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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 12073 ***
+
+LETTERS
+
+OF
+
+HORACE WALPOLE
+
+
+SELECTED AND EDITED BY
+
+CHARLES DUKE YONGE, M.A.
+
+AUTHOR OF "THE HISTORY OF FRANCE UNDER THE BOURBONS," "A LIFE OF MARIE
+ANTOINETTE," ETC., ETC.
+
+
+WITH PORTRAITS AND ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+
+VOLUME I
+
+
+London
+
+T. FISHER UNWIN
+
+PATERNOSTER SQUARE
+
+NEW YORK: G.P. PUTNAM'S SONS
+
+MDCCCXC
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS.
+
+1736-1764.
+
+
+1. TO MONTAGU, _May_ 2, 1736.--Marriage of the Princess of Wales--Very
+lively
+
+2. TO THE SAME, _May_ 6, 1736.--Fondness for Old Stories--Reminiscences
+of Eton, etc.
+
+3. TO THE SAME, _March_ 20, 1737.--Wish to Travel--Superiority of French
+Manners to English in their manner to Ladies
+
+4. TO WEST, _April_ 21, 1739.--Theatres at Paris--St. Denis--Fondness of
+the French for Show, and for Gambling--Singular Signs--The Army the only
+Profession for Men of Gentle Birth--Splendour of the Public Buildings
+
+5. TO THE SAME, 1739.--Magnificence of Versailles--The Chartreux Relics
+
+6. TO THE SAME, _February_ 27, 1740.--The Carnival--The Florentines
+Civil, Good-natured, and Fond of the English--A Curious Challenge
+
+7. TO THE SAME, _June_ 14, 1740.--Herculaneum--Search should be made for
+other Submerged Cities--Quotations from Statius
+
+8. TO CONWAY, _July_ 5, 1740.--Danger of Malaria--Roman Catholic
+Relics--"Admiral Hosier's Ghost"--Contest for the Popedom
+
+9. TO THE SAME, _July_ 9, 1740
+
+10. TO WEST, _Oct._ 2, 1740.--A Florentine Wedding--Addison's
+Descriptions are Borrowed from Books--A Song of Bondelmonti's, with a
+Latin Version by Gray, and an English One by the Writer
+
+11. TO MANN, _Jan._ 22, 1742.--Debate on Pulteney's Motion for a
+Committee on Papers Relating to the War--Speeches of Pulteney, Pitt, Sir
+R. Walpole, Sir W. George, etc.--Smallness of the Ministerial Majority
+
+12. TO THE SAME, _May_ 26, 1742.--Ranelagh Gardens Opened--Garrick, "A
+Wine-merchant turned Player"--Defeat of the Indemnity Bill
+
+13. TO THE SAME, _Dec._ 9, 1742.--Debate on Disbanding the Hanoverian
+Troops--First Speech of Murray (afterwards Earl of Mansfield)--_Bon Mot_
+of Lord Chesterfield
+
+14. TO THE SAME, _Feb._ 24, 1743.--King Theodore--Handel Introduces
+Oratorios
+
+15. TO THE SAME, _July_ 4, 1743.--Battle of Dettingen--Death of Lord
+Wilmington
+
+16. TO THE SAME, _Sept._ 7, 1743.--French Actors at Clifden--A new Roman
+Catholic Miracle--Lady Mary Wortley
+
+17. TO THE SAME, _March_ 29, 1745.--Death of his Father--Matthews and
+Lestock in the Mediterranean--Thomson's "Tancred and
+Sigismunda"--Akenside's Odes--Conundrums in Fashion
+
+18. TO THE SAME, _May_ 11, 1745.--Battle of Fontenoy--The Ballad of the
+Prince of Wales
+
+19. TO MONTAGU, _August_ 1, 1745.--M. De Grignan--Livy's Patavinity--The
+Maréchal De Belleisle--Whiston Prophecies the Destruction of the
+World--The Duke of Newcastle
+
+20. TO MANN, _Sept._ 6, 1745.--Invasion of Scotland by the Young
+Pretender--Forces are said to be Preparing in France to join him
+
+21. TO THE SAME, _Sept._ 20, 1745.--This and the following Letters give
+a Lively Account of the Progress of the Rebellion till the Retreat from
+Derby, after which no particular interest attaches to it
+
+22. TO THE SAME, _Sept._ 27, 1745.--Defeat of Cope
+
+23. TO THE SAME, _Oct._ 21, 1745.--General Wade is Marching to
+Scotland--Violent Proclamation of the Pretender
+
+24. TO THE SAME, _Nov._ 22, 1745.--Gallant Resistance of Carlisle--Mr.
+Pitt attacks the Ministry
+
+25. TO THE SAME, _Dec._ 9, 1745.--The Rebel Army has Retreated from
+Derby--Expectation of a French Invasion
+
+26. TO THE SAME, _April_ 25, 1746.--Battle of Culloden
+
+27. TO THE SAME, _Aug._ 1, 1746.--Trial of the Rebel Lords Balmerino and
+Kilmarnock
+
+28. TO THE SAME, _Oct._ 14, 1746.--The Battle of Rancoux
+
+29. TO CONWAY, _Oct._ 24, 1746.--On Conway's Verses--No Scotch_man_ is
+capable of such Delicacy of Thought, though a Scotchwoman may
+be--Akenside's, Armstrong's, and Glover's Poems
+
+30. TO THE SAME, _June_ 8, 1747.--He has bought Strawberry Hill
+
+31. TO THE SAME, _Aug._ 29, 1748.--His Mode of
+Life--Planting--Prophecies of New Methods and New Discoveries in a
+Future Generation
+
+32. TO MANN, _May_ 3, 1749.--Rejoicings for the Peace--Masquerade at
+Ranelagh--Meeting of the Prince's Party and the Jacobites--Prevalence of
+Drinking and Gambling--Whitefield
+
+33. TO THE SAME, _March_ 11, 1750.--Earthquake in London--General
+Panic--Marriage of Casimir, King of Poland
+
+34. TO THE SAME, _April_ 2, 1750.--General Panic--Sherlock's Pastoral
+Letter--Predictions of more Earthquakes--A General Flight from
+London--Epigrams by Chute and Walpole himself--French Translation of
+Milton
+
+35. TO THE SAME, _April_ 1, 1751.--Death of Walpole's Brother, and of
+the Prince of Wales--Speech of the young Prince--Singular Sermon on His
+Death
+
+36. TO THE SAME, _June_ 18, 1751.--Changes in the Ministry and
+Household--The Miss Gunnings--Extravagance in London--Lord Harcourt,
+Governor of the Prince of Wales
+
+37. TO THE SAME, _June_ 12, 1753.--Description of Strawberry Hill--Bill
+to Prevent Clandestine Marriages
+
+38. TO MONTAGU, _May_ 19, 1756.--No News from France but what is
+Smuggled--The King's Delight at the Vote for the Hanover Troops--_Bon
+Mot_ of Lord Denbigh
+
+39. TO THE SAME, _Oct._ 17, 1756.--Victory of the King of Prussia at
+Lowositz--Singular Race--Quarrel of the Pretender with the Pope
+
+40. TO THE SAME, _Nov._ 4, 1756.--Ministerial Negotiations--Loss of
+Minorca--Disaster in North America
+
+41. TO THE EARL OF STRAFFORD, _July_ 4, 1757.--The King of Prussia's
+Victories--Voltaire's "Universal History"
+
+42. TO ZOUCH, _August_ 3, 1758.--His own "Royal and Noble Authors"
+
+43. TO THE SAME, _Oct._ 21, 1758.--His "Royal and Noble Authors"--Lord
+Clarendon--Sir R. Walpole and Lord Bolingbroke--The Duke of Leeds
+
+44. TO MANN, _Oct._ 24, 1758.--Walpole's Monument to Sir Horace's
+Brother--Attempted Assassination of the King of Portugal--Courtesy of
+the Duc D'Aiguillon to his English Prisoners
+
+45. TO ZOUCH, _Dec._ 9, 1758.--A New Edition of Lucan--Comparison of
+"Pharsalea"--Criticism on the Poet, with the Aeneid--Helvetius's Work,
+"De L'Esprit"
+
+46. TO CONWAY, _Jan._ 19, 1759.--State of the House of Commons
+
+47. TO DALRYMPLE, _Feb._ 25, 1759.--Robertson's "History of
+Scotland"--Comparison of Ramsay and Reynolds as Portrait-Painters--Sir
+David's "History of the Gowrie Conspiracy"
+
+48. TO THE SAME, _July_ 11, 1759.--Writers of History: Goodall, Hume,
+Robertson--Queen Christina
+
+49. TO CONWAY, _Aug._ 14, 1759.--The Battle of Minden--Lord G. Sackville
+
+50. TO MANN, _Sept._ 13, 1759.--Admiral Boscawen's Victory--Defeat of
+the King of Prussia--Lord G. Sackville
+
+51. TO MONTAGU, _Oct._ 21, 1759.--A Year of Triumphs
+
+52. TO THE SAME, _Nov._ 8, 1759.--French Bankruptcy--French Epigram
+
+53. TO THE SAME, _Jan._ 7, 1760.--He lives amongst Royalty--Commotions
+in Ireland
+
+54. TO THE SAME, _Jan._ 14, 1760.--Severity of the Weather--Scarcity in
+Germany--A Party at Prince Edward's--Charles Townsend's Comments on La
+Fontaine
+
+55. TO MANN, _Feb._ 28, 1760.--Capture of Carrickfergus
+
+56. TO DALRYMPLE, _April_ 4, 1760.--The Ballad of "Hardyknute"--Mr.
+Home's "Siege of Aquileia"--"Tristram Shandy"--Bishop Warburton's Praise
+of it
+
+57. TO THE SAME, _June_ 20, 1760.--Erse Poetry--"The Dialogues of the
+Dead"--"The Complete Angler"
+
+58. TO MONTAGU, _Sept._ 1, 1760.--Visits in the Midland
+Counties--Whichnovre--Sheffield--The new Art of
+Plating--Chatsworth--Haddon Hall--Hardwicke--Apartments of Mary Queen of
+Scots--Newstead--Althorp
+
+59. TO THE SAME, _April_ 16, 1761.--Gentleman's Dress--Influence of Lord
+Bute--Ode by Lord Middlesex--G. Selwyn's Quotation
+
+60. TO THE SAME, _May_ 5, 1761.--Capture of Belleisle--Gray's
+Poems--Hogarth's Vanity
+
+61. TO THE SAME, _May_ 22, 1761.--Intended Marriage of the King--Battles
+in Germany--Capture of Pondicherry--Burke
+
+62. TO MANN, _Sept._ 10, 1761.--Arrival of the Princess of
+Mecklenburgh--The Royal Wedding--The Queen's Appearance and Behaviour
+
+63. TO THE COUNTESS OF AILESBURY, _Sept._ 27, 1761.--The Coronation and
+subsequent Gaieties
+
+64. TO THE SAME, _Nov._ 28, 1761.--A Court Ball--Pamphlets on Mr.
+Pitt--A Song by Gray
+
+65. TO MANN, _Jan._ 29, 1762.--Death of the Czarina Elizabeth--The
+Cock-lane Ghost--Return to England of Lady Mary Wortley
+
+66. TO ZOUCH, _March_ 20, 1762.--His own "Anecdotes of Painting"--His
+Picture of the Wedding of Henry VII.--Burnet's Comparison of Tiberius
+and Charles II.--Addison's "Travels"
+
+67. TO MANN, _Aug._ 12, 1762.--Birth of the Prince of Wales--The
+Czarina--Voltaire's Historical Criticisms--Immense Value of the
+Treasures brought over in the _Hermione_
+
+68. TO CONWAY, _Sept._ 9, 1762.--Negotiations for Peace--Christening of
+the Prince of Wales
+
+69. TO MANN, _Oct._ 3, 1762.--Treasures from the Havannah--The Royal
+Visit to Eton--Death of Lady Mary--Concealment of Her Works--Voltaire's
+"Universal History"
+
+70. TO THE SAME, _April_ 30, 1763.--Resignation of Lord Bute--French
+Visitors--Walpole and No. 45
+
+71. TO MONTAGU, _May_ 17, 1763.--A Party at "Straberri"--Work of his
+Printing Press--Epigrams--A Garden Party at Esher
+
+72. TO CONWAY, _May_ 21, 1763.--General Character of the
+French--Festivities on the Queen's Birthday
+
+73. TO THE EARL OF HERTFORD, _Dec._ 29, 1763.--The ordinary way of Life
+in England--Wilkes--C. Townshend--Count Lally--Lord Clive--Lord
+Northington--Louis Le Bien Aimé--The Drama in France
+
+74. TO MONTAGU, _Jan._11, 1764.--A New Year's Party at Lady
+Suffolk's--Lady Temple, Poetess Laureate to the Muses
+
+75. TO MANN, _Jan._ 18, 1764.--Marriage of the Prince of Brunswick: His
+Popularity
+
+76. TO THE EARL OF HERTFORD, _Feb._ 6, 1764.--Gambling Quarrels--Mr.
+Conway's Speech
+
+77. TO THE SAME, _Feb._ 15, 1764.--Account of the Debate on the General
+Warrant
+
+78. TO MANN, _June_ 8, 1764.--Lord Clive--Mr. Hamilton, Ambassador to
+Naples--Speech of Louis XV.
+
+79. TO THE SAME, _Aug._ 13, 1764.--The King of Poland--Catherine of
+Russia
+
+80. TO THE EARL OF HERTFORD, _Oct._ 5, 1764.--Madame De Boufflers'
+Writings--King James's Journal
+
+
+
+
+LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.
+
+
+I. HORACE WALPOLE
+
+From an engraving after a sketch by Sir THOS. LAWRENCE, P.R.A.
+
+II. SIR HORACE MANN
+
+III. STRAWBERRY HILL, FROM THE SOUTH-EAST
+
+IV. GEORGE MONTAGU
+
+V. THE LIBRARY, STRAWBERRY HILL
+
+VI. HORACE WALPOLE
+
+From a picture in the National Portrait Gallery, by NATHANIEL HONE, R.A.
+
+
+
+
+INTRODUCTION.
+
+
+It is creditable to our English nobility, and a feature in their
+character that distinguishes them from their fellows of most other
+nations, that, from the first revival of learning, the study of
+literature has been extensively cultivated by men of high birth, even by
+many who did not require literary fame to secure them a lasting
+remembrance; and they have not contented themselves with showing their
+appreciation of intellectual excellence by their patronage of humbler
+scholars, but have themselves afforded examples to other labourers in
+the hive, taking upon themselves the toils, and earning no small nor
+undeserved share of the honours of authorship. The very earliest of our
+poets, Chaucer, must have been a man of gentle birth, since he was
+employed on embassies of importance, and was married to the daughter of
+a French knight of distinction, and sister of the Duchess of Lancaster.
+The long civil wars of the fifteenth century prevented his having any
+immediate followers; but the sixteenth opened more propitiously. The
+conqueror of Flodden was also "Surrey of the deathless lay";[1] and from
+his time to the present day there is hardly a break in the long line of
+authors who have shown their feeling that noble birth and high position
+are no excuses for idleness, but that the highest rank gains additional
+illustration when it is shown to be united with brilliant talents
+worthily exercised. The earliest of our tragic poets was Sackville Earl
+of Dorset. The preux chevalier of Elizabeth's Court, the accomplished
+and high-minded Sidney, took up the lyre of Surrey: Lord St. Albans,
+more generally known by his family name of Bacon, "took all learning for
+his province"; and, though peaceful studies were again for a while
+rudely interrupted by the "dark deeds of horrid war," the restoration of
+peace was, as it had been before, a signal for the resumption of their
+studies by many of the best-born of the land. Another Earl of Dorset
+displayed his hereditary talent not less than his martial gallantry.
+Lord Roscommon well deserved the praises which Dryden and Pope, after
+his death, liberally bestowed. The great Lord Chancellor Clarendon
+devoted his declining years to a work of a grander class, leaving us a
+History which will endure as long as the language itself; while ladies
+of the very highest rank, the Duchess of Newcastle and Lady Mary Wortley
+Montague, vindicated the claims of their sex to share with their
+brethren the honours of poetical fame.
+
+[Footnote 1: "Lay of the Last Minstrel," vi. 14.]
+
+Among this noble and accomplished brotherhood the author of these
+letters is by general consent allowed to be entitled to no low place.
+Horace Walpole, born in the autumn of 1717, was the youngest son of that
+wise minister, Sir Robert Walpole, who, though, as Burke afterwards
+described him, "not a genius of the first class," yet by his adoption
+of, and resolute adherence to a policy of peace throughout the greater
+part of his administration, in which he was fortunately assisted by the
+concurrence of Fleury of France, contributed in no slight degree to the
+permanent establishment of the present dynasty on the throne. He
+received his education at the greatest of English schools, Eton, to
+which throughout his life he preserved a warm attachment; and where he
+gave a strong indication of his preference for peaceful studies and his
+judicious appreciation of intellectual ability, by selecting as his most
+intimate friend Thomas Gray, hereafter to achieve a poetical immortality
+by the Bard and the Elegy. From Eton they both went to Cambridge, and,
+when they quitted the University, in 1738, joined in a travelling tour
+through France and Italy. They continued companions for something more
+than two years; but at the end of that time they separated, and in the
+spring of 1741 Gray returned to England. The cause of their parting was
+never distinctly avowed; Walpole took the blame, if blame there was, on
+himself; but, in fact, it probably lay in an innate difference of
+disposition, and consequently of object. Walpole being fond of society,
+and, from his position as the Minister's son, naturally courted by many
+of the chief men in the different cities which they visited; while Gray
+was of a reserved character shunning the notice of strangers, and fixing
+his attention on more serious subjects than Walpole found attractive.
+
+In the autumn of the same year Walpole himself returned home. He had
+become a member of Parliament at the General Election in the summer, and
+took his seat just in time to bear a part in the fierce contest which
+terminated in the dissolution of his father's Ministry. His maiden
+speech, almost the only one he ever made, was in defence of the
+character and policy of his father, who was no longer in the House of
+Commons to defend himself.[1] And the result of the conflict made no
+slight impression on his mind; but gave a colour to all his political
+views.
+
+He began almost immediately to come forward as an author: not, however,
+as--
+
+    Obliged by hunger and request of friends;
+
+for in his circumstances he was independent, and even opulent; but
+seeking to avenge his father by squibs on Mr. Pulteney (now Lord Bath),
+as having been the leader of the attacks on him, and on the new Ministry
+which had succeeded him. In one respect that age was a happy one for
+ministers and all connected with them. Pensions and preferments were
+distributed with a lavish hand; and, even while he was a schoolboy, he
+had received more than one "patent place," as such were called, in the
+Exchequer, to which before his father's resignation others were added,
+which after a time raised his income to above £5,000 a year, a fortune
+which in those times was exceeded by comparatively few, even of those
+regarded as wealthy. So rich, indeed, was he, that before he was thirty
+he was able to buy Strawberry Hill, "a small house near Twickenham," as
+he describes it at first, but which he gradually enlarged and
+embellished till it grew into something of a baronial castle on a small
+scale, somewhat as, under the affectionate diligence of a greater man,
+Abbotsford in the present century became one of the lions of the Tweed.
+
+[Footnote 1: The speech was made March 23, 1742; but Sir Robert had
+resigned office, and been created Earl of Orford in the February
+preceding.]
+
+From this time forth literary composition, with the acquisition of
+antiques and curiosities for the decoration of "Strawberry" occupied the
+greater part of his life. He erected a printing press, publishing not
+only most of his own writings, but some also of other authors, such as
+poems of Gray, with whom he kept up uninterrupted intercourse. But, in
+fact, his own works were sufficiently numerous to keep his printers
+fully employed. He was among the most voluminous writers of a voluminous
+age. In the course of the next twenty years he published seven volumes
+of memoirs of the last ten years of the reign of George II. and the
+first ten of George III.; five volumes of a work entitled "Royal and
+Noble Authors;" several more of "Anecdotes of Painting;" "The Mysterious
+Mother," a tragedy; "The Castle of Otranto," a romance; and a small
+volume to which he gave the name of "Historic Doubts on Richard III." Of
+all these not one is devoid of merit. He more than once explains that
+the "Memoirs" have no claim to the more respectable title of "History";
+and he apologises for introducing anecdotes which might be thought
+inconsistent with what Macaulay brands as "a vile phrase," the dignity
+of history. He excuses this, which he looked on as a new feature in
+historical composition, on the ground that, if trifles, "they are
+trifles relating to considerable people; such as all curious people have
+ever loved to read." "Such trifles," he says, "are valued, if relating
+to any reign one hundred and fifty years ago; and, if his book should
+live so long, these too might become acceptable." Readers of the present
+day will not think such apology was needed. The value of his "trifles"
+has been proved in a much shorter time; for there is no subsequent
+historian of that period who has not been indebted to him for many
+particulars of which no other trustworthy record existed. Walpole had in
+a great degree a historical mind; and perhaps there are few works which
+show a keener critical insight into the value of old traditions than the
+"Historic Doubts," directed to establish, not, indeed, Richard's
+innocence of the crimes charged against him, but the fact that, with
+respect to many of them, his guilt has never been proved by any evidence
+which is not open to the gravest impeachment. His "Royal and Noble
+Authors," and his "Anecdotes of Painting" are full of entertainment, not
+unmixed with instruction. "The Mysterious Mother" was never performed on
+the stage, nor is it calculated for representation; since he himself
+admits that the subject is disgusting. But dramas not intended for
+representation, and which therefore should perhaps be more fitly called
+dramatic poems, were a species of composition to which more than one
+writer of reputation had lately begun to turn their attention; though
+dramas not designed for the stage seem to most readers defective in
+their very conception, as lacking the stimulus which the intention of
+submitting them to the extemporaneous ocular judgement of the public can
+alone impart. Among such works, however, "The Mysterious Mother" is
+admitted to rank high for vigorous description and poetic imagery. A
+greater popularity, which even at the present day has not wholly passed
+away, since it is still occasionally reprinted, was achieved by "The
+Castle of Otranto," which, as he explains it in one of his letters, owed
+its origin to a dream. Novels had been a branch of literature which had
+slumbered for several years after the death of Defoe, but which the
+genius of Fielding and Smollett had again brought into fashion. But
+their tales purported to be pictures of the manners of the day. This was
+rather the forerunner of Mrs. Radcliffe's[1] weird tales of supernatural
+mystery, which for a time so engrossed the public attention as to lead
+that "wicked wag," Mr. George Coleman, to regard them as representatives
+of the class, and to describe how--
+
+    A novel now is nothing more
+    Than an old castle and a creaking door;
+         A distant hovel;
+    Clanking of chains, a gallery, a light,
+    Old armour, and a phantom all in white,
+         And there's a novel.
+
+[Footnote 1: "'The Castle of Otranto' was the father of that marvellous
+series which once overstocked the circulating library, and closed with
+Mrs. Radcliffe."--D'Israeli, "Curiosities of Literature," ii. 115.]
+
+He had published it anonymously as a tale that had been found in the
+library of an ancient family in the North of England; but it was not
+indebted solely to the mystery of its authorship for its favourable
+reception--since, after he acknowledged it as his own work in a second
+edition, the sale did not fall off. And it deserved success, for, though
+the day had passed when even the most credulous could place any faith in
+swords that required a hundred men to lift, and helmets which could only
+fit the champion whose single strength could wield such a weapon, the
+style was lively and attractive, and the dialogue was eminently dramatic
+and sparkling.
+
+But the interest of all these works has passed away. The "Memoirs" have
+served their turn as a guide and aid to more regular historians, and the
+composition which still keeps its author's fame alive is his
+Correspondence with some of his numerous friends, male and female, in
+England or abroad, which he maintained with an assiduity which showed
+how pleasurable he found the task, while the care with which he secured
+the preservation of his letters, begging his correspondents to retain
+them, in case at any future time he should desire their return, proves
+that he anticipated the possibility that they might hereafter be found
+interesting by other readers than to those to whom they were addressed.
+
+But he did not suffer either his writings or the enrichment of
+"Strawberry" with antiquarian treasures to engross the whole of his
+attention. For the first thirty years and more of his public life he was
+a zealous politician. And it is no slight proof how high was the
+reputation for sagacity and soundness of judgement which he enjoyed,
+that in the ministerial difficulties caused by Lord Chatham's illness,
+he was consulted by the leaders of more than one section of the Whig
+party, by Conway, the Duke of Bedford, the Duke of Grafton, Lord
+Holland, and others; that his advice more than once influenced their
+determinations; and that he himself drew more than one of the letters
+which passed between them. Even the King himself was not ignorant of the
+weight he had in their counsels, and, on one occasion at least,
+condescended to avail himself of it for a solution of some of the
+embarrassments with which their negotiations were beset.
+
+But after a time his attendance in Parliament, which had never been very
+regular, grew wearisome and distasteful to him. At the General Election
+of 1768 he declined to offer himself again as a candidate for Lynn,
+which he had represented for several years. And henceforth his mornings
+were chiefly occupied with literature; the continuation of his Memoirs;
+discussion of literary subjects with Gibbon, Voltaire, Mason, and
+others, while his evenings were passed in the society of his friends, a
+mode of enjoying his time in which he was eminently calculated to shine,
+since abundant testimony has come down to us from many competent judges
+of the charm of his conversation; the liveliness of his disposition
+acting as a most attractive frame to the extent and variety of his
+information.
+
+Among his distractions were his visits to France, which for some time
+were frequent. He had formed a somewhat singular intimacy with a blind
+old lady, the Marquise du Deffand, a lady whose character in her youth
+had been something less than doubtful, since she had been one of the
+Regent Duc d'Orléans's numerous mistresses; but who had retained in her
+old age much of the worldly acuteness and lively wit with which she had
+borne her part in that clever, shameless society. Her _salon_ was now
+the resort of many personages of the highest distinction, even of ladies
+themselves of the most unstained reputation, such as the Duchesse de
+Choiseul; and the rumours or opinions which he heard in their company
+enabled him to enrich his letters to his friends at home with comments
+on the conduct of the French Parliament, of Maupéon, Maurepas, Turgot,
+and the King himself, which, in many instances, attest the shrewdness
+with which he estimated the real bearing of the events which were taking
+place, and anticipated the possible character of some of those which
+were not unlikely to ensue.
+
+Thus, with a mind which, to the end, was so active and so happily
+constituted as to be able to take an interest in everything around him,
+and, even when more than seventy years old, to make new friends to
+replace those who had dropped off, he passed a long, a happy, and far
+from an useless life. When he was seventy-four he succeeded to his
+father's peerage, on the death of his elder brother; but he did not long
+enjoy the title, by which, indeed, he was not very careful to be
+distinguished, and in the spring of 1797 he died, within a few months
+of his eightieth birthday.
+
+A great writer of the last generation, whose studies were of a severer
+cast, and who, conscious perhaps of his own unfitness to shine at the
+tea-table of fashionable ladies, was led by that feeling to undervalue
+the lighter social gifts which formed conspicuous ingredients in
+Walpole's character, has denounced him not only as frivolous in his
+tastes, but scarcely above mediocrity in his abilities (a sentence to
+which Scott's description of him as "a man of great genius" may be
+successfully opposed); and is especially severe on what he terms his
+affectation in disclaiming the compliments bestowed on his learning by
+some of his friends. The expressed estimate of his acquirements and
+works which so offended Lord Macaulay was that "there is nobody so
+superficial, that, except a little history, a little poetry, a little
+painting, and some divinity, he knew nothing; he had always lived in the
+busy world; had always loved pleasure; played loo till two or three in
+the morning; haunted auctions--in short, did not know so much astronomy
+as would carry him to Knightsbridge; not more physic than a physician;
+nor, in short, anything that is called science. If it were not that he
+laid up a little provision in summer, like the ant, he should be as
+ignorant as the people he lived with."[1] In Lord Macaulay's view,
+Walpole was never less sincere than when pronouncing such a judgement on
+his works. He sees in it nothing but an affectation, fishing for
+further praises; and, fastening on his account of his ordinary
+occupations, he pronounces that a man of fifty should be ashamed of
+playing loo till after midnight.
+
+[Footnote 1: Letter to Mann, Feb. 6, 1760.]
+
+In spite, however, of Lord Macaulay's reproof, something may be said in
+favour of a man who, after giving his mornings to works which display no
+little industry as well as talent, unbent his bow in the evening at
+lively supper-parties, or even at the card-table with fair friends,
+where the play never degenerated into gambling. And his disparagement of
+his learning, which Lord Macaulay ridicules as affectation, a more
+candid judgement may fairly ascribe to sincere modesty. For it is plain
+from many other passages in his letters, that he really did undervalue
+his own writings; and that the feeling which he thus expressed was
+genuine is to a great extent proved by the patience, if not
+thankfulness, with which he allowed his friend Mann to alter passages in
+"The Mysterious Mother," and confessed the alterations to be
+improvements. It may be added that Lord Macaulay's disparagement of his
+judgement and his taste is not altogether consistent with his admission
+that Walpole's writings possessed an "irresistible charm" that "no man
+who has written so much is so seldom tiresome;" that, even in "The
+Castle of Otranto," which he ridicules, "the story never flags for a
+moment," and, what is more to our present purpose, he adds that "his
+letters are with reason considered his best performance;" and that those
+to his friend at Florence, Sir H. Mann, "contain much information
+concerning the history of that time: the portion of English History of
+which common readers know the least."
+
+Of these letters it remains for us now to speak. The value of such _pour
+servir_, to borrow a French expression, that is to say, to serve as
+materials to supply the historian of a nation or an age with an
+acquaintance with events, or persons, or manners, which would be sought
+for in vain among Parliamentary records, or ministerial despatches, has
+long been recognised.[1] Two thousand years ago, those of the greatest
+of Roman orators and statesmen were carefully preserved; and modern
+editors do not fear to claim for them a place "among the most valuable
+of all the remains of Roman literature; the specimens which they give of
+familiar intercourse, and of the public and private manners of society,
+drawing up for us the curtain from scenes of immense historical
+interest, and laying open the secret workings, the complications, and
+schemes of a great revolution period."[2] Such a description is
+singularly applicable to the letters of Walpole; and the care which he
+took for their preservation shows that he was not without a hope that
+they also would be regarded as interesting and valuable by future
+generations. He praises one of his correspondents for his diligence in
+collecting and publishing a volume of letters belonging to the reigns of
+James I. and Charles I., on the express ground that "nothing gives so
+just an idea of an age as genuine letters; nay, history waits for its
+last seal from them." And it is not too much to say that they are
+superior to journals and diaries as a mine to be worked by the judicious
+historian; while to the general public they will always be more
+attractive, from the scope they afford to elegance of style, at which
+the diary-keeper does not aim; and likewise from their frequently
+recording curious incidents, fashions, good sayings, and other things
+which, from their apparently trifling character, the grave diarist would
+not think worth preserving.
+
+[Footnote 1: D'Israeli has remarked that "the _gossiping_ of a profound
+politician, or a vivacious observer, in one of their letters, often by a
+spontaneous stroke reveals the individual, or by a simple incident
+unriddles a mysterious event;" and proceeds to quote Bolingbroke's
+estimate of the importance, from this point of view, of "that valuable
+collection of Cardinal d'Ossat's Memoirs" ("Curiosities of Literature,"
+iii. p. 381).]
+
+[Footnote 2: The Rev. J.E. Yonge, Preface to an edition of "Cicero's
+Letters."]
+
+He, however, was not the first among the moderns to achieve a reputation
+by his correspondence. In the generation before his birth, a French
+lady, Madame de Sévigné, had, with an affectionate industry, found her
+chief occupation and pleasure in keeping her daughters in the provinces
+fully acquainted with every event which interested or entertained Louis
+XIV. and his obsequious Court; and in the first years of the eighteenth
+century a noble English lady, whom we have already mentioned, did in
+like manner devote no small portion of her time to recording, for the
+amusement and information of her daughter, her sister, and her other
+friends at home, the various scenes and occurrences that came under her
+own notice in the foreign countries in which for many years her lot was
+cast, as the wife of an ambassador. In liveliness of style, Lady Mary
+Montague is little if at all inferior to her French prototype; while,
+since she was endowed with far more brilliant talents, and, from her
+foreign travels, had a wider range of observation, her letters have a
+far greater interest than could attach to those of a writer, however
+accomplished and sagacious, whose world was Paris, with bounds scarcely
+extending beyond Versailles on one side, and Compiègne on the other. To
+these fair and lively ladies Walpole was now to succeed as a third
+candidate for epistolary fame; though, with his habit of underrating his
+own talents, he never aspired to equal the gay Frenchwoman; (the English
+lady's correspondence was as yet unknown). There is evident sincerity in
+his reproof of one of his correspondents who had expressed a most
+flattering opinion: "You say such extravagant things of my letters,
+which are nothing but gossiping gazettes, that I cannot bear it; you
+have undone yourself with me, for you compare them to Madame de
+Sévigné's. Absolute treason! Do you know there is scarcely a book in the
+world I love so much as her letters?"
+
+Yet critics who should place him on an equality with her would not be
+without plausible grounds for their judgement. Many circumstances
+contributed to qualify him in a very special degree for the task which,
+looking at his letters in that light, he may be said to have undertaken.
+His birth, as the son of a great minister; his comparative opulence;
+even the indolent insignificance of his elder brothers, which caused him
+to be looked upon as his father's representative, and as such to be
+consulted by those who considered themselves as the heirs of his policy,
+while the leader of that party in the House of Commons, General Conway,
+was his cousin, and the man for whom he ever felt the strongest personal
+attachment,--were all advantages which fell to the lot of but few. And
+to these may be added the variety of his tastes, as attested by the
+variety of his published works. He was a man who observed everything,
+who took an interest in everything. His correspondents, too, were so
+various and different as to ensure a variety in his letters. Some were
+politicians, ministers at home, or envoys abroad; some were female
+leaders of fashion, planning balls and masquerades, summoning him to
+join an expedition to Ranelagh or Vauxhall; others were scholars, poets,
+or critics, inviting comments on Gray's poems, on Robertson's style, on
+Gibbon's boundless learning; or on the impostures of Macpherson and
+Chatterton; others, again, were antiquarians, to whom the helmet of
+Francis, or a pouncet-box of the fair Diana, were objects of far greater
+interest than the intrigues of a Secretary of State, or the expedients
+of a Chancellor of the Exchequer; and all such subjects are discussed by
+him with evidently equal willingness, equal clearness, and liveliness.
+
+It would not be fair to regard as a deduction from the value of those
+letters which bear on the politics of the day the necessity of
+confessing that they are not devoid of partiality--that they are
+coloured with his own views, both of measures and persons. Not only were
+political prejudices forced upon him by the peculiarities of his
+position, but it may be doubted whether any one ever has written, or can
+write, of transactions of national importance which are passing under
+his own eyes, as it were, with absolute impartiality. It may even be a
+question whether, if any one did so, it would not detract from his own
+character, at least as much as it might add to the value of his
+writings. In one of his letters, Byron enumerates among the merits of
+Mitford's "History of Greece," "wrath and partiality," explaining that
+such ingredients make a man write "in earnest." And, in Walpole's case,
+the dislike which he naturally felt towards those who had overthrown his
+father's administration by what, at a later day, they themselves
+admitted to have been a factious and blamable opposition, was sharpened
+by his friendship for his cousin Conway. At the same time we may remark
+in passing that his opinions and prejudices were not so invincible as to
+blind him to real genius and eminent public services; and the admirers
+of Lord Chatham may fairly draw an argument in favour of his policy from
+Walpole's admission of its value in raising the spirit of the people; an
+admission which, it may be supposed, it must have gone against his grain
+to make in favour of a follower of Pulteney.
+
+But from his letters on other topics, on literature and art, no such
+deduction has to be made. His judgement was generally sound and
+discriminating. He could appreciate the vast learning and stately
+grandiloquence of Gibbon, and the widely different style of Robertson.
+Nor is it greatly to his discredit that his disgust at what he considers
+Hume's needless parade of scepticism and infidelity, which did honour
+to his heart, blinded him in a great degree to the historian's
+unsurpassed acuteness and insight, and (to borrow the eulogy of Gibbon)
+"the careless inimitable felicities" of his narrative. He was among the
+first to recognize the peculiar genius of Crabbe, and to detect the
+impostures of Macpherson and Chatterton, while doing full justice to
+"the astonishing prematurity" of the latter's genius. And in matters of
+art, so independent as well as correct was his taste, that he not only,
+in one instance, ventured to differ from Reynolds, but also proved to be
+right in his opinion that a work extolled by Sir Joshua, was but a copy,
+and a poor one.
+
+On his qualifications to be a painter of the way of life, habits, and
+manners (_quorum pars magna fuit_) of the higher classes in his day, it
+would be superfluous to dwell. Scott, who was by no means a warm admirer
+of his character, does not hesitate to pronounce him "certainly the best
+letter-writer in the English language;" and the great poet who, next to
+Scott, holds the highest place in the literary history of the last two
+centuries, adds his testimony not only to the excellence of his letters,
+but also to his general ability as that of a high order. "It is the
+fashion to underrate Horace Walpole, firstly, because he was a nobleman,
+and, secondly, because he was a gentleman; but, to say nothing of the
+composition of his incomparable letters and of 'The Castle of Otranto,'
+he is the 'Ultimus Romanorum,' the author of 'The Mysterious Mother,' a
+tragedy of the highest order, and not a puling love-play. He is the
+father of the first romance, and the last tragedy in our language; and
+surely worthy of a higher place than any living writer, be he who he
+may."[1]
+
+[Footnote 1: Byron, Preface to "Marino Faliere." But in the last
+sentence the poet certainly exaggerated his admiration for Walpole;
+since it is sufficiently notorious from his own letters, and from more
+than one passage in his works, as where he ranks Scott as second to
+Shakespeare alone, that he deservedly admired him more than all their
+contemporaries put together.]
+
+And it seems not unnatural to entertain a hope that a selection from a
+correspondence which extorted such an eulogy from men whose own letters
+form no small part of the attraction of Lockhart's and Moore's
+biographies, will be acceptable to many who, while lacking courage, or
+perhaps leisure, to grapple with publications in many volumes, may
+welcome the opportunity thus here afforded them of forming an
+acquaintance, however partial, with works which, in their entire body,
+are deservedly reckoned among the masterpieces of our literature.[1]
+
+[Footnote 1: It may be proper to point out that, in some few instances,
+a letter is not given in its entirety; but, as in familiar
+correspondence, it must constantly happen that, while the incidents
+mentioned in one portion of a letter are full of interest, of
+others--such as marriages, deaths, &c.--the importance is of the most
+temporary and transitory character. It may be hoped that the liberty
+taken of leaving out such portions will be regarded as, if not
+commendable, at the least excusable.]
+
+
+
+
+A SELECTION
+
+FROM THE
+
+LETTERS OF HORACE WALPOLE.
+
+
+_MARRIAGE OF THE PRINCESS OF WALES--VERY LIVELY._[1]
+
+[Footnote 1: This letter, written before he was nineteen, is worth
+noticing as a proof how innate was his liveliness of style, since in
+that respect few of the productions of his maturer age surpasses it. It
+also shows how strong already was his expectations that his letters
+would hereafter be regarded as interesting and valuable.]
+
+TO GEORGE MONTAGU, ESQ.[1]
+
+[Footnote 1: George Montagu, Esq., of Roel, in the county of Gloucester,
+son of Brigadier-General Edward Montagu, and long M.P. for Northampton.
+He was the grandnephew of the first Earl of Halifax of the Montagu
+family, the statesman and poet, and was the contemporary at Eton of
+Walpole and Gray. When his cousin, the Earl of Halifax, was
+Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland, he was his secretary; and when Lord North
+was Chancellor of the Exchequer, he occupied the same position with him.
+He died May 10, 1780, leaving the bulk of his fortune to Lord North.
+Walpole's letters to him, 272 in number, and dating between 1736 and
+1770, were first published in 1818, "from the Originals in the
+possession of the Editor." There was a coolness between Walpole and
+Montagu several years before the latter's death, the correspondence
+dropping very abruptly. The cause is explained by Walpole in a letter to
+Cole, dated May 11, 1780. Mr. Montagu's brother, Edward, was killed at
+Fontenoy. His sister, Arabella, was married to a Mr. Wetenhall--a
+relation of the Wetenhall mentioned in De Grammont. "Of Mr. Montagu, it
+is only remembered that he was a gentleman-like body of the _vieille
+cour_, and that he was usually attended by his brother John (the Little
+John of Walpole's correspondence), who was a midshipman at the age of
+sixty, and found his chief occupation in carrying about his brother's
+snuff-box" (_Quarterly Rev._ for _April_, 1818, p. 131).]
+
+KING'S COLLEGE, _May_ 2, 1736.
+
+Dear Sir,--Unless I were to be married myself, I should despair ever
+being able to describe a wedding so well as you have done: had I known
+your talent before, I would have desired an epithalamium. I believe the
+Princess[1] will have more beauties bestowed on her by the occasional
+poets, than even a painter would afford her. They will cook up a new
+Pandora, and in the bottom of the box enclose Hope, that all they have
+said is true. A great many, out of excess of good breeding, having heard
+it was rude to talk Latin before women, propose complimenting her in
+English; which she will be much the better for. I doubt most of them,
+instead of fearing their compositions should not be understood, should
+fear they should: they write they don't know what, to be read by they
+don't know who. You have made me a very unreasonable request, which I
+will answer with another as extraordinary: you desire I would burn your
+letters: I desire you would keep mine. I know but of one way of making
+what I send you useful, which is, by sending you a blank sheet: sure
+you would not grudge threepence for a halfpenny sheet, when you give as
+much for one not worth a farthing. You drew this last paragraph on you
+by your exordium, as you call it, and conclusion. I hope, for the
+future, our correspondence will run a little more glibly, with dear
+George, and dear Harry [Conway]; not as formally as if we were playing a
+game at chess in Spain and Portugal; and Don Horatio was to have the
+honour of specifying to Don Georgio, by an epistle, whither he would
+move. In one point I would have our correspondence like a game at chess;
+it should last all our lives--but I hear you cry check; adieu!
+
+Dear George, yours ever.
+
+[Footnote 1: Augusta, younger daughter of Frederic II., Duke of
+Saxe-Gotha, married (27th April, 1736) to Frederick, Prince of Wales,
+father of George III.
+
+In 1736, I wrote a copy of Latin verses, published in the "Gratulatio
+Acad. Cantab.," on the marriage of Frederick, Prince of
+Wales.--_Walpole_ (_Short Notes_).]
+
+
+_FONDNESS FOR OLD STORIES--REMINISCENCES OF ETON, ETC._
+
+TO GEORGE MONTAGU, ESQ.
+
+KING'S COLLEGE, _May_ 6, 1736.
+
+Dear George,--I agree with you entirely in the pleasure you take in
+talking over old stories, but can't say but I meet every day with new
+circumstances, which will be still more pleasure to me to recollect. I
+think at our age 'tis excess of joy, to think, while we are running over
+past happinesses, that it is still in our power to enjoy as great.
+Narrations of the greatest actions of other people are tedious in
+comparison of the serious trifles that every man can call to mind of
+himself while he was learning those histories. Youthful passages of life
+are the chippings of Pitt's diamond, set into little heart-rings with
+mottoes; the stone itself more worth, the filings more gentle and
+agreeable.--Alexander, at the head of the world, never tasted the true
+pleasure that boys of his own age have enjoyed at the head of a school.
+Little intrigues, little schemes, and policies engage their thoughts;
+and, at the same time that they are laying the foundation for their
+middle age of life, the mimic republic they live in furnishes materials
+of conversation for their latter age; and old men cannot be said to be
+children a second time with greater truth from any one cause, than their
+living over again their childhood in imagination. To reflect on the
+season when first they felt the titillation of love, the budding
+passions, and the first dear object of their wishes! how unexperienced
+they gave credit to all the tales of romantic loves! Dear George, were
+not the playing fields at Eton food for all manner of flights? No old
+maid's gown, though it had been tormented into all the fashions from
+King James to King George, ever underwent so many transformations as
+those poor plains have in my idea. At first I was contented with tending
+a visionary flock, and sighing some pastoral name to the echo of the
+cascade under the bridge. How happy should I have been to have had a
+kingdom only for the pleasure of being driven from it, and living
+disguised in an humble vale! As I got further into Virgil and Clelia, I
+found myself transported from Arcadia to the garden of Italy; and saw
+Windsor Castle in no other view than the _Capitoli immobile saxum_. I
+wish a committee of the House of Commons may ever seem to be the senate;
+or a bill appear half so agreeable as a billet-doux. You see how deep
+you have carried me into old stories; I write of them with pleasure, but
+shall talk of them with more to you. I can't say I am sorry I was never
+quite a schoolboy: an expedition against bargemen, or a match at
+cricket, may be very pretty things to recollect; but, thank my stars, I
+can remember things that are very near as pretty. The beginning of my
+Roman history was spent in the asylum, or conversing in Egeria's
+hallowed grove; not in thumping and pummelling king Amulius's herdsmen.
+I was sometimes troubled with a rough creature or two from the plough;
+one, that one should have thought, had worked with his head, as well as
+his hands, they were both so callous. One of the most agreeable
+circumstances I can recollect is the Triumvirate, composed of yourself,
+Charles, and
+
+Your sincere friend.
+
+
+_WISH TO TRAVEL--SUPERIORITY OF FRENCH MANNERS TO ENGLISH IN THEIR
+MANNER TO LADIES._
+
+TO GEORGE MONTAGU, ESQ.
+
+KING'S COLLEGE, _March_ 20, 1737.
+
+Dear George,--The first paragraph in my letter must be in answer to the
+last in yours; though I should be glad to make you the return you ask,
+by waiting on you myself. 'Tis not in my power, from more circumstances
+than one, which are needless to tell you, to accompany you and Lord
+Conway to Italy: you add to the pleasure it would give me, by asking it
+so kindly. You I am infinitely obliged to, as I was capable, my dear
+George, of making you forget for a minute that you don't propose
+stirring from the dear place you are now in. Poppies indeed are the
+chief flowers in love nosegays, but they seldom bend towards the lady;
+at least not till the other flowers have been gathered. Prince
+Volscius's boots were made of love-leather, and honour leather; instead
+of honour, some people's are made of friendship: but since you have been
+so good to me as to draw on this, I can almost believe you are equipped
+for travelling farther than Rheims. 'Tis no little inducement to make me
+wish myself in France, that I hear gallantry is not left off there; that
+you may be polite, and not be thought awkward for it. You know the
+pretty men of the age in England use the women with no more deference
+than they do their coach-horses, and have not half the regard for them
+that they have for themselves. The little freedoms you tell me you use
+take off from formality, by avoiding which ridiculous extreme we are
+dwindled into the other barbarous one, rusticity. If you had been at
+Paris, I should have inquired about the new Spanish ambassadress, who,
+by the accounts we have thence, at her first audience of the queen, sat
+down with her at a distance that suited respect and conversation.
+
+Adieu, dear George,
+
+Yours most heartily.
+
+
+_THEATRES AT PARIS--ST. DENIS--FONDNESS OF THE FRENCH FOR SHOW, AND FOR
+GAMBLING--SINGULAR SIGNS--THE ARMY THE ONLY PROFESSION FOR MEN OF GENTLE
+BIRTH--SPLENDOUR OF THE PUBLIC BUILDINGS._
+
+TO RICHARD WEST, ESQ.
+
+PARIS, _April_ 21, N.S. 1739.[1]
+
+[Footnote 1: He is here dating according to the French custom. In
+England the calendar was not rectified by the disuse of the "Old Style"
+till 1752.]
+
+Dear West,--You figure us in a set of pleasures, which, believe me, we
+do not find; cards and eating are so universal, that they absorb all
+variation of pleasures. The operas, indeed, are much frequented three
+times a week; but to me they would be a greater penance than eating
+maigre: their music resembles a gooseberry tart as much as it does
+harmony. We have not yet been at the Italian playhouse; scarce any one
+goes there. Their best amusement, and which, in some parts, beats ours,
+is the comedy; three or four of the actors excel any we have: but then
+to this nobody goes, if it is not one of the fashionable nights; and
+then they go, be the play good or bad--except on Molière's nights, whose
+pieces they are quite weary of. Gray and I have been at the Avare
+to-night: I cannot at all commend their performance of it. Last night I
+was in the Place de Louis le Grand (a regular octagon, uniform, and the
+houses handsome, though not so large as Golden Square), to see what they
+reckoned one of the finest burials that ever was in France. It was the
+Duke de Tresmes, governor of Paris and marshal of France. It began on
+foot from his palace to his parish-church, and from thence in coaches to
+the opposite end of Paris, to be interred in the church of the
+Celestins, where is his family-vault. About a week ago we happened to
+see the grave digging, as we went to see the church, which is old and
+small, but fuller of fine ancient monuments than any, except St. Denis,
+which we saw on the road, and excels Westminster; for the windows are
+all painted in mosaic, and the tombs as fresh and well preserved as if
+they were of yesterday. In the Celestins' church is a votive column to
+Francis II., which says, that it is one assurance of his being
+immortalized, to have had the martyr Mary Stuart for his wife. After
+this long digression, I return to the burial, which was a most vile
+thing. A long procession of flambeaux and friars; no plumes, trophies,
+banners, led horses, scutcheons, or open chariots; nothing but
+
+                        friars,
+    White, black, and grey, with all their trumpery.
+
+This godly ceremony began at nine at night, and did not finish till
+three this morning; for, each church they passed, they stopped for a
+hymn and holy water. By the bye, some of these choice monks, who watched
+the body while it lay in state, fell asleep one night, and let the
+tapers catch fire of the rich velvet mantle lined with ermine and
+powdered with gold flower-de-luces, which melted the lead coffin, and
+burnt off the feet of the deceased before it wakened them. The French
+love show; but there is a meanness reigns through it all. At the house
+where I stood to see this procession, the room was hung with crimson
+damask and gold, and the windows were mended in ten or a dozen places
+with paper. At dinner they give you three courses; but a third of the
+dishes is patched up with salads, butter, puff-paste, or some such
+miscarriage of a dish. None, but Germans, wear fine clothes; but their
+coaches are tawdry enough for the wedding of Cupid and Psyche. You would
+laugh extremely at their signs: some live at the Y grec, some at Venus's
+toilette, and some at the sucking cat. You would not easily guess their
+notions of honour: I'll tell you one: it is very dishonourable for any
+gentleman not to be in the army, or in the king's service as they call
+it, and it is no dishonour to keep public gaming-houses: there are at
+least a hundred and fifty people of the first quality in Paris who live
+by it. You may go into their houses at all hours of the night, and find
+hazard, pharaoh, &c. The men who keep the hazard-table at the Duke de
+Gesvres' pay him twelve guineas each night for the privilege. Even the
+princesses of the blood are dirty enough to have shares in the banks
+kept at their houses. We have seen two or three of them; but they are
+not young, nor remarkable but for wearing their red of a deeper dye than
+other women, though all use it extravagantly.
+
+The weather is still so bad, that we have not made any excursions to see
+Versailles and the environs, not even walked in the Tuileries; but we
+have seen almost everything else that is worth seeing in Paris, though
+that is very considerable. They beat us vastly in buildings, both in
+number and magnificence. The tombs of Richelieu and Mazarin at the
+Sorbonne and the College de Quatre Nations are wonderfully fine,
+especially the former. We have seen very little of the people
+themselves, who are not inclined to be propitious to strangers,
+especially if they do not play and speak the language readily. There are
+many English here: Lord Holdernesse, Conway and Clinton, and Lord George
+Bentinck; Mr. Brand, Offley, Frederic, Frampton, Bonfoy, &c. Sir John
+Cotton's son and a Mr. Vernon of Cambridge passed through Paris last
+week. We shall stay here about a fortnight longer, and then go to Rheims
+with Mr. Conway for two or three months. When you have nothing else to
+do, we shall be glad to hear from you; and any news. If we did not
+remember there was such a place as England, we should know nothing of
+it: the French never mention it, unless it happens to be in one of their
+proverbs. Adieu!
+
+Yours ever.
+
+To-morrow we go to the Cid. They have no farces, but _petites pièces_
+like our 'Devil to Pay.'
+
+
+_MAGNIFICENCE OF VERSAILLES--THE CHARTREUX RELICS._
+
+TO RICHARD WEST, ESQ.
+
+FROM PARIS, 1739.
+
+Dear West,--I should think myself to blame not to try to divert you,
+when you tell me I can. From the air of your letter you seem to want
+amusement, that is, you want spirits. I would recommend to you certain
+little employments that I know of, and that belong to you, but that I
+imagine bodily exercise is more suitable to your complaint. If you would
+promise me to read them in the Temple garden, I would send you a little
+packet of plays and pamphlets that we have made up, and intend to
+dispatch to "Dick's"[1] the first opportunity.--Stand by, clear the way,
+make room for the pompous appearance of Versailles le Grand!----But no:
+it fell so short of my idea of it, mine, that I have resigned to Gray
+the office of writing its panegyric. He likes it. They say I am to like
+it better next Sunday; when the sun is to shine, the king is to be fine,
+the water-works are to play, and the new knights of the Holy Ghost are
+to be installed! Ever since Wednesday, the day we were there, we have
+done nothing but dispute about it. They say, we did not see it to
+advantage, that we ran through the apartments, saw the garden _en
+passant_, and slubbered over Trianon. I say, we saw nothing. However, we
+had time to see that the great front is a lumber of littleness, composed
+of black brick, stuck full of bad old busts, and fringed with gold
+rails. The rooms are all small, except the great gallery, which is
+noble, but totally wainscoted with looking-glass. The garden is littered
+with statues and fountains, each of which has its tutelary deity. In
+particular, the elementary god of fire solaces himself in one. In
+another, Enceladus, in lieu of a mountain, is overwhelmed with many
+waters. There are avenues of water-pots, who disport themselves much in
+squirting up cascadelins. In short, 'tis a garden for a great child.
+Such was Louis Quatorze, who is here seen in his proper colours, where
+he commanded in person, unassisted by his armies and generals, and left
+to the pursuit of his own puerile ideas of glory.
+
+[Footnote 1: A celebrated coffee-house, near the Temple Gate in Fleet
+Street, where quarto poems and pamphlets were taken in.]
+
+We saw last week a place of another kind, and which has more the air of
+what it would be, than anything I have yet met with: it was the convent
+of the Chartreux. All the conveniences, or rather (if there was such a
+word) all the _adaptments_ are assembled here, that melancholy,
+meditation, selfish devotion, and despair would require. But yet 'tis
+pleasing. Soften the terms, and mellow the uncouth horror that reigns
+here, but a little, and 'tis a charming solitude. It stands on a large
+space of ground, is old and irregular. The chapel is gloomy: behind it,
+through some dark passages, you pass into a large obscure hall, which
+looks like a combination-chamber for some hellish council. The large
+cloister surrounds their burying-ground. The cloisters are very narrow
+and very long, and let into the cells, which are built like little huts
+detached from each other. We were carried into one, where lived a
+middle-aged man not long initiated into the order. He was extremely
+civil, and called himself Dom Victor. We have promised to visit him
+often. Their habit is all white: but besides this he was infinitely
+clean in his person; and his apartment and garden, which he keeps and
+cultivates without any assistance, was neat to a degree. He has four
+little rooms, furnished in the prettiest manner, and hung with good
+prints. One of them is a library, and another a gallery. He has several
+canary-birds disposed in a pretty manner in breeding-cages. In his
+garden was a bed of good tulips in bloom, flowers and fruit-trees, and
+all neatly kept. They are permitted at certain hours to talk to
+strangers, but never to one another, or to go out of their convent. But
+what we chiefly went to see was the small cloister, with the history of
+St. Bruno, their founder, painted by Le Soeur. It consists of twenty-two
+pictures, the figures a good deal less than life. But sure they are
+amazing! I don't know what Raphael may be in Rome, but these pictures
+excel all I have seen in Paris and England. The figure of the dead man
+who spoke at his burial, contains all the strongest and horridest ideas,
+of ghastliness, hypocrisy discovered, and the height of damnation, pain
+and cursing. A Benedictine monk, who was there at the same time, said to
+me of this picture: _C'est une fable, mais on la croyoit autrefois._
+Another, who showed me relics in one of their churches, expressed as
+much ridicule for them. The pictures I have been speaking of are ill
+preserved, and some of the finest heads defaced, which was done at first
+by a rival of Le Soeur's. Adieu! dear West, take care of your health;
+and some time or other we will talk over all these things with more
+pleasure than I have had in seeing them.
+
+Yours ever.
+
+
+_THE CARNIVAL--THE FLORENTINES CIVIL, GOOD-NATURED, AND FOND OF THE
+ENGLISH--A CURIOUS CHALLENGE._
+
+TO RICHARD WEST, ESQ.
+
+FLORENCE, _February_ 27, 1740, N.S.
+
+Well, West, I have found a little unmasqued moment to write to you; but
+for this week past I have been so muffled up in my domino, that I have
+not had the command of my elbows. But what have you been doing all the
+mornings? Could you not write then?--No, then I was masqued too; I have
+done nothing but slip out of my domino into bed, and out of bed into my
+domino. The end of the Carnival is frantic, bacchanalian; all the morn
+one makes parties in masque to the shops and coffee-houses, and all the
+evening to the operas and balls. _Then I have danced, good gods! how
+have I danced!_ The Italians are fond to a degree of our country dances:
+_Cold and raw_ they only know by the tune; _Blowzybella_ is almost
+Italian, and _Buttered peas_ is _Pizelli al buro_. There are but three
+days more; but the two last are to have balls all the morning at the
+fine unfinished palace of the Strozzi; and the Tuesday night a
+masquerade after supper: they sup first, to eat _gras_, and not encroach
+upon Ash-Wednesday. What makes masquerading more agreeable here than in
+England, is the great deference that is showed to the disguised. Here
+they do not catch at those little dirty opportunities of saying any
+ill-natured thing they know of you, do not abuse you because they may,
+or talk gross bawdy to a woman of quality. I found the other day, by a
+play of Etheridge's, that we have had a sort of Carnival even since the
+Reformation; 'tis in _She would if She could_, they talk of going
+a-mumming in Shrove-tide.--
+
+After talking so much of diversions, I fear you will attribute to them
+the fondness I own I contract for Florence; but it has so many other
+charms, that I shall not want excuses for my taste. The freedom of the
+Carnival has given me opportunities to make several acquaintances; and
+if I have not found them refined, learned, polished, like some other
+cities, yet they are civil, good-natured, and fond of the English. Their
+little partiality for themselves, opposed to the violent vanity of the
+French, makes them very amiable in my eyes. I can give you a comical
+instance of their great prejudice about nobility; it happened yesterday.
+While we were at dinner at Mr. Mann's, word was brought by his
+secretary, that a cavalier demanded audience of him upon an affair of
+honour. Gray and I flew behind the curtain of the door. An elderly
+gentleman, whose attire was not certainly correspondent to the greatness
+of his birth, entered, and informed the British minister, that one
+Martin, an English painter, had left a challenge for him at his house,
+for having said Martin was no gentleman. He would by no means have spoke
+of the duel before the transaction of it, but that his honour, his
+blood, his &c. would never permit him to fight with one who was no
+cavalier; which was what he came to inquire of his excellency. We
+laughed loud laughs, but unheard: his fright or his nobility had closed
+his ears. But mark the sequel: the instant he was gone, my very English
+curiosity hurried me out of the gate St. Gallo; 'twas the place and hour
+appointed. We had not been driving about above ten minutes, but out
+popped a little figure, pale but cross, with beard unshaved and hair
+uncombed, a slouched hat, and a considerable red cloak, in which was
+wrapped, under his arm, the fatal sword that was to revenge the highly
+injured Mr. Martin, painter and defendant. I darted my head out of the
+coach, just ready to say, "Your servant, Mr. Martin," and talk about the
+architecture of the triumphal arch that was building there; but he would
+not know me, and walked off. We left him to wait for an hour, to grow
+very cold and very valiant the more it grew past the hour of
+appointment. We were figuring all the poor creature's huddle of
+thoughts, and confused hopes of victory or fame, of his unfinished
+pictures, or his situation upon bouncing into the next world. You will
+think us strange creatures; but 'twas a pleasant sight, as we knew the
+poor painter was safe. I have thought of it since, and am inclined to
+believe that nothing but two English could have been capable of such a
+jaunt. I remember, 'twas reported in London, that the plague was at a
+house in the city, and all the town went to see it.
+
+I have this instant received your letter. Lord! I am glad I thought of
+those parallel passages, since it made you translate them. 'Tis
+excessively near the original; and yet, I don't know, 'tis very easy
+too.--It snows here a little to-night, but it never lies but on the
+mountains. Adieu!
+
+Yours ever.
+
+P.S.--What is the history of the theatres this winter?
+
+
+_HERCULANEUM--SEARCH SHOULD BE MADE FOR OTHER SUBMERGED
+CITIES--QUOTATIONS FROM STATIUS._
+
+TO RICHARD WEST, ESQ.
+
+NAPLES, _June_ 14, 1740, N.S.
+
+Dear West,--One hates writing descriptions that are to be found in every
+book of travels; but we have seen something to-day that I am sure you
+never read of, and perhaps never heard of. Have you ever heard of a
+subterraneous town? a whole Roman town, with all its edifices, remaining
+under ground? Don't fancy the inhabitants buried it there to save it
+from the Goths: they were buried with it themselves; which is a caution
+we are not told that they ever took. You remember in Titus's time there
+were several cities destroyed by an eruption of Vesuvius, attended with
+an earthquake. Well, this was one of them, not very considerable, and
+then called Herculaneum. Above it has since been built Portici, about
+three miles from Naples, where the King has a villa. This underground
+city is perhaps one of the noblest curiosities that ever has been
+discovered. It was found out by chance, about a year and half ago. They
+began digging, they found statues; they dug further, they found more.
+Since that they have made a very considerable progress, and find
+continually. You may walk the compass of a mile; but by the misfortune
+of the modern town being overhead, they are obliged to proceed with
+great caution, lest they destroy both one and t'other. By this occasion
+the path is very narrow, just wide enough and high enough for one man to
+walk upright. They have hollowed, as they found it easiest to work, and
+have carried their streets not exactly where were the ancient ones, but
+sometimes before houses, sometimes through them. You would imagine that
+all the fabrics were crushed together; on the contrary, except some
+columns, they have found all the edifices standing upright in their
+proper situation. There is one inside of a temple quite perfect, with
+the middle arch, two columns, and two pilasters. It is built of brick
+plastered over, and painted with architecture: almost all the insides of
+the houses are in the same manner; and, what is very particular, the
+general ground of all the painting is red. Besides this temple, they
+make out very plainly an amphitheatre: the stairs, of white marble, and
+the seats are very perfect; the inside was painted in the same colour
+with the private houses, and great part cased with white marble. They
+have found among other things some fine statues, some human bones, some
+rice, medals, and a few paintings extremely fine. These latter are
+preferred to all the ancient paintings that have ever been discovered.
+We have not seen them yet, as they are kept in the King's apartment,
+whither all these curiosities are transplanted; and 'tis difficult to
+see them--but we shall. I forgot to tell you, that in several places the
+beams of the houses remain, but burnt to charcoal; so little damaged
+that they retain visibly the grain of the wood, but upon touching
+crumble to ashes. What is remarkable, there are no other marks or
+appearance of fire, but what are visible on these beams.
+
+There might certainly be collected great light from this reservoir of
+antiquities, if a man of learning had the inspection of it; if he
+directed the working, and would make a journal of the discoveries. But I
+believe there is no judicious choice made of directors. There is nothing
+of the kind known in the world; I mean a Roman city entire of that age,
+and that has not been corrupted with modern repairs. Besides
+scrutinising this very carefully, I should be inclined to search for
+the remains of the other towns that were partners with this in the
+general ruin.[1] 'Tis certainly an advantage to the learned world, that
+this has been laid up so long. Most of the discoveries in Rome were made
+in a barbarous age, where they only ransacked the ruins in quest of
+treasure, and had no regard to the form and being of the building; or to
+any circumstances that might give light into its use and history. I
+shall finish this long account with a passage which Gray has observed in
+Statius, and which directly pictures out this latent city:--
+
+    Haec ego Chalcidicis ad te, Marcelle, sonabam
+    Littoribus, fractas ubi Vestius egerit iras,
+    Aemula Trinacriis volvens incendia flammis.
+    Mira fides! credetne virûm ventura propago,
+    Cum segetes iterum, cum jam haec deserta virebunt,
+    Infra urbes populosque premi?
+
+    SYLV. lib. iv. epist. 4.
+
+Adieu, my dear West! and believe me yours ever.
+
+[Footnote 1: It was known from the account of Pliny that other towns had
+been destroyed by the same eruption as Herculaneum, and eight years
+after the date of this letter some fresh excavations led to the
+discovery of Pompeii. Matthews, in his "Diary of an Invalid," describes
+both, and his account explains why Pompeii, though the smaller town,
+presents more attractions to the scholar or the antiquarian. "On our way
+home we explored Herculaneum, which scarcely repays the labour. This
+town is filled up with lava, and with a cement caused by the large
+mixture of water with the shower of earth and ashes which destroyed it;
+and it is choked up as completely as if molten lead had been poured into
+it. Besides, it is forty feet below the surface, and another town is now
+built over it.... Pompeii, on the contrary, was destroyed by a shower of
+cinders in which there was a much less quantity of water. It lay for
+centuries only twelve feet below the surface, and, these cinders being
+easily removed, the town has been again restored to the light of day"
+(vol. i. p. 254).]
+
+
+_DANGER OF MALARIA--ROMAN CATHOLIC RELICS--"ADMIRAL HOSIER'S
+GHOST"--CONTEST FOR THE POPEDOM._
+
+TO THE HON. H.S. CONWAY.
+
+RÈ DI COFANO, vulg. RADICOFANI,
+
+_July_ 5, 1740, N.S.
+
+You will wonder, my dear Hal, to find me on the road from Rome: why,
+intend I did to stay for a new popedom, but the old eminences are cross
+and obstinate, and will not choose one, the Holy Ghost does not know
+when. There is a horrid thing called the malaria, that comes to Rome
+every summer, and kills one, and I did not care for being killed so far
+from Christian burial. We have been jolted to death; my servants let us
+come without springs to the chaise, and we are wore threadbare: to add
+to our disasters, I have sprained my ancle, and have brought it along,
+laid upon a little box of baubles that I have bought for presents in
+England. Perhaps I may pick you out some little trifle there, but don't
+depend upon it; you are a disagreeable creature, and may be I shall not
+care for you. Though I am so tired in this devil of a place, yet I have
+taken it into my head, that it is like Hamilton's Bawn,[1] and I must
+write to you. 'Tis the top of a black barren mountain, a vile little
+town at the foot of an old citadel: yet this, know you, was the
+residence of one of the three kings that went to Christ's birthday; his
+name was Alabaster, Abarasser, or some such thing; the other two were
+kings, one of the East, the other of Cologn. 'Tis this of Cofano, who
+was represented in an ancient painting, found in the Palatine Mount, now
+in the possession of Dr. Mead; he was crowned by Augustus. Well, but
+about writing--what do you think I write with? Nay, with a pen; there
+was never a one to be found in the whole circumference _but one_, and
+that was in the possession of the governor, and had been used time out
+of mind to write the parole with: I was forced to send to borrow it. It
+was sent me under the conduct of a serjeant and two Swiss, with desire
+to return it when I should have done with it. 'Tis a curiosity, and
+worthy to be laid up with the relics which we have just been seeing in a
+small hovel of Capucins on the side of the hill, and which were all
+brought by his Majesty from Jerusalem. Among other things of great
+sanctity there is a set of gnashing of teeth, the grinders very entire;
+a bit of the worm that never dies, preserved in spirits; a crow of St.
+Peter's cock, very useful against Easter; the crisping and curling,
+frizzling and frowncing of Mary Magdalen, which she cut off on growing
+devout. The good man that showed us all these commodities was got into
+such a train of calling them the blessed this, and the blessed that,
+that at last he showed us a bit of the blessed fig-tree that Christ
+cursed.
+
+[Footnote 1: Hamilton's Bawn is an old building near Richhill, in the
+County of Armagh, the subject of one of Swift's burlesque poems.]
+
+
+FLORENCE, _July_ 9.
+
+My dear Harry,--We are come hither, and I have received another letter
+from you with "Hosier's Ghost."[1] Your last put me in pain for you,
+when you talked of going to Ireland; but now I find your brother and
+sister go with you, I am not much concerned. Should I be? You have but
+to say, for my feelings are extremely at your service to dispose as you
+please. Let us see: you are to come back to stand for some place; that
+will be about April. 'Tis a sort of thing I should do, too; and then we
+should see one another, and that would be charming: but it is a sort of
+thing I have no mind to do; and then we shall not see one another,
+unless you would come hither--but that you cannot do: nay, I would not
+have you, for then I shall be gone.--So, there are many _ifs_ that just
+signify nothing at all. Return I must sooner than I shall like. I am
+happy here to a degree. I'll tell you my situation. I am lodged with Mr.
+Mann, the best of creatures. I have a terreno all to myself, with an
+open gallery on the Arno, where I am now writing to you. Over against me
+is the famous Gallery: and, on either hand, two fair bridges. Is not
+this charming and cool? The air is so serene, and so secure, that one
+sleeps with all the windows and doors thrown open to the river, and only
+covered with a slight gauze to keep away the gnats. Lady Pomfret has a
+charming conversation once a week. She has taken a vast palace and a
+vast garden, which is vastly commode, especially to the cicisbeo-part of
+mankind, who have free indulgence to wander in pairs about the arbours.
+You know her daughters: Lady Sophia is still, nay she must be, the
+beauty she was: Lady Charlotte is much improved, and is the cleverest
+girl in the world; speaks the purest Tuscan, like any Florentine. The
+Princess Craon has a constant pharaoh and supper every night, where one
+is quite at one's ease. I am going into the country with her and the
+prince for a little while, to a villa of the Great Duke's. The people
+are good-humoured here and easy; and what makes me pleased with them,
+they are pleased with me. One loves to find people care for one, when
+they can have no view in it.
+
+[Footnote 1: "Admiral Hosier's Ghost" is the title of a ballad by Glover
+on the death of Admiral Hosier, a distinguished admiral, who had been
+sent with a squadron to blockade the Spanish treasure-ships in Porto
+Bello, but was prohibited from attacking them in the harbour. He died in
+1727, according to the account that the poet adopted, of mortification
+at the inaction to which his orders compelled him; but according to
+another statement, more trustworthy if less poetical, of fever.]
+
+You see how glad I am to have reasons for not returning; I wish I had no
+better.
+
+As to "Hosier's Ghost," I think it very easy, and consequently pretty;
+but, from the ease, should never have guessed it Glover's. I delight in
+your, "the patriots cry it up, and the courtiers cry it down, and the
+hawkers cry it up and down," and your laconic history of the King and
+Sir Robert, on going to Hanover, and turning out the Duke of Argyle. The
+epigram, too, you sent me on the same occasion is charming.
+
+Unless I sent you back news that you and others send me, I can send you
+none. I have left the Conclave, which is the only stirring thing in this
+part of the world, except the child that the Queen of Naples is to be
+delivered of in August. There is no likelihood the Conclave will end,
+unless the messages take effect which 'tis said the Imperial and French
+ministers have sent to their respective courts for leave to quit the
+Corsini for the Albani faction: otherwise there will never be a pope.
+Corsini has lost the only one he could have ventured to make pope, and
+him he designed; 'twas Cenci, a relation of the Corsini's mistress. The
+last morning Corsini made him rise, stuffed a dish of chocolate down his
+throat, and would carry him to the scrutiny. The poor old creature went,
+came back, and died. I am sorry to have lost the sight of the Pope's
+coronation, but I might have staid for seeing it till I had been old
+enough to be pope myself.[1]
+
+[Footnote 1: The contest was caused by the death of Clement XII. The
+successful candidate was Benedict XIV.]
+
+Harry, what luck the Chancellor has! first, indeed, to be in himself so
+great a man; but then in accident: he is made Chief Justice and peer,
+when Talbot is made Chancellor and peer. Talbot dies in a twelvemonth,
+and leaves him the seals at an age when others are scarce made
+Solicitors:--then marries his son into one of the first families of
+Britain, obtains a patent for a Marquisate and eight thousand pounds a
+year after the Duke of Kent's death: the Duke dies in a fortnight, and
+leaves them all! People talk of Fortune's wheel, that is always
+rolling: troth, my Lord Hardwicke has overtaken her wheel, and rolled
+away with it.... Yours ever.
+
+
+_A FLORENTINE WEDDING--ADDISON'S DESCRIPTIONS ARE BORROWED FROM BOOKS--A
+SONG OF BONDELMONTI'S, WITH A LATIN VERSION BY GRAY, AND AN ENGLISH ONE
+BY THE WRITER._
+
+TO RICHARD WEST, ESQ.
+
+FLORENCE, _Oct._ 2, 1740, N.S.
+
+Dear West,--T'other night as we (you know who _we_ are) were walking on
+the charming bridge, just before going to a wedding assembly, we said,
+"Lord, I wish, just as we are got into the room, they would call us out,
+and say, West is arrived! We would make him dress instantly, and carry
+him back to the entertainment. How he would stare and wonder at a
+thousand things, that no longer strike us as odd!" Would not you? One
+agreed that you should have come directly by sea from Dover, and be set
+down at Leghorn, without setting foot in any other foreign town, and so
+land at _Us_, in all your first full amaze; for you are to know, that
+astonishment rubs off violently; we did not cry out Lord! half so much
+at Rome as at Calais, which to this hour I look upon as one of the most
+surprising cities in the universe. My dear child, what if you were to
+take this little sea-jaunt? One would recommend Sir John Norris's convoy
+to you, but one should be laughed at now for supposing that he is ever
+to sail beyond Torbay.[1] The Italians take Torbay for an English town
+in the hands of the Spaniards, after the fashion of Gibraltar, and
+imagine 'tis a wonderful strong place, by our fleet's having retired
+from before it so often, and so often returned.
+
+[Footnote 1: Sir John Norris was one of the most gallant and skilful
+seamen of his time; but an expedition in which he had had the command
+had lately proved fruitless. He had been instructed to cruise about the
+Bay of Biscay, in the hope of intercepting some of the Spanish
+treasure-ships; but the weather had been so uninterruptedly stormy that
+he had been compelled to return to port without having even seen an
+enemy. The following lines were addressed to him upon this occasion:
+
+    Homeward, oh! bend thy course; the seas are rough;
+    To the Land's End who sails, has sailed enough.]
+
+We went to this wedding that I told you of; 'twas a charming feast: a
+large palace finely illuminated; there were all the beauties, all the
+jewels, and all the sugar-plums of Florence. Servants loaded with great
+chargers full of comfits heap the tables with them, the women fall on
+with both hands, and stuff their pockets and every creek and corner
+about them. You would be as much amazed at us as at anything you saw:
+instead of being deep in the liberal arts, and being in the Gallery
+every morning, as I thought of course to be sure I would be, we are in
+all the idleness and amusements of the town. For me, I am grown so lazy,
+and so tired of seeing sights, that, though I have been at Florence six
+months, I have not seen Leghorn, Pisa, Lucca, or Pistoia; nay, not so
+much as one of the Great Duke's villas. I have contracted so great an
+aversion to inns and post-chaises, and have so absolutely lost all
+curiosity, that, except the towns in the straight road to Great Britain,
+I shall scarce see a jot more of a foreign land; and trust me, when I
+return, I will not visit Welsh mountains, like Mr. Williams. After Mount
+Cenis, the Boccheto, the Giogo, Radicofani, and the Appian Way, one has
+mighty little hunger after travelling. I shall be mighty apt to set up
+my staff at Hyde-park-corner: the alehouseman there at Hercules's
+Pillars[1] was certainly returned from his travels into foreign parts.
+
+[Footnote 1: The sign of the Hercules' Pillars remained in Piccadilly
+till very lately. It was situated on part of the ground now [1798]
+occupied by the houses of Mr. Drummond Smith and his brother.--MISS
+BERRY. That is, on the space between Hamilton Place and Apsley House. It
+was the inn mentioned in Fielding's "Tom Jones," and was notorious as a
+favourite resort of the Marquis of Granby.]
+
+Now I'll answer your questions.
+
+I have made no discoveries in ancient or modern arts. Mr. Addison
+travelled through the poets, and not through Italy; for all his ideas
+are borrowed from the descriptions, and not from the reality. He saw
+places as they were, not as they are.[1] I am very well acquainted with
+Doctor Cocchi;[2] he is a good sort of man, rather than a great man; he
+is a plain honest creature, with quiet knowledge, but I dare say all the
+English have told you, he has a very particular understanding: I really
+don't believe they meant to impose on you, for they thought so. As to
+Bondelmonti, he is much less; he is a low mimic; the brightest cast of
+his parts attains to the composition of a sonnet: he talks irreligion
+with English boys, sentiment with my sister [Lady Walpole], and bad
+French with any one that will hear him. I will transcribe you a little
+song that he made t'other day; 'tis pretty enough; Gray turned it into
+Latin, and I into English; you will honour him highly by putting it into
+French, and Ashton into Greek. Here 'tis.
+
+    Spesso Amor sotto la forma
+    D'amistà ride, e s'asconde;
+    Poi si mischia, e si confonde
+    Con lo sdegno e col rancor.
+
+    In pietade ei si trasforma,
+    Par trastullo e par dispetto,
+    Ma nel suo diverso aspetto,
+    Sempre egli è l'istesso Amor.
+
+    Risit amicitiae interdùm velatus amictu,
+      Et benè compositâ veste fefeliit Amor:
+    Mox irae assumpsit cultus faciemque minantem,
+      Inque odium versus, versus et in lacrymas:
+    Sudentem fuge, nec lacrymanti aut crede furenti;
+      Idem est dissimili semper in ore Deus.
+
+    Love often in the comely mien
+    Of friendship fancies to be seen;
+    Soon again he shifts his dress,
+    And wears disdain and rancour's face.
+
+    To gentle pity then he changes;
+    Thro' wantonness, thro' piques he ranges;
+    But in whatever shape he move,
+    He's still himself, and still is Love.
+
+[Footnote 1: Compare Letter to Zouch, March 20th, 1762. Fielding says
+("Voyage to Lisbon") that Addison, in his "Travels," is to be looked
+upon rather as a commentator on the classics, than as a writer of
+travels.]
+
+[Footnote 2: Antonio Cocchi, a learned physician and author at Florence,
+a particular friend of Mr. Mann.--WALPOLE. He died in 1758.]
+
+See how we trifle! but one can't pass one's youth too amusingly; for one
+must grow old, and that in England; two most serious circumstances
+either of which makes people grey in the twinkling of a bed-staff; for
+know you, there is not a country upon earth where there are so many old
+fools and so few young ones.
+
+Now I proceed with my answers.
+
+I made but small collections, and have only bought some bronzes and
+medals, a few busts, and two or three pictures; one of my busts is to be
+mentioned; 'tis the famous Vespasian in touchstone, reckoned the best in
+Rome, except the Caracalla of the Farnese: I gave but twenty-two pounds
+for it at Cardinal Ottoboni's sale. One of my medals is as great a
+curiosity: 'tis of Alexander Severus, with the amphitheatre in brass;
+this reverse is extant on medals of his, but mine is a _medagliuncino_,
+or small medallion, and the only one with this reverse known in the
+world: 'twas found by a peasant while I was in Rome, and sold by him for
+sixpence to an antiquarian, to whom I paid for it seven guineas and a
+half; but to virtuosi 'tis worth any sum.
+
+As to Tartini's[1] musical compositions, ask Gray; I know but little in
+music.
+
+[Footnote 1: Giuseppe Tartini, of Padua, the celebrated composer of the
+Devil's Sonata: in which he attempted to reproduce an air which he
+dreamt that Satan had played to him while he was asleep; but, in his own
+opinion, he failed so entirely, that he declared that if he had any
+other means of livelihood he would break his violin and give up music.]
+
+But for the Academy, I am not of it, but frequently in company with it:
+'tis all disjointed. Madame ----, who, though a learned lady, has not
+lost her modesty and character, is extremely scandalised with the other
+two dames, especially with Moll Worthless [Lady Mary Wortley], who knows
+no bounds. She is at rivalry with Lady W[alpole] for a certain Mr. ----,
+whom perhaps you knew at Oxford. If you did not, I'll tell you: he is a
+grave young man by temper, and a rich one by constitution; a shallow
+creature by nature, but a wit by the grace of our women here, whom he
+deals with as of old with the Oxford toasts. He fell into sentiments
+with my Lady W[alpole] and was happy to catch her at Platonic love: but
+as she seldom stops there, the poor man will be frightened out of his
+senses when she shall break the matter to him; for he never dreamt that
+her purposes were so naught. Lady Mary is so far gone, that to get him
+from the mouth of her antagonist she literally took him out to dance
+country dances last night at a formal ball, where there was no measure
+kept in laughing at her old, foul, tawdry, painted, plastered personage.
+She played at pharaoh two or three times at Princess Craon's, where she
+cheats horse and foot. She is really entertaining: I have been reading
+her works, which she lends out in manuscript, but they are too womanish:
+I like few of her performances. I forgot to tell you a good answer of
+Lady Pomfret to Mr. ----, who asked her if she did not approve Platonic
+love? "Lord, sir," says she, "I am sure any one that knows me never
+heard that I had any love but one, and there sit two proofs of it,"
+pointing to her two daughters.
+
+So I have given you a sketch of our employments, and answered your
+questions, and will with pleasure as many more as you have about you.
+
+Adieu! Was ever such a long letter? But 'tis nothing to what I shall
+have to say to you. I shall scold you for never telling us any news,
+public or private, no deaths, marriages, or mishaps; no account of new
+books: Oh, you are abominable! I could find it in my heart to hate you,
+if I did not love you so well; but we will quarrel now, that we may be
+the better friends when we meet: there is no danger of that, is there?
+Good-night, whether friend or foe! I am most sincerely
+
+Yours.
+
+
+_DEBATE ON PULTENEY'S MOTION FOR A COMMITTEE ON PAPERS RELATING TO THE
+WAR--SPEECHES OF PULTENEY, PITT, SIR R. WALPOLE, SIR W. GEORGE,
+ETC.--SMALLNESS OF THE MINISTERIAL MAJORITY._
+
+TO SIR HORACE MANN.[1]
+
+[Footnote 1: Sir H. Mann was an early friend of Walpole; and was
+Minister at Florence from 1740-1786.]
+
+[Illustration: SIR HORACE MANN.]
+
+_Friday, Jan._ 22, 1742.
+
+Don't wonder that I missed writing to you yesterday, my constant day:
+you will pity me when you hear that I was shut up in the House of
+Commons till one in the morning. I came away more dead than alive, and
+was forced to leave Sir R. at supper with my brothers: he was all alive
+and in spirits.[1] He says he is younger than me, and indeed I think
+so, in spite of his forty years more. My head aches to-night, but we
+rose early; and if I don't write to-night, when shall I find a moment to
+spare? Now you want to know what we did last night; stay, I will tell
+you presently in its place: it was well, and of infinite consequence--so
+far I tell you now.
+
+[Footnote 1: Sir Robert Wilmot also, in a letter to the Duke of
+Devonshire, written on the 12th, says, "Sir Robert was to-day observed
+to be more naturally gay and full of spirits than he has been for some
+time past."]
+
+Our recess finished last Monday, and never at school did I enjoy
+holidays so much--but, _les voilà finis jusqu'au printems_! Tuesday (for
+you see I write you an absolute journal) we sat on a Scotch election, a
+double return; their man was Hume Campbell[1], Lord Marchmont's brother,
+lately made solicitor to the Prince, for being as troublesome, as
+violent, and almost as able as his brother. They made a great point of
+it, and gained so many of our votes, that at ten at night we were forced
+to give it up without dividing. Sandys, who loves persecution, _even
+unto death_, moved to punish the sheriff; and as we dared not divide,
+they ordered him into custody, where by this time, I suppose, Sandys has
+eaten him.
+
+[Footnote 1: Hume Campbell, twin brother of Hugh, third Earl of
+Marchmont, the friend of Pope, and one of his executors. They were sons
+of Alexander, the second earl, who had quarrelled with Sir Robert
+Walpole at the time of the excise scheme in 1733. Sir Robert, in
+consequence, prevented him from being re-elected one of the sixteen
+representative Scotch peers in 1734; in requital for which, the old
+earl's two sons became the bitterest opponents of the minister. They
+were both men of considerable talents; extremely similar in their
+characters and dispositions, and so much so in their outward appearance,
+that it was very difficult to know them apart.]
+
+On Wednesday Sir Robert Godschall, the Lord Mayor, presented the
+Merchant's petition, signed by three hundred of them, and drawn up by
+_Leonidas_ Glover.[1] This is to be heard next Wednesday. This
+gold-chain came into parliament, cried up for his parts, but proves so
+dull, one would think he chewed opium. Earle says, "I have heard an
+oyster speak as well twenty times."...
+
+[Footnote 1: Mr. Glover, a London merchant, was the author of a poem
+entitled "Leonidas"; of a tragedy, "Boadicea"; and of the ode on
+"Admiral Hosier's Ghost," which is mentioned in the letter to Conway at
+p. 23.]
+
+On this Thursday, of which I was telling you, at three o'clock, Mr.
+Pulteney rose up, and moved for a secret committee of twenty-one. This
+inquisition, this council of ten, was to sit and examine whatever
+persons and papers they should please, and to meet when and where they
+pleased. He protested much on its not being intended against _any
+person_, but merely to give the King advice, and on this foot they
+fought it till ten at night, when Lord Perceval blundered out what they
+had been cloaking with so much art, and declared that he should vote for
+it as a committee of accusation. Sir Robert immediately rose, and
+protested that he should not have spoken, but for what he had heard
+last; but that now, he must take it to himself. He pourtrayed the malice
+of the Opposition, who, for twenty years, had not been able to touch
+him, and were now reduced to this infamous shift. He defied them to
+accuse him, and only desired that if they should, it might be in an open
+and fair manner; desired no favour, but to be acquainted with his
+accusation. He spoke of Mr. Dodington, who had called his administration
+infamous, as of a person of great self-mortification, who, for sixteen
+years, had condescended to bear part of the odium. For Mr. Pulteney, who
+had just spoken a second time, Sir R. said, he had begun the debate with
+great calmness, but give him his due, he had made amends for it in the
+end. In short, never was innocence so triumphant!
+
+There were several glorious speeches on both sides; Mr. Pulteney's two,
+W. Pitt's [Chatham's] and George Grenville's, Sir Robert's, Sir W.
+Yonge's, Harry Fox's [Lord Holland's], Mr. Chute's, and the
+Attorney-General's [Sir Dudley Ryder]. My friend Coke [Lovel], for the
+first time, spoke vastly well, and mentioned how great Sir Robert's
+character is abroad. Sir Francis Dashwood replied that he had found
+quite the reverse from Mr. Coke, and that foreigners always spoke with
+contempt of the Chevalier de Walpole. This was going too far, and he was
+called to order, but got off well enough, by saying, that he knew it was
+contrary to rule to name any member, but that he only mentioned it as
+spoken by an impertinent Frenchman.
+
+But of all speeches, none ever was so full of wit as Mr. Pulteney's
+last. He said, "I have heard this committee represented as a most
+dreadful spectre; it has been likened to all terrible things; it has
+been likened to the King; to the inquisition; it will be a committee of
+safety; it is a committee of danger; I don't know what it is to be! One
+gentleman, I think, called it _a cloud_! (this was the Attorney) _a
+cloud_! I remember Hamlet takes Lord Polonius by the hand shows him _a
+cloud_, and then asks him if he does not think it is like a whale."
+Well, in short, at eleven at night we divided, and threw out this famous
+committee by 253 to 250, the greatest number that ever was in the house,
+and the greatest number that ever _lost_ a question.[1]
+
+[Footnote 1: Lord Stanhope ("History of England," i. 24) gives a long
+account of this debate, mainly derived from this letter.]
+
+It was a most shocking sight to see the sick and dead brought in on both
+sides! Men on crutches, and Sir William Gordon from his bed, with a
+blister on his head, and flannel hanging out from under his wig. I could
+scarce pity him for his ingratitude. The day before the Westminster
+petition, Sir Charles Wager gave his son a ship, and the next day the
+father came down and voted against him. The son has since been cast
+away; but they concealed it from the father, that he might not absent
+himself. However, as we have our good-natured men too on our side, one
+of his own countrymen went and told him of it in the House. The old man,
+who looked like Lazarus at his resuscitation, bore it with great
+resolution, and said, he knew _why_ he was told of it, but when he
+thought his country in danger, he would not go away. As he is so near
+death, that it is indifferent to him whether he died two thousand years
+ago or to-morrow, it is unlucky for him not to have lived when such
+insensibility would have been a Roman virtue.
+
+There are no arts, no menaces, which the Opposition do not practise.
+They have threatened one gentleman to have a reversion cut off from his
+son, unless he will vote with them. To Totness there came a letter to
+the mayor from the Prince, and signed by two of his lords, to recommend
+a candidate in opposition to the Solicitor-General [Strange]. The mayor
+sent the letter to Sir Robert. They have turned the Scotch to the best
+account. There is a young Oswald, who had engaged to Sir R. but has
+voted against us. Sir R. sent a friend to reproach him; the moment the
+gentleman who had engaged for him came into the room, Oswald said, "You
+had like to have led me into a fine error! did you not tell me that Sir
+R. would have the majority?"
+
+When the debate was over, Mr. Pulteney owned that he had never heard so
+fine a debate on our side; and said to Sir Robert, "Well, nobody can do
+what you can!" "Yes," replied Sir R., "Yonge did better." Mr. Pulteney
+answered, "It was fine, but not of that weight with what you said." They
+all allow it; and now their plan is to persuade Sir Robert to retire
+with honour. All that evening there was a report about the town, that he
+and my uncle [_old_ Horace] were to be sent to the Tower, and people
+hired windows in the City to see them pass by--but for this time I
+believe we shall not exhibit so historical a parade....
+
+Sir Thomas Robinson [Long] is at last named to the government of
+Barbadoes; he has long prevented its being asked for, by declaring that
+he had the promise of it. Luckily for him, Lord Lincoln liked his house,
+and procured him this government on condition of hiring it.
+
+I have mentioned Lord Perceval's speeches; he has a set who has a
+rostrum at his house, and harangue there. A gentleman who came thither
+one evening was refused, but insisting that he was engaged to come, "Oh,
+Sir," said the porter, "what are you one of those who play at members of
+parliament?"...
+
+
+_RANELAGH GARDENS OPENED--GARRICK, "A WINE-MERCHANT TURNED
+PLAYER"--DEFEAT OF THE INDEMNITY BILL._
+
+TO SIR HORACE MANN.
+
+DOWNING STREET, _May_ 26, 1742.
+
+To-day calls itself May the 26th, as you perceive by the date; but I am
+writing to you by the fire-side, instead of going to Vauxhall. If we
+have one warm day in seven, "we bless our stars, and think it luxury."
+And yet we have as much water-works and fresco diversions, as if we lay
+ten degrees nearer warmth. Two nights ago Ranelagh-gardens were opened
+at Chelsea; the Prince, Princess, Duke, much nobility, and much mob
+besides, were there. There is a vast amphitheatre, finely gilt, painted,
+and illuminated, into which everybody that loves eating, drinking,
+staring, or crowding, is admitted for twelvepence. The building and
+disposition of the garden cost sixteen thousand pounds. Twice a-week
+there are to be Ridottos, at guinea-tickets, for which you are to have a
+supper and music. I was there last night, but did not find the joy of
+it. Vauxhall is a little better; for the garden is pleasanter, and one
+goes by water. Our operas are almost over; there were but
+three-and-forty people last night in the pit and boxes. There is a
+little simple farce at Drury Lane, called "Miss Lucy in Town," in which
+Mrs. Clive mimics the Muscovita admirably, and Beard, Amorevoli
+tolerably. But all the run is now after Garrick, a wine-merchant, who is
+turned player, at Goodman's fields. He plays all parts, and is a very
+good mimic. His acting I have seen, and may say to you, who will not
+tell it again here, I see nothing wonderful in it; but it is heresy to
+say so: the Duke of Argyll says, he is superior to Betterton. Now I talk
+of players, tell Mr. Chute, that his friend Bracegirdle breakfasted with
+me this morning. As she went out, and wanted her clogs, she turned to
+me, and said, "I remember at the playhouse, they used to call Mrs.
+Oldfield's chair! Mrs. Barry's clogs! and Mrs. Bracegirdle's pattens!"
+
+I did, indeed, design the letter of this post for Mr. Chute; but I have
+received two such charming long ones from you of the 15th and 20th of
+May (N.S.), that I must answer them, and beg him to excuse me till
+another post; so must the Prince [Craon], Princess, the Grifona, and
+Countess Galli. For the Princess's letter, I am not sure I shall answer
+it so soon, for hitherto I have not been able to read above every third
+word; however, you may thank her as much as if I understood it all. I am
+very happy that _mes bagatelles_ (for I still insist they were so)
+pleased. You, my dear child, are very good to be pleased with the
+snuff-box. I am much obliged to the superior _lumières_ of old Sarasin
+about the Indian ink: if she meant the black, I am sorry to say I had it
+into the bargain with the rest of the Japan: for coloured, it is only a
+curiosity, because it has seldom been brought over. I remember Sir Hans
+Sloane was the first who ever had any of it, and would on no account
+give my mother the least morsel of it. She afterwards got a good deal of
+it from China; and since that, more has come over; but it is even less
+valuable than the other, for we never could tell how to use it; however,
+let it make its figure.
+
+I am sure you hate me all this time, for chatting about so many trifles,
+and telling you no politics. I own to you, I am so wearied, so worn with
+them, that I scarce know how to turn my hand to them; but you shall know
+all I know. I told you of the meeting at the Fountain tavern: Pulteney
+had promised to be there, but was not; nor Carteret. As the Lords had
+put off the debate on the Indemnity Bill,[1] nothing material passed;
+but the meeting was very Jacobite. Yesterday the bill came on, and Lord
+Carteret took the lead against it, and about seven in the evening it
+was flung out by almost two to one, 92 to 47, and 17 proxies to 10.
+To-day we had a motion by the new Lord Hillsborough (for the father is
+just dead), and seconded by Lord Barrington, to examine the Lords'
+votes, to see what was become of the bill; this is the form. The
+Chancellor of the Exchequer, and all the new ministry, were with us
+against it; but they carried it, 164 to 159. It is to be reported
+to-morrow, and as we have notice, we may possibly throw it out; else
+they will hurry on to a breach with the Lords. Pulteney was not in the
+House: he was riding the other day, and met the King's coach;
+endeavouring to turn out of the way, his horse started, flung him, and
+fell upon him: he is much bruised; but not at all dangerously. On this
+occasion, there was an epigram fixed to a list, which I will explain to
+you afterwards: it is not known who wrote it, but it was addressed to
+him:
+
+    Thy horse does things by halves, like thee:
+      Thou, with irresolution,
+    Hurt'st friend and foe, thyself and me,
+      The King and Constitution.
+
+[Footnote 1: A previous letter describes this as a Bill "to indemnify
+all persons who should accuse themselves of any crime, provided they
+accuse Lord Orford [Sir R.W.]." It was carried in the House of Commons
+by 251 to 228, but, as this letter mentions, was thrown out by the Lords
+by 109 to 57. Lord Stanhope (c. 24) describes it as "a Bill which broke
+through the settled forms and safeguards of law, to strike at one
+obnoxious head."]
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I must tell you an ingenuity of Lord Raymond, an epitaph on the
+Indemnifying Bill--I believe you would guess the author:--
+
+    Interr'd beneath this marble stone doth lie
+         The Bill of Indemnity;
+    To show the good for which it was design'd,
+         It died itself to save mankind.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There has lately been published one of the most impudent things that
+ever was printed; it is called "The Irish Register," and is a list of
+all the unmarried women of any fashion in England, ranked in order,
+duchesses-dowager, ladies, widows, misses, &c., with their names at
+length, for the benefit of Irish fortune-hunters, or as it is said, for
+the incorporating and manufacturing of British commodities. Miss Edwards
+is the only one printed with a dash, because they have placed her among
+the widows. I will send you this, "Miss Lucy in Town," and the
+magazines, by the first opportunity, as I should the other things, but
+your brother tells me you have had them by another hand. I received the
+cedrati, for which I have already thanked you: but I have been so much
+thanked by several people to whom I gave some, that I can very well
+afford to thank you again....
+
+P.S.--I unseal my letter to tell you what a vast and, probably, final
+victory we have gained to-day. They moved, that the Lords flinging out
+the Bill of Indemnity was an obstruction of justice, and might prove
+fatal to the liberties of this country. We have sat till this moment,
+seven o'clock, and have rejected this motion by 245 to 193. The call of
+the House, which they have kept off from fortnight to fortnight, to keep
+people in town, was appointed for to-day. The moment the division was
+over, Sir John Cotton rose and said, "As I think the inquiry is at an
+end, you may do what you will with the call." We have put it off for two
+months. There's a noble postscript!
+
+
+_DEBATE ON DISBANDING THE HANOVERIAN TROOPS--FIRST SPEECH OF MURRAY
+(AFTERWARDS EARL OF MANSFIELD)--BON MOT OF LORD CHESTERFIELD._
+
+TO SIR HORACE MANN.
+
+ARLINGTON STREET, _Dec._ 9, 1742.
+
+I shall have quite a partiality for the post of Holland; it brought me
+two letters last week, and two more yesterday, of November 20th and
+27th; but I find you have your perpetual headaches--how can you say that
+you shall tire me with talking of them? you may make me suffer by your
+pains, but I will hear and insist upon your always telling me of your
+health. Do you think I only correspond with you to know the posture of
+the Spaniards or the _épuisements_ of the Princess! I am anxious, too,
+to know how poor Mr. Whithed does, and Mr. Chute's gout. I shall look
+upon our sea-captains with as much horror as the King of Naples can, if
+they bring gouts, fits, and headaches.
+
+You will have had a letter from me by this time, to give up sending the
+Dominichin by a man-of-war, and to propose its coming in a Dutch ship. I
+believe that will be safe.
+
+We have had another great day in the House on the army in Flanders,
+which the Opposition were for disbanding; but we carried it by a hundred
+and twenty. Murray spoke for the first time, with the greatest applause;
+Pitt answered him with all his force and art of language, but on an
+ill-founded argument. In all appearances, they will be great rivals.
+Shippen was in great rage at Murray's apostacy; if anything can really
+change his principles, possibly this competition may. To-morrow we shall
+have a tougher battle on the sixteen thousand Hanoverians. _Hanover_ is
+the word given out for this winter: there is a most bold pamphlet come
+out, said to be Lord Marchmont's, which affirms that in every treaty
+made since the accession of this family, England has been sacrificed to
+the interests of Hanover, and consequently insinuates the
+incompatibility of the two. Lord Chesterfield says "that if we have a
+mind effectually to prevent the Pretender from ever obtaining this
+crown, we should make him Elector of Hanover, for the people of England
+will never fetch another king from thence."
+
+Adieu! my dear child. I am sensible that I write you short letters, but
+I write you all I know. I don't know how it is, but _the wonderful_
+seems worn out. In this our day, we have no rabbit-women--no
+elopements--no epic poems, finer than Milton's--no contest about
+Harlequins and Polly Peachems. Jansen[1] has won no more estates, and
+the Duchess of Queensberry has grown as tame as her neighbours. Whist
+has spread an universal opium over the whole nation; it makes courtiers
+and patriots sit down to the same pack of cards. The only thing
+extraordinary, and which yet did not seem to surprise anybody, was the
+Barbarina's being attacked by four men masqued, the other night, as she
+came out of the Opera House, who would have forced her away; but she
+screamed, and the guard came. Nobody knows who set them on, and I
+believe nobody inquired.
