Lord Nuneham.--Madame de Sévigné.--Charles Fox.--Mrs. Clive
and Cliveden.--Goldsmith and Garrick.--Dearth of News.--Madame
de Trop.--A Bunch of Grapes.--General Election.--Perils by
Land and Water.--Sir Horace Mann.--Lord Clive.--The History
of Manners.--A Traveller from Lima.--The Sçavoir Vivre
Club.--Reflections on Life.--The Pretender’s Happiness.--Paris
Fashions.--Madame Du Deffand ill.--Growth of London.--Sir
Joshua Reynolds.--Change in Manners.--Our Climate.
The following letter is a specimen of Horace’s gossiping style at
its best. It is addressed to Lord Nuneham, who was in Ireland with
his father, Simon Earl Harcourt, the then Lord-Lieutenant. Elsewhere
Walpole salutes his correspondent as “Your O’Royal Highness”:
“Strawberry Hill, Dec. 6, 1773.
“I wanted an excuse for writing to you, my dear Lord, and
your letter gives me an opportunity of thanking you; yet that
is not all I wanted to say. I would, if I had dared, have
addressed myself to Lady Nuneham, but I had not confidence
enough, especially on so unworthy a subject as myself. Lady
Temple, my friend, as well as that of Human Nature, has shown
me some verses; but alas! how came such charming poetry to be
thrown away on so unmeritorious a topic? I don’t know whether
I ought to praise the lines most, or censure the object most.
Voltaire makes the excellence of French poetry consist in the
number of difficulties it vanquishes. Pope, who celebrated
Lord Bolingbroke, could not have succeeded, did not succeed,
better; and yet I hope that, though a meaner subject, I am
not so bad an one! Well! with all my humility, I cannot but
be greatly flattered. Madame de Sévigné spread her leaf-gold
over all her acquaintance, and made them shine; I should not
doubt of the same glory, when Lady Nuneham’s poetry shall
come to light, if my own works were but burnt at the same
time; but alas! Coulanges’ verses were preserved, and so may
my writings too. Apropos, my Lord, I have got a new volume of
that divine woman’s letters. Two are entertaining; the rest,
not very divine. But there is an application, the happiest,
the most exquisite, that even she herself ever made! She is
joking with a President de Provence, who was hurt at becoming a
grandfather. She assures him there is no such great misfortune
in it; ‘I have experienced the case,’ says she, ‘and, believe
me, _Pæte, non dolet_.’ If you are not both transported with
_this_, ye are not the Lord and Lady Nuneham I take ye to be.
There are besides some twenty letters of Madame de Simiane, who
shows she would not have degenerated totally, if she had not
lived in the country, or had anything to say. At the end are
reprinted Madame de Sévigné’s letters on Fouquet’s Trial, which
are very interesting.
“I do not know how you like your new subjects, but I hear
they are extremely content with their Prince and Princess. I
ought to wish your Lordship joy of all your prosperities, and
of Mr. Fludd’s baptism into the Catholic or Universal Faith;
but I reserve public felicities for your old _Drawing-Room_
in Leicester Fields. Private news we have little but Lord
Carmarthen’s and Lord Cranborne’s marriages, and the
approaching one of Lady Bridget Lane and Mr. Tall-Match. Lord
Holland has given Charles Fox a draught of an hundred thousand
pounds, and it pays all his debts, but a trifle of thirty
thousand pounds, and those of Lord Carlisle, Crewe, and Foley,
who being only friends, not Jews, may wait. So now any younger
son may justify losing his father’s and elder brother’s estate
on precedent.[56]
“Neither Lord nor Lady Temple are well, and yet they are both
gone to Lord Clare’s, in Essex, for a week. Lord Temple had a
very bad fall in the Park, and lost his senses for an hour.
Yet, though the horse is a vicious one, he has been upon it
again. In short, there are no right-headed people but the Irish!
