(7) Lady Charlotte Ponsonby, second daughter of William, second Earl of Besborough. The marriage took place on the 1st of July.-E.
(8) Dr. Johnson, having read in the newspapers an account of a masquerade given at Edinburgh, by the Countess Dowager of Fife, at which Boswell had appeared in the character of a dumb conjuror, thus wrote to him:—"I have heard of your masquerade. What says your synod to such innovations? I am not studiously scrupulous, nor do I think a Masquerade either evil in itself or very likely to be the occasion of evil, yet, as the world thinks it a very licentious relaxation of manners, I would not have been one of the first masquers in a country where no masquerades had ever been before."-E.
Letter 5 To George Montagu, Esq.
Strawberry Hill, June 11, 1770. (page 29)
My company and I have wished for you very much to-day. The Duchess of Portland, Mrs. Delany, Mr. Bateman, and your cousin, Fred. Montagu, dined here. Lord Guildford was very obliging, and would have come if he dared have ventured. Mrs. Montagu was at Bill-hill with Lady Gower. The day was tolerable, with sun enough for the house, though not for the garden. You, I suppose, will never come again, as I have not a team of horses large enough to draw you out of the clay of Oxfordshire.
I went yesterday to see my niece(9) in her new principality of Ham. It delighted me and made me peevish. Close to the Thames, in the centre of all rich and verdant beauty, it is so blocked up and barricaded with walls, vast trees, and gates, that you think yourself an hundred miles off and an hundred years back. The old furniture is so magnificently ancient, dreary and decayed, that at every step one's spirits sink, and all my passion for antiquity could not keep them up. Every minute I expected to see ghosts sweeping by; ghosts I would not give sixpence to See, Lauderdales, Tollcmaches, and Maitlands. There is one old brown gallery full of Vandycks and Lelys, charming miniatures, delightful Wouvermans, and Polenburghs, china, japan, bronzes, ivory cabinets, and silver dogs, pokers, bellows, etc. without end. One pair of bellows is of filigree. In this state of pomp and tatters my nephew intends it shall remain, and is so religious an observer of the venerable rites of his house, that because the gates never were opened by his father but once for the late Lord Granville, you are locked out and locked in, and after journeying all round the house, as you do round an old French fortified town, you are at last admitted through the stable-yard to creep along a dark passage by the housekeeper's room, and so by a back-door into the great hall. He seems as much afraid of water as a cat; for though you might enjoy the Thames from every window of three sides of the house, you may tumble into it before you guess it is there. In short, our ancestors had so little idea of taste and beauty, that I should not have been surprised if they had hung their pictures with the painted sides to the wall. Think of such a palace commanding all the reach of Richmond and Twickenham, with a domain from the foot of Richmond-hill to Kingston-bridge, and then imagine its being as dismal and prospectless as if it stood "on Stanmore's wintry wild!" I don't see why a man should not be divorced from his prospect as well as from his wife, for not being able to enjoy it. Lady Dysart frets, but it is not the etiquette of the family to yield, and @ she must content herself with her chateau of Tondertentronk as well as she can. She has another such ample prison in Suffolk, and may be glad to reside where she is. Strawberry, with all its painted glass and gloom, looked as gay when I came home as Mrs. Cornelis's ball-room.
I am very busy about the last volume of my Painters, but have lost my index, and am forced again to turn over all my Vertues, forty volumes of miniature MSS.; so that this will be the third time I shall have made an index to them. Don't say that I am not persevering, and yet I thought I was grown idle. What pains one takes to be forgotten! Good-night!
(9) Charlotte, daughter of Sir Edward Walpole, married to Lord Huntingtower, who had just succeeded to the title of the Earl of Dysart, on the death of his father.-E.
Letter 6 To George Montagu, Esq.
Strawberry Hill, June 29, 1770. (page 30)
Since the sharp mountain will not come to the little hill, the little hill must go to the mountain. In short, what do you think of seeing me walk into your parlour a few hours after this epistle! I had not time to notify myself sooner. The case is, Princess Amelia has insisted on my going with her to, that is, meeting her at Stowe on Monday, for a week. She mentioned it to me some time ago, and I thought I had parried it; but having been with her at Park-place these two or three days, she has commanded it so positively that I could not refuse. Now, as it would be extremely inconvenient to my indolence to be dressed up in weepers and hatbands by six o'clock in the morning, and lest I should be taken for chief mourner going to Beckford's funeral,(10) I trust you will be charitable enough to give me a bed at Adderbury for one night, whence I can arrive at Stowe in a decent time, and caparisoned as I ought to be, when I have lost a brother-in-law(11) and am to meet a Princess. Don't take me for a Lauson, and think all this favour portends a second marriage between our family and the blood-royal; nor that my visit to Stowe implies my espousing Miss Wilkes. I think I shall die as I am, neither higher nor lower; and above all things, no more politics. Yet I shall have many a private smile to myself, as I wander among all those consecrated and desecrated buildings, and think what company I am in, and of all that is past; but I must shorten my letter, or you will not have finished it when I arrive. Adieu! Yours, a-coming! a-coming!
(10) William Beckford, Esq. Lord Mayor of London, who died on the 21st of June, during his second mayoralty, in the sixty-fifth year of his age. On the 5th of the following month, at a meeting of the Common Council, "a motion being made and question put, that the statue of the Right Hon. William Beckford, late Lord Mayor, deceased, be erected in the Guildhall of this city, with the inscription of his late address to his Majesty, the was resolved in the affirmative." The speech here alluded to is the one which the Alderman addressed to his Majesty on the 23d of May, with reference to the King's reply—"That he should have been wanting to the public, as well as to himself, if he had not expressed his dissatisfaction at the late address." At the end of the Alderman's speech, in his copy of the City Addresses, Mr. Isaac Reed has inserted the following note:—"It is a curious fact, but a true one, that Beckford did not utter one syllable of this speech. It was penned by Horne Tooke, and by his art put on the records of the city and on Beckford's statue; as he told me, Mr. Braithwaite, Mr. Sayers, etc. at the Athenian club. Isaac Reed." There can be little doubt that the worthy commentator and his friends were imposed upon. In the Chatham Correspondence, vol. iii. p. 460, a letter from Sheriff Townsend to the Earl expressly states, that with the exception of the words "and necessary" being left out before the word "revolution," the Lord Mayor's speech in the Public Advertiser of the preceding day is verbatim the one delivered to the King.—E.