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.
After the completion of Strawberry Hill and the printing of the
_Catalogue_, Walpole's life grows comparatively barren of events.
There are still four volumes of his _Correspondence_, but they take
upon them imperceptibly the nature of _nouvelles à la main_, and are
less fruitful in personal traits. Between his books and his prints,
his time passes agreeably, 'but will not do to relate.' Indeed, from
this period until his death, in 1797, the most notable occurrences
in his history are his friendship with the Miss Berry's in 1787-8,
and his belated accession to he Earldom of Orford. Both at Strawberry
and Arlington Street, his increasing years and his persistent malady
condemn him more and more to seclusion and retirement. He is most at
Strawberry, despite its dampness, for in the country he holds 'old,
useless people ought to live.' 'If you were not to be in London,' he
tells Lady Ossory in April, 1774, 'the spring advances so charmingly, I
think I should scarce go thither. One is frightened with the inundation
of breakfasts and balls that are coming on. Every one is engaged
to everybody for the next three weeks, and if one must hunt for a
needle, I had rather look for it in a bottle of hay in the country
than in a crowd.' 'By age and situation,' he writes from Strawberry
in September, 'at this time of the year I live with nothing but old
women. They do very well for me, who have little choice left, and who
rather prefer common nonsense to wise nonsense,--the only difference
I know between old women and old men. I am out of all politics, and
never think of elections, which I think I should hate even if I
loved politics,--just as, if I loved tapestry I do not think I could
talk over the manufacture of worsteds. Books I have almost done with
too,--at least, read only such as nobody else would read. In short,
my way of life is too insipid to entertain anybody but myself; and
though I am always employed, I must own I think I have given up every
thing in the world, only to be busy about the most arrant trifles.'
His London life was not greatly different. 'How should I see or know
anything?' he says a year later, apologizing for his dearth of news.
'I seldom stir out of my house [at Arlington Street] before seven in
the evening, see very few persons, and go to fewer places, make no new
acquaintance, and have seen most of my old wear out. Loo at Princess
Amelie's, loo at Lady Hertford's, are the capital events of my history,
and a Sunday alone, at Strawberry, my chief entertainment. All this
is far from gay; but as it neither gives me _ennui_, nor lowers my
spirits, it is not uncomfortable, and I prefer it to being _déplacé_ in
younger company.' Such is his account of his life in 1774-5, when he is
nearing sixty, and it probably represents it with sufficient accuracy.
But a trifling incident easily stirs him into unwonted vivacity. While
he is protesting that he has nothing to say, his letters grow under
his pen, and, almost as a necessary consequence of his leisure, they
become more frequent and more copious. In the edition of Cunningham, up
to September, 1774, they number fourteen hundred and fifty. Speaking
roughly, this represents a period of nearly forty years. During the
two-and-twenty years that remained to him, he managed to swell them by
what was, proportionately, a far greater number. The last letter given
by Cunningham is marked 2665; and this enumeration does not include
a good many letters and fragments of letters belonging to this later
period, which were published in 1865 in Miss Berry's _Journals and
Correspondence_. Nevertheless, as stated above, they more and more
assume what he somewhere calls 'their proper character of newspapers.'
During the remainder of his life, they were his chief occupation, and
his gout was seldom so severe but that he could make shift to scribble
a line to his favourite correspondents, calling in his printer Kirgate
as secretary in cases of extremity.[168] Of literature generally he
professed to have taken final leave. 'I no longer care about fame,'
he tells Mason in 1774; 'I have done being an author.' Nevertheless,
the _Short Notes_ piously chronicle the production of more than one
trifle, which are reprinted in his _Works_. When, in the above year,
Lord Chesterfield's letters to his son were published, Walpole began
a parody of that famous performance in a _Series of Letters from a
Mother to a Daughter_, with the general title of the _New Whole Duty of
Woman_. He grew tired of the idea too soon to enable us to judge what
his success might have been with a subject which, in his hands, should
have been diverting as a satire; for, although he was a warm admirer of
Chesterfield's parts, as he had shown in his character of him in the
_Royal and Noble Authors_, he was thoroughly alive to the assailable
side of what he styles his 'impertinent institutes of education.'[169]
Another work of this year was a reply to some remarks by Mr. Masters
in the _Archæologia_ upon the old subject of the _Historic Doubts_,
which calls for no further notice. But early in 1775 he was persuaded
into writing an epilogue for the _Braganza_ of Captain Robert Jephson,
a maiden tragedy of the _Venice Preserved_ order, which was produced at
Drury Lane in February of that year, with considerable success. In a
correspondence which ensued with the author, Walpole delivered himself
of his views on tragedy for the benefit of Mr. Jephson, who acted upon
them, but not (as his Mentor thought) with conspicuous success, in his
next attempt, the _Law of Lombardy_. Jephson's third play, however, the
_Count of Narbonne_, which was well received in 1781, had a natural
claim upon Walpole's good opinion, since it was based upon the _Castle
of Otranto_.[170] Besides the above letters on tragedy, Walpole wrote,
'in 1775 and 1776,' a rather longer paper on comedy, which is printed
with them in the second volume of his works (pp. 315-22). He held, as
he says, 'a good comedy the _chef-d'œuvre_ of human genius;' and it
is manifest that his keenest sympathies were on the side of comic art.
His remarks upon Congreve are full of just appreciation. Yet, although
he mentions the _School for Scandal_ (which, by the way, shows that he
must have written rather later than the dates given above), he makes no
reference to the most recent development, in _She Stoops to Conquer_,
of the school of humour and character, and he seems rather to pose as
the advocate of that genteel or sentimental comedy which Foote and
Goldsmith and Sheridan had striven to drive from the English stage.
