(259) Blakiston has been caught in smuggling, and pardoned by Sir Robert Walpole; but continuing the practice, and being again detected was fined five thousand pounds; on which he grew a violent party man, and a ringleader of the Westminster independent electors, and died an alderman of London.
109 Letter 45 To Sir Horace Mann. Arlington Street, July 16, 1751.
I shall do little more to-day than answer your last letter of the 2d of this month; there is no kind of news. My chief reason for writing to you is to notify a visit that you will have at Florence this summer from Mr. Conway, who is forced to go to his regiment at Minorca, but is determined to reckon Italy within his quarters. You know how, particularly he is my friend; I need not recommend him to you; but you will see something very different from the staring boys that come in flocks to you new, once a year, like woodcocks. Mr. Conway is deservedly reckoned one of the first and most rising young men in England. He has distinguished himself in the greatest style both in the army and in Parliament. This is for you. for the Florentine ladies, there is still the finest person and the handsomest face I ever saw—no, I cannot say that all this will be quite for them; he will not think any of them so handsome as my Lady Aylesbury.
It is impossible to answer you why my Lord Orford would not marry Miss Nicholl. I don't believe there was any particular reason or attachment any where else; but unfortunately for himself and for us, he is totally insensible to his situation, and talks of selling Houghton with a coolness that wants nothing but being intended for philosophy to be the greatest that ever was. Mind, it is a virtue that I envy more than I honour.
I am going into Warwickshire to Lord Hertford, and set out this evening, and have so many things to do that you must excuse me, for I neither know what I write, nor have time to write more. Adieu!
110 Letter 46 To George Montagu, Esq. Daventry, July 22, 1751.
You will wonder in what part of the county of Twicks lies this Daventry. It happens to be in Northamptonshire. My letter will scarce set out till I get to London, but I choose to give it its present date lest you should admire, that Mr. Usher of the exchequer, the lord treasurer of pen, ink, and paper, should write with such coarse materials. I am on my way from Ragley,(260) and if ever the waters subside and my ark rests upon dry land again, I think of stepping over to TOnghes: but your journey has filled my postchaise's head with such terrible ideas of your roads, that I think I shall let it have done raining for a month or six weeks, which it has not done for as much time past, before I begin to grease my wheels again, and lay in a provision of French books, and tea, and blunderbusses, for my journey.
Before I tell you a word of Ragley, you must hear how busy I have been upon Grammont. You know I have long had a purpose of a new edition, with notes, and cuts of the principal beauties and heroes, if I could meet with their portraits. I have made out all the people at all remarkable except my Lord Janet, whom I cannot divine unless he be Thanet. Well, but what will entertain you is, that I have discovered the philosophe Whitnell; and what do you think his real name was? Only 'Whetenhall! Pray do you call cousins?(261) Look in Collins's Baronets, and under the article Bedingfield you will find that he was an ingenious gentleman, and la blanche Whitnell, though one of the greatest beauties of the age, an excellent wife. I am persuaded the Bedingfields crowded in these characters to take off the ridicule in Grammont; they have succeeded to a miracle. Madame de Mirepoix told me t'other day, that she had known a daughter of the Countess de Grammont, an Abbess in Lorrain, who, to the ambassadress's great scandal, was ten times more vain of the blood of Hamilton than of an equal quantity of that of Grammont. She had told her much of her sister my Lady Stafford,(262) whom I remember to have seen when I was a child. She used to live at Twickenham when Lady Mary Wortley(263) and the Duke of Wharton lived there; she had more wit than both of them. What would I give to have had Strawberry Hill twenty years ago! I think any thing but twenty years. Lady Stafford used to say to her sister, "Well, child, I have come without my wit to-day;" that is, she had not taken her opium, which she was forced to do if she had any appointment, to be in particular spirits. This rage of Grammont carried me a little while ago to old Marlborough's,(264) at Wimbledon, where I had heard there was a picture of Lady Denham;(265) it is a charming one. The house you know stands in a hole, or, as the whimsical old lady said, seems to be making a courtesy. She had directed my Lord Pembroke not to make her go up any steps; "I wont go up steps;"—and so he dug a saucer to put it in, and levelled the first floor with the ground. There is a bust of Admiral Vernon, erected I suppose by Jack Spencer, with as many lies upon it as if it was a tombstone; and a very curious old picture up-stairs that I take to be Louis Sforza the Moor, with his nephew Galeazzo. There are other good pictures in the house, but perhaps you have seen them. As I have formerly seen Oxford and Blenheim, I did not stop till I came to Stratford-upon-Avon, the wretchedest old town I ever saw, which I intended for Shakspeare's sake, to find snug and pretty, and antique, not old. His tomb, and his wife's, and John Combes', are in an agreeable church, with several other monuments; as one of the Earl of Totness,(266) and another of Sir Edward Walker, the memoirs writer. There are quantities of Cloptons, too but the bountiful corporation have exceedingly bepainted Shakspeare and the principal personages.
I was much struck with Ragley; the situation is magnificent; the house far beyond any thing I have seen of that bad age: for it was begun, as I found by an old letter in the library from Lord Ranelagh to Earl Conway, in the year 1680. By the way, I have had, and am to have, the rummaging of three chests of pedigrees and letters to that secretary Conway, which I have interceded for and saved from the flames. The prospect is as fine as one destitute of a navigated river can be, ind hitherto totally unimproved; so is the house, which is but just covered in, after so many years. They have begun to inhabit the naked walls of the attic story; the great one is unfloored and unceited - the hall is magnificent, sixty by forty, and thirty-eight high. I am going to pump Mr. Bentley for designs. The other apartments are very lofty, and in quantity, though I had suspected that this leviathan hall must have devoured half the other chambers.
The Hertfords carried me to dine at Lord Archer's,(267) an odious place. On my return, I saw Warwick, a pretty old town, small, and thinly inhabited, in the form of a cross. The castle is enchanting; the view pleased me more than I can express; the river Avon tumbles down a cascade at the foot of it. It is well laid out by one Brown(268 who has set up on a few ideas of Kent and Mr. Southcote. One sees what the prevalence of taste does; little Brooke, who would have chuckled to have been born in an age of clipt hedges and cockle-shell avenues, has submitted to let his garden and park be natural. Where he has attempted Gothic in the castle, he has failed; and has indulged himself in a new apartment, that is paltry. The chapel is very pretty, and smugged up with tiny pews, that look like `etuis for the Earl and his diminutive Countess. I shall tell you nothing of the glorious chapel of the Beauchamps in St. Mary's church, for you know it is in Dugdale; nor how ill the fierce bears and ragged staves are succeeded by puppets and corals. As I came back another road, I saw Lord Pomfret's,(269) by Towcester, where there are a few good pictures, and many masked statues; there is an exceeding fine Cicero, which has no fault, but the head being modern. I saw a pretty lodge. just built by the Duke of Grafton, in Whittleberry-forest; the design is Kent's, but, as was his manner, too heavy. Iran through the gardens at Stowe, which I have seen before, and had only time to be charmed with the variety of scenes. I do like that Albano glut of buildings, let them be ever so much condemned.