In a letter to Mann, dated November 24, 1774, Walpole returns to the subject of the new Parliament:
“A great event happened two days ago—a political and moral event; the sudden death of that second Kouli Khan, Lord Clive. There was certainly illness in the case; the world thinks more than illness. His constitution was exceedingly broken and disordered, and grown subject to violent pains and convulsions. He came unexpectedly to town last Monday, and they say, ill. On Tuesday his physician gave him a dose of laudanum, which had not the desired effect. On the rest, there are two stories; one, that the physician repeated the dose; the other, that he doubled it himself, contrary to advice.[64] In short, he has terminated at fifty a life of so much glory, reproach, art, wealth, and ostentation! He had just named ten members for the new Parliament.[65]
“Next Tuesday that Parliament is to meet—and a deep game it has to play! few Parliaments a greater. The world is in amaze here that no account is arrived from America of the result of their General Congress—if any is come, it is very secret; and that has no favourable aspect. The combination and spirit there seem to be universal, and is very alarming. I am the humble servant of events, and you know never meddle with prophecy. It would be difficult to descry good omens, be the issue what it will.
“The old French Parliament is restored with great éclat. Monsieur de Maurepas, author of the revolution, was received one night at the Opera with boundless shouts of applause. It is even said that the mob intended, when the King should go to hold the lit de justice, to draw his coach. How singular it would be if Wilkes’s case should be copied for a King of France! Do you think Rousseau was in the right, when he said that he could tell what would be the manners of any capital city, from certain given lights? I don’t know what he may do on Constantinople and Pekin—but Paris and London! I don’t believe Voltaire likes these changes. I have seen nothing of his writing for many months; not even on the poisoning Jesuits.[66] For our part, I repeat it, we shall contribute nothing to the Histoire des Mœurs, not for want of materials, but for want of writers. We have comedies without novelty, gross satires without stings, metaphysical eloquence, and antiquarians that discover nothing.
“‘Bœotûm in crasso jurares aere natos!’
“Don’t tell me I am grown old and peevish and supercilious—name the geniuses of 1774, and I submit. The next Augustan age will dawn on the other side of the Atlantic. There will, perhaps, be a Thucydides at Boston, a Xenophon at New York, and, in time, a Virgil at Mexico, and a Newton at Peru. At last, some curious traveller from Lima will visit England, and give a description of the ruins of St. Paul’s, like the editions of Balbec and Palmyra; but am I not prophesying, contrary to my consummate prudence, and casting horoscopes of empires like Rousseau? Yes; well, I will go and dream of my visions.”
More than one writer has cited Walpole’s traveller from Lima as the original of Lord Macaulay’s traveller from New Zealand, who, in the midst of a vast solitude, takes his stand on a broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St. Paul’s. Others have traced the passage in the celebrated Review of Ranke’s “History of the Popes,” to Volney, Mrs. Barbauld, Kirke White, and Shelley; while others again have pointed out that, from whatsoever source derived, the idea expressed in this passage had been twice before employed by Macaulay, once, in 1824, in a Review of Mitford’s “Greece,” and the second time, in 1829, in his Review of Mill’s “Essay on Government.” The picture of the New Zealander, however, resembles the less ambitious, but equally graphic, figure of the traveller from Lima more closely than it does any of the other passages referred to.[67] What is remarkable is, that the Review of Ranke’s “History” appeared in October, 1840, whereas the later portion of Walpole’s correspondence with Mann, to which the above extract belongs, was first published from the original manuscripts in 1843. How then could Macaulay know anything of the Peruvian stranger?[68]
The following was also addressed to Sir H. Mann. It is dated in May, 1775:
“You have not more Masquerades in Carnival than we have; there is one at the Pantheon to-night, another on Monday; and in June is to be a pompous one on the water, and at Ranelagh. This and the first are given by the Club called the Sçavoir Vivre, who till now have only shone by excess of gaming. The leader is that fashionable orator Lord Lyttelton,[69] of whom I need not tell you more. I have done with these diversions, and enjoy myself here. Your old acquaintance, Lord and Lady Dacre, and your old friend, Mr. Chute, dined with me to-day: poor Lord Dacre[70] is carried about, though not worse than he has been these twenty years. Strawberry was in great beauty; what joy I should have in showing it to you! Is this a wish I must never indulge? Alas!
“I have had a long chain of thoughts since I wrote the last paragraph. They ended in smiling at the word never. How one pronounces it to the last moment! Would not one think I counted on a long series of years to come? Yet no man has the termination of all his views more before his eyes, or knows better the idleness of framing visions to one’s self. One passes away so soon, and worlds succeed to worlds, in which the occupiers build the same castles in the air. What is ours but the present moment? And how many of mine are gone! And what do I want to show you? A plaything-vision, that has amused a poor transitory mortal for a few hours, and that will pass away like its master! Well, and yet is it not as sensible to conform to common ideas, and to live while one lives? Perhaps the wisest way is to cheat one’s self. Did one concentre all one’s thoughts on the nearness and certainty of dissolution, all the world would lie eating and sleeping like the savage Americans. Our wishes and views were given us to gild the dream of life, and if a Strawberry Hill can soften the decays of age, it is wise to embrace it, and due gratitude to the Great Giver to be happy with it. The true pain is the reflection on the numbers that are not so blessed; yet I have no doubt but the real miseries of life—I mean those that are unmerited and unavoidable,—will be compensated to the sufferers. Tyrants are a proof of an hereafter. Millions of men cannot be formed for the sport of a cruel child.