When his prejudices are aroused, he is seldom a safe guide, and in
addition to his personal contempt for Goldsmith,[171] that writer had
irritated him by his reference to the Albemarle Street Club, to which
many of his friends belonged. It was an additional offence that the
'Miss Biddy [originally Miss Rachael] Buckskin' of the comedy was said
to stand for Miss Rachael Lloyd, long housekeeper at Kensington Palace,
and a member of the club well known both to himself and to Madame du
Deffand.[172]
[168] Kirgate, who will not be again mentioned, fared but ill at
his master's decease, receiving no more than a legacy of £100,--a
circumstance which Pinkerton darkly attributes to 'his modest merit'
having been 'supplanted by intriguing impudence' (_Walpoliana_, i.
xxiv). There is a portrait of him, engraved by William Collard, after
Sylvester Harding, the Pall Mall miniature painter, who also wrote in
1797 for Kirgate some verses in which he is made to speak of himself as
'forlorn, neglected, and forgot.' He had an unique collection of the
Strawberry Press issues, which was dispersed at his death, in 1810.
[169] It was his good sense rather than his inclination that made him
condemn one with whom he had many points of sympathy. Speaking of the
quarrel of Johnson and Chesterfield, he says, 'The friendly patronage
[_i. e._ of the earl] was returned with ungrateful rudeness by the
proud pedant; and men smiled, without being surprised, at seeing a bear
worry his dancing-master.'
[170] 'Jephson's _Count of Narbonne_ has been more admired than any
play I remember to have appeared these many years. It is still [Jan.,
1782] acted with success to very full houses' (_Malone to Charlemont,
Hist. MSS. Commission, 12th Rept., App._, Pt. x., 1891, p. 395). Malone
wrote the epilogue.
[171] 'Silly Dr. Goldsmith' he calls him to Cole in April, 1773.
'Goldsmith was an idiot, with once or twice a fit of parts,' he says
again to Mason in October, 1776.
In the second of the letters to Mr. Jephson, Walpole refers to his
own efforts at comedy, and implies that he had made attempts in this
direction even before the tragedy of _The Mysterious Mother_. He had
certainly the wit, and much of the gift of direct expression, which
comedy requires. But nothing of these earlier essays appears to have
survived, and the only dramatic effort included among his _Works_ (his
tragedy excepted) is the little piece entitled _Nature will Prevail_,
which, with its fairy machinery, has something of the character of such
earlier productions of Mr. W. S. Gilbert as the _Palace of Truth_.
This he wrote in 1773, and, according to the _Short Notes_, sent it
anonymously to the elder Colman, then manager of Covent Garden. Colman
(he says) was much pleased with it, but regarding it as too short for
a farce, wished to have it enlarged. This, however, its author thought
too much trouble 'for so slight and extempore a performance.' Five
years after, it was produced at the little theatre in the Haymarket,
and, being admirably acted,--says the _Biographia Dramatica_,--met with
considerable applause. But it is obviously one of those works to which
the verdict of Goldsmith's critic, that it would have been better if
the author had taken more pains, may judiciously be applied. It is more
like a sketch for a farce than a farce itself; and it is not finished
enough for a _proverbe_. Yet the dialogue is in parts so good that one
almost regrets the inability of the author to nerve himself for an
enterprise _de longue haleine_.
[172] The rules of the so-called _Female Coterie_ in Albemarle Street,
together with the names of the members, are given in the _Gentleman's
Magazine_ for 1770, pp. 414-5. Besides Walpole and Miss Lloyd, Fox,
Conway, Selwyn, the Waldegraves, the Damers, and many other 'persons of
quality' belonged to it.
Between 1774 and 1780 the Strawberry Hill Press still now and then
showed signs of vitality. In 1775, it printed as a loose sheet some
verses by Charles James Fox,--celebrating, as Amoret, that lover of
the Whigs, the beautiful Mrs. Crewe,--and three hundred copies of an
Eclogue by Mr. Fitzpatrick,[173] entitled _Dorinda_, which contains the
couplet,--
[173] The Hon. Richard Fitzpatrick, Lord Ossory's brother. He
afterwards became a General, and Secretary at War. At this time he
was a captain in the Grenadier Guards. As a _littérateur_ he had
written _The Bath Picture; or, a Slight Sketch of its Beauties_; and
he was later one of the chief contributors to the _Rolliad_. Besides
being the life-long friend of Fox, he was a highly popular wit and
man-of-fashion. Lord Ossory put him above Walpole and Selwyn; and Lady
Holland is said to have thought him the most agreeable person she had
ever known. He died in 1813.]
'And oh! what Bliss, when each alike is pleas'd,
the Hand that squeezes, and the Hand that's squeez'd.'
These were followed, in 1778, by the _Sleep Walker_, a comedy from the
French of Madame du Deffand's friend Pont de Veyle, translated by Lady
Craven, afterwards Margravine of Anspach, and played for a charitable
purpose at Newbury. A year later came the vindication of his conduct to
Chatterton, already mentioned at pp. 196-200; and after this a sheet of
verse by Mr. Charles Miller to Lady Horatia Waldegrave,[174] a daughter
of the Duchess of Gloucester by her first husband. The last work of
any importance was the fourth volume of the _Anecdotes of Painting_,
which had been printed as far back as 1770, but was not issued until
Oct., 1780. This delay, the Advertisement informs us, arose 'from
motives of tenderness.' The author was 'unwilling [he says] to utter
even gentle censures, which might wound the affections, or offend the
prejudices, of those related to the persons whom truth forbad him to
commend beyond their merits.'[175] But despite his unwillingness to
'dispense universal panegyric,' and the limitation of his theme to
living professors, he manages, in the same Advertisement, to distribute
a fair amount of praise to some of his particular favourites. Of H. W.
Bunbury, the husband of Goldsmith's 'Little Comedy,' he says that he is
the 'second Hogarth,' and the 'first imitator who ever fully equalled
his original,'--which is sheer extravagance. He lauds the miniature
copying of Lady Lucan, as almost depreciating the 'exquisite works' of
the artists she follows,--to wit, Cooper and the Olivers; and he speaks
of Lady Di. Beauclerk's drawings as 'not only inspired by Shakespeare's
insight into nature, but by the graces and taste of Grecian artists.'
After this, the comparison of Mrs. Damer with Bernini seems almost tame.
[174] One of the three beautiful sisters painted by
Reynolds,--Elizabeth Laura, afterwards Viscountess Chewton; Charlotte
Maria, afterwards Countess of Euston; and Anne Horatia, who married
Captain Hugh Conway. 'Sir Joshua Reynolds gets avaricious in his old
age. My picture of the young ladies Waldegrave is doubtless very fine
and graceful, but it cost me 800 guineas' (_Walpoliana_, ii. 157).
[175] He was not successful as regards Hogarth, whose widow was sorely
and justly wounded by his coarse treatment of _Sigismunda_, which is
said to have been a portrait of herself. The picture is now in the
National Gallery.
Yet her works 'from the life are not inferior to the antique, and
those ... were not more like.' One can scarcely blame Walpole severely
for this hearty backing of the friends who had added so much to the
attractions of his Gothic castle; but the value of his criticisms, in
many other instances sound enough, is certainly impaired by his loyalty
to the old-new practice of 'log-rolling.'
Lady Di. Beauclerk, whose illustrations to Dryden's _Fables_ are still
a frequent item in second-hand catalogues, has a personal connection
with Strawberry through the curious little closet bearing her name,
which, with the assistance of Mr. Essex, a Gothic architect from
Cambridge, Walpole in 1776-8 managed to tuck in between the Cabinet
and the Round Tower. It was built on purpose to hold the 'seven
incomparable drawings,' executed in a fortnight, which her Ladyship
prepared, to illustrate _The Mysterious Mother_. These were the designs
to which he refers in the _Anecdotes of Painting_, and, in a letter to
Mann, says could not be surpassed by Guido and Salvator Rosa. They were
hung on Indian blue damask, in frames of black and gold; and Clive's
friend, Miss Pope, the actress, when she dined at Strawberry, was
affected by them to such a degree that she shed tears, although she
did not know the story,--an anecdote which may be regarded either as a
genuine compliment to Lady Di., or a merely histrionic tribute to her
entertainer. 'The drawings,' Walpole says, 'do not shock and disgust,
like their original, the tragedy;' but they were not to be shown to the
profane. They were, nevertheless, probably exhibited pretty freely, as
a copy of the play, carefully annotated in MS. by the author, and bound
in blue leather to match the hangings, was always kept in a drawer of
one of the tables, for the purpose of explaining them.[176] Walpole
afterwards added one or two curiosities to this closet. It contained,
according to the last edition of the _Catalogue_, a head in basalt of
Jupiter Serapis, and a book of Psalms illuminated by Giulio Clovio, the
latter purchased for £168 at the Duchess of Portland's sale in May,
1786. There was also a portrait by Powell, after Reynolds, of Lady Di.
herself, who lived for some time at Twickenham in a house now known as
Little Marble Hill, many of the rooms of which she decorated with her
own performances. These were apparently the efforts which prompted the
already mentioned postscript to the _Parish Register of Twickenham_:
"Here Genius in a later hour
Selected its sequester'd bow'r,
And threw around the verdant room
The blushing lilac's chill perfume.
So loose is flung each bold festoon,
Each bough so breathes the touch of noon,
The happy pencil so deceives,
That Flora, doubly jealous, cries,
'The work's not mine,--yet, trust these eyes,
'T is my own Zephyr waves the leaves.'"[177]
[176] Miss Hawkins (_Anecdotes_, etc., 1822, p. 103) did not think
highly of these performances: 'Unless the proportions of the human
figure are of no importance in drawing it, these 'Beauclerk drawings'
can be looked on only with disgust and contempt.' But she praises the
gipsies hereafter mentioned (p. 260 n.) as having been copied by Agnes
Berry.
[177] See pp. 158, 159.
Mention has been made of the intermittent attacks of insanity to
which Walpole's nephew, the third Earl of Orford, was subject. At the
beginning of 1774, he had returned to his senses, and his uncle, on
whom fell the chief care of his affairs during his illnesses, was,
for a brief period, freed from the irksome strain of an uncongenial
and a thankless duty. In April, 1777, however, Lord Orford's malady
broke out again, with redoubled severity. In August, he was still
fluctuating 'between violence and stupidity;' but in March, 1778, a
lucid interval had once more been reached, and Walpole was relieved of
the care of his person. Of his affairs he had declined to take care, as
his Lordship had employed a lawyer of whom Walpole had a bad opinion.
'He has resumed the entire dominion of himself,' says a letter to
Mann in April, 'and is gone into the country, and intends to command
the militia.' One of the earliest results of this 'entire dominion'
was a step which filled his relative with the keenest distress. He
offered the famous Houghton collection of pictures to Catherine of
Russia,--'the most signal mortification to my idolatry for my father's
memory that it could receive,' says Walpole to Lady Ossory. By August,
1779, the sale was completed. 'The sum stipulated,' he tells Mann,
'is forty or forty-five thousand pounds,[178] I neither know nor care
which; nor whether the picture merchant ever receives the whole sum,
which probably he will not do, as I hear it is to be discharged at
three payments,--a miserable bargain for a mighty empress!... Well!
adieu to Houghton! about its mad master I shall never trouble myself
more.... Since he has stript Houghton of its glory, I do not care a
straw what he does with the stone or the acres!'[179]
[178] The exact sum was £40,555. Cipriani and West were the valuers.
Most of the family portraits were reserved; but so many of the pictures
were presents that it is not easy to estimate the actual profit over
their first cost to the original owner.
[179] _Walpole to Mann_, 4 Aug., 1779.
Not very long after the date of the above letter Walpole made what
was, for him, an important change of residence. The lease of his
house in Arlington Street running out, he fixed upon a larger one
in the then very fashionable district of Berkeley Square. The house
he selected, now (1892) numbered 11, was then 40,[180] and he had
commenced negotiations for its purchase as early as November, 1777,
when, he tells Lady Ossory, he had come to town to take possession. But
difficulties arose over the sale, and he found himself involved in a
Chancery suit. He was too adroit, however, to allow this to degenerate
into an additional annoyance, and managed (by his own account) to
turn what promised to be a tedious course of litigation into a combat
of courtesy. Ultimately, in July, 1779, he had won his cause, and
was hurrying from Strawberry to pay his purchase money and close the
bargain. Two months later, he is moving in, and is delighted with his
acquisition. He would not change his two pretty mansions for any in
England, he says. On the 14th October, he took formal possession, upon
which day--his 'inauguration day'--he dates his first letter 'Berkeley
Square.' 'It is seeming to take a new lease of life,' he tells Mason.
'I was born in Arlington Street, lived there about fourteen years,
returned thither, and passed thirty-seven more; but I have sober
monitors that warn me not to delude myself.' He had still a decade and
a half before him.
[180] This, according to Harrison's _Memorable Houses_, 3rd ed., 1890,
p. 62, is Lord Orford's number as given in _Boyle's Court Guide_ for
1796.
Little more than twelve months after he had settled down in his new
abode, he lost the faithful friend at Paris, to whom, for the space
of fifteen years, he had written nearly once a week. By 1774, he had
become somewhat nervous about this accumulated correspondence in a
language not his own. For an Englishman, his French was good, and, as
might be expected of anything he wrote, characteristic and vivacious.
But, almost of necessity, it contained many minor faults of phraseology
and arrangement, besides abounding in personal anecdote; and he became
apprehensive lest, after Madame du Deffand's death, his utterances
should fall into alien hands. General Conway, who visited Paris in
October, 1774, had therefore been charged to beg for their return--a
request which seems at first to have been met by the reply on the
lady's part that sufficient precautions had already been taken for
ensuring their restoration. Ultimately, however, they were handed to
Conway.[181] It was in all probability under a sense of this concession
that Walpole once more risked a tedious journey to visit his blind
friend. In the following year he went to Paris, to find her, as usual,
impatiently expecting his arrival. She sat with him until half-past
two, and before his eyes were open again, he had a letter from her.
'Her soul is immortal, and forces her body to keep it company.' A
little later he complains that he never gets to bed from her suppers
before two or three o'clock. 'In short,' he says, 'I need have the
activity of a squirrel, and the strength of a Hercules, to go through
my labours,--not to count how many _démêlés_ I have had to _raccommode_
and how many _mémoires_ to present against Tonton,[182] who grows the
greater favourite the more people he devours.' But Tonton's mistress is
more worth visiting than ever, he tells Selwyn, and she is apparently
as tireless as of yore. 'Madame du Deffand and I [says another letter]
set out last Sunday at seven in the evening, to go fifteen miles to a
ball, and came back after supper; and another night, because it was
but one in the morning when she brought me home, she ordered the
coachman to make the tour of the Quais, and drive gently because it
was so early.' At last, early in October, he tears himself away, to be
followed almost immediately by a letter of farewell. Here it is:--
'Adieu, ce mot est bien triste; souvenez-vous que vous laissez ici
la personne dont vous êtes le plus aimé, et dont le bonheur et le
malheur consistent dans ce que vous pensez pour elle. Donnez-moi de vos
nouvelles le plus tôt qu'il sera possible.
'Je me porte bien, j'ai un peu dormi, ma nuit n'est pas finie; je serai
très-exacte au régime, et j'aurai soin de moi puisque vous vous y
intéressez.'
[181] According to a note in the selection from Madame du Deffand's
Correspondence with Walpole, published in 1810, iii. 44, these letters
were at that date extant. But all the subsequent letters were burnt by
her at Walpole's earnest desire--those only excepted which she received
during the last year of her life, and these, also, were sent back when
she died.
[182] Tonton was a snappish little dog belonging to Madame du Deffand,
which, when in its mistress's company, must have been extremely
objectionable. In January, 1778, the Maréchale de Luxembourg presented
her old friend with Tonton's portrait in wax on a gold snuff-box,
together with the last six volumes of Madame du Deffand's favourite,
Voltaire, adding the following epigram by the Chevalier de Boufflers:--
'Vous les trouvez tous deux charmans,
Nous les trouvons tous deux mordans:
Voilà la ressemblance;
L'un ne mord que ses ennemis,
Et l'autre mord tous vos amis:
Voilà la différence.'
