[122] Works, 1798, i. 129.
[123] He says he 'was going to Paris in a day or two.' But his memory must have deceived him, for Chatterton's last letter is dated July 24th, 1769, and, according to Miss Berry, Walpole's visit to Paris lasted from the 18th August to the 5th October, 1769; and this is confirmed by his correspondence.
[124] Works, 1798, iv. 219. In the above summary of the story we have relied by preference on the fairly established facts of the case, which is full of difficulties. The most plausible version of it, as well as the most fair to Walpole, is given in Prof. D. Wilson's Chatterton, 1869.
[125] An example of this is furnished by Miss Seward's Correspondence. 'Do not expect [she writes] that I can learn to esteem that fastidious and unfeeling being, to whose insensibility we owe the extinction of the greatest poetic luminary [Chatterton], if we may judge from the brightness of its dawn, that ever rose in our, or perhaps in any other, hemisphere' (Seward to Hardinge, 21 Nov., 1787).
[126] Works, 1798, iv. 205-45. See also Bibliographical Appendix to this volume.
[127] Henrietta Hobart, Countess Dowager of Suffolk, died in July, 1767. Her portrait by Charles Jervas, with Marble Hill in the background, hung in the Green Bed-chamber in the Round Tower at Strawberry. It once belonged to Pope, who left it to Martha Blount; and it is engraved as the frontispiece of vol. ii. of Cunningham's edition of the Letters.
[128] 'The Duke of Gloucester'—wrote Gilly Williams to Selwyn, as far back as December, 1764—'has professed a passion for the Dowager Waldegrave. He is never from her elbow. This flatters Horry Walpole not a little, though he pretends to dislike it.'
[129] The idea was borrowed from an inscription upon a statue at Milan: 'Non me Praxiteles, sed Marcus finxit Agrati!'
[130] From a passage in a letter of 15 Sept., 1787, to Lady Ossory, it appears that this, though printed, was withheld, on account of certain difficulties caused by the over-weening curiosity of Walpole's 'customers' (as he called them), the visitors to Strawberry. According to the sheet of regulations for visiting the house, it was to be seen between the 1st of May and the 1st of October. Children were not admitted; and only one company of four on one day.
[131] 'It is not much larger than an old lady's flower-knot in Bloomsbury,' said Lady Morgan in 1826.