“I never remonstrate against the behests of Dame Prudence, though a lady I never got acquainted with till near my grand climacteric.” So wrote Horace soon after passing the mystic period, compounded of seven and nine, which was once regarded as the topmost round in the ladder of human life. He would have his correspondents believe that his attention to the dame’s commands was not very regular at first. In the spring of 1781, he is able to report to Conway, “My health is most flourishing for me.” Accordingly, he goes about a good deal, and enjoys a sort of rejuvenescence. Of course, he visits the Exhibition of the Royal Academy at Somerset House, where Reynolds’s picture of the Ladies Waldegrave was shown. “The Exhibition,” he writes to Mason, “is much inferior to last year’s;[85] nobody shines there but Sir Joshua and Gainsborough. The head of the former’s Dido is very fine; I do not admire the rest of the piece. His Lord Richard Cavendish is bold and stronger than he ever coloured. The picture of my three nieces is charming. Gainsborough has two pieces with land and sea, so free and natural that one steps back for fear of being splashed. The back front of the Academy is handsome, but like the other to the street, the members are so heavy, that one cannot stand back enough to see it in any proportion, unless in a barge moored in the middle of the Thames.” The same day, May 6, he writes to Conway from Strawberry Hill:
“Though it is a bitter north-east, I came hither to-day to look at my lilacs, though à la glace; and to get from pharaoh, for which there is a rage. I doated on it above thirty years ago; but it is not decent to sit up all night now with boys and girls. My nephew, Lord Cholmondeley, the banker à la mode, has been demolished. He and his associate, Sir Willoughby Aston, went early t’other night to Brooks’s, before Charles Fox and Fitzpatrick, who keep a bank there, were come; but they soon arrived, attacked their rivals, broke their bank, and won above four thousand pounds. ‘There,’ said Fox, ‘so should all usurpers be served!’ He did still better; for he sent for his tradesmen, and paid as far as the money would go. In the mornings he continues his war on Lord North, but cannot break that bank.…
“I told you in my last that Tonton was arrived. I brought him this morning to take possession of his new villa, but his inauguration has not been at all pacific. As he has already found out that he may be as despotic as at St. Joseph’s, he began with exiling my beautiful little cat; upon which, however, we shall not quite agree. He then flew at one of my dogs, who returned it by biting his foot till it bled, but was severely beaten for it. I immediately rung for Margaret to dress his foot; but in the midst of my tribulation could not keep my countenance; for she cried, ‘Poor little thing, he does not understand my language!’ I hope she will not recollect, too, that he is a Papist!”
Sir Joshua Reynolds. Pinx. A. Dawson. Ph. Sc. S. W. Reynolds. Sc.
Sir Joshua Reynolds.
We have a further anecdote of Charles Fox told a few days later, also in a letter to Conway:
“I had been to see if Lady Aylesbury was come to town: as I came up St. James’s Street, I saw a cart and porters at Charles’s door; coppers and old chests of drawers loading. In short, his success at faro has awakened his host of creditors; but unless his bank has swelled to the size of the Bank of England, it could not have yielded a sop apiece for each. Epsom, too, had been unpropitious; and one creditor has actually seized and carried off his goods, which did not seem worth removing. As I returned full of this scene, whom should I find sauntering by my own door but Charles? He came up, and talked to me at the coach-window on the Marriage Bill,[86] with as much sang-froid as if he knew nothing of what had happened. I have no admiration for insensibility to one’s own faults, especially when committed out of vanity. Perhaps the whole philosophy consisted in the commission. If you could have been as much to blame, the last thing you would bear well would be your own reflections. The more marvellous Fox’s parts are, the more one is provoked at his follies, which comfort so many rascals and blockheads, and make all that is admirable and amiable in him only matter of regret to those who like him as I do.[87]
“I did intend to settle at Strawberry on Sunday; but must return on Thursday, for a party made at Marlborough House for Princess Amelia. I am continually tempted to retire entirely; and should, if I did not see how very unfit English tempers are for living quite out of the world. We grow abominably peevish and severe on others, if we are not constantly rubbed against and polished by them. I need not name friends and relations of yours and mine as instances. My prophecy on the short reign of faro is verified already. The bankers find that all the calculated advantages of the game do not balance pinchbeck parolis and debts of honourable women. The bankers, I think, might have had a previous and more generous reason, the very bad air of holding a bank:—but this country is as hardened against the petite morale, as against the greater.—What should I think of the world if I quitted it entirely?”