At Madame du Deffand's death, both dog and box passed to Walpole, the
latter finding an honoured place among the treasures of the Tribune.
(See _A Description of the Villa_, etc., 1774, p. 137, _Appendix of
Additions_.)
The correspondence thus resumed was continued for five years more.
Walpole does not seem to have visited Paris again, and the references
to Madame du Deffand in his general correspondence are not very
frequent. Towards the middle of 1780, her life was plainly closing in.
In July and August, she complained of being more than usually languid,
and in a letter of the 22nd of the latter month intimates that it may
be her last, as dictation grows painful to her. 'Ne vous devant revoir
de ma vie,'--she says pathetically,--'je n'ai rien à regretter.'
From this time she kept her bed, and in September Walpole tells Lady
Ossory that he is trembling at every letter he gets from Paris. 'My
dear old friend, I fear, is going!... To have struggled twenty days at
eighty-four shows such stamina that I have not totally lost hopes.' On
the 24th, however, after a lethargy of several days, she died quietly,
'without effort or struggle.' 'Elle a eu la mort la plus douce,'--says
her faithful and attached secretary, Wiart,--'quoique la maladie ait
été longue.' She was buried, at her own wish, in the parish church of
St. Sulpice. By her will she made her nephew, the Marquis d'Aulan, her
heir. Long since, she had wished Walpole to accept this character.
Thereupon he had threatened that he would never set foot in Paris again
if she carried out her intention; and it was abandoned. But she left
him the whole of her manuscripts[183] and books.
As his own letters to her have not been printed, her death makes no
difference in the amount of his correspondence. The war with the
American Colonies, of which he foresaw the disastrous results, and
the course of which he follows to Mann with the greatest keenness,
fully absorbs as much of his time as he can spare from the vagaries of
the Duchess of Kingston and the doings of the Duchess of Gloucester.
Not many months before Madame du Deffand died had occurred the famous
Gordon Riots, which, as he was in London most of the time, naturally
occupy his pen. It was General Conway who, as the author of _Barnaby
Rudge_ has not forgotten, so effectively remonstrated with Lord George
upon the occasion of the visit of the mob to the House of Commons;
and four days later Walpole chronicles from Berkeley Square the
events of the terrible 'Black Wednesday.' From the roof of Gloucester
House he sees the blazing prisons,--a sight he shall not soon forget.
Other subjects for which one dips in the lucky bag of his records
are the defence of Gibraltar, the trial of Warren Hastings, the loss
of the _Royal George_. But it is generally in the minor chronicle
that he is most diverting. The last _bon mot_ of George Selwyn or
Lady Townshend, the newest 'royal pregnancy,' the details of court
ceremonial, the most recent addition to Strawberry, the endless stream
of anecdote and tittle-tattle which runs dimpling all the way,--these
are the themes he loves best; this is the element in which his easy
persiflage delights to disport itself. He is, above all, a _rieur_.
About his serious passages there is generally a false ring, but
never when he pours out the gossip that he loves, and of which he
has so inexhaustible a supply. 'I can sit and amuse myself with my
own memory,' he says to Mann in February, 1785, 'and yet find new
stores at every audience that I give to it. Then, for private episodes
[he has been speaking of his knowledge of public events], varieties
of characters, political intrigues, literary anecdotes, etc., the
profusion that I remember is endless; in short, when I reflect on all
I have seen, heard, read, written, the many idle hours I have passed,
the nights I have wasted playing at faro, the weeks, nay months, I have
spent in pain, you will not wonder that I almost think I have, like
Pythagoras, been Panthoides Euphorbus, and have retained one memory in
at least two bodies.'
[183] The MSS., which included eight hundred of Madame du Deffand's
letters, were sold in the Strawberry Hill sale of 1842 for £157 10_s._
He was sixty-eight when he wrote the above letter. Mann was
eighty-four, and the long correspondence--a correspondence 'not to be
paralleled in the annals of the Post Office'--was drawing to a close.
'What Orestes and Pylades ever wrote to each other for four-and-forty
years without meeting?' Walpole asks. In June, 1786, however, the last
letter of the eight hundred and nine specimens printed by Cunningham
was despatched to Florence.[184] In the following November, Mann died,
after a prolonged illness. He had never visited England, nor had
Walpole set eyes upon him since he had left him at Florence in May,
1741. His death followed hard upon that of another faithful friend
(whose gifts, perhaps, hardly lay in the epistolary line),--bustling,
kindly Kitty Clive. Her cheerful, ruddy face, 'all sun and vermilion,'
set peacefully in December, 1785, leaving Cliveden vacant, not, as we
shall see, for long.[185] Earlier still had departed another old ally,
Cole, the antiquary, and the lapse of time had in other ways contracted
Walpole's circle. In 1781, Lady Orford had ended her erratic career at
Pisa, leaving her son a fortune so considerable as to make his uncle
regret vaguely that the sale of the Houghton pictures had not been
delayed for a few months longer. Three years later, she was followed by
her brother-in-law, Sir Edward Walpole,--an occurrence which had the
effect of leaving between Horace Walpole and his father's title nothing
but his lunatic and childless nephew.
