“Strawberry Hill, past midnight, June 11, 1773.
“Unless I borrow from my sleep, I can certainly have no time to please myself. I am this minute arrived here, Madam, and being the flower of chivalry, I sacrifice, like a true knight, the moments I steal from my rest to gallantry. Save me, or I shall become a solicitor in Chancery, unless business and fatigue overset my head, and reduce me to my poor nephew’s state. Indeed, I am half hurried out of my senses. Think of me putting queries to lawyers, up to the ears in mortgages, wills, settlements, and contingent remainders. My lawyer is sent away that I may give audience to the Honourable Mr. Manners, the genuine, if not the legitimate son of Lord William. He came civilly yesterday morning to ask me if he might not seize the pictures at Houghton, which he heard were worth threescore thousand pounds, for nine thousand he has lent Lord Orford. The vulture’s throat gaped for them all—what a scene is opened! Houghton will be a rookery of harpies—I doubt there are worse scenes to follow, and black transactions! What occupation chalked out for an end of a life that I had calculated for tranquillity, and which gout and law are to divide between them!
“In the midst of this prospect must I keep up the tone of the world, go shepherdising with Macaronies, sit up at loo with my Lady Hertford, be witness to Miss Pelham’s orgies, dine at villas, and give dinners at my own. ’Tis well my spirits and resolution have survived my youth: you have heard how my mornings pass—now for the rest. Consultations of physicians, letters to Lady Orford, sent for to my brother, decent visits to my Court,55 sup at Lady Powis’s on Wednesday, drink tea with all the fashionable world at Mr. Fitzroy’s farm on Thursday, blown by a north wind there into the house, and whisk back to Lady Hertford’s; this morning to my brother’s to hear of new bills, away to dine at –, Muswell Hill, with the Beauclerks, and florists and natural historians, Banks and Solanders; return to town, step to ask a friend whether reversions of jointures can be left away, into my chaise and hither. To-morrow come two Frenchmen to dinner—on Monday, a man to sell me two acres immensely dear as a favour,—Philip [his valet], I cannot help it, you must go and put him off; I have not a minute, I must go back to-morrow night to meet the lawyers at my brother’s on Sunday morning. Margaret [his housekeeper] comes in. ‘Sir, Lady Bingham desires you will dine with her at Hampton Court on Tuesday;’ I cannot. ‘Sir, Captain What-d’ye-call’m has sent twice for a ticket to see the house’—Don’t plague me about tickets. ‘Sir, a servant from Isleworth brought this parcel.’ What on earth is in it?—only printed proposals for writing the lives of all British writers, and a letter to tell me I could do it better than anybody, but as I may not have time, Dr. Berkenhout proposes to do it, and will write mine into the bargain, if I will but be so good as to write it first and send it him, and give him advice for the conduct of his work, and point out materials, and furnish him with anecdotes.
“My dear madam, what if you should send him this letter as a specimen of my life! Alas, alas! I have already lost my lilac tide. I have heard but one nightingale this year, and my farmer cut my hay last Tuesday morning without telling me, just as I was going to London. Is it to be borne? O for the sang-froid of an Almackian, who pursues his delights,
“‘Though in the jaws of ruin and codille!’”
CHAPTER VI
Lord Nuneham.—Madame de Sévigné.—Charles Fox.—Mrs. Clive and Cliveden.—Goldsmith and Garrick.—Dearth of News.—Madame de Trop.—A Bunch of Grapes.—General Election.—Perils by Land and Water.—Sir Horace Mann.—Lord Clive.—The History of Manners.—A Traveller from Lima.—The Sçavoir Vivre Club.—Reflections on Life.—The Pretender’s Happiness.—Paris Fashions.—Madame Du Deffand ill.—Growth of London.—Sir Joshua Reynolds.—Change in Manners.—Our Climate.
The following letter is a specimen of Horace’s gossiping style at its best. It is addressed to Lord Nuneham, who was in Ireland with his father, Simon Earl Harcourt, the then Lord-Lieutenant. Elsewhere Walpole salutes his correspondent as “Your O’Royal Highness”:
“Strawberry Hill, Dec. 6, 1773.
