HORACE WALPOLE

After Rosalba

Horace Walpole

A MEMOIR

WITH AN APPENDIX OF BOOKS PRINTED AT THE STRAWBERRY-HILL PRESS

BY

AUSTIN DOBSON

NEW YORK
DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY

Publishers

Copyright, 1890,
By Dodd, Mead and Company.

University Press:
John Wilson and Son, Cambridge, U.S.A.

CONTENTS.

HORACE WALPOLE:

A Memoir.

CHAPTER I.

The Walpoles of Houghton.—Horace Walpole born, 24 September, 1717.—Lady Louisa Stuart's Story.—Scattered Facts of his Boyhood.—Minor Anecdotes.—'La belle Jennings.'—The Bugles.—Interview with George I. before his Death.—Portrait at this time.—Goes to Eton, 26 April, 1727.—His Studies and Schoolfellows.—The 'Triumvirate,' the 'Quadruple Alliance.'—Entered at Lincoln's Inn, 27 May, 1731.—Leaves Eton, September, 1734.—Goes to King's College, Cambridge, 11 March, 1735.—His University Studies.—Letters from Cambridge.—Verses in the Gratulatio.—Verses in Memory of Henry VI.—Death of Lady Walpole, 20 August, 1737.

The Walpoles of Houghton, in Norfolk, ten miles from King's Lynn, were an ancient family, tracing their pedigree to a certain Reginald de Walpole who was living in the time of William the Conqueror. Under Henry II. there was a Sir Henry de Walpol of Houton and Walpol; and thenceforward an orderly procession of Henrys and Edwards and Johns (all 'of Houghton') carried on the family name to the coronation of Charles II., when, in return for his vote and interest as a member of the Convention Parliament, one Edward Walpole was made a Knight of the Bath. This Sir Edward was in due time succeeded by his son, Robert, who married well, sat for Castle Rising,[1] one of the two family boroughs (the other being King's Lynn, for which his father had been member), and reputably filled the combined offices of county magnate and colonel of militia. But his chief claim to distinction is that his eldest son, also a Robert, afterwards became the famous statesman and Prime Minister to whose 'admirable prudence, fidelity, and success' England owes her prosperity under the first Hanoverians. It is not, however, with the life of 'that corrupter of parliaments, that dissolute tipsy cynic, that courageous lover of peace and liberty, that great citizen, patriot, and statesman,'—to borrow a passage from one of Mr. Thackeray's graphic vignettes,—that these pages are concerned. It is more material to their purpose to note that in the year 1700, and on the 30th day of July in that year (being the day of the death of the Duke of Gloucester, heir presumptive to the crown of England), Robert Walpole, junior, then a young man of three-and-twenty, and late scholar of King's College, Cambridge, took to himself a wife. The lady chosen was Miss Catherine Shorter, eldest daughter of John Shorter, of Bybrook, an old Elizabethan red-brick house near Ashford in Kent. Her grandfather, Sir John Shorter, had been Lord Mayor of London under James II., and her father was a Norway timber merchant, having his wharf and counting-house on the Southwark side of the Thames, and his town residence in Norfolk Street, Strand, where, in all probability, his daughter met her future husband. They had a family of four sons and two daughters. One of the sons, William, died young. The third son, Horatio,[2] or Horace, born, as he himself tells us, on the 24th September, 1717, O. S., is the subject of this memoir.

With the birth of Horace Walpole is connected a scandal so industriously repeated by his later biographers that (although it has received far more attention than it deserves) it can scarcely be left unnoticed here. He had, it is asserted, little in common, either in tastes or appearance, with his elder brothers Robert and Edward, and he was born eleven years after the rest of his father's children. This led to a suggestion which first found definite expression in the Introductory Anecdotes supplied by Lady Louisa Stuart to Lord Wharncliffe's edition of the works of her grandmother, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu.[3] It was to the effect that Horace was not the son of Sir Robert Walpole, but of one of his mother's admirers, Carr, Lord Hervey, elder brother of Pope's 'Sporus,' the Hervey of the Memoirs. It is advanced in favour of this supposition that his likeness to the Herveys, both physically and mentally, was remarkable; that the whilom Catherine Shorter was flighty, indiscreet, and fond of admiration; and that Sir Robert's cynical disregard of his wife's vagaries, as well as his own gallantries (his second wife, Miss Skerret, had been his mistress), were matters of notoriety. On the other hand, there is no indication that any suspicion of his parentage ever crossed the mind of Horace Walpole himself. His devotion to his mother was one of the most consistent traits in a character made up of many contradictions; and although between the frail and fastidious virtuoso and the boisterous, fox-hunting Prime Minister there could have been but little sympathy, the son seems nevertheless to have sedulously maintained a filial reverence for his father, of whose enemies and detractors he remained, until his dying day, the implacable foe. Moreover, it must be remembered that, admirable as are Lady Louisa Stuart's recollections, in speaking of Horace Walpole she is speaking of one whose caustic pen and satiric tongue had never spared the reputation of the vivacious lady whose granddaughter she was.

With this reference to what can be, at best, but an insoluble question, we may return to the story of Walpole's earlier years. Of his childhood little is known beyond what he has himself told in the Short Notes of my Life which he drew up for the use of Mr. Berry, the nominal editor of his works.[4] His godfathers, he says, were the Duke of Grafton and his father's second brother, Horatio, who afterwards became Baron Walpole of Wolterton. His godmother was his aunt, the beautiful Dorothy Walpole, who, escaping the snares of Lord Wharton, as related by Lady Louisa Stuart, had become the second wife of Charles, second Viscount Townshend. In 1724, he was 'inoculated for the small-pox;' and in the following year, was placed with his cousins, Lord Townshend's younger sons, at Bexley, in Kent, under the charge of one Weston, son to the Bishop of Exeter of that name. In 1726, the same course was pursued at Twickenham, and in the winter months he went to Lord Townshend's. Much of his boyhood, however, must have been spent in the house 'next the College' at Chelsea, of which his father became possessed in 1722. It still exists in part, with but little alteration, as the infirmary of the hospital, and Ward No. 7 is said to have been its dining-room.[5] With this, or with some other reception-chamber at Chelsea, is connected one of the scanty anecdotes of this time. Once, when Walpole was a boy, there came to see his mother one of those formerly famous beauties chronicled by Anthony Hamilton,—'la belle Jennings,' elder sister to the celebrated Duchess of Marlborough, and afterwards Duchess of Tyrconnell. At this date she was a needy Jacobite seeking Lady Walpole's interest in order to obtain a pension. She no longer possessed those radiant charms which under Charles had revealed her even through the disguise of an orange-girl; and now, says Walpole, annotating his own copy of the Memoirs of Grammont, 'her eyes being dim, and she full of flattery, she commended the beauty of the prospect; but unluckily the room in which they sat looked only against the garden-wall.'[6]

Another of the few events of his boyhood which he records, illustrates the old proverb that 'One half of the world knows not how the other half lives,' rather than any particular phase of his biography. Going with his mother to buy some bugles (beads), at the time when the opposition to his father was at its highest, he notes that having made her purchase,—beads were then out of fashion, and the shop was in some obscure alley in the City, where lingered unfashionable things,—Lady Walpole bade the shopman send it home. Being asked whither, she replied, 'To Sir Robert Walpole's.' 'And who,' rejoined he coolly, 'is Sir Robert Walpole?'[7] But the most interesting incident of his youth was the visit he paid to the King, which he has himself related in Chapter I. of the Reminiscences. How it came about he does not know, but at ten years old an overmastering desire seized him to inspect His Majesty. This childish caprice was so strong that his mother, who seldom thwarted him, solicited the Duchess of Kendal (the maîtresse en titre) to obtain for her son the honour of kissing King George's hand before he set out upon that visit to Hanover from which he was never to return. It was an unusual request, but being made by the Prime Minister's wife, could scarcely be refused. To conciliate etiquette and avoid precedent, however, it was arranged that the audience should be in private and at night. 'Accordingly, the night but one before the King began his last journey [i. e., on 1 June, 1727], my mother carried me at ten at night to the apartment of the Countess of Walsingham [Melusina de Schulemberg, the Duchess's reputed niece], on the ground floor, towards the garden at St. James's, which opened into that of her aunt, ... apartments occupied by George II. after his Queen's death, and by his successive mistresses, the Countesses of Suffolk [Mrs. Howard] and Yarmouth [Madame de Walmoden]. Notice being given that the King was come down to supper, Lady Walsingham took me alone into the Duchess's ante-room, where we found alone the King and her. I knelt down, and kissed his hand. He said a few words to me, and my conductress led me back to my mother. The person of the King is as perfect in my memory as if I saw him but yesterday. It was that of an elderly man, rather pale, and exactly like his pictures and coins; not tall; of an aspect rather good than august; with a dark tie-wig, a plain coat, waistcoat, and breeches of snuff-coloured cloth, with stockings of the same colour, and a blue ribband over all. So entirely was he my object that I do not believe I once looked at the Duchess; but as I could not avoid seeing her on entering the room, I remember that just beyond His Majesty stood a very tall, lean, ill-favoured old lady; but I did not retain the least idea of her features, nor know what the colour of her dress was.'[8] In the Walpoliana (p. 25)[9] Walpole is made to say that his introducer was his father, and that the King took him up in his arms and kissed him. Walpole's own written account is the more probable one. His audience must have been one of the last the King granted, for, as already stated, it was almost on the eve of his departure; and ten days later, when his chariot clattered swiftly into the courtyard of his brother's palace at Osnabruck, he lay dead in his seat, and the reign of his successor had begun.

Although Walpole gives us a description of George I., he does not, of course, supply us with any portrait of himself. But in Mr. Peter Cunningham's excellent edition of the Correspondence there is a copy of an oil-painting belonging (1857) to Mrs. Bedford of Kensington, which, upon the faith of a Cupid who points with an arrow to the number ten upon a dial, may be accepted as representing him about the time of the above interview. It is a full length of a slight, effeminate-looking lad in a stiff-skirted coat, knee-breeches, and open-breasted laced waistcoat, standing in a somewhat affected attitude at the side of the afore-mentioned sundial. He has dark, intelligent eyes, and a profusion of light hair curling abundantly about his ears and reaching to his neck. If the date given in the Short Notes be correct, he must have already become an Eton boy, since he says that he went to that school on the 26th April, 1727, and he adds in the Reminiscences that he shed a flood of tears for the King's death, when, 'with the other scholars at Eton College,' he walked in procession to the proclamation of his successor. Of the cause of this emotion he seems rather doubtful, leaving us to attribute it partly to the King's condescension in gratifying his childish loyalty, partly to the feeling that, as the Prime Minister's son, it was incumbent on him to be more concerned than his schoolfellows; while the spectators, it is hinted, placed it to the credit of a third and not less cogent cause,—the probability of that Minister's downfall. Of this, however, as he says, he could not have had the slightest conception. His tutor at Eton was Henry Bland, eldest son of the master of the school. 'I remember,' says Walpole, writing later to his relative and schoolfellow Conway, 'when I was at Eton, and Mr. Bland had set me an extraordinary task, I used sometimes to pique myself upon not getting it, because it was not immediately my school business. What, learn more than I was absolutely forced to learn! I felt the weight of learning that, for I was a blockhead, and pushed up above my parts.' That, as the son of the great Minister, he was pushed, is probably true; but, despite his own disclaimer, it is clear that his abilities were by no means to be despised. Indeed, one of the pièces justificatives in the story of Lady Louisa Stuart, though advanced for another purpose, is distinctly in favour of something more than average talent. Supporting her theory as to his birth by the statement that in his boyhood he was left so entirely in the hands of his mother as to have little acquaintance with his father, she goes on to say that 'Sir Robert Walpole took scarcely any notice of him, till his proficiency at Eton School, when a lad of some standing, drew his attention, and proved that whether he had or had not a right to the name he went by, he was likely to do it honour.'[10] Whatever this may be held to prove, it certainly proves that he was not the blockhead he declares himself to have been.

Among his schoolmates he made many friends. For his cousins, Henry (afterwards Marshal) Conway and Lord Hertford, Conway's elder brother, he formed an attachment which lasted through life, and many of his best letters were written to these relatives. Other associates were the later lyrist, Charles Hanbury Williams, and the famous wit, George Augustus Selwyn, both of whom, if the child be father to the man, must be supposed to have had unusual attractions for their equally witty schoolmate. Another contemporary at school, to whom, in after life, he addressed many letters, was William Cole, subsequently to develop into a laborious antiquary, and probably already exhibiting proclivities towards 'tall copies' and black letter. But his chiefest friends, no doubt, were grouped in the two bodies christened respectively the 'triumvirate' and the 'quadruple alliance.'

Of these the 'triumvirate' was the less important. It consisted of Walpole and the two sons of Brigadier-General Edward Montagu. George, the elder, afterwards M.P. for Northampton, and the recipient of some of the most genuine specimens of his friend's correspondence, is described in advanced age as 'a gentleman-like body of the vieille cour,' usually attended by a younger brother, who was still a midshipman at the mature age of sixty, and whose chief occupation consisted in carrying about his elder's snuff-box. Charles Montagu, the remaining member of the 'triumvirate,' became a Lieut.-General and Knight of the Bath. But it was George, who had 'a fine sense of humour, and much curious information,' who was Walpole's favourite. 'Dear George,'—he writes to him from Cambridge,—'were not the playing fields at Eton food for all manner of flights? No old maid's gown, though it had been tormented into all the fashions from King James to King George, ever underwent so many transformations as those poor plains have in my idea. At first I was contented with tending a visionary flock, and sighing some pastoral name to the echo of the cascade under the bridge. How happy should I have been to have had a kingdom only for the pleasure of being driven from it, and living disguised in an humble vale! As I got further into Virgil and Clelia, I found myself transported from Arcadia to the garden of Italy; and saw Windsor Castle in no other view than the Capitoli immobile saxum.' Further on he makes an admission which need scarcely surprise us. 'I can't say I am sorry I was never quite a schoolboy: an expedition against bargemen, or a match at cricket, may be very pretty things to recollect; but, thank my stars, I can remember things that are very near as pretty. The beginning of my Roman history was spent in the asylum, or conversing in Egeria's hallowed grove; not in thumping and pummelling King Amulius's herdsmen.'[11] The description seems to indicate a schoolboy of a rather refined and effeminate type, who would probably fare ill with robuster spirits. But Walpole's social position doubtless preserved him from the persecution which that variety generally experiences at the hands—literally the hands—of the tyrants of the playground.

The same delicacy of organisation seems to have been a main connecting link in the second or 'quadruple alliance' already referred to,—an alliance, it may be, less intrinsically intimate, but more obviously cultivated. The most important figure in this quartet was a boy as frail and delicate as Walpole himself, 'with a broad, pale brow, sharp nose and chin, large eyes, and a pert expression,' who was afterwards to become famous as the author of one of the most popular poems in the language, the Elegy written in a Country Church Yard. Thomas Gray was at this time about thirteen, and consequently somewhat older than his schoolmate. Another member of the association was Richard West, also slightly older, a grandson of the Bishop Burnet who wrote the History of My Own Time, and son of the Lord Chancellor of Ireland. West, a slim, thoughtful lad, was the most precocious genius of the party, already making verses in Latin and English, and making them even in his sleep. The fourth member was Thomas Ashton, afterwards Fellow of Eton College and Rector of St. Botolph, Bishopsgate. Such was the group which may be pictured sauntering arm in arm through the Eton meadows, or threading the avenue which is still known as the 'Poet's Walk.' Each of the four had his nickname, either conferred by himself or by his schoolmates. Ashton, for example, was Plato; Gray was Orosmades.

On 27 May, 1731, Walpole was entered at Lincoln's Inn, his father intending him for the law. 'But'—he says in the Short Notes—'I never went thither, not caring for the profession.' On 23 September, 1734, he left Eton for good, and no further particulars of his school-days remain. That they were not without their pleasant memories may, however, be inferred from the letters already quoted, and especially from one to George Montagu written some time afterwards upon the occasion of a visit to the once familiar scenes. It is dated from the Christopher Inn, a famous old hostelry, well known to Eton boys,—'The Christopher. How great I used to think anybody just landed at the Christopher! But here are no boys for me to send for; there I am, like Noah, just returned into his old world again, with all sorts of queer feels about me. By the way, the clock strikes the old cracked sound; I recollect so much, and remember so little; and want to play about; and am so afraid of my playfellows; and am ready to shirk Ashton; and can't help making fun of myself; and envy a dame over the way, that has just locked in her boarders, and is going to sit down in a little hot parlour to a very bad supper, so comfortably! And I could be so jolly a dog if I did not fat,—which, by the way, is the first time the word was ever applicable to me. In short, I should be out of all bounds if I was to tell you half I feel,—how young again I am one minute, and how old the next. But do come and feel with me, when you will,—to-morrow. Adieu! If I don't compose myself a little more before Sunday morning, when Ashton is to preach ['Plato' at the date of this letter had evidently taken orders], I shall certainly be in a bill for laughing at church; but how to help it, to see him in the pulpit, when the last time I saw him here was standing up funking over against a conduit to be catechised.'[12]

This letter, of which the date is not given, but which Cunningham places after March, 1737, must have been written some time after the writer had taken up his residence at Cambridge in his father's college of King's.[13] This he did in March, 1735, following an interval of residence in London. By this time the 'quadruple alliance' had been broken up by the defection of West, who, much against his will, had gone to Christ Church, Oxford. Ashton and Gray had, however, been a year at Cambridge, the latter as a fellow-commoner of Peterhouse, the former at Walpole's own college, King's. Cole and the Conways were also at Cambridge, so that much of the old intercourse must have been continued. Walpole's record of his university studies is of the most scanty kind. He does little more than give us the names of his tutors, public and private. In civil law he attended the lectures of Dr. Dickens of Trinity Hall; in anatomy, those of Dr. Battie. French, he says, he had learnt at Eton. His Italian master at Cambridge was Signor Piazza (who had at least an Italian name!), and his instructor in drawing was the miniaturist Bernard Lens, the teacher of the Duke of Cumberland and the Princesses Mary and Louisa. Lens was the author of a New and Complete Drawing Book for curious young Gentlemen and Ladies that study and practice the noble and commendable Art of Drawing, Colouring, etc., and is kindly referred to in the later Anecdotes of Painting. In mathematics, which Walpole seems to have hated as cordially as Swift and Goldsmith and Gray did, he sat at the feet of the blind Professor Nicholas Saunderson, author of the Elements of Algebra.[14] Years afterwards (à propos of a misguided enthusiast who had put the forty-seventh proposition of Euclid into Latin verse) he tells one of his correspondents the result of these ministrations: 'I ... was always so incapable of learning mathematics that I could not even get by heart the multiplication table, as blind Professor Saunderson honestly told me, above threescore years ago, when I went to his lectures at Cambridge. After the first fortnight he said to me, 'Young man, it would be cheating you to take your money; for you can never learn what I am trying to teach you.' I was exceedingly mortified, and cried; for, being a Prime Minister's son, I had firmly believed all the flattery with which I had been assured that my parts were capable of anything. I paid a private instructor for a year; but, at the year's end, was forced to own Saunderson had been in the right.'[15] This private instructor was in all probability Mr. Trevigar, who, Walpole says, read lectures to him in mathematics and philosophy. From other expressions in his letters, it must be inferred that his progress in the dead languages, if respectable, was not brilliant. He confesses, on one occasion, his inability to help Cole in a Latin epitaph, and he tells Pinkerton that he never was a good Greek scholar.

