At Madame du Deffand's death, both dog and box passed to Walpole, the latter finding an honoured place among the treasures of the Tribune. (See A Description of the Villa, etc., 1774, p. 137, Appendix of Additions.)
[183] The MSS., which included eight hundred of Madame du Deffand's letters, were sold in the Strawberry Hill sale of 1842 for £157 10s.
[184] Walpole, as in the case of Madame du Deffand, had taken the precaution of getting back his letters, and at his friend's death not more than a dozen of them were still in Mann's possession. According to Cunningham (Corr., ix. xv), Mann's letters to Walpole are 'absolutely unreadable.' An attempt to skim the cream of them (such as it is) was made by Dr. Doran in two volumes entitled 'Mann' and Manners at the Court of Florence, 1740-1786, Bentley, 1876.
[185] Mrs. Clive is buried at Twickenham, where a mural slab was erected to her in the parish church by her protégée and successor, Miss Jane Pope, the clever actress who shed tears over the Beauclerk drawings (see p. [244]). Her portrait by Davison, which is engraved as the frontispiece to Cunningham's fourth volume, hung in the Round Bedchamber at Strawberry. It was given to Walpole by her brother, James Raftor.
[186] 'Whom she [Madame de Genlis] has educated to be very like herself in the face,' says Walpole, referring to a then current scandal. At this date, however, it is but just to add that the recent investigations of Mr. J. G. Alger, as embodied in vol. xix. of the Dictionary of National Biography, tend to show that it is by no means certain that Pamela was the daughter of the accomplished lady whom Philippe Egalité entrusted with the education of his sons.
[187] He is not explicit as to his creed. 'Atheism I dislike,' he said to Pinkerton. 'It is gloomy, uncomfortable; and, in my eye, unnatural and irrational. It certainly requires more credulity to believe that there is no God, than to believe that there is' (Walpoliana, i. 75-6). But Pinkerton must be taken with caution. (Cf. Quarterly Review, 1843, lxxii. 551.)
[188] In 1786 she had dedicated to him her Florio, A Tale, etc., with a highly complimentary Preface, in which she says: 'I should be unjust to your very engaging and well-bred turn of wit, if I did not declare that, among all the lively and brilliant things I have heard from you, I do not remember ever to have heard an unkind or an ungenerous one.'
[189] This (we are told) was Lady Di.'s chef-d'œuvre. It was a water-colour drawing representing 'Gipsies telling a country-maiden her fortune at the entrance of a beech-wood,' and hung in the Red Bedchamber at Strawberry.
[190] Walpole to Lady Ossory, 11 Oct., 1788.
[191] Walpole to Pinkerton, 26 Dec., 1791.