“I wanted an excuse for writing to you, my dear Lord, and your letter gives me an opportunity of thanking you; yet that is not all I wanted to say. I would, if I had dared, have addressed myself to Lady Nuneham, but I had not confidence enough, especially on so unworthy a subject as myself. Lady Temple, my friend, as well as that of Human Nature, has shown me some verses; but alas! how came such charming poetry to be thrown away on so unmeritorious a topic? I don’t know whether I ought to praise the lines most, or censure the object most. Voltaire makes the excellence of French poetry consist in the number of difficulties it vanquishes. Pope, who celebrated Lord Bolingbroke, could not have succeeded, did not succeed, better; and yet I hope that, though a meaner subject, I am not so bad an one! Well! with all my humility, I cannot but be greatly flattered. Madame de Sévigné spread her leaf-gold over all her acquaintance, and made them shine; I should not doubt of the same glory, when Lady Nuneham’s poetry shall come to light, if my own works were but burnt at the same time; but alas! Coulanges’ verses were preserved, and so may my writings too. Apropos, my Lord, I have got a new volume of that divine woman’s letters. Two are entertaining; the rest, not very divine. But there is an application, the happiest, the most exquisite, that even she herself ever made! She is joking with a President de Provence, who was hurt at becoming a grandfather. She assures him there is no such great misfortune in it; ‘I have experienced the case,’ says she, ‘and, believe me, Pæte, non dolet.’ If you are not both transported with this, ye are not the Lord and Lady Nuneham I take ye to be. There are besides some twenty letters of Madame de Simiane, who shows she would not have degenerated totally, if she had not lived in the country, or had anything to say. At the end are reprinted Madame de Sévigné’s letters on Fouquet’s Trial, which are very interesting.
“I do not know how you like your new subjects, but I hear they are extremely content with their Prince and Princess. I ought to wish your Lordship joy of all your prosperities, and of Mr. Fludd’s baptism into the Catholic or Universal Faith; but I reserve public felicities for your old Drawing-Room in Leicester Fields. Private news we have little but Lord Carmarthen’s and Lord Cranborne’s marriages, and the approaching one of Lady Bridget Lane and Mr. Tall-Match. Lord Holland has given Charles Fox a draught of an hundred thousand pounds, and it pays all his debts, but a trifle of thirty thousand pounds, and those of Lord Carlisle, Crewe, and Foley, who being only friends, not Jews, may wait. So now any younger son may justify losing his father’s and elder brother’s estate on precedent.56
“Neither Lord nor Lady Temple are well, and yet they are both gone to Lord Clare’s, in Essex, for a week. Lord Temple had a very bad fall in the Park, and lost his senses for an hour. Yet, though the horse is a vicious one, he has been upon it again. In short, there are no right-headed people but the Irish!
“As it is ancient good breeding not to conclude a letter without troubling the reader with compliments, and as I have none to send, I must beg your Lordship not to forget to present my respects to the Countesses of Barrymore and Massareene, my dear Sisters in Loo. You may be sure I am charged with a large parcel from Cliveden,57 where I was last night. Except being extremely ill, Mrs. Clive is extremely well; but the tax-gatherer is gone off, and she must pay her window-lights over again; and the road before her door is very bad, and the parish won’t mend it, and there is some suspicion that Garrick is at the bottom of it; so if you please to send a shipload of the Giant’s Causey by next Monday, we shall be able to go to Mr. Rofey’s rout at Kingston. The Papers said she was to act at Covent Garden, and she has printed a very proper answer in the Evening Post. Mr. Raftor58 told me, that formerly, when he played Luna in ‘The Rehearsal,’ he never could learn to dance the Hays, and at last he went to the Man that teaches grown gentlemen.
“Miss Davis59 is the admiration of all London, but of me, who do not love the perfection of what anybody can do, and wish she had less top to her voice and more bottom. However, she will break Millico’s heart, which will not break mine. Fierville has sprained his leg, and there is another man who sprains his mouth with smiling on himself—as I have heard, for I have not seen him yet, nor a fat old woman and her lean daughter, who dance with him. London is very dull, so pray come back as soon as you can. Mason is up to the ears in ‘Gray’s Life;’ you will like it exceedingly, which is more than you will do this long letter. Well! you have but to go into Lady Nuneham’s dressing-room, and you may read something ten thousand times more pleasing. No, no! you are not the most to be pitied of any human being, though in the midst of Dublin Castle.”