His correspondence at this period, chiefly addressed to West and George Montagu, is not extensive, but it is already characteristic. In one of his letters to Montagu he encloses a translation of a little French dialogue between a turtle-dove and a passer-by. The verses are of no particular merit, but in the comment one recognizes a cast of style soon to be familiar. 'You will excuse this gentle nothing, I mean mine, when I tell you I translated it out of pure good-nature for the use of a disconsolate wood-pigeon in our grove, that was made a widow by the barbarity of a gun. She coos and calls me so movingly, 'twould touch your heart to hear her. I protest to you it grieves me to pity her. She is so allicholly[16] as any thing. I'll warrant you now she's as sorry as one of us would be. Well, good man, he's gone, and he died like a lamb. She's an unfortunate woman, but she must have patience.'[17] In another letter to West, after expressing his astonishment that Gray should be at Burnham in Buckinghamshire, and yet be too indolent to revisit the old Eton haunts in his vicinity, he goes on to gird at the university curriculum. At Cambridge, he says, they are supposed to betake themselves 'to some trade, as logic, philosophy, or mathematics.' But he has been used to the delicate food of Parnassus, and can never condescend to the grosser studies of Alma Mater. 'Sober cloth of syllogism colour suits me ill; or, what's worse, I hate clothes that one must prove to be of no colour at all. If the Muses cœlique vias et sidera monstrent, and quâ vi maria alta tumescant; why accipiant: but 'tis thrashing, to study philosophy in the abstruse authors. I am not against cultivating these studies, as they are certainly useful; but then they quite neglect all polite literature, all knowledge of this world. Indeed, such people have not much occasion for this latter; for they shut themselves up from it, and study till they know less than any one. Great mathematicians have been of great use; but the generality of them are quite unconversible: they frequent the stars, sub pedibusque vident nubes, but they can't see through them. I tell you what I see; that by living amongst them, I write of nothing else: my letters are all parallelograms, two sides equal to two sides; and every paragraph an axiom, that tells you nothing but what every mortal almost knows.'[18] In an earlier note he has been on a tour to Oxford, and, with a premonition of the future connoisseur of Strawberry Hill, criticises the gentlemen's seats on the road. 'Coming back, we saw Easton Neston [in Northamptonshire], a seat of Lord Pomfret, where in an old greenhouse is a wonderful fine statue of Tully, haranguing a numerous assemblage of decayed emperors, vestal virgins with new noses, Colossus's, Venus's, headless carcases and carcaseless heads, pieces of tombs, and hieroglyphics.'[19] A little later he has been to his father's seat at Houghton: 'I am return'd again to Cambridge, and can tell you what I never expected,—that I like Norfolk. Not any of the ingredients, as Hunting or Country Gentlemen, for I had nothing to do with them, but the county; which a little from Houghton is woody, and full of delightfull prospects. I went to see Norwich and Yarmouth, both which I like exceedingly. I spent my time at Houghton for the first week almost alone. We have a charming garden, all wilderness; much adapted to my Romantick inclinations.' In after life the liking for Norfolk here indicated does not seem to have continued, especially when his father's death had withdrawn a part of its attractions. He 'hated Norfolk,'—says Mr. Cunningham. 'He did not care for Norfolk ale, Norfolk turnips, Norfolk dumplings, or Norfolk turkeys. Its flat, sandy, aguish scenery was not to his taste.' He preferred 'the rich blue prospects' of his mother's county, Kent.

Of literary effort while at Cambridge, Walpole's record is not great. In 1736, he was one of the group of university poets—Gray and West being also of the number—who addressed congratulatory verses to Frederick, Prince of Wales, upon his marriage with the Princess Augusta of Saxe-Gotha; and he wrote a poem (which is reprinted in vol. i. of his works) to the memory of the founder of King's College, Henry VI. This is dated 2 February, 1738. In the interim Lady Walpole died. Her son's references to his loss display the most genuine regret. In a letter to Charles Lyttelton (afterwards the well-known Dean of Exeter, and Bishop of Carlisle), which is not included in Cunningham's edition, and is apparently dated in error September, 1732, instead of 1737,[20] he dwells with much feeling on 'the surprizing calmness and courage which my dear Mother show'd before her death. I believe few women wou'd behave so well, & I am certain no man cou'd behave better. For three or four days before she dyed, she spoke of it with less indifference than one speaks of a cold; and while she was sensible, which she was within her two last hours, she discovered no manner of apprehension.' That his warm affection for her was well known to his friends may be inferred from a passage in one of Gray's letters to West: 'While I write to you, I hear the bad news of Lady Walpole's death on Saturday night last [20 Aug., 1737]. Forgive me if the thought of what my poor Horace must feel on that account, obliges me to have done.'[21] Lady Walpole was buried in Westminster Abbey, where, on her monument in Henry VIIth's Chapel, may be read the piously eulogistic inscription which her youngest son composed to her memory,—an inscription not easy to reconcile in all its terms with the current estimate of her character. But in August, 1737, she was considerably over fifty, and had probably long outlived the scandals of which she had been the subject in the days when Kneller and Eckardt painted her as a young and beautiful woman.

CHAPTER II.

Patent Places under Government.—Starts with Gray on the Grand Tour, March, 1739.—From Dover to Paris.—Life at Paris.—Versailles.—The Convent of the Chartreux.—Life at Rheims.—A Fête Galante.—The Grande Chartreuse.—Starts for Italy.—The tragedy of Tory.—Turin; Genoa.—Academical Exercises at Bologna.—Life at Florence.—Rome; Naples; Herculaneum.—The Pen of Radicofani.—English at Florence.—Lady Mary Wortley Montagu.—Preparing for Home.—Quarrel with Gray.—Walpole's Apologia; his Illness, and Return to England.

That, in those piping days of patronage, when even very young ladies of quality drew pay as cornets of horse, the son of the Prime Minister of England should be left unprovided for, was not to be expected. While he was still resident at Cambridge, lucrative sinecures came to Horace Walpole. Soon after his mother's death, his father appointed him Inspector of Imports and Exports in the Custom House,—a post which he resigned in January, 1738, on succeeding Colonel William Townshend as Usher of the Exchequer. When, later in the year, he came of age (17 September), he 'took possession of two other little patent-places in the Exchequer, called Comptroller of the Pipe, and Clerk of the Estreats,' which had been held for him by a substitute. In 1782, when he still filled them, the two last-mentioned offices produced together about £300 per annum, while the Ushership of the Exchequer, at the date of his obtaining it, was reckoned to be worth £900 a year. 'From that time [he says] I lived on my own income, and travelled at my own expense; nor did I during my father's life receive from him but £250 at different times,—which I say not in derogation of his extreme tenderness and goodness to me, but to show that I was content with what he had given to me, and that from the age of twenty I was no charge to my family.'[22]

He continued at King's College for some time after he had attained his majority, only quitting it formally in March, 1739, not without regretful memories of which his future correspondence was to bear the traces. If he had neglected mathematics, and only moderately courted the classics, he had learnt something of the polite arts and of modern Continental letters,—studies which would naturally lead his inclination in the direction of the inevitable 'Grand Tour.' Two years earlier he had very unwillingly declined an invitation from George Montagu and Lord Conway to join them in a visit to Italy. Since that date his desire for foreign travel, fostered no doubt by long conversations with Gray, had grown stronger, and he resolved to see 'the palms and temples of the south' after the orthodox eighteenth-century fashion. To think of Gray in this connection was but natural, and he accordingly invited his friend (who had now quitted Cambridge, and was vegetating rather disconsolately in his father's house on Cornhill) to be his travelling companion. Walpole was to act as paymaster; but Gray was to be independent. Furthermore, Walpole made a will under which, if he died abroad, Gray was to be his sole legatee. Dispositions so advantageous and considerate scarcely admitted of refusal, even if Gray had been backward, which he was not. The two friends accordingly set out for Paris. Walpole makes the date of departure 10 March, 1739; Gray says they left Dover at twelve on the 29th.

The first records of the journey come from Amiens in a letter written by Gray to his mother. After a rough passage across the Straits, they reached Calais at five. Next day they started for Boulogne in the then new-fangled invention, a post-chaise,—a vehicle which Gray describes 'as of much greater use than beauty, resembling an ill-shaped chariot, only with the door opening before instead of [at] the side.' Of Boulogne they see little, and of Montreuil (where later Sterne engaged La Fleur) Gray's only record, besides the indifferent fare, is that 'Madame the hostess made her appearance in long lappets of bone lace, and a sack of linsey-woolsey.' From Montreuil they go by Abbeville to Amiens, where they visit the cathedral, and the chapels of the Jesuits and Ursuline Nuns. But the best part of this first letter is the little picture with which it (or rather as much of it as Mason published) concludes. 'The country we have passed through hitherto has been flat, open, but agreeably diversified with villages, fields well cultivated, and little rivers. On every hillock is a windmill, a crucifix, or a Virgin Mary dressed in flowers and a sarcenet robe; one sees not many people or carriages on the road; now and then indeed you meet a strolling friar, a countryman with his great muff, or a woman riding astride on a little ass, with short petticoats, and a great head-dress of blue wool.'[23]

The foregoing letter is dated the 1st April, and it speaks of reaching Paris on the 3rd. But it was only on the evening of Saturday the 9th that they rolled into the French capital, 'driving through the streets a long while before they knew where they were.' Walpole had wisely resolved not to hurry, and they had besides broken down at Luzarches, and lingered at St. Denis over the curiosities of the abbey, particularly a vase of oriental onyx carved with Bacchus and the nymphs, of which they had dreamed ever since. At Paris, they found a warm welcome among the English residents,—notably from Mason's patron, Lord Holdernesse, and Walpole's cousins, the Conways. They seem to have plunged at once into the pleasures of the place,—pleasures in which, according to Walpole, cards and eating played far too absorbing a part. At Lord Holdernesse's they met at supper the famous author of Manon Lescaut, M. l'Abbé Antoine-François Prévost d'Exilles, who had just put forth the final volume of his tedious and scandalous Histoire de M. Cléveland, fils naturel de Cromwel. They went to the spectacle of Pandore at the Salle des Machines of the Tuileries; and they went to the opera, where they saw the successful Ballet de la Paix,—a curious hotchpot, from Gray's description, of cracked voices and incongruous mythology. With the Comédie Française they were better pleased, although Walpole, strange to say, unlike Goldsmith ten years later, was not able to commend the performance of Molière's L'Avare. They saw Mademoiselle Gaussin (as yet unrivalled by the unrisen Mademoiselle Clairon) in La Noue's tragedy of Mahomet Second, then recently produced, with Dufresne in the leading male part; and they also saw the prince of petits-maîtres, Grandval, acting with Dufresne's sister, Mademoiselle Jeanne-Françoise Quinault (an actress 'somewhat in Mrs. Clive's way,' says Gray), in the Philosophe marié of Nericault Destouches,—a charming comedy already transferred to the English stage in the version by John Kelly of The Universal Spectator.

Theatres, however, are not the only amusements which the two travellers chronicle to the home-keeping West. A great part of their time is spent in seeing churches and palaces full of pictures. Then there is the inevitable visit to Versailles, which, in sum, they concur in condemning. 'The great front,' says Walpole, 'is a lumber of littleness, composed of black brick, stuck full of bad old busts, and fringed with gold rails.' Gray (he says) likes it; but Gray is scarcely more complimentary,—at all events is quite as hard upon the façade, using almost the same phrases of depreciation. It is 'a huge heap of littleness,' in hue 'black, dirty red, and yellow; the first proceeding from stone changed by age; the second, from a mixture of brick; and the last, from a profusion of tarnished gilding. You cannot see a more disagreeable tout ensemble; and, to finish the matter, it is all stuck over in many places with small busts of a tawny hue between every two windows.' The garden, however, pleases him better; nothing could be vaster and more magnificent than the coup d'œil, with its fountains and statues and grand canal. But the 'general taste of the place' is petty and artificial. 'All is forced, all is constrained about you; statues and vases sowed everywhere without distinction; sugar-loaves and minced pies of yew; scrawl work of box, and little squirting jets d'eau, besides a great sameness in the walks,—cannot help striking one at first sight; not to mention the silliest of labyrinths, and all Æsop's fables in water.'[24] 'The garden is littered with statues and fountains, each of which has its tutelary deity. In particular, the elementary god of fire solaces himself in one. In another, Enceladus, in lieu of a mountain, is overwhelmed with many waters. There are avenues of water-pots, who disport themselves much in squirting up cascadelins. In short, 'tis a garden for a great child.'[25] The day following, being Whitsunday, they witness a grand ceremonial,—the installation of nine Knights of the Saint Esprit: 'high mass celebrated with music, great crowd, much incense, King, Queen, Dauphin, Mesdames, Cardinals, and Court; Knights arrayed by His Majesty; reverences before the altar, not bows, but curtsies; stiff hams; much tittering among the ladies; trumpets, kettle-drums, and fifes.'[26]

It is Gray who thus summarises the show. But we must go to Walpole for the account of another expedition, the visit to the Convent of the Chartreux, the uncouth horror of which, with its gloomy chapel and narrow cloisters, seems to have fascinated the Gothic soul of the future author of the Castle of Otranto. Here, in one of the cells, they make the acquaintance of a fresh initiate into the order,—the account of whose environment suggests retirement rather than solitude. 'He was extremely civil, and called himself Dom Victor. We have promised to visit him often. Their habit is all white: but besides this he was infinitely clean in his person; and his apartment and garden, which he keeps and cultivates without any assistance, was neat to a degree. He has four little rooms, furnished in the prettiest manner, and hung with good prints. One of them is a library, and another a gallery. He has several canary-birds disposed in a pretty manner in breeding-cages. In his garden was a bed of good tulips in bloom, flowers and fruit-trees, and all neatly kept. They are permitted at certain hours to talk to strangers, but never to one another, or to go out of their convent.' In the same institution they saw Le Sueur's history (in pictures) of St. Bruno, the founder of the Chartreux. Walpole had not yet studied Raphael at Rome, but these pictures, he considered, excelled everything he had seen in England and Paris.[27]

'From thence [Paris],' say Walpole's Short Notes, 'we went with my cousin, Henry Conway, to Rheims, in Champagne, [and] staid there three months.' One of their chief objects was to improve themselves in French. 'You must not wonder,' he tells West, 'if all my letters resemble dictionaries, with French on one side, and English on t'other; I deal in nothing else at present, and talk a couple of words of each language alternately from morning till night.'[28] But he does not seem to have yet developed his later passion for letter-writing, and the 'account of our situation and proceedings' is still delegated to Gray, some of whose despatches at this time are not preserved. There is, however, one from Rheims to Gray's mother which gives a vivid idea of the ancient French Cathedral city, slumbering in its vast vine-clad plain, with its picturesque old houses and lonely streets, its long walks under the ramparts, and its monotonous frog-haunted moat. They have no want of society, for Henry Conway procured them introductions everywhere; but the Rhemois are more constrained, less familiar, less hospitable, than the Parisians. Quadrille is the almost invariable amusement, interrupted by one entertainment (for the Rhemois as a rule give neither dinners nor suppers); to wit, a five o'clock goûter, which is 'a service of wine, fruits, cream, sweetmeats, crawfish, and cheese,' after which they sit down to cards again. Occasionally, however, the demon of impromptu flutters these 'set, gray lives,' and (like Dr. Johnson) even Rheims must 'have a frisk.' 'For instance,' says Gray, 'the other evening we happened to be got together in a company of eighteen people, men and women of the best fashion here, at a garden in the town, to walk; when one of the ladies bethought herself of asking, Why should we not sup here? Immediately the cloth was laid by the side of a fountain under the trees, and a very elegant supper served up; after which another said, Come, let us sing; and directly began herself. From singing we insensibly fell to dancing, and singing in a round; when somebody mentioned the violins, and immediately a company of them was ordered. Minuets were begun in the open air, and then came country dances, which held till four o'clock next morning; at which hour the gayest lady there proposed that such as were weary should get into their coaches, and the rest of them should dance before them with the music in the van; and in this manner we paraded through all the principal streets of the city, and waked everybody in it.' Walpole, adds Gray, would have made this entertainment chronic. But 'the women did not come into it,' and shrank back decorously 'to their dull cards, and usual formalities.'[29]

At Rheims the travellers lingered on in the hope of being joined by Selwyn and George Montagu. In September they left Rheims for Dijon, the superior attractions of which town made them rather regret their comparative rustication of the last three months. From Dijon they passed southward to Lyons, whence Gray sent to West (then drinking the Tunbridge waters) a daintily elaborated conceit touching the junction of the Rhone and the Saône. While at Lyons they made an excursion to Geneva to escort Henry Conway, who had up to this time been their companion, on his way to that place. They took a roundabout route in order to visit the Convent of the Grande Chartreuse, and on the 28th Walpole writes to West from 'a Hamlet among the mountains of Savoy [Echelles].' He is to undergo many transmigrations, he says, before he ends his letter. 'Yesterday I was a shepherd of Dauphiné; to-day an Alpine savage; to-morrow a Carthusian monk; and Friday a Swiss Calvinist.' When he next takes up his pen, he has passed through his third stage, and visited the Chartreuse. With the convent itself neither Gray nor his companions seem to have been much impressed, probably because their expectations had been indefinite. For the approach and the situation they had only enthusiasm. Gray is the accredited landscape-painter of the party, but here even Walpole breaks out: 'The road, West, the road! winding round a prodigious mountain, and surrounded with others, all shagged with hanging woods, obscured with pines, or lost in clouds! Below, a torrent breaking through cliffs, and tumbling through fragments of rocks! Sheets of cascades forcing their silver speed down channelled precipices, and hastening into the roughened river at the bottom! Now and then an old foot bridge, with a broken rail, a leaning cross, a cottage, or the ruin of an hermitage! This sounds too bombast and too romantic to one that has not seen it, too cold for one that has. If I could send you my letter post between two lovely tempests that echoed each other's wrath, you might have some idea of this noble roaring scene, as you were reading it. Almost on the summit, upon a fine verdure, but without any prospect, stands the Chartreuse.'[30]

