James's Park for the people. Fond of outdoor amusements himself, the
Premier heard, with dismay, a proposal on the part of Queen Caroline to
convert that ancient park into a palace garden. 'She asked my father,'
Horace Walpole relates, 'what the alteration might possibly
cost?'--_Only three crowns_' was the civil, witty, candid answer. The
queen was wise enough to take the hint. It is possible she meant to
convert the park into gardens that should be open to the public as at
Berlin, Mannheim, and even the Tuileries. Still it would not have been
ours.
Horace Walpole owed, perhaps, his love of architecture and his taste for
gardening, partly to the early companionship of Gray, who delighted in
those pursuits. Walpole's estimation of pictures, medals, and statues,
was however the fruit of a long residence abroad. We are apt to rail at
continental nations; yet had it not been for the occasional intercourse
with foreign nations, art would have altogether died out among us. To
the 'Grandes Tours,' performed as a matter of course by our young
nobility in the most impressionable period of their lives we owe most of
our noble private collections. Charles I. and Buckingham, renewed, in
their travels in Spain, the efforts previously made by Lord Arundel and
Lord Pembroke, to embellish their country seats. Then came the
Rebellion; and like a mighty rushing river, made a chasm in which much
perished. Art languished in the reign of the second Charles, excepting
in what related to portrait painting. Evelyn stood almost alone in his
then secluded and lovely retirement at Wotton; apart in his undying
exertions still to arrest the Muses ere they quitted for ever English
shores. Then came the deadly frost of William's icy influence. The reign
of Anne was conspicuous more for letters than for art: architecture,
more especially, was vulgarized under Vanbrugh. George I. had no
conception of anything abstract: taste, erudition, science, art, were
like a dead language to his common sense, his vulgar profligacy, and his
personal predilections. Neither George II. nor his queen had an iota of
taste, either in language, conduct, literature, or art. To be vulgar,
was _haut-ton;_ to be refined, to have pursuits that took one from low
party gossip, or heterodox disquisitions upon party, was esteemed odd:
everything original was cramped; everything imaginative was sneered at;
the enthusiasm that is elevated by religion was unphilosophic; the
poetry that is breathed out from the works of genius was not
comprehended.
It was at Houghton, under the roof of that monster palace, that Horace
Walpole indulged that tastes for pictures which he had acquired in
Italy. His chief coadjutor, however, as far as the antiquities of
painting are concerned, was George Vertue, the eminent engraver. Vertue
was a man of modest merit, and was educated merely as an engraver; but,
conscious of talent, studied drawing, which he afterwards applied to
engraving. He was patronised both by the vain Godfrey Kneller and by the
intellectual Lord Somers: yet his works have more fidelity than
elegance, and betray in every line the antiquary rather than the genius.
Vertue was known to be a first-rate authority as to the history of a
painter; he was admitted and welcomed into every great country house in
England; he lived in an atmosphere of vertù; every line a dilettante
collector wrote, every word he uttered, was minuted down by him; he
visited every collection of rarities; he copied every paper he could
find relative to art; registers of wills, and registers of parishes, for
births and deaths were his delight; sales his recreation. He was the
'Old Mortality' of pictures in this country. No wonder that his
compilations were barely contained in forty volumes, which he left in
manuscript. Human nature has singular varieties: here was a man who
expended his very existence in gathering up the works of others, and
died without giving to the world one of his own. But Horace Walpole has
done him justice. After Vertue's death he bought his manuscripts from
his widow. In one of his pocket-books was contained the whole history of
this man of one idea: Vertue began his collection in 1713, and worked at
it until his death in 1757, forty-four years.
He died in the belief that he should one day publish an unique work on
painting and painters: such was the aim of his existence, and his study
must have been even more curious than the wonderfully crammed, small
house at Islington, where William Upcott, the 'Old Mortality' in his
line, who saved from the housemaid's fire-lighting designs the MSS. Of
Evelyn's
Life and Letters, which he found tossing about in the old gallery at
Wotton, near Dorking, passed his days. Like Upcott, like Palissy, Vertue
lived and died under the influence of one isolated aim, effort, and
hope.
