disagreeable. There was something farcical in the old man's receptions
on his death-bed; whilst, amongst the rest of the company came Madame du
Deffand, a blind old woman of seventy, who, bawling in his ear, aroused
the lethargic man, by inquiring after a former rival of hers, Madame de
Castelmaron--about whom he went on babbling until death stopped his
voice.
She was seventy years of age when Horace Walpole, at fifty, became her
passion. She was poor and disreputable, and even the high position of
having been mistress to the regent could not save her from being decried
by a large portion of that society which centered round the _bel
esprit_. 'She was,' observes the biographer of Horace Walpole (the
lamented author of the 'Crescent and the Cross,') 'always gay, always
charming--everything but a Christian.' The loss of her eyesight did not
impair the remains of her beauty; her replies, her compliments, were
brilliant; even from one whose best organs of expression were mute.
A frequent guest at her suppers, Walpole's kindness, real or pretended,
soon made inroads on a heart still susceptible. The ever-green passions
of this venerable sinner threw out fresh shoots; and she became
enamoured of the attentive and admired Englishman. Horace was
susceptible of ridicule: there his somewhat icy heart was easily
touched. Partly in vanity, partly in playfulness, he encouraged the
sentimental-exaggeration of his correspondent; but, becoming afraid of
the world's laughter, ended by reproving her warmth, and by chilling,
under the refrigerating influence of his cautions, all the romance of
the octogenarian.
In later days, however, after his solicitude--partly soothed by the
return of his letters to Madame du Deffand, partly by her death--had
completely subsided, a happier friendship was permitted to solace his
now increasing infirmities, as well as to enhance his social pleasures.
It was during the year 1788, when he was living in retirement at
Strawberry, that his auspicious friendship was formed. The only grain of
ambition he had left he declared was to believe himself forgotten; that
was 'the thread that had run through his life;' 'so true,' he adds,
'except the folly of being an author, has been what I said last year to
the Prince' (afterwards George IV.), 'when he asked me "If I was a
Freemason," I replied, "No sir; I never was anything."'
Lady Charleville told him that some of her friends had been to see
Strawberry. 'Lord!' cried one lady, 'who is that Mr. Walpole?' 'Lord!'
cried a second; 'don't you know the great epicure, Mr. Walpole?' 'Who?'
cried the first,--'great epicure! you mean the antiquarian.' 'Surely,'
adds Horace, 'this anecdote may take its place in the chapter of local
fame.'
But he reverts to his new acquisition--the acquaintance of the Miss
Berrys, who had accidentally taken a house next to his at Strawberry
Hill. Their story, he adds, was a curious one: their descent Scotch;
their grandfather had an estate of £5,000 a year, but disinherited his
son on account of his marrying a woman with no fortune. She died, and
the grandfather, wishing for an heir-male, pressed the widower to marry
again: he refused; and said he would devote himself to the education of
his two daughters. The second son generously gave up £8oo a year to his
brother, and the two motherless girls were taken to the Continent,
whence they returned the 'best informed and most perfect creatures that
Horace Walpole ever saw at their age.'
Sensible, natural, frank, their conversation proved most agreeable to a
man who was sated of grand society, and sick of vanity until he had
indulged in vexation of spirit. He discovered by chance only--for there
was no pedantry in these truly well-educated women--that the eldest
understood Latin, and 'was a perfect Frenchwoman in her language. Then
the youngest drew well; and copied one of Lady Di Beauclerk's pictures,
'The Gipsies,' though she had never attempted colours before. Then, as
to looks: Mary, the eldest, had a sweet face, the more interesting from
being pale; with fine dark eyes that were lighted up when she spoke.
Agnes, the younger, was 'hardly to be called handsome, but almost;' with
an agreeable sensible countenance. It is remarkable that women thus
delineated--not beauties, yet not plain--are always the most fascinating
to men. The sisters doted on each other: Mary taking the lead in
society. 'I must even tell you,' Horace wrote to the Countess of Ossory,
'that they dress within the bounds of fashion, but without the
excrescences and balconies with which modern hoydens overwhelm and
barricade their persons.' (One would almost have supposed that Horace
had lived in the days of crinoline.')
The first night that Horace met the two sisters, he refused to be
introduced to them: having heard so much of them that he concluded they
would be 'all pretension.' The second night that he met them, he sat
next Mary, and found her an 'angel both inside and out.' He did not know
which he liked best; but Mary's face, which was formed for a sentimental
novel, or, still more, for genteel comedy, riveted him, he owned. Mr.
Berry, the father, was a little 'merry man with a round face,' whom no
one would have suspected of sacrificing 'all for love, and the world
well lost.' This delightful family visited him every Sunday evening; the
region of wickenham being too 'proclamatory' for cards to be introduced
on the seventh day, conversation was tried instead; thankful, indeed,
was Horace, for the 'pearls,' as he styled them, thus thrown in his
path. His two 'Strawberries,' as he christened them, were henceforth the
theme of every letter. He had set up a printing-press many years
previously at Strawberry, and on taking the young ladies to see it, he
remembered the gallantry of his former days, and they found these
stanzas in type:--
'To Mary's lips has ancient Rome
Her purest language taught;
And from the modern city home
Agnes its pencil brought.
'Rome's ancient Horace sweetly chants
Such maids with lyric fire;
Albion's old Horace sings nor paints,
He only can admire.
'Still would his press their fame record,
So amiable the pair is!
But, ah! how vain to think his word
Can add a straw to Berry's.'
On the following day, Mary, whom he terms the Latin nymph sent the
following lines:--
'Had Rome's famed Horace thus addrest
His Lydia or his Lyce,
He had ne'er so oft complained their breast
To him was cold and icy.
'But had they sought their joy to explain,
Or praise their generous bard,
Perhaps, like me, they had tried in vain,
And felt the task too hard.'
The society of this family gave Horace Walpole the truest, and perhaps
the only relish he ever had of domestic life. But his mind was harassed
towards the close of the eighteenth century, by the insanity not only of
his nephew, but by the great national calamity, that of the king. 'Every
_eighty-eight_ seems,' he remarks, 'to be a favourite period with fate;'
he was 'too ancient,' he said, 'to tap what might almost be called a new
reign;' of which he was not likely to see much. He never pretended to
penetration, but his foresight, 'if he gave it the reign, would not
prognosticate much felicity to the country from the madness of his
father, and the probable regency of the Prince of Wales. His happiest
relations were now not with politics or literature, but with Mrs. Damer
and the Miss Berrys, to whom he wrote:--'I am afraid of protesting how
much I delight in your society, lest I should seem to affect being
gallant; but, if two negatives make an affirmative, why may not two
ridicules compose one piece of sense? and, therefore, as I am in love
with you both, I trust it is a proof of the good sense of your
devoted--H. WALPOLE,'
He was doomed, in the decline of life, to witness two great national
convulsions: of the insurrection of 1745 he wrote
feelingly--justly--almost pathetically: forty-five years later he was
tired, he said, of railing against French barbarity and folly.
'Legislators! a Senate! To neglect laws, in order to annihilate
coats-of-arms and liveries!' George Selwyn said, that Monsieur the
king's brother was the only man of rank from whom they could not take a
title. His alarm at the idea of his two young friends going to the
Continent was excessive. The flame of revolution had burst forth at
Florence: Flanders was not a safe road; dreadful horrors had been
perpetrated at Avignon. Then he relates a characteristic anecdote of
poor _Marie Antoinette!_ She went with the king to see the manufacture
of glass. As they passed the Halle, the _poissardes_ hurra'd them. 'Upon
my word,' said the queen, 'these folks are civiller when you visit them,
than when they visit you.'
Walpole's affection for the Miss Berrys cast a glow of happiness over
the fast-ebbing years of his life, 'In happy days,' he wrote to them
when they were abroad, 'I called you my dear wives; now I can only think
of you as darling children, of whom I am bereaved.' He was proud of
their affection; proud of their spending many hours with 'a very old
man,' whilst they were the objects of general admiration. These charming
women survived until our own time: the centre of a circle of the leading
characters in literature, politics, art, rank, and virtue. They are
remembered with true regret. The fulness of their age perfected the
promise of their youth. Samuel Rogers used to say that they had lived in
the reign of Queen Anne, so far back seemed their memories which were so
coupled to the past; but the youth of their minds, their feelings, their
intelligence, remained almost to the last.
For many years Horace Walpole continued, in spite of incessant attacks
of the gout, to keep almost open house at Strawberry; in short, he said,
he kept an inn--the sign, the Gothic Castle! 'Take my advice,' he wrote
to a friend, 'never build a charming house for yourself between London
and Hampton Court; everybody will live in it but you.'
The death of Lady Suffolk, in 1767, had been an essential loss to her
partial, and not too rigid neighbours. Two days before the death of
George II. she had gone to Kensington not knowing that there was a
review there. Hemmed in by coaches, she found herself close to George
II. and to Lady Yarmouth. Neither of them knew her--a circumstance which
greatly affected the countess.
Horace Walpole was now desirous of growing old with dignity. He had no
wish 'to dress up a withered person, nor to drag it about to public
places;' but he was equally averse from 'sitting at home, wrapped up in
flannels,' to receive condolences from people he did not care for--and
attentions from relations who were impatient for his death. Well might a
writer in the 'Quarterly Review' remark that our most useful lessons in
reading Walpole's Letters are not only derived from his sound sense, but
from 'considering this man of the world, full of information and
sparkling with vivacity, stretched on a sick bed, and apprehending all
the tedious languor of helpless decrepitude and deserted solitude.' His
later years had been diversified by correspondence with Hannah More, who
sent him her poem of the _Bas Bleu_, into which she had introduced his
name. In 1786 she visited him at Strawberry Hill. He was then a martyr
to the gout, but with spirits gay as ever: 'I never knew a man suffer
pain with such entire patience,' was Hannah More's remark. His
correspondence with her continued regularly; but that with the charming
sisters was delightfully interrupted by their residence at little
Strawberry Hill--_Cliveden_, as it was also called, where day after day,
night after night, they gleaned stores from that rich fund of anecdote
which went back to the days of George I., touched even on the anterior
epoch of Anne, and came in volumes of amusement down to the very era
when the old man was sitting by his parlour fire, happy with his _wives_
near him, resigned and cheerful. For his young friends he composed his
'Reminiscences of the Court of England.'
He still wrote cheerfully of his physical state, in which eyesight was
perfect; hearing little impaired; and though his hands and feet were
crippled, he could use them; and since he neither 'wished to box, to
wrestle, nor to dance a hornpipe,' he was contented.
His character became softer, his wit less caustic, his heart more
tender, his talk more reverent, as he approached the term of a long,
prosperous life--and knew, practically, the small value of all that he
had once too fondly prized.
His later years were disturbed by the marriage of his niece Maria
Waldegrave to the Duke of Gloucester: but the severest interruption to
his peace was his own succession to an Earldom.
In 1791, George, Earl of Orford, expired; leaving an estate encumbered
with debt, and, added to the bequest, a series of lawsuits threatened to
break down all remaining comfort in the mind of the uncle, who had
already suffered so much on the young man's account.
Horace Walpole disdained the honours which brought him such solid
trouble, with such empty titles, and for some time refused to sign
himself otherwise but 'Uncle to the late Earl of Orford.' He was
certainly not likely to be able to walk in his robes to the House of
Lords, or to grace a levee. However, he thanked God he was free from
pain. 'Since all my fingers are useless,' he wrote to Hannah More, 'and
that I have only six hairs left, I am not very much grieved at not being
able to comb my head!' To Hannah More he wrote in all sincerity,
referring to his elevation to the peerage: 'For the other empty
metamorphosis that has happened to the outward man, you do me justice in
believing that it can do nothing but tease me; it is being called names
in one's old age:' in fact, he reckoned on being styled 'Lord
Methusalem.' He had lived to hear of the cruel deaths of the once gay
and high-born friends whom he had known in Paris, by the guillotine: he
had lived to execrate the monsters who persecuted the grandest heroine
of modern times, Marie Antoinette, to madness; he lived to censure the
infatuation of religious zeal in the Birmingham riots. 'Are not the
devils escaped out of the swine, and overrunning the earth
headlong?'--he asked in one of his letters.
He had offered his hand, and all the ambitious views which it opened, to
each of the Miss Berrys successively, but they refused to bear his name,
though they still cheered his solitude: and, strange to say, two of the
most admired and beloved women of their time remained single.
In 1796, the sinking invalid was persuaded to remove to Berkeley Square,
to be within reach of good and prompt advice. He consented unwillingly,
for his 'Gothic Castle' was his favourite abode. He left it with a
presentiment that he should see it no more; but he followed the
proffered advice, and in the spring of the year was established in
Berkeley Square. His mind was still clear. He seems to have cherished to
the last a concern for that literary fame which he affected to despise.
'Literature has,' he said, 'many revolutions; if an author could rise
from the dead, after a hundred years, what would be his surprise at the
adventures of his works! I often say, perhaps my books may be published
in Paternoster Row!' He would indeed have been astonished at the vast
circulation of his Letters, and the popularity which has carried them
into every aristocratic family in England. It is remarkable that among
the middle and lower classes they are far less known, for he was
essentially the chronicler, as well as the wit and beau, of St. James's,
of Windsor, and Richmond.
At last he declared that he should 'be content with a sprig of rosemary'
thrown on him when the parson of the parish commits his 'dust to dust.'
The end of his now suffering existence was near at hand. Irritability,
one of the unpitied accompaniments of weakness, seemed to compete with
the gathering clouds of mental darkness as the last hour drew on. At
intervals there were flashes of a wit that appeared at that solemn
moment hardly natural, and that must have startled rather than pleased,
the watchful friends around him. He became unjust in his fretfulness,
and those who loved him most could not wish to see him survive the wreck
of his intellect. Fever came on, and he died on the 2nd of March, 1797.
He had collected his letters from his friends: these epistles were
deposited in two boxes, one marked with an A., the other with a B. The
chest A. was not to be opened until the eldest son of his grandniece,
Lady Laura, should attain the age of twenty-five. The chest was found to
contain memoirs, and bundles of letters ready for publication.
It was singular, at the sale of the effects at Strawberry Hill, to see
this chest, with the MSS. in the clean _Horatian_ hand, and to reflect
how poignant would have been the anguish of the writer could he have
seen his Gothic Castle given up for fourteen days, to all that could
pain the living, or degrade the dead.
Peace to his manes, prince of letter-writers; prince companion of beaux;
wit of the highest order! Without thy pen, society in the eighteenth
century would have been to us almost as dead as the _beau monde_ of
Pompeii, or the remains of Etruscan leaders of the ton. Let us not be
ungrateful to our Horace: we owe him more than we could ever have
calculated on before we knew him through his works: prejudiced, he was
not false; cold, he was rarely cruel; egotistical, he was seldom
vain-glorious. Every age should have a Horace Walpole; every country
possess a chronicler so sure, so keen to perceive, so exact to delineate
peculiarities, manners, characters, and events.
GEORGE SELWYN.
A Love of Horrors.--Anecdotes of Selwyn's Mother.--Selwyn's College
Days.--Orator Henley.--Selwyn's Blasphemous Freak.--The Profession
of a Wit.--The Thirst for Hazard.--Reynolds's Conversation-Piece.--
Selwyn's Eccentricities and Witticisms.--A most Important
Communication.--An Amateur Headsman.--The Eloquence of Indifference.--
Catching a Housebreaker.--The Family of the Selwyns.--The Man of the
People.--Selwyn's Parliamentary Career.--True Wit.---Some of Selwyn's
Witty Sayings.--The Sovereignty of the People.--On two kinds of Wit.--
Selwyn's Love for Children.--Mie Mie, the Little Italian.--Selwyn's
Little Companion taken from him.--His Later Days and Death.
I have heard, at times, of maiden ladies of a certain age who found
pleasure in the affection of 'spotted snakes with double tongue, thorny
hedge-hogs, newts, and in live worms.' I frequently meet ladies who
think conversation lacks interest without the recital of 'melancholy
deaths,' 'fatal diseases,' and 'mournful cases;' _on ne dispute pas les
goûts_, and certainly the taste for the night side of nature seems
immensely prevalent among the lower orders--in whom, perhaps, the
terrible only can rouse from a sullen insensibility. What happy people!
I always think to myself, when I hear of the huge attendance on the last
tragic performance at Newgate; how very little they can see of mournful
and horrible in common life, if they seek it out so eagerly, and relish
it so thoroughly, when they find it! I don't know; for my own part,
_gaudeamus_. I have always thought that the text, 'Blessed are they that
mourn,' referred to the inner private life, not to a perpetual display
of sackcloth and ashes; but I know not. I can understand the
weeping-willow taste among people, who have too little wit or too little
Christianity to be cheerful, but it is a wonder to find the luxury of
gloom united to the keenest perception of the laughable in such a man as
George Selwyn.
If human beings could be made pets, like Miss Tabitha's snake or toad,
Selwyn would have fondled a hangman. He loved the noble art of
execution, and was a connoisseur of the execution of the art. In
childhood he must have decapitated his rocking-horse, hanged his doll in
a miniature gallows, and burnt his baubles at mimic stakes. The man
whose calm eye was watched for the quiet sparkle that announced--and
only that ever did announce it--the flashing wit within the mind, by a
gay crowd of loungers at Arthur's, might be found next day rummaging
among coffins in a damp vault, glorying in a mummy, confessing and
preparing a live criminal, paying any sum for a relic of a dead one, or
pressing eagerly forward to witness the dying agonies of a condemned
man.
Yet Walpole and Warner both bore the highest testimony to the goodness
of his heart; and it is impossible to doubt that his nature was as
gentle as a woman's. There have been other instances of even educated
men delighting in scenes of suffering; but in general their characters
have been more or less gross, their heads more or less insensible. The
husband of Madame Récamier went daily to see the guillotine do its vile
work during the reign of Terror; but then he was a man who never wept
over the death of a friend. The man who was devoted to a little child,
whom he adopted and treated with the tenderest care, was very different
from M. Récamier--and that he _had_ a heart there is no doubt. He was an
anomaly, and famous for being so; though, perhaps, his well-known
eccentricity was taken advantage of by his witty friends, and many a
story fathered on Selwyn which has no origin but in the brain of its
narrator.
George Augustus Selwyn, then, famous for his wit, and notorious for his
love of horrors, was the second son of a country gentleman, of Matson,
in Gloucestershire, Colonel John Selwyn, who had been an aide-de-camp of
Marlborough's, and afterwards a frequenter of the courts of the first
two Georges. He inherited his wit chiefly from his mother, Mary, the
daughter of General Farington or Farringdon, of the county of Kent.
Walpole tells us that she figured among the beauties of the court of the
Prince and Princess of Wales, and was bedchamber-woman to Queen
Caroline. Her character was not spotless, for we hear of an intrigue,
which her own mistress imparted in confidence to the Duchess of Orleans
(the mother of the Regent: they wrote on her tomb _Cy gist l'oisiveté_,
because idleness is the _mother_ of all vice), and which eventually
found its way into the 'Utrecht Gazette.' It was Mrs. Selwyn, too, who
said to George II., that he was the last person she would ever have an
intrigue with, because she was sure he would tell the queen of it: it
was well known that that very virtuous sovereign made his wife the
confidante of his amours, which was even more shameless than young De
Sévigné's taking advice from his mother on his intrigue with Ninon de
l'Enclos. She seems to have been reputed a wit, for Walpole retails her
_mots_ as if they were worth it, but they are not very remarkable: for
instance, when Miss Pelham lost a pair of diamond earrings, which she
had borrowed, and tried to faint when the loss was discovered, some one
called for lavender-drops as a restorative. 'Pooh!' cries Mrs. Selwyn,
'give her diamond-drops.'