The foregoing passage is dated Aix-in-Savoy, 30 September. Two days later, passing by Annecy, they came to Geneva. Here they stayed a week to see Conway settled, and made a 'solitary journey' back to Lyons, but by a different road, through the spurs of the Jura and across the plains of La Bresse. At Lyons they found letters awaiting them from Sir Robert Walpole, desiring his son to go to Italy,—a proposal with which Gray, only too glad to exchange the over-commercial city of Lyons for 'the place in the world that best deserves seeing,' was highly delighted. Accordingly, we speedily find them duly equipped with 'beaver bonnets, beaver gloves, beaver stockings, muffs, and bear-skins' en route for the Alps. At the foot of Mont Cenis their chaise was taken to pieces and loaded on mules, and they themselves were transferred to low matted legless chairs carried on poles,—a not unperilous mode of progression, when, as in this case, quarrels took place among the bearers. But the tragedy of the journey happened before they had quitted the chaise. Walpole had a fat little black spaniel of King Charles's breed, named Tory, and he had let the little creature out of the carriage for the air. While it was waddling along contentedly at the horses' heads, a gaunt wolf rushed out of a fir wood, and exit poor Tory before any one had time to snap a pistol. In later years, Gray would perhaps have celebrated this mishap as elegantly as he sang the death of his friend's favourite cat; but in these pre-poetic days he restricts himself to calling it an 'odd accident enough.'[31]

'After eight days' journey through Greenland,'—as Gray puts it to West,—they reached Turin, where among other English they found Pope's friend, Joseph Spence, Professor of Poetry at Oxford. Beyond Walpole's going to Court, and their visiting an extraordinary play called La Rappresentazione dell' Anima Dannata (for the benefit of an Hospital), a full and particular account of which is contained in one of Spence's letters to his mother,[32] nothing remarkable seems to have happened to them in the Piedmontese capital. From Turin they went on to Genoa,—'the happy country where huge lemons grow' (as Gray quotes, not textually, from Waller),—whose blue sea and vine-trellises they quit reluctantly for Bologna, by way of Tortona, Piacenza, Parma (where they inspect the Correggios in the Duomo), Reggio, and Modena. At Bologna, in the absence of introductions, picture-seeing is their main occupation. 'Except pictures and statues,' writes Walpole, 'we are not very fond of sights.... Now and then we drop in at a procession, or a high mass, hear the music, enjoy a strange attire, and hate the foul monkhood. Last week was the feast of the Immaculate Conception. On the eve we went to the Franciscans' church to hear the academical exercises. There were moult and moult clergy, about two dozen dames, that treated one another with illustrissima and brown kisses, the vice-legate, the gonfalonier, and some senate. The vice-legate ... is a young personable person of about twenty, and had on a mighty pretty cardinal-kind of habit; 'twou'd make a delightful masquerade dress. We asked his name: Spinola. What, a nephew of the cardinal-legate? Signor, no; ma credo che gli sia qualche cosa. He sat on the right hand with the gonfalonier in two purple fauteuils. Opposite was a throne of crimson damask, with the device of the Academy, the Gelati;[33] and trimmings of gold. Here sat at a table, in black, the head of the Academy, between the orator and the first poet. At two semicircular tables on either hand sat three poets and three; silent among many candles. The chief made a little introduction, the orator a long Italian vile harangue. Then the chief, the poet, the poets,—who were a Franciscan, an Olivetan, an old abbé, and three lay,—read their compositions; and to-day they are pasted up in all parts of the town. As we came out of the church, we found all the convent and neighbouring houses lighted all over with lanthorns of red and yellow paper, and two bonfires.'[34]

In the Christmas of 1739, the friends crossed the Apennines, and entered Florence. If they had wanted introductions at Bologna, there was no lack of them in Tuscany, and they were to find one friend who afterwards figured largely in Walpole's correspondence. This was Mr. (afterwards Sir Horace) Mann, British Minister Plenipotentiary at the Court of Florence. 'He is the best and most obliging person in the world,' says Gray, and his house, with a brief interval, was their residence for fifteen months. Their letters from Florence are less interesting than those from which quotations have already been made, while their amusements seem to have been more independent of each other than before. Gray occupied himself in the galleries taking the notes of pictures and statuary afterwards published by Mitford, and in forming a collection of MS. music; Walpole, on the other hand, had slightly cooled in his eagerness for the antique, which now 'pleases him calmly.' 'I recollect'—he says—'the joy I used to propose if I could but see the Great Duke's gallery; I walk into it now with as little emotion as I should into St. Paul's. The statues are a congregation of good sort of people that I have a great deal of unruffled regard for.' The fact was, no doubt, that society had now superior attractions. As the son of the English Prime Minister, and with Mann, who was a relation,[35] at his elbow, all doors were open to him. A correct record of his time would probably show an unvaried succession of suppers, balls, and masquerades. In the carnival week, when he snatches 'a little unmasqued moment' to write to West, he says he has done nothing lately 'but slip out of his domino into bed, and out of bed into his domino. The end of the Carnival is frantic, bacchanalian; all the morn one makes parties in masque to the shops and coffee-houses, and all the evening to the operas and balls.' If Gray was of these junketings, his letters do not betray it. He was probably engaged in writing uncomplimentary notes on the Venus de' Medici, or transcribing a score of Pergolesi.

The first interruption to these diversions came in March, when they quitted Florence for Rome in order to witness the coronation of the successor of Clement XII., who had died in the preceding month. On their road from Siena they were passed by a shrill-voiced figure in a red cloak, with a white handkerchief on its head, which they took for a fat old woman, but which afterwards turned out to be Farinelli's rival, Senesino. Rome disappointed them,—especially in its inhabitants and general desolation. 'I am very glad,' writes Walpole, 'that I see it while it yet exists;' and he goes on to prophesy that before a great number of years it will cease to exist. 'I am persuaded,' he says again, 'that in an hundred years Rome will not be worth seeing; 'tis less so now than one would believe. All the public pictures are decayed or decaying; the few ruins cannot last long; and the statues and private collections must be sold, from the great poverty of the families.' Perhaps this last consideration, coupled with the depressing character of Roman hospitality ('Roman conversations are dreadful things!' he tells Conway), revived his virtuoso tastes. 'I am far gone in medals, lamps, idols, prints, etc., and all the small commodities to the purchase of which I can attain; I would buy the Coliseum if I could.' Meanwhile as the cardinals are quarrelling, the coronation is still deferred; and they visit Naples, whence they explore Herculaneum, then but recently exposed and identified. But neither Gray nor Walpole waxes very eloquent upon this theme,—probably because at this time the excavations were only partial, while Pompeii was, of course, as yet under ground. Walpole's next letter is written from Radicofani,—'a vile little town at the foot of an old citadel,' which again is at 'the top of a black barren mountain;' the whole reminding the writer of 'Hamilton's Bawn' in Swift's verses. In this place, although the traditional residence of one of the Three Kings of Cologne, there is but one pen, the property of the Governor, who when Walpole borrows it, sends it to him under 'conduct of a sergeant and two Swiss,' with special injunctions as to its restoration,—a precaution which in Walpole's view renders it worthy to be ranked with the other precious relics of the poor Capuchins of the place, concerning which he presently makes rather unkindly fun. A few days later they were once more in the Casa Ambrosio, Mann's pleasant house at Florence, with the river running so close to them that they could fish out of the windows. 'I have a terreno [ground-floor] all to myself,' says Walpole, 'with an open gallery on the Arno, where I am now writing to you [i. e., Conway]. Over against me is the famous Gallery; and, on either hand, two fair bridges. Is not this charming and cool?' Add to which, on the bridges aforesaid, in the serene Italian air, one may linger all night in a dressing-gown, eating iced fruits to the notes of a guitar. But (what was even better than music and moonlight) there is the society that was the writer's 'fitting environment.' Lady Pomfret, with her daughters, Lady Charlotte, afterwards governess to the children of George III., and the beauty Lady Sophia, held a 'charming conversation' once a week; while the Princess Craon de Beauvau has 'a constant pharaoh and supper every night, where one is quite at one's ease.' Another lady-resident, scarcely so congenial to Walpole, was his sister-in-law, the wife of his eldest brother, Robert, who, with Lady Pomfret, made certain (in Walpole's eyes) wholly preposterous pretentions to the yet uninvented status of blue-stocking. To Lady Walpole and Lady Pomfret was speedily added another 'she-meteor' in the person of the celebrated Lady Mary Wortley Montagu.

When Lady Mary arrived in Florence in the summer of 1740, she was a woman of more than fifty, and was just entering upon that unexplained exile from her country and husband which was prolonged for two-and-twenty years. Her brilliant abilities were unimpaired; but it is probable that the personal eccentricities which had exposed her to the satire of Pope, had not decreased with years. That these would be extenuated under Walpole's malicious pen was not to be expected; still less, perhaps, that they would be treated justly. Although, as already intimated, he was not aware of the scandal respecting himself which her descendants were to revive, he had ample ground for antipathy. Her husband was the bitter foe of Sir Robert Walpole; and she herself had been the firm friend and protectress of his mother's rival and successor, Miss Skerret.[36] Accordingly, even before her advent, he makes merry over the anticipated issue of this portentous 'triple alliance' of mysticism and nonsense, and later he writes to Conway: 'Did I tell you Lady Mary Wortley is here? She laughs at my Lady Walpole, scolds my Lady Pomfret, and is laughed at by the whole town. Her dress, her avarice, and her impudence must amaze any one that never heard her name. She wears a foul mob, that does not cover her greasy black locks, that hang loose, never combed or curled; an old mazarine blue wrapper, that gaps open and discovers a canvas petticoat.... In three words, I will give you her picture as we drew it in the Sortes Virgilianæ,—Insanam vatem aspicies. I give you my honour we did not choose it; but Gray, Mr. Coke, Sir Francis Dashwood, and I, with several others, drew it fairly amongst a thousand for different people.'[37] In justice to Lady Mary it is only fair to say that she seems to have been quite unconscious that she was an object of ridicule, and was perfectly satisfied with her reception at Florence. 'Lord and Lady Pomfret'—she tells Mr. Wortley—'take pains to make the place agreeable to me, and I have been visited by the greatest part of the people of quality.'[38] But although Walpole's portrait is obviously malicious (some of its details are suppressed in the above quotation), it is plain that even unprejudiced spectators could not deny her peculiarities. 'Lady Mary,' said Spence, 'is one of the most shining characters in the world, but shines like a comet; she is all irregularity, and always wandering; the most wise, the most imprudent; loveliest, most disagreeable; best-natured, cruellest woman in the world: "all things by turns, but nothing long."'[39]

By this time the new pope, Benedict XIV., had been elected. But although the friends were within four days journey of Rome, the fear of heat and malaria forced them to forego the spectacle of the coronation. They continued to reside with Mann at Florence until May in the following year. Upon Gray the 'violent delights' of the Tuscan capital had already begun to pall. It is, he says, 'an excellent place to employ all one's animal sensations in, but utterly contrary to one's rational powers.' Walpole, on the other hand, is in his element. 'I am so well within and without,' he says in the same letter which sketches Lady Mary, 'that you would scarce know me: I am younger than ever, think of nothing but diverting myself, and live in a round of pleasures. We have operas, concerts, and balls, mornings and evenings. I dare not tell you all of one's idlenesses; you would look so grave and senatorial at hearing that one rises at eleven in the morning, goes to the opera at nine at night, to supper at one, and to bed at three! But literally here the evenings and nights are so charming and so warm, one can't avoid 'em.' In a later letter he says he has lost all curiosity, and 'except the towns in the straight road to Great Britain, shall scarce see a jot more of a foreign land.' Indeed, save a sally concerning the humours of 'Moll Worthless' (Lady Mary) and Lady Walpole, and the record of the purchase of a few pictures, medals, and busts,—one of the last of which, a Vespasian in basalt, was subsequently among the glories of the Twickenham Gallery,—his remaining letters from Florence contain little of interest. Early in 1741, the homeward journey was mapped out. They were to go to Bologna to hear the Viscontina sing, they were to visit the Fair at Reggio, and so by Venice homewards.

But whether the Viscontina was in voice or not, there is, as far as our travellers are concerned, absence of evidence. No further letter of Gray from Florence has been preserved, nor is there any mention of him in Walpole's next despatch to West from Reggio. At that place a misunderstanding seems to have arisen, and they parted, Gray going forward to Venice with two other travelling companions, Mr. John Chute and Mr. Whitehed. In the rather barren record of Walpole's story, this misunderstanding naturally assumes an exaggerated importance. But it was really a very trifling and a very intelligible affair. They had been too long together; and the first fascination of travel, which formed at the outset so close a bond, had gradually faded with time. As this alteration took place, their natural dispositions began to assert themselves, and Walpole's normal love of pleasure and Gray's retired studiousness became more and more apparent. It is probable too, that, in all the Florentine gaieties, Gray, who was not a great man's son, fell a little into the background. At all events, the separation was imminent, and it needed but a nothing—the alleged opening by Walpole of a letter of Gray[40]—to to bring it about. Whatever the proximate cause, both were silent on the subject, although, years after the quarrel had been made up, and Gray was dead, Walpole took the entire blame upon himself. When Mason was preparing Gray's Memoirs in 1773, he authorized him to insert a note by which, in general terms, he admitted himself to have been in fault, assigning as his reason for not being more explicit, that while he was living it would not be pleasant to read his private affairs discussed in magazines and newspapers. But to Mason personally he was at the same time thoroughly candid, as well as considerate to his departed friend: 'I am conscious,' he says, 'that in the beginning of the differences between Gray and me, the fault was mine. I was too young, too fond of my own diversions, nay, I do not doubt, too much intoxicated by indulgence, vanity, and the insolence of my situation, as a Prime Minister's son, not to have been inattentive and insensible to the feelings of one I thought below me; of one, I blush to say it, that I knew was obliged to me; of one whom presumption and folly perhaps made me deem not my superior then in parts, though I have since felt my infinite inferiority to him. I treated him insolently: he loved me, and I did not think he did. I reproached him with the difference between us when he acted from conviction of knowing he was my superior; I often disregarded his wishes of seeing places, which I would not quit other amusements to visit, though I offered to send him to them without me. Forgive me, if I say that his temper was not conciliating. At the same time that I will confess to you that he acted a more friendly part, had I had the sense to take advantage of it; he freely told me of my faults. I declared I did not desire to hear them, nor would correct them. You will not wonder that with the dignity of his spirit, and the obstinate carelessness of mine, the breach must have grown wider till we became incompatible.'[41]

'Sir, you have said more than was necessary' was Johnson's reply to a peace-making speech from Topham Beauclerk. It is needless to comment further upon this incident, except to add that Walpole's generous words show that the disagreement was rather the outcome of a sequence of long-strained circumstances than the result of momentary petulance. For a time reconciliation was deferred, but eventually it was effected by a lady, and the intimacy thus renewed continued for the remainder of Gray's life.

Shortly after Gray's departure in May, Walpole fell ill of a quinsy. He did not, at first, recognise the gravity of his ailment, and doctored himself. By a fortunate chance, Joseph Spence, then travelling as governor to the Earl of Lincoln, was in the neighbourhood, and, responding to a message from Walpole, 'found him scarce able to speak.' Spence immediately sent for medical aid, and summoned from Florence one Antonio Cocchi, a physician and author of some eminence. Under Cocchi's advice, Walpole speedily showed signs of improvement, though, in his own words in the Short Notes, he 'was given over for five hours, escaping with great difficulty.' The sequel may be told from the same source. 'I went to Venice with Henry Clinton, Earl of Lincoln, and Mr. Joseph Spence, Professor of Poetry, and after a month's stay there, returned with them by sea from Genoa, landing at Antibes; and by the way of Toulon, Marseilles, Aix, and through Languedoc to Montpellier, Toulouse, and Orléans, arrived at Paris, where I left the Earl and Mr. Spence, and landed at Dover, September 12th, 1741, O. S., having been chosen Member of Parliament for Kellington [Callington], in Cornwall, at the preceding General Election [of June], which Parliament put a period to my father's administration, which had continued above twenty years.'

CHAPTER III.

Gains of the Grand Tour.—'Epistle to Ashton.'—Resignation of Sir Robert Walpole, who becomes Earl of Orford.—Collapse of the Secret Committee.—Life at Houghton.—The Picture Gallery.—'A Sermon on Painting.'—Lord Orford as Moses.—The 'Ædes Walpolianæ.'—Prior's 'Protogenes and Apelles.'—Minor Literature.—Lord Orford's Decline and Death; his Panegyric.—Horace Walpole's Means.

Although, during his stay in Italy, Walpole had neglected to accumulate the store of erudition which his friend Gray had been so industriously hiving for home consumption, he can scarcely be said to have learned nothing, especially at an age when much is learned unconsciously. His epistolary style, which, with its peculiar graces and pseudo-graces, had been already formed before he left England, had now acquired a fresh vivacity from his increased familiarity with the French and Italian languages; and he had carried on, however discursively, something more than a mere flirtation with antiquities. Dr. Conyers Middleton, whose once famous Life of Cicero was published early in 1741, and who was himself an antiquary of distinction, thought highly of Walpole's attainments in this way,[42] and indeed more than one passage in a poem written by Walpole to Ashton at this time could scarcely have been penned by any one not fairly familiar with (for example) the science of those 'medals' upon which Mr. Joseph Addison had discoursed so learnedly after his Italian tour:—

'What scanty precepts! studies how confin'd!

Too mean to fill your comprehensive mind;

Unsatisfy'd with knowing when or where

Some Roman bigot rais'd a fane to Fear;

On what green medal Virtue stands express'd,

How Concord's pictur'd, Liberty how dress'd;

Or with wise ken judiciously define

When Pius marks the honorary coin

Of Caracalla, or of Antonine.'[43]

The poem from which these lines are taken—An Epistle from Florence. To Thomas Ashton, Esq., Tutor to the Earl of Plimouth—extends to some four hundred lines, and exhibits another side of Walpole's activity in Italy. 'You have seen'—says Gray to West in July, 1740—'an Epistle to Mr. Ashton, that seems to me full of spirit and thought, and a good deal of poetic fire.' Writing to him ten years later, Gray seems still to have retained his first impression. 'Satire'—he says—'will be heard, for all the audience are by nature her friends; especially when she appears in the spirit of Dryden, with his strength, and often with his versification, such as you have caught in those lines on the Royal Unction, on the Papal dominion, and Convents of both Sexes; on Henry VIII. and Charles II., for these are to me the shining parts of your Epistle. There are many lines I could wish corrected, and some blotted out, but beauties enough to atone for a thousand worse faults than these.'[44] Walpole has never been ranked among the poets; but Gray's praise, in which Middleton and others concurred, justifies a further quotation. This is the passage on the Royal Unction and the Papal Dominion:—

'When at the altar a new monarch kneels,

What conjur'd awe upon the people steals!