“As it is ancient good breeding not to conclude a letter
without troubling the reader with compliments, and as I have
none to send, I must beg your Lordship not to forget to present
my respects to the Countesses of Barrymore and Massareene,
my dear Sisters in Loo. You may be sure I am charged with a
large parcel from Cliveden,[57] where I was last night. Except
being extremely ill, Mrs. Clive is extremely well; but the
tax-gatherer is gone off, and she must pay her window-lights
over again; and the road before her door is very bad, and the
parish won’t mend it, and there is some suspicion that Garrick
is at the bottom of it; so if you please to send a shipload of
the Giant’s Causey by next Monday, we shall be able to go to
Mr. Rofey’s rout at Kingston. The Papers said she was to act at
Covent Garden, and she has printed a very proper answer in the
_Evening Post_. Mr. Raftor[58] told me, that formerly, when he
played Luna in ‘The Rehearsal,’ he never could learn to dance
the Hays, and at last he went to the Man that teaches grown
gentlemen.
“Miss Davis[59] is the admiration of all London, but of me, who
do not love the perfection of what anybody can do, and wish she
had less top to her voice and more bottom. However, she will
break Millico’s heart, which will not break mine. Fierville
has sprained his leg, and there is another man who sprains his
mouth with smiling on himself--as I have heard, for I have
not seen him yet, nor a fat old woman and her lean daughter,
who dance with him. London is very dull, so pray come back as
soon as you can. Mason is up to the ears in ‘Gray’s Life;’
you will like it exceedingly, which is more than you will do
this long letter. Well! you have but to go into Lady Nuneham’s
dressing-room, and you may read something ten thousand times
more pleasing. No, no! you are not the most to be pitied of any
human being, though in the midst of Dublin Castle.”
Next to the above, Walpole’s liveliest letters about this date were
written to Lady Ossory. Sometimes he has to lament the want of news:
“Pray, Madam, where is the difference between London and the country,
when everybody is in the country and nobody in town? The houses do
not marry, intrigue, talk politics, game, or fling themselves out
of window. The streets do not all run to the Alley, nor the squares
mortgage themselves over head and ears. The play-houses do not pull
themselves down; and all summer long, when nobody gets about them,
they behave soberly and decently as any Christian in the parish
of Marylebone. The English of this preface is that I have not the
Israelitish art of making bricks without straw. I cannot invent news
when nobody commits it.” He has nothing better to tell than an anecdote
of Goldsmith, who died a few months later, and Garrick: “I dined and
passed Saturday at Beauclerk’s, with the Edgecombes, the Garricks, and
Dr. Goldsmith, and was most thoroughly tired, as I knew I should be, I
who hate the playing off a butt. Goldsmith is a fool, the more wearying
for having some sense. It was the night of a new comedy, called ‘The
School for Wives,’[60] which was exceedingly applauded, and which
Charles Fox says is execrable. Garrick has at least the chief hand in
it. I never saw anybody in a greater fidget, nor more vain when he
returned, for he went to the play-house at half-an-hour after five, and
we sat waiting for him till ten, when he was to act a speech in ‘Cato’
with Goldsmith! that is, the latter sat in t’other’s lap, covered with
a cloak, and while Goldsmith spoke, Garrick’s arms that embraced him,
made foolish actions. How could one laugh when one had expected this
for four hours?” On Christmas night 1773, he writes: “This has been a
very barren half-year. The next, I hope, will reinstate my letters in
their proper character of newspapers.”
The event, however, belied his hopes. In June, 1774, he writes to his
Countess:
“Offended at you, Madam! I have crossed myself forty times
since I read the impious words, never to be pronounced by
human lips,--nay, and to utter them, when I am seemingly to
blame!--yet, believe me, my silence is not owing to negligence,
or to that most wicked of all sins, inconstancy. I have thought
on you waking or sleeping, whenever I have thought at all,
from the moment I saw you last; and if there was an echo in
the neighbourhood besides Mr. Cambridge, I should have made
it repeat your Ladyship’s name, till the parish should have
presented it for a nuisance. I have begun twenty letters, but
the naked truth is, I found I had absolutely nothing to say.
You yourself owned, Madam, that I am grown quite lifeless, and
it is very true. I am none of your Glastonbury thorns that
blow at Christmas. I am a remnant of the last age, and have
nothing to do with the present. I am an exile from the sunbeams
of drawing-rooms; I have quitted the gay scenes of Parliament
and the Antiquarian Society; I am not of Almack’s; I don’t
understand horse-races; I never go to reviews; what can I have
to talk of? I go to no _fêtes champêtres_, what can I have to
think of? I know nothing but about myself, and about myself
I know nothing. I have scarce been in town since I saw you,
have scarce seen anybody here, and don’t remember a tittle but
having scolded my gardener twice, which, indeed, would be as
important an article as any in Montaigne’s Travels, which I
have been reading, and if I was tired of his Essays, what must
one be of these! What signifies what a man thought, who never
thought of anything but himself; and what signifies what a man
did, who never did anything?”
In August, hearing that Lady Ossory had again been disappointed of a
son, he tells her: “I don’t design to acknowledge Anne III.; I shall
call her _Madame de Trop_, as they named one of the late King of
France’s daughters. A _dauphin_! a _dauphin_! I will repeat it as often
as the _Graces_.” A month later he is informed that _Madame de Trop_
has received the name of Gertrude:
“MADAM,--‘Methinks an Æsop’s fable you relate,’ as Dryden says
in the ‘Hind and Panther.’ A mouse that wraps itself in a
French cloak and sleeps on a couch; and a goldfinch that taps
at the window and swears it will come in to quadrille at eleven
o’clock at night! no, no, these are none of Æsop’s cattle; they
are too fashionable to have lived so near the creation. The
mouse is neither Country Mouse nor City Mouse; and whatever
else he may be, the goldfinch must be a Macaroni, or at least
of the _Sçavoir vivre_. I do not deny but I have some skill in
expounding types and portents; and could give a shrewd guess
at the identical persons who have travestied themselves into a
quadruped and biped; but the truth is, I have no mind, Madam,
to be Prime Minister. King Pharaoh is mighty apt on emergencies
to send for us soothsayers, and put the whole kingdom into our
hands, if his butler or baker, with whom he is wont to gossip,
does but tell him of a cunning man.
“I have no ambition to supplant Lord North--especially as
the season approaches when I dread the gout; and I should be
very sorry to be fetched out of my bed to pacify America.
To be sure, Madam, you give me a fair field for uttering
oracles: however, all I will unfold is, that the emblematic
animals have no views on Lady Louisa.[61] The omens of her
fortune are in herself; and I will burn my books, if beauty,
sense, and merit, do not bestow all the happiness on her they
prognosticate.…
“I like the blue eyes, Madam, better than the denomination of
Lady Gertrude Fitzpatrick, which, all respectable as it is, is
very harsh and rough sounding; pray let her change it with the
first goldfinch that offers. Nay, I do not even trust to the
blueth of the eyes. I do not believe they last once in twenty
times. One cannot go into any village fifty miles from London
without seeing a dozen little children with flaxen hair and
eyes of sky-blue. What becomes of them all? One does not see a
grown Christian with them twice in a century, except in poetry.
“The Strawberry Gazette is very barren of news. Mr. Garrick
has the gout, which is of more consequence to the metropolis
than to Twitnamshire. Lady Hertford dined here last Saturday,
brought her loo party, and stayed supper; there were Lady
Mary Coke, Mrs. Howe, and the Colonels Maude and Keene. This
was very heroic, for one is robbed every hundred yards. Lady
Hertford herself was attacked last Wednesday on Hounslow
Heath at three in the afternoon, but she had two servants on
horseback, who would not let her be robbed, and the highwayman
decamped.
“The greatest event I know was a present I received last
Sunday, just as I was going to dine at Lady Blandford’s, to
whom I sacrificed it. It was a bunch of grapes as big--as
big--as that the two spies carried on a pole to Joshua; for
spies in those days, when they robbed a vineyard, were not
at all afraid of being overtaken. In good truth, this bunch
weighed three pounds and a half, _côte rôtie_ measure; and was
sent to me by my neighbour Prado, of the tribe of Issachar,
who is descended from one of foresaid spies, but a good deal
richer than his ancestor. Well, Madam, I carried it to the
Marchioness of Blandford, but gave it to the _maître d’hotel_,
with injunctions to conceal it till the dessert. At the end of
dinner, Lady Blandford said, she had heard of three immense
bunches of grapes at Mr. Prado’s, at a dinner he had made for
Mr. Welbore Ellis. I said those things were always exaggerated.
She cried, Oh! but Mrs. Ellis told it, and it weighed I don’t
know how many pounds, and the Duke of Argyll had been to see
the hothouse, and she wondered, as it was so near, I would
not go and see it. Not I, indeed, said I; I dare to say there
is no curiosity in it. Just then entered the gigantic bunch.
Everybody screamed. There, said I, I will be shot if Mr.