[184] Walpole, as in the case of Madame du Deffand, had taken the
precaution of getting back his letters, and at his friend's death not
more than a dozen of them were still in Mann's possession. According to
Cunningham (_Corr._, ix. xv), Mann's letters to Walpole are 'absolutely
unreadable.' An attempt to skim the cream of them (such as it is) was
made by Dr. Doran in two volumes entitled _'Mann' and Manners at the
Court of Florence_, 1740-1786, Bentley, 1876.
[185] Mrs. Clive is buried at Twickenham, where a mural slab was
erected to her in the parish church by her _protégée_ and successor,
Miss Jane Pope, the clever actress who shed tears over the Beauclerk
drawings (see p. 244). Her portrait by Davison, which is engraved as
the frontispiece to Cunningham's fourth volume, hung in the Round
Bedchamber at Strawberry. It was given to Walpole by her brother, James
Raftor.
If his relatives and friends were falling away, however, their
places--the places of the friends, at least--were speedily filled
again; and, as a general rule, most of his male favourites were
replaced by women. Pinkerton, the antiquary, who afterwards published
the _Walpoliana_, is one of the exceptions; and several of Walpole's
letters to him are contained in that book, and in the volumes of
Pinkerton's own correspondence published by Dawson Turner in 1830.
But Walpole's appetite for correspondence of the purely literary kind
had somewhat slackened in his old age, and it was to the other sex
that he turned for sympathy and solace. He liked them best; his style
suited them; and he wrote to them with most ease. In July, 1785,
he was visited at Strawberry by Madame de Genlis, who arrived with
her friend Miss Wilkes and the famous Pamela,[186] afterwards Lady
Edward Fitzgerald. Madame de Genlis at this date was nearing forty,
and had lost much of her good looks. But Walpole seems to have found
her less _précieuse_ and affected than he had anticipated, and she
was, on this occasion, unaccompanied by the inevitable harp. A later
visit was from Dr. Burney and his daughter Fanny,--'Evelina-Cecilia'
Walpole calls her,--a young lady for whose good sense and modesty he
expresses a genuine admiration. Miss Burney had not as yet entered
upon that court bondage which was to be so little to her advantage.
Another and more intimate acquaintanceship of this period was with
Miss Burney's friend, Hannah More. Hannah More ultimately became one
of Walpole's correspondents, although scarcely 'so corresponding' as
he wished; and they met frequently in society when she visited London.
On her side, she seems to have been wholly fascinated by his wit
and conversational powers; he, on his, was attracted by her mingled
puritanism and vivacity. He writes to her as 'St. Hannah;' and she, in
return, sighs plaintively over his lack of religion. Yet (she adds)
she 'must do him the justice to say, that except the delight he has
in teasing me for what he calls over-strictness, I have never heard
a sentence from him which savoured of infidelity.'[187] He evidently
took a great interest in her works, and indeed in 1789 printed at his
press one of her poems, _Bonner's Ghost_.[188] His friendship for her
endured for the remainder of his life; and not long before his death he
presented her with a richly bound copy of Bishop Wilson's _Bible_, with
a complimentary inscription which may be read in the second volume of
her Life and Correspondence.
[186] 'Whom she [Madame de Genlis] has educated to be very like
herself in the face,' says Walpole, referring to a then current
scandal. At this date, however, it is but just to add that the recent
investigations of Mr. J. G. Alger, as embodied in vol. xix. of the
_Dictionary of National Biography_, tend to show that it is by no means
certain that Pamela was the daughter of the accomplished lady whom
Philippe _Egalité_ entrusted with the education of his sons.
[187] He is not explicit as to his creed. 'Atheism I dislike,' he said
to Pinkerton. 'It is gloomy, uncomfortable; and, in my eye, unnatural
and irrational. It certainly requires more credulity to believe that
there is no God, than to believe that there is' (_Walpoliana_, i.
75-6). But Pinkerton must be taken with caution. (Cf. _Quarterly
Review_, 1843, lxxii. 551.)
[188] In 1786 she had dedicated to him her _Florio, A Tale_, etc., with
a highly complimentary Preface, in which she says: 'I should be unjust
to your very engaging and well-bred turn of wit, if I did not declare
that, among all the lively and brilliant things I have heard from you,
I do not remember ever to have heard an unkind or an ungenerous one.'
It was, however, neither the author of _Evelina_ nor the author of
_The Manners of the Great_ who was destined to fill the void created
by the death of Madame du Deffand. In the winter of 1787-8, he had
first seen, and a year later he made the formal acquaintance of, 'two
young ladies of the name of Berry.' They had a story. Their father,
at this time a widower, had married for love, and had afterwards been
supplanted in the good graces of a rich uncle by a younger brother who
had the generosity to allow him an annuity of a thousand a year. In
1783, Mr. Berry had taken his daughters abroad to Holland, Switzerland,
and Italy, whence, in June, 1785, they had returned, being then
highly cultivated and attractive young women of two-and-twenty and
one-and-twenty respectively. Three years later, Walpole met them for
the second time at the house of a Lady Herries, the wife of a banker
in St. James's Street. The first time he saw them he 'would not be
acquainted with them, having heard so much in their praise that he
concluded they would be all pretension.' But on the second occasion,
'in a very small company,' he sat next the elder, Mary, 'and found her
an angel both inside and out.' 'Her face'--he tells Lady Ossory--'is
formed for a sentimental novel, but it is ten times fitter for a fifty
times better thing, genteel comedy.' The other sister was speedily
discovered to be nearly as charming. 'They are exceedingly sensible,
entirely natural and unaffected, frank, and, being qualified to talk on
any subject, nothing is so easy and agreeable as their conversation,
nor more apposite than their answers and observations. The eldest, I
discovered by chance, understands Latin, and is a perfect Frenchwoman
in her language. The younger draws charmingly, and has copied admirably
Lady Di.'s gipsies,[189] which I lent, though for the first time of her
attempting colours. They are of pleasing figures: Mary, the eldest,
sweet, with fine dark eyes that are very lively when she speaks, with
a symmetry of face that is the more interesting from being pale;
Agnes, the younger, has an agreeable, sensible countenance, hardly to
be called handsome, but almost. She is less animated than Mary, but
seems, out of deference to her sister, to speak seldomer; for they
dote on each other, and Mary is always praising her sister's talents.