In these men, the cherished and amiable monomania of gifted minds was
realized. Upcott had every possible autograph from every known hand in
his collection: Palissy succeeded in making glazed china; but Vertue
left his ore to the hands of others to work out into shape, and the man
who moulded his crude materials was Horace Walpole, and Vertue's forty
volumes were shaped into a readable work, as curious and accurate in
facts as it is flippant and prejudiced in style and opinions.
Walpole's 'Anecdotes of Painting' are the foundation of all our small
amount of knowledge as to what England has done formerly to encourage
art.
One may fancy the modest, ingenious George Vertue arranging first, and
then making a catalogue of the Houghton Gallery; Horace, a boy still, in
looks,--with a somewhat chubby face, admiring and following: Sir Robert,
in a cocked hat, edged with silver lace, a curled short wig, a loose
coat, also edged with silver lace, and with a half humorous expression
on his vulgar countenance, watching them at intervals, as they paraded
through the hall, a large square space, adorned with bas-reliefs and
busts, and containing a bronze copy of the Laocoon, for which Sir Robert
(or rather we English) paid a thousand pounds; or they might be seen
hopping speedily through the ground-floor apartments where there could
be little to arrest the footsteps of the mediaeval-minded Vertue. Who
but a courtier could give one glance at a portrait of George I., though
by Kneller? Who that _was_ a courtier in that house would pause to look
at the resemblance, also by Kneller, of the short-lived, ill-used
Catherine Shorter, the Premier's first wife--even though he still
endured it in his bed-room? a mute reproach for his neglect and
misconduct. So let us hasten to the yellow dining-room where presently
we may admire the works of Titian, Guido, Vanderwerf, and last, not
least, eleven portraits by Vandyck, of the Wharton family, which Sir
Robert bought at the sale of the spendthrift Duke of Wharton.
Then let us glance at the saloon, famed for the four large 'Market
Pieces,' as they were called, by Rubens and Snyders: let us lounge into
what were called the Carlo Maratti and the Vandyck rooms; step we also
into the green velvet bed-chamber, the tapestry-room, the worked bed
chamber; then comes another dining-room: in short, we are lost in wonder
at this noble collection, which cost £40,000.
Many of the pictures were selected and bargained for by Vertue, who, in
Flanders, purchased the Market Pieces referred to, for £428; but did not
secure the 'Fish Market,' and the 'Meat Market,' by the same painter. In
addition to the pictures, the stateliness and beauty of the rooms were
enhanced by rich furniture, carving, gilding, and all the subsidiary
arts which our grandfathers loved to add to high merit in design or
colouring. Besides his purchases, Sir Robert received presents of
pictures from friends, and expectant courtiers; and the gallery at
Houghton contained at last 222 pictures. To our sorrow now, to our
disgrace then, this splendid collection was suffered to go out of the
country: Catherine, empress of Russia, bought it for £40,000, and it
adorns the Hermitage Palace of St. Petersburgh.
After Sir Robert's retirement from power, the good qualities which he
undoubtedly possessed, seemed to re-appear as soon as the pressure of
party feeling was withdrawn. He was fast declining in health when the
insurrection of 1745 was impending. He had warned the country of its
danger in his last speech, one of the finest ever made in the House of
Lords: after that effort his voice was heard no more. The gallant,
unfortunate Charles Edward was then at Paris, and that scope of old
experience
----'which doth attain
To somewhat of prophetic strain,'
showed the ex-minister of Great Britain that an invasion was at hand. It
was on this occasion that Frederick, Prince of Wales, took Sir Robert,
then Lord Orford, by the hand, and thanked him for his zeal in the cause
of the royal family. Walpole returned to Norfolk, but was summoned again
to London to afford the ministry the benefit of his counsels. Death,
however, closed his prosperous, but laborious life. He suffered agonies
from the stone; large doses of opium kept him in a state of stupor, and
alone gave him ease; but his strength failed, and he was warned to
prepare himself for his decease. He bore the announcement with great
fortitude, and took leave of his children in perfect resignation to his
doom. He died on the 28th of March, 1745.