Prado has such a bunch as yours. In short, she suspected Lady
Egremont, and the adventure succeeded to admiration. If you
will send the Bedfordshire waggon, Madam, I will beg a dozen
grapes for you.…
“Pray, Madam, is not it Farming-Woods’ tide?[62] Who is to have
the care of the dear mouse in your absence? I wish I could
spare Margaret [his housekeeper], who loves all creatures so
well that she would have been happy in the Ark, and sorry when
the Deluge ceased; unless people had come to see Noah’s old
house, which she would have liked still better than cramming
his menagerie.”
[Illustration: _Sir Joshua Reynolds. Pinx._ _A. Dawson. Ph. Sc._ _J.
Raphael Smith. Sc._
_Lady Gertrude Fitzpatrick._]
The dearth of news was presently relieved by a General Election, about
which and other topics Walpole writes to Mann:
“Strawberry Hill, Oct. 6, 1774.
“It would be unlike my attention and punctuality, to see so
large an event as an irregular dissolution of Parliament,
without taking any notice of it to you. It happened last
Saturday, six months before its natural death, and without the
design being known but the Tuesday before, and that by very few
persons. The chief motive is supposed to be the ugly state of
North America, and the effects that a cross winter might have
on the next elections. Whatever were the causes, the first
consequences, as you may guess, were such a ferment in London
as is seldom seen at this dead season of the year. Couriers,
despatches, post-chaises, post-horses, hurrying every way!
Sixty messengers passed through one single turnpike on Friday.
The whole island is by this time in equal agitation; but less
wine and money will be shed than have been at any such period
for these fifty years.…
“The first symptoms are not favourable to the Court; the great
towns are casting off submission, and declaring for popular
members. London, Westminster, Middlesex, seem to have no
monarch but Wilkes, who is at the same time pushing for the
Mayoralty of London, with hitherto a majority on the poll.
It is strange how this man, like a phœnix, always revives
from his embers! America, I doubt, is still more unpromising.
There are whispers of their having assembled an armed force,
and of earnest supplications arrived for succours of men and
ships. A civil war is no trifle; and how we are to suppress
or pursue in such a vast region, with a handful of men, I am
not an Alexander to guess; and for the fleet, can we put it
upon casters and wheel it from Hudson’s Bay to Florida? But
I am an ignorant soul, and neither pretend to knowledge nor
foreknowledge. All I perceive already is, that our Parliaments
are subjected to America and India, and must be influenced by
their politics; yet I do not believe our senators are more
universal than formerly.
“It would be quite unfashionable to talk longer of anything but
elections; and yet it is the topic on which I never talk or
think, especially since _I took up my freedom_.[63]…
“In the midst of this combustion, we are in perils by land and
water. It has rained for this month without intermission. There
is a sea between me and Richmond, and Sunday was se’nnight I
was hurried down to Isleworth in the ferryboat by the violence
of the current, and had great difficulty to get to shore. Our
roads are so infested by highwaymen, that it is dangerous
stirring out almost by day. Lady Hertford was attacked on
Hounslow Heath at three in the afternoon. Dr. Eliot was shot
at three days ago, without having resisted; and the day before
yesterday we were near losing our Prime Minister, Lord North;
the robbers shot at the postilion, and wounded the latter. In
short, all the freebooters, that are not in India, have taken
to the highway. The Ladies of the Bedchamber dare not go to the
Queen at Kew in an evening. The lane between me and the Thames
is the only safe road I know at present, for it is up to the
middle of the horses in water. Next week I shall not venture
to London even at noon, for the Middlesex election is to be
at Brentford, where the two demagogues, Wilkes and Townshend,
oppose each other; and at Richmond there is no crossing the
river. How strange all this must appear to you Florentines; but
you may turn to your Machiavelli and Guicciardini, and have
some idea of it. I am the quietest man at present in the whole
island; not but I might take some part, if I would. I was in my
garden yesterday, seeing my servants lop some trees; my brewer
walked in and pressed me to go to Guildhall for the nomination
of members for the county. I replied, calmly, ‘Sir, when I
would go no more to my own election, you may be very sure I
will go to that of nobody else.’ My old tune is,
“‘Suave mari magno turbantibus æquora ventis,’ &c.
“Adieu!
“P.S. Arlington Street, 7th.