The chosen He adores the precious oil,

Meekly receives the solemn charm, and while

The priest some blessed nothings mutters o'er,

Sucks in the sacred grease at every pore:

He seems at once to shed his mortal skin,

And feels divinity transfus'd within.

The trembling vulgar dread the royal nod,

And worship God's anointed more than God.

'Such sanction gives the prelate to such kings!

So mischief from those hallow'd fountains springs.

But bend your eye to yonder harass'd plains,

Where king and priest in one united reigns;

See fair Italia mourn her holy state,

And droop oppress'd beneath a papal weight;

Where fat celibacy usurps the soil,

And sacred sloth consumes the peasant's toil:

The holy drones monopolise the sky,

And plunder by a vow of poverty.

The Christian cause their lewd profession taints,

Unlearn'd, unchaste, uncharitable saints.'[45]

That the refined and fastidious Horace Walpole of later years should have begun as a passable imitator of Dryden is sufficiently piquant. But that the son of the great courtier Prime Minister should have distinguished himself by the vigour of his denunciations of kings and priests, especially when, as his biographers have not failed to remark, he was writing to one about to take orders, is more noticeable still. The poem was reprinted in his works, but he makes no mention of it in the Short Notes, nor of an Inscription for the Neglected Column in the Place of St. Mark at Florence, written at the same time, and characterized by the same anti-monarchical spirit.

His letters to Mann, his chief correspondent at this date, are greatly occupied, during the next few months, with the climax of the catastrophe recorded at the end of the preceding chapter,—the resignation of Sir Robert Walpole. The first of the long series was written on his way home in September, 1741, when he had for his fellow-passengers the Viscontina, Amorevoli, and other Italian singers, then engaged in invading England. He appears to have at once taken up his residence with his father in Downing Street. Into the network of circumstances which had conspired to array against the great peace Minister the formidable opposition of disaffected Whigs, Jacobites, Tories, and adherents of the Prince of Wales, it would here be impossible to enter. But there were already signs that Sir Robert was nodding to his fall; and that, although the old courage was as high as ever, the old buoyancy was beginning to flag. Failing health added its weight to the scale. In October Walpole tells his correspondent that he had 'been very near sealing his letter with black wax,' for his father had been in danger of his life, but was recovering, though he is no longer the Sir Robert that Mann once knew. He who formerly would snore before they had drawn his curtains, now never slept above an hour without waking; and 'he who at dinner always forgot that he was Minister,' now sat silent, with eyes fixed for an hour together. At the opening of Parliament, however, there was an ostensible majority of forty for the Court, and Walpole seems to have regarded this as encouraging. But one of the first motions was for an inquiry into the state of the nation, and this was followed by a division upon a Cornish petition which reduced the majority to seven,—a variation which sets the writer nervously jesting about apartments in the Tower. Seven days later, the opposition obtained a majority of four; and although Sir Robert, still sanguine in the remembrance of past successes, seemed less anxious than his family, matters were growing grave, and his youngest son was reconciling himself to the coming blow. It came practically on the 21st January, 1742, when Pulteney moved for a secret committee, which (in reality) was to be a committee of accusation against the Prime Minister. Walpole defeated this manœuvre with his characteristic courage and address, but only by a narrow majority of three. So inconsiderable a victory upon so crucial a question was perilously close to a reverse; and when, in the succeeding case of the disputed Chippenham Election, the Government were defeated by one, he yielded to the counsels of his advisers, and decided to resign. He was thereupon raised to the peerage as Earl of Orford, with a pension of £4,000 a year,[46] while his daughter by his second wife, Miss Skerret, was created an Earl's daughter in her own right. His fall was mourned by no one more sincerely than by the master he had served so staunchly for so long; and when he went to kiss hands at St. James's upon taking leave, the old king fell upon his neck, embraced him, and broke into tears.

The new Earl himself seems to have taken his reverses with his customary equanimity, and, like the shrewd 'old Parliamentary hand' that he was, to have at once devoted himself to the difficult task of breaking the force of the attack which he foresaw would be made upon himself by those in power. He contrived adroitly to foster dissension and disunion among the heterogeneous body of his opponents; he secured that the new Ministry should be mainly composed of his old party, the Whigs; and he managed to discredit his most formidable adversary, Pulteney. One of the first results of these precautionary measures was that a motion by Lord Limerick for a committee to examine into the conduct of the last twenty years was thrown out by a small majority. A fortnight later the motion was renewed in a fresh form, the scope of the examination being limited to the last ten years. Upon this occasion Horace Walpole made his maiden speech,—a graceful and modest, if not very forcible, effort on his father's side. In this instance, however, the Government were successful, and the Committee was appointed. Yet, despite the efforts to excite the public mind respecting Lord Orford, the case against him seems to have faded away in the hands of his accusers. The first report of the Committee, issued in May, contained nothing to criminate the person against whom the inquiry had been directly levelled; and despite the strenuous and even shameless efforts of the Government to obtain evidence inculpating the late Minister, the Committee were obliged to issue a second report in June, of which,—so far as the chief object was concerned,—the gross result was nil. By the middle of July, Walpole was able to tell Mann that the 'long session was over, and the Secret Committee already forgotten,'—as much forgotten, he says in a later letter, 'as if it had happened in the last reign.'

When Sir Robert Walpole had resigned, he had quitted his official residence in Downing Street (which ever since he first occupied it in 1735 has been the official residence of the First Lord of the Treasury), and moved to No. 5, Arlington Street, opposite to, but smaller than, the No. 17 in which his youngest son had been born, and upon the site of which William Kent built a larger house for Mr. Pelham. No. 5 is now distinguished by a tablet erected by the Society of Arts, proclaiming it to have been the house of the ex-Minister. From Arlington Street, or from the other home at Chelsea already mentioned, most of Walpole's letters were dated during the months which succeeded the crisis. But in August, when the House had risen, he migrated with the rest of the family to Houghton,—the great mansion in Norfolk which had now taken the place of the ancient seat of the Walpoles, where during the summer months his father had been accustomed in his free-handed manner to keep open house to all the county. Fond of hospitality, fond of field-sports, fond of gardening, and all out-door occupations, Lord Orford was at home among the flat expanses and Norfolk turnips. But the family seat had no such attractions to his son, fresh from the multi-coloured Continental life, and still bearing about him, in a certain frailty of physique and enervation of spirit, the tokens of a sickly childhood. 'Next post'—he says despairingly to Mann—'I shall not be able to write to you; and when I am there [at Houghton], shall scarce find materials to furnish a letter above every other post. I beg, however, that you will write constantly to me; it will be my only entertainment; for I neither hunt, brew, drink, nor reap.' 'Consider'—he says again—'I am in the barren land of Norfolk, where news grows as slow as anything green; and besides, I am in the house of a fallen minister!' Writing letters (in company with the little white dog 'Patapan'[47] which he had brought from Rome as a successor to the defunct Tory), walking, and playing comet with his sister Lady Mary or any chance visitors to the house, seem to have been his chief resources. A year later he pays a second visit to Houghton, and he is still unreconciled to his environment. 'Only imagine that I here every day see men, who are mountains of roast beef, and only just seem roughly hewn out into the outlines of human form, like the giant-rock at Pratolino! I shudder when I see them brandish their knives in act to carve, and look on them as savages that devour one another.' Then there are the enforced civilities to entirely uninteresting people,—the intolerable female relative, who is curious about her cousins to the fortieth remove. 'I have an Aunt here, a family piece of goods, an old remnant of inquisitive hospitality and economy, who, to all intents and purposes, is as beefy as her neighbours. She wore me so down yesterday with interrogatories that I dreamt all night she was at my ear with "who's" and "why's," and "when's" and "where's," till at last in my very sleep I cried out, "For heaven's sake, Madam, ask me no more questions."' And then, in his impatience of bores in general, he goes on to write a little essay upon that 'growth of English root,' that 'awful yawn, which sleep cannot abate,' as Byron calls it,—Ennui. 'I am so far from growing used to mankind [he means 'uncongenial mankind'] by living amongst them, that my natural ferocity and wildness does but every day grow worse. They tire me, they fatigue me; I don't know what to do with them; I don't know what to say to them; I fling open the windows, and fancy I want air; and when I get by myself, I undress myself, and seem to have had people in my pockets, in my plaits, and on my shoulders! I indeed find this fatigue worse in the country than in town, because one can avoid it there, and has more resources; but it is there too. I fear 'tis growing old; but I literally seem to have murdered a man whose name was Ennui, for his ghost is ever before me. They say there is no English word for ennui; I think you may translate it most literally by what is called "entertaining people" and "doing the honours:" that is, you sit an hour with somebody you don't know and don't care for, talk about the wind and the weather, and ask a thousand foolish questions, which all begin with, "I think you live a good deal in the country," or "I think you don't love this thing or that." Oh, 'tis dreadful!'[48]

But even Houghton, with its endless 'doing the honours,' must have had its compensations. There was a library, and—what must have had even stronger attractions for Horace Walpole—that magnificent and almost unique collection of pictures which under a later member of the family, the third Earl of Orford, passed to Catherine of Russia. For years Lord Orford, with unwearied diligence and exceptional opportunities, had been accumulating these treasures. Mann in Florence, Vertue in England, and a host of industrious foragers had helped to bring together the priceless canvases which crowded the rooms of the Minister's house next the Treasury at Whitehall. And if he was inexperienced as a critic, he was far too acute a man to be deceived by the shiploads of 'Holy Families, Madonnas, and other dismal dark subjects, neither entertaining nor ornamental,' against which the one great native artist of his time,—the painter of the 'Rake's Progress,' so persistently inveighed. There was no doubt about the pedigrees of the Wouvermanns and Teniers, the Guidos and Rubens, the Vandykes and Murillos, which decorated the rooms at Downing Street and Chelsea and Richmond. From the few records which remain of prices, it would seem that, in addition to the merit of authenticity, many of the pictures must have had the attraction of being 'bargains.' In days when £4,000 or £5,000 is no extravagant price to be given for an old master, it is instructive to read that £750 was the largest sum ever given by Lord Orford for any one picture, and Walpole himself quotes this amount as £630. For four great Snyders, which Vertue bought for him, he only paid £428, and for a portrait of Clement IX. by Carlo Maratti no more than £200. Many of the other pictures in his gallery cost him still less, being donations—no doubt sometimes in gratitude for favours to come—from his friends and adherents. The Earl of Pembroke, Lord Waldegrave, the Duke of Montagu, Lord Tyrawley, were among these. But, upon the whole, the collection was gathered mainly from galleries like the Zambecari at Bologna, the Arnaldi Palace at Florence, the Pallavicini at Rome, and from the stores of noble collectors in England.

In 1743, the majority of these had apparently been concentrated at Houghton, where there was special accommodation for them. 'My Lord,' says Horace, groaning over a fresh visit to Norfolk, 'has pressed me so much that I could not with decency refuse: he is going to furnish and hang his picture-gallery, and wants me.' But it is impossible to believe that he really objected to a duty so congenial to his tastes. In fact, he was really greatly interested in it. His letters contain frequent references to a new Domenichino, a Virgin and Child, which Mann is sending from Florence, and he comes up to London to meet this and other pictures, and is not seriously inconsolable to find that owing to the quarantine for the plague on the Continent, he is detained for some days in town. One of the best evidences of his solicitude in connection with the arrangements of the Houghton collection is, however, the discourse which he wrote in the summer of 1742, under the title of a Sermon on Painting, and which he himself tells us was actually preached by the Earl's chaplain in the gallery, and afterwards repeated at Stanno, his elder brother's house. The text was taken from Psalm CXV.: 'They have Mouths, but they speak not: Eyes have they, but they see not: neither is there any Breath in their Nostrils;' and the writer, illustrating his theme by reference to the pictures around his audience in the gallery, or dispersed through the building, manages to eulogize the painter's art with considerable skill. He touches upon the pernicious effect which the closely realized representation of popish miracles must have upon the illiterate spectator, and points out how much more commendable and serviceable is the portraiture of benignity, piety, and chastity,—how much more instructive the incidents of the Passion, where every 'touch of the pencil is a lesson of contrition, each figure an apostle to call you to repentance.' He lays stress, as Lessing and other writers have done, on the universal language of the brush, and indicates its abuse when restricted to the reproduction of inquisitors, visionaries, imaginary hermits, 'consecrated gluttons,' or 'noted concubines,' after which (as becomes his father's son) he does not fail to disclose its more fitting vocation, to perpetuate the likeness of William the Deliverer, and the benign, the honest house of Hanover. The Dives and Lazarus of Veronese and the Prodigal Son of Salvator Rosa, both on the walls, are pressed into his service, and the famous Usurers of Quentin Matsys also prompt their parable. Then, after adroitly dwelling upon the pictorial honours lavished upon mere asceticism to the prejudice of real heroes, taking Poussin's picture of Moses Striking the Rock for his text, he winds into what was probably the ultimate purpose of his discourse, a neatly veiled panegyric of Sir Robert Walpole under guise of the great lawgiver of the Israelites, which may be cited as a favourable sample of this curious oration:

'But it is not necessary to dive into profane history for examples of unregarded merit; the Scriptures themselves contain instances of the greatest patriots, who lie neglected, while new-fashioned bigots or noisy incendiaries are the reigning objects of public veneration. See the great Moses himself,—the lawgiver, the defender, the preserver of Israel! Peevish orators are more run after, and artful Jesuits more popular. Examine but the life of that slighted patriot, how boldly in his youth he understood the cause of liberty! Unknown, without interest, he stood against the face of Pharaoh! He saved his countrymen from the hand of tyranny, and from the dominion of an idolatrous king. How patiently did he bear for a series of years the clamours and cabals of a factious people, wandering after strange lusts, and exasperated by ambitious ringleaders! How oft did he intercede for their pardon, when injured himself! How tenderly deny them specious favours, which he knew must turn to their own destruction! See him lead them through opposition, through plots, through enemies, to the enjoyment of peace, and to the possession of a land flowing with milk and honey. Or with more surprise see him in the barren desert, where sands and wilds overspread the dreary scene, where no hopes of moisture, no prospect of undiscovered springs, could flatter their parching thirst; see how with a miraculous hand—

'"He struck the rock, and straight the waters flowed."'

Whoever denies his praises to such evidences of merit, or with jealous look can scowl on such benefits, is like the senseless idol, that has a mouth that speaks not, and eyes that cannot see.'

If, in accordance with some perverse fashion of the day, the foregoing production had not been disguised as a sermon, and actually preached with the orthodox accompaniment of bands and doxology, there is no reason why it should not have been regarded as a harmless and not unaccomplished essay on Art. But the objectionable spirit of parody upon the ritual, engendered by the strife between 'high' and 'low' (Walpole himself wrote some Lessons for the Day, 1742, which are to be found in the works of Sir Charles Hanbury Williams), seems to have dictated the title of what in other respects is a serious Spectator, and needed no spice of irreverence to render it palatable. The Sermon had, however, one valuable result, namely, that it suggested to its author the expediency of preparing some record of the pictorial riches of Houghton upon the model of the famous Ædes Barberini and Giustinianæ. As the dedication of the Ædes Walpolianæ is dated 24 August, 1743, it must have been written before that date; but it was not actually published until 1747, and then only to give away. Another enlarged and more accurate edition was issued in 1752, and it was finally reprinted in the second volume of the Works of 1798, pp. 221-78, where it is followed by the Sermon on Painting. Professing to be more a catalogue of the pictures than a description of them, it nevertheless gives a good idea of a collection which (as its historian says) both in its extent and the condition of its treasures excelled most of the existing collections of Italy. In an 'Introduction,' the characteristics of the various artists are distinguished with much discrimination, although it is naturally more sympathetic than critical. Perhaps one of its happiest pages is the following excursus upon a poem of Prior: 'I cannot conclude this topic of the ancient painters without taking notice of an extreme pretty instance of Prior's taste, and which may make an example on that frequent subject, the resemblance between poetry and painting, and prove that taste in the one will influence in the other. Everybody has read his tale of Protogenes and Apelles. If they have read the story in Pliny they will recollect that by the latter's account it seemed to have been a trial between two Dutch performers. The Roman author tells you that when Apelles was to write his name on a board, to let Protogenes know who had been to inquire for him, he drew an exactly straight and slender line. Protogenes returned, and with his pencil and another colour, divided his competitor's. Apelles, on seeing the ingenious minuteness of the Rhodian master, took a third colour, and laid on a still finer and indivisible line. But the English poet, who could distinguish the emulation of genius from nice experiments about splitting hairs, took the story into his own hands, and in a less number of trials, and with bolder execution, comprehended the whole force of painting, and flung drawing, colouring, and the doctrine of light and shade into the noble contention of those two absolute masters. In Prior, the first wrote his name in a perfect design, and

'"——with one judicious stroke

On the plain ground Apelles drew

A circle regularly true."'

Protogenes knew the hand, and showed Apelles that his own knowledge of colouring was as great as the other's skill in drawing.

'"Upon the happy line he laid

Such obvious light and easy shade

That Paris' apple stood confest,

Or Leda's egg, or Chloe's breast."'[49]

Apelles acknowledged his rival's merit, without jealously persisting to refine on the masterly reply:—

'"Pugnavere pares, succubuere pares"'[50]

Among the other efforts of his pen at this time were some squibs in ridicule of the new Ministry. One was a parody of a scene in Macbeth; the other of a scene in Corneille's Cinna. He also wrote a paper against Lord Bath in the Old England Journal.

In the not very perplexed web of Horace Walpole's life, the next occurrence of importance is his father's death. When, as Sir Robert Walpole, he had ceased to be Prime Minister, he was sixty-five years of age; and though his equanimity and wonderful constitution still seemed to befriend him, he had personally little desire, even if the ways had been open, to recover his ancient power. 'I believe nothing could prevail on him to return to the Treasury,' writes his son to Mann in 1743. 'He says he will keep the 12th of February—the day he resigned—with his family as long as he lives.' He continued nevertheless, to assist his old master with his counsel, and more than one step of importance by which the King startled his new Ministry owed its origin to a confidential consultation with Lord Orford. When, in January, 1744, the old question of discontinuing the Hanoverian troops was revived with more than ordinary insistence, it was through Lord Orford's timely exertions, and his personal credit with his friends, that the motion was defeated by an overwhelming majority. On the other hand, a further attempt to harass him by another Committee of Secret Inquiry was wholly unsuccessful, and signs were not wanting that his old prestige had by no means departed. Towards the close of 1744, however, his son begins to chronicle a definite decline in his health. He is evidently suffering seriously from stone, and is forbidden to take the least exercise by the King's serjeant-surgeon, that famous Mr. Ranby who was the friend of Hogarth and Fielding.[51] In January of the next year, he is trying a famous specific for his complaint, Mrs. Stephens's medicine. Six weeks later, he has been alarmingly ill for about a month; and although reckoned out of absolute danger, is hardly ever conscious more than four hours out of the four-and-twenty, from the powerful opiates he takes in order to deaden pain. A month later, on the 18th March, 1745, he died at Arlington Street, in his sixty-ninth year. At first his son dares scarcely speak of his loss, but a fortnight afterwards he writes more fully. After showing that the state of his circumstances proved how little truth there had been in the charges of self-enrichment made against him, Walpole goes on to say: 'It is certain, he is dead very poor: his debts, with his legacies, which are trifling, amount to fifty thousand pounds. His estate, a nominal eight thousand a year, much mortgaged. In short, his fondness for Houghton has endangered him. If he had not so overdone it, he might have left such an estate to his family as might have secured the glory of the place for many years: another such debt must expose it to sale. If he had lived, his unbounded generosity and contempt of money would have run him into vast difficulties. However irreparable his personal loss may be to his friends, he certainly died critically well for himself: he had lived to stand the rudest trials with honour, to see his character universally cleared, his enemies brought to infamy for their ignorance or villainy, and the world allowing him to be the only man in England fit to be what he had been; and he died at a time when his age and infirmities prevented his again undertaking the support of a government, which engrossed his whole care, and which he foresaw was falling into the last confusion. In this I hope his judgment failed! His fortune attended him to the last, for he died of the most painful of all distempers, with little or no pain.'[52]

From the Short Notes we learn further: 'He [my father] left me the house in Arlington-street in which he died, £5000 in money, and £1000 a year from the Collector's place in the Custom-house, and the surplus to be divided between my brother Edward and me.'

CHAPTER IV.

Stage-gossip and Small-talk.—Ranelagh Gardens.—Fontenoy and Leicester House.—Echoes of the '45.—Preston Pans.—Culloden.—Trial of the Rebel Lords.—Deaths of Kilmarnock and Balmerino.—Epilogue to Tamerlane.—Walpole and his Relatives.—Lady Orford.—Literary Efforts.—The Beauties.—Takes a House at Windsor.

During the period between Walpole's return to England and the death of Lord Orford, his letters, addressed almost exclusively to Mann, are largely occupied with the occurrences which accompanied and succeeded his father's downfall. To Lord Orford's protégé and relative these particulars were naturally of the first importance, and Walpole's function of 'General Intelligencer' fell proportionately into the background. Still, there are occasional references to current events of a merely social character. After the Secret Committee, he is interested (probably because his friend Conway was pecuniarily interested) in the Opera, and the reception by the British public of the Viscontina, Amorevoli, and the other Italian singers whom he had known abroad. Of the stage he says comparatively little, dismissing poor Mrs. Woffington, who had then just made her appearance at Covent Garden, as 'a bad actress,' who, nevertheless, 'has life,'—an opinion in which he is supported by Conway, who calls her 'an impudent, Irish-faced girl.' In the acting of Garrick, after whom all the town is (as Gray writes) 'horn-mad' in May, 1742, he sees nothing wonderful, although he admits that it is heresy to say so, since that infallible stage critic, the Duke of Argyll, has declared him superior to Betterton. But he praises 'a little simple farce' at Drury Lane, Miss Lucy in Town, by Henry Fielding, in which his future friend, Mrs. Clive, and Beard mimic Amorevoli and the Muscovita. The same letter contains a reference to another famous stage-queen, now nearing eighty, Anne Bracegirdle, who should have had the money that Congreve left to Henrietta, Duchess of Marlborough. 'Tell Mr. Chute [he says] that his friend Bracegirdle breakfasted with me this morning. As she went out, and wanted her clogs, she turned to me, and said, "I remember at the playhouse, they used to call, Mrs. Oldfield's chair! Mrs. Barry's clogs! and Mrs. Bracegirdle's pattens!"'[53] One pictures a handsome old lady, a little bent, and leaning on a crutch stick as she delivers this parting utterance at the door.[54]

Among the occurrences of 1742 which find fitting record in the correspondence, is the opening of that formidable rival to Vauxhall, Ranelagh Gardens. All through the spring the great Rotunda, with its encircling tiers of galleries and supper-boxes,—the coup d'œil of which Johnson thought was the finest thing he had ever seen,—had been rising slowly at the side of Chelsea Hospital. In April it was practically completed, and almost ready for visitors. Walpole, of course, breakfasts there, like the rest of the beau monde. 'The building is not finished [he says], but they get great sums by people going to see it and breakfasting in the house; there were yesterday no less than three hundred and eighty persons, at eighteenpence a-piece. You see how poor we are, when, with a tax of four shillings in the pound, we are laying out such sums for cakes and ale.'[55] A week or two later comes the formal inauguration. 'Two nights ago [May 24] Ranelagh-gardens were opened at Chelsea; the Prince, Princess, Duke, much nobility, and much mob besides, were there. There is a vast amphitheatre, finely gilt, painted, and illuminated, into which everybody that loves eating, drinking, staring, or crowding, is admitted for twelvepence. The building and disposition of the gardens cost sixteen thousand pounds. Twice a week there are to be Ridottos at guinea-tickets, for which you are to have a supper and music. I was there last night [May 25],'—the writer adds,—'but did not find the joy of it,'[56] and, at present, he prefers Vauxhall, because of the approach by water, that 'trajet du fleuve fatal,'—as it is styled in the Vauxhall de Londres which a French poet dedicated in 1769 to M. de Fontenelle. He seems, however, to have taken Lord Orford to Ranelagh, and he records in July that they walked with a train at their heels like two chairmen going to fight,—from which he argues a return of his father's popularity. Two years later Fashion has declared itself on the side of the new garden, and Walpole has gone over to the side of Fashion. 'Every night constantly [he tells Conway] I go to Ranelagh; which has totally beat Vauxhall. Nobody goes anywhere else,—everybody goes there. My Lord Chesterfield is so fond of it that he says he has ordered all his letters to be directed thither. If you had never seen it, I would make you a most pompous description of it, and tell you how the floor is all of beaten princes; that you can't set your foot without treading on a Prince of Wales or Duke of Cumberland. The company is universal: there is from his Grace of Grafton down to children out of the Foundling Hospital; from my Lady Townshend to the kitten; from my Lord Sandys to your humble cousin and sincere friend.'[57]

After Lord Orford's death, the next landmark in Horace Walpole's life is his removal to the house at Twickenham, subsequently known as Strawberry Hill. To a description of this historical mansion the next chapter will be in part devoted. In the mean time we may linger for a moment upon the record which these letters contain of the famous '45. No better opportunity will probably occur of exhibiting Walpole as the reporter of history in the process of making. Much that he tells Mann and Montagu is no doubt little more than the skimming of the last Gazette; but he had always access to trustworthy information, and is seldom a dull reporter, even of newspaper news. Almost the next letter to that in which he dwells at length upon the loss of his father, records the disaster of Tournay, or Fontenoy, in which, he tells Mann, Mr. Conway has highly distinguished himself, magnificently engaging—as appears from a subsequent communication—no less than two French Grenadiers at once. His account of the battle is bare enough; but what apparently interests him most is the patriotic conduct of the Prince of Wales, who made a chanson on the occasion, after the fashion of the Regent Orléans:—

'Venez, mes chères Déesses,

Venez calmer mon chagrin;

Aidez, mes belles Princesses,

A le noyer dans le vin.

Poussons cette douce Ivresse

Jusqu'au milieu de la nuit,

Et n'écoutons que la tendresse

D'un charmant vis-à-vis.

'Que m'importe que l'Europe

Ait un ou plusieurs tyrans?

Prions seulement Calliope,

Qu'elle inspire nos vers, nos chants.

Laissons Mars et toute la gloire;

Livrons nous tous à l'amour;

Que Bacchus nous donne à boire;

A ces deux fasions [sic] la cour.'

The goddesses addressed were Lady Catherine Hanmer, Lady Fauconberg, and Lady Middlesex, who played Congreve's Judgment of Paris at Leicester House, with his Royal Highness as Paris, and Prince Lobkowitz for Mercury. Walpole says of the song that it 'miscarried in nothing but the language, the thoughts, and the poetry.' Yet he copies the whole five verses, of which the above are two, for Mann's delectation.

A more logical sequence to Fontenoy than the lyric of Leicester House is the descent of Charles Edward upon Scotland. In August Walpole reports to Mann that there is a proclamation out 'for apprehending the Pretender's son,' who had landed in July; in September he is marching on Edinburgh. Ten days later the writer is speculating half ruefully upon the possibilities of being turned out of his comfortable sinecures in favour of some forlorn Irish peer. 'I shall wonderfully dislike being a loyal sufferer in a threadbare coat, and shivering in an ante-chamber at Hanover, or reduced to teach Latin and English to the young princes at Copenhagen. The Dowager Strafford has already written cards for my Lady Nithsdale, my Lady Tullibardine, the Duchess of Perth and Berwick, and twenty more revived peeresses, to invite them to play at whisk, Monday three months; for your part, you will divert yourself with their old taffeties, and tarnished slippers, and their awkwardness, the first day they go to Court in shifts and clean linen. Will you ever write to me in my garret at Herrenhausen?'[58] Then upon this come the contradictions of rumour, the 'general supineness,' the raising of regiments, and the disaster of Preston Pans, with its inevitable condemnation of Cope. 'I pity poor him, who, with no shining abilities, and no experience, and no force, was sent to fight for a crown! He never saw a battle but that of Dettingen, where he got his red ribbon; Churchill, whose led-captain he was, and my Lord Harrington, had pushed him up to this misfortune.[59] We have lost all our artillery, five hundred men taken—and three killed, and several officers, as you will see in the papers. This defeat has frightened everybody but those it rejoices, and those it should frighten most; but my Lord Granville still buoys up the King's spirits, and persuades him it is nothing.'[60]

Nothing, indeed, it proved in the issue. But Walpole was wiser in his immediate apprehensions than King George's advisers, who were not wise. In his subsequent letters we get scattered glimpses of the miserable story that ended in Culloden. Towards the end of October he is auguring hopefully from the protracted neglect of the rebels to act upon their success. In November they are in England. But the backwardness of the Jacobites to join them is already evident, and he writes 'in the greatest confidence of our getting over this ugly business.' Early in December they have reached Derby, only to be soon gone again, miserably harassed, and leaving their sick and cannon behind. With the new year come tidings to Mann that the rebellion is dying down in England, and that General Hawley has marched northward to put it quite out. Once more, on the 23rd February, it flares fitfully at Falkirk, and then fades as suddenly. The battle that Walpole hourly expects, not without some trepidation, for Conway is one of the Duke of Cumberland's aides-de-camp, is still deferred, and it is April before the two armies face each other on Culloden Moor. Then he writes jubilantly to his Florentine correspondent: 'On the 16th, the Duke, by forced marches, came up with the rebels a little on this side Inverness,—by the way, the battle is not christened yet; I only know that neither Preston Pans nor Falkirk are to be god-fathers. The rebels, who had fled from him after their victory [of Falkirk], and durst not attack him, when so much exposed to them at his passage of the Spey, now stood him, they seven thousand, he ten. They broke through Barril's regiment and killed Lord Robert Kerr, a handsome young gentleman, who was cut to pieces with about thirty wounds; but they were soon repulsed, and fled; the whole engagement not lasting above a quarter of an hour. The young Pretender escaped, Mr. Conway says, he hears, wounded: he certainly was in the rear. They have lost above a thousand men in the engagement and pursuit; and six hundred were already taken; among which latter are their French Ambassador and Earl Kilmarnock. The Duke of Perth and Lord Ogilvie are said to be slain.... Except Lord Robert Kerr, we lost nobody of note: Sir Robert Rich's eldest son has lost his hand, and about a hundred and thirty private men fell. The defeat is reckoned total, and the dispersion general; and all their artillery is taken. It is a brave young Duke! The town is all blazing round me [i. e., at Arlington Street] as I write, with fireworks and illuminations: I have some inclination to wrap up half-a-dozen sky-rockets, to make you drink the Duke's health. Mr. Dodington [in Pall Mall], on the first report, came out with a very pretty illumination,—so pretty that I believe he had it by him, ready for any occasion.'[61]

Walpole's account of these occurrences is, of course, hearsay, although, as regards Culloden, he probably derived the details from Conway, who was present. But in some of the events which ensued, he is either actually a spectator himself, or fresh from direct communication with those who have been spectators. One of the most graphic passages in his entire correspondence is his description of the trial of the rebel lords, at which he assisted; and another is his narrative of the executions of Kilmarnock and Balmerino, written down from the relation of eye-witnesses. It is hardly possible to get much nearer to history.

'I am this moment come from the conclusion of the greatest and most melancholy scene I ever yet saw! You will easily guess it was the Trials of the rebel Lords. As it was the most interesting sight, it was the most solemn and fine: a coronation is a puppet-show, and all the splendour of it idle; but this sight at once feasted one's eyes and engaged all one's passions. It began last Monday; three parts of Westminster-hall were inclosed with galleries, and hung with scarlet; and the whole ceremony was conducted with the most awful solemnity and decency, except in the one point of leaving the prisoners at the bar, amidst the idle curiosity of some crowd, and even with the witnesses who had sworn against them, while the Lords adjourned to their own House to consult. No part of the royal family was there, which was a proper regard to the unhappy men, who were become their victims.... I had armed myself with all the resolution I could, with the thought of their crimes and of the danger past, and was assisted by the sight of the Marquis of Lothian in weepers for his son [Lord Robert Kerr], who fell at Culloden; but the first appearance of the prisoners shocked me! their behaviour melted me.' After going on to speak of Lord Kilmarnock and Lord Cromartie (afterwards reprieved), he continues: 'For Lord Balmerino, he is the most natural brave old fellow I ever saw: the highest intrepidity, even to indifference. At the bar he behaved like a soldier and a man; in the intervals of form, with carelessness and humour. He pressed extremely to have his wife, his pretty Peggy [Margaret Chalmers], with him in the Tower, Lady Cromartie only sees her husband through the grate, not choosing to be shut up with him, as she thinks she can serve him better by her intercession without: she is big with child and very handsome: so are their daughters. When they were to be brought from the Tower in separate coaches, there was some dispute in which the axe must go: old Balmerino cried, 'Come, come, put it with me.' At the bar he plays with his fingers upon the axe, while he talks to the gentleman-gaoler; and one day somebody coming up to listen, he took the blade and held it like a fan between their faces. During the trial, a little boy was near him, but not tall enough to see; he made room for the child, and placed him near himself.'[62]

Balmerino's gallant demeanour evidently fascinated Walpole. In his next letter he relates how on his way back to the Tower the sturdy old dragoon had stopped the coach at Charing Cross to buy some 'honey-blobs' (gooseberries); and when afterwards he comes to write his account of the execution, although he tells the story of Kilmarnock's death with feeling, the best passage is given to his companion in misfortune. He describes how, on the fatal 15th August, before he left the Tower, Balmerino drank a bumper to King James; how he wore his rebellious regimentals (blue and red) over a flannel waistcoat and his shroud; how, embracing Lord Kilmarnock, he said, 'My Lord, I wish I could suffer for both.' Then followed the beheading of Kilmarnock; and the narrator goes on: 'The scaffold was immediately new-strewed with sawdust, the block new covered, the executioner new-dressed, and a new axe brought. Then came old Balmerino, treading with the air of a general. As soon as he mounted the scaffold, he read the inscription on his coffin, as he did again afterwards: he then surveyed the spectators, who were in amazing numbers, even upon masts upon ships in the river; and pulling out his spectacles, read a treasonable speech, which he delivered to the Sheriff, and said, the young Pretender was so sweet a Prince that flesh and blood could not resist following him; and lying down to try the block, he said, 'If I had a thousand lives, I would lay them all down here in the same cause.' He said if he had not taken the sacrament the day before, he would have knocked down Williamson, the Lieutenant of the Tower, for his ill-usage of him. He took the axe and felt it, and asked the headsman how many blows he had given Lord Kilmarnock; and gave him three guineas. Two clergymen, who attended him, coming up, he said, 'No, gentlemen, I believe you have already done me all the service you can.' Then he went to the corner of the scaffold, and called very loud for the warder, to give him his perriwig, which he took off, and put on a night-cap of Scotch plaid, and then pulled off his coat and waistcoat and lay down; but being told he was on the wrong side, vaulted round, and immediately gave the sign by tossing up his arm, as if he were giving the signal for battle. He received three blows; but the first certainly took away all sensation. He was not a quarter of an hour on the scaffold; Lord Kilmarnock above half a one. Balmerino certainly died with the intrepidity of a hero, but the insensibility of one too. As he walked from his prison to execution, seeing every window and top of house filled with spectators, he cried out, "Look, look, how they are all piled up like rotten oranges."'[63]

In the old print of the execution, the scaffold on Tower Hill is shown surrounded by a wide square of dragoons, beyond which the crowd—'the immense display of human countenances which surrounded it like a sea,' as Scott has it—are visible on every side. No. 14 Tower Hill is said to have been the house from which the two lords were led to the block, and a trail of blood along the hall and up the first flight of stairs was long shown as indicating the route by which the mutilated bodies were borne to await interment in St. Peter's Chapel. A few months later Walpole records the execution in the same place of Simon Fraser, Lord Lovat, the cunning old Jacobite, whose characteristic attitude and 'pawky' expression live for ever in the admirable sketch which Hogarth made of him at St. Albans. He died (says Walpole) 'extremely well, without passion, affectation, buffoonery, or timidity.' But he is not so distinguished as either Kilmarnock or Balmerino, and, however Roman his taking-off, the chief memorable thing about it is, that it was happily the last of these sanguinary scenes in this country. The only other incident which it is here needful to chronicle in connection with the 'Forty Five' is Walpole's verses on the Suppression of the late Rebellion. On the 4th and 5th November, the anniversaries of King William's birth and landing, it was the custom to play Rowe's Tamerlane, and this year (1746) the epilogue spoken by Mrs. Pritchard 'in the Character of the Comic Muse' was from Walpole's pen. According to the writer, special terrors had threatened the stage from the advent of 'Rome's young missionary spark,' the Chevalier, and the Tragic Muse, raising, 'to eyes well-tutor'd in the trade of grief,' 'a small and well-lac'd handkerchief,' is represented by her lighter sister as bewailing the prospect to her 'buskined progeny' after this fashion:—

'Ah! sons, our dawn is over-cast; and all

Theatric glories nodding to their fall.

From foreign realms a bloody chief is come,

Big with the work of slav'ry and of Rome.

A general ruin on his sword he wears,

Fatal alike to audience and to play'rs.

For ah! my sons, what freedom for the stage

When bigotry with sense shall battle wage?

When monkish laureats only wear the bays,

Inquisitors lord chamberlains of plays?

Plays shall be damn'd that 'scap'd the critic's rage,

For priests are still worse tyrants to the stage.

Cato, receiv'd by audiences so gracious,

Shall find ten Cæsars in one St. Ignatius,

And god-like Brutus here shall meet again

His evil genius in a capuchin.

For heresy the fav'rites of the pit

Must burn, and excommunicated wit;

And at one stake, we shall behold expire

My Anna Bullen, and the Spanish Fryar.'[64]

After this the epilogue digresses into a comparison of the Duke of Cumberland with King William. Virgil, Juvenal, Addison, Dryden, and Pope, upon one of whose lines on Cibber Walpole bases his reference to the Lord Chamberlain, are all laid under contribution in this performance. It 'succeeded to flatter me,' he tells Mann a few days later,—a Gallicism from which we must infer an enthusiastic reception.

Walpole's personal and domestic history does not present much interest at this period. His sister Mary (Catherine Shorter's daughter), who had married the third Earl of Cholmondeley, had died long before her mother. In February, 1746, his half-sister, Lady Mary, his playmate at comet in the Houghton days, married Mr. Churchill,—'a foolish match,' in Horace's opinion, to which he will have nothing to say. With his second brother, Sir Edward Walpole, he seems to have had but little intercourse, and that scarcely of a fraternal character. In 1857, Cunningham published for the first time a very angry letter from Edward to his junior, in which the latter was bitterly reproached for his interference in disposing of the family borough of Castle Rising, and (incidentally) for his assumption of superiority, mental and otherwise. To this communication Walpole prepared a most caustic and categorical answer, which, however, he never sent. For his nieces, Edward Walpole's natural daughters, of whom it will be more convenient to speak later, Horace seems always to have felt a sincere regard. But although his brother had tastes which must have been akin to his own, for Edward Walpole was in his way an art patron (Roubillac the sculptor, for instance, was much indebted to him) and a respectable musician, no real cordiality ever existed between them. 'There is nothing in the world'—he tells Montagu in May, 1745—'the Baron of Englefield has such an aversion for as for his brother.'[65]

For his eldest brother's wife, the Lady Walpole who had formed one of the learned trio at Florence, he entertained no kind of respect, and his letters are full of flouts at her Ladyship's manners and morality. Indeed, between préciosité and 'Platonic love,' her life does not appear to have been a particularly worshipful one, and her long sojourn under Italian skies had not improved her. At present she was Lady Orford, her husband, who is seldom mentioned, and from whom she had been living apart, having succeeded to the title at his father's death. From Walpole's letters to Mann, it seems that in April, 1745, she was, much to the dismay of her relatives, already preening her wings for England. In September, she has arrived, and Walpole is maliciously delighted at the cold welcome she obtains from the Court and from society in general, with the exception of her old colleague, Lady Pomfret, and that in one sense congenial spirit, Lady Townshend. Later on, a definite separation from her husband appears to have been agreed upon, which Walpole fondly hopes may have the effect of bringing about her departure for Italy. 'The Ladies O[rford] and T[ownshend]'—he says—'have exhausted scandal both in their persons and conversations.' However much this may be exaggerated (and Walpole never spares his antipathies), the last we hear of Lady Orford is certainly on his side, for she has retired from town to a villa near Richmond with a lover for whom she has postponed that southward flight which her family so ardently desired. This fortunate Endymion, the Hon. Sewallis Shirley, son of Robert, first Earl Ferrers, had already been one of the most favoured lovers of the notorious 'lady of quality' whose memoirs were afterwards foisted into Peregrine Pickle. To Lady Vane now succeeded Lady Orford, as eminent for wealth—says sarcastic Lady Mary Wortley Montagu—as her predecessor had been for beauty, and equal in her 'heroic contempt for shame.' This new connection was destined to endure. It was in September, 1746, that Walpole chronicled his sister-in-law's latest frailty, and in May, 1751, only a few weeks after her husband's death,[66] she married Shirley at the Rev. Alexander Keith's convenient little chapel in May Fair.'

In 1744, died Alexander Pope, to be followed a year later by the great Dean of St. Patrick's. Neither of these events leaves any lasting mark in Walpole's correspondence,—indeed of Swift's death there is no mention at all. A nearer bereavement was the premature loss of West, which had taken place two years before, closing sorrowfully with faint accomplishment a life of promise. Vale, et vive paulisper cum vivis,—he had written a few days earlier to Gray,—his friend to the last. With Gray, Walpole's friendship, as will be seen presently, had been resumed. His own literary essays still lie chiefly in the domain of squib and jeu d'esprit. In April, 1746, over the appropriate signature of 'Descartes,' he printed in No. II. of The Museum a 'Scheme for Raising a Large Sum of Money for the Use of the Government, by laying a tax on Message-Cards and Notes,' and in No. V. a pretended Advertisement and Table of Contents for a History of Good Breeding, from the Creation of the World, by the Author of the Whole Duty of Man. The wit of this is a little laboured, and scarcely goes beyond the announcement that 'The Eight last Volumes, which relate to Germany, may be had separate;' nor does that of the other exceed a mild reflection of Fielding's manner in some of his minor pieces. Among other things, we gather that it was the custom of the fine ladies of the day to send open messages on blank playing-cards; and it is stated as a fact or a fancy that 'after the fatal day of Fontenoy,' persons of quality 'all wrote their notes on Indian paper, which, being red, when inscribed with Japan ink made a melancholy military kind of elegy on the brave youths who occasioned the fashion, and were often the honourable subject of the epistle.' The only remaining effort of any importance at this time is the little poem of The Beauties, somewhat recalling Gay's Prologue to the Shepherd's Week, and written in July, 1746, to Eckardt the painter. Here is a specimen:—

In smiling Capel's bounteous look

Rich autumn's goddess is mistook.

With poppies and with spiky corn,

Eckardt, her nut-brown curls adorn;

And by her side, in decent line,

Place charming Berkeley, Proserpine.

Mild as a summer sea, serene,

In dimpled beauty next be seen

Aylesb'ry, like hoary Neptune's queen.

With her the light-dispensing fair,

Whose beauty gilds the morning air,

And bright as her attendant sun,

The new Aurora, Lyttelton.

Such Guido's pencil, beauty-tip'd,

And in ethereal colours dip'd,

In measur'd dance to tuneful song

Drew the sweet goddess, as along

Heaven's azure 'neath their light feet spread,

The buxom hours the fairest led.'[67]

'Charming Berkeley,' here mentioned, afterwards became the third wife of Goldsmith's friend, Earl Nugent, and the mother of the little girl who played tricks upon the author of She Stoops to Conquer at her father's country seat of Gosfield; 'Aylesb'ry, like hoary Neptune's queen,' married Walpole's friend, Conway, and 'the new Aurora, Lyttelton,' was that engaging Lucy Fortescue upon whose death in 1747 her husband wrote the monody so pitilessly parodied by Smollett.[68] Lady Almeria Carpenter, Lady Emily Lenox, Miss Chudleigh (afterwards the notorious Duchess of Kingston), and many other well-known names, quos nunc perscribere longum est, are also celebrated.

In August, 1746, Walpole announces to Mann that he has taken a pretty house within the precincts of the castle at Windsor, to which he is going for the remainder of the summer. In September he has entered upon residence, for Gray tells Wharton that he sees him 'usually once a week.' 'All is mighty free, and even friendly more than one could expect,'—and one of the first things posted off to Conway, is Gray's Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College, which the sender desires he 'will please to like excessively.' He is drawn from his retreat by the arrival of a young Florentine friend, the Marquis Rinuncini, to whom he has to do the London honours. 'I stayed literally an entire week with him, carried him to see palaces and Richmond gardens and park, and Chenevix's shop, and talked a great deal to him alle conversazioni.'[69] 'Chenevix's shop' suggests the main subject of the next chapter,—the purchase and occupation of Strawberry Hill.

CHAPTER V.

The New House at Twickenham.—Its First Tenants.—Christened 'Strawberry Hill.'—Planting and Embellishing.—Fresh Additions.—Walpole's Description of it in 1753.—Visitors and Admirers.—Lord Bath's Verses.—Some Rival Mansions.—Minor Literature.—Robbed by James Maclean.—Sequel from The World.—The Maclean Mania.— High Life at Vauxhall.—Contributions to The World.—Theodore of Corsica.—Reconciliation with Gray.—Stimulates his Works.—The Poëmata-Grayo-Bentleiana.—Richard Bentley.—Müntz the Artist.—Dwellers at Twickenham.—Lady Suffolk and Mrs. Clive.

On the 5th of June, 1747, Walpole announces to Mann that he has taken a little new farm, just out of Twickenham. 'The house is so small that I can send it to you in a letter to look at: the prospect is as delightful as possible, commanding the river, the town [Twickenham], and Richmond Park; and, being situated on a hill, descends to the Thames through two or three little meadows, where I have some Turkish sheep and two cows, all studied in their colours for becoming the view. This little rural bijou was Mrs. Chenevix's, the toy woman à la mode,[70] who in every dry season is to furnish me with the best rain water from Paris, and now and then with some Dresden-china cows, who are to figure like wooden classics in a library; so I shall grow as much a shepherd as any swain in the Astræa.' Three days later, further details are added in a letter to Conway, then in Flanders with the Duke of Cumberland: 'You perceive by my date [Twickenham, 8 June] that I am got into a new camp, and have left my tub at Windsor. It is a little play-thing-house, that I got out of Mrs. Chenevix's shop, and is the prettiest bauble you ever saw. It is set in enamelled meadows, with filagree hedges:

'"A small Euphrates through the piece is roll'd,

And little finches wave their wings in gold."'[71]

'Two delightful roads, that you would call dusty, supply me continually with coaches and chaises; barges as solemn as Barons of the Exchequer move under my window; Richmond Hill and Ham Walks bound my prospect; ... Dowagers as plenty as flounders inhabit all around, and Pope's ghost is just now skimming under my window by a most poetical moonlight. I have about land enough to keep such a farm as Noah's, when he set up in the ark with a pair of each kind; but my cottage is rather cleaner than I believe his was after they had been cooped up together forty days. The Chenevixes had tricked it out for themselves: up two pair of stairs is what they call Mr. Chenevix's library, furnished with three maps, one shelf, a bust of Sir Isaac Newton, and a lame telescope without any glasses. Lord John Sackville predecessed me here, and instituted certain games called cricketalia, which have been celebrated this very evening in honour of him in a neighbouring meadow.'[72]

The house thus whimsically described, which grew into the Gothic structure afterwards so closely associated with its owner's name, was not, even at this date, without its history. It stood on the left bank of the Thames, at the corner of the Upper Road to Teddington, not very far from Twickenham itself. It had been built about 1698 as a 'country box' by a retired coachman of the Earl of Bradford, and, from the fact that he was supposed to have acquired his means by starving his master's horses, was known popularly as Chopped-Straw Hall. Its earliest possessor not long afterwards let it out as a lodging-house, and finally, after several improvements, sub-let it altogether. One of its first tenants was Colley Cibber, who found it convenient when he was in attendance for acting at Hampton Court; and he is said to have written in it the comedy called The Refusal; or, the Ladies' Philosophy, produced at Drury Lane in 1721. Then, for eight years, it was rented by the Bishop of Durham, Dr. Talbot, who was reported to have kept in it a better table than the extent of its kitchen seemed, in Walpole's judgement, to justify. After the Bishop came a Marquis, Henry Bridges, son of the Duke of Chandos; after the Marquis, Mrs. Chenevix, the toy-woman, who, upon her husband's death, let it for two years to the nobleman who predecessed Walpole, Lord John Philip Sackville. Before this, Mrs. Chenevix had taken lodgers, one of whom was the celebrated theologian, Père Le Courrayer. At the expiration of Lord John Sackville's tenancy, Walpole took the remainder of Mrs. Chenevix's lease; and in 1748 had grown to like the situation so much that he obtained a special act to purchase the fee simple from the existing possessors, three minors of the name of Mortimer. The price he paid was £1356 10s. Nothing was then wanting but the name, and in looking over some old deeds this was supplied. He found that the ground on which it stood had been known originally as 'Strawberry-Hill-Shot.' 'You shall hear from me,' he tells Mann in June, 1748, 'from Strawberry Hill, which I have found out in my lease is the old name of my house; so pray, never call it Twickenham again.'

The transformation of the toy-woman's 'villakin' into a Gothic residence was not, however, the operation of a day. Indeed, at first, the idea of rebuilding does not seem to have entered its new owner's mind. But he speedily set about extending his boundaries, for before 26 December, 1748, he has added nine acres to his original five, making fourteen in all,—a 'territory prodigious in a situation where land is so scarce.' Among the tenants of some of the buildings which he acquired in making these additions was Richard Francklin, the printer of the Craftsman, who, during Sir Robert Walpole's administration, had been taken up for printing that paper. He occupied a small house in what was afterwards known as the Flower Garden, and Walpole permitted him to retain it during his lifetime. Walpole's letters towards the close of 1748 contain numerous references to his assiduity in planting. 'My present and sole occupation' he says in August, 'is planting, in which I have made great progress, and talk very learnedly with the nurserymen, except that now and then a lettuce run to seed overturns all my botany, as I have more than once taken it for a curious West Indian flowering shrub. Then the deliberation with which trees grow is extremely inconvenient to my natural impatience.' Two months later he is 'all plantation, and sprouts away like any chaste nymph in the Metamorphosis.' In December, we begin to hear of that famous lawn so well known in the later history of the house. He is 'making a terrace the whole breadth of his garden on the brow of a natural hill, with meadows at the foot, and commanding the river, the village [Twickenham], Richmond-hill, and the park, and part of Kingston' A year after this (September, 1749), while he is still 'digging and planting till it is dark,' come the first dreams of building. At Cheney's, in Buckinghamshire, he has seen some old stained glass, in the windows of an ancient house which had been degraded into a farm, and he thinks he will beg it of the Duke of Bedford (to whom the farm belongs), as it would be 'magnificent for Strawberry-castle.' Evidently he has discussed this (as yet) château en Espagne with Montagu. 'Did I tell you [he says] that I have found a text in Deuteronomy to authorise my future battlements? "When thou buildest a new house, then shalt thou make a battlement for thy roof, that thou bring not blood upon thy house, if any man fall from thence."' In January, the new building is an established fact, as far as purpose is concerned. In a postscript to Mann he writes: 'I must trouble you with a commission, which I don't know whether you can execute. I am going to build a little gothic castle at Strawberry Hill. If you can pick me up any fragments of old painted glass, arms, or anything, I shall be excessively obliged to you. I can't say I remember any such things in Italy; but out of old chateaus, I imagine, one might get it cheap, if there is any.'

From a subsequent letter it would seem that Mann, as a resident in Italy, had rather expostulated against the style of architecture which his friend was about to adopt, and had suggested the Grecian. But Walpole, rightly or wrongly, knew what he intended. 'The Grecian,' he said, was 'only proper for magnificent and public buildings. Columns and all their beautiful ornaments look ridiculous when crowded into a closet or a cheesecake-house. The variety is little, and admits no charming irregularities. I am almost as fond of the Sharawaggi, or Chinese want of symmetry, in buildings, as in grounds or gardens. I am sure, whenever you come to England, you will be pleased with the liberty of taste into which we are struck, and of which you can have no idea.' The passage shows that he himself anticipated some of the ridicule which was levelled by unsympathetic people at the 'oyster-grotto-like profanation' which he gradually erected by the Thames. In the mean time it went on progressing slowly, as its progress was entirely dependent on his savings out of income; and the references to it in his letters, perhaps because Mann was doubtful, are not abundant. 'The library and refectory, or great parlour,' he says in his description, 'were entirely new built in 1753; the gallery, round tower, great cloyster, and cabinet, in 1760 and 1761; and the great north bedchamber in 1770.' To speak of these later alterations would be to anticipate too much, and the further description of Strawberry Hill will be best deferred until his own account of the house and contents was printed in 1774, four years after the last addition above recorded. But even before he made the earliest of them, he must have done much to alter and improve the aspect of the place, for Gray, more admiring than Mann, praises what has been done. 'I am glad,' he tells Wharton, 'that you enter into the spirit of Strawberry-castle. It has a purity and propriety of Gothicism in it (with very few exceptions) that I have not seen elsewhere;' and in an earlier letter he implies that its 'extreme littleness' is its chief defect. But here, before for the moment leaving the subject, it is only fair to give the proprietor's own description of Strawberry Hill at this date, i. e., in June, 1753. After telling Mann that it is 'so monastic' that he has 'a little hall decked with long saints in lean arched windows and with taper columns, which we call the Paraclete, in memory of Eloisa's cloister,'[73] he sends him a sketch of it, and goes on: 'The enclosed enchanted little landscape, then, is Strawberry Hill.... This view of the castle is what I have just finished [it was a view of the south side, towards the north-east], and is the only side that will be at all regular. Directly before it is an open grove, through which you see a field, which is bounded by a serpentine wood of all kind of trees, and flowering shrubs, and flowers. The lawn before the house is situated on the top of a small hill, from whence to the left you see the town and church of Twickenham encircling a turn of the river, that looks exactly like a sea-port in miniature. The opposite shore is a most delicious meadow, bounded by Richmond Hill, which loses itself in the noble woods of the park to the end of the prospect on the right, where is another turn of the river, and the suburbs of Kingston as luckily placed as Twickenham is on the left: and a natural terrace on the brow of my hill, with meadows of my own down to the river, commands both extremities. Is not this a tolerable prospect? You must figure that all this is perpetually enlivened by a navigation of boats and barges, and by a road below my terrace, with coaches, post-chaises, waggons, and horsemen constantly in motion, and the fields speckled with cows, horses, and sheep. Now you shall walk into the house. The bow window below leads into a little parlour hung with a stone-colour Gothic paper and Jackson's Venetian prints,[74] which I could never endure while they pretended, infamous as they are, to be after Titian, etc., but when I gave them this air of barbarous bas-reliefs, they succeeded to a miracle: it is impossible at first sight not to conclude that they contain the history of Attila or Tottila done about the very æra. From hence, under two gloomy arches, you come to the hall and staircase, which it is impossible to describe to you, as it is the most particular and chief beauty of the castle. Imagine the walls covered with (I call it paper, but it is really paper painted in perspective to represent) Gothic fretwork: the lightest Gothic balustrade to the staircase, adorned with antelopes (our supporters) bearing shields; lean windows fattened with rich saints in painted glass, and a vestibule open with three arches on the landing place, and niches full of trophies of old coats of mail, Indian shields made of rhinoceros's hides, broadswords, quivers, long-bows, arrows, and spears,—all supposed to be taken by Sir Terry Robsart [an ancestor of Sir Robert Walpole] in the holy wars. But as none of this regards the enclosed drawing, I will pass to that. The room on the ground floor nearest to you is a bedchamber, hung with yellow paper and prints, framed in a new manner, invented by Lord Cardigan; that is, with black and white borders printed. Over this is Mr. Chute's bed-chamber, hung with red in the same manner. The bow-window room one pair of stairs is not yet finished; but in the tower beyond it is the charming closet where I am now writing to you. It is hung with green paper and water-colour pictures; has two windows: the one in the drawing looks to the garden, the other to the beautiful prospect; and the top of each glutted with the richest painted glass of the arms of England, crimson roses, and twenty other pieces of green, purple, and historic bits. I must tell you, by the way, that the castle, when finished, will have two-and-thirty windows enriched with painted glass. In this closet, which is Mr. Chute's College of Arms, are two presses of books of heraldry and antiquities, Madame Sévigné's Letters, and any French books that relate to her and her acquaintance. Out of this closet is the room where we always live, hung with a blue and white paper in stripes adorned with festoons, and a thousand plump chairs, couches, and luxurious settees covered with linen of the same pattern, and with a bow window commanding the prospect, and gloomed with limes that shade half each window, already darkened with painted glass in chiaroscuro, set in deep blue glass. Under this room is a cool little hall, where we generally dine, hung with paper to imitate Dutch tiles.

'I have described so much that you will begin to think that all the accounts I used to give you of the diminutiveness of our habitation were fabulous; but it is really incredible how small most of the rooms are. The only two good chambers I shall have are not yet built: they will be an eating-room and a library, each twenty by thirty, and the latter fifteen feet high. For the rest of the house, I could send it to you in this letter as easily as the drawing, only that I should have nowhere to live until the return of the post. The Chinese summer-house, which you may distinguish in the distant landscape, belongs to my Lord Radnor.[75] We pique ourselves upon nothing but simplicity, and have no carvings, gildings, paintings, inlayings, or tawdry businesses.'[76]

From this it will appear that in June, 1753, the library and refectory were not yet built, so that when he says, in the printed description, that they were new built in 1753, he must mean no more than that they had been begun. In a later letter, of May, 1754, they were still unfinished. Meanwhile the house is gradually attracting more and more attention. George Montagu comes, and is 'in raptures and screams, and hoops, and hollas, and dances, and crosses himself a thousand times over.' The next visitor is 'Nolkejumskoi,'—otherwise the Duke of Cumberland,—who inspects it much after the fashion of a gracious Gulliver surveying a castle in Lilliput. Afterwards, attracted by the reports of Lady Hervey and Mr. Bristow (brother of the Countess of Buckingham), arrives my Lord Bath, who is stirred into celebrating it to the tune of a song of Bubb Dodington on Mrs. Strawbridge. His Lordship does not seem to have got further than two stanzas; but Walpole, not to leave so complimentary a tribute in the depressed condition of a fragment, discreetly revised and completed it himself. The lines may fairly find a place here as an example of his lighter muse. The first and third verses are Lord Bath's, the rest being obviously written in order to bring in 'Nolkejumskoi' and some personal friends:—

'Some cry up Gunnersbury,

For Sion some declare;

And some say that with Chiswick-house

No villa can compare:

But ask the beaux of Middlesex,

Who know the county well,

If Strawb'ry-hill, if Strawb'ry-hill

Don't bear away the bell?

'Some love to roll down Greenwich-hill

For this thing and for that;

And some prefer sweet Marble-hill,

Tho' sure 'tis somewhat flat:

Yet Marble-hill and Greenwich-hill,

If Kitty Clive can tell,

From Strawb'ry-hill, from Strawb'ry-hill

Will never bear the bell.

'Tho' Surrey boasts its Oatlands,

And Clermont kept so jim,

And some prefer sweet Southcote's,

'Tis but a dainty whim;

For ask the gallant Bristow,

Who does in taste excell,

If Strawb'ry-hill, if Strawb'ry-hill

Don't bear away the bell

'Since Denham sung of Cooper's,

There's scarce a hill around,

But what in song or ditty

Is turn'd to fairy-ground,—

Ah, peace be with their memories!

I wish them wond'rous well;

But Strawb'ry-hill, but Strawb'ry-hill

Must bear away the bell.

'Great William dwells at Windsor,

As Edward did of old;

And many a Gaul and many a Scot

Have found him full as bold.

On lofty hills like Windsor

Such heroes ought to dwell;

Yet little folks like Strawb'ry-hill,

Like Strawb'ry-hill as well.'[77]

Cumberland Lodge, where, say the old guide-books, the hero of Culloden 'reposed after victory,' still stands on the hill at the end of the Long Walk at Windsor; and at 'Gunnersbury' lived the Princess Amelia. All the other houses referred to are in existence. 'Sweet Marble-hill,' which, like Strawberry, was not long ago put up for sale, had at this date for mistress the Countess Dowager of Suffolk (Mrs. Howard), for whom it had been built by her royal lover, George II.; and Chiswick House, (now the Marquis of Bute's), that famous structure of Kent which Lord Hervey said was 'too small to inhabit, and too large to hang to one's watch,' was the residence of Richard, Earl of Burlington. Claremont 'kept so jim' [neat], was the seat of the Duke of Newcastle at Esher; Oatlands, near Weybridge, belonged to the Duke of York, and Sion House, on the Thames, to the Duke of Northumberland. Walpole and his friends, it will be perceived, did not shrink from comparing small things with great. But perhaps the most notable circumstance about this glorification of Strawberry is that it should have originated with its reputed author. 'Can there be,' says Walpole, 'an odder revolution of things, than that the printer of the Craftsman should live in a house of mine, and that the author of the Craftsman should write a panegyric on a house of mine?' The printer was Richard Francklin, already mentioned as his tenant; and Lord Bath, if not the actual, was at least the putative, writer of most of the Craftsman's attacks upon Sir Robert Walpole. It is possible, however, that, as with the poem, part only of this honour really belonged to him.

Strawberry Hill and its improvements have, however, carried us far from the date at which this chapter begins, and we must return to 1747. Happily the life of Walpole, though voluminously chronicled in his correspondence, is not so crowded with personal incident as to make a space of six years a serious matter to recover, especially when tested by the brief but still very detailed record in the Short Notes of what he held to be its conspicuous occurrences. In 1747-49 his zeal for his father's memory involved him in a good deal of party pamphleteering, and in 1749, he had what he styles 'a remarkable quarrel' with the Speaker, of which one may say that, in these days, it would scarcely deserve its qualifying epithet, although it produced more paper war. 'These things [he says himself] were only excusable by the lengths to which party had been carried against my father; or rather, were not excusable even then.' For this reason it is needless to dwell upon them here, as well as upon certain other papers in The Remembrancer for 1749, and a tract called Delenda est Oxonia, prompted by a heinous scheme, which was meditated by the Ministry, of attacking the liberties of that University by vesting in the Crown the nomination of the Chancellor. This piece [he says], which I think one of my best, was seized at the printer's and suppressed.' Then in November, 1749, comes something like a really 'moving incident,'—he is robbed in Hyde Park. He was returning by moonlight to Arlington Street from Lord Holland's, when his coach was stopped by two of the most notorious of 'Diana's foresters,'—Plunket and James Maclean; and the adventure had all but a tragic termination. Maclean's pistol went off by accident, sending a bullet so nearly through Walpole's head that it grazed the skin under his eye, stunned him, and passed through the roof of the chariot. His correspondence contains no more than a passing reference to this narrow escape,—probably because it was amply reported (and expanded) in the public prints. But in a paper which he contributed to the World a year or two later, under guise of relating what had happened to one of his acquaintance, he reverts to this experience. 'The whole affair [he says] was conducted with the greatest good-breeding on both sides. The robber, who had only taken a purse this way, because he had that morning been disappointed of marrying a great fortune, no sooner returned to his lodgings, than he sent the gentleman [i. e., Walpole himself] two letters of excuses, which, with less wit than the epistles of Voiture, had ten times more natural and easy politeness in the turn of their expression. In the postscript, he appointed a meeting at Tyburn at twelve at night, where the gentleman might purchase again any trifles he had lost; and my friend has been blamed for not accepting the rendezvous, as it seemed liable to be construed by ill-natured people into a doubt of the honour of a man who had given him all the satisfaction in his power for having unluckily been near shooting him through the head.'[78]

The 'fashionable highwayman' (as Mr. Maclean was called) was taken soon afterwards, and hanged. 'I am honourably mentioned in a Grub-street ballad [says Walpole] for not having contributed to his sentence;' and he goes on to say that there are as many prints and pamphlets about him as about that other sensation of 1750, the earthquake. Maclean seems nevertheless to have been rather a pinchbeck Macheath; but for the moment, in default of larger lions, he was the rage. After his condemnation, several thousand people visited him in his cell at Newgate where he is stated to have fainted twice from the heat and pressure of the crowd. And his visitors were not all men. In a note to The Modern Fine Lady, Soame Jenyns says that some of the brightest eyes were in tears for him; and Walpole himself tells us that he excited the warmest commiseration in two distinguished beauties of the day, Lady Caroline Petersham and Miss Ashe.[79]

Miss Ashe, of whom we are told mysteriously by the commentators that she 'was said to have been of very high parentage,' and Lady Caroline Petersham, a daughter of the Duke of Grafton, figure more pleasantly in another letter of Walpole, which gives a glimpse of some of those diversions with which he was wont to relieve the gothicising of his villa by the Thames. In a sentence that proves how well he understood his own qualities, he says he tells the story 'to show the manners of the age, which are always as entertaining to a person fifty miles off as to one born an hundred and fifty years after the time.' We have not yet reached the later limit; but there is little doubt as to the interest of Walpole's account of his visit in the month of June, 1750, to the famous gardens of Mr. Jonathan Tyers. He got a card, he says, from Lady Caroline to go with her to Vauxhall. He repairs accordingly to her house, and finds her 'and the little Ashe, or the Pollard Ashe, as they call her,' having 'just finished their last layer of red, and looking as handsome as crimson could make them.' Others of the party are the Duke of Kingston; Lord March, of Thackeray's Virginians; Harry Vane, soon to be Earl of Darlington; Mr. Whitehead; a 'pretty Miss Beauclerc,' and a 'very foolish Miss Sparre.' As they sail up the Mall, they encounter cross-grained Lord Petersham (my lady's husband) shambling along after his wont,[80] and 'as sulky as a ghost that nobody will speak to first.' He declines to accompany his wife and her friends, who, getting into the best order they can, march to their barge, which has a boat of French horns attending, and 'little Ashe' sings. After parading up the river, they 'debark' at Vauxhall, where at the outset they narrowly escape the excitement of a quarrel. For a certain Mrs. Lloyd, of Spring Gardens, afterwards married to Lord Haddington, observing Miss Beauclerc and her companion following Lady Caroline, says audibly, 'Poor girls, I am sorry to see them in such bad company,'—a remark which the 'foolish Miss Sparre' (she is but fifteen), for the fun of witnessing a duel, endeavours to make Lord March resent. But my Lord, who is not only 'very lively and agreeable,' but also of a nice discretion, laughs her out of 'this charming frolic, with a great deal of humour.' Next they pick up Lord Granby, arriving very drunk from 'Jenny's Whim,' at Chelsea, where he has left a mixed gathering of thirteen persons of quality playing at Brag. He is in the sentimental stage of his malady, and makes love to Miss Beauclerc and Miss Sparre alternately, until the tide of champagne turns, and he remembers that he is married. 'At last,' says Walpole,—and at this point the story may be surrendered to him entirely,—'we assembled in our booth, Lady Caroline in the front, with the visor of her hat erect, and looking gloriously jolly and handsome. She had fetched my brother Orford from the next box, where he was enjoying himself with his petite partie, to help us to mince chickens. We minced seven chickens into a china dish, which Lady Caroline stewed over a lamp with three pats of butter and a flagon of water, stirring and rattling and laughing, and we every minute expecting to have the dish fly about our ears. She had brought Betty, the fruit girl,[81] with hampers of strawberries and cherries from Rogers's, and made her wait upon us, and then made her sup by us at a little table. The conversation was no less lively than the whole transaction. There was a Mr. O'Brien arrived from Ireland, who would get the Duchess of Manchester from Mr. Hussey, if she were still at liberty. I took up the biggest hautboy in the dish, and said to Lady Caroline, "Madam, Miss Ashe desires you would eat this O'Brien strawberry;" she replied immediately, "I won't, you hussey." You may imagine the laugh this reply occasioned. After the tempest was a little calmed, the Pollard said, "Now, how anybody would spoil this story that was to repeat it, and say, "I won't, you jade." In short, the whole air of our party was sufficient, as you will easily imagine, to take up the whole attention of the garden; so much so that from eleven o'clock till half an hour after one we had the whole concourse round our booth: at last, they came into the little gardens of each booth on the sides of our's, till Harry Vane took up a bumper, and drank their healths, and was proceeding to treat them with still greater freedom. It was three o'clock before we got home.' He adds a characteristic touch to explain Lord Granby's eccentricities. He had lost eight hundred pounds to the Prince of Wales at Kew the night before, and this had a 'little ruffled' his lordship's temper.[82]

Early in 1753, Edward Moore, the author of some Fables for the Female Sex, once popular enough to figure, between Thomson and Prior, in Goldsmith's Beauties of English Poesy, established the periodical paper called The World, which, to quote a latter-day definition, might fairly claim to be 'written by gentlemen for gentlemen.' Soame Jenyns, Cambridge of the Scribleriad (Walpole's Twickenham neighbour), Hamilton Boyle, Sir Charles Hanbury Williams, and Lord Chesterfield were all contributors. That Walpole should also attempt this 'bow of Ulysses, in which it was the fashion for men of rank and genius to try their strength,' goes without saying. His gifts were exactly suited to the work, and his productions in the new journal are by no means its worst. His first essay was a bright little piece of persiflage upon what he calls the return of nature, and proceeds to illustrate by the introduction of 'real water' on the stage, by Kent's landscape gardening, and by the fauna and flora of the dessert table. A second effort was devoted to that extraordinary adventurer, Baron Neuhoff, otherwise Theodore, King of Corsica, who, with his realm for his only assets, was at this time a tenant of the King's Bench prison. Walpole, with genuine kindness, proposed a subscription for this bankrupt Belisarius, and a sum of fifty pounds was collected. This, however, proved so much below the expectations of His Corsican Majesty that he actually had the effrontery to threaten Dodsley, the printer of the paper, with a prosecution for using his name unjustifiably. 'I have done with countenancing kings,' wrote Walpole to Mann.[83] Others of his World essays are on the Glastonbury Thorn; on Letter-Writing,—a subject of which he might claim to speak with authority; on old women as objects of passion; and on politeness, wherein occurs the already quoted anecdote of Maclean the highwayman. His light hand and lighter humour made him an almost ideal contributor to Moore's pages, and it is not surprising to find that such judges as Lady Mary approved his performances, or that he himself regarded them with a complacency which peeps out now and again in his letters. 'I met Mrs. Clive two nights ago,' he says, 'and told her I had been in the meadows, but would walk no more there, for there was all the world. "Well," says she, "and don't you like The World? I hear it was very clever last Thursday."' 'Last Thursday' had appeared Walpole's paper on elderly 'flames.'

During the period covered by this chapter the redintegratio amoris with Gray, to which reference has been made, became confirmed. Whether the attachment was ever quite on the old basis, may be doubted. Gray always poses a little as the aggrieved person who could not speak first, and to whom unmistakable overtures must be made by the other side. He as yet 'neither repents, nor rejoices over much, but is pleased,'—he tells Chute in 1750. On the other hand, Walpole, though he appears to have proffered his palm-branch with very genuine geniality, and desire to let by-gones be by-gones, was not above very candid criticism of his recovered friend. 'I agree with you most absolutely in your opinion about Gray,' he writes to Montagu in September, 1748: 'he is the worst company in the world. From a melancholy turn, from living reclusely, and from a little too much dignity, he never converses easily; all his words are measured and chosen, and formed into sentences; his writings are admirable; he himself is not agreeable.' Meantime, however, the revived connection went on pleasantly. Gray made flying visits to Strawberry and Arlington Street, and prattled to Walpole from Pembroke between whiles. And certainly, in a measure, it is to Walpole that we owe Gray. It was Walpole who induced Gray to allow Dodsley to print in 1747, as an attenuated folio pamphlet, the Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College; and it was the tragic end of one of Walpole's favourite cats in a china tub of gold-fish (of which, by the way, there was a large pond called Po-yang at Strawberry) which prompted the delightful occasional verses by Gray beginning:—

''Twas on a lofty vase's side,

Where china's gayest art had dy'd

The azure flow'rs that blow;

Demurest of the tabby kind,

The pensive Selima reclin'd,

Gaz'd on the lake below,'—

a stanza which, with trifling verbal alterations, long served as a label for the 'lofty vase' in the Strawberry Hill collection. To Walpole's officious circulation in manuscript of the famous Elegy written in a Country Church-Yard must indirectly be attributed its publication by Dodsley in February, 1751; to Walpole also is due that typical piece of vers de société, the Long Story, which originated in the interest in the recluse poet of Stoke Poges with which Walpole's well-meaning (if unwelcome) advocacy had inspired Lady Cobham and some other lion-hunters of the neighbourhood. But his chief enterprise in connection with his friend's productions was the edition of them put forth in March, 1753, with illustrations by Richard Bentley, the youngest child of the famous Master of Trinity. Bentley possessed considerable attainments as an amateur artist, and as a scholar and connoisseur had just that virtuoso finesse of manner which was most attractive to Walpole, whose guest and counsellor he frequently became during the progress of the Strawberry improvements. Out of this connection, which, in its hot fits, was of the most confidential character, grew the suggestion that Bentley should make, at Walpole's expense, a series of designs for Gray's poems. These, which are still in existence,[84] were engraved with great delicacy by two of the best engravers of that time, Müller and Charles Grignion; and the Poemata-Grayo-Bentleiana, as Walpole christened them, became and remains one of the most remarkable of the illustrated books of the last century. Gray, as may be imagined, could scarcely oppose the compliment; and he seems to have grown minutely interested in the enterprise, rewarding the artist by some commendatory verses, in which he certainly does not deny himself—to use a phrase of Mr. Swinburne—'the noble pleasure of praising.'[85] But even over this book the sensitive ligament that linked him to Walpole was perilously strained. Without consulting him, Walpole had his likeness engraved as a frontispiece,—a step which instantly drew from Gray a wail of nervous expostulation so unmistakably heartfelt that it was impossible to proceed with the plate. Thus it came about that Designs by Mr. R. Bentley for Six Poems by Mr. T. Gray made its appearance without the portrait of the poet.