Horace Walpole--whatsoever doubts may rest on the fact of his being Lord
Orford's son or not--writes feelingly and naturally upon this event, and
its forerunner, the agonies of disease. He seems, from the following
passages in his letters to Sir Horace Mann, to have devoted himself
incessantly to the patient invalid: on his father having rallied, he
thus expresses himself:--
'You have heard from your brother the reason of my not having written to
you so long. I have been out but twice since my father fell into this
illness, which is now near a month, and all that time either continually
in his room, or obliged to see multitudes of people: for it is wonderful
how everybody of all kinds has affected to express their concern for
him! He has been out of danger this week; but I can't say he mended at
all perceptibly till these last three days. His spirits are amazing, and
his constitution more, for Dr. Hulse said honestly from the first, that
if he recovered it would be from his own strength, not from their art.
How much more,' he adds, mournfully, 'he will ever recover, one scarce
dare hope about; for us, he is greatly recovered; for himself--' He then
breaks off.
A month after we find him thus referring to the parent still throbbing
in mortal agony on the death-bed, with no chance of amendment:--
'How dismal a prospect for him, with the possession of the greatest
understanding in the world, not the least impaired, to lie without any
use for it! for to keep him from pains and restlessness, he takes so
much opiate, that he is scarce awake four hours of the four-and-twenty;
but I will say no more of this.'
On the 29th of March, he again wrote to his friend in the following
terms:--
'I begged your brothers to tell you what it is impossible for me to tell
you. You share in our common loss! Don't expect me to enter at all upon
the subject. After the melancholy two months that I have passed, and in
my situation, you will not wonder I shun a conversation which could not
be bounded by a letter, a letter that would grow into a panegyric or a
piece of a moral; improper for me to write upon, and too distressful for
us both! a death is only to be felt, never to be talked upon by those it
touches.'
Nevertheless, the world soon had Horace Walpole for her own again;
during Lord Orford's last illness, George II. Thought of him, it seems,
even though the 'Granvilles' were the only people tolerated at court.
That famous _clique_ comprised the secretly adored of Horace (Lady
Granville now), Lady Sophia Fermor.
'The Granville faction,' Horace wrote, before his father's death, 'are
still the constant and only countenanced people at court. Lord
Winchelsea, one of the disgraced, played at court at Twelfth-night, and
won; the king asked him next morning how much he had for his own share.
He replied, "Sir, about a quarter's salary." I liked the spirit, and was
talking to him of it the next night at Lord Granville's. "Why yes," said
he, "I think it showed familiarity at least: tell it your father, I
don't think he will dislike it."'
The most trifling incidents divided the world of fashion and produced
the bitterest rancour. Indeed, nothing could exceed the frivolity of the
great, except their impertinence. For want of better amusements, it had
become the fashion to make conundrums, and to have printed books full of
them, which were produced at parties. But these were peaceful
diversions. The following anecdote is worthy of the times of George II.
and of Frederick of Wales:--
'There is a very good quarrel,' Horace writes, 'on foot, between two
duchesses: she of Queensberry sent to invite Lady Emily Lenox to a ball:
her grace of Richmond, who is wonderfully cautious since Lady Caroline's
elopement (with Mr. Fox), sent word "she could not determine." The other
sent again the same night: the same answer. The Queensberry then sent
word, that she had made up her company, and desired to be excused from
having Lady Emily's; but at the bottom of the card wrote, "Too great
trust." There is no declaration of war come out from the other duchess:
but I believe it will be made a national quarrel of the whole
illegitimate royal family.'
Her Grace of Queensberry, Prior's 'Kitty, beautiful and young,' lorded
it, with a tyrannical hand, over the court. Her famed loveliness was, it
is true, at this time on the wane. Her portrait delineating her in her
bib and tucker, with her head rolled back underneath a sort of half cap,
half veil, shows how intellectual was the face to which such incense was
paid for years. Her forehead and eyebrows are beautiful: her eyes soft
though lively in expression: her features refined. She was as whimsical
in her attire as in her character. When, however, she chose to appear as
the _grande dame_, no one could cope with her, Mrs. Delany describes her
at the Birth-day,--her dress of white satin, embroidered with vine
leaves, convolvuluses, rose-buds, shaded after nature; but she, says her
friend, 'was _so far_ beyond the master-_piece of art_ that one could
hardly think of her clothes--allowing for her age I never saw so
_beautiful a creature_.'