Next to the above, Walpole’s liveliest letters about this date were written to Lady Ossory. Sometimes he has to lament the want of news: “Pray, Madam, where is the difference between London and the country, when everybody is in the country and nobody in town? The houses do not marry, intrigue, talk politics, game, or fling themselves out of window. The streets do not all run to the Alley, nor the squares mortgage themselves over head and ears. The play-houses do not pull themselves down; and all summer long, when nobody gets about them, they behave soberly and decently as any Christian in the parish of Marylebone. The English of this preface is that I have not the Israelitish art of making bricks without straw. I cannot invent news when nobody commits it.” He has nothing better to tell than an anecdote of Goldsmith, who died a few months later, and Garrick: “I dined and passed Saturday at Beauclerk’s, with the Edgecombes, the Garricks, and Dr. Goldsmith, and was most thoroughly tired, as I knew I should be, I who hate the playing off a butt. Goldsmith is a fool, the more wearying for having some sense. It was the night of a new comedy, called ‘The School for Wives,’60 which was exceedingly applauded, and which Charles Fox says is execrable. Garrick has at least the chief hand in it. I never saw anybody in a greater fidget, nor more vain when he returned, for he went to the play-house at half-an-hour after five, and we sat waiting for him till ten, when he was to act a speech in ‘Cato’ with Goldsmith! that is, the latter sat in t’other’s lap, covered with a cloak, and while Goldsmith spoke, Garrick’s arms that embraced him, made foolish actions. How could one laugh when one had expected this for four hours?” On Christmas night 1773, he writes: “This has been a very barren half-year. The next, I hope, will reinstate my letters in their proper character of newspapers.”
The event, however, belied his hopes. In June, 1774, he writes to his Countess:
“Offended at you, Madam! I have crossed myself forty times since I read the impious words, never to be pronounced by human lips,—nay, and to utter them, when I am seemingly to blame!—yet, believe me, my silence is not owing to negligence, or to that most wicked of all sins, inconstancy. I have thought on you waking or sleeping, whenever I have thought at all, from the moment I saw you last; and if there was an echo in the neighbourhood besides Mr. Cambridge, I should have made it repeat your Ladyship’s name, till the parish should have presented it for a nuisance. I have begun twenty letters, but the naked truth is, I found I had absolutely nothing to say. You yourself owned, Madam, that I am grown quite lifeless, and it is very true. I am none of your Glastonbury thorns that blow at Christmas. I am a remnant of the last age, and have nothing to do with the present. I am an exile from the sunbeams of drawing-rooms; I have quitted the gay scenes of Parliament and the Antiquarian Society; I am not of Almack’s; I don’t understand horse-races; I never go to reviews; what can I have to talk of? I go to no fêtes champêtres, what can I have to think of? I know nothing but about myself, and about myself I know nothing. I have scarce been in town since I saw you, have scarce seen anybody here, and don’t remember a tittle but having scolded my gardener twice, which, indeed, would be as important an article as any in Montaigne’s Travels, which I have been reading, and if I was tired of his Essays, what must one be of these! What signifies what a man thought, who never thought of anything but himself; and what signifies what a man did, who never did anything?”
In August, hearing that Lady Ossory had again been disappointed of a son, he tells her: “I don’t design to acknowledge Anne III.; I shall call her Madame de Trop, as they named one of the late King of France’s daughters. A dauphin! a dauphin! I will repeat it as often as the Graces.” A month later he is informed that Madame de Trop has received the name of Gertrude:
“Madam,—‘Methinks an Æsop’s fable you relate,’ as Dryden says in the ‘Hind and Panther.’ A mouse that wraps itself in a French cloak and sleeps on a couch; and a goldfinch that taps at the window and swears it will come in to quadrille at eleven o’clock at night! no, no, these are none of Æsop’s cattle; they are too fashionable to have lived so near the creation. The mouse is neither Country Mouse nor City Mouse; and whatever else he may be, the goldfinch must be a Macaroni, or at least of the Sçavoir vivre. I do not deny but I have some skill in expounding types and portents; and could give a shrewd guess at the identical persons who have travestied themselves into a quadruped and biped; but the truth is, I have no mind, Madam, to be Prime Minister. King Pharaoh is mighty apt on emergencies to send for us soothsayers, and put the whole kingdom into our hands, if his butler or baker, with whom he is wont to gossip, does but tell him of a cunning man.
“I have no ambition to supplant Lord North—especially as the season approaches when I dread the gout; and I should be very sorry to be fetched out of my bed to pacify America. To be sure, Madam, you give me a fair field for uttering oracles: however, all I will unfold is, that the emblematic animals have no views on Lady Louisa.61 The omens of her fortune are in herself; and I will burn my books, if beauty, sense, and merit, do not bestow all the happiness on her they prognosticate.…
“I like the blue eyes, Madam, better than the denomination of Lady Gertrude Fitzpatrick, which, all respectable as it is, is very harsh and rough sounding; pray let her change it with the first goldfinch that offers. Nay, I do not even trust to the blueth of the eyes. I do not believe they last once in twenty times. One cannot go into any village fifty miles from London without seeing a dozen little children with flaxen hair and eyes of sky-blue. What becomes of them all? One does not see a grown Christian with them twice in a century, except in poetry.
“The Strawberry Gazette is very barren of news. Mr. Garrick has the gout, which is of more consequence to the metropolis than to Twitnamshire. Lady Hertford dined here last Saturday, brought her loo party, and stayed supper; there were Lady Mary Coke, Mrs. Howe, and the Colonels Maude and Keene. This was very heroic, for one is robbed every hundred yards. Lady Hertford herself was attacked last Wednesday on Hounslow Heath at three in the afternoon, but she had two servants on horseback, who would not let her be robbed, and the highwayman decamped.
“The greatest event I know was a present I received last Sunday, just as I was going to dine at Lady Blandford’s, to whom I sacrificed it. It was a bunch of grapes as big—as big—as that the two spies carried on a pole to Joshua; for spies in those days, when they robbed a vineyard, were not at all afraid of being overtaken. In good truth, this bunch weighed three pounds and a half, côte rôtie measure; and was sent to me by my neighbour Prado, of the tribe of Issachar, who is descended from one of foresaid spies, but a good deal richer than his ancestor. Well, Madam, I carried it to the Marchioness of Blandford, but gave it to the maître d’hotel, with injunctions to conceal it till the dessert. At the end of dinner, Lady Blandford said, she had heard of three immense bunches of grapes at Mr. Prado’s, at a dinner he had made for Mr. Welbore Ellis. I said those things were always exaggerated. She cried, Oh! but Mrs. Ellis told it, and it weighed I don’t know how many pounds, and the Duke of Argyll had been to see the hothouse, and she wondered, as it was so near, I would not go and see it. Not I, indeed, said I; I dare to say there is no curiosity in it. Just then entered the gigantic bunch. Everybody screamed. There, said I, I will be shot if Mr. Prado has such a bunch as yours. In short, she suspected Lady Egremont, and the adventure succeeded to admiration. If you will send the Bedfordshire waggon, Madam, I will beg a dozen grapes for you.…
“Pray, Madam, is not it Farming-Woods’ tide?62 Who is to have the care of the dear mouse in your absence? I wish I could spare Margaret [his housekeeper], who loves all creatures so well that she would have been happy in the Ark, and sorry when the Deluge ceased; unless people had come to see Noah’s old house, which she would have liked still better than cramming his menagerie.”
Sir Joshua Reynolds. Pinx. A. Dawson. Ph. Sc. J. Raphael Smith. Sc.
Lady Gertrude Fitzpatrick.
The dearth of news was presently relieved by a General Election, about which and other topics Walpole writes to Mann:
“Strawberry Hill, Oct. 6, 1774.
