Beaver's Memorials of Old Chelsea, 1892, p. 291.
[6] Cunningham, v. 36, and ix. 519. The Duchess of Tyrconnell's portrait, copied by Milbourn from the original at Lord Spencer's, was one of the prominent ornaments of the Great Bedchamber at Strawberry Hill. (See A Description of the Villa, etc., 1774, p. 138.) There are some previously unpublished particulars respecting her as 'Mlle. Genins' in M. Jusserand's extremely interesting French Ambassador at the Court of Charles the Second, 1892, pp. 153 et seq., 170, 182.
[7] Walpole to the Miss Berrys, 5 March, 1791.
[8] Reminiscences of the Courts of George the First and Second, in Cunningham's Corr., i. xciii-xciv.
[9] The book referred to is a 'little lounging miscellany' of notes and anecdotes by John Pinkerton, and was printed, soon after Walpole's death, by Bensley, who lived in Johnson's old house, No. 8 Bolt Court. It requires to to be used with caution (see Quarterly Review, vol. lxxii., No. cxliv.), and must not be confused with Lord Hardwicke's privately printed Walpoliana, which relate to Sir Robert Walpole.
[10] This is quoted by Mr. Hayward and others as if the last words were Sir Robert Walpole's. But Lady Louisa Stuart says nothing to indicate this (Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's Letters, etc., 1887, i. xciii).
[11] Letter to Montagu, 6 May, 1736.
[12] Walpole to Montagu. Cunningham, 1857, i. 15.