Meantime, Houghton was shut up: for its owner died £50,000 in debt, and
the elder brother of Horace, the second Lord Orford, proposed, on
entering it again, after keeping it closed for some time, to enter upon
'new, and then very unknown economy, for which there was great need:'
thus Horace refers to the changes.
It was in the South Sea scheme that Sir Robert Walpole had realized a
large sum of money, by selling out at the right moment. In doing so he
had gained 1000 per cent. But he left little to his family, and at his
death, Horace received a legacy only of £5,000, and a thousand pounds
yearly, which he was to draw (for doing nothing) from the collector's
place in the Custom House; the surplus to be divided between his brother
Edward and himself: this provision was afterwards enhanced by some money
which came to Horace and his brothers from his uncle Captain Shorter's
property; but Horace was not at this period a rich man, and perhaps his
not marrying was owing to his dislike of fortune-hunting, or to his
dread of refusal.
Two years after his father's death, he took a small house at Twickenham:
the property cost him nearly £14,000; in the deeds he found that it was
called Strawberry Hill. He soon commenced making considerable additions
to the house--which became a sort of raree-show in the latter part of
the last, and until a late period in this, century.
Twickenham--so called, according to the antiquary Norden, because the
Thames, as it flows near it, seems from the islands to be divided into
two rivers,--had long been celebrated for its gardens, when Horace
Walpole, the generalissimo of all bachelors, took Strawberry Hill.
'Twicknam is as much as Twynam,' declares Norden, 'a place scytuate
between two rivers.' So fertile a locality could not be neglected by the
monks of old, the great gardeners and tillers of land in ancient days;
and the Manor of Twickenham was consequently given to the monks of
Christ Church, Canterbury, by King Edred, in 491; who piously inserted
his anathema against any person--whatever their rank, sex, or order--who
should infringe the rights of these holy men. 'May their memory,' the
king decreed, with a force worthy of the excommunicator-wholesale, Pius
IX., 'be blotted out of the Book of Life; may their strength continually
waste away, and be there no restorative to repair it!' nevertheless,
there were in the time of Lysons, a hundred and fifty acres of
fruit-gardens at Twickenham: the soil being a sandy loam, raspberries
grew plentifully. Even so early as Queen Elizabeth's days, Bishop
Corbet's father had a nursery garden at Twickenham,--so that King
Edred's curse seems to have fallen as powerlessly as it may be hoped all
subsequent maledictions may do.
In 1698, one of the Earl of Bradford's coachmen built a small house on a
piece of ground, called in old works, Strawberry-Hill-Shot; lodgings
were here let, and Colley Cibber became one of the occupants of the
place, and here wrote his Comedy called 'Refusal; or the Ladies'
Philosophy.' The spot was so greatly admired that Talbot, Bishop of
Durham, lived eight years in it, and the Marquis of Carnarvon succeeded
him as a tenant: next came Mrs. Chenevix, a famous toy-woman. She was
probably a French woman, for Father Courayer--he who vainly endeavoured
to effect an union between the English and the Gallican churches--lodged
here some time. Horace Walpole bought up Mrs. Chenevix's lease, and
afterwards the fee-simple; and henceforth became the busiest, if not the
happiest, man in a small way in existence.
[Illustration: STRAWBERRY HILL FROM THE THAMES.]
We now despise the poor, over-ornate miniature Gothic style of
Strawberry Hill; we do not consider with what infinite pains the
structure was enlarged into its final and well-known form. In the first
place, Horace made a tour to collect models from the chief cathedral
cities in England; but the building required twenty-three years to
complete it. It was begun in 1753, and finished in 1776. Strawberry Hill
had one merit, everything was in keeping: the internal decorations, the
screens, the niches, the chimney-pieces, the book-shelves, were all
Gothic; and most of these were designed by Horace himself; and, indeed,
the description of Strawberry Hill is too closely connected with the
annals of his life to be dissevered from his biography. Here he gathered
up his mental forces to support and amuse himself during a long life,
sometimes darkened by spleen, but rarely by solitude; for Horace, with
much isolation of the heart, was, to the world, a social being.
What scandal, what trifles, what important events, what littleness of
mind, yet what stretch of intellect were henceforth issued by the
recluse of Strawberry, as he plumed himself on being styled, from that
library of 'Strawberry!' Let us picture to ourselves the place, the
persons--put on, if we can, the sentiments and habits of the retreat;
look through its loopholes, not only on the wide world beyond, but into
the small world within; and face the fine gentleman author in every
period of his varied life.
