Let Mrs. Stanhope imagine that I have said all she deserves: I certainly think it, and will ratify it, when I have learnt the language of the nineteenth century; but I really am so ancient, that as Pythagoras imagined he had been Panthoides Euphorbus[1] in the Trojan war, I am not sure that I did not ride upon a pillion behind a Gentleman-Usher, when her Majesty Elizabeth went into procession to St. Paul's on the defeat of the Armada! Adieu! the postman puts an end to my idle speculations—but, Scarborough for ever! with three huzzas!
[Footnote 1: "Euphorbus." This is an allusion to the doctrine of metempsychosis taught by the ancient philosopher Pythagoras of Samos, according to which when a man died his soul remained in the shades below suffering any punishment which the man had deserved, till after a certain lapse of time all the taint of the former existence had been worn away, when the soul returned to earth to animate some other body. The passage referred to here by Walpole occurs in Ovid's "Metamorphoses," xvi. 160, where Pythagoras is expounding his theory, which is also explained to Aeneas by Anchises in the shades below (Aeneid, vi. 745). But the two poets differ in more points than one. According to Anchises, one thousand years are required between the two existences; according to Pythagoras, not above four hundred or five hundred. According to Anchises, before the soul revives in another body it must have forgotten all that happened to it in the body of its former owner. As Dryden translates Virgil—
Whole droves of minds are by the driving God
Compell'd to drink the deep Lethaean flood,
In large forgetful draughts to steep the cares
Of their past labours, and their irksome years;
That unremembering of its former pain
The soul may suffer mortal flesh again.
(Aeneid, vi. 1020).
Pythagoras, on the other hand, professes a distinct recollection of who he was and what he suffered in his former life. He remembers that in the time of the Trojan war (at the outside not five hundred years before his time) he was a Trojan—Euphorbus, the son of Panthous—and that in the war he was killed by Menelaus; and his memory is so accurate, that not long before he had recognised the very shield which he had borne in the conflict hanging up as a trophy in the temple of Juno at Argos.]
EXPECTATIONS OF A VISIT TO STRAWBERRY BY THE QUEEN.
TO THE HON. H.S. CONWAY.
STRAWBERRY HILL, July 2, 1795.
I will write a word to you, though scarce time to write one, to thank you for your great kindness about the soldier, who shall get a substitute if he can. As you are, or have been in town, your daughter will have told you in what a bustle I am, preparing—not to resist, but to receive an invasion of royalties to-morrow; and cannot even escape them like Admiral Cornwallis, though seeming to make a semblance; for I am to wear a sword, and have appointed two aides-de-camp, my nephews, George and Horace Churchill. If I fall, as ten to one but I do, to be sure it will be a superb tumble, at the feet of a Queen and eight daughters of Kings; for, besides the six Princesses, I am to have the Duchess of York and the Princess of Orange! Woe is me, at seventy-eight, and with scarce a hand and foot to my back! Adieu! Yours, &c.