Certain waves of sentiment or action, or both combined, have at various times passed over the face of European society. A thousand years ago the Old Continent went madly crusading to snatch the Holy Sepulchre from the grasp of the pagan Sultan, who, sick man as he is, still holds it. The movement had certain advantages: it cleared Europe of a good deal of ruffianism, which never came back, as it perished on the journey to Jerusalem, or very properly was killed off by the justly incensed Turks, who could not understand by what right these hordes of robbers invaded their country. Then another phase of society madness arose. Some maniac, clad in armour, on a horse similarly accoutred, would appear, and challenge everyone to admit that the Lady Gwendolyne Mousetrap, whom he kept company with, and took to the tea-gardens on Sundays, was the most peerless damosel, and that whoso doubted it, would not get off by paying a dollar, but would have to fight it out with him. Then another mailed and belted chap would jump up, and maintain that the Countess of Rabbit-Warren—who was the girl he was just then booming—was the finest woman going, and that that slut Gwendolyne Mousetrap was no better than she should be. Of course, as soon as the King and Court heard of the shindy between the two knights a day was appointed when they should fight it out, the combatants being enclosed in a kind of rat-pit, officially called lists, whilst the King, his courtiers and their gentle ladies looked at the sport; and if one of the knights was killed, or perhaps both were killed, or at least maimed for life, the Lady Gwendolyne and the Countess of Rabbit-Warren, who, of course, both assisted at the spectacle, received the congratulations of the Court. Sometimes one of the knights would funk, and not come up to the scratch; then he was declared a lame duck, and the lady whom he had left in the lurch and made a laughing-stock of would erase his name from her tablets, and shy the trumpery proofs of devotion he had given her, a worn-out scarf or Brummagem aigrette, out of an upper window. This was called the age of chivalry. Then a totally different eruption of the fighting mania—which is, after all, the universal principle in human action—took place. A vagrant scholasticus would appear in a University town, and announce that he was ready to hold a disputation with any professor, Doctor of Divinity, or Master of Arts, on any mortal subject, the more subtle, and the more incomprehensible, and the more mystical, the better. Thus, one such scholasticus got into the rostrum at Tübingen, and addressed his audience thus: 'I am about to propound three theses: the answer to the first is known to myself only, and not to you; to the second, the answer is known neither to you nor to me; to the third, the answer is known to you only.' This was a promising programme, and, indeed, proved highly edifying. 'Now, the first question,' resumed the scholasticus, 'is this: Have I got any breeches on? You don't know, but I do; I have not. The second question, the answer to which is known neither to you nor to me, is: Shall I find in this town any draper willing to advance on credit stuff enough to make me a pair? And the third question, the answer to which is known to you only, is: Will any of you pay a tailor's wages to make me a pair? And now that the argument is clearly before you, we may proceed to the consideration of the parabolic triangulation of the binocular theorem;' and then he would bewilder them with a lot of jaw-breaking words, which then, as now, passed for learning. This was called the age of scholasticism. It was succeeded by the Renaissance, which, after a good boil-up of its intellectual ingredients, settled down into a literary mud, an Acqui-la-Bollente, a Nile mud, pleasant to the soul, and fertilizing to the mind, the protoplasm of diarists and letter-writers, of whom—to mention but three—Evelyn, Pepys, and Horace Walpole were prominent patterns in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