I must even tell you they dress within the bounds of fashion, though
fashionably; but without the excrescences and balconies with which
modern hoydens overwhelm and barricade their persons. In short, good
sense, information, simplicity, and ease characterize the Berrys; and
this is not particularly mine, who am apt to be prejudiced, but the
universal voice of all who know them.'[190]
[189] This (we are told) was Lady Di.'s _chef-d'œuvre_. It was a
water-colour drawing representing 'Gipsies telling a country-maiden
her fortune at the entrance of a beech-wood,' and hung in the Red
Bedchamber at Strawberry.
[190] _Walpole to Lady Ossory_, 11 Oct., 1788.
'This delightful family,' he goes on to say, 'comes to me almost every
Sunday evening. [They were at the time living on Twickenham Common.] Of
the father not much is recorded beyond the fact that he was 'a little
merry man with a round face,' and (as his eldest daughter reports)
'an odd inherent easiness in his disposition,' who seems to have
been perfectly contented in his modest and unobtrusive character of
paternal appendage to the favourites. Walpole's attachment to his new
friends grew rapidly. Only a few days after the date of the foregoing
letter, Mr. Kirgate's press was versifying in their honour, and they
themselves were already 'his two Straw Berries,' whose praises he sang
to all his friends. He delighted in devising new titles for them,--they
were his 'twin wives,' his 'dear Both,' his 'Amours.' For them in this
year he began writing the charming little volume of _Reminiscences
of the Courts of George the 1st and 2nd_, and in December, 1789, he
dedicated to them his _Catalogue of Strawberry Hill_. It was not long
before he had secured them a home at Teddington and finally, when, in
1791, Cliveden became vacant, he prevailed upon them to become his
neighbours. He afterwards bequeathed the house to them, and for many
years after his death, it was their summer residence. On either side
the acquaintance was advantageous. His friendship at once introduced
them to the best and most accomplished fashionable society of their
day, while the charm of their 'company, conversation and talents' must
have inexpressibly sweetened and softened what, on his part, had begun
to grow more and more a solitary, joyless, and painful old age.
His establishment of his 'wives' in his immediate vicinity was not,
however, accomplished without difficulty. For a moment some ill-natured
newspaper gossip, which attributed the attachment of the Berry family
to interested motives, so justly aroused the indignation of the elder
sister that the whole arrangement threatened to collapse. But the
slight estrangement thus caused soon passed away; and at the close of
1791, they took up their abode in Mrs. Clive's old house, now doubly
honoured. On the 5th of the December in the same year, after a fresh
fit of frenzy, Walpole's nephew died, and he became fourth Earl of
Orford. The new dignity was by no means a welcome one, and scarcely
compensated for the cares which it entailed. 'A small estate, loaded
with debt, and of which I do not understand the management, and am too
old to learn; a source of law suits amongst my near relations, though
not affecting me; endless conversations with lawyers, and packets of
letters to read every day and answer,--all this weight of new business
is too much for the rag of life that yet hangs about me, and was
preceded by three weeks of anxiety about my unfortunate nephew, and a
daily correspondence with physicians and mad-doctors, falling upon me
when I had been out of order ever since July.'[191] 'For the other
empty metamorphosis,' he writes to Hannah More, 'that has happened to
the outward man, you do me justice in concluding that it can do nothing
but tease me; it is being called names in one's old age. I had rather
be my Lord Mayor, for then I should keep the nickname but a year; and
mine I may retain a little longer,--not that at seventy-five I reckon
on becoming my Lord Methusalem.' For some time he could scarcely
bring himself to use his new signature, and occasionally varied it by
describing himself as 'The uncle of the late Earl of Orford.' In 1792,
he delivered himself, after the fashion of Cowley, of the following
_Epitaphium vivi Auctoris_:--
'An estate and an earldom at seventy-four!
Had I sought them or wished them, 'twould add one fear more,--
That of making a countess when almost four-score.
But Fortune, who scatters her gifts out of season,
Though unkind to my limbs, has still left me my reason;
And whether she lowers or lifts me, I'll try,
In the plain simple style I have lived in, to die:
For ambition too humble, for manners too high.'
[191] _Walpole to Pinkerton_, 26 Dec., 1791.