“I am just come to town, and find your letter.… The approaching
death of the Pope will be an event of no consequence. That old
mummery is near its conclusion, at least as a political object.
The history of the latter Popes will be no more read than
that of the last Constantinopolitan Emperors. Wilkes is a more
conspicuous personage in modern story than the Pontifex Maximus
of Rome. The poll for Lord Mayor ended last night; he and his
late Mayor had above 1,900 votes, and their antagonists not
1,500. It is strange that the more he is opposed, the more he
succeeds!”
The foregoing is an average sample of the bulk of Walpole’s Letters
to Sir Horace Mann. It was to these Macaulay referred when he said,
sneeringly, that Walpole “left copies of his private letters, with
copious notes, to be published after his decease.” There can be no
doubt that their author regarded them as a valuable contribution to
the history of his times. And such, in truth, they were. Many of them
contain full details of some political movement, written by one who,
if not himself engaged in the struggle, was in close communication
with the actors on one side at least. Hence, though these letters may
be loaded with bias, they are often of solid substance. If they are
not equally important for our present purpose, this is because they
deal almost entirely with public matters and with the general news of
the day. “Nothing is so pleasant in a letter,” writes Walpole to Lady
Ossory, “as the occurrences of society. I am always regretting in my
correspondence with Madame du Deffand and Sir Horace Mann, that I must
not make use of them, as the one has never lived in England, and the
other not these fifty years; and so, my private stories would want
notes as much as Petronius. Sir Horace and I have no acquaintance in
common but the Kings and Queens of Europe.”
In a letter to Mann, dated November 24, 1774, Walpole returns to the
subject of the new Parliament:
“A great event happened two days ago--a political and moral
event; the sudden death of that second Kouli Khan, Lord Clive.
There was certainly illness in the case; the world thinks more
than illness. His constitution was exceedingly broken and
disordered, and grown subject to violent pains and convulsions.
He came unexpectedly to town last Monday, and they say, ill. On
Tuesday his physician gave him a dose of laudanum, which had
not the desired effect. On the rest, there are two stories;
one, that the physician repeated the dose; the other, that he
doubled it himself, contrary to advice.[64] In short, he has
terminated at fifty a life of so much glory, reproach, art,
wealth, and ostentation! He had just named ten members for the
new Parliament.[65]
“Next Tuesday that Parliament is to meet--and a deep game it
has to play! few Parliaments a greater. The world is in amaze
here that no account is arrived from America of the result of
their General Congress--if any is come, it is very secret; and
_that_ has no favourable aspect. The combination and spirit
there seem to be universal, and is very alarming. I am the
humble servant of events, and you know never meddle with
prophecy. It would be difficult to descry good omens, be the
issue what it will.
“The old French Parliament is restored with great _éclat_.
Monsieur de Maurepas, author of the revolution, was received
one night at the Opera with boundless shouts of applause. It
is even said that the mob intended, when the King should go
to hold the _lit de justice_, to draw his coach. How singular
it would be if Wilkes’s case should be copied for a King of
France! Do you think Rousseau was in the right, when he said
that he could tell what would be the manners of any capital
city, from certain given lights? I don’t know what he may do on
Constantinople and Pekin--but Paris and London! I don’t believe
Voltaire likes these changes. I have seen nothing of his
writing for many months; not even on the poisoning Jesuits.[66]
For our part, I repeat it, we shall contribute nothing to the
_Histoire des Mœurs_, not for want of materials, but for want
of writers. We have comedies without novelty, gross satires
without stings, metaphysical eloquence, and antiquarians that
discover nothing.
“‘Bœotûm in crasso jurares aere natos!’
“Don’t tell me I am grown old and peevish and
supercilious--name the geniuses of 1774, and I submit. The next
Augustan age will dawn on the other side of the Atlantic. There
will, perhaps, be a Thucydides at Boston, a Xenophon at New
York, and, in time, a Virgil at Mexico, and a Newton at Peru.
At last, some curious traveller from Lima will visit England,
and give a description of the ruins of St. Paul’s, like the
editions of Balbec and Palmyra; but am I not prophesying,
contrary to my consummate prudence, and casting horoscopes of
empires like Rousseau? Yes; well, I will go and dream of my
visions.”
