STRAWBERRY HILL, _Aug._ 29, 1748.
Dear Harry,--Whatever you may think, a campaign at Twickenham furnishes
as little matter for a letter as an abortive one in Flanders. I can't
say indeed that my generals wear black wigs, but they have long
full-bottomed hoods which cover as little entertainment to the full.
[Illustration: STRAWBERRY HILL, FROM THE SOUTH EAST.]
There's General my Lady Castlecomer, and General my Lady Dowager Ferris!
Why, do you think I can extract more out of them than you can out of
Hawley or Honeywood? Your old women dress, go to the Duke's levée, see
that the soldiers cock their hats right, sleep after dinner, and soak
with their led-captains till bed-time, and tell a thousand lies of what
they never did in their youth. Change hats for head-clothes, the rounds
for visits, and led-captains for toad-eaters, and the life is the very
same. In short, these are the people I live in the midst of, though not
with; and it is for want of more important histories that I have wrote
to you seldom; not, I give you my word, from the least negligence. My
present and sole occupation is planting, in which I have made great
progress and talked 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. I lament living in so barbarous an age, when we are
come to so little perfection in gardening. I am persuaded that a hundred
and fifty years hence it will be as common to remove oaks a hundred and
fifty years old, as it is now to transplant tulip roots.[1] I have even
begun a treatise or panegyric on the great discoveries made by posterity
in all arts and sciences, wherein I shall particularly descant on the
great and cheap convenience of making trout-rivers--one of the
improvements which Mrs. Kerwood wondered Mr. Hedges would not make at
his country-house, but which was not then quite so common as it will be.
I shall talk of a secret for roasting a wild boar and a whole pack of
hounds alive, without hurting them, so that the whole chase may be
brought up to table; and for this secret, the Duke of Newcastle's
grandson, if he can ever get a son, is to give a hundred thousand
pounds. Then the delightfulness of having whole groves of humming-birds,
tame tigers taught to fetch and carry, pocket spying-glasses to see
all that is doing in China, with a thousand other toys, which we now
look upon as impracticable, and which pert posterity would laugh in
one's face for staring at, while they are offering rewards for
perfecting discoveries, of the principles of which we have not the least
conception! If ever this book should come forth, I must expect to have
all the learned in arms against me, who measure all knowledge backward:
some of them have discovered symptoms of all arts in Homer; and
Pineda,[2] had so much faith in the accomplishments of his ancestors,
that he believed Adam understood all sciences but politics. But as these
great champions for our forefathers are dead, and Boileau not alive to
hitch me into a verse with Perrault, I am determined to admire the
learning of posterity, especially being convinced that half our present
knowledge sprung from discovering the errors of what had formerly been
called so. I don't think I shall ever make any great discoveries myself,
and therefore shall be content to propose them to my descendants, like
my Lord Bacon,[3] who, as Dr. Shaw says very prettily in his preface to
Boyle, "had the art of inventing arts:" or rather like a Marquis of
Worcester, of whom I have seen a little book which he calls "A Century
of Inventions,"[4] where he has set down a hundred machines to do
impossibilities with, and not a single direction how to make the
machines themselves.
[Footnote 1: It is worth noting that these predictions that "it will be
common to remove oaks a hundred and fifty years old" has been verified
many years since; at least, if not in the case of oaks, in that of large
elms and ashtrees. In 1850 Mr. Paxton offered to a Committee of the
House of Commons to undertake to remove the large elm which was standing
on the ground proposed for the Crystal Palace of the Exhibition of 1851,
and his master, the Duke of Devonshire, has since that time removed many
trees of very large size from one part of his grounds to another; and
similarly the "making of trout rivers" has been carried out in many
places, even in our most distant colonies, by Mr. Buckland's method of
raising the young fish from roe in boxes and distributing them in places
where they were needed.]
[Footnote 2: Pineda was a Spanish Jesuit of the seventeenth century, and
a voluminous writer.]
[Footnote 3: It is a singular thing that this most eminent man should be
so constantly spoken of by a title which he never had. His first title
in the peerage was Baron Verulam; his second, on a subsequent promotion,
was Viscount St. Albans; yet the error is as old as Dryden, and is
defended by Lord Macaulay in a sentence of pre-eminent absurdity:
"Posterity has felt that the greatest of English philosophers could
derive no accession of dignity from any title which power could bestow,
and, in defiance of letters-patent, has obstinately refused to degrade
Francis Bacon into Viscount St. Albans." But, without stopping to
discuss the propriety of representing a Britiph peerage, honestly
earned, and, in his case as Lord Chancellor, necessarily conferred, as a
"degradation," the mistake made is not that of continuing to call him
Francis Bacon, a name by which at one time he was known, but that of
calling him "Lord Bacon," a title by which he was never known for a
single moment in his lifetime; while, if a great philosopher was really
"degraded" by a peerage, it is hard to see how the degradation would
have been lessened by the title being Lord Bacon, which it was not,
rather than Viscount St. Albans, which it was.]
[Footnote 4: The "Biographie Universelle" (art. _Newcomen_) says of the
Marquis: "Longtemps avant lui [Neucomen] on avait remarqué la grande
force expansive de la vapeur, et on avait imaginé de l'employer comme
puissance. On trouve déja cetté application proposée et même executée
dans un ouvrage publié en 1663, par le Marquis de Worcester, sous le
titre bizarre, 'A Century of Inventions.'"]
If I happen to be less punctual in my correspondence than I intend to
be, you must conclude I am writing my book, which being designed for a
panegyric, will cost me a great deal of trouble. The dedication with
your leave, shall be addressed to your son that is coming, or, with Lady
Ailesbury's leave, to your ninth son, who will be unborn nearer to the
time I am writing of; always provided that she does not bring three at
once, like my Lady Berkeley.
Well! I have here set you the example of writing nonsense when one has
nothing to say, and shall take it ill if you don't keep up the
correspondence on the same foot. Adieu!
_REJOICINGS FOR THE PEACE--MASQUERADE AT RANELAGH--MEETING OF THE
PRINCES PARTY AND THE JACOBITES--PREVALENCE OF DRINKING AND
GAMBLING--WHITEFIELD._