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]
[70] She was the sister of Pope's Mrs. Bertrand, an equally fashionable
toy-woman at Bath. Her shop, according to an advertisement in the
_Daily Journal_ for May 24, 1733, was then 'against Suffolk Street,
Charing Cross.' It is mentioned in Fielding's _Amelia_. When, in Bk.
viii., ch. i., Mr. Bondum the bailiff contrives to capture Captain
Booth, it is by a false report that his Lady has been 'taken violently
ill, and carried into Mrs. _Chenevix's_ Toy-shop.' It is also mentioned
in the Hon. Mrs. Osborne's _Letters_, 1891, p. 73; and again by Walpole
himself in the _World_ for 19 Dec., 1754.
[71] This is slightly varied from ll. 29, 30, of Pope's fifth _Moral
Essay_ ('To Mr. Addison: Occasioned by his Dialogues on Medals').
'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]
[72] _Walpole to Conway_, 8 June, 1747.
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 10_s._ 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.
[73] In the Tribune (see chap. viii.) was a drawing by Mr. Bentley,
representing two lovers in a church looking at the tombs of Abelard and
Eloisa, and illustrating Pope's lines:--
'If ever chance two wand'ring lovers brings
To Paraclete's white walls and silver springs,' etc.
[74] The chiaroscuros of John Baptist Jackson, published at Venice in
1742. At this date he had returned to England, and was working in a
paper-hanging manufactory at Battersea.
'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]
[75] Lord Radnor's fantastic house on the river, which Walpole
nicknamed Mabland, came between Strawberry Hill and Pope's Villa, and
is a conspicuous object in old views of Twickenham, notably in that,
dated 1757, by Müntz, a Jersey artist for some time domiciled at
Strawberry Hill (_see_ p. 138). It was in the garden of Radnor House
that Pope first met Warburton.
[76] _Walpole to Mann_, 12 June, 1753.
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]
[77] The version here followed is that given in _A Description of the
Villa_, etc., 1774, pp. 117-19.
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]
[78] _World_, 19 Dec., 1754 (_Works_, 1798, i. 177-8).
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]
[79] Another instance of Maclean's momentary vogue is given by
Cunningham. He is hitched into Gray's _Long Story_, which was written
at the very time he was taken:
'A sudden fit of ague shook him,
He stood as mute as poor _Macleane_.'
This couplet has been recently explained by Gray's latest editor, Dr.
Bradshaw, to be a reference to Maclean's only observation when called
to receive sentence. 'My Lord [he said], I _cannot speak_.'
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]
[80] He was popularly known as 'Peter Shamble.' He afterwards became
Earl of Harrington.
[81] Elizabeth Neale, here referred to, was a well-known personage
in St. James's Street, where, for many years, she kept a fruit shop.
From Lady Mary Coke's _Letters and Journals_, 1889, vol. ii., p. 427,
Betty appears to have assiduously attended the debates in the House
of Commons being characterized as a 'violent Politician, & always in
the opposition.' In Mason's _Heroic Epistle to Sir William Chambers,
Knight_, she is spoken of as 'Patriot Betty.' She survived until 1797,
when her death, at the age of 67, is recorded in the _Gentleman's
Magazine_.
[82] _Walpole to Montagu_, 23 June, 1750.
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.'
[83] Nevertheless, when this '_Roi en Exil_' shortly afterwards died,
Walpole erected a tablet in St. Anne's Churchyard, Soho, to his memory,
with the following inscription:--
'Near this place is interred
Theodore, King of Corsica;
Who died in this parish, Dec. 11, 1756,
Immediately after leaving the King's-Bench-Prison,
By the benefit of the Act of Insolvency;
In consequence of which he registered
His Kingdom of Corsica
For the use of his Creditors.
'The Grave, great teacher, to a level brings
Heroes and beggars, galley-slaves and Kings.
But Theodore this moral learn'd, ere dead;
Fate pour'd its lessons on his _living_ head,
Bestow'd a kingdom, and denied him bread.'
Theodore's Great Seal, and 'that very curious piece by which he took
the benefit of the Act of Insolvency,' and in which he was only styled
Theodore Stephen, Baron de Neuhoff, were among the treasures of the
Tribune. (See Chapter VIII.)
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.
[84] A copy of the poems, 'illustrated with the original designs of Mr.
Richard Bentley, ... and also with Mr. Gray's original sketch of Stoke
House, from which Mr. Bentley made his finished pen drawing,' was sold
at the Strawberry Hill sale of 1842 to H. G. Bohn for £8 8_s._
[85] The verses include this magnificent stanza:--
'But not to one in this benighted age
Is that diviner inspiration giv'n,
That burns in Shakespeare's or in Milton's page,
The pomp and prodigality of heav'n.'
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.
[86] It is copied in Cunningham, vol. iii. p. 475. It was sold for £157
10_s._ at the Strawberry Hill sale, and passed into the collection of
the late Lord Taunton.
[87] See p. 192 n.