More than one writer has cited Walpole’s traveller from Lima as the
original of Lord Macaulay’s traveller from New Zealand, who, in the
midst of a vast solitude, takes his stand on a broken arch of London
Bridge to sketch the ruins of St. Paul’s. Others have traced the
passage in the celebrated Review of Ranke’s “History of the Popes,”
to Volney, Mrs. Barbauld, Kirke White, and Shelley; while others
again have pointed out that, from whatsoever source derived, the idea
expressed in this passage had been twice before employed by Macaulay,
once, in 1824, in a Review of Mitford’s “Greece,” and the second time,
in 1829, in his Review of Mill’s “Essay on Government.” The picture of
the New Zealander, however, resembles the less ambitious, but equally
graphic, figure of the traveller from Lima more closely than it does
any of the other passages referred to.[67] What is remarkable is, that
the Review of Ranke’s “History” appeared in October, 1840, whereas the
later portion of Walpole’s correspondence with Mann, to which the above
extract belongs, was first published from the original manuscripts
in 1843. How then could Macaulay know anything of the Peruvian
stranger?[68]
The following was also addressed to Sir H. Mann. It is dated in May,
1775:
“You have not more Masquerades in Carnival than we have; there
is one at the Pantheon to-night, another on Monday; and in June
is to be a pompous one on the water, and at Ranelagh. This and
the first are given by the Club called the _Sçavoir Vivre_,
who till now have only shone by excess of gaming. The leader
is that fashionable orator Lord Lyttelton,[69] of whom I need
not tell you more. I have done with these diversions, and enjoy
myself here. Your old acquaintance, Lord and Lady Dacre, and
your old friend, Mr. Chute, dined with me to-day: poor Lord
Dacre[70] is carried about, though not worse than he has been
these twenty years. Strawberry was in great beauty; what joy I
should have in showing it to you! Is this a wish I must never
indulge? Alas!
“I have had a long chain of thoughts since I wrote the last
paragraph. They ended in smiling at the word _never_. How
one pronounces it to the last moment! Would not one think I
counted on a long series of years to come? Yet no man has the
termination of all his views more before his eyes, or knows
better the idleness of framing visions to one’s self. One
passes away so soon, and worlds succeed to worlds, in which the
occupiers build the same castles in the air. What is ours but
the present moment? And how many of mine are gone! And what
do I want to show you? A plaything-vision, that has amused a
poor transitory mortal for a few hours, and that will pass
away like its master! Well, and yet is it not as sensible to
conform to common ideas, and to live while one lives? Perhaps
the wisest way is to cheat one’s self. Did one concentre all
one’s thoughts on the nearness and certainty of dissolution,
all the world would lie eating and sleeping like the savage
Americans. Our wishes and views were given us to gild the dream
of life, and if a Strawberry Hill can soften the decays of
age, it is wise to embrace it, and due gratitude to the Great
Giver to be happy with it. The true pain is the reflection on
the numbers that are not so blessed; yet I have no doubt but
the real miseries of life--I mean those that are unmerited and
unavoidable,--will be compensated to the sufferers. Tyrants
are a proof of an hereafter. Millions of men cannot be formed
for the sport of a cruel child.
“How happy is the Pretender in missing a Crown! When dead, he
will have all the advantage that other Kings have, the being
remembered; and that greater advantage, which Kings who die
in their childhood have, historians will say, he would have
been a great King if he had lived to reign; and that greatest
advantage which so very few of them have, his reign will be
stained with no crimes and blunders. If he is at Florence,
pray recommend me to him for his historian; you see I have all
the qualities a Monarch demands, I am disposed to flatter him.
You may tell him too what I have done for his uncle Richard
III. The mischief is in it, if I am not qualified for a Royal
Historiographer, when I have whitewashed one of the very few
whom my brethren, so contrary to their custom, have agreed to
traduce.”
In the autumn of 1775, Walpole was in Paris, whence he sends, for the
benefit of Conway’s daughter, this important piece of information:
“Tell Mrs. Damer, that the fashion now is to erect the _toupée_ into a
high detached tuft of hair, like a cockatoo’s crest; and this _toupée_
they call _la physionomie_--I don’t guess why.” And in giving George
Selwyn an account of the modish French ladies whom he met, he adds a
description suited to the humour of that facetious gentleman: “With one
of them,” he says, “you would be delighted, a Madame de Marchais. She
is not perfectly young, has a face like a Jew pedlar, her person is
about four feet, her head about six, and her _coiffure_ about ten. Her
forehead, chin, and neck are whiter than a miller’s; and she wears more
festoons of natural flowers than all the _figurantes_ at the Opera.
Her eloquence is still more abundant, her _attentions_ exuberant. She
talks volumes, writes folios--I mean in _billets_; presides over the
Académie, inspires passions.… She has a house in a nut-shell, that is
fuller of invention than a fairy tale; her bed stands in the middle
of the room, because there is no other space that would hold it; it
is surrounded by a perspective of looking-glasses.…” In reference
to the rage for _billets,_ he mentions “a collection that was found
last winter at Monsieur de Pondeveylle’s: there were sixteen thousand
from one lady, in a correspondence of only eleven years. For fear of
setting the house on fire if thrown into the chimney, the executors
crammed them into the oven.” “There have been known,” he adds, “persons
here who wrote to one another four times a day; and I was told of one
couple, who being always together, and the lover being fond of writing,
he placed a screen between them, and then wrote to Madam on t’other
side, and flung them over.” Of his “dear old friend,” he reports:
“Madame du Deffand has been so ill, that the day she was
seized I thought she would not live till night. Her Herculean
weakness, which could not resist strawberries and cream after
supper, has surmounted all the _ups_ and _downs_ which followed
her excess; but her impatience to go everywhere and to do
everything has been attended with a kind of relapse, and
another kind of giddiness; so that I am not quite easy about
her, as they allow her to take no nourishment to recruit, and
she will die of inanition, if she does not live upon it. She
cannot lift her head from the pillow without _étourdissemens_;
and yet her spirits gallop faster than anybody’s, and so do
her repartees. She has a great supper to-night for the Duc de
Choiseul, and was in such a passion yesterday with her cook
about it, and that put Tonton[71] into such a rage, that _nos
dames de Saint Joseph_ thought the devil or the philosophers
were flying away with their convent! As I have scarce quitted
her, I can have had nothing to tell you. If she gets well, as I
trust, I shall set out on the 12th; but I cannot leave her in
any danger--though I shall run many myself, if I stay longer.
I have kept such bad hours with this _malade_, that I have had
alarms of gout; and bad weather, worse inns, and a voyage in
winter, will ill suit me.…
“I must repose a great while after all this living in company;
nay, intend to go very little into the world again, as I do not
admire the French way of burning one’s candle to the very snuff
in public.”
At the end of 1775, Sir Horace Mann’s elder brother died, the family
estate came to the Ambassador, and Walpole flattered himself “that
a regular correspondence of thirty-four years will cease, and that
I shall see him again before we meet in the Elysian fields.” He was
disappointed. In February, 1776, he writes to his old friend: “You have
chilled me so thoroughly by the coldness of your answer, and by the
dislike you express to England, that I shall certainly press you no
more to come. I thought at least it would have cost you a struggle.”
Again, a little later: “Pray be assured, I acquiesce in all you say
on your own return, though grieved at your resolution, and more so at
the necessity you find in adhering to it. It is not my disposition to
prefer my own pleasure to the welfare of my friends. Your return might
have opened a warm channel of affection which above thirty years could
not freeze; but I am sure you know my steadiness too well to suspect me
of cooling to you, because we are both grown too old to meet again. I
wished that meeting as a luxury beyond what old age often tastes; but I
am too well prepared for parting with everything to be ill-humouredly
chagrined because one vision fails.” In July, 1776, we find the
following, also addressed to Mann:
“I did flatter myself with being diverted at your surprise
from so general an alteration of persons, objects, manners,
as you would have found; but there is an end of all that
pleasing vision! I remember when my father went out of place,
and was to return visits, which Ministers are excused from
doing, he could not guess where he was, finding himself in
so many new streets and squares. This was thirty years ago.
They have been building ever since, and one would think they
had imported two or three capitals. London could put Florence
into its fob-pocket; but as they build so slightly, if they
did not rebuild, it would be just the reverse of Rome, a vast
circumference of city surrounding an area of ruins. As its
present progress is chiefly north, and Southwark marches south,
the metropolis promises to be as broad as long. Rows of houses
shoot out every way like a polypus; and, so great is the rage
of building everywhere, that, if I stay here a fortnight,
without going to town, I look about to see if no new house is
built since I went last. America and France must tell us how
long this exuberance of opulence is to last! The East Indies,
I believe, will not contribute to it much longer. Babylon and
Memphis and Rome, probably, stared at their own downfall.
Empires did not use to philosophise, nor thought much but of
themselves. Such revolutions are better known now, and we ought
to expect them--I do not say we do. This little island will be
ridiculously proud some ages hence of its former brave days,
and swear its capital was once as big again as Paris, or--what
is to be the name of the city that will then give laws to
Europe?--perhaps New York or Philadelphia.”
At the close of 1776, Walpole had another severe illness. It is first
mentioned in a letter to Lady Ossory:
“It is not from being made Archbishop of York, that I write
by a secretary [Kirgate], Madam; but because my right hand
has lost its cunning. It has had the gout ever since Friday
night, and I am overjoyed with it, for there is no appearance
of its going any farther. I came to town on Sunday in a panic,
concluding I should be bedrid for three months, but I went out
last night, and think I shall be able in a few days to play
upon the guitar if I could play upon it at all.…
“I have seen the picture of ‘St. George,’ and approve the Duke
of Bedford’s head, and the exact likeness of Miss Vernon,[72]
but the attitude is mean and foolish, and expresses silly
wonderment. But of all, delicious is a picture of a little
girl of the Duke of Buccleuch, who is overlaid with a long
cloak, bonnet, and muff, in the midst of the snow, and is
perishing blue and red with cold, but looks so smiling, and so
good-humoured, that one longs to catch her up in one’s arms and
kiss her till she squalls.
“My hand has not a word more to say.”
[Illustration: _Sir Joshua Reynolds. Pinx._ _A. Dawson. Ph. Sc._ _J.
Raphael Smith. Sc._
_Lady Caroline Montagu._]
The attack proved obstinate, and we have again complaints of the
English climate, mixed with lamentations over the change in English
manners. Thus in February, 1777, he writes:
“Everything is changed; as always must happen when one grows
old, and is prejudiced to one’s old ways. I do not like dining
at nearly six, nor beginning the evening at ten at night. If
one does not conform, one must live alone; and that is more
disagreeable and more difficult in town than in the country,
where old useless people ought to live. Unfortunately, the
country does not agree with me; and I am sure it is not fancy;
for my violent partiality to Strawberry Hill cannot be imposed
upon. I am persuaded that it is the dampness of this climate
that gives me so much gout; and London, from the number of
fires and inhabitants, must be the driest spot in the nation.”
The following, written to Lord Nuneham in July, is in a gayer tone:
“Now I have taken this liberty, my dear Lord, I must take a
little more; you know my old admiration and envy are your
garden. I do not grudge Pomona or Sir James Cockburn their
hot-houses, nor intend to ruin myself by raising sugar and
water in tanner’s bark and peach skins. The Flora Nunehamica
is the height of my ambition, and if your Linnæus should have
any disciple that would condescend to look after my little
flower-garden, it would be the delight of my eyes and nose,
provided the cataracts of heaven are ever shut again! Not one
proviso do I make, but that the pupil be not a Scot. We had
peace and warm weather before the inundation of that northern
people, and therefore I beg to have no Attila for my gardener.
“Apropos, don’t your Lordship think that another set of
legislators, the Maccaronis and Maccaronesses, are very wise?
People abuse them for turning days, nights, hours and seasons
topsy-turvy; but surely it was upon mature reflection. We had a
set of customs and ideas borrowed from the continent that by no
means suited our climate. Reformers bring back things to their
natural course. Notwithstanding what I said in spite in the
paragraph above, we are in truth but Greenlanders, and ought to
conform to our climate. We should lay in store of provisions
and candles and masquerades and coloured lamps for ten months
in the year, and shut out our twilight and enjoy ourselves.
In September and October, we may venture out of our ark, and
make our hay, and gather in our corn, and go to horse-races,
and kill pheasants and partridges for stock for our winter’s
supper. I sailed in a skiff and pair this morning to Lady
Cecilia Johnston, and found her, like a good housewife, sitting
over her fire, with her cats and dogs and birds and children.
She brought out a dram to warm me and my servants, and we were
very merry and comfortable. As Lady Nuneham has neither so many
two-footed or four-footed cares upon her hands, I hope her
hands have been better employed.
“I wish I could peep over her shoulder one of these wet
mornings!”