With the Marquise du Deffand, the old, blind, but clever leader of French society, he became acquainted at Paris late in her life. Her devotion for him appears to have been very great, and is sometimes expressed in her letters with a warmth and tenderness, which Walpole, who was most sensitive of ridicule, thought so absurd in a person of her years and infirmities, that he frequently reproves her very harshly for it; so much so, as to give him the appearance of a want of kindly feeling towards her, which his general conduct to her, and the regrets he expressed on her death, do not warrant us in accusing him of. (51)
In concluding the literary part of the character of Walpole, it is natural to allude to the transactions which took place between him and the unfortunate Chatterton; a text upon which so much calumny and misrepresentation have been embroidered. The periodicals of the day, and the tribe of those "who daily scribble for their daily bread," and for whom Walpole had, perhaps unwisely, frequently expressed his contempt, attacked him bitterly for his inhumanity to genius, and even accused him as the author of the subsequent misfortunes and untimely death of that misguided son of genius; nay, even the author of "The Pursuits of Literature," who wrote many years after the transaction had taken place, and who ought to have known better, gave in to the prevailing topic of abuse. (52) It therefore becomes necessary to state shortly what really took place upon this occasion, a task which is rendered easier by the clear view of the transaction taken both by Walter Scott in his "Lives of the Novelists," and by Chalmers in his "Biographical Dictionary," which is also fully borne out by the narrative drawn up by Walpole himself, and accompanied by the correspondence.
it appears then, that in March 1769, Walpole-received a letter from Chatterton, enclosing a few specimens of the pretended poems of Rowley, and announcing his discovery of a series of ancient painters at Bristol. To this communication Walpole, naturally enough, returned a very civil answer. Shortly afterwards, doubts arose in his mind as to the authenticity of the poems; these were confirmed by the opinions of some friends, to whom he showed them; and he then wrote an expression of these doubts to Chatterton. This appears to have excited the anger of Chatterton, who, after one or two short notes, wrote Walpole a very impertinent one, in which he redemanded his manuscripts. This last letter Walpole had intended to have answered with some sharpness; but did not do so. He only returned the specimens on the 4th of August 1769; and this concluded the intercourse between them, and as Walpole observes, "I never saw him then, before, or since." Subsequently to this transaction, Chatterton acquired other patrons more credulous than Walpole, and proceeded with his forgeries. In April 1770 he came to London, and committed suicide in August of that year; a fate which befell him, it is to be feared, more in consequence of his own dissolute and profligate habits, than from any want of patronage. However this may be, Walpole clearly had nothing to say to it.
In addition to the accusation of crushing, instead of fostering his genius, Walpole has also been charged with cruelty in not assisting him with money. Upon this, he very truly says himself, "Chatterton was neither indigent nor distressed, at the time of his correspondence with me. He was maintained by his mother and lived with a lawyer. His only pleas to my assistance were, disgust to his profession, inclination to poetry, and communication of some suspicious MSS. His distress was the consequence of quitting his master, and coming to London, and of his other extravagances. He had depended on the impulse of the talents he felt for making impression, and lifting him to wealth, honours, and faine. I have already said, that I should have been blamable to his mother and society, if I had seduced an apprentice from his master to marry him to the nine Muses;' and I should have encouraged a propensity to forgery, which is not the talent most wanting culture in the present age." (53) Such and so unimportant was the transaction with Chatterton, which brought so much obloquy on Walpole, and seems really to have given him at different times great annoyance.
There remains but little more to relate in the life of Walpole. His old age glided on peacefully, and, with the exception of his severe sufferings from the gout, apparently contentedly, in the pursuit of his favourite studies and employments. In the year 1791, he succeeded his unhappy nephew, George, third Earl of Orford, who had at different periods of his life been insane, in the family estate and the earldom. The accession of this latter dignity seems rather to have annoyed him than otherwise. He never took his seat in the House of Lords, and his unwillingness to adopt his title was shown in his endeavours to avoid making use of it in his signature. He not unfrequently signed himself, "The Uncle of the late Earl of Orford." (54)
He retained his faculties to the last, but his limbs became helpless from his frequent attacks of gout: as he himself expresses it,
"Fortune, who scatters her gifts out of season,
Though unkind to my limbs, has yet left me my reason." (55)
As a friend of his, who only knew him in the last years of his life, speaks of "his conversation as singularly brilliant as it was original," (56) we may conclude his liveliness never deserted him; that his talent for letter-writing did not, we have a proof in a letter written only six weeks before his death, in which, with all his accustomed grace of manner he entreats a lady of his acquaintance not to show "the idle notes of her ancient servant."-Lord Orford died in the eightieth year `of his life, at his house in Berkeley Square, on the 2d of March 1797, and was buried with his family in the church at Houghton and with him concluded the male line of the descendants of Sir Robert Walpole.
(20) Originally prefixed to his lordship's edition of Walpole's Letters to Sir Horace Mann, first published in 1833.
(21) In a MS. note by Walpole, in his own copy of collins's Peerage, it is stated, that Sir Robert Walpole had, by his first wife, "another son, William, who died young, and a daughter, Catherine, who died of a consumption at Bath, aged nineteen."-E.