The last line seems like another of the many echoes of Goldsmith's
_Retaliation_. As for the fear indicated in the third, it is hinted
that this at one time bade fair to be something more than a poetical
apprehension. If we are to credit a tradition handed down by Lord
Lansdowne, he had been willing to go through the form of marriage with
either of the Berrys, merely to secure their society, and to enrich
them, as he had the power of charging the Orford estate with a jointure
of £2000 per annum. But this can only have been a passing thought at
some moment when their absence, in Italy or elsewhere, left him more
sensitive to the loss of their gracious and stimulating presence. He
himself was far too keenly alive to ridicule, and too much in bondage
to _les bienséances_, to take a step which could scarcely escape
ill-natured comment; and Mary Berry, who would certainly have been his
preference, was not only as fully alive as was he to the shafts of the
censorious, but, during the greater part of her acquaintanceship with
him, was, apparently with his knowledge, warmly attached to a certain
good-looking General O'Hara, who, a year before Walpole's death,
in November, 1796, definitely proposed. He had just been appointed
Governor of Gibraltar, and he wished Miss Berry to marry him at once,
and go out with him. This, 'out of consideration for others,' she
declined to do. A few months later the engagement was broken off, and
she never again saw her soldier admirer. Whether Lord Orford's comfort
went for anything in this adjournment of her happiness, does not
clearly appear; but it is only reasonable to suppose that his tenacious
desire for her companionship had its influence in a decision which,
however much it may have been for the best (and there were those of her
friends who regarded it as a providential escape), was nevertheless a
lifelong source of regret to herself. When, in 1802, she heard suddenly
at the Opera of O'Hara's death, she fell senseless to the floor.
The 'late Horace Walpole' never took his seat in the House of Lords. He
continued, as before, to divide his time between Berkeley Square and
Strawberry, to eulogize his 'wives' to Lady Ossory, and to watch life
from his beloved Blue Room. Now and then he did the rare honours of his
home to a distinguished guest,--in 1793, it was the Duchess of York; in
1795, Queen Charlotte herself. In the latter year died his old friend
Conway, by this time a Field-Marshal; and it was evident at the close
of 1796 that his faithful correspondent would not long survive him.
His ailments had increased, and in the following January, he wrote his
last letter to Lady Ossory:--
Jan. 15, 1797.
MY DEAR MADAM,--
You distress me infinitely by showing my idle notes, which I cannot
conceive can amuse anybody. My old-fashioned breeding impels me every
now and then to reply to the letters you honour me with writing, but
in truth very unwillingly, for I seldom can have anything particular
to say; I scarce go out of my own house, and then only to two or three
very private places, where I see nobody that really knows anything,
and what I learn comes from Newspapers, that collect intelligence from
coffee-houses, consequently what I neither believe nor report. At home
I see only a few charitable elders, except about four-score nephews
and nieces of various ages, who are each brought to me about once
a-year, to stare at me as the Methusalem of the family, and they can
only speak of their own contemporaries, which interest me no more than
if they talked of their dolls, or bats and balls. Must not the result
of all this, Madam, make me a very entertaining correspondent? And can
such letters be worth showing? or can I have any spirit when so old,
and reduced to dictate?
Oh! my good Madam, dispense with me from such a task, and think how
it must add to it to apprehend such letters being shown. Pray send me
no more such laurels, which I desire no more than their leaves when
decked with a scrap of tinsel, and stuck on twelfth-cakes that lie
on the shop-boards of pastry-cooks at Christmas. I shall be quite
content with a sprig of rosemary thrown after me, when the parson of
the parish commits my dust to dust. Till then, pray, Madam, accept the
resignation of your
Ancient servant,
ORFORD.
Six weeks after the date of the above letter, he died at his house
in Berkeley Square, to which he had been moved at the close of the
previous year. During the latter days of his life, he suffered from a
cruel lapse of memory, which led him to suppose himself neglected even
by those who had but just quitted him. He sank gradually, and expired
without pain on the 2nd of March, 1797, being then in his eightieth
year. He was buried at the family seat of Houghton.
His fortune, over and above his leases, amounted to ninety-one thousand
pounds. To each of the Miss Berrys he left the sum of £4000 for their
lives, together with the house and garden of 'Little Strawberry'
(Cliveden), the long meadow in front of it, and all the furniture. He
also bequeathed to them and to their father his printed works and his
manuscripts, with discretionary power to publish. It was understood
that the real editorship was to fall on the elder sister, who forthwith
devoted herself to her task. The result was the edition, in five quarto
volumes, of Lord Orford's _Works_, which has been so often referred
to during the progress of these pages, and which appeared in 1798. It
was entirely due to Mary Berry's unremitting care, her father's share
being confined to a final paragraph in the preface, in which she is
eulogized.[192]
[192] Mary Berry died 20th Nov., 1852; Agnes Berry, Jan., 1852. They
were buried in one grave in Petersham churchyard, 'amidst scenes'--says
Lord Carlisle's inscription--'which in life they had frequented &
loved.' H. F. Chorley (_Autobiography_, etc., 1873, vol. i., p. 276)
describes them as 'more like one's notion of ancient Frenchwomen than
anything I have ever seen; rouged, with the remains of some beauty,
managing large fans like the Flirtillas, etc., etc., of Ranelagh.'
See also _Extracts from Miss Berry's Journals and Correspondence_,
1783-1852, edited by Lady Theresa Lewis, 1865.
Strawberry Hill passed to Mrs. Damer for life, together with £2000 to
keep it in repair. After living in it for some years, she resigned it,
in 1811, to the Countess Dowager of Waldegrave, in whom the remainder
in fee was vested. It subsequently passed to George, seventh Earl of
Waldegrave, who sold its contents in 1842. At his death, in 1846, he
left it to his widow, Frances, Countess of Waldegrave, who married the
Rt. Hon. Chichester S. Parkinson-Fortescue, later Lord Carlingford.
Lady Waldegrave died in 1879; but she had greatly added to and extended
the original building, besides restoring many of the objects by which
it had been decorated in Walpole's day.