It is with the latter, Horace Walpole, of Strawberry Hill, we are chiefly concerned. Horace Walpole, after enlarging a cottage into a Gothic castle, with lath and plaster, and rough-cast walls, and wooden pinnacles, filled it with literary and artistic treasures. But he also gathered around him a select social circle, which included Garrick, Paul Whitehead, General Conway, George Selwyn, Richard Bentley, the poet Gray, Sir Horace Mann, and Lords Edgcumbe and Strafford. And of ladies there was no lack; there were Mrs. Pritchard, Kitty Clive, Lady Suffolk, the Misses Berry, and—would you believe it?—Hannah More! It was the age for chronicling small-beer and home-made wine, gossip, scandal, and frivolity; and Horace Walpole enjoyed existence as a cynical Seladon or platonic Bluebeard amidst this bevy of lively, gay-minded, frolicsome beauties, young and old. Happily, or unhappily, for him, he did not become acquainted with the Misses Berry before 1788, when he was seventy-one years of age. He took the most extraordinary liking to them, and was never content except when they were with him, or corresponding with him. When they went to Italy, he wrote to them regularly once a week, and on their return he installed them at Little Strawberry Hill, a house close to his own, so that he might daily enjoy their society. He appointed them his literary executors, with the charge of collecting and publishing his writings, which was done under the superintendence of Mr. Berry, their father, who was a Yorkshire gentleman. When Walpole had succeeded to the Earldom of Orford he made Mary, the elder of the two sisters, an offer of his hand. Both sisters survived him upwards of sixty years. Little Strawberry Hill, which we just mentioned as the residence of the Misses Berry, had, before their coming to live in it, been occupied by Kitty Clive, the famous actress. Born in 1711, she made her first appearance on the stage of Drury Lane, and in 1732 she married a brother of Lord Clive, but the union proved unhappy, and was soon dissolved. She quitted the stage in 1769, leaving a splendid reputation as an actress and as a woman behind her, and retired to Little Strawberry Hill, where she lived in ease, surrounded by friends and respected by the world. Horace Walpole was a constant visitor at her house, as were many other persons of rank and eminence. It was said of her that no man could be grave when Kitty chose to be merry. But she must have been a woman of some spirit, too, for when it was proposed to stop up a footpath in her neighbourhood she placed herself at the head of the opponents, and defeated the project. She died suddenly in 1785, and Walpole placed an urn in the grounds to her memory, with the inscription:
'Here lived the laughter-loving dame;
A matchless actress, Clive her name.
The comic Muse with her retired,
And shed a tear when she expired.'
The Mrs. Pritchard mentioned above was also an actress, of great and well-deserved fame. She lived at an originally small house, called "Ragman's Castle," which she much improved and enlarged. It had, after her, various occupants, and was finally taken down by Lord Kilmorey during his occupancy of Orleans House, near which it stood.
Another of the constant visitors at Strawberry Hill was Lady Suffolk, Pope's 'Chloe.' She was married to the Hon. Charles Howard, from whom she separated when she became the mistress of the Prince, afterwards George II., who, as Prince, allowed her £2,000 a year, and as King £3,200 a year, besides several sums at various times. He gave her £12,000 towards Marble Hill, the mansion still facing the Thames, which became her residence. Her husband lived long enough to become Earl of Suffolk, and dying, left her free to marry, when she was forty-five, the Hon. George Berkeley, who died eleven years after. She survived him twenty-one years, and supplied her neighbour, Horace Walpole, with Court anecdotes and scandal during all that period. Walpole calls her remarkably 'genteel'—a favourite expression of his, though now so vulgar!—and, in spite of her antecedents, she was courted by the highest in the land. Such were the morals of those days. According to Horace Walpole, her mental qualifications were not of a high order, but she was gentle and engaging in her manners, and she was a gossip with a good memory—and that answered her host's purpose admirably. Pope also made great use of her reminiscences.
Like Dr. Johnson, Horace Walpole liked to fill his house with a lot of female devotees; but whilst Johnson seemed to prefer a parcel of disagreeable, ugly, and cantankerous women, always quarrelling among themselves and with everybody else, Walpole liked his women to be young and fair, full of life and mirth. By what strange circumstance was the cynical and sarcastic Walpole led into a sort of friendship with the mild and pietistic Mrs. Hannah More? It was in 1784 that this queer friendship began. It appears that about that date Hannah More had discovered at Bristol a milk woman who wrote verses, just such verses as Hannah More and Walpole—neither of whom had an idea of poetry—would consider wonderful. A subscription must be started for the benefit of the milkwoman, and Hannah More applied to Horace Walpole, who set up for a Mæcenas, though he always expressed the utmost contempt for authors, for a contribution. Of course, Hannah More did not make this application without a dose of fulsome compliment to Horace Walpole's genius, and he went into the trap, subscribed, and expressed his admiration of the milkwoman's poetry. The woman's name was Yearsley; she was quite ready to receive the money, but, having evidently a very high opinion of her own doggerel, she refused to listen to the literary advice given to her by Horace Walpole and her patroness, with whom she very soon quarrelled. Walpole condoled with Hannah thus: 'You are not only benevolence itself, but, with fifty times the genius of Dame Yearsley, you are void of vanity. How strange that vanity should expel gratitude! Does not the wretched woman owe her fame to you? ... Dame Yearsley reminds me of the troubadours, those vagrants whom I used to admire till I knew their history, and who used to pour out trumpery verses, and flatter or abuse, accordingly as they were housed and clothed, or dismissed to the next parish. Yet you did not set this person in the stocks, after procuring an annuity for her.' By this letter we see what were Horace Walpole's ideas of patronage: flattery and a pittance, independence and the stocks. Walpole was open to flattery. Dr. Johnson was not—at least, not from a woman; he despised the sex too much to care for their praise. When Hannah More laid it on very thick in his case, he fiercely turned round on her and said: 'Madam, before you flatter a man so grossly to his face, you should consider whether or not your flattery is worth his having.' And, with all his admiration for her character, Walpole could not help sneering at what he called her saintliness, and venting his sarcasm on her silly 'Cœlebs in Search of a Wife,' the absurdity of which has, indeed, been surpassed by a few modern novels of the same tendency. The last we hear of their friendship is that he made her a present of a Bible—fancy the satyr's leer with which he must have presented it to her! She paid him out for the implied irony by wishing that he would read it.
Among the ladies who were neighbours of Horace Walpole, we must not omit Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, who lived for some years in a house on the south side of the road leading to Twickenham Common. She may justly be considered as one of the witty, if not of the pretty, women of Walpole's time. He detested her. Probably he was somewhat jealous of her, for her letters from Constantinople on Turkish life and society earned her the sobriquet of the 'Female Horace Walpole.' He writes of her thus whilst she was living at Florence: 'She is laughed at by the whole town. Her dress, her avarice, and her impudence must amaze anyone.... She wears a foul mob, that does not cover her greasy black locks, that hang loose, never combed or curled; an old mazarine blue wrapper, that gapes open and discovers a canvas petticoat. Her face swelled violently on one side, and partly covered with white paint, which for cheapness she has bought so coarse that you would not use it to wash a chimney.' In another letter he describes her dress as consisting of 'a groundwork of dirt, with an embroidery of filthiness.' When he wrote of her then, she was about fifty years of age, and seems to have retained none of the beauty which distinguished her in her earlier years. She was not only coarse in looks, but in her speech and writings, which shock modern fastidiousness. She was not the woman to please Horace Walpole, who, even when in the seventies, liked nothing better than acting as squire or cicerone to fine ladies. Lady Mary was not one of them. She was, in fact, what we now should call a regular Bohemian; and was it to be wondered at? She had been introduced into that sort of life when she was a girl only eight years old by her own father, Evelyn, Earl of Kingston. He was a member of the Kitcat Club, whose chief occupation was the proposing and toasting the beauties of the day. One evening the Earl took it into his head to nominate his daughter. She was sent for in a chaise, and introduced to the company in dirty Shire Lane in a grimy chamber, reeking with foul culinary smells and stale tobacco-smoke, and elected by acclamation. The gentlemen drank the little lady's health upstanding; and feasting her with sweets, and passing her round with kisses, at once inscribed her name with a diamond on a drinking-glass. 'Pleasure,' she says, 'was too poor a word to express my sensations. They amounted to ecstasy. Never again throughout my whole life did I pass so happy an evening.' Of course, the child could not perceive the hideousness of the whole proceeding and its surroundings: if the kisses were seasoned with droppings of snuff from the noses above, which otherwise were not always very clean—even at the beginning of this century Lord Kenyon, Chief Justice of the King's Bench, was an utter stranger to the luxury of a pocket-handkerchief, and had no delicacy about avowing it—it did not detract from the sweetness of the bon-bons with which she was regaled.
The founder of the Blue-Stocking Club, Mrs. Montagu, née Elizabeth Robinson, was another of Walpole's witty and handsome lady friends. As a girl she was lively, full of fun, yet fond of study. In 1742 she was married to Edward Montagu, M.P., a coal-owner of great wealth. As a girl the Duchess of Portland had called her 'La Petite Fidget'; but after her marriage she became more sedate, and a great power in the literary world. She established the Blue-Stocking Club, of which herself, Mrs. Vesey, Miss Boscawen, Mrs. Carter, Lord Lyttelton, Mr. Pulteney, Mr. Stillingfleet, and Horace Walpole were the first members. The name originally came from Venice, where, in 1400, the Academical Society delle calze had been established, whence the name was transferred to similar associations in France, there called Bas Bleus, and from the latter country it was introduced into England. Mrs. Montagu, having been left a widow with £7,000 a year, built herself a mansion, standing in a large garden at the north-west corner of Portman Square, and there the Blue-Stocking Club continued to hold its meetings for a number of years, including all the persons of her time who were celebrated in art, science, or literature, among whom may be mentioned Boswell and Johnson, the latter of whom, in the presence of ladies, somewhat modified his bearish habits. Mrs. Montagu died in 1800, and the house she had built eventually became the town residence of Viscount Portman.
Of course, Horace Walpole was acquainted with the Misses Gunning—'those goddesses,' as Mary Montagu styled them. They were nieces of the first Earl of Mayo, and so got a ready introduction into London society, which literally went raving mad about them. Horace Walpole tells us that even the 'great unwashed' followed them in crowds whenever they appeared in public: there must have been an extraordinary appreciation of beauty in the rabble—and what a rabble of ruffians it was!—of those days. But London then was no bigger than a provincial town, compared with what it is now. The two ladies speedily found husbands: the Duke of Hamilton married Elizabeth, the younger, after an evening spent in the society of the sisters and their mother at Bedford House, and was in such a hurry about it that he would wait for neither licence nor ring, and, after with some difficulty satisfying the scruples of the parson called upon to celebrate the extempore ceremony, they were married with the ring of a bed-curtain, at half an hour after twelve at night, at Mayfair Chapel. Three weeks afterwards Lord Coventry married her sister, Maria. The Duke of Hamilton dying in 1758, six years after the strange nuptials in Mayfair Chapel, the widow in the following year married Jack Campbell, afterwards Duke of Argyll. Lady Coventry did not wear her coronet long; in 1760 she died, it is said, in consequence of her excessive use of white paint. Her sister, 'twice duchessed,' survived her many years.
We have far from exhausted the list of the ladies distinguished for wit and beauty who figure in Horace Walpole's 'Letters,' but our space is exhausted. We cannot, however, conclude without a few words on the 'Letters' in question. Their chief value consists in the lively descriptions of public events; not as dry and cold history records them, but by letting us have peeps behind the scenes, so as to see the wire-pullers, the secret machinery, which set in motion the actors on the political and social stage. They show us lords and ladies in their negligés, and how the conceit of a hairdresser, or the caprice of a lady's-maid, may make or mar the destinies of a nation. This copious letter-writing forms indeed an era in our literary history which will never return or be renewed; the prying reporter and the irrepressible interviewer now supply all the world with what the letter-writer communicated to a few friends only. This present age may be called the Age of Reminiscences: everybody is writing his; of making books there is no end!