[202] 'I have persisted'—he tells Gray from Paris in January, 1766—'through this Siberian winter in not adding a grain to my clothes and in going open-breasted without an under waistcoat.'
[203] He was probably thinking of Spectator, No. 228: 'The Indian answered very well to an European, who asked him how he could go naked: I am all Face.' Lord Chesterfield wished his little godson to have the same advantage. 'I am very willing that he should be all face,' he says in a letter to Arthur Stanhope of 19th October, 1762.
[204] Walpoliana, i. xi-xiv.
[205] See Mr. Robins's Catalogue of the Classic Contents of Strawberry Hill, etc. (1842), 4to. It is compiled in his well-known grandiloquent manner; but includes an account of the Castle by Harrison Ainsworth, together with many interesting details. It gave rise to a humorous squib by Crofton Croker, entitled Gooseberry Hall, with 'Puffatory Remarks,' and cuts.
[206] Walpole to Montagu, 12 March, 1768.
[207] The full titles of these memoirs are Memoires of the last Ten Years of the Reign of King George II. Edited by Lord Holland. 2 vols. 4to., 1822; and Memoirs of the Reign of King George III. Edited, with Notes, by Sir Denis Le Marchant, Bart. 4 vols. 8vo., 1845. Both were reviewed, more suo, by Mr. Croker in the Quarterly, with the main intention of proving that all Walpole's pictures of his contemporaries were coloured and distorted by successive disappointments arising out of his solicitude concerning the patent places from which he derived his income,—in other words (Mr. Croker's words!), that 'the whole is "a copious polyglot of spleen."' Such an investigation was in the favourite line of the critic, and might be expected to result in a formidable indictment. But the best judges hold it to have been exaggerated, and to-day the method of Mr Croker is more or less discredited. Indeed, it is an instance of those quaint revenges of the whirligig of Time, that some of his utterances are really more applicable to himself than to Walpole. 'His [Walpole's] natural inclination [says Croker] was to grope an obscure way through mazes and souterrains rather than walk the high road by daylight. He is never satisfied with the plain and obvious cause of any effect, and is for ever striving after some tortuous solution.' This is precisely what unkind modern critics affirm of the Rt. Honourable John Wilson Croker.
[208] Idler, No. lxxvii. (6 Oct., 1759).
[209] See Appendix, p. [320]. To the advocates of the rival school Walpole's utterance, perhaps inevitably, appears in a less favourable light. 'Horace Walpole published an Essay on Modern Gardening in 1785, in which he repeated what other writers had said on the subject. This was at once translated, and had a great circulation on the Continent. The jardin à l'Anglaise became the rage; many beautiful old gardens were destroyed in France and elsewhere; and Scotch and English gardeners were in demand all over Europe to renovate gardens in the English manner. It is not an exhilarating thought that in the one instance in which English taste in a matter of design has taken hold on the Continent, it has done so with such disastrous results' (The Formal Garden in England, 2nd edn., 1892, p. 86).
Transcriber's Notes:
Minor punctuation and printer errors repaired.