Bentley's ingenious son was not the only person whom the decoration of Strawberry pressed into the service of its owner. Selwyn, the wit, George James (or 'Gilly') Williams, a connoisseur of considerable ability, and Richard, second Lord Edgecumbe, occasionally sat as a committee of taste,—a function commemorated by Reynolds in a conversation-piece which afterwards formed one of the chief ornaments of the Refectory;[86] and upon Bentley's recommendation Walpole invited from Jersey a humbler guest in the person of a German artist named Müntz,—'an inoffensive, good creature,' who would 'rather ponder over a foreign gazette than a palette,' but whose services kept him domiciled for some time at the Gothic castle. Müntz executed many views of the neighbourhood, which are still, like that of Twickenham already referred to,[87] preserved in contemporary engravings. And besides the persons whom Walpole drew into his immediate circle, the 'village,' as he called it, was growing steadily in public favour. 'Mr. Müntz'—writes Walpole in July, 1755—'says we have more coaches than there are in half France. Mrs. Pritchard has bought Ragman's Castle, for which my Lord Litchfield could not agree. We shall be as celebrated as Baiæ or Tivoli; and if we have not as sonorous names as they boast, we have very famous people: Clive and Pritchard, actresses; Scott and Hudson, painters; my Lady Suffolk, famous in her time; Mr. H[ickey], the impudent Lawyer, that Tom Hervey wrote against; Whitehead, the poet; and Cambridge, the everything.' Cambridge has already been referred to as a contributor to The World, and the Whitehead was the one mentioned in Churchill's stinging couplet:—

'May I (can worse disgrace on manhood fall?)

Be born a Whitehead, and baptiz'd a Paul,'

who then lived on Twickenham Common. Hickey, a jovial Irish attorney, was the legal adviser of Burke and Reynolds, and the 'blunt, pleasant creature' of Goldsmith's 'Retaliation.' Scott was Samuel Scott, the 'English Canaletto;' Hudson, Sir Joshua's master, who had a house on the river near Lord Radnor's. But Walpole's best allies were two of the other sex. One was Lady Suffolk, the whilom friend (as Mrs. Howard) of Pope and Swift and Gay, whose home at Marble Hill is celebrated in the Walpole-cum-Pulteney poem; the other was red-faced Mrs. Clive, who occupied a house known familiarly as 'Clive-den,' and officially as Little Strawberry. She had not yet retired from the stage. Lady Suffolk's stories of the Georgian Court and its scandals, and Mrs. Clive's anecdotes of the green-room, and of their common neighbour at Hampton, the great 'Roscius' himself (with whom she was always at war), must have furnished Walpole with an inexhaustible supply of just the particular description of gossip which he most appreciated.

CHAPTER VI.

Gleanings from the Short Notes.—Letter from Xo Ho.—The Strawberry Hill Press.—Robinson the Printer.—Gray's Odes.—Other Works.—Catalogue of Royal and Noble Authors.—Anecdotes of Painting.—Humours of the Press.—The Parish Register of Twickenham.—Lady Fanny Shirley.—Fielding.—The Castle of Otranto.

In order to take up the little-variegated thread of Walpole's life, we must again resort to the Short Notes, in which, as already stated, he has recorded what he considered to be its most important occurrences. In 1754, he had been chosen member, in the new Parliament of that year, for Castle Rising, in Norfolk. In March, 1755, he says, he was very ill-used by his nephew, Lord Orford [i. e., the son of his eldest brother, Robert], upon a contested election in the House of Commons, 'on which I wrote him a long letter, with an account of my own conduct in politics.' This letter does not seem to have been preserved, and it is difficult to conceive that its theme could have involved very lengthy explanations. In February, 1757, he vacated his Castle Rising seat for that of Lynn, and about the same time, he tells us, used his best endeavours, although in vain, to save the unfortunate Admiral Byng, who was executed, pour encourager les autres, in the following March. But with the exception of his erection of a tablet to Theodore of Corsica, and the dismissal, in 1759, of Mr. Müntz, with whom his connection seems to have been exceptionally prolonged, his record for the next decade, or until the publication of the Castle of Otranto, is almost exclusively literary, and deals with the establishment of his private printing press at Strawberry Hill, his publication thereat of Gray's Odes and other works, his Catalogue of Royal and Noble Authors, his Anecdotes of Painting, and his above-mentioned romance. This accidental absorption of his chronicle by literary production will serve as a sufficient reason for devoting this chapter to those efforts of his pen which, from the outset, were destined to the permanence of type.

Already, as far back as March, 1751, he had begun the work afterwards known as the Memoires of the last Ten Years of the Reign of George II., to the progress of which there are scattered references in the Short Notes. He had intended at first to confine them to the history of one year, but they grew under his hand. His first definite literary effort in 1757, however, was the clever little squib, after the model of Montesquieu's Lettres Persanes, entitled A Letter from Xo Ho, a Chinese Philosopher at London, to his Friend Lien Chi, at Peking, in which he ingeniously satirizes the 'late political revolutions' and the inconstant disposition of the English nation, not forgetting to fire off a few sarcasms à propos of the Byng tragedy. The piece, he tells Mann, was written 'in an hour and a half' (there is always a little of Oronte's Je n'ai demeuré qu'un quart d'heure à le faire about Walpole's literary efforts), was sent to press next day, and ran through five editions in a fortnight.[88] Mrs. Clive was of opinion that the rash satirist would be sent to the Tower; but he himself regarded it as 'perhaps the only political paper ever written, in which no man of any party could dislike or deny a single fact;' and Henry Fox, to whom he sent a copy, may be held to confirm this view, since his only objection seems to have been that it did not hit some of the other side a little harder. It would be difficult now without long notes to make it intelligible to modern readers; but the following outburst of the Chinese philosopher respecting the variations of the English climate has the merit of enduring applicability. 'The English have no sun, no summer, as we have, at least their sun does not scorch like ours. They content themselves with names: at a certain time of the year they leave their capital, and that makes summer; they go out of the city, and that makes the country. Their monarch, when he goes into the country, passes in his calash[89] by a row of high trees, goes along a gravel walk, crosses one of the chief streets, is driven by the side of a canal between two rows of lamps, at the end of which he has a small house [Kensington Palace], and then he is supposed to be in the country. I saw this ceremony yesterday: as soon as he was gone the men put on under vestments of white linen, and the women left off those vast draperies, which they call hoops, and which I have described to thee; and then all the men and all the women said it was hot. If thou wilt believe me, I am now [in May] writing to thee before a fire.'[90]

In the following June Walpole had betaken himself to the place he 'loved best of all,' and was amusing himself at Strawberry with his pen. The next work which he records is the publication of a Catalogue of the Collection of Pictures, etc., of [i. e., belonging to] Charles the First, for which he prepared 'a little introduction.' This, and the subsequent 'prefaces or advertisements' to the Catalogues of the Collections of James the Second, and the Duke of Buckingham, are to be found in vol. i., pp. 234-41, of his works. But the great event of 1757 is the establishment of the Officina Arbuteana, or private printing press, of Strawberry Hill. 'Elzevir, Aldus, and Stephens,' he tells Chute in July, 'are the freshest personages in his memory,' and he jestingly threatens to assume as his motto (with a slight variation) Pope's couplet:—

'Some have at first for wits, then poets pass'd;

Turn'd printers next, and proved plain fools at last.'

'I am turned printer,' he writes somewhat later, 'and have converted a little cottage into a printing-office. My abbey is a perfect college or academy. I keep a painter [Müntz] in the house, and a printer,—not to mention Mr. Bentley, who is an academy himself.' William Robinson, the printer, an Irishman with noticeable eyes which Garrick envied ('they are more Richard the Third's than Garrick's own,' says Walpole), must have been a rather original personage, to judge by a copy of one of his letters which his patron incloses to Mann. He says he found it in a drawer where it had evidently been placed to attract his attention. After telling his correspondent in bad blank verse that he dates from the 'shady bowers, nodding groves, and amaranthine shades (?)' of Twickenham,—'Richmond's near neighbour, where great George the King resides,'—Robinson proceeds to describe his employer as 'the Hon. Horatio Walpole, son to the late great Sir Robert Walpole, who is very studious, and an admirer of all the liberal arts and sciences; amongst the rest he admires printing. He has fitted out a complete printing-house at this his country seat, and has done me the favour to make me sole manager and operator (there being no one but myself). All men of genius resorts his house, courts his company, and admires his understanding: what with his own and their writings, I believe I shall be pretty well employed. I have pleased him, and I hope to continue so to do.' Then, after reference to the extreme heat,—a heat by which fowls and quarters of lamb have been roasted in the London Artillery grounds 'by the help of glasses,' so capricious was the climate over which Walpole had made merry in May,—he proceeds to describe Strawberry. 'The place I am now in is all my comfort from the heat; the situation of it is close to the Thames, and is Richmond Gardens (if you were ever in them) in miniature, surrounded by bowers, groves, cascades, and ponds, and on a rising ground not very common in this part of the country; the building elegant, and the furniture of a peculiar taste, magnificent and superb.' At this date poor Robinson seems to have been delighted with the place and the fastidious master whom he hoped 'to continue to please.' But Walpole was nothing if not mutable, and two years later he had found out that Robinson of the remarkable eyes was 'a foolish Irishman who took himself for a genius,' and they parted, with the result that the Officina Arbuteana was temporarily at a standstill.

For the moment, however, things went smoothly enough. It had been intended that the maiden effort of the Strawberry types should have been a translation by Bentley of Paul Hentzner's curious account of England in 1598. But Walpole suddenly became aware that Gray had put the penultimate, if not the final, touches to his painfully elaborated Pindaric Odes, the Bard and the Progress of Poesy, and he pounced upon them forthwith; Gray, as usual, half expostulating, half overborne. 'You will dislike this as much as I do,'—he writes to Mason,—'but there is no help.' 'You understand,' he adds, with the air of one resigning himself to the inevitable, 'it is he that prints them, not for me, but for Dodsley.' However, he persisted in refusing Walpole's not entirely unreasonable request for notes. 'If a thing cannot be understood without them,' he said characteristically, 'it had better not be understood at all.' Consequently, while describing them as 'Greek, Pindaric, sublime,' Walpole confesses under his breath that they are a little obscure. Dodsley paid Gray forty guineas for the book, which was a large, thin quarto, entitled Odes by Mr. Gray; Printed, at Strawberry Hill, for R. and J. Dodsley in Pall-Mall. It was published in August, and the price was a shilling. On the title-page was a vignette of the Gothic castle at Twickenham. From a letter of Walpole to Lyttelton it would seem that his apprehensions as to the poems being 'understanded of the people' proved well founded. 'They [the age] have cast their eyes over them, found them obscure, and looked no further; yet perhaps no compositions ever had more sublime beauties than are in each,'—and he goes on to criticise them minutely in a fashion which shows that his own appreciation of them was by no means unqualified. But Warburton and Garrick and the 'word-picker' Hurd were enthusiastic. Lyttelton and Shenstone followed more moderately. Upon the whole, the success of the first venture was encouraging, and the share in it of 'Elzevir Horace,' as Conway called his friend, was not forgotten.

Gray's Odes were succeeded by Hentzner's Travels, or, to speak more accurately, by that portion of Hentzner's Travels which refers to England. In England Hentzner was little known, and the 220 copies which Walpole printed in October, 1757, were prefaced by an Advertisement from his pen, and a dedication to the Society of Antiquaries, of which he was a member. After this came, in 1758, his Catalogue of Royal and Noble Authors; a collection of Fugitive Pieces (which included his essays in the World), dedicated to Conway;[91] and seven hundred copies of Lord Whitworth's Account of Russia. Then followed a book by Joseph Spence, the Parallel of Magliabecchi and Mr. [Robert] Hill, a learned tailor of Buckingham, the object of which was to benefit Hill,—an end which must have been attained, as six out of seven hundred copies were sold in a fortnight, and the book was reprinted in London. Bentley's Lucan, a quarto of five hundred copies, succeeded Spence, and then came three other quartos of Anecdotes of Painting, by Walpole himself. The only other notable products of the press during this period are the Autobiography of Lord Herbert of Cherbury, quarto, 1764, and one hundred copies of the Poems of Lady Temple. This, however, is a very fair record for seven years' work, when it is remembered that the Strawberry Hill staff never exceeded a man and a boy. As already stated, the first printer, Robinson, was dismissed in 1759. His place, after a short interval of 'occasional hands,' was taken by Thomas Kirgate, whose name thenceforth appears on all the Twickenham issues, with which it is indissolubly connected. Kirgate continued, with greater good fortune than his predecessors, to perform his duties until Walpole's death.

In the above list there are two volumes which, in these pages, deserve a more extended notice than the rest. The Catalague of Royal and Noble Authors had at least the merit of novelty, and certainly a better reason for existing than some of the works to which its author refers in his preface. Even the performances of Pulteney, Earl of Bath, and the English rondeaus of Charles of Orleans are more worthy of a chronicler than the lives of physicians who had been poets, of men who had died laughing, or of Frenchmen who had studied Hebrew. Walpole took considerable pains in obtaining information, and his book was exceedingly well received,—indeed, far more favourably than he had any reason to expect. A second edition, which was not printed at Strawberry Hill, speedily followed the first, with no diminution of its prosperity. For an effort which made no pretensions to symmetry, which is often meagre where it might have been expected to be full, and is everywhere prejudiced by a sort of fine-gentleman disdain of exactitude, this was certainly as much as he could anticipate. But he seems to have been more than usually sensitive to criticism, and some of the amplest of his Short Notes are devoted to the discussion of the adverse opinions which were expressed. From these we learn that he was abused by the Critical Review for disliking the Stuarts, and by the Monthly for liking his father. Further, that he found an apologist in Dr. Hill (of the Inspector), whose gross adulation was worse than abuse; and lastly, that he was seriously attacked in a Pamphlet of Remarks on Mr. Walpole's 'Catalogue of Royal and Noble Authors' by a certain Carter, concerning whose antecedents his irritation goes on to bring together all the scandals he can collect. As the Short Notes were written long after the events, it shows how his soreness against his critics continued. What it was when still fresh may be gathered from the following quotation from a letter to Rev. Henry Zouch, to whom he was indebted for many new facts and corrections, especially in the second edition, and who afterwards helped him in the Anecdotes of Painting: 'I am sick of the character of author; I am sick of the consequences of it; I am weary of seeing my name in the newspapers; I am tired with reading foolish criticisms on me, and as foolish defences of me; and I trust my friends will be so good as to let the last abuse of me pass unanswered. It is called "Remarks" on my Catalogue, asperses the Revolution more than it does my book, and, in one word, is written by a non-juring preacher, who was a dog-doctor. Of me, he knows so little that he thinks to punish me by abusing King William!'[92]

In a letter of a few months earlier to the same correspondent, he refers to another task, upon which, in despite of the sentence just quoted, he continued to employ himself. 'Last summer'—he says—'I bought of Vertue's widow forty volumes of his MS. collections relating to English painters, sculptors, gravers, and architects. He had actually begun their lives: unluckily he had not gone far, and could not write grammar. I propose to digest and complete this work.'[93] The purchases referred to had been made subsequent to 1756, when Mrs. Vertue applied to Walpole, as a connoisseur, to buy from her the voluminous notes and memoranda which her husband had accumulated with respect to art and artists in England. Walpole also acquired at Vertue's sale in May, 1757, a number of copies from Holbein and two or three other pictures. He seems to have almost immediately set about arranging and digesting this unwieldy and chaotic heap of material,[94] much of which, besides being illiterate, was also illegible. More than once his patience gave way under the drudgery; but he nevertheless persevered in a way that shows a tenacity of purpose foreign, in this case at all events, to his assumption of dilettante indifference. His progress is thus chronicled. He began in January, 1760, and finished the first volume on 14 August. The second volume was begun in September, and completed on the 23rd October. On the 4th January in the following year he set about the third volume, but laid it aside after the first day, not resuming it until the end of June. In August, however, he finished it. Two volumes were published in 1762, and a third, which is dated 1763, in 1764. As usual, he affected more or less to undervalue his own share in the work; but he very justly laid stress in his 'Preface' upon the fact that he was little more than the arranger of data not collected by his own exertions. 'I would not,' he said to Zouch, 'have the materials of forty years, which was Vertue's case, depreciated in compliment to the work of four months, which is almost my whole merit.' Here, again, the tone is a little in the Oronte manner; but, upon the main point, the interest of the work, his friends did not share his apprehensions, and Gray especially was 'violent about it.' Nor did the public show themselves less appreciative, for there was so much that was new in the dead engraver's memoranda, and so much which was derived from private galleries or drawn from obscure sources, that the work could scarcely have failed of readers even if the style had been hopelessly corrupt, which, under Walpole's revision, it certainly was not. In 1762, he began a Catalogue of Engravers, which he finished in about six weeks as a supplementary volume, and in 1765, still from the Strawberry Press, he issued a second edition of the whole.[95]

After the appearance of the second edition of the Anecdotes of Painting, a silence fell upon the Officina Arbuteana for three years, during the earlier part of which time Walpole was at Paris, as will be narrated in the next chapter. His press, as may be guessed, was one of the sights of his Gothic castle, and there are several anecdotes showing how his ingenious fancy made it the vehicle of adroit compliment. Once, not long after it had been established, my Lady Rochford, Lady Townshend (the witty Ethelreda, or Audrey, Harrison),[96] and Sir John Bland's sister were carried after dinner into the printing-room to see Mr. Robinson at work. He immediately struck off some verse which was already in type, and presented it to Lady Townshend:—

The Press speaks:

From me wits and poets their glory obtain;

Without me their wit and their verses were vain.

Stop, Townshend, and let me but paint[97] what you say,

You, the fame I on others bestow, will repay.

The visitors then asked, as had been anticipated to see the actual process of setting up; and Walpole ostensibly gave the printer four lines out of Rowe's Fair Penitent. But, by what would now be styled a clever feat of prestidigitation, the forewarned Robinson struck off the following, this time to Lady Rochford:—

The Press speaks.

In vain from your properest name you have flown,

And exchanged lovely Cupid's for Hymen's dull throne;

By my art shall your beauties be constantly sung,

And in spite of yourself, you shall ever be young.