“It would be unlike my attention and punctuality, to see so large an event as an irregular dissolution of Parliament, without taking any notice of it to you. It happened last Saturday, six months before its natural death, and without the design being known but the Tuesday before, and that by very few persons. The chief motive is supposed to be the ugly state of North America, and the effects that a cross winter might have on the next elections. Whatever were the causes, the first consequences, as you may guess, were such a ferment in London as is seldom seen at this dead season of the year. Couriers, despatches, post-chaises, post-horses, hurrying every way! Sixty messengers passed through one single turnpike on Friday. The whole island is by this time in equal agitation; but less wine and money will be shed than have been at any such period for these fifty years.…
“The first symptoms are not favourable to the Court; the great towns are casting off submission, and declaring for popular members. London, Westminster, Middlesex, seem to have no monarch but Wilkes, who is at the same time pushing for the Mayoralty of London, with hitherto a majority on the poll. It is strange how this man, like a phœnix, always revives from his embers! America, I doubt, is still more unpromising. There are whispers of their having assembled an armed force, and of earnest supplications arrived for succours of men and ships. A civil war is no trifle; and how we are to suppress or pursue in such a vast region, with a handful of men, I am not an Alexander to guess; and for the fleet, can we put it upon casters and wheel it from Hudson’s Bay to Florida? But I am an ignorant soul, and neither pretend to knowledge nor foreknowledge. All I perceive already is, that our Parliaments are subjected to America and India, and must be influenced by their politics; yet I do not believe our senators are more universal than formerly.
“It would be quite unfashionable to talk longer of anything but elections; and yet it is the topic on which I never talk or think, especially since I took up my freedom.63…
“In the midst of this combustion, we are in perils by land and water. It has rained for this month without intermission. There is a sea between me and Richmond, and Sunday was se’nnight I was hurried down to Isleworth in the ferryboat by the violence of the current, and had great difficulty to get to shore. Our roads are so infested by highwaymen, that it is dangerous stirring out almost by day. Lady Hertford was attacked on Hounslow Heath at three in the afternoon. Dr. Eliot was shot at three days ago, without having resisted; and the day before yesterday we were near losing our Prime Minister, Lord North; the robbers shot at the postilion, and wounded the latter. In short, all the freebooters, that are not in India, have taken to the highway. The Ladies of the Bedchamber dare not go to the Queen at Kew in an evening. The lane between me and the Thames is the only safe road I know at present, for it is up to the middle of the horses in water. Next week I shall not venture to London even at noon, for the Middlesex election is to be at Brentford, where the two demagogues, Wilkes and Townshend, oppose each other; and at Richmond there is no crossing the river. How strange all this must appear to you Florentines; but you may turn to your Machiavelli and Guicciardini, and have some idea of it. I am the quietest man at present in the whole island; not but I might take some part, if I would. I was in my garden yesterday, seeing my servants lop some trees; my brewer walked in and pressed me to go to Guildhall for the nomination of members for the county. I replied, calmly, ‘Sir, when I would go no more to my own election, you may be very sure I will go to that of nobody else.’ My old tune is,
“‘Suave mari magno turbantibus æquora ventis,’ &c.
“Adieu!“P.S. Arlington Street, 7th.
“I am just come to town, and find your letter.… The approaching death of the Pope will be an event of no consequence. That old mummery is near its conclusion, at least as a political object. The history of the latter Popes will be no more read than that of the last Constantinopolitan Emperors. Wilkes is a more conspicuous personage in modern story than the Pontifex Maximus of Rome. The poll for Lord Mayor ended last night; he and his late Mayor had above 1,900 votes, and their antagonists not 1,500. It is strange that the more he is opposed, the more he succeeds!”
The foregoing is an average sample of the bulk of Walpole’s Letters to Sir Horace Mann. It was to these Macaulay referred when he said, sneeringly, that Walpole “left copies of his private letters, with copious notes, to be published after his decease.” There can be no doubt that their author regarded them as a valuable contribution to the history of his times. And such, in truth, they were. Many of them contain full details of some political movement, written by one who, if not himself engaged in the struggle, was in close communication with the actors on one side at least. Hence, though these letters may be loaded with bias, they are often of solid substance. If they are not equally important for our present purpose, this is because they deal almost entirely with public matters and with the general news of the day. “Nothing is so pleasant in a letter,” writes Walpole to Lady Ossory, “as the occurrences of society. I am always regretting in my correspondence with Madame du Deffand and Sir Horace Mann, that I must not make use of them, as the one has never lived in England, and the other not these fifty years; and so, my private stories would want notes as much as Petronius. Sir Horace and I have no acquaintance in common but the Kings and Queens of Europe.”
In a letter to Mann, dated November 24, 1774, Walpole returns to the subject of the new Parliament:
“A great event happened two days ago—a political and moral event; the sudden death of that second Kouli Khan, Lord Clive. There was certainly illness in the case; the world thinks more than illness. His constitution was exceedingly broken and disordered, and grown subject to violent pains and convulsions. He came unexpectedly to town last Monday, and they say, ill. On Tuesday his physician gave him a dose of laudanum, which had not the desired effect. On the rest, there are two stories; one, that the physician repeated the dose; the other, that he doubled it himself, contrary to advice.64 In short, he has terminated at fifty a life of so much glory, reproach, art, wealth, and ostentation! He had just named ten members for the new Parliament.65
“Next Tuesday that Parliament is to meet—and a deep game it has to play! few Parliaments a greater. The world is in amaze here that no account is arrived from America of the result of their General Congress—if any is come, it is very secret; and that has no favourable aspect. The combination and spirit there seem to be universal, and is very alarming. I am the humble servant of events, and you know never meddle with prophecy. It would be difficult to descry good omens, be the issue what it will.
“The old French Parliament is restored with great éclat. Monsieur de Maurepas, author of the revolution, was received one night at the Opera with boundless shouts of applause. It is even said that the mob intended, when the King should go to hold the lit de justice, to draw his coach. How singular it would be if Wilkes’s case should be copied for a King of France! Do you think Rousseau was in the right, when he said that he could tell what would be the manners of any capital city, from certain given lights? I don’t know what he may do on Constantinople and Pekin—but Paris and London! I don’t believe Voltaire likes these changes. I have seen nothing of his writing for many months; not even on the poisoning Jesuits.66 For our part, I repeat it, we shall contribute nothing to the Histoire des Mœurs, not for want of materials, but for want of writers. We have comedies without novelty, gross satires without stings, metaphysical eloquence, and antiquarians that discover nothing.
“‘Bœotûm in crasso jurares aere natos!’
“Don’t tell me I am grown old and peevish and supercilious—name the geniuses of 1774, and I submit. The next Augustan age will dawn on the other side of the Atlantic. There will, perhaps, be a Thucydides at Boston, a Xenophon at New York, and, in time, a Virgil at Mexico, and a Newton at Peru. At last, some curious traveller from Lima will visit England, and give a description of the ruins of St. Paul’s, like the editions of Balbec and Palmyra; but am I not prophesying, contrary to my consummate prudence, and casting horoscopes of empires like Rousseau? Yes; well, I will go and dream of my visions.”
More than one writer has cited Walpole’s traveller from Lima as the original of Lord Macaulay’s traveller from New Zealand, who, in the midst of a vast solitude, takes his stand on a broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St. Paul’s. Others have traced the passage in the celebrated Review of Ranke’s “History of the Popes,” to Volney, Mrs. Barbauld, Kirke White, and Shelley; while others again have pointed out that, from whatsoever source derived, the idea expressed in this passage had been twice before employed by Macaulay, once, in 1824, in a Review of Mitford’s “Greece,” and the second time, in 1829, in his Review of Mill’s “Essay on Government.” The picture of the New Zealander, however, resembles the less ambitious, but equally graphic, figure of the traveller from Lima more closely than it does any of the other passages referred to.67 What is remarkable is, that the Review of Ranke’s “History” appeared in October, 1840, whereas the later portion of Walpole’s correspondence with Mann, to which the above extract belongs, was first published from the original manuscripts in 1843. How then could Macaulay know anything of the Peruvian stranger?68
The following was also addressed to Sir H. Mann. It is dated in May, 1775:
“You have not more Masquerades in Carnival than we have; there is one at the Pantheon to-night, another on Monday; and in June is to be a pompous one on the water, and at Ranelagh. This and the first are given by the Club called the Sçavoir Vivre, who till now have only shone by excess of gaming. The leader is that fashionable orator Lord Lyttelton,69 of whom I need not tell you more. I have done with these diversions, and enjoy myself here. Your old acquaintance, Lord and Lady Dacre, and your old friend, Mr. Chute, dined with me to-day: poor Lord Dacre70 is carried about, though not worse than he has been these twenty years. Strawberry was in great beauty; what joy I should have in showing it to you! Is this a wish I must never indulge? Alas!
“I have had a long chain of thoughts since I wrote the last paragraph. They ended in smiling at the word never. How one pronounces it to the last moment! Would not one think I counted on a long series of years to come? Yet no man has the termination of all his views more before his eyes, or knows better the idleness of framing visions to one’s self. One passes away so soon, and worlds succeed to worlds, in which the occupiers build the same castles in the air. What is ours but the present moment? And how many of mine are gone! And what do I want to show you? A plaything-vision, that has amused a poor transitory mortal for a few hours, and that will pass away like its master! Well, and yet is it not as sensible to conform to common ideas, and to live while one lives? Perhaps the wisest way is to cheat one’s self. Did one concentre all one’s thoughts on the nearness and certainty of dissolution, all the world would lie eating and sleeping like the savage Americans. Our wishes and views were given us to gild the dream of life, and if a Strawberry Hill can soften the decays of age, it is wise to embrace it, and due gratitude to the Great Giver to be happy with it. The true pain is the reflection on the numbers that are not so blessed; yet I have no doubt but the real miseries of life—I mean those that are unmerited and unavoidable,—will be compensated to the sufferers. Tyrants are a proof of an hereafter. Millions of men cannot be formed for the sport of a cruel child.
“How happy is the Pretender in missing a Crown! When dead, he will have all the advantage that other Kings have, the being remembered; and that greater advantage, which Kings who die in their childhood have, historians will say, he would have been a great King if he had lived to reign; and that greatest advantage which so very few of them have, his reign will be stained with no crimes and blunders. If he is at Florence, pray recommend me to him for his historian; you see I have all the qualities a Monarch demands, I am disposed to flatter him. You may tell him too what I have done for his uncle Richard III. The mischief is in it, if I am not qualified for a Royal Historiographer, when I have whitewashed one of the very few whom my brethren, so contrary to their custom, have agreed to traduce.”
In the autumn of 1775, Walpole was in Paris, whence he sends, for the benefit of Conway’s daughter, this important piece of information: “Tell Mrs. Damer, that the fashion now is to erect the toupée into a high detached tuft of hair, like a cockatoo’s crest; and this toupée they call la physionomie—I don’t guess why.” And in giving George Selwyn an account of the modish French ladies whom he met, he adds a description suited to the humour of that facetious gentleman: “With one of them,” he says, “you would be delighted, a Madame de Marchais. She is not perfectly young, has a face like a Jew pedlar, her person is about four feet, her head about six, and her coiffure about ten. Her forehead, chin, and neck are whiter than a miller’s; and she wears more festoons of natural flowers than all the figurantes at the Opera. Her eloquence is still more abundant, her attentions exuberant. She talks volumes, writes folios—I mean in billets; presides over the Académie, inspires passions.… She has a house in a nut-shell, that is fuller of invention than a fairy tale; her bed stands in the middle of the room, because there is no other space that would hold it; it is surrounded by a perspective of looking-glasses.…” In reference to the rage for billets, he mentions “a collection that was found last winter at Monsieur de Pondeveylle’s: there were sixteen thousand from one lady, in a correspondence of only eleven years. For fear of setting the house on fire if thrown into the chimney, the executors crammed them into the oven.” “There have been known,” he adds, “persons here who wrote to one another four times a day; and I was told of one couple, who being always together, and the lover being fond of writing, he placed a screen between them, and then wrote to Madam on t’other side, and flung them over.” Of his “dear old friend,” he reports: