With the help of Mr. Essex, who assisted him in designing the later portions, he gradually learned the depth of the architectural ignorance in which he and the “Committee,” who were his first advisers, had been involved at the commencement of his work. In short, Strawberry Hill, child’s baby-house as it was, proved the first step in the renascence of Gothic art.
As chamber after chamber was added to the Castle, it became Walpole’s next care to fill them with fresh antiques in furniture, pictures, bronzes, armour, painted glass, and other like articles. “In his villa,” says Lord Macaulay, “every apartment is a museum, every piece of furniture is a curiosity; there is something strange in the form of the shovel; there is a long story belonging to the bell-rope. We wander among a profusion of rarities, of trifling intrinsic value, but so quaint in fashion, or connected with such remarkable names and events, that they may well detain our attention for a moment. A moment is enough. Some new relic, some new unique, some new carved work, some new enamel, is forthcoming in an instant. One cabinet of trinkets is no sooner closed than another is opened.”
Of Walpole’s writings other than his letters, we do not propose to offer any detailed account or criticism. His earliest work, “Ædes Walpolianæ,” was published as early as 1747; it was merely a description of his father’s pictures at Houghton Hall, the family seat in Norfolk. Among his next efforts were some papers contributed in 1753 and following years to a periodical work of the day, called The World.[7] Most persons have read the “Castle of Otranto,” so warmly applauded by the author of “Ivanhoe.” Most students of art, we suppose, are acquainted with Walpole’s “Anecdotes of Painting,” and his “Catalogue of Engravers.” His “Catalogue of Noble and Royal Authors,” though abounding in agreeable anecdotes, is probably now consulted by few; and his “Historic Doubts on the Life and Reign of Richard III.,” acute and ingenious as it was, cannot detain anyone who is aware of the recent researches on the same subject. His “Reminiscences of the Courts of George I. and George II.,” and his “Memoirs” and “Journals” relating to the reigns of George II. and George III., are, and must ever remain, among the most valuable historical documents of the eighteenth century. The Reminiscences were written for the amusement of the Misses Berry, and have been extolled with justice as being, both in manner and matter, the very perfection of anecdote writing. The rest of Walpole’s works, including his tragedy of “The Mysterious Mother”—the merits of which, whatever they may be, are cancelled by the atrocity of the fable—are as nearly as possible forgotten.
Not content with writing and collecting books, Horace in 1757 established a printing press in the grounds of Strawberry Hill. The first printer employed by him was William Robinson; the last, Thomas Kirgate, whose name will often be found in the following extracts. The first work printed at this press was Gray’s “Odes,” with Bentley’s Illustrations. Its other productions include Walpole’s own Royal and Noble Authors, Anecdotes of Painting, Engravers, and Tragedy; his “Description of Strawberry Hill,” and “Fugitive Pieces;” besides several works by other authors, such as Bentley’s “Lucan,” Lord Herbert’s Life, a translation of Hentzner’s “Travels,” and Lord Whitworth’s “Account of Russia;” as well as small collections of verses by sundry friends. These “Strawberry Hill” editions are now scarce, and command high prices.
The rest of our author’s career may be summed up in a few words. His eldest brother had died early, and had been succeeded by an only son, whose profligacy and occasional fits of insanity caused much trouble. In December, 1791, when seventy-four years of age, Horace became, by the death of this nephew, Earl of Orford, which made little addition to his income, the family estate being heavily incumbered. The inheritance was far from welcome. In a letter to a friend, he says he does not understand the management of such an estate, and is too old to learn. “A source of lawsuits among my near relations, endless conversations with lawyers, and packets of letters to read every day and answer—all this weight of new business is too much for the rag of life that yet hangs about me.”[8] He never took his seat in the House of Lords. He lived for upwards of five years longer, in the full possession of all his faculties, though suffering great bodily infirmity from the effects of gout, to which he was long a martyr. He died at his house, No. 11, Berkeley Square, on the 2nd of March, 1797, in his eightieth year, and was buried at the family seat of Houghton. With him the male line of Sir Robert Walpole and the title of Orford became extinct. The estate of Houghton descended to the fourth Earl of Cholmondeley, grandson of Horace Walpole’s younger sister Mary, who married the third earl of that ilk. Strawberry Hill was at its founder’s absolute disposal, and he left it, as already mentioned, to Mrs. Damer, Conway’s daughter, but for life only, with limitations over in strict settlement.
“It is somewhat curious,” says his biographer, “as a proof of the inconsistency of the human mind, that, having built his Castle with so little view to durability, Walpole entailed the perishable possession with a degree of strictness which would have been more fitting for a baronial estate. And that, too, after having written a fable entitled ‘The Entail,’ in consequence of some one having asked him whether he did not intend to entail Strawberry Hill, and in ridicule of such a proceeding.”
Inconsistency, caprice, eccentricity, affectation, are faults which have been freely charged against the character of Horace Walpole. His strong prejudices and antipathies, his pride of rank, his propensity to satire, even his sensitive temperament, made him many enemies, who not only exaggerated his failings, but succeeded, in some instances at least, in transmitting their personal resentments to men of the present century.
As a politician, especially, Walpole has received rather hard measure from the partisan critics on both sides. A generation back, Whig Reviewers and Tory Reviewers vied with each other in defaming his memory. Macaulay and Croker, who seldom agreed in anything, were of one accord in this. To Croker, of course, Horace was just a place-holder who furnished a telling example of Whig jobbery. To rake up all the details of his places in the Exchequer, and his “rider,” or charge, on the place in the Customs, to compute and exaggerate his gains from each of these sources, to track him in dark intrigues for extending his tenure of one appointment and bettering his position in another; all this was congenial employment for the Rigby of the nineteenth century, as it would have been for his prototype in the eighteenth. The motive of Macaulay’s deadly attack is not quite so obvious. Walpole’s politics were those of his father and of the old Whigs generally. While in theory inclined to Republicanism—though he was never, as he tells us, quite a Republican[9]—it was his habit, on practical questions, to consider what course the great Sir Robert would have taken under similar circumstances. There seems nothing in all this to excite the wrath of the most atrabilious Liberal. The truth appears to be that, in the Whig circles of Macaulay’s time, there existed a traditional grudge against Horace Walpole. In the “Memorials of Charles James Fox,” which were arranged by Lord Vassall-Holland, and edited by Lord John Russell, both the noble commentators speak of Horace in terms of undisguised bitterness. Nor is the cause very far to seek. In politics, Conway was under the dominion of Walpole; and Conway, on more than one critical occasion, disobliged the Rockingham faction, from which the modern Whigs deduce their origin. “Conway,” says Lord John Russell, writing of the events of 1766, “had been made Secretary of State by Lord Rockingham, and ought to have resigned when Lord Rockingham left office; but Mr. Walpole did not choose that this should be so.” Sixteen years later, Conway sat again in a Cabinet presided over by Lord Rockingham, and when that nobleman died, he again refused to resign. It will be remembered that, on this occasion, the Cavendishes and Fox quitted their places when the Treasury was given to Lord Shelburne, instead of their own nominee, the Duke of Portland, whose only recommendations were that he was Lord of Welbeck, and had married a daughter of the House of Devonshire.
In 1782, the Duke of Richmond, Conway’s son-in-law, concurred with Conway in declining to desert the new Premier; and we know that Walpole stoutly supported, if he did not dictate, the joint resolution of his two friends. Lord Holland tells us that Fox did not like Walpole at all, and accounts for this dislike by suggesting that his uncle may have imbibed some prejudice against Walpole for unkindness shown to the first Lord Holland. But this seems going needlessly far back for an explanation. There can be no doubt that Fox looked on Walpole as having assisted to thwart his design of governing England in the name of the insignificant Duke of Portland, and detested him accordingly. Nor did subsequent events tend to soften Fox’s recollection of this passage in his life, or of the persons concerned in it. Had he overcome his jealousy of Lord Shelburne, or had he succeeded in compelling his rival to bow before the “wooden idol”—so Lord John Russell himself calls Portland—which he had set up, he would probably, in either case, have avoided the ill-famed coalition with Lord North, which was the main cause of his long-continued exclusion from power. Walpole had spoken his mind very plainly on the subject. “It is very entertaining,” he wrote, “that two or three great families should persuade themselves that they have an hereditary and exclusive right of giving us a head without a tongue.”[10] And he told Fox himself: “My Whiggism is not confined to the Peak of Derbyshire.”[11] We can imagine with what horror such utterances as these were received by the believers in the Whig doctrine of divine right. No wonder that Mr. Fox did not like Walpole. And what Mr. Fox disliked was, of course, anathema to every true Whig, and especially to an Edinburgh Reviewer of 1833.