On coming to town yesterday upon business, I found, Sir, your very magnificent and most valuable present,(572) for which I beg you will accept my most grateful thanks. I am impatient to return to Twickenham, to read it tranquilly. As yet I have only had time to turn the prints over, and to read the preface; but I see already that it is both a noble and laborious work, and -will do great honour both to you and to your country. Yet one apprehension it has given me-I fear not living to see the second part! Yet I shall presume to keep it Unbound; not only till it is perfectly dry and secure, but, as I mean the binding should be as fine as it deserves, I should be afraid of not having both volumes exactly alike.
Your partiality, I doubt, Sir, has induced you to insert a paper not so worthy of the public regard as the rest of your splendid performance. My letter to Mr. Cole,(573) which I am sure I had utterly forgotten .to have ever written, was a hasty indigested sketch, like the rest of my scribblings, and never calculated to lead such well-meditated and accurate works as yours. Having lived familiarly with Mr. Cole, from our boyhood, I used to write to him carelessly on the occasions that occurred. As it was always on subjects of' no importance, I never thought of enjoining secrecy. I could not foresee that such idle Communications would find a place in a great national work, or I should have been more attentive to 'what I said. Your taste, Sir, I fear, has for once been misled; and I shall be sorry for having innocently blemished a single page. Since your partiality (for such it certainly was) has gone so far, I flatter myself you will have retained enough to accept, not a retribution, but a trifling mark of my regard, in the little volume that accompanies this; in which you will find that another too favourable reader has bestowed on me more distinction than I could procure for myself, by turning my slight Essay on Gardening(574) into the pure French of the last age;(575) and, which is wonderful, has not debased Milton by French poetry: on the contrary, I think Milton has given a dignity to French poetry—nay, and harmony; both which I thought that language almost incapable of receiving. As I would wish to give all the value I can to my offering, I Will mention, that I have printed but four hundred copies, half of which went to France; and as this is an age in which mere rarities are preferred to commoner things of intrinsic worth,-as I have found by the ridiculous prices given for some of my insignificant publications, merely because they are scarce,-I hope, under the title of a kind of curiosity, my thin piece will be admitted into your library. If you would indulge me so far, Sir, as to let me know when I might hope to see the second part, I would calculate how many more fits of the gout I may weather, and would be still more strict in my regimen. I hope, at least, that you will not wait for the engravers, but will accomplish the text for the sake of the world: in this I speak disinterestedly. Though you are much younger than I am, I would have your part of the work secure - engravers may always proceed, or be found; another author cannot.
(572) The first volume of Mr. Gough's "Sepulchral Monuments in Great Britain."-E.
(573) See vol. iii., Aug. 12, 1769, letter 366.-E.
(574) The author of "The Pursuits of Literature",—
"Well pleased to see
Walpole and Nature may, for once, agree,"
adds, in a note, "read (it well deserves the attention) that quaint, but most curious and learned writer's excellent Essay on Modern Gardening."-E.
(575) Besides Walpole's Essay on Modern Gardening, the Duc do Nivernois translated Pope's Essay on Man, and a portion of Milton's Paradise Lost, into French verse.-E.
Letter 303 To The Earl Of Strafford.
Strawberry Hill, August 29, 1786. (page 384)
Since I received the honour of your lordship's last, I have been at Park-place for a few days. Lord and Lady Frederick Campbell and Mrs. Damer were there. We went on the Thames to see the new bridge at Henley, and Mrs. Damer's colossal masks. There is not a sight in the island more worthy of being visited. The bridge is as perfect as if bridges were natural productions, and as beautiful as if it had been built"for Wentworth Castle; and the masks, as if the Romans had left them here. We saw them in a fortunate moment; for the rest of the time was very cold and uncomfortable, and the evenings as chill as many we have had lately. In short, I am come to think that the beginning of an old ditty, which passes for a collection of blunders, was really an old English pastoral, it is so descriptive of our climate: