“I do not know how you like your new subjects, but I hear they are extremely content with their Prince and Princess. I ought to wish your Lordship joy of all your prosperities, and of Mr. Fludd’s baptism into the Catholic or Universal Faith; but I reserve public felicities for your old Drawing-Room in Leicester Fields. Private news we have little but Lord Carmarthen’s and Lord Cranborne’s marriages, and the approaching one of Lady Bridget Lane and Mr. Tall-Match. Lord Holland has given Charles Fox a draught of an hundred thousand pounds, and it pays all his debts, but a trifle of thirty thousand pounds, and those of Lord Carlisle, Crewe, and Foley, who being only friends, not Jews, may wait. So now any younger son may justify losing his father’s and elder brother’s estate on precedent.[56]
“Neither Lord nor Lady Temple are well, and yet they are both gone to Lord Clare’s, in Essex, for a week. Lord Temple had a very bad fall in the Park, and lost his senses for an hour. Yet, though the horse is a vicious one, he has been upon it again. In short, there are no right-headed people but the Irish!
“As it is ancient good breeding not to conclude a letter without troubling the reader with compliments, and as I have none to send, I must beg your Lordship not to forget to present my respects to the Countesses of Barrymore and Massareene, my dear Sisters in Loo. You may be sure I am charged with a large parcel from Cliveden,[57] where I was last night. Except being extremely ill, Mrs. Clive is extremely well; but the tax-gatherer is gone off, and she must pay her window-lights over again; and the road before her door is very bad, and the parish won’t mend it, and there is some suspicion that Garrick is at the bottom of it; so if you please to send a shipload of the Giant’s Causey by next Monday, we shall be able to go to Mr. Rofey’s rout at Kingston. The Papers said she was to act at Covent Garden, and she has printed a very proper answer in the Evening Post. Mr. Raftor[58] told me, that formerly, when he played Luna in ‘The Rehearsal,’ he never could learn to dance the Hays, and at last he went to the Man that teaches grown gentlemen.
“Miss Davis[59] is the admiration of all London, but of me, who do not love the perfection of what anybody can do, and wish she had less top to her voice and more bottom. However, she will break Millico’s heart, which will not break mine. Fierville has sprained his leg, and there is another man who sprains his mouth with smiling on himself—as I have heard, for I have not seen him yet, nor a fat old woman and her lean daughter, who dance with him. London is very dull, so pray come back as soon as you can. Mason is up to the ears in ‘Gray’s Life;’ you will like it exceedingly, which is more than you will do this long letter. Well! you have but to go into Lady Nuneham’s dressing-room, and you may read something ten thousand times more pleasing. No, no! you are not the most to be pitied of any human being, though in the midst of Dublin Castle.”
Next to the above, Walpole’s liveliest letters about this date were written to Lady Ossory. Sometimes he has to lament the want of news: “Pray, Madam, where is the difference between London and the country, when everybody is in the country and nobody in town? The houses do not marry, intrigue, talk politics, game, or fling themselves out of window. The streets do not all run to the Alley, nor the squares mortgage themselves over head and ears. The play-houses do not pull themselves down; and all summer long, when nobody gets about them, they behave soberly and decently as any Christian in the parish of Marylebone. The English of this preface is that I have not the Israelitish art of making bricks without straw. I cannot invent news when nobody commits it.” He has nothing better to tell than an anecdote of Goldsmith, who died a few months later, and Garrick: “I dined and passed Saturday at Beauclerk’s, with the Edgecombes, the Garricks, and Dr. Goldsmith, and was most thoroughly tired, as I knew I should be, I who hate the playing off a butt. Goldsmith is a fool, the more wearying for having some sense. It was the night of a new comedy, called ‘The School for Wives,’[60] which was exceedingly applauded, and which Charles Fox says is execrable. Garrick has at least the chief hand in it. I never saw anybody in a greater fidget, nor more vain when he returned, for he went to the play-house at half-an-hour after five, and we sat waiting for him till ten, when he was to act a speech in ‘Cato’ with Goldsmith! that is, the latter sat in t’other’s lap, covered with a cloak, and while Goldsmith spoke, Garrick’s arms that embraced him, made foolish actions. How could one laugh when one had expected this for four hours?” On Christmas night 1773, he writes: “This has been a very barren half-year. The next, I hope, will reinstate my letters in their proper character of newspapers.”
The event, however, belied his hopes. In June, 1774, he writes to his Countess:
“Offended at you, Madam! I have crossed myself forty times since I read the impious words, never to be pronounced by human lips,—nay, and to utter them, when I am seemingly to blame!—yet, believe me, my silence is not owing to negligence, or to that most wicked of all sins, inconstancy. I have thought on you waking or sleeping, whenever I have thought at all, from the moment I saw you last; and if there was an echo in the neighbourhood besides Mr. Cambridge, I should have made it repeat your Ladyship’s name, till the parish should have presented it for a nuisance. I have begun twenty letters, but the naked truth is, I found I had absolutely nothing to say. You yourself owned, Madam, that I am grown quite lifeless, and it is very true. I am none of your Glastonbury thorns that blow at Christmas. I am a remnant of the last age, and have nothing to do with the present. I am an exile from the sunbeams of drawing-rooms; I have quitted the gay scenes of Parliament and the Antiquarian Society; I am not of Almack’s; I don’t understand horse-races; I never go to reviews; what can I have to talk of? I go to no fêtes champêtres, what can I have to think of? I know nothing but about myself, and about myself I know nothing. I have scarce been in town since I saw you, have scarce seen anybody here, and don’t remember a tittle but having scolded my gardener twice, which, indeed, would be as important an article as any in Montaigne’s Travels, which I have been reading, and if I was tired of his Essays, what must one be of these! What signifies what a man thought, who never thought of anything but himself; and what signifies what a man did, who never did anything?”
In August, hearing that Lady Ossory had again been disappointed of a son, he tells her: “I don’t design to acknowledge Anne III.; I shall call her Madame de Trop, as they named one of the late King of France’s daughters. A dauphin! a dauphin! I will repeat it as often as the Graces.” A month later he is informed that Madame de Trop has received the name of Gertrude: