“Strawberry Hill, June 14, 1787.
“Though your Ladyship gave me law (a very proper synonyme for delay), I should have answered your letter incontinently, but I have had what is called a blight in one of my eyes, and for some days was forced to lie fallow, neither reading nor writing a line; which is a little uncomfortable when quite alone. I do begin to creep about my house, but have not recovered my feet enough to compass the whole circuit of my garden. Monday last was pleasant, and Tuesday very warm; but we are relapsed into our east windhood, which has reigned ever since I have been here for this green winter, which, I presume, is the highest title due to this season, which in southern climes is positive summer, a name imported by our travellers, with grapes, peaches, and tuberoses. However, most of my senses have enjoyed themselves—my sight with verdure, my smell by millions of honeysuckles, my hearing by nightingales, and my feeling with good fires: tolerable luxury for an old cavalier in the north of Europe! Semiramis of Russia is not of my taste, or she would not travel half round the arctic circle; unless she means to conquer the Turks, and transfer the seat of her empire to Constantinople, like its founder. The ghost of Irene will be mighty glad to see her there, though a little surprised that the Grand Duke, her son, is still alive. I hear she has carried her grandchildren with her as hostages, or she might be dethroned, and not hear of it for three months.
“I am very far from tired, Madam, of encomiums on the performance at Richmond House, but I, by no means, agree with the criticism on it that you quote, and which, I conclude, was written by some player, from envy. Who should act genteel comedy perfectly, but people of fashion that have sense? Actors and actresses can only guess at the tone of high life, and cannot be inspired with it. Why are there so few genteel comedies, but because most comedies are written by men not of that sphere? Etherege, Congreve, Vanbrugh, and Cibber wrote genteel comedy, because they lived in the best company; and Mrs. Oldfield played it so well, because she not only followed, but often set, the fashion. General Burgoyne has written the best modern comedy, for the same reason; and Miss Farren106 is as excellent as Mrs. Oldfield, because she has lived with the best style of men in England: whereas Mrs. Abington can never go beyond Lady Teazle, which is a second-rate character, and that rank of women are always aping women of fashion, without arriving at the style. Farquhar’s plays talk the language of a marching regiment in country quarters: Wycherley, Dryden, Mrs. Centlivre, etc., wrote as if they had only lived in the ‘Rose Tavern;’107 but then the Court lived in Drury Lane, too, and Lady Dorchester and Nell Gwyn were equally good company. The Richmond Theatre, I imagine, will take root. I supped with the Duke at Mrs. Damer’s, the night before I left London, and they were talking of improvements on the local, as the French would say.”
A few weeks later, he has dismissed the talk of London, and is occupied with his neighbours on the Thames. The following is a letter to Lord Strafford:
“Strawberry Hill, July 28, 1787.
“Saint Swithin is no friend to correspondence, my dear Lord. There is not only a great sameness in his own proceedings, but he makes everybody else dull—I mean in the country, where one frets at its raining every day and all day. In town he is no more minded than the proclamation against vice and immorality. Still, though he has all the honours of the quarantine, I believed it often rained for forty days long before St. Swithin was born, if ever born he was; and the proverb was coined and put under his patronage, because people observed that it frequently does rain for forty days together at this season. I remember Lady Suffolk telling me, that Lord Dysart’s great meadow at Ham had never been mowed but once in forty years without rain. I said, ‘All that that proved was, that rain was good for hay,’ as I am persuaded the climate of a country and its productions are suited to each other. Nay, rain is good for haymakers too, who get more employment the oftener the hay is made over again. I do not know who is the saint that presides over thunder; but he has made an unusual quantity in this chill summer, and done a great deal of serious mischief, though not a fiftieth part of what Lord George Gordon did seven years ago, and happily he is fled.
“Our little part of the world has been quiet as usual. The Duke of Queensberry has given a sumptuous dinner to the Princesse de Lamballe—et voilà tout. I never saw her, not even in France. I have no particular penchant for sterling princes and princesses, much less for those of French plate.
“The only entertaining thing I can tell your Lordship from our district is, that old Madam French, who lives close by the bridge at Hampton Court, where, between her and the Thames, she has nothing but one grass-plot of the width of her house, has paved that whole plot with black and white marble in diamonds, exactly like the floor of a church; and this curious metamorphosis of a garden into a pavement has cost her three hundred and forty pounds:—a tarpaulin she might have had for some shillings, which would have looked as well, and might easily have been removed. To be sure, this exploit, and Lord Dudley’s obelisk below a hedge, with his canal at right angles with the Thames, and a sham bridge no broader than that of a violin, and parallel to the river, are not preferable to the monsters in clipt yews of our ancestors. On the contrary, Mrs. Walsingham is making her house at Ditton (now baptized Boyle Farm108) very orthodox. Her daughter Miss Boyle, who has real genius, has carved three tablets in marble with boys, designed by herself. Those sculptures are for a chimney-piece; and she is painting panels in grotesque for the library, with pilasters of glass in black and gold. Miss Crewe, who has taste too, has decorated a room for her mother’s house at Richmond, which was Lady Margaret Compton’s, in a very pretty manner. How much more amiable the old women of the next age will be, than most of those we remember, who used to tumble at once from gallantry to devout scandal and cards, and revenge on the young of their own sex the desertion of ours! Now they are ingenious, they will not want amusement.”
In the autumn, he pays a visit to Lord North:
“I dined last Monday at Bushy (for you know I have more penchant for Ministers that are out than when they are in) and never saw a more interesting scene. Lord North’s spirits, good humour, wit, sense, drollery, are as perfect as ever—the unremitting attention of Lady North and his children, most touching. Mr. North leads him about, Miss North sits constantly by him, carves meat, watches his every motion, scarce puts a bit into her own lips; and if one cannot help commending her, she colours with modesty and sorrow till the tears gush into her eyes. If ever loss of sight could be compensated, it is by so affectionate a family.”
Not long after this, Walpole repeats a good-humoured jest of the blind old man on receiving a call from his quondam opponent, Colonel Barré, whose sight also was nearly gone. Lord North said: “Colonel Barré, nobody will suspect us of insincerity, if we say that we should always be overjoyed to see each other.”
With the return of winter, the theatre comes up again. There was a stage at Ampthill as well as at Whitehall:
“Berkeley Square, Jan. 15, 1788.
“All joy to your Ladyship on the success of your theatric campaign. I do think the representation of plays as entertaining and ingenious, as choosing king and queen, and the gambols and mummeries of our ancestors at Christmas; or as making one’s neighbours and all their servants drunk, and sending them home ten miles in the dark with the chance of breaking their necks by some comical overturn. I wish I could have been one of the audience; but, alas! I am like the African lamb, and can only feed on the grass and herbs that grow within my reach.
“I can make no returns yet from the theatre at Richmond House; the Duke and Duchess do not come till the birthday, and I have been at no more rehearsals, being satisfied with two of the play. Prologue or epilogue there is to be none, as neither the plays nor the performers, in general, are new. The ‘Jealous Wife’ is to succeed for the exhibition of Mrs. Hobart, who could have no part in ‘The Wonder.’
“My histrionic acquaintance spreads. I supped at Lady Dorothy Hotham’s with Mrs. Siddons, and have visited and been visited by her, and have seen and liked her much, yes, very much, in the passionate scenes of ‘Percy;’ but I do not admire her in cool declamation, and find her voice very hollow and defective. I asked her in which part she would most wish me to see her? She named Portia in the ‘Merchant of Venice;’ but I begged to be excused. With all my enthusiasm for Shakespeare, it is one of his plays that I like the least. The story of the caskets is silly, and, except the character of Shylock, I see nothing beyond the attainment of a mortal: Euripides, or Racine, or Voltaire, might have written all the rest. Moreover, Mrs. Siddons’s warmest devotees do not hold her above a demigoddess in comedy. I have chosen ‘Athenais,’ in which she is to appear soon; her scorn is admirable.…
“Puppet-shows are coming on, the birth-day, the Parliament, and the trial of Hastings and his imp, Elijah. They will fill the town, I suppose.”
Walpole was as severe on professional authors as on professional actors. “Except,” he says, “for such a predominant genius as Shakespeare and Milton, I hold authors cheap enough: what merit is there in pains, and study, and application, compared with the extempore abilities of such men as Mr. Fox, Mr. Sheridan, or Mr. Pitt?” But he made a further exception in favour of Gibbon. The following extract, besides an estimate of Gibbon’s History, contains a reference to the celebrated Begum Speech delivered by Sheridan in Westminster Hall on the trial of Warren Hastings:
“I finished Mr. Gibbon a full fortnight ago, and was extremely pleased. It is a most wonderful mass of information, not only on history, but almost on all the ingredients of history, as war, government, commerce, coin, and what not. If it has a fault, it is in embracing too much, and consequently in not detailing enough, and in striding backwards and forwards from one set of princes to another, and from one subject to another; so that, without much historic knowledge, and without much memory, and much method in one’s memory, it is almost impossible not to be sometimes bewildered: nay, his own impatience to tell what he knows, makes the author, though commonly so explicit, not perfectly clear in his expressions. The last chapter of the fourth volume, I own, made me recoil, and I could scarcely push through it. So far from being Catholic or heretic, I wished Mr. Gibbon had never heard of Monophysites, Nestorians, or any such fools! But the sixth volume made ample amends; Mahomet and the Popes were gentlemen and good company. I abominate fractions of theology and reformation.
“Mr. Sheridan, I hear, did not quite satisfy the passionate expectation that had been raised; but it was impossible he could, when people had worked themselves into an enthusiasm of offering fifty—ay, fifty guineas for a ticket to hear him. Well, we are sunk and deplorable in many points, yet not absolutely gone, when history and eloquence throw out such shoots! I thought I had outlived my country; I am glad not to leave it desperate!”
The next letter contains further references to the Begum Speech. It is addressed to Lord Strafford, and is one of the latest of Walpole’s letters to that nobleman which have been preserved:
“Strawberry Hill, Tuesday night, June 17, 1788.
“I guess, my dear Lord, and only guess, that you are arrived at Wentworth Castle. If you are not, my letter will lose none of its bloom by waiting for you; for I have nothing fresh to tell you, and only write because you enjoined it. I settled in my Liliputian towers but this morning. I wish people would come into the country on May-day, and fix in town the first of November. But as they will not, I have made up my mind; and having so little time left, I prefer London, when my friends and society are in it, to living here alone, or with the weird sisters of Richmond and Hampton. I had additional reason now, for the streets are as green as the fields: we are burnt to the bone, and have not a lock of hay to cover our nakedness: oats are so dear, that I suppose they will soon be eaten at Brooks’s and fashionable tables as a rarity. Though not resident till now, I have flitted backwards and forwards, and last Friday came hither to look for a minute at a ball at Mrs. Walsingham’s at Ditton; which would have been very pretty, for she had stuck coloured lamps in the hair of all her trees and bushes, if the east wind had not danced a reel all the time by the side of the river.
“Mr. Conway’s play,109 of which your Lordship has seen some account in the papers, has succeeded delightfully, both in representation and applause. The language is most genteel, though translated from verse; and both prologue and epilogue are charming. The former was delivered most justly and admirably by Lord Derby, and the latter with inimitable spirit and grace by Mrs. Damer. Mr. Merry and Mrs. Bruce played excellently too. But General Conway, Mrs. Damer, and everybody else are drowned by Mr. Sheridan, whose renown has engrossed all Fame’s tongues and trumpets. Lord Townshend said he should be sorry were he forced to give a vote directly on Hastings, before he had time to cool; and one of the Peers saying the speech had not made the same impression on him, the Marquis replied, A seal might be finely cut, and yet not be in fault for making a bad impression.
“I have, you see, been forced to send your Lordship what scraps I brought from town. The next four months, I doubt, will reduce me to my old sterility; for I cannot retail French Gazettes, though as a good Englishman bound to hope they will contain a civil war. I care still less about the double imperial campaign, only hoping that the poor dear Turks will heartily beat both Emperor and Empress. If the first Ottomans could be punished, they deserve it, but the present possessors have as good a prescription on their side as any people in Europe. We ourselves are Saxons, Danes, Normans; our neighbours are Franks, not Gauls; who the rest are, Goths, Gepidæ, Heruli, Mr. Gibbon knows; and the Dutch usurped the estates of herrings, turbots, and other marine indigenæ. Still, though I do not wish the hair of a Turk’s beard to be hurt, I do not say that it would not be amusing to have Constantinople taken, merely as a lusty event; for neither could I live to see Athens revive, nor have I much faith in two such bloody-minded vultures, cock and hen, as Catherine and Joseph, conquering for the benefit of humanity; nor does my Christianity admire the propagation of the Gospel by the mouth of cannon. What desolation of peasants and their families by the episodes of forage and quarters! Oh! I wish Catherine and Joseph were brought to Westminster Hall and worried by Sheridan! I hope, too, that the poor Begums are alive to hear of his speech: it will be some comfort, though I doubt nobody thinks of restoring them a quarter of a lac!”
We must now find place for a letter to Miss More:
“Strawberry Hill, July 4, 1788.
“I am soundly rejoiced, my dear Madam, that the present summer is more favourable to me than the last; and that, instead of not answering my letters in three months, you open the campaign first. May not I flatter myself that it is a symptom of your being in better health? I wish, however, you had told me so in positive words, and that all your complaints have left you. Welcome as is your letter, it would have been ten times more welcome bringing me that assurance; for don’t think I forget how ill you was last winter. As letters, you say, now keep their coaches, I hope those from Bristol will call often at my door.110 I promise you I will never be denied to them.
“No botanist am I; nor wished to learn from you, of all the Muses, that piping has a new signification. I had rather that you handled an oaten pipe than a carnation one; yet setting layers, I own, is preferable to reading newspapers, one of the chronical maladies of this age. Everybody reads them, nay, quotes them, though everybody knows they are stuffed with lies or blunders. How should it be otherwise? If any extraordinary event happens, who but must hear it before it descends through a coffee-house to the runner of a daily paper? They who are always wanting news, are wanting to hear they don’t know what. A lower species, indeed, is that of the scribes you mention, who every night compose a journal for the satisfaction of such illiterati, and feed them with all the vices and misfortunes of every private family; nay, they now call it a duty to publish all those calamities which decency to wretched relations used in compassion to suppress, I mean self-murder in particular. Mr. Hesse’s was detailed at length; and to-day that of Lord Saye and Sele. The pretence is, in terrorem, like the absurd stake and highway of our ancestors; as if there were a precautionary potion for madness, or the stigma of a newspaper were more dreadful than death. Daily journalists, to be sure, are most respectable magistrates! Yes, much like the cobblers that Cromwell made peers.
“I do lament your not going to Mr. Conway’s play: both the author and actors deserved such an auditor as you, and you deserved to hear them. However, I do not pity good people who out of virtue lose or miss any pleasures. Those pastimes fleet as fast as those of the wicked; but, when gone, you saints can sit down and feast on your self-denial, and drink bumpers of satisfaction to the health of your own merit. So truly I don’t pity you.
“You say you hear no news, yet you quote Mr. Topham;111 therefore why should I tell you that the King is going to Cheltenham? or that the Baccelli lately danced at the Opera at Paris with a blue bandeau on her forehead, inscribed, Honi soit qui mal y pense!
“Well! would we committed nothing but follies! What do we not commit when the abolition of slavery hitches! Adieu!
“Though Cato died, though Tully spoke,
Though Brutus dealt the godlike stroke,
Yet perish’d fated Rome.
“You have written; and I fear that even, if Mr. Sheridan speaks, trade, the modern religion, will predominate. Adieu!”
Our next extract contains an account of an incident which proved more fortunate for the writer than anything that happened to him during the remainder of his life. It is from a letter to Lady Ossory, dated Strawberry Hill, October 11, 1788. Horace writes:
“I am sorry, for the third time of this letter, that I have no new village anecdotes to send your Ladyship, since they divert you for a moment. I have one, but some months old. Lady Charleville, my neighbour, told me three months ago, that, having some company with her, one of them had been to see Strawberry. ‘Pray,’ said another, ‘who is that Mr. Walpole?’ ‘Who!’ cried a third, ‘don’t you know the great epicure, Mr. Walpole?’ ‘Pho!’ said the first, ‘great epicure! you mean the antiquarian.’ There, Madam, surely this anecdote may take its place in the chapter of local fame. If I have picked up no recent anecdotes on our Common, I have made a much more, to me, precious acquisition. It is the acquaintance of two young ladies of the name of Berry, whom I first saw last winter, and who accidentally took a house here with their father for the season. Their story is singular enough to entertain you. The grandfather,112 a Scot, had a large estate in his own country, £5,000 a year it is said; and a circumstance I shall tell you makes it probable. The oldest son married for love a woman with no fortune. The old man was enraged, and would not see him. His wife died and left these two young ladies. The grandfather wished for an heir male, and pressed the widower to remarry, but could not prevail; the son declaring he would consecrate himself to his daughters and their education. The old man did not break with him again, but, much worse, totally disinherited him, and left all to his second son, who very handsomely gave up £800 a year to his elder brother. Mr. Berry has since carried his daughters for two or three years to France and Italy, and they are returned the best-informed and the most perfect creatures I ever saw at their age. 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, 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 characterise the Berrys; and this is not particularly mine, who am apt to be prejudiced, but the universal voice of all who know them. The first night I met them I would not be acquainted with them, having heard so much in their praise that I concluded they would be all pretension. The second time, in a very small company, I sat next to Mary, and found her an angel both inside and out. Now, I do not know which I like best; except Mary’s face, which is formed for a sentimental novel, but it is ten times fitter for a fifty times better thing, genteel comedy. This delightful family comes to me almost every Sunday evening, as our region is too proclamatory to play at cards on the seventh day. I forgot to tell you that Mr. Berry is a little merry man, with a round face, and you would not suspect him of so much feeling and attachment. I make no excuse for such minute details; for, if your Ladyship insists on hearing the humours of my district, you must for once indulge me with sending you two pearls that I found in my path.”
At the date of the above extract, Mary Berry was in her twenty-sixth year, Agnes Berry in her twenty-fifth. The notice taken by Walpole of these ladies gave them a position in the best London society, which they enjoyed for upwards of sixty years; but this patronage, and any other benefits which he bestowed upon them, were much more than repaid by the grateful attention with which they sacrificed themselves to promote the comfort of his last years. The new acquaintance advanced rapidly. Here is one of the earliest of Walpole’s letters to the sisters which has been published. Like many others of the series, it is addressed to the two jointly.
“February 2, 17-71113 [1789].
“I am sorry, in the sense of that word before it meant, like a Hebrew word, glad or sorry, that I am engaged this evening; and I am at your command on Tuesday, as it is always my inclination to be. It is a misfortune that words are become so much the current coin of society, that, like King William’s shillings, they have no impression left; they are so smooth, that they mark no more to whom they first belonged than to whom they do belong, and are not worth even the twelvepence into which they may be changed: but if they mean too little, they may seem to mean too much too, especially when an old man (who is often synonymous for a miser) parts with them. 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.”
A few months later we have the following letter to Miss More:
“Strawberry Hill, June 23, 1789.
“Madam Hannah,
“You are an errant reprobate, and grow wickeder and wickeder every day. You deserve to be treated like a nègre; and your favourite Sunday, to which you are so partial, that you treat the other poor six days of the week as if they had no souls to be saved, should, if I could have my will, ‘shine no Sabbath-day for you.’ Now, don’t simper, and look as innocent as if virtue would not melt in your mouth. Can you deny the following charges?—I lent you the ‘Botanic Garden,’ and you returned it without writing a syllable, or saying where you were, or whither you was going; I suppose for fear I should know how to direct to you. Why, if I did send a letter after you, could not you keep it three months without an answer, as you did last year?
“In the next place, you and your nine accomplices, who, by the way, are too good in keeping you company, have clubbed the prettiest Poem imaginable,114 and communicated it to Mrs. Boscawen, with injunctions not to give a copy of it; I suppose because you are ashamed of having written a panegyric. Whenever you do compose a satire, you are ready enough to publish it; at least, whenever you do, you will din one to death with it. But now, mind your perverseness: that very pretty novel poem, and I must own it is charming, have you gone and spoiled, flying in the faces of your best friends the Muses, and keeping no measures with them. I’ll be shot if they dictated two of the best lines with two syllables too much in each—nay, you have weakened one of them,
“‘Ev’n Gardiner’s mind’
is far more expressive than steadfast Gardiner’s; and, as Mrs. Boscawen says, whoever knows anything of Gardiner, could not want that superfluous epithet; and whoever does not, would not be the wiser for your foolish insertion—Mrs. Boscawen did not call it foolish, but I do. The second line, as Mesdemoiselles the Muses handed it to you, Miss, was,
“‘Have all be free and saved—’
not, ‘All be free and all be saved:’ the second all be is a most unnecessary tautology. The poem was perfect and faultless, if you could have let it alone. I wonder how your mischievous flippancy could help maiming that most new and beautiful expression, ‘sponge of sins;’ I should not have been surprised, as you love verses too full of feet, if you had changed it to ‘that scrubbing-brush of sins.’
“Well! I will say no more now: but if you do not order me a copy of ‘Bonner’s Ghost’ incontinently, never dare to look my printing-house in the face again. Or come, I’ll tell you what; I will forgive all your enormities if you will let me print your poem. I like to filch a little immortality out of others, and the Strawberry press could never have a better opportunity. I will not haggle for the public; I will be content with printing only two hundred copies, of which you shall have half and I half. It shall cost you nothing but a yes. I only propose this in case you do not mean to print it yourself. Tell me sincerely which you like. But as to not printing it at all, charming and unexceptionable as it is, you cannot be so preposterous.
“I by no means have a thought of detracting from your own share in your own poem; but, as I do suspect that it caught some inspiration from your perusal of ‘The Botanic Garden,’ so I hope you will discover that my style is much improved by having lately studied ‘Bruce’s Travels.’ There I dipped, and not in St. Giles’s Pound, where one would think this author had been educated. Adieu! Your friend, or mortal foe, as you behave on the present occasion.”
Before the date of the last, the Misses Berry had set out on a summer excursion. The following is in answer to a letter from the elder:
“Strawberry Hill, June 30, 1789.
“Were there any such thing as sympathy at the distance of two hundred miles, you would have been in a mightier panic than I was; for, on Saturday se’nnight, going to open the glass case in the Tribune, my foot caught in the carpet, and I fell with my whole weight (si weight y a) against the corner of the marble altar on my side, and bruised the muscles so badly, that for two days I could not move without screaming. I am convinced I should have broken a rib, but that I fell on the cavity whence two of my ribs were removed that are gone to Yorkshire. I am much better both of my bruise and of my lameness, and shall be ready to dance at my own wedding when my wives return. And now to answer your letter.
“If you grow tired of the ‘Arabian Nights,’ you have no more taste than Bishop Atterbury, who huffed Pope for sending him them (or the ‘Persian Tales’), and fancied he liked Virgil better, who had no more imagination than Dr. Akenside. Read ‘Sinbad the Sailor’s Voyages,’ and you will be sick of Æneas’s. What woful invention were the nasty poultry that spoiled his dinner, and ships on fire turned into Nereids! A barn metamorphosed into a cascade in a pantomime is full as sublime an effort of genius. I do not know whether the ‘Arabian Nights’ are of Oriental origin or not: I should think not, because I never saw any other Oriental composition that was not bombast without genius, and figurative without nature; like an Indian screen, where you see little men on the foreground, and larger men hunting tigers above in the air, which they take for perspective. I do not think the Sultaness’s narratives very natural or very probable, but there is a wildness in them that captivates. However, if you could wade through two octavos115 of Dame Piozzi’s though’s and so’s and I trow’s, and cannot listen to seven volumes of Scheherezade’s narrations, I will sue for a divorce in foro Parnassi, and Boccalini shall be my proctor. The cause will be a counterpart to the sentence of the Lacedæmonian, who was condemned for breach of the peace, by saying in three words what he might have said in two.
“So, you was not quite satisfied, though you ought to have been transported, with King’s College Chapel, because it has no aisles, like every common cathedral. I suppose you would object to a bird of paradise, because it has no legs, but shoots to heaven in a trail, and does not rest on earth. Criticism and comparison spoil many tastes. You should admire all bold and unique essays that resemble nothing else; the ‘Botanic Garden,’ the ‘Arabian Nights,’ and King’s Chapel are above all rules: and how preferable is what no one can imitate, to all that is imitated even from the best models! Your partiality to the pageantry of popery I do approve, and I doubt whether the world would not be a loser (in its visionary enjoyments) by the extinction of that religion, as it was by the decay of chivalry and the proscription of the heathen deities. Reason has no invention; and as plain sense will never be the legislator of human affairs, it is fortunate when taste happens to be regent.”
During the absence of his young favourites, he amuses himself with visiting his neighbours, and grumbling at his “customers,” as he called the strangers who came to view his villa and grounds: