He had another illness in the middle of 1766, for which he tried the Bath waters; but Bath proved not at all to his taste, though he met the great Lord Chatham there, and many other persons of distinction. “These watering-places,” he says, “that mimic a capital, and add vulgarisms and familiarities of their own, seem to me like abigails in cast gowns, and I am not young enough to take up with either.” Finding himself dull at Bath, he attended a Wesleyan service, of which he gives a somewhat flippant description:
“My health advances faster than my amusement. However, I have been at one opera, Mr. Wesley’s. They have boys and girls with charming voices, that sing hymns, in parts, to Scotch ballad tunes; but indeed so long, that one would think they were already in eternity, and knew how much time they had before them. The chapel is very neat, with true Gothic windows (yet I am not converted); but I was glad to see that luxury is creeping in upon them before persecution: they have very neat mahogany stands for branches, and brackets of the same in taste. At the upper end is a broad hautpas of four steps, advancing in the middle: at each end of the broadest part are two of my eagles,[43] with red cushions for the parson and clerk. Behind them rise three more steps, in the midst of which is a third eagle for pulpit. Scarlet armed chairs to all three. On either hand, a balcony for elect ladies. The rest of the congregation sit on forms. Behind the pit, in a dark niche, is a plain table within rails; so you see the throne is for the apostle. Wesley is a lean elderly man, fresh-coloured, his hair smoothly combed, but with a soupçon of curl at the ends. Wondrous clean, but as evidently an actor as Garrick. He spoke his sermon, but so fast, and with so little accent, that I am sure he has often uttered it, for it was like a lesson. There were parts and eloquence in it; but towards the end he exalted his voice, and acted very ugly enthusiasm; decried learning, and told stories, like Latimer, of the fool of his college, who said, ‘I thanks God for everything.’ Except a few from curiosity, and some honourable women, the congregation was very mean. There was a Scotch Countess of Buchan, who is carrying a pure rosy vulgar face to heaven, and who asked Miss Rich, if that was the author of the poets. I believe she meant me and the Noble Authors.”
Walpole was in a peevish humour about this time. He was out of health, and dispirited besides by an apprehension that the climate of Twickenham did not suit him. Thus he writes from Strawberry Hill: “What afflicts me most is, that I am persuaded that this place is too damp for me. I revive after being in London an hour, like a member of Parliament’s wife. It will be a cruel fate, after having laid out so much money here, and building upon it as the nest of my old age, if I am driven from it by bad health.” Unfavourable weather seems to have been in some measure the cause of these fears, and of the writer’s disordered condition. Though the harvest-time of 1766 was fine, the crops, we are told, had been spoilt by previous rains, and the years which followed were a cycle of wet and cold seasons. Walpole grumbles at the weather with English vigour and French vivacity. Thus he writes to Montagu, in June, 1768:
“I perceive the deluge fell upon you before it reached us. It began here but on Monday last, and then rained near eight-and-forty hours without intermission. My poor hay has not a dry thread to its back. I have had a fire these three days. In short, every summer one lives in a state of mutiny and murmur, and I have found the reason: it is because we will affect to have a summer, and we have no title to any such thing. Our poets learnt their trade of the Romans, and so adopted the terms of their masters. They talk of shady groves, purling streams, and cooling breezes, and we get sore throats and agues with attempting to realize these visions. Master Damon writes a song, and invites Miss Chloe to enjoy the cool of the evening, and never a bit have we of any such thing as a cool evening. Zephyr is a north-east wind, that makes Damon button up to the chin, and pinches Chloe’s nose till it is red and blue; and then they cry, This is a bad summer! as if we ever had any other. The best sun we have is made of Newcastle coal, and I am determined never to reckon upon any other. We ruin ourselves with inviting over foreign trees, and making our houses clamber up hills to look at prospects. How our ancestors would laugh at us, who knew there was no being comfortable, unless you had a high hill before your nose, and a thick warm wood at your back! Taste is too freezing a commodity for us, and, depend upon it, will go out of fashion again.—There is indeed a natural warmth in this country, which, as you say, I am very glad not to enjoy any longer; I mean the hot-house in St. Stephen’s chapel. My own sagacity makes me very vain, though there was very little merit in it. I had seen so much of all parties, that I had little esteem left for any; it is most indifferent to me who is in or who is out, or which is set in the pillory, Mr. Wilkes or my Lord Mansfield. I see the country going to ruin, and no man with brains enough to save it. That is mortifying; but what signifies who has the undoing it? I seldom suffer myself to think on this subject: my patriotism could do no good, and my philosophy can make me be at peace.”
The concluding lines of the above extract refer to the writer’s recent retirement from the House of Commons. In the spring of the preceding year, Walpole had announced that he should not again ask the suffrages of the Lynn burgesses, stating as his reasons the declining state of his health and his wish to withdraw from all public business; and though his health had improved in the interval, the General Election of 1768 found him fixed in his decision. Whatever may have been the real motives of his conduct, there is no indication in his Letters that he ever regretted the course he had taken. In June, 1769, he writes from Strawberry Hill: “I am come hither for two months, very busy with finishing my round tower, which has stood still these five years, and with an enchanting new cottage that I have built, and other little works. In August, I shall go to Paris for six weeks. In short, I am delighted with having bid adieu to Parliament and politics, and with doing nothing but what I like all the year round.” But the season was again rainy. A few days later, we have a letter to Cole, who was then settled at Waterbeach, near Cambridge:
“Strawberry Hill, Monday, June 26, 1769.
“Oh! yes, yes, I shall like Thursday or Friday, 6th or 7th, exceedingly; I shall like your staying with me two days exceedinglier; and longer exceedingliest: and I will carry you back to Cambridge on our pilgrimage to Ely. But I should not at all like to be catched in the glories of an installation,[44] and find myself a doctor, before I knew where I was. It will be much more agreeable to find the whole caput asleep, digesting turtle, dreaming of bishoprics, and humming old catches of Anacreon, and scraps of Corelli. I wish Mr. Gray may not be set out for the north; which is rather the case than setting out for the summer. We have no summers, I think, but what we raise, like pine-apples, by fire. My hay is an absolute water-souchy, and teaches me how to feel for you. You are quite in the right to sell your fief in Marshland. I should be glad if you would take one step more, and quit Marshland. We live, at least, on terra firma in this part of the world, and can saunter out without stilts. Item, we do not wade into pools, and call it going upon the water, and get sore throats. I trust yours is better; but I recollect this is not the first you have complained of. Pray be not incorrigible, but come to shore.”
At the end of August he is in Paris with Madame du Deffand. “My dear old woman,” he writes, “is in better health than when I left her, and her spirits so increased, that I tell her she will go mad with age. When they ask her how old she is, she answers, ‘J’ai soixante et mille ans.’” In a letter written to George Montagu a week afterwards, we have a description of this true Frenchwoman:
“Your two letters flew here together in a breath. I shall answer the article of business first. I could certainly buy many things for you here, that you would like, the reliques of the last age’s magnificence; but since my Lady Holdernesse invaded the Custom-House with an hundred and fourteen gowns, in the reign of that two-penny monarch George Grenville, the ports are so guarded, that not a soul but a smuggler can smuggle anything into England; and I suppose you would not care to pay seventy-five per cent. on second-hand commodities. All I transported three years ago, was conveyed under the canon of the Duke of Richmond. I have no interest in our present representative; nor if I had, is he returning. Plate, of all earthly vanities, is the most impassable: it is not counterband in its metallic capacity, but totally so in its personal; and the officers of the Custom-House not being philosophers enough to separate the substance from the superficies, brutally hammer both to pieces, and return you—only the intrinsic; a compensation which you, who are no member of Parliament, would not, I trow, be satisfied with. Thus I doubt you must retrench your generosity to yourself, unless you can contract it into an Elzevir size, and be content with anything one can bring in one’s pocket.