[Illustration]
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.
CHAPTER I.
PAGE
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 1
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. 27
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. 57
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. 82
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. 107
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._ 141
CHAPTER VII.
State of French Society in 1765.--Walpole at Paris.--The
Royal Family and the Bête du Gévaudan.--French
Ladies of Quality.--Madame du Deffand.--A Letter
from Madame de Sévigné.--Rousseau and the King of
Prussia.--The Hume-Rousseau Quarrel.--Returns to
England, and hears Wesley at Bath.--Paris again.--Madame
du Deffand's Vitality.--Her Character.--Minor
Literary Efforts.--The _Historic Doubts_.--The
_Mysterious Mother_.--Tragedy in England.--Doings
of the Strawberry Press.--Walpole and Chatterton. 166
CHAPTER VIII.
PAGE
Old Friends and New.--Walpole's Nieces.--Mrs.
Damer.--Progress of Strawberry Hill.--Festivities
and Later Improvements.--_A Description_, etc., 1774.--The
House and Approaches.--Great Parlour, Waiting
Room, China Room, and Yellow Bedchamber.--Breakfast
Room.--Green Closet and Blue Bedchamber.--Armoury
and Library.--Red Bed-chamber, Holbein
Chamber, and Star Chamber.--Gallery.--Round
Drawing Room and Tribune.--Great North Bed-chamber.--Great
Cloister and Chapel.--Walpole on
Strawberry.--Its Dampness.--A Drive from Twickenham
to Piccadilly. 201
CHAPTER IX.
Occupations and Correspondence.--Literary Work.--Jephson
and the Stage.--_Nature will Prevail._--Issues
from the Strawberry Press.--Fourth Volume
of the _Anecdotes of Painting_.--The Beauclerk Tower
and Lady Di.--George, third Earl of Orford.--Sale
of the Houghton Pictures.--Moves to Berkeley Square.--Last
Visit to Madame du Deffand.--Her Death.--Themes
for Letters.--Death of Sir Horace Mann.--Pinkerton,
Madame de Genlis, Miss Burney, Hannah
More.--Mary and Agnes Berry.--Their Residence at
Twickenham.--Becomes fourth Earl of Orford.--_Epitaphium
vivi Auctoris._--The Berrys again.--Death
of Marshal Conway.--Last Letter to Lady Ossory.--Dies
at Berkeley Square, 2 March, 1797.--His Fortune
and Will.--The Fate of Strawberry. 232
CHAPTER X.
Macaulay on Walpole.--Effect of the _Edinburgh_ Essay.--Macaulay
and Mary Berry.--Portraits of Walpole.--Miss
Hawkins's Description.--Pinkerton's Rainy
Day at Strawberry.--Walpole's Character as a Man;
as a Virtuoso; as a Politician; as an Author and Letter-writer. 271
APPENDIX 299
INDEX 325
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.
[1] Another member for Castle Rising was Samuel Pepys, the Diarist.
[2] The name of _Horatio_ I dislike. It is theatrical, and not English.
I have, ever since I was a youth, written and subscribed _Horace_, an
English name for an Englishman. In all my books (and perhaps you will
think of the _numerosus Horatius_) I so spell my name.--_Walpoliana_,
i. 62.
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.
[3] It is also to be found asserted as a current story in the _Note
Books_ (unpublished) of the Duchess of Portland, the daughter of Edward
Harley, second Earl of Oxford, and the 'noble, lovely little Peggy' of
her father's friend and _protégé_, Matthew Prior.
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]
[4] These, hereafter referred to as the _Short Notes_, are the chief
authority for three parts of Walpole's not very eventful life. They
were first published with the concluding series of his _Letters to
Sir Horace Mann_, 2 vols., 1844, and are reprinted in Mr. Peter
Cunningham's edition of the _Correspondence_, vol. i. (1857), pp.
lxi-lxxvii.
[5] Martin's _Old Chelsea_, 1889, p. 82; Beaver's _Memorials of Old
Chelsea_, 1892, p. 291.
[6] Cunningham, v. 36, and ix. 519. The Duchess of Tyrconnell's
portrait, copied by Milbourn from the original at Lord Spencer's, was
one of the prominent ornaments of the Great Bedchamber at Strawberry
Hill. (See _A Description of the Villa_, etc., 1774, p. 138.) There
are some previously unpublished particulars respecting her as 'Mlle.
Genins' in M. Jusserand's extremely interesting _French Ambassador at
the Court of Charles the Second_, 1892, pp. 153 _et seq._, 170, 182.
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.
[7] _Walpole to the Miss Berrys_, 5 March, 1791.
[8] _Reminiscences of the Courts of George the First and Second_, in
Cunningham's _Corr._, i. xciii-xciv.
[9] The book referred to is a 'little lounging miscellany' of notes
and anecdotes by John Pinkerton, and was printed, soon after Walpole's
death, by Bensley, who lived in Johnson's old house, No. 8 Bolt Court.
It requires to to be used with caution (see _Quarterly Review_, vol.
lxxii., No. cxliv.), and must not be confused with Lord Hardwicke's
privately printed _Walpoliana_, which relate to Sir Robert Walpole.
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.
[10] This is quoted by Mr. Hayward and others as if the last words were
Sir Robert Walpole's. But Lady Louisa Stuart says nothing to indicate
this (Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's _Letters_, etc., 1887, i. xciii).
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.
[11] _Letter to Montagu_, 6 May, 1736.
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]
[12] _Walpole to Montagu._ Cunningham, 1857, i. 15.
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.
[13] Mr. D.C. Tovey (_Gray and his Friends_, 1890, 3 n.) thinks that
Ashton probably never preached at Eton before he was made Fellow, in
December, 1745,--which would greatly advance the date of Walpole's
communication. But it is cited here solely for its reminiscences of his
school-days.
[14] Saunderson had lost both his eyes in infancy from small-pox. This,
however, did not prevent him from lecturing on Newton's _Optics_,
and becoming Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge. Another
undergraduate who attended his lectures was Chesterfield. (See Letter
to Jouneau, 12 Oct., 1712.) There is an interesting account of
Saunderson by a former pupil, together with an excellent portrait, in
the _Gentleman's Magazine_ for September, 1754.
[15] _Walpole to Miss Berry_, 16 Aug., 1796.
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.
[16] Indeed, she is given too much to allicholly and musing.--_Merry
Wives of Windsor_, act i. sc. iv.
[17] _Walpole to Montagu_, 30 May, 1736.
[18] _Walpole to West_, 17 Aug., 1736.
[19] _Walpole to Montagu_, 20 May, 1736.
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.
[20] _Notes and Queries_, 2 Jan., 1869.
[21] Gray's _Works_, by Gosse, 1884, ii. 9.