'The Strawberry Gazette,' Horace once wrote to a fine and titled lady,
'is very barren of weeds.' Such, however, was rarely the case. Peers,
and still better, peeresses,--politicians, actors, actresses,--the poor
poet who knew not where to dine, the Maecenas who was 'fed with
dedications'--the belle of the season, the demirep of many, the
antiquary, and the dilettanti,--painters, sculptors, engravers, all
brought news to the 'Strawberry Gazette;' and incense, sometimes wrung
from aching hearts, to the fastidious wit who professed to be a judge of
all material and immaterial things--from a burlesque to an Essay on
history or Philosophy--from the construction of Mrs. Chenevix's last new
toy to the mechanism of a clock made in the sixteenth century, was
lavished there.
Suppose that it is noon-day: Horace is showing a party of guests from
London over Strawberry:--enter we with him, and let us stand in the
great parlour before a portrait by Wright of the Minister to whom all
courts bowed. 'That is my father, Sir Robert, in profile,' and a vulgar
face in profile is always seen at its vulgarest; and the
_nex-retroussé,_ the coarse mouth, the double chin, are most forcibly
exhibited in this limning by Wright; who did not, like Reynolds, or like
Lawrence, cast a _nuance_ of gentility over every subject of his pencil.
Horace--can we not hear him in imagination?--is telling his friends how
Sir Robert used to celebrate the day on which he sent in his
resignation, as a fête; then he would point out to his visitors a
Conversation-piece, one of Reynolds's earliest efforts in small life,
representing the second Earl of Edgecumbe, Selwyn, and Williams---all
wits and beaux, and _habitués_ of Strawberry. Colley Cibber, however,
was put in cold marble in the anteroom; a respect very _Horatian_, for
no man knew better how to rank his friends than the recluse of
Strawberry. He hurries the lingering guests through the little parlour,
the chimneypiece of which was copied from the tomb of Ruthall, Bishop of
Durham, in Westminster Abbey. Yet how he pauses complacently to
enumerate what has been done for him by titled belles: how these dogs,
modelled in terra-cotta, are the production of Anne Darner; a
water-colour drawing by Agnes Berry; a landscape with gipsies by Lady Di
Beauclerk;--all platonically devoted to our Horace; but he dwells long,
and his bright eyes are lighted up as he pauses before a case, looking
as if it contained only a few apparently faded, of no-one-knows-who (or
by whom) miniatures; this is a collection of Peter Oliver's best
works--portraits of the Digby family.
How sadly, in referring to these invaluable pictures, does one's mind
revert to the day when, before the hammer of Robins had resounded in
these rooms--before his transcendent eloquence had been heard at
Strawberry--Agnes Strickland, followed by all eyes, pondered over that
group of portraits: how, as she slowly withdrew, we of the commonalty
scarce worthy to look, gathered around the spot again, and wondered at
the perfect life, the perfect colouring, proportion, and keeping of
those tiny vestiges of a bygone generation!
Then Horace--we fear it was not till his prime was past, and a touch of
gout crippled his once active limbs--points to a picture of Rose, the
gardener (well named), presenting Charles II. with a pine-apple. Some
may murmur a doubt whether pine-apples were cultivated in cold Britain
so long since. But Horace enforces the fact; 'the likeness of the king,'
quoth he, 'is too marked, and his features are too well known to doubt
the fact;' and then he tells 'how he had received a present the last
Sunday of fruit--and from whom.'
They pause next on Sir Peter Lely's portrait of Cowley--next on
Hogarth's Sarah Malcolm, the murderess of her mistress; then--and
doubtless, the spinster ladies are in fault here for the delay,--on Mrs.
Damer's model of two kittens, pets, though, of Horace Walpole's--for he
who loved few human beings was, after the fashion of bachelors, fond of
cats.
They ascend the staircase: the domestic adornments merge into the
historic. We have Francis I.--not himself, but his armour: the
chimneypiece, too, is a copy from the tomb-works of John, Earl of
Cornwall, in Westminster Abbey; the stonework from that of Thomas, Duke
of Clarence, at Canterbury.