+
+[Footnote 1: H. Jansen, a celebrated gamester, who cheated the Duke of
+Bedford of an immense sum: Pope hints at that affair in this line,
+
+    Or when a duke to Jansen punts at White's.]
+
+The Austrians in Flanders have separated from our troops a little out of
+humour, because it was impracticable for them to march without any
+preparatory provision for their reception. They will probably march in
+two months, if no peace prevents it. Adieu!
+
+
+_KING THEODORE--HANDEL INTRODUCES ORATORIOS._
+
+TO SIR HORACE MANN.
+
+ARLINGTON STREET, _Feb._ 24, 1743.
+
+I write to you in the greatest hurry in the world, but write I will.
+Besides, I must wish you joy: you are warriors; nay, conquerors[1]; two
+things quite novel in this war, for hitherto it has been armies without
+fighting, and deaths without killing. We talk of this battle as of a
+comet; "Have you heard of _the_ battle?" it is so strange a thing, that
+numbers imagine you may go and see it at Charing Cross. Indeed, our
+officers, who are going to Flanders, don't quite like it; they are
+afraid it should grow the fashion to fight, and that a pair of colours
+should no longer be a sinecure. I am quite unhappy about poor Mr. Chute:
+besides, it is cruel to find that abstinence is not a drug. If
+mortification ever ceases to be a medicine, or virtue to be a passport
+to carnivals in the other world, who will be a self-tormentor any
+longer--not, my child, that I am one; but, tell me, is he quite
+recovered?
+
+[Footnote 1: This alludes to an engagement, which took place on the 8th
+of February, near Bologna, between the Spaniards under M. de Gages, and
+the Austrians under General Traun, in which the latter were successful.]
+
+I thank you for King Theodore's declaration,[1] and wish him success
+with all my soul. I hate the Genoese; they make a commonwealth the most
+devilish of all tyrannies!
+
+[Footnote 1: With regard to Corsica, of which he had declared himself
+king. By this declaration, which was dated January 30, Theodore
+recalled, under pain of confiscation of their estates, all the Corsicans
+in foreign service, except that of the Queen of Hungary, and the Grand
+Duke of Tuscany. (See vol. ii. p. 74.)]
+
+We have every now and then motions for disbanding Hessians and
+Hanoverians,[1] alias mercenaries; but they come to nothing. To-day the
+party have declared that they have done for this session; so you will
+hear little more but of fine equipages for Flanders: our troops are
+actually marched, and the officers begin to follow them--I hope they
+know whither! You know in the last war in Spain, Lord Peterborough[2]
+rode galloping about to inquire for his army.
+
+[Footnote 1: The employment of Hessian and Hanoverian troops in this war
+was not only the subject of frequent complaints in Parliament, but was
+also the cause of very general dissatisfaction in the country, where it
+was commonly regarded as one of the numerous instances in which the
+Ministers sacrificed the interests of England from an unworthy desire to
+maintain their places by humouring the king's preference for his native
+land.]
+
+[Footnote 2: Lord Peterborough is celebrated by Pope as
+
+            taming the genius of the arid plain
+    Almost as quickly as he conquered Spain:
+
+not that he did conquer Spain; but by an extraordinary combination of
+hardihood and skill he took Barcelona, which had defied all previous
+attacks; and, in the confidence inspired by this important success, he
+offered Archduke Charles to escort him to Madrid, so that he might be
+crowned King of Spain in that capital. But the Archduke, under the
+advice of some of his own countrymen, who were jealous of his influence,
+rejected the plan.]
+
+But to come to more _real_ contests; Handel has set up an Oratorio
+against the Operas, and succeeds. He has hired all the goddesses from
+farces and the singers of _Roast Beef_[1] from between the acts at both
+theatres, with a man with one note in his voice, and a girl without ever
+an one; and so they sing, and make brave hallelujahs; and the good
+company encore the recitative, if it happens to have any cadence like
+what they call a tune. I was much diverted the other night at the opera;
+two gentlewomen sat before my sister, and not knowing her, discoursed at
+their ease. Says one, "Lord! how fine Mr. W. is!" "Yes," replied the
+other, with a tone of saying sentences, "some men love to be
+particularly so, your _petit-maîtres_--but they are not always the
+brightest of their sex."--Do thank me for this period! I am sure you
+will enjoy it as much as we did.
+
+[Footnote 1: It was customary at this time for the galleries to call for
+a ballad called "The Roast Beef of Old England" between the acts, or
+before or after the play.--WALPOLE.]
+
+I shall be very glad of my things, and approve entirely of your
+precautions; Sir R. will be quite happy, for there is no telling you how
+impatient he is for his Dominchin. Adieu!
+
+
+_BATTLE OF DETTINGEN--DEATH OF LORD WILMINGTON._
+
+TO SIR HORACE MANN.
+
+HOUGHTON, _July_ 4, 1743.
+
+I hear no particular news here, and I don't pretend to send you the
+common news; for as I must have it first from London, you will have it
+from thence sooner in the papers than in my letters. There have been
+great rejoicings for the victory; which I am convinced is very
+considerable by the pains the Jacobites take to persuade it is not. My
+Lord Carteret's Hanoverian articles have much offended; his express has
+been burlesqued a thousand ways. By all the letters that arrive, the
+loss of the French turns out more considerable than by the first
+accounts: they have dressed up the battle into a victory for
+themselves--I hope they will always have such! By their not having
+declared war with us, one should think they intended a peace. It is
+allowed that our fine horse did us no honour: the victory was gained by
+the foot. Two of their princes of the blood, the Prince de Dombes, and
+the Count d'Eu his brother, were wounded, and several of their first
+nobility. Our prisoners turn out but seventy-two officers, besides the
+private men; and by the printed catalogue, I don't think many of great
+family. Marshal Noailles' mortal wound is quite vanished, and Duc
+d'Aremberg's shrunk to a very slight one. The King's glory remains in
+its first bloom.
+
+Lord Wilmington is dead.[1] I believe the civil battle for his post will
+be tough. Now we shall see what service Lord Carteret's Hanoverians will
+do him. You don't think the crisis unlucky for him, do you? If you
+wanted a Treasury, should you choose to have been in Arlington Street,
+or driving by the battle of Dettingen? You may imagine our Court wishes
+for Mr. Pelham. I don't know any one who wishes for Lord Bath but
+himself--I believe that is a pretty substantial wish.
+
+[Footnote 1: Formerly Sir Spencer Compton, and successor of Sir R.
+Walpole at the Treasury. He was succeeded by Mr. Pelham, a brother of
+the Duke of Newcastle.]
+
+I have got the Life of King Theodore, but I don't know how to convey
+it--I will inquire for some way.
+
+We are quite alone. You never saw anything so unlike as being here five
+months out of place, to the congresses of a fortnight in place; but you
+know the "Justum et tenacem propositi virum"[1] can amuse himself
+without the "Civium ardor!" As I have not so much dignity of character
+to fill up my time, I could like a little more company. With all this
+leisure, you may imagine that I might as well be writing an ode or so
+upon the victory; but as I cannot build upon the Laureate's[2] place
+till I know whether Lord Carteret or Mr. Pelham will carry the
+Treasury, I have bounded my compliments to a slender collection of
+quotations against I should have any occasion for them. Here are some
+fine lines from Lord Halifax's[3] poem on the battle of the Boyne--
+
+    The King leads on, the King does all inflame,
+    The King;--and carries millions in the name.
+
+[Footnote 1: A quotation from Horace, Odes iii. 3.]
+
+[Footnote 2: The Poet Laureate was Colley Cibber.]
+
+[Footnote 3: The celebrated Chancellor of the Exchequer, Charles
+Montagu, was raised to the peerage as Earl of Halifax. In conjunction
+with Prior, he wrote the "Country and City Mouse," in ridicule of
+Dryden's "Hind and Panther."]
+
+Then follows a simile about a deluge, which you may imagine; but the
+next lines are very good:
+
+    So on the foe the firm battalions prest,
+    And he, like the tenth wave, drove on the rest.
+    Fierce, gallant, young, he shot through ev'ry place,
+    Urging their flight, and hurrying on the chase,
+    He hung upon their rear, or lighten'd in their face.
+
+The next are a magnificent compliment, and, as far as verse goes, to be
+sure very applicable.
+
+    Stop, stop! brave Prince, allay that generous flame;
+    Enough is given to England and to Fame.
+    Remember, Sir, you in the centre stand;
+    Europe's divided interests you command,
+    All their designs uniting in your hand.
+    Down from your throne descends the golden chain
+    Which does the fabric of our world sustain,
+    That once dissolved by any fatal stroke,
+    The scheme of all our happiness is broke.
+
+Adieu! my dear Sir; pray for peace!
+
+
+_FRENCH ACTORS AT CLIFDEN--A NEW ROMAN CATHOLIC MIRACLE--LADY MARY
+WORTLEY._
+
+TO SIR HORACE MANN.
+
+HOUGHTON, _Sept._ 7, 1743.
+
+My letters are now at their _ne plus ultra_ of nothingness; so you may
+hope they will grow better again. I shall certainly go to town soon, for
+my patience is worn out. Yesterday, the weather grew cold; I put on _a
+new_ waistcoat for its being winter's birthday--the season I am forced
+to love; for summer has no charms for me when I pass it in the country.
+
+We are expecting another battle, and a congress at the same time.
+Ministers seem to be flocking to Aix la Chapelle: and, what will much
+surprise you, unless you have lived long enough not to be surprised, is,
+that Lord Bolingbroke has hobbled the same way too--you will suppose, as
+a minister for France; I tell you, no. My uncle [_old_ Horace], who is
+here, was yesterday stumping along the gallery with a very political
+march: my Lord asked him whither he was going. Oh, said I, to Aix la
+Chapelle.
+
+You ask me about the marrying Princesses. I know not a tittle. Princess
+Louisa seems to be going, her clothes are bought; but marrying our
+daughters makes no conversation. For either of the other two, all
+thoughts seem to be dropped of it. The Senate of Sweden design
+themselves to choose a wife for their man of Lubeck.
+
+The City, and our supreme governors, the mob, are very angry that there
+is a troop of French players at Clifden. One of them was lately
+impertinent to a countryman, who thrashed him. His Royal Highness sent
+angrily to know the cause. The fellow replied, "he thought to have
+pleased his Highness in beating one of them, who had tried to kill his
+father and had wounded his brother." This was not easy to answer.
+
+I delight in Prince Craon's exact intelligence! For his satisfaction, I
+can tell him that numbers, even here, would believe any story full as
+absurd as that of the King and my Lord Stair; or that very one, if
+anybody will write it over. Our faith in politics will match any
+Neapolitan's in religion. A political missionary will make more converts
+in a county progress than a Jesuit in the whole empire of China, and
+will produce more preposterous miracles. Sir Watkin Williams, at the
+last Welsh races, convinced the whole principality (by reading a letter
+that affirmed it), that the King was not within two miles of the battle
+of Dettingen. We are not good at hitting off anti-miracles, the only way
+of defending one's own religion. I have read an admirable story of the
+Duke of Buckingham, who, when James II. sent a priest to him to persuade
+him to turn Papist, and was plied by him with miracles, told the doctor,
+that if miracles were proofs of a religion, the Protestant cause was as
+well supplied as theirs. We have lately had a very extraordinary one
+near my estate in the country. A very holy man, as you might be, Doctor,
+was travelling on foot, and was benighted. He came to the cottage of a
+poor dowager, who had nothing in the house for herself and daughter but
+a couple of eggs and a slice of bacon. However, as she was a pious
+widow, she made the good man welcome. In the morning, at taking leave,
+the saint made her over to God for payment, and prayed that whatever she
+should do as soon as he was gone she might continue to do all day. This
+was a very unlimited request, and, unless the saint was a prophet too,
+might not have been very pleasant retribution. The good woman, who
+minded her affairs, and was not to be put out of her way, went about her
+business. She had a piece of coarse cloth to make a couple of shifts for
+herself and child. She no sooner began to measure it but the yard fell
+a-measuring, and there was no stopping it. It was sunset before the good
+woman had time to take breath. She was almost stifled, for she was up to
+her ears in ten thousand yards of cloth. She could have afforded to have
+sold Lady Mary Wortley a clean shift, of the usual coarseness she wears,
+for a groat halfpenny.
+
+I wish you would tell the Princess this story. Madame Riccardi, or the
+little Countess d'Elbenino, will doat on it. I don't think it will be
+out of Pandolfini's way, if you tell it to the little Albizzi. You see I
+have not forgot the tone of my Florentine acquaintance. I know I should
+have translated it to them: you remember what admirable work I used to
+make of such stories in broken Italian. I have heard old Churchill tell
+Bussy English puns out of jest-books: particularly a reply about eating
+hare, which he translated, "j'ai mon ventre plein de poil." Adieu!
+
+
+_DEATH OF HIS FATHER--MATTHEWS AND LESTOCK IN THE
+MEDITERRANEAN--THOMSON'S "TANCRED AND SIGISMUNDA"--AKENSIDE'S
+ODES--CONUNDRUMS IN FASHION._
+
+TO SIR HORACE MANN.
+
+ARLINGTON STREET, _March_ 29, 1745.
+
+I begged your brother to tell you what it was impossible for me to tell
+you. You share nearly 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 moral; improper for me to write upon, and too
+distressful for us both!--a death is only to be felt, never to be talked
+over by those it touches!
+
+I had yesterday your letter of three sheets: I began to flatter myself
+that the storm was blown over, but I tremble to think of the danger you
+are in! a danger, in which even the protection of the great friend you
+have lost could have been of no service to you. How ridiculous it seems
+for me to renew protestations of my friendship for you, at an instant
+when my father is just dead, and the Spaniards just bursting into
+Tuscany! How empty a charm would my name have, when all my interest and
+significance are buried in my father's grave! All hopes of present
+peace, the only thing that could save you, seem vanished. We expect
+every day to hear of the French declaration of war against Holland. The
+new Elector of Bavaria is French, like his father; and the King of Spain
+is not dead. I don't know how to talk to you. I have not even a belief
+that the Spaniards will spare Tuscany. My dear child, what will become
+of you? whither will you retire till a peace restores you to your
+ministry? for upon that distant view alone I repose!
+
+We are every day nearer confusion. The King is in as bad humour as a
+monarch can be; he wants to go abroad, and is detained by the
+Mediterranean affair; the inquiry into which was moved by a Major
+Selwyn, a dirty pensioner, half-turned patriot, by the Court being
+overstocked with votes. This inquiry takes up the whole time of the
+House of Commons, but I don't see what conclusion it can have. My
+confinement has kept me from being there, except the first day; and all
+I know of what is yet come out is, as it was stated by a Scotch member
+the other day, "that there had been one (Matthews)[1] with a bad head,
+another (Lestock) with a worse heart, and four (the captains of the
+inactive ships) with na heart at all." Among the numerous visits of form
+that I have received, one was from my Lord Sandys: as we two could only
+converse upon general topics, we fell upon this of the Mediterranean,
+and I made _him_ allow, "that, to be sure, there is not so bad a court
+of justice in the world as the House of Commons; and how hard it is upon
+any man to have his cause tried there!"...
+
+[Footnote 1: Admiral Matthews, an officer of great courage and skill,
+was Commander-in-chief of the Mediterranean fleet. Lestock, his second
+in command, was also a skilful officer; but the two were on bad terms,
+and when, in February, 1744, Matthews attacked the Spanish fleet,
+Lestock disobeyed his signals, and by his misconduct deprived Matthews
+of a splendid victory, which was clearly within his grasp.
+Court-martials were held on the conduct of both officers; but the
+Admiralty was determined to crush Matthews, as being a member of the
+House of Commons and belonging to the party of Opposition, and the
+consequence was that, though Lestock's misconduct was clearly proved, he
+was acquitted, and Matthews was sentenced to be cashiered, and declared
+incapable of any further employment in his Majesty's service. The whole
+is perhaps the most disgraceful transaction in the history of the navy
+or of the country. (See the Editor's "History of the British Navy," i.
+203-214.)]
+
+The town flocks to a new play of Thomson's called "Tancred and
+Sigismunda:" it is very dull; I have read it. I cannot bear modern
+poetry; these refiners of the purity of the stage, and of the
+incorrectness of English verse, are most wofully insipid. I had rather
+have written the most absurd lines in Lee, than "Leonidas" or "The
+Seasons;" as I had rather be put into the round-house for a wrong-headed
+quarrel, than sup quietly at eight o'clock with my grandmother. There is
+another of these tame genius's, a Mr. Akenside, who writes Odes: in one
+he has lately published, he says, "Light the tapers, urge the fire."[1]
+Had not you rather make gods "jostle in the dark," than light the
+candles for fear they should break their heads? One Russel, a mimic, has
+a puppet-show to ridicule Operas; I hear, very dull, not to mention its
+being twenty years too late: it consists of three acts, with foolish
+Italian songs burlesqued in Italian.
+
+[Footnote 1: Walpole's quotation, however, is incorrect; the poet wrote:
+
+    Urge the warm bowl, and ruddy fire.]
+
+There is a very good quarrel 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 a trust."
+You know how mad she is, and how capable of such a stroke. 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.
+
+It is the present fashion to make conundrums: there are books of them
+printed, and produced at all assemblies: they are full silly enough to
+be made a fashion. I will tell you the most renowned: "Why is my uncle
+Horace like two people conversing?--Because he is both teller and
+auditor." This was Winnington's....
+
+I will take the first opportunity to send Dr. Cocchi his translated
+book; I have not yet seen it myself.
+
+Adieu! my dearest child! I write with a house full of relations, and
+must conclude. Heaven preserve you and Tuscany.
+
+
+_BATTLE OF FONTENOY--THE BALLAD OF THE PRINCE OF WALES._
+
+TO SIR HORACE MANN.
+
+ARLINGTON STREET, _May_ 11, 1745.
+
+I stayed till to-day, to be able to give you some account of the battle
+of Tournay: the outlines you will have heard already. We don't allow it
+to be a victory on the French side: but that is, just as a woman is not
+called _Mrs._ till she is married, though she may have had half-a-dozen
+natural children. In short, we remained upon the field of battle three
+hours; I fear, too many of us remain there still! without palliating, it
+is certainly a heavy stroke. We never lost near so many officers. I pity
+the Duke [of Cumberland], for it is almost the first battle of
+consequence that we ever lost. By the letters arrived to-day, we find
+that Tournay still holds out. There are certainly killed Sir James
+Campbell, General Ponsonby, Colonel Carpenter, Colonel Douglas, young
+Ross, Colonel Montagu, Gee, Berkeley, and Kellet. Mr. Vanburgh is since
+dead. Most of the young men of quality in the Guards are wounded. I have
+had the vast fortune to have nobody hurt, for whom I was in the least
+interested. Mr. Conway, in particular, has highly distinguished himself;
+he and Lord Petersham, who is slightly wounded, are most commended;
+though none behaved ill but the Dutch horse. There has been but very
+little consternation here: the King minded it so little, that being set
+out for Hanover, and blown back into Harwich roads since the news came,
+he could not be persuaded to return, but sailed yesterday with the fair
+wind. I believe you will have the _Gazette_ sent to-night; but lest it
+should not be printed time enough, here is a list of the numbers, as it
+came over this morning:
+
+British foot          1237 killed.
+Ditto horse             90 ditto.
+Ditto foot            1968 wounded.
+Ditto horse            232 ditto.
+Ditto foot             457 missing.
+Ditto horse             18 ditto.
+Hanoverian foot        432 killed.
+Ditto horse             78 ditto.
+Ditto foot             950 wounded.
+Ditto horse            192 ditto.
+Ditto horse and foot    53 missing.
+Dutch                  625 killed and wounded.
+Ditto                 1019 missing.
+
+So the whole _hors de combat_ is above seven thousand three hundred. The
+French own the loss of three thousand; I don't believe many more, for it
+was a most rash and desperate perseverance on our side. The Duke behaved
+very bravely and humanely; but this will not have advanced the peace.
+
+However coolly the Duke may have behaved, and coldly his father, at
+least his brother [the Prince of Wales] has outdone both. He not only
+went to the play the night the news came, but in two days made a ballad.
+It is in imitation of the Regent's style, and has miscarried in nothing
+but the language, the thoughts, and the poetry. Did not I tell you in my
+last that he was going to act Paris in Congreve's "Masque"? The song is
+addressed to the goddesses.
+
+    I.
+
+    Venez, mes chères Déesses,
+    Venez calmer mon chagrin;
+    Aidez, mes belles Princesses,
+    A le noyer dans le vin.
+    Poussons cette douce Ivresse
+    Jusqu'au milieu de la nuit,
+    Et n'écoutons que la tendresse
+    D'un charmant vis-à-vis.
+
+    II.
+
+    Quand le chagrin me dévore,
+    Vite à table je me mets,
+    Loin des objets que j'abhorre,
+    Avec joie j'y trouve la paix.
+    Peu d'amis, restes d'un naufrage
+    Je rassemble autour de moi,
+    Et je me ris de l'étalage
+    Qu'a chez lui toujours un Roi.
+
+    III.
+
+    Que m'importe, que l'Europe
+    Ait un, ou plusieurs tyrans?
+    Prions seulement Calliope,
+    Qu'elle inspire nos vers, nos chants
+    Laissons Mars et toute la gloire;
+    Livrons nous tous à l'amour;
+    Que Bacchus nous donne à boire;
+    A ces deux faisons la cour.
+
+    IV.
+
+    Passons ainsi notre vie,
+    Sans rêver à ce qui suit;
+    Avec ma chère Sylvie
+    Le tems trop vîte me fuit.
+    Mais si, par un malheur extrême,
+    Je perdois cet objet charmant,
+    Oui, cette compagnie même
+    Ne me tiendroit un moment.
+
+    V.
+
+    Me livrant à ma tristesse,
+    Toujours plein de mon chagrin,
+    Je n'aurois plus d'allégresse
+    Pour mettre Bathurst en train:
+    Ainsi pour vous tenir en joie
+    Invoquez toujours les Dieux,
+    Qu'elle vive et qu'elle soit
+    Avec nous toujours heureuse!
+
+Adieu! I am in great hurry.
+
+
+_M. DE GRIGNAN--LIVY'S PATAVINITY--THE MARÉCHAL DE BELLEISLE--WHISTON
+PROPHECIES THE DESTRUCTION OF THE WORLD--THE DUKE OF NEWCASTLE._
+
+TO GEORGE MONTAGU, ESQ.
+
+[_August_ 1, 1745.]
+
+Dear George,--I cannot help thinking you laugh at me when you say such
+very civil things of my letters, and yet, coming from you, I would fain
+not have it all flattery:
+
+    So much the more, as, from a little elf,
+    I've had a high opinion of myself,
+    Though sickly, slender, and not large of limb.
+
+With this modest prepossession, you may be sure I like to have you
+commend me, whom, after I have done with myself, I admire of all men
+living. I only beg that you will commend me no more: it is very
+ruinous; and praise, like other debts, ceases to be due on being paid.
+One comfort indeed is, that it is as seldom paid as other debts.
+
+I have been very fortunate lately: I have met with an extreme good print
+of M. de Grignan;[1] I am persuaded, very like; and then it has his
+_touffe ébourifée_; I don't, indeed, know what that was, but I am sure
+it is in the print. None of the critics could ever make out what Livy's
+Patavinity is; though they are all confident it is in his writings. I
+have heard within these few days what, for your sake, I wish I could
+have told you sooner--that there is in Belleisle's suite the Abbé
+Perrin, who published Madame Sévigné's letters, and who has the
+originals in his hands. How one should have liked to have known him! The
+Marshal[2] was privately in London last Friday. He is entertained to-day
+at Hampton Court by the Duke of Grafton. Don't you believe it was to
+settle the binding the scarlet thread in the window, when the French
+shall come in unto the land to possess it? I don't at all wonder at any
+shrewd observations the Marshal has made on our situation. The bringing
+him here at all--the sending him away now--in short, the whole series of
+our conduct convinces me, that we shall soon see as silent a change as
+that in "The Rehearsal," of King Usher and King Physician. It may well
+be so, when the disposition of the drama is in the hands of the Duke of
+Newcastle--those hands that are always groping and sprawling, and
+fluttering, and hurrying on the rest of his precipitate person. But
+there is no describing him but as M. Courcelle, a French prisoner, did
+t'other day: "Je ne scais pas," dit il, "je ne scaurois m'exprimer, mais
+il a un certain tatillonage." If one could conceive a dead body hung in
+chains, always wanting to be hung somewhere else, one should have a
+comparative idea of him.
+
+[Footnote 1: M. de Grignan son-in-law to Mme. de Sévigné, the greater
+part of whose letters are to his wife.]
+
+[Footnote 2: The Maréchal de Belleisle and his younger brother, the
+Comte de Belleisle, were the grandsons of Fouquet, the Finance Minister
+treated with such cruelty and injustice by Louis XIV. The Parisians
+nicknamed the two brothers "Imagination" and "Common Sense." The Marshal
+was joined with the Marshal de Broglie in the disastrous expedition
+against Prague in the winter of 1742; when, though they succeeded in
+taking and occupying the city for a time, they were afterwards forced to
+evacuate it; and though Belleisle conducted the retreat with great
+courage and skill, the army, which had numbered fifty thousand men when
+it crossed the Rhine, scarcely exceeded twelve thousand when it regained
+the French territory. (See the Editor's "History of France under the
+Bourbons," c. xxv.)]
+
+For my own part, I comfort myself with the humane reflection of the
+Irishman in the ship that was on fire--I am but a passenger! If I were
+not so indolent, I think I should rather put in practice the late
+Duchess of Bolton's geographical resolution of going to China, when
+Whiston told her the world would be burnt in three years. Have you any
+philosophy? Tell me what you think. It is quite the fashion to talk of
+the French coming here. Nobody sees it in any other light but as a thing
+to be talked of, not to be precautioned against. Don't you remember a
+report of the plague being in the City, and everybody went to the house
+where it was to see it? You see I laugh about it, for I would not for
+the world be so unenglished as to do otherwise. I am persuaded that
+when Count Saxe,[1] with ten thousand men, is within a day's march of
+London, people will be hiring windows at Charing-cross and Cheapside to
+see them pass by. 'Tis our characteristic to take dangers for sights,
+and evils for curiosities.
+
+[Footnote 1: The great Maréchal Saxe, Commander-in-chief of the French
+army in Flanders during the war of the Austrian succession.]
+
+Adieu! dear George: I am laying in scraps of Cato against it may be
+necessary to take leave of one's correspondents _à la Romaine_, and
+before the play itself is suppressed by a _lettre de cachet_ to the
+book-sellers.
+
+P.S.--Lord! 'tis the first of August,[1] 1745, a holiday that is going
+to be turned out of the almanack!
+
+[Footnote 1: August 1 was the anniversary of the accession of George I.]
+
+
+_INVASION OF SCOTLAND BY THE YOUNG PRETENDER--FORCES ARE SAID TO BE
+PREPARING IN FRANCE TO JOIN HIM._
+
+TO SIR HORACE MANN.
+
+ARLINGTON STREET, _Sept._ 6, 1745.
+
+It would have been inexcusable in me, in our present circumstances, and
+after all I have promised you, not to have written to you for this last
+month, if I had been in London; but I have been at Mount Edgecumbe, and
+so constantly upon the road, that I neither received your letters, had
+time to write, or knew what to write. I came back last night, and found
+three packets from you, which I have no time to answer, and but just
+time to read. The confusion I have found, and the danger we are in,
+prevent my talking of anything else. The young Pretender, at the head of
+three thousand men, has got a march on General Cope, who is not eighteen
+hundred strong; and when the last accounts came away, was fifty miles
+nearer Edinburgh than Cope, and by this time is there. The clans will
+not rise for the Government: the Dukes of Argyll and Athol are come post
+to town, not having been able to raise a man. The young Duke of Gordon
+sent for his uncle, and told him he must arm their clan. "They are in
+arms."--"They must march against the rebels."--"They will wait on the
+Prince of Wales." The Duke flew in a passion; his uncle pulled out a
+pistol, and told him it was in vain to dispute. Lord Loudon, Lord
+Fortrose, and Lord Panmure have been very zealous, and have raised some
+men; but I look upon Scotland as gone! I think of what King William said
+to Duke Hamilton, when he was extolling Scotland: "My Lord, I only wish
+it was a hundred thousand miles off, and that you was king of it!"
+
+There are two manifestoes published, signed Charles Prince, Regent for
+his father, King of Scotland, England, France, and Ireland. By one, he
+promises to preserve everybody in their just rights; and orders all
+persons who have public monies in their hands to bring it to him; and by
+the other dissolves the union between England and Scotland. But all this
+is not the worst! Notice came yesterday, that there are ten thousand
+men, thirty transports, and ten men-of-war at Dunkirk. Against this
+force we have--I don't know what--scarce fears! Three thousand Dutch we
+hope are by this time landed in Scotland; three more are coming hither.
+We have sent for ten regiments from Flanders, which may be here in a
+week, and we have fifteen men-of-war in the Downs. I am grieved to tell
+you all this; but when it is so, how can I avoid telling you? Your
+brother is just come in, who says he has written to you--I have not time
+to expiate.
+
+My Lady O[rford] is arrived; I hear she says, only to endeavour to get a
+certain allowance. Her mother has sent to offer her the use of her
+house. She is a poor weak woman. I can say nothing to Marquis Ricardi,
+nor think of him; only tell him that I will when I have time.
+
+My sister [Lady Maria Walpole] has married herself, that is, declared
+she will, to young Churchill. It is a foolish match; but I have nothing
+to do with it. Adieu! my dear Sir; excuse my haste, but you must imagine
+that one is not much at leisure to write long letters--hope if you can!
+
+
+_THIS AND THE FOLLOWING LETTERS GIVE A LIVELY ACCOUNT OF THE PROGRESS OF
+THE REBELLION TILL THE RETREAT FROM DERBY, AFTER WHICH NO PARTICULAR
+INTEREST ATTACHES TO IT._
+
+TO SIR HORACE MANN.
+
+ARLINGTON STREET, _Sept._ 20, 1745.
+
+One really don't know what to write to you: the accounts from Scotland
+vary perpetually, and at best are never very certain. I was just going
+to tell you that the rebels are in England; but my uncle [_old_ Horace]
+is this moment come in, and says, that an express came last night with
+an account of their being at Edinburgh to the number of five thousand.
+This sounds great, to have walked through a kingdom, and taken
+possession of the capital! But this capital is an open town; and the
+castle impregnable, and in our possession. There never was so
+extraordinary a sort of rebellion! One can't tell what assurances of
+support they may have from the Jacobites in England, or from the French;
+but nothing of either sort has yet appeared--and if there does not,
+never was so desperate an enterprise. One can hardly believe that the
+English are more disaffected than the Scotch; and among the latter, no
+persons of property have joined them: both nations seem to profess a
+neutrality. Their money is all gone, and they subsist merely by levying
+contributions. But, sure, banditti can never conquer a kingdom! On the
+other hand, what cannot any number of men do, who meet no opposition?
+They have hitherto taken no place but open towns, nor have they any
+artillery for a siege but one-pounders. Three battalions of Dutch are
+landed at Gravesend, and are ordered to Lancashire: we expect every
+moment to hear that the rest are got to Scotland; none of our own are
+come yet. Lord Granville and his faction persist in persuading the King,
+that it is an affair of no consequence; and for the Duke of Newcastle,
+he is glad when the rebels make any progress, in order to confute Lord
+Granville's assertions. The best of our situation is, our strength at
+sea: the Channel is well guarded, and twelve men-of-war more are arrived
+from Rowley. Vernon, that simple noisy creature, has hit upon a scheme
+that is of great service; he has laid Folkstone cutters all round the
+coast, which are continually relieved, and bring constant notice of
+everything that stirs. I just now hear that the Duke of Bedford declares
+that he will be amused no longer, but will ask the King's leave to raise
+a regiment. The Duke of Montagu has a troop of horse ready, and the Duke
+of Devonshire is raising men in Derbyshire. The Yorkshiremen, headed by
+the Archbishop [Herring] and Lord Malton, meet the gentlemen of the
+county the day after to-morrow, to defend that part of England. Unless
+we have more ill fortune than is conceivable, or the general supineness
+continues, it is impossible but we must get over this. You desire me to
+send you news: I confine myself to tell you nothing but what you may
+depend upon; and leave you in a fright rather than deceive you. I
+confess my own apprehensions are not near so strong as they were; and if
+we get over this, I shall believe that we never can be hurt; for we
+never can be more exposed to danger. Whatever disaffection there is to
+the present family, it plainly does not proceed from love to the other.
+
+My Lady O[rford] makes little progress in popularity. Neither the
+protection of my Lady Pomfret's prudery, nor of my Lady Townshend's
+libertinism, do her any service. The women stare at her, think her
+ugly, awkward, and disagreeable; and what is worse, the men think so
+too. For the height of mortification, the King has declared publicly to
+the Ministry, that he has been told of the great civilities which he was
+said to show to her at Hanover; that he protests he showed her only the
+common civilities due to any English lady that comes thither; that he
+never intended to take any particular notice of her; nor had, nor would
+let my Lady Yarmouth. In fact, my Lady Yarmouth peremptorily refused to
+carry her to court here; and when she did go with my Lady Pomfret, the
+King but just spoke to her. She declares her intention of staying in
+England, and protests against all lawsuits and violences; and says she
+only asks articles of separation, and to have her allowance settled by
+any two arbitrators chosen by my brother and herself. I have met her
+twice at my Lady Townshend's, just as I used at Florence. She dresses
+English and plays at whist. I forgot to tell a _bon-mot_ of Leheup on
+her first coming over; he was asked if he would not go and see her? He
+replied, "No, I never visit modest women." Adieu! my dear child! I
+flatter myself you will collect hopes from this letter.
+
+
+_DEFEAT OF COPE._
+
+TO SIR HORACE MANN.
+
+ARLINGTON STREET, _Sept._ 27, 1745.
+
+I can't doubt but the joy of the Jacobites has reached Florence before
+this letter. Your two or three Irish priests, I forget their names,
+will have set out to take possession of abbey lands here. I feel for
+what you will feel, and for the insulting things that will be said to
+you upon the battle we lost in Scotland; but all this is nothing to what
+it prefaces. The express came hither on Tuesday morning, but the Papists
+knew it on Sunday night. Cope lay in face of the rebels all Friday; he
+scarce two thousand strong, they vastly superior, though we don't know
+their numbers. The military people say that he should have attacked
+them. However, we are sadly convinced that they are not such raw
+ragamuffins as they were represented. The rotation that has been
+established in that country, to give all the Highlanders the benefit of
+serving in the independent companies, has trained and disciplined them.
+Macdonald (I suppose, he from Naples), who is reckoned a very
+experienced able officer, is said to have commanded them, and to be
+dangerously wounded. One does not hear the Boy's personal valour cried
+up; by which I conclude he was not in the action. Our dragoons most
+shamefully fled without striking a blow, and are with Cope, who escaped
+in a boat to Berwick. I pity poor him, who with no shining abilities,
+and no experience, and no force, was sent to fight for a crown! He never
+saw a battle but that of Dettingen, where he got his red ribbon:
+Churchill, whose led-captain he was, and my Lord Harrington, had pushed
+him up to his misfortune. We have lost all our artillery, five hundred
+men taken--and _three_ killed, and several officers, as you will see in
+the papers. This defeat has frightened everybody but those it rejoices,
+and those it should frighten most; but my Lord Granville still buoys up
+the King's spirits, and persuades him it is nothing. He uses his
+Ministers as ill as possible, and discourages everybody that would risk
+their lives and fortunes with him. Marshal Wade is marching against the
+rebels; but the King will not let him take above eight thousand men; so
+that if they come into England, another battle, with no advantage on our
+side, may determine our fate. Indeed, they don't seem so unwise as to
+risk their cause upon so precarious an event; but rather to design to
+establish themselves in Scotland, till they can be supported from
+France, and be set up with taking Edinburgh Castle, where there is to
+the value of a million, and which they would make a stronghold. It is
+scarcely victualled for a month, and must surely fall into their hands.
+Our coasts are greatly guarded, and London kept in awe by the arrival of
+the guards. I don't believe what I have been told this morning, that
+more troops are sent for from Flanders, and aid asked of Denmark.
+
+Prince Charles has called a Parliament in Scotland for the 7th of
+October; ours does not meet till the 17th, so that even in the show of
+liberty and laws they are beforehand with us. With all this, we hear of
+no men of quality or fortune having joined him but Lord Elcho, whom you
+have seen at Florence; and the Duke of Peith, a silly race horsing boy,
+who is said to be killed in this battle. But I gather no confidence
+from hence: my father always said, "If you see them come again, they
+will begin by their lowest people; their chiefs will not appear till the
+end." His prophecies verify every day!
+
+The town is still empty; on this point only the English act contrary to
+their custom, for they don't throng to see a Parliament, though it is
+likely to grow a curiosity!...
+
+
+_GENERAL WADE IS MARCHING TO SCOTLAND--VIOLENT PROCLAMATION OF THE
+PRETENDER._
+
+TO SIR HORACE MANN.
+
+ARLINGTON STREET, _Oct._ 21, 1745.
+
+I had been almost as long without any of your letters as you had without
+mine; but yesterday I received one, dated the 5th of this month, N.S.
+
+The rebels have not left their camp near Edinburgh, and, I suppose, will
+not now, unless to retreat into the Highlands. General Wade was to march
+yesterday from Doncaster for Scotland. By their not advancing, I
+conclude that either the Boy and his council could not prevail on the
+Highlanders to leave their own country, or that they were not strong
+enough, and still wait for foreign assistance, which, in a new
+declaration, he intimates that he still expects. One only ship, I
+believe, a Spanish one, is got to them with arms, and Lord John Drummond
+and some people of quality on board. We don't hear that the younger Boy
+is of the number. Four ships sailed from Corunna; the one that got to
+Scotland, one taken by a privateer of Bristol, and one lost on the Irish
+coast; the fourth is not heard of. At Edinburgh and thereabouts they
+commit the most horrid barbarities. We last night expected as bad here:
+information was given of an intended insurrection and massacre by the
+Papists; all the Guards were ordered out, and the Tower shut up at
+seven. I cannot be surprised at anything, considering the supineness of
+the Ministry--nobody has yet been taken up!
+
+The Parliament met on Thursday. I don't think, considering the crisis,
+that the House was very full. Indeed, many of the Scotch members cannot
+come if they would. The young Pretender had published a declaration,
+threatening to confiscate the estates of the Scotch that should come to
+Parliament, and making it treason for the English. The only points that
+have been before the House, the address and the suspension of the Habeas
+Corpus, met with obstructions from the Jacobites. By this we may expect
+what spirit they will show hereafter. With all this, I am far from
+thinking that they are so confident and sanguine as their friends at
+Rome. I blame the Chutes extremely for cockading themselves: why take a
+part, when they are only travelling? I should certainly retire to
+Florence on this occasion.
+
+You may imagine how little I like our situation; but I don't despair.
+The little use they made, or could make of their victory; their not
+having marched into England; their miscarriage at the Castle of
+Edinburgh; the arrival of our forces, and the non-arrival of any French
+or Spanish, make me conceive great hopes of getting over this ugly
+business. But it is still an affair wherein the chance of battles, or
+perhaps of one battle, may decide.
+
+I write you but short letters, considering the circumstances of the
+time; but I hate to send you paragraphs only to contradict them again: I
+still less choose to forge events; and, indeed, am glad I have so few to
+tell you.
+
+My Lady O[rford] has forced herself upon her mother, who receives her
+very coolly: she talks highly of her demands, and quietly of her
+methods: the fruitlessness of either will, I hope, soon send her back--I
+am sorry it must be to you!
+
+You mention Holdisworth:[1] he has had the confidence to come and visit
+me within these ten days; and (I suppose, from the overflowing of his
+joy) talked a great deal and quick--with as little sense as when he was
+more tedious.
+
+[Footnote 1: A nonjuror, who travelled with Mr. George Pitt.--WALPOLE.]
+
+Since I wrote this, I hear the Countess [of Orford] has told her mother,
+that she thinks her husband the best of our family, and me the
+worst--nobody so bad, except you! I don't wonder at my being so ill with
+her; but what have you done? or is it, that we are worse than anybody,
+because we know more of her than anybody does? Adieu!
+
+
+_GALLANT RESISTANCE OF CARLISLE--MR. PITT ATTACKS THE MINISTRY._
+
+TO SIR HORACE MANN.
+
+ARLINGTON STREET, _Nov._ 22, 1745.
+
+For these two days we have been expecting news of a battle. Wade marched
+last Saturday from Newcastle, and must have got up with the rebels if
+they stayed for him, though the roads are exceedingly bad and great
+quantities of snow have fallen. But last night there was some notice of
+a body of rebels being advanced to Penryth. We were put into great
+spirits by an heroic letter from the Mayor of Carlisle, who had fired on
+the rebels and made them retire; he concluded with saying, "And so I
+think the town of Carlisle has done his Majesty more service than the
+great city of Edinburgh, or than all Scotland together." But this hero,
+who was grown the whole fashion for four-and-twenty hours, had chosen to
+stop all other letters. The King spoke of him at his _levée_ with great
+encomiums; Lord Stair said, "Yes, sir, Mr. Patterson has behaved very
+bravely." The Duke of Bedford interrupted him; "My lord, his name is not
+_Paterson_; that is a Scotch name; his name is _Patinson_." But, alack!
+the next day the rebels returned, having placed the women and children
+of the country in waggons in front of their army, and forcing the
+peasants to fix the scaling-ladders. The great Mr. Pattinson, or
+Patterson (for now his name may be which one pleases), instantly
+surrendered the town, and agreed to pay two thousand pounds to save it
+from pillage. Well! then we were assured that the citadel could hold out
+seven or eight days; but did not so many hours. On mustering the
+militia, there were not found above four men in a company; and for two
+companies, which the ministry, on a report of Lord Albemarle, who said
+they were to be sent from Wade's army, thought were there, and did not
+know were not there, there was nothing but two of invalids. Colonel
+Durand, the governor, fled, because he would not sign the capitulation,
+by which the garrison, it is said, has sworn never to bear arms against
+the house of Stuart. The Colonel sent two expresses, one to Wade, and
+another to Ligonier at Preston; but the latter was playing at whist with
+Lord Harrington at Petersham. Such is our diligence and attention! All
+my hopes are in Wade, who was so sensible of the ignorance of our
+governors, that he refused to accept the command, till they consented
+that he should be subject to no kind of orders from hence. The rebels
+are reckoned up at thirteen thousand; Wade marches with about twelve;
+but if they come southward, the other army will probably be to fight
+them; the Duke is to command it, and sets out next week with another
+brigade of Guards, the Ligonier under him. There are great apprehensions
+for Chester from the Flintshire-men, who are ready to rise. A
+quartermaster, first sent to Carlisle, was seized and carried to Wade;
+he behaved most insolently; and being asked by the general, how many the
+rebels were, replied, "Enough to beat any army you have in England." A
+Mackintosh has been taken, who reduces their formidability, by being
+sent to raise two clans, and with orders, if they would not rise, at
+least to give out they had risen, for that three clans would leave the
+Pretender, unless joined by those two. Five hundred new rebels are
+arrived at Perth, where our prisoners are kept.
+
+I had this morning a subscription-book brought me for our parish; Lord
+Granville had refused to subscribe. This is in the style of his friend
+Lord Bath, who has absented himself whenever any act of authority was to
+be executed against the rebels.
+
+Five Scotch lords are going to raise regiments _à l'Angloise_! resident
+in London, while the rebels were in Scotland; they are to receive
+military emoluments for their neutrality!
+
+The _Fox_ man-of-war of 20 guns is lost off Dunbar. One Beavor, the
+captain, has done us notable service: the Pretender sent to commend his
+zeal and activity, and to tell him, that if he would return to his
+allegiance, he should soon have a flag. Beavor replied, "He never
+treated with any but principals; that if the Pretender would come on
+board him, he would talk with him." I must now tell you of our great
+Vernon: without once complaining to the Ministry, he has written to Sir
+John Philipps, a distinguished Jacobite, to complain of want of
+provisions; yet they do not venture to recall him! Yesterday they had
+another baiting from Pitt, who is ravenous for the place of Secretary at
+War: they would give it him; but as a preliminary, he insists on a
+declaration of our having nothing to do with the continent. He mustered
+his forces, but did not notify his intention; only at two o'clock
+Lyttelton said at the Treasury, that there would be business at the
+House. The motion was, to augment our naval force, which, Pitt said, was
+the only method of putting an end to the rebellion. Ships built a year
+hence to suppress an army of Highlanders, now marching through England!
+My uncle [_old_ Horace] attacked him, and congratulated his country on
+the wisdom of the modern young men; and said he had a son of
+two-and-twenty, who, he did not doubt, would come over wiser than any of
+them. Pitt was provoked, and retorted on his negotiations and
+_grey-headed_ experience. At those words, my uncle, as if he had been at
+Bartholomew fair, snatched off his wig, and showed his grey hairs, which
+made the _august senate_ laugh, and put Pitt out, who, after laughing
+himself, diverted his venom upon Mr. Pelham. Upon the question, Pitt's
+party amounted but to thirty-six: in short, he has nothing left but his
+words, and his haughtiness, and his Lytteltons, and his Grenvilles.
+Adieu!
+
+
+_THE REBEL ARMY HAS RETREATED FROM DERBY--EXPECTATION OF A FRENCH
+INVASION._
+
+TO SIR HORACE MANN.
+
+ARLINGTON STREET, _Dec._ 9, 1745.
+
+I am glad I did not write to you last post as I intended; I should have
+sent you an account that would have alarmed you, and the danger would
+have been over before the letter had crossed the sea. The Duke, from
+some strange want of intelligence, lay last week for four-and-twenty
+hours under arms at Stone, in Staffordshire, expecting the rebels every
+moment, while they were marching in all haste to Derby. The news of this
+threw the town into great consternation; but his Royal Highness repaired
+his mistake, and got to Northampton, between the Highlanders and London.
+They got nine thousand pounds at Derby, and had the books brought to
+them, and obliged everybody to give them what they had subscribed
+against them. Then they retreated a few miles, but returned again to
+Derby, got ten thousand pounds more, plundered the town, and burnt a
+house of the Countess of Exeter. They are gone again, and go back to
+Leake, in Staffordshire, but miserably harassed, and, it is said, have
+left all their cannon behind them, and twenty waggons of sick. The Duke
+has sent General Hawley with the dragoons to harass them in their
+retreat, and despatched Mr. Conway to Marshal Wade, to hasten his march
+upon the back of them. They must either go to North Wales, where they
+will probably all perish, or to Scotland, with great loss. We dread them
+no longer. We are threatened with great preparations for a French
+invasion, but the coast is exceedingly guarded; and for the people, the
+spirit against the rebels increases every day. Though they have marched
+thus into the heart of the kingdom, there has not been the least symptom
+of a rising, nor even in the great towns of which they possessed
+themselves. They have got no recruits since their first entry into
+England, excepting one gentleman in Lancashire, one hundred and fifty
+common men, and two parsons, at Manchester, and a physician from York.
+But here in London, the aversion to them is amazing: on some thoughts of
+the King's going to an encampment at Finchley,[1] the weavers not only
+offered him a thousand men, but the whole body of the Law formed
+themselves into a little army, under the command of Lord Chief Justice
+Willes, and were to have done duty at St. James's, to guard the royal
+family in the King's absence.
+
+[Footnote 1: The troops which were being collected for the Duke of
+Cumberland, as soon as he should arrive from the Continent, to march
+with against the Pretender, were in the meantime encamped on Finchley
+Common near London. The march of the Guards to the camp is the subject
+of one of Hogarth's best pictures.]
+
+But the greatest demonstration of loyalty appeared on the prisoners
+being brought to town from the Soleil prize: the young man is certainly
+Mr. Radcliffe's son; but the mob, persuaded of his being the youngest
+Pretender, could scarcely be restrained from tearing him to pieces all
+the way on the road, and at his arrival. He said he had heard of English
+mobs, but could not conceive they were so dreadful, and wished he had
+been shot at the battle of Dettingen, where he had been engaged. The
+father, whom they call Lord Derwentwater, said, on entering the Tower,
+that he had never expected to arrive there alive. For the young man, he
+must only be treated as a French captive; for the father, it is
+sufficient to produce him at the Old Bailey, and prove that he is the
+individual person condemned for the last Rebellion, and so to Tyburn.
+
+We begin to take up people, but it is with as much caution and timidity
+as women of quality begin to pawn their jewels; we have not ventured
+upon any great stone yet! The Provost of Edinburgh is in custody of a
+messenger; and the other day they seized an odd man, who goes by the
+name of Count St. Germain. He has been here these two years, and will
+not tell who he is, or whence, but professes that he does not go by his
+right name. He sings, plays on the violin wonderfully, composes, is mad,
+and not very sensible. He is called an Italian, a Spaniard, a Pole; a
+somebody that married a great fortune in Mexico, and ran away with her
+jewels to Constantinople; a priest, a fiddler, a vast nobleman. The
+Prince of Wales has had unsatiated curiosity about him, but in vain.
+However, nothing has been made out against him;[1] he is released; and,
+what convinces me that he is not a gentleman, stays here, and talks of
+his being taken up for a spy.
+
+[Footnote 1: In the beginning of the year 1755, on rumours of a great
+armament at Brest, one Virette, a Swiss, who had been a kind of
+toad-eater to this St. Germain, was denounced to Lord Holdernesse for a
+spy; but Mr. Stanley going pretty surlily to his lordship, on his
+suspecting a friend of his, Virette was declared innocent, and the
+penitent secretary of state made him the _amende honorable_ of a dinner
+in form. About the same time, a spy of ours was seized at Brest, but,
+not happening to be acquainted with Mr. Stanley, was broken upon the
+wheel.--WALPOLE.]
+
+I think these accounts, upon which you may depend, must raise your
+spirits, and figure in Mr. Chute's loyal journal.--But you don't get my
+letters: I have sent you eleven since I came to town; how many of these
+have you received? Adieu!
+
+
+_BATTLE OF CULLODEN._
+
+TO SIR HORACE MANN.
+
+ARLINGTON STREET, _April_ 25, 1746.
+
+You have bid me for some time to send you good news--well! I think I
+will. How good would you have it? must it be a total victory over the
+rebels; with not only the Boy, that is here, killed, but the other, that
+is not here, too; their whole army put to the sword, besides an infinite
+number of prisoners; all the Jacobite estates in England confiscated,
+and all those in Scotland--what would you have done with them?--or could
+you be content with something much under this? how much will you abate?
+will you compound for Lord John Drummond, taken by accident? or for
+three Presbyterian parsons, who have very poor livings, stoutly refusing
+to pay a large contribution to the rebels? Come, I will deal as well
+with you as I can, and for once, but not to make a practice of it, will
+let you have a victory! My friend, Lord Bury, arrived this morning from
+the Duke, though the news was got here before him; for, with all our
+victory, it was not thought safe to send him through the heart of
+Scotland; so he was shipped at Inverness, within an hour after the Duke
+entered the town, kept beating at sea five days, and then put on shore
+at North Berwick, from whence he came post in less than three days to
+London; but with a fever upon him, for which he had been twice blooded
+but the day before the battle; but he is young, and high in spirits, and
+I flatter myself will not suffer from this kindness of the Duke: the
+King has immediately ordered him a thousand pound, and I hear will make
+him his own aide-de-camp. My dear Mr. Chute, I beg your pardon; I have
+forgot you have the gout, and consequently not the same patience to wait
+for the battle, with which I, knowing the particulars, postpone it.
+
+On the 16th, the Duke, by forced marches, came up with the rebels, a
+little on this side Inverness--by the way, the battle is not christened
+yet; I only know that neither Prestonpans nor Falkirk are to be
+godfathers. The rebels, who fled from him after their victory, and durst
+not attack him, when so much exposed to them at his passage of the Spey,
+now stood him, they seven thousand, he ten. They broke through Barril's
+regiment, and killed Lord Robert Kerr, a handsome young gentleman, who
+was cut to pieces with above thirty wounds; but they were soon repulsed,
+and fled; the whole engagement not lasting above a quarter of an hour.
+The young Pretender escaped; Mr. Conway says, he hears, wounded: he
+certainly was in the rear. They have lost above a thousand men in the
+engagement and pursuit; and six hundred were already taken; among which
+latter are their French ambassador and Earl Kilmarnock. The Duke of
+Perth and Lord Ogilvie are said to be slain; Lord Elcho was in a
+salivation, and not there. Except Lord Robert Kerr, we lost nobody of
+note: Sir Robert Rich's eldest son has lost his hand, and about a
+hundred and thirty private men fell. The defeat is reckoned total, and
+the dispersion general; and all their artillery is taken. It is a brave
+young Duke! The town is all blazing round me, as I write, with fireworks
+and illuminations: I have some inclination to wrap up half a dozen
+sky-rockets, to make you drink the Duke's health. Mr. Dodington, on the
+first report, came out with a very pretty illumination; so pretty, that
+I believe he had it by him, ready for _any_ occasion....
+
+
+_TRIAL OF THE REBEL LORDS BALMERINO AND KILMARNOCK._
+
+TO SIR HORACE MANN.
+
+ARLINGTON STREET, _Aug._ 1, 1746.
+
+I am this moment come from the conclusion of the greatest and most
+melancholy scene I ever yet saw! You will easily guess it was the Trials
+of the rebel Lords. As it was the most interesting sight, it was the
+most solemn and fine: a coronation is a puppet-show, and all the
+splendour of it idle; but this sight at once feasted one's eyes and
+engaged all one's passions. It began last Monday; three parts of
+Westminster Hall were inclosed with galleries, and hung with scarlet;
+and the whole ceremony was conducted with the most awful solemnity and
+decency, except in the one point of leaving the prisoners at the bar,
+amidst the idle curiosity of some crowd, and even with the witnesses
+who had sworn against them, while the Lords adjourned to their own House
+to consult. No part of the royal family was there, which was a proper
+regard to the unhappy men, who were become their victims. One hundred
+and thirty-nine Lords were present, and made a noble sight on their
+benches _frequent and full_! The Chancellor [Hardwicke] was Lord High
+Steward; but though a most comely personage with a fine voice, his
+behaviour was mean, curiously searching for occasion to bow to the
+minister [Mr. Pelham] that is no peer, and consequently applying to the
+other ministers, in a manner, for their orders; and not even ready at
+the ceremonial. To the prisoners he was peevish; and instead of keeping
+up to the humane dignity of the law of England, whose character it is to
+point out favour to the criminal, he crossed them, and almost scolded at
+any offer they made towards defence. I had armed myself with all the
+resolution I could, with the thought of their crimes and of the danger
+past, and was assisted by the sight of the Marquis of Lothian in weepers
+for his son who fell at Culloden--but the first appearance of the
+prisoners shocked me! their behaviour melted me! Lord Kilmarnock and
+Lord Cromartie are both past forty, but look younger. Lord Kilmarnock is
+tall and slender, with an extreme fine person: his behaviour a most just
+mixture between dignity and submission; if in anything to be
+reprehended, a little affected, and his hair too exactly dressed for a
+man in his situation; but when I say it is not to find fault with him,
+but to show how little fault there was to be found. Lord Cromartie is
+an indifferent figure, appeared much dejected, and rather sullen: he
+dropped a few tears the first day, and swooned as soon as he got back to
+his cell. For Lord Balmerino, he is the most natural brave old fellow I
+ever saw: the highest intrepidity, even to indifference. At the bar he
+behaved like a soldier and a man; at the intervals of form, with
+carelessness and humour. He pressed extremely to have his wife, his
+pretty Peggy, with him in the Tower. Lady Cromartie only sees her
+husband through the grate, not choosing to be shut up with him, as she
+thinks she can serve him better by her intercession without: she is big
+with child and very handsome: so are their daughters. When they were to
+be brought from the Tower in separate coaches, there was some dispute in
+which the axe must go--old Balmerino cried, "Come, come, put it with
+me." At the bar, he plays with his fingers upon the axe, while he talks
+with the gentleman-gaoler; and one day somebody coming up to listen, he
+took the blade and held it like a fan between their faces. During the
+trial, a little boy was near him, but not tall enough to see; he made
+room for the child and placed him near himself.
+
+When the trial began, the two Earls pleaded guilty; Balmerino not
+guilty, saying he could prove his not being at the taking of the castle
+of Carlisle, as was laid in the indictment. Then the King's counsel
+opened, and Serjeant Skinner pronounced the most absurd speech
+imaginable; and mentioned the Duke of Perth, "who," said he, "I see by
+the papers is dead." Then some witnesses were examined, whom afterwards
+the old hero shook cordially by the hand. The Lords withdrew to their
+House, and returning, demanded of the judges, whether one point not
+being proved, though all the rest were, the indictment was false? to
+which they unanimously answered in the negative. Then the Lord High
+Steward asked the Peers severally, whether Lord Balmerino was guilty!
+All said, "guilty upon honour," and then adjourned, the prisoner having
+begged pardon for giving them so much trouble. While the Lords were
+withdrawn, the Solicitor-General Murray (brother of the Pretender's
+minister) officiously and insolently went up to Lord Balmerino, and
+asked him, how he could give the Lords so much trouble, when his
+solicitor had informed him that his plea could be of no use to him?
+Balmerino asked the bystanders who this person was? and being told he
+said, "Oh, Mr. Murray! I am extremely glad to see you; I have been with
+several of your relations; the good lady, your mother, was of great use
+to us at Perth." Are not you charmed with this speech? how just it was!
+As he went away, he said, "They call me Jacobite; I am no more a
+Jacobite than any that tried me: but if the Great Mogul had set up his
+standard, I should have followed it, for I could not starve." The worst
+of his case is, that after the battle of Dumblain, having a company in
+the Duke of Argyll's regiment, he deserted with it to the rebels, and
+has since been pardoned. Lord Kilmarnock is a Presbyterian, with four
+earldoms in him, but so poor since Lord Wilmington's stopping a pension
+that my father had given him, that he often wanted a dinner. Lord
+Cromartie was receiver of the rents of the King's second son in
+Scotland, which, it was understood, he should not account for; and by
+that means had six-hundred a-year from the Government: Lord Elibank, a
+very prating, impertinent Jacobite, was bound for him in nine thousand
+pounds, for which the Duke is determined to sue him.
+
+When the Peers were going to vote, Lord Foley withdrew, as too well a
+wisher; Lord Moray, as nephew of Lord Balmerino--and Lord Stair,--as, I
+believe, uncle to his great-grandfather. Lord Windsor, very affectedly,
+said, "I am sorry I must say, _guilty upon my honour_." Lord Stamford
+would not answer to the name of _Henry_, having been christened
+_Harry_--what a great way of thinking on such an occasion! I was
+diverted too with old Norsa, the father of my brother's concubine, an
+old Jew that kept a tavern; my brother [Orford], as Auditor of the
+Exchequer, has a gallery along one whole side of the court; I said, "I
+really feel for the prisoners!" old Issachar replied, "Feel for them!
+pray, if they had succeeded, what would have become of _all us_?" When
+my Lady Townsend heard her husband vote, she said, "I always knew _my_
+Lord was _guilty_, but I never thought he would own it _upon his
+honour_." Lord Balmerino said, that one of his reasons for pleading _not
+guilty_, was that so many ladies might not be disappointed of their
+show.
+
+On Wednesday they were again brought to Westminster Hall, to receive
+sentence; and being asked what they had to say, Lord Kilmarnock, with a
+very fine voice, read a very fine speech, confessing the extent of his
+crime, but offering his principles as some alleviation, having his
+eldest son (his second unluckily with him), in the Duke's army,
+_fighting for the liberties of his country at Culloden, where his
+unhappy father was in arms to destroy them_. He insisted much on his
+tenderness to the English prisoners, which some deny, and say that he
+was the man who proposed their being put to death, when General
+Stapleton urged that _he_ was come to fight, but not to butcher; and
+that if they acted any such barbarity, he would leave them with all his
+men. He very artfully mentioned Van Hoey's letter, and said how much he
+would scorn to owe his life to such intercession.[1] Lord Cromartie
+spoke much shorter, and so low, that he was not heard but by those who
+sat very near him; but they prefer his speech to the other. He mentioned
+his misfortune in having drawn in his eldest son, who is prisoner with
+him; and concluded with saying, "If no part of this bitter cup must pass
+from me, not mine, O God, but thy will be done!" If he had pleaded _not
+guilty_, there was ready to be produced against him a paper signed with
+his own hand, for putting the English prisoners to death.
+
+[Footnote 1: In a subsequent letter Walpole attributes Lord Kilmarnock's
+complicity in the rebellion partly to the influence of his mother, the
+Countess of Errol, and partly to his extreme poverty. He says: "I don't
+know whether I told you that the man at the tennis-court protests that
+he has known him dine with the man that sells pamphlets at Storey's
+Gate; 'and,' says he, 'he would often have been glad if I would have
+taken him home to dinner.' He was certainly so poor, that in one of his
+wife's intercepted letters she tells him she has plagued their steward
+for a fortnight for money, and can get but three shillings." One cannot
+help remembering, _Ibit eo quo vis qui zonam perdidit_. And afterwards,
+in relating his execution, he mentions a report that the Duke of
+Cumberland charging him (certainly on misinformation) with having
+promoted the adoption of "a resolution taken the day before the battle
+of Culloden" to put the English prisoners to death, "decided this
+unhappy man's fate" by preventing his obtaining a pardon.]
+
+Lord Leicester went up to the Duke of Newcastle, and said, "I never
+heard so great an orator as Lord Kilmarnock? if I was your grace I would
+pardon him, and make him _paymaster_."[1]
+
+[Footnote 1: "_I would make him paymaster._" The paymaster at this time
+was Mr. Pitt.]
+
+That morning a paper had been sent to the lieutenant of the Tower for
+the prisoners; he gave it to Lord Cornwallis, the governor, who carried
+it to the House of Lords. It was a plea for the prisoners, objecting
+that the late act for regulating the trials of rebels did not take place
+till after their crime was committed. The Lords very tenderly and
+rightly sent this plea to them, of which, as you have seen, the two
+Earls did not make use; but old Balmerino did, and demanded council on
+it. The High Steward, almost in a passion, told him, that when he had
+been offered council, he did not accept it. Do but think on the ridicule
+of sending them the plea, and then denying them council on it! The Duke
+of Newcastle, who never let slip an opportunity of being absurd, took it
+up as a ministerial point, in defence of his creature the Chancellor
+[Hardwicke]; but Lord Granville moved, according to order, to adjourn to
+debate in the chamber of Parliament, where the Duke of Bedford and many
+others spoke warmly for their having council; and it was granted. I said
+_their_, because the plea would have saved them all, and affected nine
+rebels who had been hanged that very morning; particularly one Morgan, a
+poetical lawyer. Lord Balmerino asked for Forester and Wilbraham; the
+latter a very able lawyer in the House of Commons, who, the Chancellor
+said privately, he was sure would as soon be hanged as plead such a
+cause. But he came as council to-day (the third day), when Lord
+Balmerino gave up his plea as invalid, and submitted, without any
+speech. The High Steward [Hardwicke] then made his, very long and very
+poor, with only one or two good passages; and then pronounced sentence!
+
+Great intercession is made for the two Earls: Duke Hamilton, who has
+never been at Court, designs to kiss the King's hand, and ask Lord
+Kilmarnock's life. The King is much inclined to some mercy; but the
+Duke, who has not so much of Caesar after a victory, as in gaining it,
+is for the utmost severity. It was lately proposed in the city to
+present him with the freedom of some company; one of the aldermen said
+aloud, "Then let it be of the _Butchers_!"[1] The Scotch and his Royal
+Highness are not at all guarded in their expressions of each other. When
+he went to Edinburgh, in his pursuit of the rebels, they would not
+admit his guards, alleging that it was contrary to their privileges; but
+they rode in, sword in hand; and the Duke, very justly incensed, refused
+to see any of the magistrates. He came with the utmost expedition to
+town, in order for Flanders; but found that the Court of Vienna had
+already sent Prince Charles thither, without the least notification, at
+which both King and Duke are greatly offended. When the latter waited on
+his brother, the Prince carried him into a room that hangs over the wall
+of St. James's Park, and stood there with his arm about his neck, to
+charm the gazing mob.
+
+[Footnote 1: "The Duke," says Sir Walter Scott, "was received with all
+the honours due to conquest; and all the incorporated bodies of the
+capital, from the Guild brethren to the Butchers, desired the acceptance
+of the freedom of their craft, or corporation." Billy the Butcher was
+one of his by-names.]
+
+Murray, the Pretender's secretary, has made ample confessions: the Earl
+of Traquair, and Mr. Barry, a physician, are apprehended, and more
+warrants are out; so much for rebels! Your friend, Lord Sandwich, is
+instantly going ambassador to Holland, to pray the Dutch to build more
+ships. I have received yours of July 19th, but you see have no more room
+left, only to say, that I conceive a good idea of my eagle, though the
+seal is a bad one. Adieu!
+
+P.S.--I have not room to say anything to the Tesi till next post; but,
+unless she will sing gratis, would advise her to drop this thought.
+
+
+_THE BATTLE OF RANCOUX._
+
+TO SIR HORACE MANN.
+
+ARLINGTON STREET, _Oct._ 14, 1746.
+
+You will have been alarmed with the news of another battle lost in
+Flanders, where we have no Kings of Sardinia. We make light of it; do
+not allow it to be a battle, but call it "the action near Liege." Then
+we have whittled down our loss extremely, and will not allow a man more
+than three hundred and fifty English slain out of the four thousand. The
+whole of it, as it appears to me, is, that we gave up eight battalions
+to avoid fighting; as at Newmarket people pay their forfeit when they
+foresee they should lose the race; though, if the whole army had fought,
+and we had lost the day, one might have hoped to have come off for eight
+battalions. Then they tell you that the French had
+four-and-twenty-pounders, and that they must beat us by the superiority
+of their cannon; so that to me it is grown a paradox, to war with a
+nation who have a mathematical certainty of beating you; or else it is
+still a stranger paradox, why you cannot have as large cannon as the
+French.[1] This loss was balanced by a pompous account of the triumphs
+of our invasion of Bretagne; which, in plain terms, I think, is reduced
+to burning two or three villages and reimbarking: at least, two or three
+of the transports are returned with this history, and know not what is
+become of Lestock and the rest of the invasion. The young Pretender is
+landed in France, with thirty Scotch, but in such a wretched condition
+that his Highland Highness had no breeches.
+
+[Footnote 1: Marshal Saxe had inspired his army with confidence that a
+day of battle was sure to be a day of victory, as was shown by the
+theatrical company which accompanied the camp. After the performance on
+the evening of October 10th the leading actress announced that there
+would be no performance on the morrow, because there was to be a battle,
+but on the 12th the company would have the honour of presenting "The
+Village Clock." (See the Editor's "France under the Bourbons," iii.
+26.)]
+
+I have received yours of the 27th of last month, with the capitulation
+of Genoa, and the kind conduct of the Austrians to us their allies, so
+extremely like their behaviour whenever they are fortunate. Pray, by the
+way, has there been any talk of my cousin, the Commodore, being
+blameable in letting slip some Spanish ships?--don't mention it as from
+me, but there are whispers of court-martial on him. They are all the
+fashion now; if you miss a post to me, I will have you tried by a
+court-martial. Cope is come off most gloriously, his courage
+ascertained, and even his conduct, which everybody had given up,
+justified. Folkes and Lascelles, two of his generals, are come off too;
+but not so happily in the opinion of the world. Oglethorpe's sentence is
+not yet public, but it is believed not to be favourable. He was always a
+bully, and is now tried for cowardice. Some little dash of the same sort
+is likely to mingle with the judgment on _il furibondo_ Matthews; though
+his party rises again a little, and Lestock's acquittal begins to pass
+for a party affair. In short, we are a wretched people, and have seen
+our best days!
+
+I must have lost a letter, if you really told me of the sale of the
+Duke of Modena's pictures, as you think you did; for when Mr. Chute told
+it me, it struck me as quite new. They are out of town, good souls; and
+I shall not see them this fortnight; for I am here only for two or three
+days, to inquire after the battle, in which not one of my friends were.
+Adieu!
+
+
+_ON CONWAY'S VERSES--NO SCOTCH_MAN_ IS CAPABLE OF SUCH DELICACY OF
+THOUGHT, THOUGH A SCOTCHWOMAN MAY BE--AKENSIDE'S, ARMSTRONG'S, AND
+GLOVER'S POEMS._
+
+TO THE HON. H.S. CONWAY.
+
+WINDSOR, _Oct._ 24, 1746.
+
+Well, Harry, Scotland is the last place on earth I should have thought
+of for turning anybody poet: but I begin to forgive it half its treasons
+in favour of your verses, for I suppose you don't think I am the dupe of
+the Highland story that you tell me: the only use I shall make of it is
+to commend the lines to you, as if they really were a Scotchman's. There
+is a melancholy harmony in them that is charming, and a delicacy in the
+thoughts that no Scotchman is capable of, though a _Scotchwoman_ might
+inspire it.[1] I beg, both for Cynthia's sake and my own, that you
+would continue your De Tristibus till I have an opportunity of seeing
+your muse, and she of rewarding her: _Reprens la musette, berger
+amoureux_! If Cynthia has ever travelled ten miles in fairy-land, she
+must be wondrous content with the person and qualifications of her
+knight, who in future story will be read of thus: Elmedorus was tall and
+perfectly well made, his face oval, and features regularly handsome, but
+not effeminate; his complexion sentimentally brown, with not much
+colour; his teeth fine, and forehead agreeably low, round which his
+black hair curled naturally and beautifully. His eyes were black too,
+but had nothing of fierce or insolent; on the contrary, a certain
+melancholy swimmingness, that described hopeless love rather than a
+natural amorous languish. His exploits in war, where he always fought by
+the side of the renowned Paladine William of England, have endeared his
+memory to all admirers of true chivalry, as the mournful elegies which
+he poured out among the desert rocks of Caledonia in honour of the
+peerless lady and his heart's idol, the incomparable Cynthia, will for
+ever preserve his name in the flowery annals of poesy.
+
+[Footnote 1: Walpole could not foresee the genius of Burns, that before
+his own death was to shed such glory on Scotland. His compliment to a
+Scotchwoman was an allusion to Lady Aylesbury (_née_ Miss Caroline
+Campbell), whom Conway married after her husband's death, which took
+place a few months after the date of this letter. Lady Aylesbury was no
+poetess, but his estimate of what might be accomplished by Scotch ladies
+was afterwards fully borne out by Lady Anne Lindsay, the authoress of
+"Auld Gray," and Lady Nairn.]
+
+What a pity it is I was not born in the golden age of Louis the
+Fourteenth, when it was not only the fashion to write folios, but to
+read them too! or rather, it is a pity the same fashion don't subsist
+now, when one need not be at the trouble of invention, nor of turning
+the whole Roman history into romance for want of proper heroes. Your
+campaign in Scotland, rolled out and well be-epitheted, would make a
+pompous work, and make one's fortune; at sixpence a number, one should
+have all the damsels within the liberties for subscribers: whereas now,
+if one has a mind to be read, one must write metaphysical poems in blank
+verse, which, though I own to be still easier, have not half the
+imagination of romances, and are dull without any agreeable absurdity.
+Only think of the gravity of this wise age, that have exploded
+"Cleopatra and Pharamond," and approve "The Pleasures of the
+Imagination," "The Art of Preserving Health," and "Leonidas!" I beg the
+age's pardon: it has done approving these poems, and has forgot them.
+
+Adieu! dear Harry. Thank you seriously for the poem. I am going to town
+for the birthday, and shall return hither till the Parliament meets; I
+suppose there is no doubt of our meeting then.
+
+Yours ever.
+
+P.S.--Now you are at Stirling, if you should meet with Drummond's
+History of the five King Jameses, pray look it over. I have lately read
+it, and like it much. It is wrote in imitation of Livy; the style
+masculine, and the whole very sensible; only he ascribes the misfortunes
+of one reign to the then king's loving architecture and
+
+    In trim gardens taking pleasure.
+
+
+_HE HAS BOUGHT STRAWBERRY HILL._
+
+TO THE HON. H.S. CONWAY.
+
+TWICKENHAM, _June_ 8, 1747.
+
+You perceive by my date that I am got into a new camp, and have left my
+tub at Windsor. It is a little plaything-house that I got out of Mrs.
+Chenevix's shop, and is the prettiest bauble you ever saw. It is set in
+enamelled meadows, with filigree hedges:
+
+    A small Euphrates through the piece is told,
+    And little finches wave their wings in gold.
+
+Two delightful roads, that you would call dusty, supply me continually
+with coaches and chaises: barges as solemn as Barons of the Exchequer
+move under my window; Richmond Hill and Ham walks bound my prospect;
+but, thank God! the Thames is between me and the Duchess of Queensberry.
+Dowagers as plenty as flounders inhabit all around, and Pope's ghost is
+just now skimming under my window by a most poetical moonlight. I have
+about land enough to keep such a farm as Noah's, when he set up in the
+ark with a pair of each kind; but my cottage is rather cleaner than I
+believe his was after they had been cooped up together forty days. The
+Chenevixes had tricked it out for themselves: up two pair of stairs is
+what they call Mr. Chenevix's library, furnished with three maps, one
+shelf, a bust of Sir Isaac Newton, and a lame telescope without any
+glasses. Lord John Sackville _predecessed_ me here, and instituted
+certain games called _cricketalia_, which have been celebrated this
+very evening in honour of him in a neighbouring meadow.
+
+You will think I have removed my philosophy from Windsor with my
+tea-things hither; for I am writing to you in all this tranquillity,
+while a Parliament is bursting about my ears. You know it is going to be
+dissolved: I am told, you are taken care of, though I don't know where,
+nor whether anybody that chooses you will quarrel with me because he
+does choose you, as that little bug the Marquis of Rockingham did; one
+of the calamities of my life which I have bore as abominably well as I
+do most about which I don't care. They say the Prince has taken up two
+hundred thousand pounds, to carry elections which he won't carry:--he
+had much better have saved it to buy the Parliament after it is chosen.
+A new set of peers are in embryo, to add more dignity to the silence of
+the House of Lords.
+
+I made no remarks on your campaign, because, as you say, you do nothing
+at all; which, though very proper nutriment for a thinking head, does
+not do quite so well to write upon. If any one of you can but contrive
+to be shot upon your post, it is all we desire, shall look upon it as a
+great curiosity, and will take care to set up a monument to the person
+so slain; as we are doing by vote to Captain Cornewall, who was killed
+at the beginning of the action in the Mediterranean four years ago. In
+the present dearth of glory, he is canonized; though, poor man! he had
+been tried twice the year before for cowardice.
+
+I could tell you much election news, none else; though not being
+thoroughly attentive to so important a subject, as to be sure one ought
+to be, I might now and then mistake, and give you a candidate for Durham
+in place of one for Southampton, or name the returning officer instead
+of the candidate. In general, I believe, it is much as usual--those sold
+in detail that afterwards will be sold in the representation--the
+ministers bribing Jacobites to choose friends of their own--the name of
+well-wishers to the present establishment, and patriots outbidding
+ministers that they may make the better market of their own
+patriotism:--in short, all England, under some name or other, is just
+now to be bought and sold; though, whenever we become posterity and
+forefathers, we shall be in high repute for wisdom and virtue. My
+great-great-grandchildren will figure me with a white beard down to my
+girdle; and Mr. Pitt's will believe him unspotted enough to have walked
+over nine hundred hot ploughshares, without hurting the sole of his
+foot. How merry my ghost will be, and shake its ears to hear itself
+quoted as a person of consummate prudence! Adieu, dear Harry!
+
+Yours ever.
+
+
+_HIS MODE OF LIFE--PLANTING--PROPHECIES OF NEW METHODS AND NEW
+DISCOVERIES IN A FUTURE GENERATION._
+
+TO THE HON. H.S. CONWAY.
+
+STRAWBERRY HILL, _Aug._ 29, 1748.
+
+Dear Harry,--Whatever you may think, a campaign at Twickenham furnishes
+as little matter for a letter as an abortive one in Flanders. I can't
+say indeed that my generals wear black wigs, but they have long
+full-bottomed hoods which cover as little entertainment to the full.
+
+[Illustration: STRAWBERRY HILL, FROM THE SOUTH EAST.]
+
+There's General my Lady Castlecomer, and General my Lady Dowager Ferris!
+Why, do you think I can extract more out of them than you can out of
+Hawley or Honeywood? Your old women dress, go to the Duke's levée, see
+that the soldiers cock their hats right, sleep after dinner, and soak
+with their led-captains till bed-time, and tell a thousand lies of what
+they never did in their youth. Change hats for head-clothes, the rounds
+for visits, and led-captains for toad-eaters, and the life is the very
+same. In short, these are the people I live in the midst of, though not
+with; and it is for want of more important histories that I have wrote
+to you seldom; not, I give you my word, from the least negligence. My
+present and sole occupation is planting, in which I have made great
+progress and talked very learnedly with the nurserymen, except that now
+and then a lettuce run to seed overturns all my botany, as I have more
+than once taken it for a curious West Indian flowering shrub. Then the
+deliberation with which trees grow, is extremely inconvenient to my
+natural impatience. I lament living in so barbarous an age, when we are
+come to so little perfection in gardening. I am persuaded that a hundred
+and fifty years hence it will be as common to remove oaks a hundred and
+fifty years old, as it is now to transplant tulip roots.[1] I have even
+begun a treatise or panegyric on the great discoveries made by posterity
+in all arts and sciences, wherein I shall particularly descant on the
+great and cheap convenience of making trout-rivers--one of the
+improvements which Mrs. Kerwood wondered Mr. Hedges would not make at
+his country-house, but which was not then quite so common as it will be.
+I shall talk of a secret for roasting a wild boar and a whole pack of
+hounds alive, without hurting them, so that the whole chase may be
+brought up to table; and for this secret, the Duke of Newcastle's
+grandson, if he can ever get a son, is to give a hundred thousand
+pounds. Then the delightfulness of having whole groves of humming-birds,
+tame tigers taught to fetch and carry, pocket spying-glasses to see
+all that is doing in China, with a thousand other toys, which we now
+look upon as impracticable, and which pert posterity would laugh in
+one's face for staring at, while they are offering rewards for
+perfecting discoveries, of the principles of which we have not the least
+conception! If ever this book should come forth, I must expect to have
+all the learned in arms against me, who measure all knowledge backward:
+some of them have discovered symptoms of all arts in Homer; and
+Pineda,[2] had so much faith in the accomplishments of his ancestors,
+that he believed Adam understood all sciences but politics. But as these
+great champions for our forefathers are dead, and Boileau not alive to
+hitch me into a verse with Perrault, I am determined to admire the
+learning of posterity, especially being convinced that half our present
+knowledge sprung from discovering the errors of what had formerly been
+called so. I don't think I shall ever make any great discoveries myself,
+and therefore shall be content to propose them to my descendants, like
+my Lord Bacon,[3] who, as Dr. Shaw says very prettily in his preface to
+Boyle, "had the art of inventing arts:" or rather like a Marquis of
+Worcester, of whom I have seen a little book which he calls "A Century
+of Inventions,"[4] where he has set down a hundred machines to do
+impossibilities with, and not a single direction how to make the
+machines themselves.
+
+[Footnote 1: It is worth noting that these predictions that "it will be
+common to remove oaks a hundred and fifty years old" has been verified
+many years since; at least, if not in the case of oaks, in that of large
+elms and ashtrees. In 1850 Mr. Paxton offered to a Committee of the
+House of Commons to undertake to remove the large elm which was standing
+on the ground proposed for the Crystal Palace of the Exhibition of 1851,
+and his master, the Duke of Devonshire, has since that time removed many
+trees of very large size from one part of his grounds to another; and
+similarly the "making of trout rivers" has been carried out in many
+places, even in our most distant colonies, by Mr. Buckland's method of
+raising the young fish from roe in boxes and distributing them in places
+where they were needed.]
+
+[Footnote 2: Pineda was a Spanish Jesuit of the seventeenth century, and
+a voluminous writer.]
+
+[Footnote 3: It is a singular thing that this most eminent man should be
+so constantly spoken of by a title which he never had. His first title
+in the peerage was Baron Verulam; his second, on a subsequent promotion,
+was Viscount St. Albans; yet the error is as old as Dryden, and is
+defended by Lord Macaulay in a sentence of pre-eminent absurdity:
+"Posterity has felt that the greatest of English philosophers could
+derive no accession of dignity from any title which power could bestow,
+and, in defiance of letters-patent, has obstinately refused to degrade
+Francis Bacon into Viscount St. Albans." But, without stopping to
+discuss the propriety of representing a Britiph peerage, honestly
+earned, and, in his case as Lord Chancellor, necessarily conferred, as a
+"degradation," the mistake made is not that of continuing to call him
+Francis Bacon, a name by which at one time he was known, but that of
+calling him "Lord Bacon," a title by which he was never known for a
+single moment in his lifetime; while, if a great philosopher was really
+"degraded" by a peerage, it is hard to see how the degradation would
+have been lessened by the title being Lord Bacon, which it was not,
+rather than Viscount St. Albans, which it was.]
+
+[Footnote 4: The "Biographie Universelle" (art. _Newcomen_) says of the
+Marquis: "Longtemps avant lui [Neucomen] on avait remarqué la grande
+force expansive de la vapeur, et on avait imaginé de l'employer comme
+puissance. On trouve déja cetté application proposée et même executée
+dans un ouvrage publié en 1663, par le Marquis de Worcester, sous le
+titre bizarre, 'A Century of Inventions.'"]
+
+If I happen to be less punctual in my correspondence than I intend to
+be, you must conclude I am writing my book, which being designed for a
+panegyric, will cost me a great deal of trouble. The dedication with
+your leave, shall be addressed to your son that is coming, or, with Lady
+Ailesbury's leave, to your ninth son, who will be unborn nearer to the
+time I am writing of; always provided that she does not bring three at
+once, like my Lady Berkeley.
+
+Well! I have here set you the example of writing nonsense when one has
+nothing to say, and shall take it ill if you don't keep up the
+correspondence on the same foot. Adieu!
+
+
+_REJOICINGS FOR THE PEACE--MASQUERADE AT RANELAGH--MEETING OF THE
+PRINCES PARTY AND THE JACOBITES--PREVALENCE OF DRINKING AND
+GAMBLING--WHITEFIELD._
+
+TO SIR HORACE MANN.
+
+STRAWBERRY HILL, _May_ 3, 1749.
+
+I am come hither for a few days, to repose myself after a torrent of
+diversions, and am writing to you in my charming bow-window with a
+tranquillity and satisfaction which, I fear, I am grown old enough to
+prefer to the hurry of amusements, in which the whole world has lived
+for this last week. We have at last celebrated the Peace, and that as
+much in extremes as we generally do everything, whether we have reason
+to be glad or sorry, pleased or angry. Last Tuesday it was proclaimed:
+the King did not go to St. Paul's, but at night the whole town was
+illuminated. The next day was what was called "a jubilee-masquerade in
+the Venetian manner" at Ranelagh: it had nothing Venetian in it, but was
+by far the best understood and the prettiest spectacle I ever saw:
+nothing in a fairy tale ever surpassed it. One of the proprietors, who
+is a German, and belongs to Court, had got my Lady Yarmouth to persuade
+the King to order it. It began at three o'clock, and, about five, people
+of fashion began to go. When you entered, you found the whole garden
+filled with masks and spread with tents, which remained all night _very
+commodely_. In one quarter, was a May-pole dressed with garlands, and
+people dancing round it to a tabor and pipe and rustic music, all
+masqued, as were all the various bands of music that were disposed in
+different parts of the garden; some like huntsmen with French horns,
+some like peasants, and a troop of harlequins and scaramouches in the
+little open temple on the mount. On the canal was a sort of gondola,
+adorned with flags and streamers, and filled with music, rowing about.
+All round the outside of the amphitheatre were shops, filled with
+Dresden china, japan, &c., and all the shopkeepers in mask. The
+amphitheatre was illuminated; and in the middle was a circular bower,
+composed of all kinds of firs in tubs, from twenty to thirty feet high:
+under them orange-trees, with small lamps in each orange, and below them
+all sorts of the finest auriculas in pots; and festoons of natural
+flowers hanging from tree to tree. Between the arches too were firs, and
+smaller ones in the balconies above. There were booths for tea and wine,
+gaming-tables and dancing, and about two thousand persons. In short, it
+pleased me more than anything I ever saw. It is to be once more, and
+probably finer as to dresses, as there has since been a subscription
+masquerade, and people will go in their rich habits. The next day were
+the fireworks, which by no means answered the expense, the length of
+preparation, and the expectation that had been raised; indeed, for a
+week before, the town was like a country fair, the streets filled from
+morning to night, scaffolds building wherever you could or could not
+see, and coaches arriving from every corner of the kingdom. This hurry
+and lively scene, with the sight of the immense crowd in the Park and on
+every house, the guards, and the machine itself, which was very
+beautiful, was all that was worth seeing. The rockets, and whatever was
+thrown up into the air, succeeded mighty well; but the wheels, and all
+that was to compose the principal part, were pitiful and ill-conducted,
+with no changes of coloured fires and shapes: the illumination was mean,
+and lighted so slowly that scarce anybody had patience to wait the
+finishing; and then, what contributed to the awkwardness of the whole,
+was the right pavilion catching fire, and being burnt down in the middle
+of the show. The King, the Duke, and Princess Emily saw it from the
+Library, with their courts: the Prince and Princess, with their
+children, from Lady Middlesex's; no place being provided for them, nor
+any invitation given to the library. The Lords and Commons had galleries
+built for them and the chief citizens along the rails of the Mall: the
+Lords had four tickets a-piece, and each Commoner, at first, but two,
+till the Speaker bounced and obtained a third. Very little mischief was
+done, and but two persons killed: at Paris, there were forty killed and
+near three hundred wounded, by a dispute between the French and Italians
+in the management, who, quarrelling for precedence in lighting the
+fires, both lighted at once and blew up the whole. Our mob was extremely
+tranquil, and very unlike those I remember in my father's time, when it
+was a measure in the Opposition to work up everything to mischief, the
+Excise and the French players, the Convention and the Gin Act. We are as
+much now in the opposite extreme, and in general so pleased with the
+peace, that I could not help being struck with a passage I read lately
+in Pasquier, an old French author, who says, "that in the time of
+Francis I. the French used to call their creditors 'Des Anglois,' from
+the facility with which the English gave credit to them in all treaties,
+though they had broken so many." On Saturday we had a serenta at the
+Opera-house, called Peace in Europe, but it was a wretched performance.
+On Monday there was a subscription masquerade, much fuller than that of
+last year, but not so agreeable or so various in dresses. The King was
+well disguised in an old-fashioned English habit, and much pleased with
+somebody who desired him to hold their cup as they were drinking tea.
+The Duke had a dress of the same kind, but was so immensely corpulent
+that he looked like Cacofogo, the drunken captain, in "Rule a Wife and
+have a Wife." The Duchess of Richmond was a Lady Mayoress in the time of
+James I.; and Lord Delawarr, Queen Elizabeth's porter, from a picture in
+the guard-chamber at Kensington: they were admirable masks. Lord
+Rochford, Miss Evelyn, Miss Bishop, Lady Stafford, and Mrs. Pitt, were
+in vast beauty; particularly the last, who had a red veil, which made
+her look gloriously handsome. I forgot Lady Kildare. Mr. Conway was the
+Duke in "Don Quixote," and the finest figure I ever saw. Miss Chudleigh
+was Iphigenia, but so naked that you would have taken her for Andromeda;
+and Lady Betty Smithson [Seymour] had such a pyramid of baubles upon her
+head, that she was exactly the Princess of Babylon in Grammont.
+
+You will conclude that, after all these diversions, people begin to
+think of going out of town--no such matter: the Parliament continues
+sitting, and will till the middle of June; Lord Egmont told us we should
+sit till Michaelmas. There are many private bills, no public ones of any
+fame. We were to have had some chastisement for Oxford, where, besides
+the late riots, the famous Dr. King,[1] the Pretender's great agent,
+made a most violent speech at the opening of the Ratcliffe Library. The
+ministry denounced judgment, but, in their old style, have grown
+frightened, and dropped it. However, this menace gave occasion to a
+meeting and union between the Prince's party and the Jacobites which
+Lord Egmont has been labouring all the winter. They met at the St.
+Alban's tavern, near Pall Mall, last Monday morning, a hundred and
+twelve Lords and Commoners. The Duke of Beaufort opened the assembly
+with a panegyric on the stand that had been made this winter against so
+corrupt an administration, and hoped it would continue, and desired
+harmony. Lord Egmont seconded this strongly, and begged they would come
+up to Parliament early next winter. Lord Oxford spoke next; and then
+Potter with great humour, and to the great abashment of the Jacobites,
+said he was very glad to see this union, and from thence hoped, that if
+another attack like the last Rebellion should be made on the Royal
+Family, they would all stand by them. No reply was made to this. Then
+Sir Watkyn Williams spoke, Sir Francis Dashwood,[2] and Tom Pitt, and
+the meeting broke up. I don't know what this coalition may produce: it
+will require time with no better heads than compose it at present,
+though the great Mr. Dodington had carried to the conference the
+assistance of his. In France a very favourable event has happened for
+us, the disgrace of Maurepas,[3] one of our bitterest enemies, and the
+greatest promoter of their marine. Just at the beginning of the war, in
+a very critical period, he had obtained a very large sum for that
+service, but which one of the other factions, lest he should gain glory
+and credit by it, got to be suddenly given away to the King of Prussia.
+
+[Footnote 1: Dr. King was Principal of St. Mary's Hall, Oxford, and one
+of the chief supports of the Jacobite party after 1745.]
+
+[Footnote 2: Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1761, through the influence
+of the Earl of Bute. He was the owner of Medmenham Abbey, on the Thames,
+and as such, the President of the profligate Club whose doings were made
+notorious by the proceedings against Wilkes, and who, in compliment to
+him, called themselves the Franciscans.]
+
+[Footnote 3: The Comte de Maurepas was the grandson of the Chancellor of
+France, M. de Pontchartrain. When only fourteen years old Louis had made
+him Secretary of State for the Marine, as a consolation to his
+grandfather for his dismissal; and he continued in office till the
+accession of Louis XVI., when he was appointed Prime Minister. He was
+not a man of any statesmanlike ability; but Lacretelle ascribes to him
+"les graces d'un esprit aimable et frivole qui avait le don d'amuser un
+vieillard toujours porté à un elegant badinage" (ii. 53); and in a
+subsequent letter speaks of him as a man of very lively powers of
+conversation.]
+
+Sir Charles Williams[1] is appointed envoy to this last King: here is an
+epigram which he has just sent over on Lord Egmont's opposition to the
+Mutiny Bill:
+
+    Why has Lord Egmont 'gainst this bill
+    So much declamatory skill
+       So tediously exerted?
+    The reason's plain: but t'other day
+    He mutinied himself for pay,
+       And he has twice deserted.
+
+[Footnote 1: Sir Charles Hanbury Williams had represented Monmouth in
+Parliament, but in 1744 was sent as ambassador to Berlin, and from
+thence to St. Petersburg. He was more celebrated in the fashionable
+world as the author of lyrical odes of a lively character.]
+
+I must tell you a _bon-mot_ that was made the other night at the
+serenata of "Peace in Europe" by Wall,[1] who is much in fashion, and a
+kind of Gondomar. Grossatesta, the Modenese minister, a very low fellow,
+with all the jackpuddinghood of an Italian, asked, "Mais qui est ce qui
+représente mon maître?" Wall replied, "Mais, mon Dieu! L'abbé, ne sçavez
+vous pas que ce n'est pas un opéra boufon?" and here is another
+_bon-mot_ of my Lady Townshend: we were talking of Methodists; somebody
+said, "Pray, Madam, is it true that Whitfield[2] has _recanted_?" "No,
+sir, he has only _canted_."
+
+[Footnote 1: General Wall was the Spanish ambassador, as Gondomar had
+been in the reign of James I.]
+
+[Footnote 2: Whitefield, while an undergraduate at Oxford, joined
+Wesley, who had recently founded a sect which soon became known as the
+Methodists. But, after a time, Whitefield, who was of a less moderate
+temper than Wesley, adopted the views known as Calvinistic, and,
+breaking off from the Wesleyans, established a sect more rigid and less
+friendly to the Church.]
+
+If you ever think of returning to England, as I hope it will be long
+first, you must prepare yourself with Methodism. I really believe that
+by that time it will be necessary: this sect increases as fast as almost
+ever any religious nonsense did. Lady Fanny Shirley has chosen this way
+of bestowing the dregs of her beauty; and Mr. Lyttelton is very near
+making the same sacrifice of the dregs of all those various characters
+that he has worn. The Methodists love your big sinners, as proper
+subjects to work upon--and indeed they have a plentiful harvest--I think
+what you call flagrancy was never more in fashion. Drinking is at the
+highest wine-mark; and gaming joined with it so violent, that at the
+last Newmarket meeting, in the rapidity of both, a bank-bill was thrown
+down, and nobody immediately claiming it, they agreed to give it to a
+man that was standing by....
+
+
+_EARTHQUAKE IN LONDON--GENERAL PANIC--MARRIAGE OF CASIMIR, KING OF
+POLAND._
+
+TO SIR HORACE MANN.
+
+ARLINGTON STREET, _March_ 11, 1750.
+
+    Portents and prodigies are grown so frequent,
+    That they have lost their name.
+
+My text is not literally true; but as far as earthquakes go towards
+lowering the price of wonderful commodities, to be sure we are
+overstocked. We have had a second, much more violent than the first; and
+you must not be surprised if by next post you hear of a burning mountain
+sprung up in Smithfield. In the night between Wednesday and Thursday
+last (exactly a month since the first shock), the earth had a shivering
+fit between one and two; but so slight that, if no more had followed, I
+don't believe it would have been noticed. I had been awake, and had
+scarce dozed again--on a sudden I felt my bolster lift up my head; I
+thought somebody was getting from under my bed, but soon found it was a
+strong earthquake, that lasted near half a minute, with a violent
+vibration and great roaring. I rang my bell; my servant came in,
+frightened out of his senses: in an instant we heard all the windows in
+the neighbourhood flung up. I got up and found people running into the
+streets, but saw no mischief done: there has been some; two old houses
+flung down, several chimneys, and much chinaware. The bells rung in
+several houses. Admiral Knowles, who has lived long in Jamaica, and felt
+seven there, says this was more violent than any of them: Francesco
+prefers it to the dreadful one at Leghorn. The wise say,[1] that if we
+have not rain soon, we shall certainly have more. Several people are
+going out of town, for it has nowhere reached above ten miles from
+London: they say, they are not frightened, but that it is such fine
+weather, "Lord! one can't help going into the country!" The only visible
+effect it has had, was on the Ridotto, at which, being the following
+night, there were but four hundred people. A parson, who came into
+White's the morning of earthquake the first, and heard bets laid on
+whether it was an earthquake or the blowing up of powder mills, went
+away exceedingly scandalized, and said, "I protest, they are such an
+impious set of people, that I believe if the last trumpet was to sound,
+they would bet puppet-show against Judgment." If we get any nearer
+still to the torrid zone, I shall pique myself on sending you a present
+of cedrati and orange-flower water: I am already planning a _terreno_
+for Strawberry Hill.
+
+[Footnote 1: In an earlier letter Walpole mentions that Sir I. Newton
+had foretold a great alteration in the English climate in 1750.]
+
+The Middlesex election is carried against the Court: the Prince, in a
+green frock (and I won't swear, but in a Scotch plaid waistcoat), sat
+under the Park-wall in his chair, and hallooed the voters on to
+Brentford. The Jacobites are so transported, that they are opening
+subscriptions for all boroughs that shall be vacant--this is wise! They
+will spend their money to carry a few more seats in a Parliament where
+they will never have the majority, and so have none to carry the general
+elections. The omen, however, is bad for Westminster; the High Bailiff
+went to vote for the Opposition.
+
+I now jump to another topic; I find all this letter will be detached
+scraps; I can't at all contrive to hide the seams: but I don't care. I
+began my letter merely to tell you of the earthquake, and I don't pique
+myself upon doing any more than telling you what you would be glad to
+have told you. I told you too how pleased I was with the triumphs of
+another old beauty, our friend the Princess. Do you know, I have found a
+history that has great resemblance to hers; that is, that will be very
+like hers, if hers is but like it. I will tell it you in as few words as
+I can. Madame la Maréchale l'Hôpital was the daughter of a seamstress; a
+young gentleman fell in love with her, and was going to be married to
+her, but the match was broken off. An old fermier-general, who had
+retired into the province where this happened, hearing the story, had a
+curiosity to see the victim; he liked her, married her, died, and left
+her enough not to care for her inconstant. She came to Paris, where the
+Maréchal de l'Hôpital married her for her riches. After the Maréchal's
+death, Casimir, the abdicated King of Poland, who was retired into
+France, fell in love with the Maréchale, and privately married her. If
+the event ever happens, I shall certainly travel to Nancy, to hear her
+talk of _ma belle fille la Reine de France_. What pains my Lady Pomfret
+would take to prove that an abdicated King's wife did not take place of
+an English countess; and how the Princess herself would grow still
+fonder of the Pretender for the similitude of his fortune with that of
+_le Roi mon mari_! Her daughter, Mirepoix, was frightened the other
+night, with Mrs. Nugent's calling out, _un voleur! un voleur_! The
+ambassadress had heard so much of robbing, that she did not doubt but
+_dans ce pais cy_, they robbed in the middle of an assembly. It turned
+out to be a _thief in the candle_! Good night!
+
+
+GENERAL PANIC--SHERLOCK'S PASTORAL LETTER--PREDICTIONS OF MORE
+EARTHQUAKES--A GENERAL FLIGHT FROM LONDON--EPIGRAMS BY CHUTE AND WALPOLE
+HIMSELF--FRENCH TRANSLATION OF MILTON.
+
+TO SIR HORACE MANN.
+
+ARLINGTON STREET, _April_ 2, 1750.
+
+You will not wonder so much at our earthquakes as at the effects they
+have had. All the women in town have taken them up upon the foot of
+_Judgments_; and the clergy, who have had no windfalls of a long season,
+have driven horse and foot into this opinion. There has been a shower of
+sermons and exhortations: Seeker, the Jesuitical Bishop of Oxford, began
+the mode. He heard the women were all going out of town to avoid the
+next shock; and so, for fear of losing his Easter offerings, he set
+himself to advise them to await God's good pleasure in fear and
+trembling. But what is more astonishing, Sherlock, who has much better
+sense, and much less of the Popish confessor, has been running a race
+with him for the old ladies, and has written a pastoral letter, of which
+ten thousand were sold in two days; and fifty thousand have been
+subscribed for, since the two first editions.
+
+I told you the women talked of going out of town: several families are
+literally gone, and many more going to-day and to-morrow; for what adds
+to the absurdity, is, that the second shock having happened exactly a
+month after the former, it prevails that there will be a third on
+Thursday next, another month, which is to swallow up London. I am almost
+ready to burn my letter now I have begun it, lest you should think I am
+laughing at you: but it is so true, that Arthur of White's told me last
+night, that he should put off the last ridotto, which was to be on
+Thursday, because he hears nobody would come to it. I have advised
+several, who are going to keep their next earthquake in the country, to
+take the bark for it, as it is so periodic.[1] Dick Leveson and Mr.
+Rigby, who had supped and stayed late at Bedford House the other night,
+knocked at several doors, and in a watchman's voice cried, "Past four
+o'clock, and a dreadful earthquake!"...
+
+[Footnote 1: "I remember," says Addison, in the 240th _Tatler_, "when
+our whole island was shaken with an earthquake some years ago, that
+there was an impudent mountebank who sold pills, which, as he told the
+country people, were 'very good against an earthquake.'"]
+
+This frantic terror prevails so much, that within these three days seven
+hundred and thirty coaches have been counted passing Hyde Park corner,
+with whole parties removing into the country. Here is a good
+advertisement which I cut out of the papers to-day:--
+
+     "On Monday next will be published (price 6_d._) A true and exact
+     List of all the Nobility and Gentry who have left, or shall leave,
+     this place through fear of another Earthquake."
+
+Several women have made earthquake gowns; that is, warm gowns to sit out
+of doors all to-night. These are of the more courageous. One woman,
+still more heroic, is come to town on purpose: she says, all her friends
+are in London, and she will not survive them. But what will you think of
+Lady Catherine Pelham, Lady Frances Arundel, and Lord and Lady Galway,
+who go this evening to an inn ten miles out of town, where they are to
+play at brag till five in the morning, and then come back--I suppose, to
+look for the bones of their husbands and families under the rubbish. The
+prophet of all this (next to the Bishop of London) is a trooper of Lord
+Delawar's, who was yesterday sent to Bedlam. His _colonel_ sent to the
+man's wife, and asked her if her husband had ever been disordered
+before. She cried, "Oh dear! my lord, he is not mad now; if your
+_lordship_ would but get any _sensible_ man to examine him, you would
+find he is quite in his right mind."...
+
+I shall now go and show you Mr. Chute in a different light from
+heraldry, and in one in which I believe you never saw him. He will shine
+as usual; but, as a little more severely than his good-nature is
+accustomed to, I must tell you that he was provoked by the most
+impertinent usage. It is an epigram on Lady Caroline Petersham, whose
+present fame, by the way, is coupled with young Harry Vane.
+
+    WHO IS THIS?
+
+    Her face has beauty, we must all confess,
+    But beauty on the brink of ugliness:
+    Her mouth's a rabbit feeding on a rose;
+    With eyes--ten times too good for such a nose!
+    Her blooming cheeks--what paint could ever draw 'em?
+    That paint, for which no mortal ever saw 'em.
+    Air without shape--of royal race divine--
+    'Tis Emily--oh! fie!--'tis Caroline.
+
+Do but think of my beginning a third sheet! but as the Parliament is
+rising, and I shall probably not write you a tolerably long letter again
+these eight months, I will lay in a stock of merit with you to last me
+so long. Mr. Chute has set me too upon making epigrams; but as I have
+not his art mine is almost a copy of verses: the story he told me, and
+is literally true, of an old Lady Bingley:
+
+    Celia now had completed some thirty campaigns,
+    And for new generations was hammering chains;
+    When whetting those terrible weapons, her eyes,
+    To Jenny, her handmaid, in anger she cries,
+    "Careless creature! did mortal e'er see such a glass!
+    Who that saw me in this, could e'er guess what I was!
+    Much you mind what I say! pray how oft have I bid you
+    Provide me a new one? how oft have I chid you?"
+    "Lord, Madam!" cried Jane, "you're so hard to be pleased!
+    I am sure every glassman in town I have teased:
+    I have hunted each shop from Pall Mall to Cheapside:
+    Both Miss Carpenter's man, and Miss Banks's I've tried."
+    "Don't tell me of those girls!--all I know, to my cost,
+    Is, the looking-glass art must be certainly lost!
+    One used to have mirrors so smooth and so bright,
+    They did one's eyes justice, they heightened one's white,
+    And fresh roses diffused o'er one's bloom--but, alas!
+    In the glasses made now, one detests one's own face;
+    They pucker one's cheeks up and furrow one's brow,
+    And one's skin looks as yellow as that of Miss Howe!"
+
+After an epigram that seems to have found out the longitude, I shall
+tell you but one more, and that wondrous short. It is said to be made by
+a cow. You must not wonder; we tell as many strange stories as Baker and
+Livy:
+
+    A warm winter, a dry spring,
+    A hot summer, a new King.
+
+Though the sting is very epigrammatic, the whole of the distich has more
+of the truth than becomes prophecy; that is, it is false, for the spring
+is wet and cold.
+
+There is come from France a Madame Bocage,[1] who has translated Milton:
+my Lord Chesterfield prefers the copy to the original; but that is not
+uncommon for him to do, who is the patron of bad authors and bad actors.
+She has written a play too, which was damned, and worthy my lord's
+approbation. You would be more diverted with a Mrs. Holman, whose
+passion is keeping an assembly, and inviting literally everybody to it.
+She goes to the drawing-room to watch for sneezes; whips out a curtsey,
+and then sends next morning to know how your cold does, and to desire
+your company next Thursday.
+
+[Footnote 1: Madame du Boccage published a poem in imitation of Milton,
+and another founded on Gesner's "Death of Abel." She also translated
+Pope's "Temple of Fame;" but her principal work was "La Columbiade." It
+was at the house of this lady, at Paris, in 1775, that Johnson was
+annoyed at her footman's taking the sugar in his fingers and throwing it
+into his coffee. "I was going," says the Doctor, "to put it aside, but
+hearing it was made on purpose for me, I e'en tasted Tom's fingers." She
+died in 1802.]
+
+Mr. Whithed has taken my Lord Pembroke's house at Whitehall; a glorious
+situation, but as madly built as my lord himself was. He has bought some
+delightful pictures too, of Claude, Caspar and good masters, to the
+amount of four hundred pounds.
+
+Good night! I have nothing more to tell you, but that I have lately seen
+a Sir William Boothby, who saw you about a year ago, and adores you, as
+all the English you receive ought to do. He is much in my favour.
+
+
+_DEATH OF WALPOLE'S BROTHER, AND OF THE PRINCE OF WALES--SPEECH OF THE
+YOUNG PRINCE--SINGULAR SERMON ON HIS DEATH._
+
+TO SIR HORACE MANN.
+
+ARLINGTON STREET, _April_ 1, 1751.
+
+How shall I begin a letter that will--that must--give you as much pain
+as I feel myself? I must interrupt the story of the Prince's death, to
+tell you of _two_ more, much more important, God knows! to you and me!
+One I had prepared you for--but how will you be shocked to hear that our
+poor Mr. Whithed is dead as well as my brother!...
+
+I now must mention my own misfortune. Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday
+mornings, the physicians and _all the family of painful death_ (to alter
+Gray's phrase), were persuaded and persuaded me, that the bark, which
+took great place, would save my brother's life--but he relapsed at three
+o'clock on Thursday, and died last night. He ordered to be drawn and
+executed his will with the greatest tranquillity and satisfaction on
+Saturday morning. His spoils are prodigious--not to his own family!
+indeed I think his son the most ruined young man in England. My loss, I
+fear, may be considerable, which is not the only motive of my concern,
+though, as you know, I had much to forgive, before I could regret: but
+indeed I do regret. It is no small addition to my concern, to fear or
+foresee that Houghton and all the remains of my father's glory will be
+pulled to pieces! The widow-Countess immediately marries--not Richcourt,
+but Shirley, and triumphs in advancing her son's ruin by enjoying her
+own estate, and tearing away great part of his.
+
+Now I will divert your private grief by talking to you of what is called
+the public. The King and Princess are grown as fond as if they had never
+been of different parties, or rather as people who always had been of
+different. She discountenances all opposition, and he _all ambition_.
+Prince George, who, with his two eldest brothers, is to be lodged at St.
+James's, is speedily to be created Prince of Wales. Ayscough, his tutor,
+is to be removed with her entire inclination as well as with everybody's
+approbation. They talk of a Regency to be established (in case of a
+minority) by authority of Parliament, even this session, with the
+Princess at the head of it. She and Dr. Lee, the only one she consults
+of the late cabal, very sensibly burned the late Prince's papers the
+moment he was dead. Lord Egmont, by seven o'clock the next morning,
+summoned (not very decently) the faction to his house: all was whisper!
+at last he hinted something of taking the Princess and her children
+under their protection, and something of the necessity of harmony. No
+answer was made to the former proposal. Somebody said, it was very
+likely indeed they should agree now, when the Prince could never bring
+it about; and so everybody went away to take care of himself. The
+imposthumation is supposed to have proceeded, not from his fall last
+year, but from a blow with a tennis-ball some years ago. The grief for
+the dead brother is affectedly displayed. They cried about an elegy,[1]
+and added, "Oh, that it were but his brother!" On 'Change they said,
+"Oh, that it were but the butcher[2]!"
+
+[Footnote 1: The elegy alluded to, was probably the effusion of some
+Jacobite royalist. That faction could not forgive the Duke of Cumberland
+his excesses or successes in Scotland; and, not contented with branding
+the parliamentary government of the country as usurpation, indulged in
+frequent unfeeling and scurrilous personalities on every branch of the
+reigning family:
+
+       Here lies Fred,
+    Who was alive and is dead:
+       Had it been his father,
+       I had much rather;
+       Had it been his brother,
+       Still better than another;
+       Had it been his sister,
+       No one would have missed her;
+       Had it been the whole generation,
+       Still better for the nation:
+       But since 'tis only Fred,
+    Who was alive and is dead--
+       There's no more to be said.
+
+Walpole's _Memoirs of George II._]
+
+[Footnote 2: A name given to the Duke of Cumberland for his severities
+to his prisoners after the battle of Culloden.]
+
+The Houses sit, but no business will be done till after the holidays.
+Anstruther's affair will go on, but not with much spirit. One wants to
+see faces about again! Dick Lyttelton, one of the patriot officers, had
+collected depositions on oath against the Duke for his behaviour in
+Scotland, but I suppose he will now throw his papers into Hamlet's
+grave?
+
+Prince George, who has a most amiable countenance, behaved excessively
+well on his father's death. When they told him of it, he turned pale,
+and laid his hand on his breast. Ayscough said, "I am afraid, Sir, you
+are not well!"--he replied, "I feel something here, just as I did when I
+saw the two workmen fall from the scaffold at Kew." Prince Edward is a
+very plain boy, with strange loose eyes, but was much the favourite. He
+is a sayer of things! Two men were heard lamenting the death in
+Leicester Fields: one said, "He has left a great many small
+children!"--"Ay," replied the other, "and what is worse, they belong to
+our parish!" But the most extraordinary reflections on his death were
+set forth in a sermon at Mayfair chapel. "He had no great parts (pray
+mind, this was the parson said so, not I), but he had great virtues;
+indeed, they degenerated into vices: he was very generous, but I hear
+his generosity has ruined a great many people: and then his
+condescension was such, that he kept very bad company."
+
+Adieu! my dear child; I have tried, you see, to blend so much public
+history with our private griefs, as may help to interrupt your too great
+attention to the calamities in the former part of my letter. You will,
+with the properest good-nature in the world, break the news to the poor
+girl, whom I pity, though I never saw. Miss Nicoll is, I am told,
+extremely to be pitied too; but so is everybody that knew Whithed! Bear
+it yourself as well as you can!
+
+
+_CHANGES IN THE MINISTRY AND HOUSEHOLD--THE MISS GUNNINGS--EXTRAVAGANCE
+IN LONDON--LORD HARCOURT, GOVERNOR OF THE PRINCE OF WALES._
+
+TO SIR HORACE MANN.
+
+ARLINGTON STREET, _June_ 18, 1751.
+
+I send my letter as usual from the Secretary's office, but of what
+Secretary I don't know. Lord Sandwich last week received his dismission,
+on which the Duke of Bedford resigned the next day, and Lord Trentham
+with him, both breaking with old Gower, who is entirely in the hands of
+the Pelhams, and made to declare his quarrel with Lord Sandwich (who
+gave away his daughter to Colonel Waldegrave) the foundation of
+detaching himself from the Bedfords. Your friend Lord Fane comforts Lord
+Sandwich with an annuity of a thousand a-year--scarcely for his handsome
+behaviour to his sister; Lord Hartington is to be Master of the Horse,
+and Lord Albemarle Groom of the Stole; Lord Granville[1] is actually
+Lord President, and, by all outward and visible signs, something
+more--in short, if he don't overshoot himself, the Pelhams have; the
+King's favour to him is visible, and so much credited, that all the
+incense is offered to him. It is believed that Impresario Holdernesse
+will succeed the Bedford in the foreign seals, and Lord Halifax in
+those for the plantations. If the former does, you will have ample
+instructions to negotiate for singers and dancers! Here is an epigram
+made upon his directorship:
+
+[Footnote 1: Lord Granville, known as Lord Carteret during the lifetime
+of his mother, was a statesman of the very highest ability, and was
+regarded with special favour by the King for his power of conversing in
+German, then a very rare accomplishment.]
+
+    That secrecy will now prevail
+      In politics, is certain;
+    Since Holdernesse, who gets the seals,
+      Was bred behind the curtain.
+
+The Admirals Rowley and Boscawen are brought into the Admiralty under
+Lord Anson, who is advanced to the head of the board. Seamen are
+tractable fishes! especially it will be Boscawen's case, whose name in
+Cornish signifies obstinacy, and who brings along with him a good
+quantity of resentment to Anson. In short, the whole present system is
+equally formed for duration!
+
+Since I began my letter, Lord Holdernesse has kissed hands for the
+seals. It is said that Lord Halifax is to be made easy, by the
+plantations being put under the Board of Trade. Lord Granville comes
+into power as boisterously as ever, and dashes at everything. His
+lieutenants already beat up for volunteers; but he disclaims all
+connexions with Lord Bath, who, he says, forced him upon the famous
+ministry of twenty-four hours, and by which he says he paid all his
+debts to him. This will soon grow a turbulent scene--it is not
+unpleasant to sit upon the beach and see it; but few people have the
+curiosity to step out to the sight. You, who knew England in other
+times, will find it difficult, to conceive what an indifference reigns
+with regard to ministers and their squabbles. The two Miss Gunnings,[1]
+and a late extravagant dinner at White's, are twenty times more the
+subject of conversation than the two brothers [Newcastle and Pelham] and
+Lord Granville. These are two Irish girls, of no fortune, who are
+declared the handsomest women alive. I think their being two so handsome
+and both such perfect figures is their chief excellence, for singly I
+have seen much handsomer women than either; however, they can't walk in
+the park or go to Vauxhall, but such mobs follow them that they are
+generally driven away. The dinner was a folly of seven young men, who
+bespoke it to the utmost extent of expense: one article was a tart made
+of duke cherries from a hot-house; and another, that they tasted but one
+glass out of each bottle of champagne. The bill of fare is got into
+print, and with good people has produced the apprehension of another
+earthquake. Your friend St. Leger was at the head of these luxurious
+heroes--he is the hero of all fashion. I never saw more dashing vivacity
+and absurdity, with some flashes of parts. He had a cause the other day
+for ducking a sharper, and was going to swear: the judge said to him, "I
+see, Sir, you are very ready to take an oath." "Yes, my lord," replied
+St. Leger, "my father was a judge."
+
+[Footnote 1: One of the Miss Gunnings had singular fortune. She was
+married to two Dukes--the Duke of Hamilton, and, after his death, the
+Duke of Argyll. She refused a third, the Duke of Bridgewater; and she
+was the mother of four--two Dukes of Hamilton and two Dukes of Argyll.
+Her sister married the Earl of Coventry. In his "Memoirs of George III."
+Walpole mentions that they were so poor while in Dublin that they could
+not have been presented to the Lord-Lieutenant if Peg Woffington, the
+celebrated actress, had not lent them some clothes.]
+
+We have been overwhelmed with lamentable Cambridge and Oxford dirges on
+the Prince's death: there is but one tolerable copy; it is by a young
+Lord Stormont, a nephew of Murray, who is much commended. You may
+imagine what incense is offered to Stone by the people of Christchurch:
+they have hooked in, too, poor Lord Harcourt, and call him _Harcourt the
+Wise_! his wisdom has already disgusted the young Prince; "Sir, pray
+hold up your head. Sir, for God's sake, turn out your toes!" Such are
+Mentor's precepts!
+
+I am glad you receive my letters; as I knew I had been punctual, it
+mortified me that you should think me remiss. Thank you for the
+transcript from _Bubb[1] de tristibus_! I will keep your secret, though
+I am persuaded that a man who had composed such a funeral oration on his
+master and himself fully intended that its flowers should not bloom and
+wither in obscurity.
+
+[Footnote 1: Bubb means Mr. Bubb Doddington, afterwards Lord Melcombe,
+who had written Mr. Mann a letter of most extravagant lamentation on the
+death of the Prince of Wales. He was member for Winchelsea, and left
+behind him a diary, which was published some years after his death, and
+which throws a good deal of light on the political intrigues of the
+day.]
+
+We have already begun to sell the pictures that had not found place at
+Houghton: the sale gives no great encouragement to proceed (though I
+fear it must come to that!); the large pictures were thrown away; the
+whole-length Vandykes went for a song! I am mortified now at having
+printed the catalogue. Gideon the Jew, and Blakiston the independent
+grocer, have been the chief purchasers of the pictures sold
+already--there, if you love moralizing!
+
+Adieu! I have no more articles to-day for my literary gazette.
+
+
+_DESCRIPTION OF STRAWBERRY HILL--BILL TO PREVENT CLANDESTINE MARRIAGES._
+
+TO SIR HORACE MANN.
+
+STRAWBERRY HILL, _June_ 12, 1753.
+
+I could not rest any longer with the thought of your having no idea of a
+place of which you hear so much, and therefore desired Mr. Bentley to
+draw you as much idea of it as the post would be persuaded to carry from
+Twickenham to Florence. The enclosed enchanted little landscape, then,
+is Strawberry Hill; and I will try to explain so much of it to you as
+will help to let you know whereabouts we are when we are talking to you;
+for it is uncomfortable in so intimate a correspondence as ours not to
+be exactly master of every spot where one another is writing, or
+reading, or sauntering. This view of the castle is what I have just
+finished, and is the only side that will be at all regular. Directly
+before it is an open grove, through which you see a field, which is
+bounded by a serpentine wood of all kind of trees, and flowering shrubs,
+and flowers. The lawn before the house is situated on the top of a small
+hill, from whence to the left you see the town and church of Twickenham
+encircling a turn of the river, that looks exactly like a seaport in
+miniature. The opposite shore is a most delicious meadow, bounded by
+Richmond Hill, which loses itself in the noble woods of the park to the
+end of the prospect on the right, where is another turn of the river,
+and the suburbs of Kingston as luckily placed as Twickenham is on the
+left: and a natural terrace on the brow of my hill, with meadows of my
+own down to the river, commands both extremities. Is not this a
+tolerable prospect? You must figure that all this is perpetually
+enlivened by a navigation of boats and barges, and by a road below my
+terrace, with coaches, post-chaises, waggons, and horsemen constantly in
+motion, and the fields speckled with cows, horses, and sheep. Now you
+shall walk into the house. The bow-window below leads into a little
+parlour hung with a stone-colour Gothic paper and Jackson's Venetian
+prints, which I could never endure while they pretended, infamous as
+they are, to be after Titian, &c., but when I gave them this air of
+barbarous bas-reliefs, they succeeded to a miracle: it is impossible at
+first sight not to conclude that they contain the history of Attila or
+Tottila, done about the very aera. From hence, under two gloomy arches,
+you come to the hall and staircase, which it is impossible to describe
+to you, as it is the most particular and chief beauty of the castle.
+Imagine the walls covered with (I call it paper, but it is really paper
+painted in perspective to represent) Gothic fretwork: the lightest
+Gothic balustrade to the staircase, adorned with antelopes (our
+supporters) bearing shields; lean windows fattened with rich saints in
+painted glass, and a vestibule open with three arches on the
+landing-place, and niches full of trophies of old coats of mail, Indian
+shields made of rhinoceros's hides, broadswords, quivers, longbows,
+arrows, and spears--all _supposed_ to be taken by Sir Terry Robsart in
+the holy wars. But as none of this regards the enclosed drawing, I will
+pass to that. The room on the ground-floor nearest to you is a
+bedchamber, hung with yellow paper and prints, framed in a new manner,
+invented by Lord Cardigan; that is, with black and white borders
+printed. Over this is Mr. Chute's bedchamber, hung with red in the same
+manner. The bow-window room one pair of stairs is not yet finished; but
+in the tower beyond it is the charming closet where I am now writing to
+you. It is hung with green paper and water-colour pictures; has two
+windows; the one in the drawing looks to the garden, the other to the
+beautiful prospect; and the top of each glutted with the richest painted
+glass of the arms of England, crimson roses, and twenty other pieces of
+green, purple, and historic bits. I must tell you, by the way, that the
+castle, when finished, will have two-and-thirty windows enriched with
+painted glass. In this closet, which is Mr. Chute's college of Arms, are
+two presses with books of heraldry and antiquities, Madame Sévigné's
+Letters, and any French books that relate to her and her acquaintance.
+Out of this closet is the room where we always live, hung with a blue
+and white paper in stripes adorned with festoons, and a thousand plump
+chairs, couches, and luxurious settees covered with linen of the same
+pattern, and with a bow-window commanding the prospect, and gloomed
+with limes that shade half each window, already darkened with painted
+glass in chiaroscuro, set in deep blue glass. Under this room is a cool
+little hall, where we generally dine, hung with paper to imitate Dutch
+tiles.
+
+I have described so much, that you will begin to think that all the
+accounts I used to give you of the diminutiveness of our habitation were
+fabulous; but it is really incredible how small most of the rooms are.
+The only two good chambers I shall have are not yet built: they will be
+an eating-room and a library, each twenty by thirty, and the latter
+fifteen feet high. For the rest of the house I could send it you in this
+letter as easily as the drawing, only that I should have nowhere to live
+till the return of the post. The Chinese summer-house, which you may
+distinguish in the distant landscape, belongs to my Lord Radnor. We
+pique ourselves upon nothing but simplicity, and have no carvings,
+gildings, paintings, inlayings, or tawdry businesses.
+
+You will not be sorry, I believe, by this time to have done with
+Strawberry Hill, and to hear a little news. The end of a very dreaming
+session has been extremely enlivened by an accidental bill which has
+opened great quarrels, and those not unlikely to be attended with
+interesting circumstances. A bill to prevent clandestine marriages,[1]
+so drawn by the Judges as to clog all matrimony in general, was
+inadvertently espoused by the Chancellor; and having been strongly
+attacked in the House of Commons by Nugent, the Speaker, Mr. Fox, and
+others, the last went very great lengths of severity on the whole body
+of the law, and on its chieftain in particular, which, however, at the
+last reading, he softened and explained off extremely. This did not
+appease: but on the return of the bill to the House of Lords, where our
+amendments were to be read, the Chancellor in the most personal terms
+harangued against Fox, and concluded with saying that "he despised his
+scurrility as much as his adulation and recantation." As Christian
+charity is not one of the oaths taken by privy-counsellors, and as it is
+not the most eminent virtue in either of the champions, this quarrel is
+not likely to be soon reconciled. There are natures whose disposition it
+is to patch up political breaches, but whether they will succeed, or try
+to succeed in healing this, can I tell you?
+
+[Footnote 1: These clandestine marriages were often called "Fleet
+marriages." Lord Stanhope, describing this Act, states that "there was
+ever ready a band of degraded and outcast clergymen, prisoners for debt
+or for crime, who hovered about the verge of the Fleet prison soliciting
+customers, and plying, like porters, for employment.... One of these
+wretches, named Keith, had gained a kind of pre-eminence in infamy. On
+being told there was a scheme on foot to stop his lucrative traffic, he
+declared, with many oaths, he would still be revenged of the Bishops,
+that he would buy a piece of ground and outbury them!" ("History of
+England," c. 31).]
+
+The match for Lord Granville, which I announced to you, is not
+concluded: the flames are cooled in that quarter as well as in others.
+
+I begin a new sheet to you, which does not match with the other, for I
+have no more of the same paper here. Dr. Cameron is executed, and died
+with the greatest firmness. His parting with his wife the night before
+was heroic and tender: he let her stay till the last moment, when being
+aware that the gates of the Tower would be locked, he told her so; she
+fell at his feet in agonies: he said, "Madam, this was not what you
+promised me," and embracing her, forced her to retire: then with the
+same coolness looked at the window till her coach was out of sight,
+after which he turned about and wept. His only concern seemed to be at
+the ignominy of Tyburn: he was not disturbed at the dresser for his
+body, or at the fire to burn his bowels.[1] The crowd was so great, that
+a friend who attended him could not get away, but was forced to stay and
+behold the execution; but what will you say to the minister or priest
+that accompanied him? The wretch, after taking leave, went into a
+landau, where, not content with seeing the Doctor hanged, he let down
+the top of the landau for the better convenience of seeing him
+embowelled! I cannot tell you positively that what I hinted of this
+Cameron being commissioned from Prussia was true, but so it is believed.
+Adieu! my dear child; I think this is a very tolerable letter for
+summer!
+
+[Footnote 1: "The populace," says Smollett, "though not very subject to
+tender emotions, were moved to compassion, and even to tears, by his
+behaviour at the place of execution; and many sincere well-wishers of
+the present establishment thought that the sacrifice of this victim, at
+such a juncture, could not redound either to its honour or security."]
+
+[Illustration: GEORGE MONTAGU.]
+
+
+_NO NEWS FROM FRANCE BUT WHAT IS SMUGGLED--THE KING'S DELIGHT AT THE
+VOTE FOR THE HANOVER TROOPS--BON MOT OF LORD DENBIGH._
+
+TO GEORGE MONTAGU, ESQ.
+
+ARLINGTON STREET, _May_ 19, 1756.
+
+Nothing will be more agreeable to me than to see you at Strawberry Hill;
+the weather does not seem to be of my mind, and will not invite you. I
+believe the French have taken the sun. Among other captures, I hear the
+King has taken another English mistress, a Mrs. Pope, who took her
+degrees in gallantry some years ago. She went to Versailles with the
+famous Mrs. Quon: the King took notice of them; he was told they were
+not so rigid as _all_ other English women are--mind, I don't give you
+any part of this history for authentic; you know we can have no news
+from France but what we run.[1] I have rambled so that I forgot what I
+intended to say; if ever we can have spring, it must be soon: I propose
+to expect you any day you please after Sunday se'nnight, the 30th: let
+me know your resolution, and pray tell me in what magazine is the
+Strawberry ballad? I should have proposed an earlier day to you, but
+next week the Prince of Nassau is to breakfast at Strawberry Hill, and I
+know your aversion to clashing with grandeur.
+
+[Footnote 1: "During the winter England was stirred with constantly
+recurring alarms of a French invasion.... Addresses were moved in both
+Houses entreating or empowering the King to summon over for our defence
+some of his Hanoverian troops, and also some of hired Hessians--an
+ignominious vote, but carried by large majorities" (Lord Stanhope,
+"History of England," c. 22).]
+
+As I have already told you one mob story of a King, I will tell you
+another: _they say_, that the night the Hanover troops were voted, _he_
+sent Schutz for his German cook, and said, "Get me a very good supper;
+get me all de varieties; I don't mind expense."
+
+I tremble lest his Hanoverians should be encamped at Hounslow;
+Strawberry would become an inn; all the Misses would breakfast there, to
+go and see the camp!
+
+My Lord Denbigh is going to marry a fortune, I forget her name; my Lord
+Gower asked him how long the honey-moon would last? He replied, "Don't
+tell me of the honey-moon; it is harvest moon with me." Adieu!
+
+
+_VICTORY OF THE KING OF PRUSSIA AT LOWOSITZ--SINGULAR RACE--QUARREL OF
+THE PRETENDER WITH THE POPE._
+
+TO SIR HORACE MANN.
+
+STRAWBERRY HILL, _Oct._ 17, 1756.
+
+Lentulus (I am going to tell you no old Roman tale; he is the King of
+Prussia's aid-de-camp) arrived yesterday, with ample confirmation of the
+victory in Bohemia.[1]--Are not you glad that we have got a victory that
+we can at least call _Cousin_? Between six and seven thousand Austrians
+were killed: eight Prussian squadrons sustained the _acharnement_, which
+is said to have been extreme, of thirty-two squadrons of Austrians: the
+pursuit lasted from Friday noon till Monday morning; both our
+countrymen, Brown and Keith, performed wonders--we seem to flourish much
+when transplanted to Germany--but Germans don't make good manure here!
+The Prussian King writes that both Brown and Piccolomini are too
+strongly intrenched to be attacked. His Majesty ran _to_ this victory;
+not _à la_ Molwitz. He affirms having found in the King of Poland's
+cabinet ample justification of his treatment of Saxony--should not one
+query whether he had not these proofs in his hands antecedent to the
+cabinet? The Dauphiness[2] is said to have flung herself at the King of
+France's feet and begged his protection for her father; that he promised
+"qu'il le rendroit au centuple au Roi de Prusse."
+
+[Footnote 1: On the 1st of the month Frederic II. had defeated the
+Austrian general, Marshal Brown, at Lowositz. It was the first battle of
+the Seven Years' War, and was of great political importance as leading
+to the capture of Dresden and of laying all Saxony at the mercy of the
+conqueror. "_À la_ Molwitz" is an allusion to the first battle in the
+war of the Austrian Succession, April 10, 1741, in which Frederic showed
+that he was not what Voltaire and Mr. Pitt called "a heaven-born
+general;" since on the repulse of his cavalry he gave up all for lost,
+and rode from the field, to learn at night that, after his flight, his
+second in command, the veteran Marshal Schwerin, had rallied the broken
+squadrons, and had obtained a decisive victory.]
+
+[Footnote 2: The Dauphiness was the daughter of Augustus, King of Poland
+and Elector of Saxony.]
+
+Peace is made between the courts of Kensington and Kew:[1] Lord Bute,
+who had no visible employment at the latter, and yet whose office was
+certainly no _sinecure_, is to be Groom of the Stole to the Prince of
+Wales; which satisfies. The rest of the family will be named before the
+birthday--but I don't know how, as soon as one wound is closed, another
+breaks out! Mr. Fox, extremely discontent at having no power, no
+confidence, no favour (all entirely engrossed by the old monopolist),
+has asked leave to resign. It is not yet granted. If Mr. Pitt will--or
+can, accept the seals, probably Mr. Fox will be indulged,--if Mr. Pitt
+will not, why then, it is impossible to tell you what will happen.
+Whatever happens on such an emergency, with the Parliament so near, with
+no time for considering measures, with so bad a past, and so much worse
+a future, there certainly is no duration or good in prospect. Unless the
+King of Prussia will take our affairs at home as well as abroad to
+nurse, I see no possible recovery for us--and you may believe, when a
+doctor like him is necessary, I should be full as willing to die of the
+distemper.
+
+[Footnote 1: "The courts of Kensington and Kew"--in other words, of the
+King and the Prince of Wales and his mother, to whom George II. was not
+very friendly. A scandal, which had no foundation, imputed to the
+Princess undue intimacy with the Earl of Bute, who, however, did stand
+high in her good graces, and who probably was indebted to them for his
+appointment in the next reign to the office of Prime Minister, for which
+he had no qualification whatever.]
+
+Well! and so you think we are undone!--not at all; if folly and
+extravagance are symptoms of a nation's being at the height of their
+glory, as after-observers pretend that they are forerunners of its ruin,
+we never were in a more flourishing situation. My Lord Rockingham and my
+nephew Lord Orford have made a match of five hundred pounds, between
+five turkeys and five geese, to run from Norwich to London. Don't you
+believe in the transmigration of souls? And are not you convinced that
+this race is between Marquis Sardanapalus and Earl Heliogabalus? And
+don't you pity the poor Asiatics and Italians who comforted themselves
+on their resurrection with their being geese and turkeys?
+
+Here's another symptom of our glory! The Irish Speaker Mr. Ponsonby has
+been _reposing_ himself at _Newmarket_: George Selwyn, seeing him toss
+about bank-bills at the hazard-table said, "How easily the Speaker
+passes the money-bills!"
+
+You, who live at Florence among vulgar vices and tame slavery, will
+stare at these accounts. Pray be acquainted with your own country, while
+it is in its lustre. In a regular monarchy the folly of the Prince gives
+the tone; in a downright tyranny, folly dares give itself no airs; it is
+in a wanton overgrown commonwealth that whim and debauchery intrigue
+best together. Ask me which of these governments I prefer--oh! the
+last--only I fear it is the least durable.
+
+I have not yet thanked you for your letter of September 18th, with the
+accounts of the Genoese treaty and of the Pretender's quarrel with the
+Pope--it is a squabble worthy a Stuart. Were he, here, as absolute as
+any Stuart ever wished to be, who knows with all his bigotry but he
+might favour us with a reformation and the downfall of the mass? The
+ambition of making a Duke of York vice-chancellor of holy church would
+be as good a reason for breaking with holy church, as Harry the Eighth's
+was for quarrelling with it, because it would not excuse him from going
+to bed to his sister after it had given him leave.
+
+I wish I could tell you that your brother mends! indeed I don't think he
+does: nor do I know what to say to him; I have exhausted both arguments
+and entreaties, and yet if I thought either would avail, I would gladly
+recommence them. Adieu!
+
+
+_MINISTERIAL NEGOTIATIONS--LOSS OF MINORCA--DISASTER IN NORTH AMERICA._
+
+TO SIR HORACE MANN.
+
+ARLINGTON STREET, _Nov._ 4, 1756.
+
+I desired your brother last week to tell you that it was in vain for me
+to write while everything was in such confusion. The chaos is just as
+far from being dispersed now; I only write to tell you what has been its
+motions. One of the Popes, I think, said soon after his accession, he
+did not think it had been so easy to govern. What would he have thought
+of such a nation as this, engaged in a formidable war, without any
+government at all, literally, for above a fortnight! The foreign
+ministers have not attempted to transact any business since yesterday
+fortnight. For God's sake, what do other countries say of us?--but hear
+the progress of our interministerium.
+
+When Mr. Fox had declared his determination of resigning, great offers
+were sent to Mr. Pitt; his demands were much greater, accompanied with a
+total exclusion of the Duke of Newcastle. Some of the latter's friends
+would have persuaded him, as the House of Commons is at his devotion, to
+have undertaken the government against both Pitt and Fox; but fears
+preponderated. Yesterday se'nnight his grace declared his resolution of
+retiring, with all that satisfaction of mind which must attend a man
+whom not one man of sense will trust any longer. The King sent for Mr.
+Fox, and bid him try if Mr. Pitt would join him. The latter, without any
+hesitation, refused. In this perplexity the King ordered the Duke of
+Devonshire to try to compose some Ministry for him, and sent him to
+Pitt, to try to accommodate with Fox. Pitt, with a list of terms a
+little modified, was ready to engage, but on condition that Fox should
+have no employment in the cabinet. Upon this plan negotiations have been
+carrying on for this week. Mr. Pitt and Mr. Legge, whose whole party
+consists of from twelve to sixteen persons, exclusive of Leicester House
+(of that presently), concluded they were entering on the government as
+Secretary of State and Chancellor of the Exchequer: but there is so
+great unwillingness to give it up totally into their hands, that all
+manner of expedients have been projected to get rid of their proposals,
+or to limit their power. Thus the case stands at this instant: the
+Parliament has been put off for a fortnight, to gain time; the Lord
+knows whether that will suffice to bring on any sort of temper! In the
+meantime the government stands still; pray Heaven the war may too! You
+will wonder how fifteen or sixteen persons can be of such importance. In
+the first place, their importance has been conferred on them, and has
+been notified to the nation by these concessions and messages; next,
+Minorca[1] is gone; Oswego gone;[2] the nation is in a ferment; some
+very great indiscretions in delivering a Hanoverian soldier from prison
+by a warrant from the Secretary of State have raised great difficulties;
+instructions from counties, boroughs, especially from the City of
+London, in the style of 1641, and really in the spirit of 1715 and 1745,
+have raised a great flame; and lastly, the countenance of Leicester
+House, which Mr. Pitt is supposed to have, and which Mr. Legge thinks he
+has, all these tell Pitt that he may command such numbers without doors
+as may make the majorities within the House tremble.
+
+[Footnote 1: Minorca had been taken by the Duc de Richelieu; Admiral
+Byng, after an indecisive action with the French fleet, having adopted
+the idea that he should not be able to save it, for which, as is too
+well known, he was condemned to death by a court-martial.]
+
+[Footnote 2: "_Oswego gone._" "A detachment of the enemy was defeated by
+Colonel Broadstreet on the river Onondaga; on the other hand, the small
+forts of Ontario and Oswego were reduced by the French" (Lord Stanhope,
+"History of England," c. 33).]
+
+Leicester House[1] is by some thought inclined to more pacific measures.
+Lord Bute's being established Groom of the Stole has satisfied. They
+seem more occupied in disobliging all their new court than in disturbing
+the King's. Lord Huntingdon, the new Master of the Horse to the Prince,
+and Lord Pembroke, one of his Lords, have not been spoken to. Alas! if
+the present storms should blow over, what seeds for new! You must guess
+at the sense of this paragraph, which it is difficult, at least
+improper, to explain to you; though you could not go into a coffee-house
+here where it would not be interpreted to you. One would think all those
+little politicians had been reading the Memoirs of the minority of Louis
+XIV.
+
+[Footnote 1: Leicester House was the London residence of the young
+Prince of Wales.]
+
+There has been another great difficulty: the season obliging all camps
+to break up, the poor Hanoverians have been forced to continue soaking
+in theirs. The county magistrates have been advised that they are not
+obliged by law to billet foreigners on public-houses, and have refused.
+Transports were yesterday ordered to carry away the Hanoverians! There
+are eight thousand men taken from America; for I am sure we can spare
+none from hence. The negligence and dilatoriness of the ministers at
+home, the wickedness of our West Indian governors, and the little-minded
+quarrels of the regulars and irregular forces, have reduced our affairs
+in that part of the world to a most deplorable state. Oswego, of ten
+times more importance even than Minorca, is so annihilated that we
+cannot learn the particulars.
+
+My dear Sir, what a present and future picture have I given you! The
+details are infinite, and what I have neither time, nor, for many
+reasons, the imprudence to send by the post: your good sense will but
+too well lead you to develop them. The crisis is most melancholy and
+alarming. I remember two or three years ago I wished for more active
+times, and for events to furnish our correspondence. I think I could
+write you a letter almost as big as my Lord Clarendon's History. What a
+bold man is he who shall undertake the administration! How much shall we
+be obliged to him! How mad is he, whoever is ambitious of it! Adieu!
+
+
+_THE KING OF PRUSSIA'S VICTORIES--VOLTAIRE'S "UNIVERSAL HISTORY."_
+
+TO THE EARL OF STRAFFORD.
+
+STRAWBERRY HILL, _July_ 4, 1757.
+
+My Dear Lord,--It is well I have not obeyed you sooner, as I have often
+been going to do: what a heap of lies and contradictions I should have
+sent you! What joint ministries and sole ministries! What acceptances
+and resignations!--Viziers and bowstrings never succeeded one another
+quicker. Luckily I have stayed till we have got an administration that
+will last a little more than for ever. There is such content and harmony
+in it, that I don't know whether it is not as perfect as a plan which I
+formed for Charles Stanhope, after he had plagued me for two days for
+news. I told him the Duke of Newcastle was to take orders, and have the
+reversion of the bishopric of Winchester; that Mr. Pitt was to have a
+regiment, and go over to the Duke; and Mr. Fox to be chamberlain to the
+Princess, in the room of Sir William Irby. Of all the new system I
+believe the happiest is Offley; though in great humility he says he only
+takes the bedchamber _to accommodate_. Next to him in joy is the Earl of
+Holdernesse--who has not got the garter. My Lord Waldegrave has; and
+the garter by this time I believe has got fifty spots.
+
+Had I written sooner, I should have told your lordship, too, of the King
+of Prussia's triumphs[1]--but they are addled too! I hoped to have had a
+few bricks from Prague to send you towards building Mr. Bentley's
+design, but I fear none will come from thence this summer. Thank God,
+the happiness of the menagerie does not depend upon administrations or
+victories! The happiest of beings in this part of the world is my Lady
+Suffolk: I really think her acquisition and conclusion of her law-suit
+will lengthen her life ten years. You may be sure I am not so satisfied,
+as Lady Mary [Coke] has left Sudbroke.
+
+[Footnote 1: On the 6th of May Frederic defeated the Austrian army under
+Prince Charles of Lorraine and Marshal Brown in the battle of Prague.
+Brown was killed, as also was the Prussian Marshal, Schwerin; indeed,
+the King lost eighteen thousand men--nearly as many as had fallen on the
+side of the enemy; and the Austrian disaster was more than retrieved by
+the great victory of Kolin, gained by Marshal Daun, June 18th, to which
+Walpole probably alludes when he says Frederic's "triumphs are addled."]
+
+Are your charming lawns burnt up like our humble hills? Is your sweet
+river as low as our deserted Thames?--I am wishing for a handful or two
+of those floods that drowned me last year all the way from Wentworth
+Castle. I beg my best compliments to my lady, and my best wishes that
+every pheasant egg and peacock egg may produce as many colours as a
+harlequin-jacket.
+
+
+_Tuesday, July 5th._
+
+Luckily, my good lord, my conscience had saved its distance. I had writ
+the above last night, when I received the honour of your kind letter
+this morning. You had, as I did not doubt, received accounts of all our
+strange histories. For that of the pretty Countess [of Coventry], I fear
+there is too much truth in all you have heard: but you don't seem to
+know that Lord Corydon and Captain Corydon his brother have been most
+abominable. I don't care to write scandal; but when I see you, I will
+tell you how much the chits deserve to be whipped. Our favourite general
+[Conway] is at his camp: Lady Ailesbury don't go to him these three
+weeks. I expect the pleasure of seeing her and Miss Rich and Fred.
+Campbell here soon for a few days. I don't wonder your lordship likes
+St. Philippe better than Torcy:[1] except a few passages interesting to
+Englishmen, there cannot be a more dry narration than the latter. There
+is an addition of seven volumes of Universal History to Voltaire's
+Works, which I think will charm you: I almost like it the best of his
+works. It is what you have seen extended, and the Memoirs of Louis XIV.
+_refondues_ in it. He is a little tiresome with contradicting La
+Beaumelle and Voltaire, one remains with scarce a fixed idea about that
+time. I wish they would produce their authorities and proofs; without
+which, I am grown to believe neither. From mistakes in the English part,
+I suppose there are great ones in the more distant histories; yet
+altogether it is a fine work. He is, as one might believe, worst
+informed on the present times.--He says eight hundred persons were put
+to death for the last Rebellion--I don't believe a quarter of the number
+were: and he makes the first Lord Derwentwater--who, poor man! was in no
+such high-spirited mood--bring his son, who by the way was not above a
+year and a half old, upon the scaffold to be sprinkled with his
+blood.--However, he is in the right to expect to be believed: for he
+believes all the romances in Lord Anson's Voyage, and how Admiral
+Almanzor made one man-of-war box the ears of the whole empire of
+China!--I know nothing else new but a new edition of Dr. Young's Works.
+If your lordship thinks like me, who hold that even in his most frantic
+rhapsodies there are innumerable fine things, you will like to have this
+edition. Adieu, once more, my best lord!
+
+[Footnote 1: Torcy had been Secretary of State in the time of Louis
+XIV., and was the diplomatist who arranged the details of the First
+Partition Treaty with William III.]
+
+
+_HIS OWN "ROYAL AND NOBLE AUTHORS."_
+
+TO THE REV. HENRY ZOUCH.[1]
+
+[Footnote 1: Mr. Zouch was the squire and vicar of Sandhill, in
+Yorkshire.]
+
+STRAWBERRY HILL, _August_ 3, 1758.
+
+Sir,--I have received, with much pleasure and surprise, the favour of
+your remarks upon my Catalogue; and whenever I have the opportunity of
+being better known to you, I shall endeavour to express my gratitude for
+the trouble you have given yourself in contributing to perfect a work,
+which, notwithstanding your obliging expressions, I fear you found very
+little worthy the attention of so much good sense and knowledge, Sir, as
+you possess.
+
+I am extremely thankful for all the information you have given me; I had
+already met with a few of the same lights as I have received, Sir, from
+you, as I shall mention in their place. The very curious accounts of
+Lord Fairfax were entirely new and most acceptable to me. If I decline
+making use of one or two of your hints, I believe I can explain my
+reasons to your satisfaction. I will, with your leave, go regularly
+through your letter.
+
+As Caxton[1] laboured in the monastery of Westminster, it is not at all
+unlikely that he should wear the habit, nor, considering how vague our
+knowledge of that age is, impossible but he might enter the order.
+
+[Footnote 1: Mr. Zouch had expressed a doubt whether a portrait of a man
+in a clerical garb could possibly be meant for Caxton, and Mr. Cole and
+three of Walpole's literary correspondents suggested that it was
+probably a portrait of Jehan de Jeonville, Provost of Paris.]
+
+I have met with Henry's institution of a Christian, and shall give you
+an account of it in my next edition. In that, too, I shall mention, that
+Lord Cobham's allegiance professed at his death to Richard II., probably
+means to Richard and his right heirs whom he had abandoned for the house
+of Lancaster. As the article is printed off, it is too late to say
+anything more about his works.
+
+In all the old books of genealogy you will find, Sir, that young Richard
+Duke of York was solemnly married to a child of his own age, Anne
+Mowbray, the heiress of Norfolk, who died young as well as he.
+
+The article of the Duke of Somerset is printed off too; besides, I
+should imagine the letter you mention not to be of his own composition,
+for, though not illiterate, he certainly could not write anything like
+classic Latin. I may, too, possibly have inclusively mentioned the very
+letter; I have not Ascham's book, to see from what copy the letter was
+taken, but probably from one of those which I have said is in Bennet
+Library.
+
+The Catalogue of Lord Brooke's works is taken from the volume of his
+works; such pieces of his as I found doubted, particularly the tragedy
+of Cicero, I have taken notice of as doubtful.
+
+In my next edition you will see, Sir, a note on Lord Herbert, who,
+besides being with the King at York, had offended the peers by a speech
+in his Majesty's defence. Mr. Wolseley's preface I shall mention, from
+your information. Lord Rochester's letters to his son are letters to a
+child, bidding him mind his book and his grandmother. I had already been
+told, Sir, what you tell me of Marchmont Needham.
+
+Matthew Clifford I have altered to Martin, as you prescribed; the
+blunder was my own, as well as a more considerable one, that of Lord
+Sandwich's death--which was occasioned by my supposing, at first, that
+the translation of Barba was made by the second Earl, whose death I had
+marked in the list, and forgot to alter, after I had writ the account of
+the father. I shall take care to set this right, as the second volume
+is not yet begun to be printed.
+
+Lord Halifax's Maxims I have already marked down, as I shall Lord
+Dorset's share in Pompey.
+
+The account of the Duke of Wharton's death I had from a very good
+hand--Captain Willoughby; who, in the convent where the Duke died, saw a
+picture of him in the habit. If it was a Bernardine convent, the
+gentleman might confound them; but, considering that there is no life of
+the Duke but bookseller's trash, it is much more likely that they
+mistook.
+
+I have no doubts about Lord Belhaven's speeches; but unless I could
+verify their being published by himself, it were contrary to my rule to
+insert them.
+
+If you look, Sir, into Lord Clarendon's account of Montrose's death, you
+will perceive that there is no probability of the book of his actions
+being composed by himself.
+
+I will consult Sir James Ware's book on Lord Totness's translation; and
+I will mention the Earl of Cork's Memoirs.
+
+Lord Leppington is the Earl of Monmouth, in whose article I have taken
+notice of his Romulus and Tarquin.
+
+Lord Berkeley's book I have actually got, and shall give him an article.
+
+There is one more passage, Sir, in your letter, which I cannot answer,
+without putting you to new trouble--a liberty which all your indulgence
+cannot justify me in taking; else I would beg to know on what authority
+you attribute to Laurence Earl of Rochester[1] the famous preface to
+his father's history, which I have always heard ascribed to Atterbury,
+Smallridge, and Aldridge.[2] The knowledge of this would be an
+additional favour; it would be a much greater, Sir, if coming this way,
+you would ever let me have the honour of seeing a gentleman to whom I am
+so much obliged.
+
+[Footnote 1: The Earl of Rochester was the second son of the Earl of
+Clarendon. He was Lord Treasurer under James II., but was dismissed
+because he refused to change his religion (Macaulay's "History of
+England," c. 6).]
+
+[Footnote 2: Atterbury was the celebrated Bishop of Rochester,
+Smallridge was Bishop of Bristol, and Aldridge (usually written Aldrich)
+was Dean of Christchurch, Oxford, equally well known for his treatise on
+Logic and his five reasons for drinking--
+
+    Good wine, a friend, or being dry;
+    Or lest you should be by and by,
+    Or any other reason why--]
+
+
+_HIS "ROYAL AND NOBLE AUTHORS"--LORD CLARENDON--SIR R. WALPOLE AND LORD
+BOLINGBROKE--THE DUKE OF LEEDS._
+
+TO THE REV. HENRY ZOUCH.
+
+STRAWBERRY HILL, _Oct._ 21, 1758.
+
+Sir,--Every letter I receive from you is a new obligation, bringing me
+new information: but, sure, my Catalogue was not worthy of giving you so
+much trouble. Lord Fortescue is quite new to me; I have sent him to the
+press. Lord Dorset's[1] poem it will be unnecessary to mention
+separately, as I have already said that his works are to be found among
+those of the minor poets.
+
+[Footnote 1: Lord Dorset, Lord Chamberlain under Charles II., author of
+the celebrated ballad "To all you ladies now on land," and patron of
+Dryden and other literary men, was honourably mentioned as such by
+Macaulay in c. 8 of his "History," and also for his refusal, as
+Lord-Lieutenant of Essex, to comply with some of James's illegal
+orders.]
+
+I don't wonder, Sir, that you prefer Lord Clarendon to Polybius[1]; nor
+can two authors well be more unlike: the _former_ wrote a general
+history in a most obscure and almost unintelligible style; the _latter_,
+a portion of private history, in the noblest style in the world. Whoever
+made the comparison, I will do them the justice to believe that they
+understood bad Greek better than their own language in its elevation.
+For Dr. Jortin's[2] Erasmus, which I have very nearly finished, it has
+given me a good opinion of the author, and he has given me a very bad
+one of his subject. By the Doctor's labour and impartiality, Erasmus
+appears a begging parasite, who had parts enough to discover truth, and
+not courage enough to profess it: whose vanity made him always writing;
+yet his writings ought to have cured his vanity, as they were the most
+abject things in the world. _Good Erasmus's honest mean_ was alternate
+time-serving. I never had thought much about him, and now heartily
+despise him.
+
+[Footnote 1: "_You prefer Lord Clarendon to Polybius._" It is hard to
+understand this sentence. Lord Clarendon did _not_ write a general
+history, but an account of a single event, "The Great Rebellion." It was
+Polybius who wrote a "Universal History," of which, however, only five
+books have been preserved, the most interesting portion of which is a
+narrative of Hannibal's invasion of Italy and march over the Alps in the
+Second Punic War.]
+
+[Footnote 2: Dr. Jortin was Archdeacon of London; and, among other
+works, had recently published a life of the celebrated Erasmus, the
+mention of whom by Pope, which Walpole presently quotes, is not very
+unfairly interpreted by Walpole.]
+
+When I speak my opinion to you, Sir, about what I dare say you care as
+little for as I do, (for what is the merit of a mere man of letters?) it
+is but fit I should answer you as sincerely on a question about which
+you are so good as to interest yourself. That my father's life is likely
+to be written, I have no grounds for believing. I mean I know nobody
+that thinks of it. For, myself, I certainly shall not, for many reasons,
+which you must have the patience to hear. A reason to me myself is, that
+I think too highly of him, and too meanly of myself, to presume I am
+equal to the task. They who do not agree with me in the former part of
+my position, will undoubtedly allow the latter part. In the next place,
+the very truths that I should relate would be so much imputed to
+partiality, that he would lose of his due praise by the suspicion of my
+prejudice. In the next place, I was born too late in his life to be
+acquainted with him in the active part of it. Then I was at school, at
+the university, abroad, and returned not till the last moments of his
+administration. What I know of him I could only learn from his own mouth
+in the last three years of his life; when, to my shame, I was so idle,
+and young, and thoughtless, that I by no means profited of his leisure
+as I might have done; and, indeed, I have too much impartiality in my
+nature to care, if I could, to give the world a history, collected
+solely from the person himself of whom I should write. With the utmost
+veneration for his truth, I can easily conceive, that a man who had
+lived a life of party, and who had undergone such persecution from
+party, should have had greater bias than he himself could be sensible
+of. The last, and that a reason which must be admitted, if all the
+others are not--his papers are lost. Between the confusion of his
+affairs, and the indifference of my elder brother to things of that
+sort, they were either lost, burnt, or what we rather think, were stolen
+by a favourite servant of my brother, who proved a great rogue, and was
+dismissed in my brother's life; and the papers were not discovered to be
+missing till after my brother's death. Thus, Sir, I should want vouchers
+for many things I could say of much importance. I have another personal
+reason that discourages me from attempting this task, or any other,
+besides the great reluctance that I have to being a voluminous author.
+Though I am by no means the learned man you are so good as to call me in
+compliment; though, on the contrary, nothing can be more superficial
+than my knowledge, or more trifling than my reading,--yet, I have so
+much strained my eyes, that it is often painful to me to read even a
+newspaper by daylight. In short, Sir, having led a very dissipated life,
+in all the hurry of the world of pleasure, I scarce ever read but by
+candlelight, after I have come home late at nights. As my eyes have
+never had the least inflammation or humour, I am assured I may still
+recover them by care and repose. I own I prefer my eyes to anything I
+could ever read, much more to anything I could write. However, after
+all I have said, perhaps I may now and then, by degrees, throw together
+some short anecdotes of my father's private life and particular story,
+and leave his public history to more proper and more able hands, if such
+will undertake it. Before I finish on this chapter, I can assure you he
+did forgive my Lord Bolingbroke[1]--his nature was forgiving: after all
+was over, and he had nothing to fear or disguise, I can say with truth,
+that there were not _three_ men of whom he ever dropped a word with
+rancour. What I meant of the clergy not forgiving Lord Bolingbroke,
+alluded not to his doctrines, but to the direct attack and war he made
+on the whole body. And now, Sir, I will confess my own weakness to you.
+I do not think so highly of that writer, as I seem to do in my book; but
+I thought it would be imputed to prejudice in me, if I appeared to
+undervalue an author of whom so many persons of sense still think
+highly. My being Sir Robert Walpole's son warped me to praise, instead
+of censuring Lord Bolingbroke. With regard to the Duke of Leeds,[2] I
+think you have misconstrued the decency of my expression. I said,
+_Burnet_[3] _had treated him severely_; that is, I chose that Burnet
+should say so, rather than myself. I have never praised where my heart
+condemned. Little attentions, perhaps, to worthy descendants, were
+excusable in a work of so extensive a nature, and that approached so
+near to these times. I may, perhaps, have an opportunity, at one day or
+other of showing you some passages suppressed on these motives, which
+yet I do not intend to destroy.
+
+[Footnote 1: Sir R. Walpole was so far from having any personal quarrel
+with Bolingbroke, that he took off so much of his outlawry as banished
+him, though he would not allow him to take his seat in the House of
+Peers.]
+
+[Footnote 2: This celebrated statesman was originally Sir Thomas
+Osborne. On the dissolution of the Cabal Ministry he was raised to the
+peerage as Earl of Danby, and was appointed Lord Treasurer. An attempt
+to impeach him, which was prompted by Louis XIV., was baffled by
+Charles. Under William III. he was appointed President of the Council,
+being the recognised leader of the Tory section of the Ministry; and in
+the course of the reign he was twice promoted--first to be Marquis of
+Carmarthen, and subsequently to be Duke of Leeds.]
+
+[Footnote 3: Burnet, the Bishop of Salisbury, to whose "Memoirs of His
+Own Time" all subsequent historians are greatly indebted. He accompanied
+William to England as his chaplain.]
+
+Crew,[1] Bishop of Durham, was as abject a tool as possible. I would be
+very certain he is an author before I should think him worth mentioning.
+If ever you should touch on Lord Willoughby's sermon, I should be
+obliged for a hint of it. I actually have a printed copy of verses by
+his son, on the marriage of the Princess Royal; but they are so
+ridiculously unlike measure, and the man was so mad and so poor, that I
+determined not to mention him.
+
+[Footnote 1: Crew was Bishop of Durham. He is branded by Macaulay (c. 6)
+as "mean, vain, and cowardly." He accepted a seat on James's
+Ecclesiastical Commission, and when "some of his friends represented to
+him the risk which he ran by sitting on an illegal tribunal, he was not
+ashamed to answer that he could not live out of the royal smile."]
+
+If these details, Sir, which I should have thought interesting to no
+mortal but myself, should happen to amuse you, I shall be glad; if they
+do not, you will learn not to question a man who thinks it his duty to
+satisfy the curiosity of men of sense and honour, and who, being of too
+little consequence to have secrets, is not ambitious of the less
+consequence of appearing to have any.
+
+P.S.--I must ask you one question, but to be answered entirely at your
+leisure. I have a play in rhyme called "Saul," said to be written by a
+peer. I guess Lord Orrery. If ever you happen to find out, be so good to
+tell me.
+
+
+_WALPOLE'S MONUMENT TO SIR HORACE'S BROTHER--ATTEMPTED ASSASSINATION OF
+THE KING OF PORTUGAL--COURTESY OF THE DUC D'AIGUILLON TO HIS ENGLISH
+PRISONERS._
+
+TO SIR HORACE MANN.
+
+STRAWBERRY HILL, _Oct._ 24, 1758.
+
+It is a very melancholy present I send you here, my dear Sir; yet,
+considering the misfortune that has befallen us, perhaps the most
+agreeable I could send you. You will not think it the bitterest tear you
+have shed when you drop one over this plan of an urn inscribed with the
+name of your dear brother, and with the testimonial of my eternal
+affection to him! This little monument is at last placed over the pew of
+your family at Linton [in Kent], and I doubt whether any tomb was ever
+erected that spoke so much truth of the departed, and flowed from so
+much sincere friendship in the living. The thought was my own, adopted
+from the antique columbaria, and applied to Gothic. The execution of the
+design was Mr. Bentley's, who alone, of all mankind, could unite the
+grace of Grecian architecture and the irregular lightness and solemnity
+of Gothic. Kent and many of our builders sought this, but have never
+found it. Mr. Chute, who has as much taste as Mr. Bentley, thinks this
+little sketch a perfect model. The soffite is more beautiful than
+anything of either style separate. There is a little error in the
+inscription; it should be _Horatius Walpole posuit_. The urn is of
+marble, richly polished; the rest of stone. On the whole, I think there
+is simplicity and decency, with a degree of ornament that destroys
+neither.
+
+What do you say in Italy on the assassination of the King of
+Portugal?[1] Do you believe that Portuguese subjects lift their hand
+against a monarch for gallantry? Do you believe that when a slave
+murders an absolute prince, he goes a walking with his wife the next
+morning and murders her too? Do you believe the dead King is alive? and
+that the Jesuits are as _wrongfully_ suspected of this assassination as
+they have been of many others they have committed? If you do believe
+this, and all this, you are not very near turning Protestants. It is
+scarce talked of here, and to save trouble, we admit just what the
+Portuguese Minister is ordered to publish. The King of Portugal
+murdered, throws us two hundred years back--the King of Prussia _not_
+murdered, carries us two hundred years forward again.
+
+[Footnote 1: The Duke of Aveiro was offended with the King of Portugal
+for interfering to prevent his son's marriage, and, in revenge, he
+plotted his assassination. He procured the co-operation of some other
+nobles, especially the Marquis and Marchioness of Tavora, and also of
+some of the chief Jesuits in the country, who promised absolution to any
+assassin. The attempt was made on September 3rd, when the King was fired
+at and severely wounded. The conspirators were all convicted and
+executed, and the Jesuits were expelled from the country.]
+
+Another King, I know, has had a little blow: the Prince de Soubise has
+beat some Isenbourgs and Obergs, and is going to be Elector of Hanover
+this winter. There has been a great sickness among our troops in the
+other German army; the Duke of Marlborough has been in great danger, and
+some officers are dead. Lord Frederick Cavendish is returned from
+France. He confirms and adds to the amiable accounts we had received of
+the Duc d'Aiguillon's[1] behaviour to our prisoners. You yourself, the
+pattern of attentions and tenderness, could not refine on what he has
+done both in good-nature and good-breeding: he even forbad any ringing
+of bells or rejoicings wherever they passed--but how your representative
+blood will curdle when you hear of the absurdity of one of your
+countrymen: the night after the massacre at St. Cas, the Duc d'Aiguillon
+gave a magnificent supper of eighty covers to our prisoners--a Colonel
+Lambert got up at the bottom of the table, and asking for a bumper,
+called out to the Duc, "My Lord Duke, here's the Roy de Franse!" You
+must put all the English you can crowd into the accent. _My Lord Duke_
+was so confounded at this preposterous compliment, which it was
+impossible for him to return, that he absolutely sank back into his
+chair and could not utter a syllable: our own people did not seem to
+feel more.
+
+[Footnote 1: The Duc d'Aiguillon was governor of Brittany when the
+disastrous attempt of the Duke of Marlborough on St. Cast was repulsed.
+But he did not get much credit for the defeat. Lacretelle mentions that:
+"Les Bretons qui le considérent comme leur tyran prétendent qu'il
+l'était tenu caché pendant le combat" (iii. 345). He was subsequently
+prosecuted on charges of peculation and subornation, which the
+Parliament declared to be fully established, but Mme. de Barri persuaded
+Louis to cancel their resolution.]
+
+You will read and hear that we have another expedition sailing,
+somewhither in the West Indies. Hobson, the commander, has in his whole
+life had but one stroke of a palsy, so possibly may retain half of his
+understanding at least. There is a great tranquillity at home, but I
+should think not promising duration. The disgust in the army on the late
+frantic measures will furnish some warmth probably to Parliament--and if
+the French should think of returning our visits, should you wonder?
+There are even rumours of some stirring among your little neighbours at
+Albano--keep your eye on them--if you could discover anything in time,
+it would do you great credit. _Apropos_ to _them_, I will send you an
+epigram that I made the other day on Mr. Chute's asking why Taylor the
+oculist called himself Chevalier?[1]
+
+[Footnote 1: Walpole was proud of the epigram, for the week before he
+had sent it to Lady Hervey. It was--
+
+    Why Taylor the quack calls himself Chevalier
+     'Tis not easy a reason to render,
+    Unless blinding eyes that he thinks to make clear
+      Demonstrates he's but a _Pretender_.
+
+Le Chevalier was the name commonly given in courtesy by both parties to
+Prince Charles Edward in 1745. Colonel Talbot says: "'Well, I never
+thought to have been so much indebted to the Pretend--' 'To the Prince,'
+said Waverley, smiling. 'To the Chevalier,' said the Colonel; 'it is a
+good travelling name which we may both freely use'" ("Waverley," c.
+55).]
+
+
+_A NEW EDITION OF LUCAN--COMPARISON OF "PHARSALEA"--CRITICISM ON THE
+POET, WITH THE AENEID--HELVETIUS'S WORK, "DE L'ESPRIT."_
+
+TO THE REV. HENRY ZOUCH.
+
+ARLINGTON STREET, _Dec._ 9, 1758.
+
+Sir,--I have desired Mr. Whiston to convey to you the second edition of
+my Catalogue, not so complete as it might have been, if great part had
+not been printed before I received your remarks, but yet more correct
+than the first sketch with which I troubled you. Indeed, a thing of this
+slight and idle nature does not deserve to have much more pains employed
+upon it.
+
+I am just undertaking an edition of Lucan, my friend Mr. Bentley having
+in his possession his father's notes and emendations on the first seven
+books. Perhaps a partiality for the original author concurs a little
+with this circumstance of the notes, to make me fond of printing, at
+Strawberry Hill, the works of a man who, alone of all the classics, was
+thought to breathe too brave and honest a spirit for the perusal of the
+Dauphin and the French. I don't think that a good or bad taste in poetry
+is of so serious a nature, that I should be afraid of owning too, that,
+with that great judge Corneille, and with that, perhaps, _no_ judge
+Heinsius, I prefer Lucan to Virgil. To speak fairly, I prefer great
+sense, to poetry with little sense. There are hemistichs in Lucan that
+go to one's soul and one's heart;--for a mere epic poem, a fabulous
+tissue of uninteresting battles that don't teach one even to fight, I
+know nothing more tedious. The poetic images, the versification and
+language of the Aeneid are delightful; but take the story by itself, and
+can anything be more silly and unaffecting? There are a few gods without
+power, heroes without character, heaven-directed wars without justice,
+inventions without probability, and a hero who betrays one woman with a
+kingdom that he might have had, to force himself upon another woman and
+another kingdom to which he had no pretensions, and all this to show his
+obedience to the gods! In short, I have always admired his numbers so
+much, and his meaning so little, that I think I should like Virgil
+better if I understood him less.
+
+Have you seen, Sir, a book which has made some noise--"Helvetius de
+l'Esprit"[1]? The author is so good and moral a man, that I grieve he
+should have published a system of as relaxed morality as can well be
+imagined: 'tis a large quarto, and in general a very superficial one.
+His philosophy may be new in France, but it greatly exhausted here. He
+tries to imitate Montesquieu,[2] and has heaped common-places upon
+common-places, which supply or overwhelm his reasoning; yet he has
+often wit, happy allusions, and sometimes writes finely: there is merit
+enough to give an obscure man fame; flimsiness enough to depreciate a
+great man. After his book was licensed, they forced him to retract it by
+a most abject recantation. Then why print this work? If zeal for his
+system pushed him to propagate it, did not he consider that a
+recantation would hurt his cause more than his arguments could support
+it?
+
+[Footnote 1: Helvetius was the son of the French king's physician. His
+book was condemned by the Parliament of Paris as derogatory to the
+nature of man.]
+
+[Footnote 2: Montesquieu was President of the Parliament of Bordeaux. He
+was a voluminous writer, his most celebrated work being his "L'Esprit
+des Lois." Burke described him as "A genius not born in every country,
+or every time: with a Herculean robustness of mind; and nerves not to be
+broken by labour."]
+
+We are promised Lord Clarendon in February from Oxford, but I hear shall
+have the surreptitious edition from Holland much sooner.
+
+You see, Sir, I am a sceptic as well as Helvetius, but of a more
+moderate complexion. There is no harm in telling mankind that there is
+not so much divinity in the Aeneid as they imagine; but, even if I
+thought so, I would not preach that virtue and friendship are mere
+names, and resolvable into self-interest; because there are numbers that
+would remember the grounds of the principle, and forget what was to be
+engrafted on it. Adieu!
+
+
+_STATE OF THE HOUSE OF COMMONS._
+
+TO THE HON. H.S. CONWAY.
+
+ARLINGTON STREET, _Jan._ 19, 1759.
+
+I hope the treaty of Sluys[1] advances rapidly. Considering that your
+own court is as new to you as Monsieur de Bareil and his, you cannot be
+very well entertained: the joys of a Dutch fishing town and the
+incidents of a cartel will not compose a very agreeable history. In the
+mean time you do not lose much; though the Parliament is met, no
+politics are come to town; one may describe the House of Commons like
+the price of stocks--Debates, nothing done. Votes, under par. Patriots,
+no price. Oratory, books shut. Love and war are as much at a stand;
+neither the Duchess of Hamilton, nor the expeditions are gone off yet.
+Prince Edward has asked to go to Quebec, and has been refused. If I was
+sure they would refuse me, I would ask to go thither too. I should not
+dislike about as much laurel as I could stick in my window at Christmas.
+
+[Footnote 1: Treaty of Sluys. Conway was engaged at Sluys negotiating
+with the French envoy, M. de Bareil, for an exchange of prisoners.]
+
+We are next week to have a serenata at the Opera-house for the King of
+Prussia's birthday; it is to begin, "Viva Georgio, e Frederigo viva!" It
+will, I own, divert me to see my Lord Temple whispering _for_ this
+alliance, on the same bench on which I have so often seen him whisper
+_against_ all Germany. The new opera pleases universally, and I hope
+will yet hold up its head. Since Vanneschi is cunning enough to make us
+sing _the roast beef of old Germany_, I am persuaded it will revive;
+politics are the only hot-bed for keeping such a tender plant as Italian
+music alive in England.
+
+You are so thoughtless about your dress, that I cannot help giving you a
+little warning against your return. Remember, everybody that comes from
+abroad is _censé_ to come from France, and whatever they wear at their
+first reappearance immediately grows the fashion. Now if, as is very
+likely, you should through inadvertence change hats with a master of a
+Dutch smack, Offley will be upon the watch, will conclude you took your
+pattern from M. de Bareil, and in a week's time we shall all be equipped
+like Dutch skippers. You see I speak very disinterestedly; for, as I
+never wear a hat myself, it is indifferent to me what sort of hat I
+don't wear. Adieu! I hope nothing in this letter, if it is opened, will
+affect _the conferences_, nor hasten our rupture with Holland. Lest it
+should, I send it to Lord Holdernesse's office; concluding, like Lady
+Betty Waldegrave, that the Government never suspect what they send under
+their own covers.
+
+
+_ROBERTSON'S "HISTORY OF SCOTLAND"--COMPARISON OF RAMSAY AND REYNOLDS AS
+PORTRAIT-PAINTERS--SIR DAVID'S "HISTORY OF THE GOWRIE CONSPIRACY."_
+
+TO SIR DAVID DALRYMPLE.
+
+STRAWBERRY HILL, _Feb._ 25, 1759.
+
+I think, Sir, I have perceived enough of the amiable benignity of your
+mind, to be sure that you will like to hear the praises of your
+friend.[1] Indeed, there is but one opinion about Mr. Robertson's
+"History [of Scotland]." I don't remember any other work that ever met
+universal approbation. Since the Romans and the Greeks, who have _now_
+an exclusive charter for being the best writers in every kind, he is the
+historian that pleases me best; and though what he has been so indulgent
+as to say of me ought to shut my mouth, I own I have been unmeasured in
+my commendations. I have forfeited my own modesty rather than not do
+justice to him. I did send him my opinion some time ago, and hope he
+received it. I can add, with the strictest truth, that he is regarded
+here as one of the greatest men that this island has produced. I say
+_island_, but you know, Sir, that I am disposed to say _Scotland_. I
+have discovered another very agreeable writer among your countrymen, and
+in a profession where I did not look for an author; it is Mr. Ramsay,
+the painter, whose pieces being anonymous, have been overlooked. He has
+a great deal of genuine wit, and a very just manner of reasoning. In his
+own walk, he has great merit. He and Mr. Reynolds are our favourite
+painters, and two of the very best we ever had. Indeed, the number of
+good has been very small, considering the numbers there are. A very few
+years ago there were computed two thousand portrait-painters in London;
+I do not exaggerate the computation, but diminish it; though I think it
+must have been exaggerated. Mr. Reynolds and Mr. Ramsay can scarce be
+rivals; their manners are so different. The former is bold, and has a
+kind of tempestuous colouring, yet with dignity and grace; the latter is
+all delicacy. Mr. Reynolds seldom succeeds in women; Mr. Ramsay is
+formed to paint them.
+
+[Footnote 1: Sir David was himself a historical writer of some
+importance. Macaulay was greatly indebted to his "Memoirs of Great
+Britain and Ireland from the Restoration to the Battle of La Hogue." The
+secret history and object of the strange attempt on James VI.
+(afterwards James I. of England) have been discussed by many writers,
+but without any of them succeeding in any very clear or certain
+elucidation of the transaction.]
+
+I fear I neglected, Sir, to thank you for your present of the history of
+the "Conspiracy of the Gowries"; but I shall never forget all the
+obligations I have to you. I don't doubt but in Scotland you approve
+what is liked here almost as much as Mr. Robertson's History; I mean the
+marriage of Colonel Campbell and the Duchess of Hamilton. If her fortune
+is singular, so is her merit. Such uncommon noise as her beauty made has
+not at all impaired the modesty of her behaviour. Adieu!
+
+
+_WRITERS OF HISTORY: GOODALL, HUME, ROBERTSON--QUEEN CHRISTINA._
+
+TO SIR DAVID DALRYMPLE.
+
+STRAWBERRY HILL, _July_ 11, 1759.
+
+You will repent, Sir, I fear, having drawn such a correspondent upon
+yourself. An author flattered and encouraged is not easily shaken off
+again; but if the interests of my book did not engage me to trouble you,
+while you are so good as to write me the most entertaining letters in
+the world, it is very natural for me to lay snares to inveigle more of
+them. However, Sir, excuse me this once, and I will be more modest for
+the future in trespassing on your kindness. Yet, before I break out on
+my new wants, it will be but decent, Sir, to answer some particulars of
+your letter.
+
+I have lately read Mr. Goodall's[1] book. There is certainly ingenuity
+in parts of his defence; but I believe one seldom thinks a defence
+_ingenious_ without meaning that it is unsatisfactory. His work left me
+fully convinced of what he endeavoured to disprove; and showed me, that
+the piece you mention is not the only one that he has written against
+moderation.
+
+[Footnote 1: Mr. Goodall had published an Essay on the letters put
+forward as written by Queen Mary to Bothwell, branding them as
+forgeries. The question of their genuineness has been examined with
+great acuteness by more than one subsequent writer, and the arguments
+against their genuineness are certainly very strong.]
+
+I have lately got Lord Cromerty's "Vindication of the legitimacy of King
+Robert [the Third]," and his "Synopsis Apocalyptica," and thank you
+much, Sir, for the notice of any of his pieces. But if you expect that
+his works should lessen my esteem for the writers of Scotland, you will
+please to recollect, that the letter which paints Lord Cromerty's pieces
+in so ridiculous a light, is more than a counterbalance in favour of the
+writers of your country; and of all men living, Sir, you are the last
+who will destroy my partiality for Scotland.
+
+There is another point, Sir, on which, with all your address, you will
+persuade me as little. Can I think that we want writers of history while
+Mr. Hume and Mr. Robertson are living? It is a truth, and not a
+compliment, that I never heard objections made to Mr. Hume's History
+without endeavouring to convince the persons who found fault with it,
+of its great merit and beauty; and for what I saw of Mr. Robertson's
+work, it is one of the purest styles, and of the greatest impartiality,
+that I ever read. It is impossible for me to recommend a subject to him;
+because I cannot judge of what materials he can obtain. His present
+performance will undoubtedly make him so well known and esteemed, that
+he will have credit to obtain many new lights for a future history; but
+surely those relating to his own country will always lie most open to
+him. This is much my way of thinking with regard to myself. Though the
+Life of Christina[1] is a pleasing and a most uncommon subject, yet,
+totally unacquainted as I am with Sweden and its language, how could I
+flatter myself with saying anything new of her? And when original
+letters and authentic papers shall hereafter appear, may not they
+contradict half one should relate on the authority of what is already
+published? for though Memoirs _written_ nearest to the time are likely
+to be the truest, those _published_ nearest to it are generally the
+falsest.
+
+[Footnote 1: Queen Christina of Sweden was the daughter and heiress of
+the great Gustavus Adolphus. After a time she abdicated the throne and
+lived for some time in Paris, where she acted in one respect as if still
+possessed of royal authority, actually causing her equerry, Monaldeschi,
+to be hung in one of her sitting-rooms.]
+
+But, indeed, Sir, I am now making you only civil excuses; the real one
+is, I have no kind of intention of continuing to write. I could not
+expect to succeed again with so much luck,--indeed, I think it so,--as I
+have done; it would mortify me more now, after a little success, to be
+despised, than it would have done before; and if I could please as much
+as I should wish to do, I think one should dread being a voluminous
+author. My own idleness, too, bids me desist. If I continued, I should
+certainly take more pains than I did in my Catalogue; the trouble would
+not only be more than I care to encounter, but would probably destroy
+what I believe the only merit of my last work, the ease. If I could
+incite you to tread in steps which I perceive you don't condemn, and for
+which it is evident you are so well qualified, from your knowledge, the
+grace, facility, and humour of your expression and manner, I shall have
+done a real service, where I expected at best to amuse.
+
+
+_THE BATTLE OF MINDEN--LORD G. SACKVILLE._
+
+TO THE HON. H.S. CONWAY.
+
+ARLINGTON STREET, _Aug._ 14, 1759.
+
+I am here in the most unpleasant way in the world, attending poor Mrs.
+Leneve's death-bed, a spectator of all the horrors of tedious suffering
+and clear sense, and with no one soul to speak to--but I will not tire
+you with a description of what has quite worn me out.
+
+Probably by this time you have seen the Duke of Richmond or Fitzroy--but
+lest you should not, I will tell you all I can learn, and a wonderful
+history it is. Admiral Byng was not more unpopular than Lord George
+Sackville.[1] I should scruple repeating his story if Betty and the
+waiters at Arthur's did not talk of it publicly, and thrust Prince
+Ferdinand's orders into one's hand.
+
+[Footnote 1: Lord George was brought to court-martial for disobedience
+of orders, and most deservedly cashiered--a sentence which was, not very
+becomingly, oveilooked some years afterwards, when, having changed his
+name to Germaine on succeeding to a large fortune, and having become a
+member of the House of Commons, he was made a Secretary of State by Lord
+North.]
+
+You have heard, I suppose, of the violent animosities that have reigned
+for the whole campaign between him and Lord Granby--in which some other
+warm persons have been very warm too. In the heat of the battle, the
+Prince, finding thirty-six squadrons of French coming down upon our
+army, sent Ligonier to order our thirty-two squadrons, under Lord
+George, to advance. During that transaction, the French appeared to
+waver; and Prince Ferdinand, willing, as it is supposed, to give the
+honour to the British horse of terminating the day, sent Fitzroy to bid
+Lord George bring up only the British cavalry. Ligonier had but just
+delivered his message, when Fitzroy came with his.--Lord George said,
+"This can't be so--would he have me break the line? here is some
+mistake." Fitzroy replied, he had not argued upon the orders, but those
+were the orders. "Well!" said Lord George, "but I want a guide." Fitzroy
+said, he would be his guide. Lord George, "Where is the Prince?"
+Fitzroy, "I left him at the head of the left wing, I don't know where he
+is now." Lord George said he would go seek him, and have this explained.
+Smith then asked Fitzroy to repeat the orders to him; which being done,
+Smith went and whispered Lord George, who says he then bid Smith carry
+up the cavalry. Smith is come, and says he is ready to answer anybody
+any question. Lord George says, Prince Ferdinand's behaviour to him has
+been most infamous, has asked leave to resign his command, and to come
+over, which is granted. Prince Ferdinand's behaviour is summed up in the
+enclosed extraordinary paper: which you will doubt as I did, but which
+is certainly genuine. I doubted, because, in the military, I thought
+direct disobedience of orders was punished with an immediate arrest, and
+because the last paragraph seemed to me very foolish. The going out of
+the way to compliment Lord Granby with what he would have done, seems to
+take off a little from the compliments paid to those that have done
+something; but, in short, Prince Ferdinand or Lord George, one of them,
+is most outrageously in the wrong, and the latter has much the least
+chance of being thought in the right.
+
+The particulars I tell you, I collected from the most _accurate_
+authorities.--I make no comments on Lord George, it would look like a
+little dirty court to you; and the best compliment I can make you, is to
+think, as I do, that you will be the last man to enjoy this revenge.
+
+You will be sorry for poor M'Kinsey and Lady Betty, who have lost their
+only child at Turin. Adieu!
+
+
+_ADMIRAL BOSCAWEN'S VICTORY--DEFEAT OF THE KING OF PRUSSIA--LORD G.
+SACKVILLE._
+
+TO SIR HORACE MANN.
+
+ARLINGTON STREET, _Sept._ 13, 1759.
+
+With your unathletic constitution I think you will have a greater weight
+of glory to represent than you can bear. You will be as _épuisé_ as
+Princess Craon with all the triumphs over Niagara, Ticonderoga,
+Crown-point, and such a parcel of long names. You will ruin yourself in
+French horns, to exceed those of Marshal Botta, who has certainly found
+out a pleasant way of announcing victories. Besides, _all_ the West
+Indies, which we have taken by a panic, there is Admiral Boscawen has
+demolished the Toulon squadron, and has made _you_ Viceroy of the
+Mediterranean. I really believe the French will come hither now, for
+they can be safe nowhere else. If the King of Prussia should be totally
+undone in Germany,[1] we can afford to give him an appanage, as a
+younger son of England, of some hundred thousand miles on the Ohio. Sure
+universal monarchy was never so put to shame as that of France! What a
+figure do they make! They seem to have no ministers, no generals, no
+soldiers! If anything could be more ridiculous than their behaviour in
+the field, it would be in the cabinet! Their invasion appears not to
+have been designed against us, but against their own people, who, they
+fear, will mutiny, and to quiet whom they disperse expresses, with
+accounts of the progress of their arms in England. They actually have
+established posts, to whom people are directed to send their letters for
+their friends _in England_. If, therefore, you hear that the French have
+established themselves at Exeter or at Norwich, don't be alarmed, nor
+undeceive the poor women who are writing to their husbands for English
+baubles.
+
+[Footnote 1: Frederic the Great had sustained a severe defeat at
+Hochkirch in October, 1758, and a still more terrible one in August of
+this year from Marshals Laudon and Soltikof at Kunersdorf. It seemed so
+irreparable that for a moment he even contemplated putting an end to his
+life; but he was saved from the worst consequences of the blow by
+jealousies which sprang up between the Austrian and Russian commanders,
+and preventing them from profiting by their victory as they might have
+done.]
+
+We have lost another Princess, Lady Elizabeth.[1] She died of an
+inflammation in her bowels in two days. Her figure was so very
+unfortunate, that it would have been difficult for her to be happy, but
+her parts and application were extraordinary. I saw her act in "Cato" at
+eight years old, (when she could not stand alone, but was forced to lean
+against the side-scene,) better than any of her brothers and sisters.
+She had been so unhealthy, that at that age she had not been taught to
+read, but had learned the part of Lucia by hearing the others study
+their parts. She went to her father and mother, and begged she might
+act. They put her off as gently as they could--she desired leave to
+repeat her part, and when she did, it was with so much sense, that there
+was no denying her.
+
+[Footnote 1: Second daughter of Frederick, Prince of Wales.--WALPOLE.]
+
+I receive yours of August 25. To all your alarms for the King of
+Prussia I subscribe. With little Brandenburgh he could not exhaust all
+the forces of Bohemia, Hungary, Austria, Muscovy, Siberia, Tartary,
+Sweden, &c., &c., &c.--but not to politicize too much, I believe the
+world will come to be fought for somewhere between the North of Germany
+and the back of Canada, between Count Daun and Sir William Johnson.[1]
+
+[Footnote 1: Our General in America--WALPOLE.]
+
+You guessed right about the King of Spain; he is dead, and the Queen
+Dowager may once more have an opportunity of embroiling the little of
+Europe that remains unembroiled.
+
+Thank you, my dear Sir, for the Herculaneum and Caserta that you are
+sending me. I wish the watch may arrive safe, to show you that I am not
+insensible to all your attentions for me, but endeavour, at a great
+distance, to imitate you in the execution of commissions.
+
+I would keep this letter back for a post, that I might have but one
+trouble of sending you Quebec too; but when one has taken so many
+places, it is not worth while to wait for one more.
+
+Lord George Sackville, the hero of all conversation, if one can be so
+for not being a hero, is arrived. He immediately applied for a
+Court-Martial, but was told it was impossible now, as the officers
+necessary are in Germany. This was in writing from Lord Holdernesse--but
+Lord Ligonier in words was more squab--"If he wanted a Court-Martial, he
+might go seek it in Germany." All that could be taken from him, is, his
+regiment, above two thousand pounds a year: commander in Germany at ten
+pounds a day, between three and four thousand pounds: lieutenant-general
+of the ordnance, one thousand five hundred pounds: a fort, three hundred
+pounds. He remains with a patent place in Ireland of one thousand two
+hundred pounds, and about two thousand pounds a year of his own and
+wife's. With his parts and ambition it cannot end here; he calls himself
+ruined, but when the Parliament meets, he will probably attempt some
+sort of revenge.
+
+They attribute, I don't know with what grounds, a sensible kind of plan
+to the French; that De la Clue was to have pushed for Ireland, Thurot
+for Scotland, and the Brest fleet for England--but before they lay such
+great plans, they should take care of proper persons to execute them.[1]
+
+[Footnote 1: De la Clue and the French were this year making unusual
+efforts to establish a naval superiority over us, which they never had
+done, and never will do. As is mentioned in this letter, one powerful
+fleet was placed under De la Clue, another under Conflans, and a strong
+squadron under Commodore Thurot. De la Clue, however, for many weeks
+kept close in Toulon, resisting every endeavour of Boscawen to tempt him
+out, till the English admiral was compelled to retire to Gibraltar for
+the repair of some of his ships. De la Clue, not knowing which way he
+had gone, thought he could steal through the Straits to join Conflans,
+according to his original orders. But Boscawen caught him off Cape
+Lagos, and gave him a decisive defeat, capturing five sail of the line,
+and among them the flagship _L'Océan_ (80). Before the end of the year
+Hawke almost destroyed the fleet of Conflans, capturing five and driving
+the rest on shore; while Thurot, who at first had a gleam of success,
+making one or two descents on the northern coast of Ireland, and even
+capturing Carrickfergus, had, in the end, worse fortune than either of
+his superior officers, being overtaken at the mouth of Belfast Lough by
+Captain Elliott with a squadron of nearly equal force, when the whole of
+the French squadron was taken and he himself was killed (the Editor's
+"History of the British Navy," c. 12).]
+
+I cannot help smiling at the great objects of our letters. We never
+converse on a less topic than a kingdom. We are a kind of citizens of
+the world, and battles and revolutions are the common incidents of our
+neighbourhood. But that is and must be the case of distant
+correspondences: Kings and Empresses that we never saw, are the only
+persons we can be acquainted with in common. We can have no more
+familiarity than the _Daily Advertiser_ would have if it wrote to the
+_Florentine Gazette_. Adieu! My compliments to any monarch that lives
+within five hundred miles of you.
+
+
+_A YEAR OF TRIUMPHS._
+
+TO GEORGE MONTAGU, ESQ.
+
+STRAWBERRY HILL, _Oct._ 21, 1759.
+
+Your pictures shall be sent as soon as any of us go to London, but I
+think that will not be till the Parliament meets. Can we easily leave
+the remains of such a year as this? It is still all gold.[1] I have not
+dined or gone to bed by a fire till the day before yesterday. Instead of
+the glorious and ever-memorable year 1759, as the newspapers call it, I
+call it this ever-warm and victorious year. We have not had more
+conquest than fine weather: one would think we had plundered East and
+West Indies of sunshine. Our bells are worn threadbare with ringing for
+victories. I believe it will require ten votes of the House of Commons
+before people will believe it is the Duke of Newcastle that has done
+this, and not Mr. Pitt. One thing is very fatiguing--all the world is
+made knights or generals. Adieu! I don't know a word of news less than
+the conquest of America. Adieu! yours ever.
+
+[Footnote 1: The immediate cause of this exultation was the battle
+(September 14th) and subsequent capture of Quebec. On the other side of
+the world Colonel Forde had inflicted severe defeats on the French and
+Dutch, and had taken Masulipatam; and besides these triumphs there were
+our naval successes mentioned in the last letter, and the battle of
+Minden.]
+
+P.S.--You shall hear from me again if we take Mexico or China before
+Christmas.
+
+2nd P.S.--I had sealed my letter, but break it open again, having forgot
+to tell you that Mr. Cowslade has the pictures of Lord and Lady Cutts,
+and is willing to sell them.
+
+
+_FRENCH BANKRUPTCY--FRENCH EPIGRAM._
+
+TO GEORGE MONTAGU, ESQ.
+
+ARLINGTON STREET, _Nov._ 8, 1759.
+
+Your pictures will set out on Saturday; I give you notice, that you may
+inquire for them. I did not intend to be here these three days, but my
+Lord Bath taking the trouble to send a man and horse to ask me to dinner
+yesterday, I did not know how to refuse; and besides, as Mr. Bentley
+said to me, "you know he was an old friend of your father."
+
+The town is empty, but is coming to dress itself for Saturday. My Lady
+Coventry showed George Selwyn her clothes; they are blue, with spots of
+silver, of the size of a shilling, and a silver trimming, and cost--my
+lord will know what. She asked George how he liked them; he replied,
+"Why, you will be change for a guinea."
+
+I find nothing talked of but the French bankruptcy;[1] Sir Robert Brown,
+I hear--and am glad to hear--will be a great sufferer. They put gravely
+into the article of bankrupts in the newspaper, "Louis le Petit, of the
+city of Paris, peace-breaker, dealer, and chapman;" it would have been
+still better if they had said, "Louis Bourbon of petty France." We don't
+know what is become of their Monsieur Thurot, of whom we had still a
+little mind to be afraid. I should think he would do like Sir Thomas
+Hanmer, make a faint effort, beg pardon of the Scotch for their
+disappointment, and retire. Here are some pretty verses just arrived.
+
+    Pourquoi le baton à Soubise,
+    Puisque Chevert est le vainqueur?[2]
+    C'est de la cour une méprise,
+    Ou bien le but de la faveur.
+    Je ne vois rien là qui m'étonne,
+    Repond aussitot un railleur;
+    C'est à l'aveugle qu'on le donne,
+    Et non pas au conducteur.
+
+[Footnote 1: In 1759 M. Bertin was Finance Minister--the fourth who had
+held that office in four years; and among his expedients for raising
+money he had been compelled to have recourse to the measure of stopping
+the payment of the interest on a large portion of the National Debt.]
+
+[Footnote 2: "_Chevert est le vainqueur._" He was one of the most
+brilliant officers in the French army. It was he who, under the orders
+of Saxe, surprised Prague in 1744, and it was to him that Maréchal
+d'Estrées was principally indebted for his victory of Hastenbeck.]
+
+Lady Meadows has left nine thousand pounds in reversion after her
+husband to Lord Sandwich's daughter. _Apropos_ to my Lady Meadows's
+maiden name, a name I believe you have sometimes heard; I was diverted
+t'other day with a story of a lady of that name,[1] and a lord, whose
+initial is no farther from hers than he himself is sometimes supposed to
+be. Her postillion, a lad of sixteen, said, "I am not such a child but I
+can guess something: whenever my Lord Lyttelton comes to my lady, she
+orders the porter to let in nobody else, and then they call for a pen
+and ink, and say they are going to write history." Is not this _finesse_
+so like him? Do you know that I am persuaded, now he is parted, that he
+will forget he is married, and propose himself in form to some woman or
+other.
+
+[Footnote 1: Mrs. Montagu was the foundress of "The Blue-stocking Club."
+She was the authoress of three "Dialogues of the Dead," to which Walpole
+is alluding here, and which she published with some others by Lord
+Lyttelton.]
+
+When do you come? if it is not soon, you will find a new town. I stared
+to-day at Piccadilly like a country squire; there are twenty new stone
+houses: at first I concluded that all the grooms, that used to live
+there, had got estates, and built palaces. One young gentleman, who was
+getting an estate, but was so indiscreet as to step out of his way to
+rob a comrade, is convicted, and to be transported; in short, one of the
+waiters at Arthur's. George Selwyn says, "What a horrid idea he will
+give of us to the people in Newgate!"
+
+I was still more surprised t'other day, than at seeing Piccadilly, by
+receiving a letter from the north of Ireland from a clergyman, with
+violent encomiums on my "Catalogue of Noble Authors"--and this when I
+thought it quite forgot. It puts me in mind of the queen[1] that sunk at
+Charing Cross and rose at Queenhithe.
+
+[Footnote 1: Queen Eleanor, wife of Edward I., who erected the cross at
+Charing, and others at the different places where her body had stopped
+on the way from the North to Westminster.]
+
+Mr. Chute has got his commission to inquire about your Cutts, but he
+thinks the lady is not your grandmother. You are very ungenerous to
+hoard tales from me of your ancestry: what relation have I spared? If
+your grandfathers were knaves, will your bottling up their bad blood
+mend it? Do you only take a cup of it now and then by yourself, and then
+come down to your parson, and boast of it, as if it was pure old
+metheglin? I sat last night with the Mater Gracchorum--oh! 'tis a Mater
+Jagorum; if her descendants taste any of her black blood, they surely
+will make as wry faces at it as the servant in Don John does when the
+ghost decants a corpse. Good night! I am just returning to Strawberry,
+to husband my two last days and to avoid all the pomp of the birthday.
+Oh! I had forgot, there is a Miss Wynne coming forth, that is to be
+handsomer than my Lady Coventry; but I have known one threatened with
+such every summer for these seven years, and they are always addled by
+winter!
+
+
+_HE LIVES AMONGST ROYALTY--COMMOTIONS IN IRELAND._
+
+TO GEORGE MONTAGU, ESQ.
+
+ARLINGTON STREET, _Jan._ 7, 1760.
+
+You must not wonder I have not written to you a long time; a person of
+my consequence! I am now almost ready to say, _We_, instead of _I_. In
+short, I live amongst royalty--considering the plenty, that is no great
+wonder. All the world lives with them, and they with all the world.
+Princes and Princesses open shops, in every corner of the town, and the
+whole town deals with them. As I have gone to one, I chose to frequent
+all, that I might not be particular, and seem to have views; and yet it
+went so much against me, that I came to town on purpose a month ago for
+the Duke's levée, and had engaged Brand to go with me--and then could
+not bring myself to it. At last, I went to him and Princess Emily
+yesterday. It was well I had not flattered myself with being still in my
+bloom; I am grown so old since they saw me, that neither of them knew
+me. When they were told, he just spoke to me (I forgive him; he is not
+out of my debt, even with that): she was exceedingly gracious, and
+commended Strawberry to the skies. To-night, I was asked to their party
+at Norfolk House. These parties are wonderfully select and dignified:
+one might sooner be a knight of Malta than qualified for them; I don't
+know how the Duchess of Devonshire, Mr. Fox, and I, were forgiven some
+of our ancestors. There were two tables at loo, two at whist, and a
+quadrille. I was commanded to the Duke's loo; he was sat down: not to
+make him wait, I threw my hat upon the marble table, and broke four
+pieces off a great crystal chandelier. I stick to my etiquette, and
+treat them with great respect; not as I do my friend, the Duke of York.
+But don't let us talk any more of Princes. My Lucan appears to-morrow; I
+must say it is a noble volume. Shall I send it to you--or won't you come
+and fetch it?
+
+There is nothing new of public, but the violent commotions in
+Ireland,[1] whither the Duke of Bedford still persists in going. Aeolus
+to quell a storm!
+
+[Footnote 1: "In 1759 reports that a Legislative Union was contemplated
+led to some furious Protestant riots in Dublin. The Chancellor and some
+of the Bishops were violently attacked. A judge in a law case warned the
+Roman Catholics that 'the laws did not presume a Papist to exist in the
+kingdom'; nor could they breathe without the connivance of the
+Government" (Lecky, "History of England," ii. 436). Gray, in a letter to
+Dr. Wharton, mentions that they forced their way into the House of
+Lords, and "placed an old woman on the throne, and called for pipes and
+tobacco." He especially mentions the Bishops of Killaloe and Waterford
+as exposed to ardent ill-treatment, and concludes: "The notion that had
+possessed the crowd was that an union was to be voted between the two
+nations, and they should have no more Parliaments in Dublin."]
+
+I am in great concern for my old friend, poor Lady Harry Beauclerc; her
+lord dropped down dead two nights ago, as he was sitting with her and
+all their children. Admiral Boscawen is dead by this time. Mrs.
+Osborn[1] and I are not much afflicted: Lady Jane Coke too is dead,
+exceedingly rich; I have not heard her will yet.
+
+[Footnote 1: Boscawen had been a member of the court martial which had
+found Admiral Byng guilty. Mrs. Osborn was Byng's sister.]
+
+If you don't come to town soon, I give you warning, I will be a lord of
+the bedchamber, or a gentleman usher. If you will, I will be nothing but
+what I have been so many years--my own and yours ever.
+
+
+_SEVERITY OF THE WEATHER--SCARCITY IN GERMANY--A PARTY AT PRINCE
+EDWARD'S--CHARLES TOWNSEND'S COMMENTS ON LA FONTAINE._
+
+TO GEORGE MONTAGU, ESQ.
+
+ARLINGTON STREET, _Jan._ 14, 1760.
+
+How do you contrive to exist on your mountain in this rude season? Sure
+you must be become a snowball! As I was not in England in forty-one, I
+had no notion of such cold. The streets are abandoned; nothing appears
+in them: the Thames is almost as solid. Then think what a campaign must
+be in such a season! Our army was under arms for fourteen hours on the
+twenty-third, expecting the French; and several of the men were frozen
+when they should have dismounted. What milksops the Marlboroughs and
+Turennes, the Blakes and the Van Tromps appear now, who whipped into
+winter quarters and into port, the moment their noses looked blue. Sir
+Cloudesley Shovel said that an admiral would deserve to be broke, who
+kept great ships out after the end of September, and to be shot if after
+October. There is Hawke in the bay weathering _this_ winter, after
+conquering in a storm. For my part, I scarce venture to make a campaign
+in the Opera-house; for if I once begin to freeze, I shall be frozen
+through in a moment. I am amazed, with such weather, such ravages, and
+distress, that there is anything left in Germany, but money; for
+thither, half the treasure of Europe goes: England, France, Russia, and
+all the Empress can squeeze from Italy and Hungary, all is sent thither,
+and yet the wretched people have not subsistence. A pound of bread sells
+at Dresden for eleven-pence. We are going to send many more troops
+thither; and it is so much the fashion to raise regiments, that I wish
+there were such a neutral kind of beings in England as abbés,[1] that
+one might have an excuse for not growing military mad, when one has
+turned the heroic corner of one's age. I am ashamed of being a young
+rake, when my seniors are covering their grey toupees with helmets and
+feathers, and accoutering their pot-bellies with cuirasses and martial
+masquerade habits. Yet rake I am, and abominably so, for a person that
+begins to wrinkle reverendly. I have sat up twice this week till between
+two and three with the Duchess of Grafton, at loo, who, by the way, has
+got a pam-child this morning, and on Saturday night I supped with Prince
+Edward at my Lady Rochford's, and we stayed till half an hour past
+three. My favour with that Highness continues, or rather increases. He
+makes everybody make suppers for him to meet me, for I still hold out
+against going to court. In short, if he were twenty years older, or I
+could make myself twenty years younger, I might carry him to Campden
+House, and be as impertinent as ever my Lady Churchill was; but, as I
+dread being ridiculous, I shall give my Lord Bute no uneasiness. My Lady
+Maynard, who divides the favour of this tiny court with me, supped with
+us. Did you know she sings French ballads very prettily? Lord Rochford
+played on the guitar, and the Prince sung; there were my two nieces, and
+Lord Waldegrave, Lord Huntingdon, and Mr. Morrison the groom, and the
+evening was pleasant; but I had a much more agreeable supper last night
+at Mrs. Clive's, with Miss West, my niece Cholmondeley, and Murphy, the
+writing actor, who is very good company, and two or three more. Mrs.
+Cholmondeley is very lively; you know how entertaining the Clive is, and
+Miss West is an absolute original.
+
+[Footnote 1: French chroniclers remark that the title Abbé had long
+since ceased in France to denote the possession of any ecclesiastical
+preferment, but had become a courteous denomination of unemployed
+ecclesiastics; and they compare it to the use of the term "Esquire" in
+England.]
+
+There is nothing new, but a very dull pamphlet written by Lord Bath, and
+his chaplain Douglas, called a "Letter to Two Great Men." It is a plan
+for the peace, and much adopted by the City, and much admired by all who
+are too humble to judge for themselves.
+
+I was much diverted the other morning with another volume on birds by
+Edwards, who has published four or five. The poor man, who is grown very
+old and devout, begs God to take from him the love of natural
+philosophy; and having observed some heterodox proceedings among bantam
+cocks, he proposes that all schools of girls and boys should be
+promiscuous, lest, if separated, they should learn wayward passions. But
+what struck me most were his dedications, the last was to God; this is
+to Lord Bute, as if he was determined to make his fortune in one world
+or the other.
+
+Pray read Fontaine's fable of the lion grown old; don't it put you in
+mind of anything? No! not when his shaggy majesty has borne the insults
+of the tiger and the horse, &c., and the ass comes last, kicks out his
+only remaining fang, and asks for a blue bridle? _Apropos_, I will tell
+you the turn Charles Townshend gave to this fable. "My lord," said he,
+"has quite mistaken the thing; he soars too high at first: people often
+miscarry by not preceding by degrees; he went and at once asked for my
+_Lord_ Carlisle's garter--if he would have been contented to ask first
+for my _Lady_ Carlisle's garter, I don't know but he would have obtained
+it!" Adieu!
+
+
+_CAPTURE OF CARRICKFERGUS._
+
+TO SIR HORACE MANN.
+
+ARLINGTON STREET, _Feb._ 28, 1760.
+
+The next time you see Marshal Botta, and are to act King of Great
+Britain, France, and Ireland, you must abate about a hundredth
+thousandth part of the dignity of your crown. You are no more monarch
+of _all_ Ireland, than King O'Neil, or King Macdermoch is. Louis XV. is
+sovereign of France, Navarre, and Carrickfergus. You will be mistaken if
+you think the peace is made, and that we cede this Hibernian town, in
+order to recover Minorca, or to keep Quebec and Louisbourg. To be sure,
+it is natural you should think so: how should so victorious and heroic a
+nation cease to enjoy any of its possessions, but to save Christian
+blood? Oh! I know you will suppose there has been another insurrection,
+and that it is King John of Bedford, and not King George of Brunswick,
+that has lost this town. Why, I own you are a great politician, and see
+things in a moment--and no wonder, considering how long you have been
+employed in negotiations; but for once all your sagacity is mistaken.
+Indeed, considering the total destruction of the maritime force of
+France, and that the great mechanics and mathematicians of this age have
+not invented a flying bridge to fling over the sea and land from the
+coast of France to the north of Ireland, it was not easy to conceive how
+the French should conquer Carrickfergus--and yet they have. But how I
+run on! not reflecting that by this time the old Pretender must have
+hobbled through Florence on his way to Ireland, to take possession of
+this scrap of his recovered domains; but I may as well tell you at once,
+for to be sure you and the loyal body of English in Tuscany will slip
+over all this exordium to come to the account of so extraordinary a
+revolution. Well, here it is. Last week Monsieur Thurot--oh! now you
+are _au fait_!--Monsieur Thurot, as I was saying, landed last week in
+the isle of Islay, the capital province belonging to a great Scotch
+King, who is so good as generally to pass the winter with his friends
+here in London. Monsieur Thurot had three ships, the crews of which
+burnt two ships belonging to King George, and a house belonging to his
+friend the King of Argyll--pray don't mistake; by _his friend_, I mean
+King George's, not Thurot's friend. When they had finished this
+campaign, they sailed to Carrickfergus, a poorish town, situate in the
+heart of the Protestant cantons. They immediately made a moderate demand
+of about twenty articles of provisions, promising to pay for them; for
+you know it is the way of modern invasions to make them cost as much as
+possible to oneself, and as little to those one invades. If this was not
+complied with, they threatened to burn the town, and then march to
+Belfast, which is much richer. We were sensible of this civil
+proceeding, and not to be behindhand, agreed to it; but somehow or other
+this capitulation was broken; on which a detachment (the whole invasion
+consists of one thousand men) attack the place. We shut the gates, but
+after the battle of Quebec, it is impossible that so great a people
+should attend to such trifles as locks and bolts, accordingly there were
+none--and as if there were no gates neither, the two armies fired
+through them--if this is a blunder, remember I am describing an _Irish_
+war. I forgot to give you the numbers of the Irish army. It consisted of
+four companies--indeed they consisted but of seventy-two men, under
+Lieut.-colonel Jennings, a wonderful brave man--too brave, in short, to
+be very judicious. Unluckily our ammunition was soon spent, for it is
+not above a year that there have been any apprehensions for Ireland, and
+as all that part of the country are most protestantly loyal, it was not
+thought necessary to arm people who would fight till they die for their
+religion. When the artillery was silenced, the garrison thought the best
+way of saving the town was by flinging it at the heads of the besiegers;
+according they poured volleys of brickbats at the French, whose
+commander, Monsieur Flobert, was mortally knocked down, and his troops
+began to give way. However, General Jennings thought it most prudent to
+retreat to the castle, and the French again advanced. Four or five raw
+recruits still bravely kept the gates, when the garrison, finding no
+more gunpowder in the castle than they had had in the town, and not near
+so good a brick-kiln, sent to desire to surrender. General Thurot
+accordingly made them prisoners of war, and plundered the town.
+
+
+_THE BALLAD OF "HARDYKNUTE"--MR. HOME'S "SIEGE OF AQUILEIA"--"TRISTRAM
+SHANDY"--BISHOP WARBURTON'S PRAISE OF IT._
+
+TO SIR DAVID DALRYMPLE.
+
+STRAWBERRY HILL, _April_ 4, 1760.
+
+Sir,--As I have very little at present to trouble you with myself, I
+should have deferred writing till a better opportunity, if it were not
+to satisfy the curiosity of a friend; a friend whom you, Sir, will be
+glad to have made curious, as you originally pointed him out as a likely
+person to be charmed with the old Irish poetry you sent me. It is Mr.
+Gray, who is an enthusiast about those poems, and begs me to put the
+following queries to you; which I will do in his own words, and I may
+say truly, _Poeta loquitur_.
+
+"I am so charmed with the two specimens of Erse poetry, that I cannot
+help giving you the trouble to inquire a little farther about them, and
+should wish to see a few lines of the original, that I may form some
+slight idea of the language, the measure, and the rhythm.
+
+"Is there anything known of the author or authors, and of what antiquity
+are they supposed to be?
+
+"Is there any more to be had of equal beauty, or at all approaching to
+it?
+
+"I have been often told, that the poem called Hardykanute[1] (which I
+always admired and still admire) was the work of somebody that lived a
+few years ago. This I do not at all believe, though it has evidently
+been retouched in places by some modern hand; but, however, I am
+authorised by this report to ask, whether the two poems in question are
+certainly antique and genuine. I make this inquiry in quality of an
+antiquary, and am not otherwise concerned about it; for if I were sure
+that any one now living in Scotland had written them, to divert himself
+and laugh at the credulity of the world, I would undertake a journey
+into the Highlands only for the pleasure of seeing him."
+
+[Footnote 1: "Hardyknute" was an especial favourite of Sir W. Scott. In
+his "Life of Mr. Lockhart" he mentions having found in one of his books
+a mention that "he was taught 'Hardyknute' by heart before he could read
+the ballad itself; it was the first poem he ever learnt, the last he
+should ever forget" (c. 2). And in the very last year of his life, while
+at Malta, in a discussion on ballads in general, "he greatly lamented
+his friend Mr. Frere's heresy in not esteeming highly enough that of
+'Hardyknute.' He admitted that it was not a veritable old ballad, but
+'just old enough,' and a noble imitation of the best style." In fact, it
+was the composition of a lady, Mrs. Hachet, of Wardlaw.]
+
+You see, Sir, how easily you may make our greatest southern bard travel
+northward to visit a brother. The young translator has nothing to do but
+to own a forgery, and Mr. Gray is ready to pack up his lyre, saddle
+Pegasus, and set out directly. But seriously, he, Mr. Mason, my Lord
+Lyttelton, and one or two more, whose taste the world allows, are in
+love with your Erse elegies: I cannot say in general they are so much
+admired--but Mr. Gray alone is worth satisfying.
+
+The "Siege of Aquileia," of which you ask, pleased less than Mr. Home's
+other plays.[1] In my own opinion, "Douglas" far exceeds both the
+other. Mr. Home seems to have a beautiful talent for painting genuine
+nature and the manners of his country. There was so little of nature in
+the manners of both Greeks and Romans, that I do not wonder at his
+success being less brilliant when he tried those subjects; and, to say
+the truth, one is a little weary of them. At present, nothing is talked
+of, nothing admired, but what I cannot help calling a very insipid and
+tedious performance: it is a kind of novel, called "The Life and
+Opinions of Tristram Shandy;"[2] the great humour of which consists in
+the whole narration always going backwards. I can conceive a man saying
+that it would be droll to write a book in that manner, but have no
+notion of his persevering in executing it. It makes one smile two or
+three times at the beginning, but in recompense makes one yawn for two
+hours. The characters are tolerably kept up, but the humour is for ever
+attempted and missed. The best thing in it is a Sermon, oddly coupled
+with a good deal of coarseness, and both the composition of a clergyman.
+The man's head, indeed, was a little turned before, now topsy-turvy with
+his success and fame. Dodsley has given him six hundred and fifty pounds
+for the second edition and two more volumes (which I suppose will reach
+backwards to his great-great-grandfather); Lord Fauconberg, a donative
+of one hundred and sixty pounds a-year; and Bishop Warburton[3] gave him
+a purse of gold and this compliment (which happened to be a
+contradiction), "that it was quite an original composition, and in the
+true Cervantic vein:" the only copy that ever was an original, except in
+painting, where they all pretend to be so. Warburton, however, not
+content with this, recommended the book to the bench of bishops, and
+told them Mr. Sterne, the author, was the English Rabelais. They had
+never heard of such a writer. Adieu!
+
+[Footnote 1: "_Mr. Home's other plays._" Mr. Home was a Presbyterian
+minister. His first play was "The Tragedy of Douglas," which D'Israeli
+describes as a drama which, "by awakening the piety of domestic
+affections with the nobler passions, would elevate and purify the mind;"
+and proceeds, with no little indignation, to relate how nearly it cost
+the author dear. The "Glasgow divines, with the monastic spirit of the
+darkest ages, published a paper, which I abridge for the contemplation
+of the reader, who may wonder to see such a composition written in the
+eighteenth century: 'On Wednesday, February 2, 1757, the Presbytery of
+Glasgow came to the following resolution: They, having seen a printed
+paper intituled an admonition and exhortation of the reverend Presbytery
+of Edinburgh, which, among other evils prevailing, observed the
+following _melancholy_ but _notorious_ facts, that one who is a minister
+of the Church of Scotland did _himself_ write and compose _a stage
+play_, intituled 'The Tragedy of Douglas,' and got it to be acted at the
+theatre of Edinburgh; and that he, with several other ministers of the
+Church, were present, and _some_ of them _oftener than once_, at the
+acting of the said play before a numerous audience. The presbytery being
+_deeply affected_ with this new and strange appearance, do publish these
+sentiments,'" &c., &c.--sentiments with which I will not disgust the
+reader.]
+
+[Footnote 2: Walpole's criticism is worth preserving as a singular proof
+how far prejudice can obscure the judgement of a generally shrewd
+observer, and it is the more remarkable since he selects as its especial
+fault the failure of the author's attempts at humour; while all other
+critics, from Macaulay to Thackeray, agree in placing it among those
+works in which the humour is most conspicuous and most attractive. Even
+Johnson, when Boswell once, thinking perhaps that his "illustrious
+friend" might be offended with its occasional coarseness, pronounced
+Sterne to be "a dull fellow," was at once met with, "Why no, Sir."]
+
+[Footnote 3: Bishop Warburton was Bishop of Gloucester, a prelate whose
+vast learning was in some degree tarnished by unepiscopal violence of
+temper. He was a voluminous author; his most important work being an
+essay on "The Divine Legation of Moses." In one of his letters to
+Garrick he praises "Tristram Shandy" highly, priding himself on having
+recommended it to all the best company in town.]
+
+
+_ERSE POETRY--"THE DIALOGUES OF THE DEAD"--"THE COMPLETE ANGLER."_
+
+TO SIR DAVID DALRYMPLE.
+
+_June_ 20, 1760.
+
+I am obliged to you, Sir, for the volume of Erse poetry: all of it has
+merit; but I am sorry not to see in it the six descriptions of night
+with which you favoured me before, and which I like as much as any of
+the pieces. I can, however, by no means agree with the publisher, that
+they seem to be parts of an heroic poem; nothing to me can be more
+unlike. I should as soon take all the epitaphs in Westminster Abbey, and
+say it was an epic poem on the History of England. The greatest part are
+evidently elegies; and though I should not expect a bard to write by the
+rules of Aristotle, I would not, on the other hand, give to any work a
+title that must convey so different an idea to every common reader. I
+could wish, too, that the authenticity had been more largely stated. A
+man who knows Dr. Blair's character will undoubtedly take his word; but
+the gross of mankind, considering how much it is the fashion to be
+sceptical in reading, will demand proofs, not assertions.
+
+I am glad to find, Sir, that we agree so much on "The Dialogues of the
+Dead;"[1] indeed, there are very few that differ from us. It is well for
+the author, that none of his critics have undertaken to ruin his book
+by improving it, as you have done in the lively little specimen you sent
+me. Dr. Brown has writ a dull dialogue, called "Pericles and Aristides,"
+which will have a different effect from what yours would have. One of
+the most objectionable passages in Lord Lyttelton's book is, in my
+opinion, his apologising for the _moderate_ government of Augustus. A
+man who had exhausted tyranny in the most lawless and unjustifiable
+excesses is to be excused, because, out of weariness or policy, he grows
+less sanguinary at last!
+
+[Footnote 1: "The Dialogues of the Dead" were by Lord Lyttelton. In an
+earlier letter Walpole pronounces them "not very lively or striking."]
+
+There is a little book coming out, that will amuse you. It is a new
+edition of Isaac Walton's "Complete Angler,"[1] full of anecdotes and
+historic notes. It is published by Mr. Hawkins,[2] a very worthy
+gentleman in my neighbourhood, but who, I could wish, did not think
+angling so very _innocent_ an amusement. We cannot live without
+destroying animals, but shall we torture them for our sport--sport in
+their destruction? I met a rough officer at his house t'other day, who
+said he knew such a person was turning Methodist; for, in the middle of
+conversation, he rose, and opened the window to let out a moth. I told
+him I did not know that the Methodists had any principle so good, and
+that I, who am certainly not on the point of becoming one, always did so
+too. One of the bravest and best men I ever knew, Sir Charles Wager, I
+have often heard declare he never killed a fly willingly. It is a
+comfortable reflection to me, that all the victories of last year have
+been gained since the suppression of the Bear Garden and prize-fighting;
+as it is plain, and nothing else would have made it so, that our valour
+did not singly and solely depend upon these two Universities. Adieu!
+
+[Footnote 1: "The Complete Angler" is one of those rare books which
+retain its popularity 250 years after its publication--not for the value
+of its practical instructions to fishermen, for in this point of view it
+is valueless (Walton himself being only a worm or livebait fisherman,
+and the chapters on fly-fishing being by Cotton), but for its healthy
+tone and love of country scenery and simple country amusements which are
+seldom more attractively displayed.]
+
+[Footnote 2: Afterwards Sir John Hawkins, the executor and biographer of
+Dr. Johnson.]
+
+
+_VISITS IN THE MIDLAND COUNTIES--WHICHNOVRE--SHEFFIELD--THE NEW ART OF
+PLATING--CHATSWORTH--HADDON HALL--HARDWICKE--APARTMENTS OF MARY QUEEN OF
+SCOTS--NEWSTEAD--ALTHORP._
+
+TO GEORGE MONTAGU, ESQ.
+
+ARLINGTON STREET, _Sept._ 1, 1760.
+
+I was disappointed at your not being at home as I returned from my
+expedition.
+
+My tour has been extremely agreeable. I set out with winning a good deal
+at Loo at Ragley; the Duke of Grafton was not so successful, and had
+some high words with Pam. I went from thence to Offley's at
+Whichnovre[1], the individual manor of the flitch of bacon, which has
+been growing rusty for these thirty years in his hall. I don't wonder; I
+have no notion that one could keep in good humour with one's wife for a
+year and a day, unless one was to live on the very spot, which is one of
+the sweetest scenes I ever saw. It is the brink of a high hill; the
+Trent wriggles through at the foot; Lichfield and twenty other churches
+and mansions decorate the view. Mr. Anson has bought an estate
+[Shugborough] close by, whence my Lord used to cast many a wishful eye,
+though without the least pretensions even to a bit of lard.
+
+[Footnote 1: The manor of Whichnovre, near Lichfield, is held (like the
+better-known Dunmow, in Essex) on the singular custom of the Lord of the
+Manor "keeping ready, all times of the year but Lent, one bacon-flyke
+hanging in his hall, to be given to every man or woman who demanded it a
+year and a day after marriage, upon their swearing that they would not
+have changed for none other, fairer nor fouler, richer nor poorer, nor
+for no other descended of great lineage sleeping nor waking at no
+time."]
+
+I saw Lichfield Cathedral, which has been rich, but my friend Lord
+Brooke and his soldiery treated poor St. Chad[1] with so little
+ceremony, that it is in a most naked condition. In a niche at the very
+summit they have crowded a statue of Charles the Second, with a special
+pair of shoe-strings, big enough for a weathercock. As I went to Lord
+Strafford's I passed through Sheffield, which is one of the foulest
+towns in England in the most charming situation; there are
+two-and-twenty thousand inhabitants making knives and scissors: they
+remit eleven thousand pounds a week to London. One man there has
+discovered the art of plating copper with silver; I bought a pair of
+candlesticks for two guineas that are quite pretty. Lord Strafford has
+erected the little Gothic building, which I got Mr. Bentley to draw; I
+took the idea from Chichester Cross. It stands on a high bank in the
+menagerie, between a pond and a vale, totally bowered over with oaks. I
+went with the Straffords to Chatsworth and stayed there four days; there
+were Lady Mary Coke, Lord Besborough and his daughters, Lord Thomond,
+Mr. Boufoy, the Duke, the old Duchess, and two of his brothers. Would
+you believe that nothing was ever better humoured than the ancient
+Grace? She stayed every evening till it was dark in the skittle-ground,
+keeping the score; and one night, that the servants had a ball for Lady
+Dorothy's birthday, we fetched the fiddler into the drawing-room, and
+the dowager herself danced with us! I never was more disappointed than
+at Chatsworth,[2] which, ever since I was born, I have condemned. It is
+a glorious situation; the vale rich in corn and verdure, vast woods hang
+down the hills, which are green to the top, and the immense rocks only
+serve to dignify the prospect. The river runs before the door, and
+serpentises more than you can conceive in the vale. The Duke is widening
+it, and will make it the middle of his park; but I don't approve an idea
+they are going to execute, of a fine bridge with statues under a noble
+cliff. If they will have a bridge (which by the way will crowd the
+scene), it should be composed of rude fragments, such as the giant of
+the Peak would step upon, that he might not be wetshod. The expense of
+the works now carrying on will amount to forty thousand pounds. A heavy
+quadrangle of stables is part of the plan, is very cumbrous, and
+standing higher than the house, is ready to overwhelm it. The principal
+front of the house is beautiful, and executed with the neatness of
+wrought plate; the inside is most sumptuous, but did not please me; the
+heathen gods, goddesses, Christian virtues, and allegoric gentlefolks,
+are crowded into every room, as if Mrs. Holman had been in heaven and
+invited everybody she saw. The great apartment is first; painted
+ceilings, inlaid floors, and unpainted wainscots make every room
+_sombre_. The tapestries are fine, but not fine enough, and there are
+few portraits. The chapel is charming. The great _jet d'eau_ I like, nor
+would I remove it; whatever is magnificent of the kind in the time it
+was done, I would retain, else all gardens and houses wear a tiresome
+resemblance. I except that absurdity of a cascade tumbling down marble
+steps, which reduces the steps to be of no use at all. I saw Haddon, an
+abandoned old castle of the Rutlands, in a romantic situation, but which
+never could have composed a tolerable dwelling. The Duke sent Lord John
+[Cavendish] with me to Hardwicke, where I was again disappointed; but I
+will not take relations from others; they either don't see for
+themselves, or can't see for me. How I had been promised that I should
+be charmed with Hardwicke,[3] and told that the Devonshires ought to
+have established there! never was I less charmed in my life. The house
+is not Gothic, but of that betweenity, that intervened when Gothic
+declined and Paladian was creeping in--rather, this is totally naked of
+either. It has vast chambers--aye, vast, such as the nobility of that
+time delighted in, and did not know how to furnish. The great apartment
+is exactly what it was when the Queen of Scots was kept there. Her
+council-chamber, the council-chamber of a poor woman, who had only two
+secretaries, a gentleman-usher, an apothecary, a confessor, and three
+maids, is so outrageously spacious, that you would take it for King
+David's, who thought, contrary to all modern experience, that in the
+multitude of counsellors there is wisdom. At the upper end is the state,
+with a long table, covered with a sumptuous cloth, embroidered and
+embossed with gold,--at least what was gold; so are all the tables.
+Round the top of the chamber runs a monstrous frieze, ten or twelve feet
+deep, representing stag-hunting in miserable plastered relief. The next
+is her dressing-room, hung with patch-work on black velvet; then her
+state bedchamber. The bed has been rich beyond description, and now
+hangs in costly golden tatters. The hangings, part of which they say her
+Majesty worked, are composed of figures as large as life, sewed and
+embroidered on black velvet, white satin, &c., and represent the virtues
+that were necessary for her, or that she was forced to have, as Patience
+and Temperance, &c. The fire-screens are particular; pieces of yellow
+velvet, fringed with gold, hang on a cross-bar of wood, which is fixed
+on the top of a single stick, that rises from the foot. The only
+furniture which has any appearance of taste are the table and cabinets,
+which are all of oak, richly carved. There is a private chamber within,
+where she lay, her arms and style over the door; the arras hangs over
+all the doors; the gallery is sixty yards long, covered with bad
+tapestry, and wretched pictures of Mary herself, Elizabeth in a gown of
+sea-monsters, Lord Darnley, James the Fifth and his Queen, curious, and
+a whole history of Kings of England, not worth sixpence a-piece. There
+is an original of old Bess of Hardwicke herself, who built the house.
+Her estates were then reckoned at sixty thousand pounds a-year, and now
+let for two hundred thousand pounds. Lord John Cavendish told me, that
+the tradition in the family is, that it had been prophesied to her that
+she should never die as long as she was building; and that at last she
+died in a hard frost, when the labourers could not work. There is a fine
+bank of old oaks in the park over a lake; nothing else pleased me there.
+However, I was so diverted with this old beldam and her magnificence,
+that I made this epitaph for her:--
+
+    Four times the nuptial bed she warm'd,
+    And every time so well perform'd,
+    That when death spoil'd each husband's billing,
+    He left the widow every shilling.
+    Fond was the dame, but not dejected;
+    Five stately mansions she erected
+    With more than royal pomp, to vary
+    The prison of her captive Mary.
+    When Hardwicke's towers shall bow their head,
+    Nor mass be more in Worksop said;
+    When Bolsover's fair fame shall tend
+    Like Olcotes, to its mouldering end;
+    When Chatsworth tastes no Ca'ndish bounties,
+    Let fame forget this costly countess.
+
+[Footnote 1: Scott alludes to Lord Brooke's violation of St. Chad's
+Cathedral in "Marmion," whose tomb
+
+    Was levelled when fanatic Brooke
+    The fair cathedral stormed and took,
+    But thanks to Heaven and good St. Chad
+    A guerdon meet the spoiler had (c. vi. 36).
+
+And the poet adds in a note that Lord Brooke himself, "who commanded the
+assailants, was shot with a musket-ball through the visor of his helmet;
+and the royalists remarked that he was killed by a shot fired from St.
+Chad's Cathedral on St. Chad's Day, and received his wound in the very
+eye with which, he had said, he hoped to see the ruin of all the
+cathedrals in England."]
+
+[Footnote 2: "_Disappointed with Chatsworth._" In a letter, however, to
+Lord Strafford three days afterwards he says: "Chatsworth surpassed his
+expectations; there is such richness and variety of prospect."]
+
+[Footnote 3: Hardwicke was one of what Home calls "the gentleman's
+houses," to which the unfortunate Queen was removed between the times of
+her detention at Tutbury and Fotheringay. It is not mentioned by
+Burton.]
+
+As I returned, I saw Newstead[1] and Althorpe: I like both. The former
+is the very abbey. The great east window of the church remains, and
+connects with the house; the hall entire, the refectory entire, the
+cloister untouched, with the ancient cistern of the convent, and their
+arms on it; a private chapel quite perfect. The park, which is still
+charming, has not been so much unprofaned; the present Lord has lost
+large sums, and paid part in old oaks, five thousand pounds of which
+have been cut near the house. In recompense he has built two baby forts,
+to pay his country in castles for the damage done to the navy, and
+planted a handful of Scotch firs, that look like ploughboys dressed in
+old family liveries for a public day. In the hall is a very good
+collection of pictures, all animals; the refectory, now the great
+drawing-room, is full of Byrons; the vaulted roof remaining, but the
+windows have new dresses making for them by a Venetian tailor. Althorpe
+has several very fine pictures by the best Italian hands, and a gallery
+of all one's acquaintance by Vandyke and Lely. I wonder you never saw
+it; it is but six miles from Northampton. Well, good night; I have writ
+you such a volume, that you see I am forced to page it. The Duke [of
+Cumberland] has had a stroke of the palsy, but is quite recovered,
+except in some letters, which he cannot pronounce; and it is still
+visible in the contraction of one side of his mouth. My compliments to
+your family.
+
+[Footnote 1: Newstead, since Walpole's time immortalised as the seat of
+the illustrious Byron. Evelyn had compared it, for its situation, to
+Fontainebleau, and particularly extolled "the front of a glorious Abbey
+Church" and its "brave woods and streams;" and Byron himself has given
+an elaborate description of it under the name of "Norman Abbey," not
+overlooking its woods:
+
+      It stood embosomed in a happy valley
+    Crowned by high woodlands, where the Druid-oak
+      Stood like Caractacus in act to rally
+    His host, with broad arms, 'gainst the thunderstroke--
+
+nor the streams:
+
+      Before the mansion lay a lucid lake
+    Broad as transparent, deep, and freshly fed
+      By a river, which its softened way did take
+    In currents through the calmer waters spread
+      Around--
+
+nor the abbey front:
+
+      A glorious remnant of the Gothic pile
+    While yet the church was Rome's, stood half apart
+      In a grand arch, which once screened many an angle.
+
+("Don Juan," xiii. 56-59.)]
+
+
+_GENTLEMAN'S DRESS--INFLUENCE OF LORD BUTE--ODE BY LORD MIDDLESEX--G.
+SELWYN'S QUOTATION._
+
+
+TO GEORGE MONTAGU, ESQ.
+
+ARLINGTON STREET, _April_ 16, 1761.
+
+You are a very mule; one offers you a handsome stall and manger in
+Berkeley Square, and you will not accept it. I have chosen your coat, a
+claret colour, to suit the complexion of the country you are going to
+visit; but I have fixed nothing about the lace. Barrett had none of
+gauze, but what were as broad as the Irish Channel. Your tailor found a
+very reputable one at another place, but I would not determine rashly;
+it will be two or three-and-twenty shillings the yard; you might have a
+very substantial real lace, which would wear like your buffet, for
+twenty. The second order of gauzes are frippery, none above twelve
+shillings, and those tarnished, for the species is out of fashion. You
+will have time to sit in judgment upon these important points; for
+Hamilton your secretary told me at the Opera two nights ago, that he had
+taken a house near Bushy, and hoped to be in my neighbourhood for four
+months.
+
+I was last night at your plump Countess's, who is so shrunk, that she
+does not seem to be composed of above a dozen hassocs. Lord Guildford
+rejoiced mightily over your preferment. The Duchess of Argyle was
+playing there, not knowing that the great Pam was just dead, to wit,
+her brother-in-law. He was abroad in the morning, was seized with a
+palpitation after dinner and was dead before the surgeon could arrive.
+There's the crown of Scotland too fallen upon my Lord Bute's head![1]
+Poor Lord Edgecumbe is still alive, and may be so for some days; the
+physicians, who no longer ago than Friday se'nnight persisted that he
+had no dropsy, in order to prevent his having Ward, on Monday last
+proposed that Ward should be called in, and at length they owned they
+thought the mortification begun. It is not clear it is yet; at times he
+is in his senses, and entirely so, composed, clear, and rational; talks
+of his death, and but yesterday, after such a conversation with his
+brother, asked for a pencil to amuse himself with drawing. What parts,
+genius, and agreeableness thrown away at a hazard table, and not
+permitted the chance of being saved by the villainy of physicians!
+
+[Footnote 1: Lord Bute used his influence in favour of Scotchmen with so
+little moderation that he raised a prejudice against the whole nation,
+which found a vent in Wilkes's _North Briton_ and Churchill's bitter and
+powerful satire, "The Prophecy of Famine."]
+
+You will be pleased with the Anacreontic, written by Lord Middlesex upon
+Sir Harry Bellendine: I have not seen anything so antique for ages; it
+has all the fire, poetry, and simplicity of Horace.
+
+    Ye sons of Bacchus, come and join
+    In solemn dirge, while tapers shine
+    Around the grape-embossed shrine
+    Of honest Harry Bellendine.
+
+    Pour the rich juice of Bourdeaux's wine,
+    Mix'd with your falling tears of brine,
+    In full libation o'er the shrine
+    Of honest Harry Bellendine.
+
+    Your brows let ivy chaplets twine,
+    While you push round the sparkling wine,
+    And let your table be the shrine
+    Of honest Harry Bellendine.
+
+He died in his vocation, of a high fever, after the celebration of some
+orgies. Though but six hours in his senses, he gave a proof of his usual
+good humour, making it his last request to the sister Tuftons to be
+reconciled; which they are. His pretty villa, in my neighbourhood, I
+fancy he has left to the new Lord Lorn. I must tell you an admirable
+_bon mot_ of George Selwyn, though not a new one; when there was a
+malicious report that the eldest Tufton was to marry Dr. Duncan, Selwyn
+said, "How often will she repeat that line of Shakspeare,
+
+    Wake Duncan with this knocking--would thou couldst!"
+
+I enclose the receipt from your lawyer. Adieu!
+
+
+_CAPTURE OF BELLEISLE--GRAY'S POEMS--HOGARTH'S VANITY._
+
+TO GEORGE MONTAGU, ESQ.
+
+ARLINGTON STREET, _May_ 5, 1761.
+
+We have lost a young genius, Sir William Williams; an express from
+Belleisle, arrived this morning, brings nothing but his death. He was
+shot very unnecessarily, riding too near a battery; in sum, he is a
+sacrifice to his own rashness, and to ours. For what are we taking
+Belleisle?[1] I rejoiced at the little loss we had on landing; for the
+glory, I leave it the common council. I am very willing to leave London
+to them too, and do pass half the week at Strawberry, where my two
+passions, lilacs and nightingales, are in full bloom. I spent Sunday as
+if it were Apollo's birthday; Gray and Mason were with me, and we
+listened to the nightingales till one o'clock in the morning. Gray has
+translated two noble incantations from the Lord knows who, a Danish
+Gray, who lived the Lord knows when. They are to be enchased in a
+history of English bards, which Mason and he are writing; but of which
+the former has not written a word yet, and of which the latter, if he
+rides Pegasus at his usual footpace, will finish the first page two
+years hence.
+
+[Footnote 1: Belleisle was of no value to us to keep; but Pitt sent an
+expedition against it, that in any future treaty of peace he might be
+able to exchange it for Minorca.]
+
+But the true frantic Oestus resides at present with Mr. Hogarth; I went
+t'other morning to see a portrait he is painting of Mr. Fox. Hogarth
+told me he had promised, if Mr. Fox would sit as he liked, to make as
+good a picture as Vandyke or Rubens could. I was silent--"Why now," said
+he, "you think this very vain, but why should not one speak truth?" This
+_truth_ was uttered in the face of his own Sigismonda, which is exactly
+a maudlin street-walker, tearing off the trinkets that her keeper had
+given her, to fling at his head. She has her father's picture in a
+bracelet on her arm, and her fingers are bloody with the heart, as if
+she had just bought a sheep's pluck in St. James's Market. As I was
+going, Hogarth put on a very grave face, and said, "Mr. Walpole, I want
+to speak to you." I sat down, and said, I was ready to receive his
+commands. For shortness, I will mark this wonderful dialogue by initial
+letters.
+
+H. I am told you are going to entertain the town with something in our
+way. W. Not very soon, Mr. Hogarth. H. I wish you would let me have it,
+to correct; I should be very sorry to have you expose yourself to
+censure; we painters must know more of those things than other people.
+W. Do you think nobody understands painting but painters? H. Oh! so far
+from it, there's Reynolds, who certainly has genius; why, but t'other
+day he offered a hundred pounds for a picture, that I would not hang in
+my cellar; and indeed, to say truth, I have generally found, that
+persons who had studied painting least were the best judges of it; but
+what I particularly wished to say to you was about Sir James Thornhill
+(you know he married Sir James's daughter): I would not have you say
+anything against him; there was a book published some time ago, abusing
+him, and it gave great offence. He was the first that attempted
+_history_ in England, and, I assure you, some Germans have said that he
+was a very great painter. W. My work will go no lower than the year one
+thousand seven hundred, and I really have not considered whether Sir J.
+Thornhill will come within my plan or not; if he does, I fear you and I
+shall not agree upon his merits. H. I wish you would let me correct it;
+besides, I am writing something of the same kind myself; I should be
+sorry we should clash. W. I believe it is not much known what my work
+is, very few persons have seen it. H. Why, it is a critical history of
+painting, is not it? W. No, it is an antiquarian history of it in
+England; I bought Mr. Vertue's MSS., and, I believe, the work will not
+give much offence; besides, if it does, I cannot help it; when I publish
+anything, I give it to the world to think of it as they please. H. Oh!
+if it is an antiquarian work, we shall not clash; mine is a critical
+work; I don't know whether I shall ever publish it. It is rather an
+apology for painters. I think it is owing to the good sense of the
+English that they have not painted better. W. My dear Mr. Hogarth, I
+must take my leave of you, you now grow too wild--and I left him. If I
+had stayed, there remained nothing but for him to bite me. I give you my
+honour this conversation is literal, and, perhaps, as long as you have
+known Englishmen and painters, you never met with anything so
+distracted. I had consecrated a line to his genius (I mean, for wit) in
+my Preface; I shall not erase it; but I hope nobody will ask me if he is
+not mad. Adieu!
+
+
+_INTENDED MARRIAGE OF THE KING--BATTLES IN GERMANY--CAPTURE OF
+PONDICHERRY--BURKE._
+
+TO GEORGE MONTAGU, ESQ.
+
+STRAWBERRY HILL, _July_ 22, 1761.
+
+For my part, I believe Mademoiselle Scudéri[1] drew the plan of this
+year. It is all royal marriages, coronations, and victories; they come
+tumbling so over one another from distant parts of the globe, that it
+looks just like the handywork of a lady romance writer, whom it costs
+nothing but a little false geography to make the Great Mogul in love
+with a Princess of Mecklenburgh, and defeat two marshals of France[2] as
+he rides post on an elephant to his nuptials. I don't know where I am. I
+had scarce found Mecklenburg Strelitz with a magnifying-glass before I
+am whisked to Pondicherry--well, I take it, and raze it. I begin to grow
+acquainted with Colonel Coote,[3] and figure him packing up chests of
+diamonds, and sending them to his wife against the King's
+wedding--thunder go to the Tower guns, and behold, Broglie and Soubise
+are totally defeated; if the mob have not much stronger heads and
+quicker conceptions than I have, they will conclude my Lord Granby is
+become nabob. How the deuce in two days can one digest all this? Why is
+not Pondicherry in Westphalia? I don't know how the Romans did, but I
+cannot support two victories every week. Well, but you will want to know
+the particulars. Broglie and Soubise united, attacked our army on the
+15th, but were repulsed; the next day, the Prince Mahomet Alli Cawn--no,
+no, I mean Prince Ferdinand, returned the attack, and the French threw
+down their arms and fled, run over my Lord Harcourt, who was going to
+fetch the new Queen; in short, I don't know how it was, but Mr. Conway
+is safe, and I am as happy as Mr. Pitt himself. We have only lost a
+Lieutenant-colonel Keith; Colonel Marlay and Harry Townshend are
+wounded.
+
+[Footnote 1: Mdlle. Scudéri and her brother were writers of romances of
+enormous length, and, in their time, of great popularity (see
+D'Israeli's account of them, "Curiosities of Literature," i. 105).]
+
+[Footnote 2: "_Defeat two French marshals_"--they were Maréchal de
+Broglie and the Prince de Soubise. The action, which, however, was of
+but little importance, is called by Lacretelle "Le Combat de
+Fillingshausen."]
+
+[Footnote 3: Colonel Eyre Coote, the best soldier next to Clive himself
+that India had yet seen, had defeated the French Governor, Count Lally,
+at Wandewash in January, 1760; and the capture of Pondicherry was one
+important fruit of the victory.]
+
+I could beat myself for not having a flag ready to display on my round
+tower, and guns mounted on all my battlements. Instead of that, I have
+been foolishly trying on my new pictures upon my gallery. However, the
+oratory of our Lady of Strawberry shall be dedicated next year on the
+anniversary of Mr. Conway's safety. Think with his intrepidity, and
+delicacy of honour wounded, what I had to apprehend; you shall
+absolutely be here on the sixteenth of next July. Mr. Hamilton tells me
+your King does not set out for his new dominions till the day after the
+Coronation; if you will come to it, I can give you a very good place for
+the procession; where, is a profound secret, because, if known, I should
+be teased to death, and none but my first friends shall be admitted. I
+dined with your secretary [Single-speech Hamilton] yesterday; there were
+Garrick and a young Mr. Burke[1]--who wrote a book in the style of Lord
+Bolingbroke, that was much admired. He is a sensible man, but has not
+worn off his authorism yet, and thinks there is nothing so charming as
+writers, and to be one. He will know better one of these days. I like
+Hamilton's little Marly; we walked in the great _allée_, and drank tea
+in the arbour of treillage; they talked of Shakspeare and Booth, of
+Swift and my Lord Bath, and I was thinking of Madame Sévigné. Good
+night--I have a dozen other letters to write; I must tell my friends how
+happy I am--not as an Englishman, but as a cousin.
+
+[Footnote 1: Mr. Burke's book was "A Vindication of Natural Society,"
+and was regarded as a very successful imitation of the style of Lord
+Bolingbroke.]
+
+
+_ARRIVAL OF THE PRINCESS OF MECKLENBURGH--THE ROYAL WEDDING--THE QUEEN'S
+APPEARANCE AND BEHAVIOUR._
+
+TO SIR HORACE MANN.
+
+ARLINGTON STREET, _Sept._ 10, 1761.
+
+When we least expected the Queen, she came, after being ten days at sea,
+but without sickness for above half-an-hour. She was gay the whole
+voyage, sung to her harpsichord, and left the door of her cabin open.
+They made the coast of Suffolk last Saturday, and on Monday morning she
+landed at Harwich; so prosperously has his Majesty's chief eunuch, as
+they have made the Tripoline ambassador call Lord Anson, executed his
+commission. She lay that night at your old friend Lord Abercorn's, at
+Witham [in Essex]; and, if she judged by her host, must have thought she
+was coming to reign in the realm of taciturnity. She arrived at St.
+James's a quarter after three on Tuesday the 8th. When she first saw the
+Palace she turned pale: the Duchess of Hamilton smiled. "My dear
+Duchess," said the Princess, "_you_ may laugh; you have been married
+twice; but it is no joke to me." Is this a bad proof of her sense? On
+the journey they wanted her to curl her toupet. "No, indeed," said she,
+"I think it looks as well as those of the ladies who have been sent for
+me: if the King would have me wear a periwig, I will; otherwise I shall
+let myself alone." The Duke of York gave her his hand at the
+garden-gate: her lips trembled, but she jumped out with spirit. In the
+garden the King met her; she would have fallen at his feet; he prevented
+and embraced her, and led her into the apartments, where she was
+received by the Princess of Wales and Lady Augusta: these three
+princesses only dined with the King. At ten the procession went to
+chapel, preceded by unmarried daughters of peers, and peeresses in
+plenty. The new Princess was led by the Duke of York and Prince William;
+the Archbishop married them; the King talked to her the whole time with
+great good humour, and the Duke of Cumberland gave her away. She is not
+tall, nor a beauty; pale, and very thin; but looks sensible; and is
+genteel. Her hair is darkish and fine; her forehead low, her nose very
+well, except the nostrils spreading too wide; her mouth has the same
+fault, but her teeth are good. She talks a good deal, and French
+tolerably; possesses herself, is frank, but with great respect to the
+King. After the ceremony, the whole company came into the drawing-room
+for about ten minutes, but nobody was presented that night. The Queen
+was in white and silver; an endless mantle of violet-coloured velvet,
+lined with ermine, and attempted to be fastened on her shoulder by a
+bunch of large pearls, dragged itself and almost the rest of her clothes
+halfway down her waist. On her head was a beautiful little tiara of
+diamonds; a diamond necklace, and a stomacher of diamonds, worth three
+score thousand pounds, which she is to wear at the Coronation too. Her
+train was borne by the ten bridesmaids, Lady Sarah Lenox,[1] Lady
+Caroline Russell, Lady Caroline Montagu, Lady Harriot Bentinck, Lady
+Anne Hamilton, Lady Essex Kerr (daughters of Dukes of Richmond, Bedford,
+Manchester, Portland, Hamilton, and Roxburgh); and four daughters of the
+Earls of Albemarle, Brook, Harcourt, and Ilchester--Lady Elizabeth
+Keppel, Louisa Greville, Elizabeth Harcourt, and Susan Fox Strangways:
+their heads crowned with diamonds, and in robes of white and silver.
+Lady Caroline Russell is extremely handsome; Lady Elizabeth Keppel very
+pretty; but with neither features nor air, nothing ever looked so
+charming as Lady Sarah Lenox; she has all the glow of beauty peculiar to
+her family. As supper was not ready, the Queen sat down, sung, and
+played on the harpsichord to the Royal Family, who all supped with her
+in private. They talked of the different German dialects; the King asked
+if the Hanoverian was not pure--"Oh, no, Sir," said the Queen; "it is
+the worst of all."--She will not be unpopular.
+
+[Footnote 1: Lady Sarah Lennox, in an account of a theatrical
+performance at Holland House in a previous letter, is described by
+Walpole as "more beautiful than you can conceive." The King himself
+admired her so greatly that he is believed to have had serious thoughts
+of choosing her to be his queen. She afterwards married Major G. Napier,
+and became the mother of Sir William and Sir Charles Napier.]
+
+The Duke of Cumberland told the King that himself and Lady Augusta were
+sleepy. The Queen was very averse to leave the company, and at last
+articled that nobody should accompany her but the Princess of Wales and
+her own two German women, and that nobody should be admitted afterwards
+but the King--they did not retire till between two and three.
+
+The next morning the King had a levée. He said to Lord Hardwicke, "It is
+a very fine day:" that old gossip replied, "Yes, Sir, and it was a very
+fine night." Lord Bute had told the King that Lord Orford had betted his
+having a child before Sir James Lowther, who had been married the night
+before to Lord Bute's eldest daughter; the King told Lord Orford he
+should be glad to go his halves. The bet was made with Mr. Rigby.
+Somebody asked the latter how he could be so bad a courtier as to bet
+against the King? He replied, "Not at all a bad courtier; I betted Lord
+Bute's daughter against him."
+
+After the King's Levee there was a Drawing-room; the Queen stood under
+the throne: the women were presented to her by the Duchess of Hamilton,
+and then the men by the Duke of Manchester; but as she knew nobody, she
+was not to speak. At night there was a ball, drawing-rooms yesterday and
+to-day, and then a cessation of ceremony till the Coronation, except
+next Monday, when she is to receive the address of the Lord Mayor and
+Aldermen, sitting on the throne attended by the bridesmaids. A
+ridiculous circumstance happened yesterday; Lord Westmoreland, not very
+young nor clear-sighted, mistook Lady Sarah Lenox for the Queen, kneeled
+to her, and would have kissed her hand if she had not prevented him.
+People think that a Chancellor of Oxford was naturally attracted by the
+blood of Stuart. It is as comical to see Kitty Dashwood, the famous old
+beauty of the Oxfordshire Jacobites, living in the palace as Duenna to
+the Queen. She and Mrs. Boughton, Lord Lyttelton's ancient Delia, are
+revived again in a young court that never heard of them. There, I think,
+you could not have had a more circumstantial account of a royal wedding
+from the Heralds' Office. Adieu!
+
+Yours to serve you,
+
+HORACE SANDFORD.
+
+Mecklenburgh King-at-Arms.
+
+
+_THE CORONATION AND SUBSEQUENT GAIETIES._
+
+TO THE COUNTESS OF AILESBURY.
+
+STRAWBERRY HILL, _Sept._ 27, 1761.
+
+You are a mean, mercenary woman. If you did not want histories of
+weddings and coronations, and had not jobs to be executed about muslins,
+and a bit of china, and counterband goods, one should never hear of you.
+When you don't want a body, you can frisk about with greffiers and
+burgomasters, and be as merry in a dyke as my lady frog herself. The
+moment your curiosity is agog, or your cambric seized, you recollect a
+good cousin in England, and, as folks said two hundred years ago, begin
+to write "upon the knees of your heart." Well! I am a sweet-tempered
+creature, I forgive you.
+
+[Illustration: THE LIBRARY, STRAWBERRY HILL]
+
+My heraldry was much more offended at the Coronation with the ladies
+that did walk, than with those that walked out of their place; yet I was
+not so _perilously_ angry as my Lady Cowper, who refused to set a foot
+with my Lady Macclesfield; and when she was at last obliged to associate
+with her, set out on a round trot, as if she designed to prove the
+antiquity of her family by marching as lustily as a maid of honour of
+Queen Gwiniver. It was in truth a brave sight. The sea of heads in
+Palace-yard, the guards, horse and foot, the scaffolds, balconies, and
+procession exceeded imagination. The Hall, when once illuminated, was
+noble; but they suffered the whole parade to return into it in the
+dark, that his Majesty might be surprised with the quickness with which
+the sconces catched fire. The Champion acted well; the other Paladins
+had neither the grace nor alertness of Rinaldo. Lord Effingham and the
+Duke of Bedford were but untoward knights errant; and Lord Talbot had
+not much more dignity than the figure of General Monk in the Abbey. The
+habit of the peers is unbecoming to the last degree; but the peeresses
+made amends for all defects. Your daughter Richmond, Lady Kildare, and
+Lady Pembroke were as handsome as the Graces. Lady Rochford, Lady
+Holdernesse, and Lady Lyttelton looked exceedingly well in that their
+day; and for those of the day before, the Duchess of Queensbury, Lady
+Westmoreland and Lady Albemarle were surprising. Lady Harrington was
+noble at a distance, and so covered with diamonds, that you would have
+thought she had bid somebody or other, like Falstaff, _rob me the
+Exchequer_. Lady Northampton was very magnificent too, and looked
+prettier than I have seen her of late. Lady Spencer and Lady Bolingbroke
+were not the worst figures there. The Duchess of Ancaster [Mistress of
+the Robes] marched alone after the Queen with much majesty; and there
+were two new Scotch peeresses that pleased everybody, Lady Sutherland
+and Lady Dunmore. _Per contra_, were Lady P----, who had put a wig on,
+and old E----, who had scratched hers off; Lady S----, the Dowager
+E----, and a Lady Say and Sele, with her tresses coal-black, and her
+hair coal-white. Well! it was all delightful, but not half so charming
+as its being over. The gabble one heard about it for six weeks before,
+and the fatigue of the day, could not well be compensated by a mere
+puppet-show; for puppet-show it was, though it cost a million. The Queen
+is so gay that we shall not want sights; she has been at the Opera, the
+Beggar's Opera and the Rehearsal, and two nights ago carried the King to
+Ranelagh.
+
+Some of the peeresses were so fond of their robes, that they graciously
+exhibited themselves for a whole day before to all the company their
+servants could invite to see them. A maid from Richmond begged leave to
+stay in town because the Duchess of Montrose was only to be seen from
+two to four. The Heralds were so ignorant of their business, that,
+though pensioned for nothing but to register lords and ladies, and what
+belongs to them, they advertised in the newspaper for the Christian
+names and places of abode of the peeresses. The King complained of such
+omissions and of the want of precedent; Lord Effingham, the Earl
+Marshal, told him, it was true there had been great neglect in that
+office, but he had now taken such care of registering directions, that
+_next coronation_ would be conducted with the greatest order imaginable.
+The King was so diverted with this _flattering_ speech that he made the
+earl repeat it several times.
+
+On this occasion one saw to how high-water-mark extravagance is risen in
+England. At the Coronation of George II. my mother gave forty guineas
+for a dining-room, scaffold, and bedchamber. An exactly parallel
+apartment, only with rather a worse view, was this time set at three
+hundred and fifty guineas--a tolerable rise in thirty-three years! The
+platform from St. Margaret's Roundhouse to the church-door, which
+formerly let for forty pounds, went this time for two thousand four
+hundred pounds. Still more was given for the inside of the Abbey. The
+prebends would like a Coronation every year. The King paid nine thousand
+pounds for the hire of jewels; indeed, last time, it cost my father
+fourteen hundred to bejewel my Lady Orford.
+
+
+_A COURT BALL--PAMPHLETS ON MR. PITT--A SONG BY GRAY._
+
+TO THE COUNTESS OF AILESBURY.
+
+ARLINGTON STREET, _Nov._ 28, 1761.
+
+Dear Madam,--You are so bad and so good, that I don't know how to treat
+you. You give me every mark of kindness but letting me hear from you.
+You send me charming drawings the moment I trouble you with a
+commission, and you give Lady Cecilia [Johnston] commissions for trifles
+of my writing, in the most obliging manner. I have taken the latter off
+her hands. The Fugitive Pieces, and the "Catalogue of Royal and Noble
+Authors" shall be conveyed to you directly. Lady Cecilia and I agree how
+we lament the charming suppers there, every time we pass the corner of
+Warwick Street! We have a little comfort for your sake and our own, in
+believing that the campaign is at an end, at least for this year--but
+they tell us, it is to recommence here or in Ireland. You have nothing
+to do with that. Our politics, I think, will soon be as warm as our war.
+Charles Townshend is to be lieutenant-general to Mr. Pitt. The Duke of
+Bedford is privy seal; Lord Thomond, cofferer; Lord George Cavendish,
+comptroller.
+
+Diversions, you know, Madam, are never at high-water mark before
+Christmas; yet operas flourish pretty well: those on Tuesdays are
+removed to Mondays, because the Queen likes the burlettas, and the King
+cannot go on Tuesdays, his post-days. On those nights we have the middle
+front box, railed in, where Lady Mary [Coke] and I sit in triste state
+like a Lord Mayor and Lady Mayoress. The night before last there was a
+private ball at court, which began at half an hour after six, lasted
+till one, and finished without a supper. The King danced the whole time
+with the Queen,--Lady Augusta with her four younger brothers. The other
+performers were: the two Duchesses of Ancaster and Hamilton, who danced
+little; Lady Effingham and Lady Egremont, who danced much; the six maids
+of honour; Lady Susan Stewart, as attending Lady Augusta; and Lady
+Caroline Russel, and Lady Jane Stuart, the only women not of the family.
+Lady Northumberland is at Bath; Lady Weymouth lies in; Lady Bolingbroke
+was there in waiting, but in black gloves, so did not dance. The men,
+besides the royals, were Lords March and Eglintoun, of the bedchamber;
+Lord Cantelupe, vice-chamberlain; Lord Huntingdon; and four strangers,
+Lord Mandeville, Lord Northampton, Lord Suffolk, and Lord Grey. No
+sitters-by, but the Princess, the Duchess of Bedford, and Lady Bute.
+
+If it had not been for this ball, I don't know how I should have
+furnished a decent letter. Pamphlets on Mr. Pitt[1] are the whole
+conversation, and none of them worth sending cross the water: at least
+I, who am said to write some of them, think so; by which you may
+perceive I am not much flattered with the imputation. There must be new
+personages, at least, before I write on any side.--Mr. Pitt and the Duke
+of Newcastle! I should as soon think of informing the world that Miss
+Chudleigh is no vestal. You will like better to see some words which Mr.
+Gray has writ, at Miss Speed's request, to an old air of Geminiani; the
+thought is from the French.
+
+    I.
+
+    Thyrsis, when we parted, swore
+      Ere the spring he would return.
+    Ah! what means yon violet flower,
+      And the bud that decks the thorn!
+    'Twas the lark that upward sprung,
+    'Twas the nightingale that sung.
+
+    II.
+
+    Idle notes! untimely green!
+      Why this unavailing haste!
+    Western gales and skies serene
+      Speak not always winter past.
+    Cease my doubts, my fears to move;
+    Spare the honour of my love.
+
+Adieu, Madam, your most faithful servant.
+
+[Footnote 1: Mr. Pitt had lately resigned the office of Secretary of
+State, on being outvoted in the Cabinet, which rejected his proposal to
+declare war against Spain; and he had accepted a pension of £3,000 a
+year and a peerage for his wife--acts which Walpole condemns in more
+than one letter, and which provoked comments in many quarters.]
+
+
+_DEATH OF THE CZARINA ELIZABETH--THE COCK-LANE GHOST--RETURN TO ENGLAND
+OF LADY MARY WORTLEY._
+
+TO SIR HORACE MANN.
+
+ARLINGTON STREET, _Jan._ 29, 1762.
+
+I wish you joy, sir minister; the Czarina [Elizabeth] is dead. As _we
+conquered America in Germany_,[1] I hope we shall overrun Spain by this
+burial at Petersburg. Yet, don't let us plume ourselves too fast;
+nothing is so like a Queen as a King, nothing so like a predecessor as a
+successor. The favourites of the Prince Royal of Prussia, who had
+suffered so much for him, were wofully disappointed, when he became the
+present glorious Monarch; they found the English maxim true, that the
+King never dies; that is, the dignity and passions of the Crown never
+die. We were not much less defeated of our hopes on the decease of
+Philip V. The Grand Duke[2] [Peter III.] has been proclaimed Czar at the
+army in Pomerania; he may love conquest like that army, or not know it
+is conquering, like his aunt. However, we cannot suffer more by this
+event. I would part with the Empress Queen, on no better a prospect.
+
+[Footnote 1: "_We conquered America in Germany._" This is a quotation
+from a boastful speech of Mr. Pitt's on the conquest of Canada.]
+
+[Footnote 2: The Grand Duke (Peter III.) was married, for his
+misfortune, to Catharine, a princess of Anhalt-Zerbzt, whose lover,
+Count Orloff, murdered him before the end of the summer, at his wife's
+command; and in August she assumed the government, and was crowned with
+all due solemnity as Czarina or Empress. Walpole had some reason for
+saying that "nothing was so like a predecessor as a successor," since in
+character Elizabeth closely resembled Catharine.]
+
+We have not yet taken the galleons, nor destroyed the Spanish fleet. Nor
+have they enslaved Portugal, nor you made a triumphant entry into
+Naples. My dear sir, you see how lucky you were not to go thither; you
+don't envy Sir James Grey, do you? Pray don't make any categorical
+demands to Marshal Botta,[1] and be obliged to retire to Leghorn,
+because they are not answered. We want allies; preserve us our friend
+the Great Duke of Tuscany. I like your answer to Botta exceedingly, but
+I fear the Court of Vienna is shame-proof. The Apostolic and Religious
+Empress is not a whit a better Christian, not a jot less a woman, than
+the late Russian Empress, who gave such proofs of her being a _woman_.
+
+[Footnote 1: Marshal Botta was the Commander-in-chief in Tuscany.]
+
+We have a mighty expedition on the point of sailing; the destination not
+disclosed. The German War loses ground daily; however, all is still in
+embryo. My subsequent letters are not likely to be so barren, and
+indecisive. I write more to prove there is nothing, than to tell you
+anything.
+
+You were mistaken, I believe, about the Graftons; they do not remove
+from Turin, till George Pitt arrives to occupy their house there. I am
+really anxious about the fate of my letter to the Duchess [of Grafton];
+I should be hurt if it had miscarried; she would have reason to think me
+very ungrateful.
+
+I have given your letter to Mr. T[homas] Pitt; he has been very
+unfortunate since his arrival--has lost his favourite sister in
+child-bed. Lord Tavistock, I hear, has written accounts of you that give
+me much pleasure.
+
+I am ashamed to tell you that we are again dipped into an egregious
+scene of folly. The reigning fashion is a ghost[1]--a ghost, that would
+not pass muster in the paltriest convent in the Apennine. It only knocks
+and scratches; does not pretend to appear or to speak. The clergy give
+it their benediction; and all the world, whether believers or infidels,
+go to hear it. I, in which number you may guess, go to-morrow; for it is
+as much the mode to visit the ghost as the Prince of Mecklenburgh, who
+is just arrived. I have not seen him yet, though I have left my name for
+him. But I will tell you who is come too--Lady Mary Wortley.[2] I went
+last night to visit her; I give you my honour, and you who know her,
+would credit me without it, the following is a faithful description. I
+found her in a little miserable bedchamber of a ready-furnished house,
+with two tallow candles, and a bureau covered with pots and pans. On her
+head, in full of all accounts, she had an old black-laced hood, wrapped
+entirely round, so as to conceal all hair or want of hair. No
+handkerchief, but up to her chin a kind of horseman's riding-coat,
+calling itself a pet-en-l'air, made of a dark green (green I think it
+had been) brocade, with coloured and silver flowers, and lined with
+furs; boddice laced, a foul dimity petticoat sprig'd, velvet muffeteens
+on her arms, grey stockings and slippers. Her face less changed in
+twenty years than I could have imagined; I told her so, and she was not
+so tolerable twenty years ago that she needed have taken it for
+flattery, but she did, and literally gave me a box on the ear. She is
+very lively, all her senses perfect, her languages as imperfect as ever,
+her avarice greater. She entertained me at first with nothing but the
+dearness of provisions at Helvoet. With nothing but an Italian, a
+French, and a Prussian, all men servants, and something she calls an
+_old_ secretary, but whose age till he appears will be doubtful; she
+receives all the world, who go to homage her as Queen Mother,[3] and
+crams them into this kennel. The Duchess of Hamilton, who came in just
+after me, was so astonished and diverted, that she could not speak to
+her for laughing. She says that she has left all her clothes at Venice.
+I really pity Lady Bute; what will the progress be of such a
+commencement!
+
+[Footnote 1: It was known as the Cock-lane Ghost. A girl in that lane
+asserted that she was nightly visited by a ghost, who could reveal a
+murder, and who gave her tokens of his (or its) presence by knocks and
+scratches, which were audible to others in the room besides herself; and
+at last she went so far as to declare that the ghost had promised to
+attend a witness, who might be selected, into the vault under the Church
+of St. John's, Clerkenwell, where the body of the supposed victim was
+buried. Her story caused such excitement, that at last Dr. Johnson, Dr.
+Douglas (afterwards Bishop of Salisbury), and one or two other
+gentlemen, undertook an investigation of the affair, which proved beyond
+all doubt that it was a trick, though they could not discover how it was
+performed, nor could they make the girl confess; and Johnson wrote an
+account of their investigations and verdict, which was published in _The
+Gentleman's Magazine_ and the newspapers of the day (Boswell's "Life of
+Johnson," ann. 1763).]
+
+[Footnote 2: Lady Mary Wortley was a daughter of the Duke of Kingston
+and wife of Mr. Wortley, our ambassador at Constantinople. She was the
+most accomplished lady of the eighteenth century. Christian Europe is
+indebted to her for the introduction of the practice of inoculation for
+the smallpox, of which she heard during her residence in Turkey, and of
+the efficacy of which she was so convinced that she caused her own
+children to be inoculated; and, by publishing its success in their case,
+she led to its general adoption. It saved innumerable lives in the
+eighteenth century, and was, in fact, the parent of the vaccination
+which has superseded it, and which is merely inoculation with matter
+derived from another source, the cow. She was also an authoress of
+considerable repute for lyric odes and _vers de société_, &c., and,
+above all, for her letters, most of which are to her daughter, Lady Bute
+(as Mme. de Sévigné's are to her daughter, Mme. de Grignan), and which
+are in no respect inferior to those of the French lady in sprightly wit,
+while in the variety of their subjects they are far superior, as giving
+the account of Turkish scenery and manners, and also of those of other
+countries which her husband visited on various diplomatic missions,
+while Mme. de Sévigné's are for the greater part confined to the gossip
+of the coteries of Paris. Her works occupy five volumes; but what we
+have is but a small part of what we might have had. D'Israeli points out
+that "we have lost much valuable literature by the illiberal or
+malignant descendants of learned and ingenious persons. Many of Lady
+Mary Wortley Montague's letters have been destroyed, I am informed, by
+her daughters, who imagined that the family honours were lowered by the
+addition of those of literature. Some of her best letters, recently
+published, were found buried in an old trunk. It would have mortified
+her ladyship's daughter to have heard that her mother was the Sévigné of
+Britain" ("Curiosities of Literature," i. 54); and, as will be seen in a
+subsequent letter (No. 67), Walpole corroborates D'Israeli. Lady Mary
+was at one time a friend and correspondent of Pope, who afterwards, for
+some unknown reason, quarrelled with her, and made her the subject of
+some of the most disgraceful libels that ever proceeded from even his
+pen.]
+
+[Footnote 3: She was mother of Lady Bute, wife of the Prime
+Minister.--WALPOLE.]
+
+The King of France has avowed a natural son,[1] and given him the estate
+which came from Marshal Belleisle, with the title of Comte de Gisors.
+The mother I think is called Matignon or Maquignon. Madame Pompadour
+was the Bathsheba that introduced this Abishag. Adieu, my dear sir!
+
+[Footnote 1: This was a false report.--WALPOLE.]
+
+
+_HIS OWN "ANECDOTES OF PAINTING"--HIS PICTURE OF THE WEDDING OF HENRY
+VII.--BURNET'S COMPARISON OF TIBERIUS AND CHARLES II.--ADDISON'S
+"TRAVELS."_
+
+TO THE REV. HENRY ZOUCH.
+
+ARLINGTON STREET, _March_ 20, 1762.
+
+I am glad you are pleased, Sir, with my "Anecdotes of Painting;" but I
+doubt you praise me too much: it was an easy task when I had the
+materials collected, and I would not have the labours of forty years,
+which was Vertue's case, depreciated in compliment to the work of four
+months, which is almost my whole merit. Style is become, in a manner, a
+mechanical affair, and if to much ancient lore our antiquaries would add
+a little modern reading, to polish their language and correct their
+prejudices, I do not see why books of antiquities should not be made as
+amusing as writings on any other subject. If Tom Hearne had lived in the
+world, he might have writ an agreeable history of dancing; at least, I
+am sure that many modern volumes are read for no reason but for their
+being penned in the dialect of the age.
+
+I am much beholden to you, dear Sir, for your remarks; they shall have
+their due place whenever the work proceeds to a second edition, for that
+the nature of it as a record will ensure to it. A few of your notes
+demand a present answer: the Bishop of Imola pronounced the nuptial
+benediction at the marriage of Henry VII., which made me suppose him the
+person represented.[1]
+
+[Footnote 1: In a previous letter Walpole mentions that Vertue (the
+engraver) had disputed the subject of this picture, because the face of
+the King did not resemble other pictures of him; but Walpole was
+convinced of the correctness of his description of it, because it does
+resemble the face on Henry's shillings, "which are more authentic than
+pictures."]
+
+Burnet, who was more a judge of characters than statues, mentions the
+resemblance between Tiberius and Charles II.; but, as far as
+countenances went, there could not be a more ridiculous prepossession;
+Charles had a long face, with very strong lines, and a narrowish brow;
+Tiberius a very square face, and flat forehead, with features rather
+delicate in proportion. I have examined this imaginary likeness, and see
+no kind of foundation for it. It is like Mr. Addison's Travels,[1] of
+which it was so truly said, he might have composed them without stirring
+out of England. There are a kind of naturalists who have sorted out the
+qualities of the mind, and allotted particular turns of features and
+complexions to them. It would be much easier to prove that every form
+has been endowed with every vice. One has heard much of the vigour of
+Burnet himself; yet I dare to say, he did not think himself like Charles
+II.
+
+[Footnote 1: It is Fielding who, in his "Voyage to Lisbon," gave this
+character to Addison's "Travels."]
+
+I am grieved, Sir, to hear that your eyes suffer; take care of them;
+nothing can replace the satisfaction they afford: one should hoard them,
+as the only friend that will not be tired of one when one grows old,
+and when one should least choose to depend on others for entertainment.
+I most sincerely wish you happiness and health in that and every other
+instance.
+
+
+_BIRTH OF THE PRINCE OF WALES--THE CZARINA--VOLTAIRE'S HISTORICAL
+CRITICISMS--IMMENSE VALUE OF THE TREASURES BROUGHT OVER IN THE
+"HERMIONE."_
+
+TO SIR HORACE MANN.
+
+ARLINGTON STREET, _Aug._ 12, 1762.
+
+A Prince of Wales [George IV.] was born this morning; the prospect of
+your old neighbour [the Pretender] at Rome does not improve; the House
+of Hanover will have numbers in its own family sufficient to defend
+their crown--unless they marry a Princess of Anhalt Zerbst. What a
+shocking tragedy that has proved already! There is a manifesto arrived
+to-day that makes one shudder! This northern Athaliah, who has the
+modesty not to name her murdered _husband_ in that light, calls him _her
+neighbour_; and, as if all the world were savages, like Russians,
+pretends that he died suddenly of a distemper that never was
+expeditious; mocks Heaven with pretensions to charity and piety; and
+heaps the additional inhumanity on the man she has dethroned and
+assassinated, of imputing his death to a judgment from Providence. In
+short, it is the language of usurpation and blood, counselled and
+apologised for by clergymen! It is Brunehault[1] and an archbishop!
+
+[Footnote 1: Brunehault (in modern English histories called Brunhild)
+was the wife of Sigebert, King of Austrasia (that district of France
+which lies between the Meuse and the Rhine) and son of Clotaire I. The
+"Biographie Universelle" says of her: "This Princess, attractive by her
+beauty, her wit, and her carriage, had the misfortune to possess a great
+ascendency over her husband, and to have lost sight of the fact that
+even sovereigns cannot always avenge themselves with impunity." Her
+sister, Galswith, the wife of Chilperic, King of Neustria, between the
+Loire and the Meuse, had been assassinated by Fredegonde, and
+Brunehault, determined to avenge her, induced Sigebert to make war on
+Chilperic, who had married Fredegonde. He gained a victory; but
+Fredegonde contrived to have him also assassinated, and Brunehault
+became Fredegonde's prisoner. But Murovée, son of Chilperic, fell in
+love with her, and married her, and escaping from Rouen, fled into
+Austrasia. At last, in 595, Fredegonde died, and Brunehault subdued the
+greater part of Neustria, and ruled with great but unscrupulous energy.
+She encouraged St. Augustine in his mission to England; she built
+hospitals and churches, earning by her zeal in such works a letter of
+panegyric from Pope Gregory the Great. But, old as she was, she at the
+same time gave herself up to a life of outrageous license. It was not,
+however, her dissolute life which proved fatal to her, but the design
+which she showed to erect a firm monarchy in Austrasia and Neustria, by
+putting down the overgrown power of the nobles. They raised an army to
+attack her; she was defeated, and with four of her great-grandchildren,
+the sons of her grandson, King Theodoric, who had been left to her
+guardianship, fell into the hands of the nobles, who put her to death
+with every circumstance of cruelty and indignity. (See Kitchin's
+"History of France," i. 91.)]
+
+I have seen Mr. Keith's first despatch; in general, my account was
+tolerably correct; but he does not mention Ivan. The conspiracy advanced
+by one of the gang being seized, though for another crime; they thought
+themselves discovered. Orloff, one of them, hurried to the Czarina, and
+told her she had no time to lose. She was ready for anything; nay,
+marched herself at the head of fourteen thousand men and a train of
+artillery against her husband, but not being the only Alecto in Muscovy,
+she had been aided by a Princess Daschkaw, a nymph under twenty, and
+sister to the Czar's mistress. It was not the latter, as I told you, but
+the Chancellor's wife, who offered up the order of St. Catherine. I do
+not know how my Lord Buckingham [the English Minister at St. Petersburg]
+feels, but unless to conjure up a tempest against this fury of the
+north, nothing could bribe me to set my foot in her dominions. Had she
+been priestess of the Scythian Diana, she would have sacrificed her
+brother by choice. It seems she does not degenerate; her mother was
+ambitious and passionate for intrigues; she went to Paris, and dabbled
+in politics with all her might.
+
+The world had been civilising itself till one began to doubt whether
+ancient histories were not ancient legends. Voltaire had unpoisoned half
+the victims to the Church and to ambition. Oh! there never was such a
+man as Borgia[1]; the league seemed a romance. For the honour of poor
+historians, the assassinations of the Kings of France and Portugal,
+majesties still living in spite of Damien and the Jesuits, and the
+dethronement and murder of the Czar, have restored some credibility to
+the annals of former ages. Tacitus recovers his character by the edition
+of Petersburg.
+
+[Footnote 1: Borgia, the father, was Pope Sextus VI.; Caesar Borgia was
+the son--both equally infamous for their crimes, and especially their
+murders by poison.]
+
+We expect the definitive courier from Paris every day. Now it is said
+that they ask time to send to Spain. What? to ask leave to desert them!
+The Spaniards, not so expeditious in usurpation as the Muscovites, have
+made no progress in Portugal. Their absurd manifestoes appeared too
+soon. The Czarina and Princess Daschkaw stay till the stroke is struck.
+Really, my dear Sir, your Italy is growing unfashionably innocent,--if
+you don't take care, the Archbishop of Novgorod will deserve, by his
+crimes, to be at the head of the _Christian_ Church.[1] I fear my
+friend, good Benedict, infected you all with his virtues.
+
+[Footnote 1: That is, Pope Benedict XIV.]
+
+You see how this Russian revolution has seized every cell in my head--a
+Prince of Wales is passed over in a line, the peace in another line. I
+have not even told you that the treasure of the _Hermione_,[1] reckoned
+eight hundred thousand pounds, passed the end of my street this morning
+in one-and-twenty waggons. Of the Havannah I could tell you nothing if I
+would; people grow impatient at not hearing from thence. Adieu!
+
+[Footnote 1: In August, 1761, Sir G. Pocock took Havannah, the capital
+of Cuba. In September Commodore Cornish and Colonel Draper took Manilla,
+the principal of the Philippine Islands; and the treasures found in
+Manilla alone exceeded the sum here mentioned by Walpole, and yet did
+not equal those brought home from the Havannah, as Walpole mentions in a
+subsequent letter.]
+
+You see I am a punctual correspondent when Empresses commit murders.
+
+
+_NEGOTIATIONS FOR PEACE--CHRISTENING OF THE PRINCE OF WALES._
+
+TO THE HON. H.S. CONWAY.
+
+STRAWBERRY HILL, _Sept._ 9, 1762.
+
+    Nondum laurus erat, longoque decentia crine
+    Tempora cingebat de quâlibet arbore Phoebus.[1]
+
+[Footnote 1: The quotation is from Ovid, Met. i. 450.]
+
+This is a hint to you, that as Phoebus, who was certainly your superior,
+could take up with a chestnut garland, or any crown he found, you must
+have the humility to be content without laurels, when none are to be
+had: you have hunted far and near for them, and taken true pains to the
+last in that old nursery-garden Germany, and by the way have made me
+shudder with your last journal: but you must be easy with _quâlibet_
+other _arbore_; you must come home to your own plantations. The Duke of
+Bedford is gone in a fury to make peace,[1] for he cannot be even
+pacific with temper; and by this time I suppose the Duke de Nivernois is
+unpacking his portion of olive _dans la rue de Suffolk Street_. I say, I
+suppose--for I do not, like my friends at Arthur's, whip into my
+post-chaise to see every novelty. My two sovereigns, the Duchess of
+Grafton and Lady Mary Coke, are arrived, and yet I have seen neither
+Polly nor Lucy. The former, I hear, is entirely French; the latter as
+absolutely English.
+
+[Footnote 1: "On the 6th of September the Duke of Bedford embarked as
+ambassador from England; on the 12th the Duc de Nivernois landed as
+ambassador from France. Of these two noblemen, Bedford, though well
+versed in affairs, was perhaps by his hasty temper in some degree
+disqualified for the profession of a Temple or a Gondomar; and Nivernois
+was only celebrated for his graceful manners and his pretty songs" (Lord
+Stanhope, "History of England," c. 38).]
+
+Well! but if you insist on not doffing your cuirass, you may find an
+opportunity of wearing it. The storm thickens. The City of London are
+ready to hoist their standard; treason is the bon-ton at that end of the
+town; seditious papers pasted up at every corner: nay, my neighbourhood
+is not unfashionable; we have had them at Brentford and Kingston. The
+Peace is the cry;[1] but to make weight, they throw in all the abusive
+ingredients they can collect. They talk of your friend the Duke of
+Devonshire's resigning; and, for the Duke of Newcastle, it puts him so
+much in mind of the end of Queen Anne's time, that I believe he hopes to
+be Minister again for another forty years.
+
+[Footnote 1: "_The Peace is the cry._" This was the peace of Paris, not
+absolutely concluded till February of the next year. The conditions in
+our favour were so inadequate to our successes in the war, that the
+treaty caused general indignation; so great, indeed, that Lord Bute, the
+Prime Minister, was afraid to face the meeting of Parliament, and
+resigned his office, in which he was succeeded by Mr. George Grenville.
+It was the subject of severe, but not undeserved comment in the
+celebrated _North Briton_, No. 45, by Wilkes.]
+
+In the mean time, there are but dark news from the Havannah; the
+_Gazette_, who would not fib for the world, says, we have lost but four
+officers; the World, who is not quite so scrupulous, says, our loss is
+heavy.--But what shocking notice to those who have _Harry Conways_
+there! The _Gazette_ breaks off with saying, that they were to storm the
+next day! Upon the whole, it is regarded as a preparative to worse news.
+
+Our next monarch [George IV.] was christened last night, George Augustus
+Frederick; the Princess, the Duke of Cumberland, and Duke of
+Mecklenburgh, sponsors; the ceremony performed by the Bishop of London.
+The Queen's bed, magnificent, and they say in taste, was placed in the
+great drawing-room: though she is not to see company in form, yet it
+looks as if they had intended people should have been there, as all who
+presented themselves were admitted, which were very few, for it had not
+been notified; I suppose to prevent too great a crowd: all I have heard
+named, besides those in waiting, were the Duchess of Queensberry, Lady
+Dalkeith, Mrs. Grenville, and about four more ladies.
+
+
+_TREASURES FROM THE HAVANNAH--THE ROYAL VISIT TO ETON--DEATH OF LADY
+MARY--CONCEALMENT OF HER WORKS--VOLTAIRE'S "UNIVERSAL HISTORY."_
+
+TO SIR HORACE MANN.
+
+STRAWBERRY HILL, _Oct._ 3, 1762.
+
+I am now only the peace in your debt, for here is the Havannah. Here it
+is, following despair and accompanied by glory, riches, and twelve
+ships-of-the-line; not all in person, for four are destroyed. The
+booty--that is an undignified term--I should say, the plunder, or the
+spoils, which is a more classic word for such heroes as we are, amounts
+to at least a million and a half. Lord Albemarle's share will be about
+£140,000. I wish I knew how much that makes in _talents_ or _great
+sesterces_. What to me is better than all, we have lost but sixteen
+hundred men; _but_, alas! Most of the sick recovered! What an affecting
+object my Lady Albemarle would make in a triumph, surrounded by her
+three victorious sons; for she had three at stake! My friend Lady
+Hervey,[1] too, is greatly happy; her son Augustus distinguished himself
+particularly, brought home the news, and on his way took a rich French
+ship going to Newfoundland with military stores. I do not surely mean to
+detract from him, who set all this spirit on float, but you see we can
+conquer, though Mr. Pitt is at his plough.
+
+[Footnote 1: Lady Hervey, the widow of Pope's Lord Fanny and Sporus, had
+been the beautiful "Molly Lepel," celebrated by Lord Chesterfield.
+
+    Had I Hanover, Bremen, and Verden
+      And likewise the Duchy of Zell,
+    I would part with them all for a farden,
+      Compared with sweet Molly Lepel.
+
+Three of her sons succeeded to the Earldom of Bristol.]
+
+The express arrived while the Duke de Nivernois was at dinner with Lord
+Bute. The world says, that the joy of the company showed itself with too
+little politeness--I hope not; I would not exult to a single man, and a
+minister of peace; it should be in the face of Europe, if I assumed that
+dominion which the French used to arrogate; nor do I believe it
+happened; all the company are not so charmed with the event. They are
+not quite convinced that it will facilitate the pacification, nor am I
+clear it will. The City of London will not lower their hopes, and views,
+and expectations, on this acquisition. Well, if we can steer wisely
+between insolence from success and impatience for peace, we may secure
+our safety and tranquillity for many years. But they are _not_ yet
+arrived, nor hear I anything that tells me the peace will certainly be
+made. France _wants_ peace; I question if she _wishes_ it. How his
+Catholic royalty will take this, one cannot guess. My good friend, we
+are not at table with Monsieur de Nivernois, so we may smile at this
+consequence of the family-compact. Twelve ships-of-the-line and the
+Havannah!--it becomes people who cannot keep their own, to divide the
+world between them!
+
+Your nephew Foote has made a charming figure; the King and Queen went
+from Windsor to see Eton; he is captain of the Oppidans, and made a
+speech to them with great applause. It was in English, which was right;
+why should we talk Latin to our Kings rather than Russ or Iroquois? Is
+this a season for being ashamed of our country? Dr. Barnard, the master,
+is the Pitt of masters, and has raised the school to the most
+flourishing state it ever knew.
+
+Lady Mary Wortley[1] has left twenty-one large volumes in prose and
+verse, in manuscript; nineteen are fallen to Lady Bute, and will not see
+the light in haste. The other two Lady Mary in her passage gave to
+somebody in Holland, and at her death expressed great anxiety to have
+them published. Her family are in terrors lest they should be, and have
+tried to get them: hitherto the man is inflexible. Though I do not doubt
+but they are an olio of lies and scandal, I should like to see them. She
+had parts, and had seen much. Truth is often at bottom of such
+compositions, and places itself here and there without the intention of
+the mother. I dare say in general, these works are like Madame del
+Pozzo's _Memoires_. Lady Mary had more wit, and something more delicacy;
+their manners and morals were a good deal more alike.
+
+[Footnote 1: In a note to this letter, subsequently added by Walpole, he
+reduces this statement to seventeen, saying: "It was true that Lady Mary
+did leave seventeen volumes of her works and memories. She gave her
+letters from Constantinople to Mr. Sowden, minister of the English
+Church at Rotterdam, who published them; and, the day before she died,
+she gave him those seventeen volumes, with injunctions to publish them
+too; but in two days the man had a crown living from Lord Bute, and Lady
+Bute had the seventeen volumes."]
+
+There is a lad, a waiter at St. James's coffee-house, of thirteen years
+old, who says he does not wonder we beat the French, for he himself
+could thrash Monsieur de Nivernois. This duke is so thin and small, that
+when minister at Berlin, at a time that France was not in favour there,
+the King of Prussia said, if his eyes were a little older, he should
+want a glass to see the embassador. I do not admire this bon-mot.
+Voltaire is continuing his "Universal History"; he showed the Duke of
+Grafton a chapter, to which the title is, _Les Anglois vainqueurs dans
+les Quatres Parties du Monde_. There have been minutes in the course of
+our correspondence when you and I did not expect to see this chapter. It
+is bigger by a quarter than our predecessors the Romans had any
+pretensions to, and larger than I hope our descendants will see written
+of them, for conquest, unless by necessity, as ours has been, is an
+odious glory; witness my hand
+
+H. WALPOLE.
+
+P.S.--I recollect that my last letter was a little melancholy; this, to
+be sure, has a grain or two of national vanity; why, I must own I am a
+miserable philosopher; the weather of the hour does affect me. I cannot
+here, at a distance from the world and unconcerned in it, help feeling a
+little satisfaction when my country is successful; yet, tasting its
+honours and elated with them, I heartily, seriously wish they had their
+_quietus_. What is the fame of men compared to their happiness? Who
+gives a nation peace, gives tranquillity to all. How many must be
+wretched, before one can be renowned! A hero bets the lives and fortunes
+of thousands, whom he has no right to game with: but alas! Caesars have
+little regard to their fish and counters!
+
+
+_RESIGNATION OF LORD BUTE--FRENCH VISITORS--WALPOLE AND NO. 45._
+
+TO SIR HORACE MANN.
+
+STRAWBERRY HILL, _April_ 30, 1763.
+
+The papers have told you all the formal changes; the real one consists
+solely in Lord Bute being out of office, for, having recovered his
+fright, he is still as much Minister as ever, and consequently does not
+find his unpopularity decrease. On the contrary, I think his situation
+more dangerous than ever: he has done enough to terrify his friends,
+and encourage his enemies, and has acquired no new strength; rather has
+lost strength, by the disappearance of Mr. Fox from the scene. His
+deputies, too, will not long care to stand all the risk for him, when
+they perceive, as they must already, that they have neither credit nor
+confidence. Indeed the new administration is a general joke, and will
+scarce want a violent death to put an end to it. Lord Bute is very
+blamable for embarking the King so deep in measures that may have so
+serious a termination. The longer the Court can stand its ground, the
+more firmly will the opposition be united, and the more inflamed. I have
+ever thought this would be a turbulent reign, and nothing has happened
+to make me alter my opinion.
+
+Mr. Fox's exit has been very unpleasant. He would not venture to accept
+the Treasury, which Lord Bute would have bequeathed to him; and could
+not obtain an earldom, for which he thought he had stipulated; but some
+of the negotiators asserting that he had engaged to resign the
+Paymaster's place, which he vehemently denies, he has been forced to
+take up with a barony, and has broken with his associates--I do not say
+friends, for with the chief of _them_[1] he had quarrelled when he
+embarked in the new system. He meets with little pity, and yet has found
+as much ingratitude as he had had power of doing service.
+
+[Footnote 1: "_The chief of them._" Walpole himself explains in a note
+that he means the Dukes of Cumberland and Devonshire.]
+
+I am glad you are going to have a great duke; it will amuse you, and a
+new Court will make Florence lively, the only beauty it wants. You
+divert me with my friend the Duke of Modena's conscientious match: if
+the Duchess had outlived him, she would not have been so scrupulous.
+But, for Hymen's sake, who is that Madame Simonetti? I trust, not that
+old painted, gaming, debauched Countess from Milan, whom I saw at the
+fair of Reggio!
+
+I surprise myself with being able to write two pages of pure English; I
+do nothing but deal in broken French. The two nations are crossing over
+and figuring-in. We have had a Count d'Usson and his wife these six
+weeks; and last Saturday arrived a Madame de Boufflers, _sçavante,
+galante_, a great friend of the Prince of Conti, and a passionate
+admirer _de nous autres Anglois_. I am forced to live much with _tout
+ça_, as they are perpetually at my Lady Hervey's; and as my Lord
+Hertford goes ambassador to Paris, where I shall certainly make him a
+visit next year--don't you think I shall be computing how far it is to
+Florence? There is coming, too, a Marquis de Fleury,[1] who is to be
+consigned to me, as a political relation, _vû l'amitié entre le Cardinal
+son oncle et feu monsieur mon père_. However, as my cousin Fleury is not
+above six-and-twenty, I had much rather be excused from such a
+commission as showing the Tombs and the Lions, and the King and Queen,
+and my Lord Bute, and the Waxwork, to a boy. All this breaks in upon my
+plan of withdrawing by little and little from the world, for I hate to
+tire it with an old lean face, and which promises to be an old lean face
+for thirty years longer, for I am as well again as ever. The Duc de
+Nivernois called here the other day in his way from Hampton Court; but,
+as the most sensible French never have eyes to see anything, unless they
+see it every day and see it in fashion, I cannot say he flattered me
+much, or was much struck with Strawberry. When I carried him into the
+Cabinet, which I have told you is formed upon the idea of a Catholic
+chapel, he pulled off his hat, but perceiving his error, he said, "_Ce
+n'est pas une chapelle pourtant_," and seemed a little displeased.
+
+[Footnote 1: Cardinal Fleury, Prime Minister of France from 1727 to
+1742. Pope celebrated his love of peace--
+
+    Peace is my dear delight, not Fleury's more;
+
+and by his resolute maintenance of peace during the first seven years of
+his administration he had so revived the resources and restored the
+power of his country, that when the question of going to war with France
+was discussed in the Council of Vienna the veteran Prince Eugene warned
+the Ministers that his wise and prudent administration had been so
+beneficial to his country that the Empire was no longer a match for it.]
+
+My poor niece [Lady Waldegrave] does not forget her Lord, though by this
+time I suppose the world has. She has taken a house here, at Twickenham,
+to be near me. Madame de Boufflers has heard so much of her beauty, that
+she told me she should be glad to peep through a grate anywhere to get a
+glimpse of her,--but at present it would not answer. I never saw so
+great an alteration in so short a period; but she is too young not to
+recover her beauty, only dimmed by grief that must be temporary. Adieu!
+my dear Sir.
+
+
+_Monday, May 2nd_, ARLINGTON STREET.
+
+The plot thickens: Mr. Wilkes is sent to the Tower for the last _North
+Briton_;[1] a paper whose fame must have reached you. It said Lord Bute
+had made the King utter a gross falsehood in his last speech. This hero
+is as bad a fellow as ever hero was, abominable in private life, dull in
+Parliament, but, they say, very entertaining in a room, and certainly no
+bad writer, besides having had the honour of contributing a great deal
+to Lord Bute's fall. Wilkes fought Lord Talbot in the autumn, whom he
+had abused; and lately in Calais, when the Prince de Croy, the Governor,
+asked how far the liberty of the press extended in England, replied, I
+cannot tell, but I am trying to know. I don't believe this will be the
+only paragraph I shall send you on this affair.
+
+[Footnote 1: The celebrated No. 45 which attacked the speech with which
+the King had opened Parliament; asserting that it was the speech not of
+the King, but of the Ministers; and that as such he had a right to
+criticise it, and to denounce its panegyric of the late speech as
+founded on falsehood.]
+
+
+_A PARTY AT "STRABERRI"--WORK OF HIS PRINTING PRESS--EPIGRAMS--A GARDEN
+PARTY AT ESHER._
+
+TO GEORGE MONTAGU, ESQ.
+
+STRAWBERRY HILL, _May_ 17, 1763.
+
+"On vient de nous donner une très jolie fête au château de Straberri:
+tout étoit tapissé de narcisses, de tulipes, et de lilacs; des cors de
+chasse, des clarionettes; des petits vers galants faits par des fées, et
+qui se trouvoient sous la presse; des fruits à la glace, du thé, du
+caffé, des biscuits, et force hot-rolls."--This is not the beginning of
+a letter to you, but of one that I might suppose sets out to-night for
+Paris, or rather, which I do not suppose will set out thither; for
+though the narrative is circumstantially true, I don't believe the
+actors were pleased enough with the scene, to give so favourable an
+account of it.
+
+The French do not come hither to see. _À l'Anglaise_ happened to be the
+word in fashion; and half a dozen of the most fashionable people have
+been the dupes of it. I take for granted that their next mode will be _à
+l'Iroquaise_, that they may be under no obligation of realising their
+pretensions. Madame de Boufflers[1] I think will die a martyr to a
+taste, which she fancied she had, and finds she has not. Never having
+stirred ten miles from Paris, and having only rolled in an easy coach
+from one hotel to another on a gliding pavement, she is already worn out
+with being hurried from morning till night from one sight to another.
+She rises every morning so fatigued with the toils of the preceding
+day, that she has not strength, if she had inclination, to observe the
+least, or the finest thing she sees! She came hither to-day to a great
+breakfast I made for her, with her eyes a foot deep in her head, her
+hands dangling, and scarce able to support her knitting-bag. She had
+been yesterday to see a ship launched, and went from Greenwich by water
+to Ranelagh. Madame Dusson, who is Dutch-built, and whose muscles are
+pleasure-proof, came with her; there were besides, Lady Mary Coke, Lord
+and Lady Holdernesse, the Duke and Duchess of Grafton, Lord Hertford,
+Lord Villiers, Offley, Messieurs de Fleury, D'Eon,[2] et Duclos.[3] The
+latter is author of the Life of Louis Onze; dresses like a dissenting
+minister, which I suppose is the livery of a _bel esprit_, and is much
+more impetuous than agreeable. We breakfasted in the great parlour, and
+I had filled the hall and large cloister by turns with French horns and
+clarionettes. As the French ladies had never seen a printing-house, I
+carried them into mine; they found something ready set, and desiring to
+see what it was, it proved as follows:--
+
+The Press speaks--
+
+FOR MADAME DE BOUFFLERS.
+
+    The graceful fair, who loves to know,
+    Nor dreads the north's inclement snow;
+    Who bids her polish'd accent wear
+    The British diction's harsher air;
+    Shall read her praise in every clime
+    Where types can speak or poets rhyme.
+
+FOR MADAME DUSSON.
+
+    Feign not an ignorance of what I speak;
+    You could not miss my meaning were it Greek:
+    'Tis the same language Belgium utter'd first,
+    The same which from admiring Gallia burst.
+    True sentiment a like expression pours;
+    Each country says the same to eyes like yours.
+
+[Footnote 1: Boswell records Mr. Beauclerk's account of his introduction
+of this lady to Johnson: "When Mme. de Boufflers was first in England
+she was desirous to see Johnson. I accordingly went with her to his
+chambers in the Temple, where she was entertained with his conversation
+for some time. When our visit was over, she and I left him, and were got
+into Inner Temple Lane, when, all at once, I heard a noise like thunder.
+This was occasioned by Johnson, who, it seems, upon a little
+recollection, had taken it into his head that he ought to have done the
+honours of his literary residence to a foreign lady of quality, and,
+eager to show himself a man of gallantry, was hurrying down the
+staircase in evident agitation. He overtook us before we reached the
+Temple Gate, and brushing in between me and Mme. de Boufflers, seized
+her hand and conducted her to her coach. His dress was a rusty brown
+morning suit, a pair of old shoes by way of slippers, a little
+shrivelled wig sticking on the top of his head, and the sleeves of his
+shirt and the knees of his breeches hanging loose. A considerable crowd
+of people gathered round, and were not a little struck by this singular
+appearance" (vol. ii., ann. 1775.)]
+
+[Footnote 2: This gentleman was at this time secretary to the Duc de
+Nivernois. For many years he dressed in woman's clothes, and the
+question of his sex was made the subject of many wagers and trials both
+in England and France.]
+
+[Footnote 3: M. Duclos was an author of good repute as a novelist, and
+one of the contributors to the "Dictionnaire de l'Academie."]
+
+You will comprehend that the first speaks English, and that the second
+does not; that the second is handsome, and the first not; and that the
+second was born in Holland. This little gentilesse pleased, and atoned
+for the popery of my house, which was not serious enough for Madame de
+Boufflers, who is Montmorency, _et du sang du premier Chrétien_; and too
+serious for Madame Dusson, who is a Dutch Calvinist. The latter's
+husband was not here, nor Drumgold, who have both got fevers, nor the
+Duc de Nivernois, who dined at Claremont. The Gallery is not advanced
+enough to give them any idea at all, as they are not apt to go out of
+their way for one; but the Cabinet, and the glory of yellow glass at
+top, which had a charming sun for a foil, did surmount their
+indifference, especially as they were animated by the Duchess of
+Grafton, who had never happened to be here before, and who perfectly
+entered into the air of enchantment and fairyism, which is the tone of
+the place, and was peculiarly so to-day--_apropos_, when do you design
+to come hither? Let me know, that I may have no measures to interfere
+with receiving you and your grandsons.
+
+Before Lord Bute ran away, he made Mr. Bentley[1] a Commissioner of the
+Lottery; I don't know whether a single or a double one: the latter,
+which I hope it is, is two hundred a-year.
+
+[Footnote 1: Mr. Bentley, who was an occasional correspondent of
+Walpole, was a son of the great Master of Trinity College, Cambridge.]
+
+
+_Thursday 19th_.
+
+I am ashamed of myself to have nothing but a journal of pleasures to
+send you; I never passed a more agreeable day than yesterday. Miss
+Pelham gave the French an entertainment at Esher;[1] but they have been
+so feasted and amused, that none of them were well enough, or reposed
+enough, to come, but Nivernois and Madame Dusson. The rest of the
+company were, the Graftons, Lady Rockingham, Lord and Lady Pembroke,
+Lord and Lady Holdernesse, Lord Villiers, Count Woronzow the Russian
+minister, Lady Sondes, Mr. and Miss Mary Pelham, Lady Mary Coke, Mrs.
+Anne Pitt, and Mr. Shelley. The day was delightful, the scene
+transporting; the trees, lawns, concaves, all in the perfection in which
+the ghost of Kent[2] would joy to see them. At twelve we made the tour
+of the farm in eight chaises and calashes, horsemen, and footmen,
+setting out like a picture of Wouverman's. My lot fell in the lap of
+Mrs. Anne Pitt, which I could have excused, as she was not at all in
+the style of the day, romantic, but political. We had a magnificent
+dinner, cloaked in the modesty of earthenware; French horns and hautboys
+on the lawn. We walked to the Belvidere on the summit of the hill, where
+a theatrical storm only served to heighten the beauty of the landscape,
+a rainbow on a dark cloud falling precisely behind the tower of a
+neighbouring church, between another tower and the building at
+Claremont. Monsieur de Nivernois, who had been absorbed all day, and
+lagging behind, translating my verses, was delivered of his version, and
+of some more lines which he wrote on Miss Pelham in the Belvidere, while
+we drank tea and coffee. From thence we passed into the wood, and the
+ladies formed a circle on chairs before the mouth of the cave, which was
+overhung to a vast height with woodbines, lilacs, and laburnums, and
+dignified by the tall shapely cypresses. On the descent of the hill were
+placed the French horns; the abigails, servants, and neighbours
+wandering below by the river; in short, it was Parnassus, as Watteau
+would have painted it. Here we had a rural syllabub, and part of the
+company returned to town; but were replaced by Giardini and Onofrio, who
+with Nivernois on the violin, and Lord Pembroke on the bass, accompanied
+Miss Pelham, Lady Rockingham, and the Duchess of Grafton, who sang. This
+little concert lasted till past ten; then there were minuets, and as we
+had seven couple left, it concluded with a country dance. I blush again,
+for I danced, but was kept in countenance by Nivernois, who has one
+wrinkle more than I have. A quarter after twelve they sat down to
+supper, and I came home by a charming moonlight. I am going to dine in
+town, and to a great ball with fireworks at Miss Chudleigh's, but I
+return hither on Sunday, to bid adieu to this abominable Arcadian life;
+for really when one is not young, one ought to do nothing but
+_s'ennuyer_; I will try, but I always go about it awkwardly. Adieu!
+
+[Footnote 1: "_Esher._" Claremont, at Esher, now the property of the
+Queen, and residence of the Duchess of Albany, at this time belonged to
+the Duke of Newcastle, Miss Pelham's uncle.]
+
+[Footnote 2: Kent was the great landscape gardener of the last
+generation.]
+
+P.S.--I enclose a copy of both the English and French verses.
+
+    À MADAME DE BOUFFLERS.
+
+    Boufflers, qu'embellissent les graces,
+    Et qui plairoit sans le vouloir,
+    Elle à qui l'amour du sçavoir
+    Fit braver le Nord et les glaces;
+    Boufflers se plait en nos vergers,
+    Et veut à nos sons étrangers
+    Plier sa voix enchanteresse.
+    Répétons son nom mille fois,
+    Sur tous les coeurs Boufflers aura des droits,
+    Par tout où la rime et la Presse
+    A l'amour prêteront leur voix.
+
+    À MADAME D'USSON.
+
+    Ne feignez point, Iris, de ne pas nous entendre;
+    Ce que vous inspirez, en Grec doit se comprendre.
+      On vous l'a dit d'abord en Hollandois,
+      Et dans un langage plus tendre
+      Paris vous l'a répété mille fois.
+      C'est de nos coeurs l'expression sincere;
+    En tout climat, Iris, à toute heure, en tous lieux,
+      Par tout où brilleront vos yeux,
+    Vous apprendrez combien ils sçavent plaire.
+
+
+_GENERAL CHARACTER OF THE FRENCH--FESTIVITIES ON THE QUEEN'S BIRTHDAY._
+
+TO THE HON. H.S. CONWAY.
+
+ARLINGTON STREET, _May_ 21, 1763.
+
+You have now seen the celebrated Madame de Boufflers. I dare say you
+could in that short time perceive that she is agreeable, but I dare say
+too that you will agree with me that vivacity[1] is by no means the
+_partage_ of the French--bating the _étourderie_ of the _mousquetaires_
+and of a high-dried _petit-maítre_ or two, they appear to me more
+lifeless than Germans. I cannot comprehend how they came by the
+character of a lively people. Charles Townshend has more _sal volatile_
+in him than the whole nation. Their King is taciturnity itself, Mirepoix
+was a walking mummy, Nivernois has about as much life as a sick
+favourite child, and M. Dusson is a good-humoured country gentleman, who
+has been drunk the day before, and is upon his good behaviour. If I have
+the gout next year, and am thoroughly humbled by it again, I will go to
+Paris, that I may be upon a level with them: at present, I am _trop fou_
+to keep them company. Mind, I do not insist that, to have spirits, a
+nation should be as frantic as poor Fanny Pelham, as absurd as the
+Duchess of Queensberry, or as dashing as the Virgin Chudleigh.[2] Oh,
+that you had been at her ball t'other night! History could never
+describe it and keep its countenance. The Queen's real birthday, you
+know, is not kept: this Maid of Honour kept it--nay, while the Court is
+in mourning, expected people to be out of mourning; the Queen's family
+really was so, Lady Northumberland having desired leave for them. A
+scaffold was erected in Hyde-park for fireworks. To show the
+illuminations without to more advantage, the company were received in an
+apartment totally dark, where they remained for two hours.--If they gave
+rise to any more birthdays, who could help it? The fireworks were fine,
+and succeeded well. On each side of the court were two large scaffolds
+for the Virgin's tradespeople. When the fireworks ceased, a large scene
+was lighted in the court, representing their Majesties; on each side of
+which were six obelisks, painted with emblems, and illuminated; mottoes
+beneath in Latin and English: 1. For the Prince of Wales, a ship,
+_Multorum spes_. 2. For the Princess Dowager, a bird of paradise, and
+_two_ little ones, _Meos ad sidera tollo_. People smiled. 3. Duke of
+York, a temple, _Virtuti et honori_. 4. Princess Augusta, a bird of
+paradise, _Non habet parem_--unluckily this was translated, _I have no
+peer_. People laughed out, considering where this was exhibited. 5. The
+three younger princes, an orange tree, _Promittit et dat_. 6. The two
+younger princesses, the flower crown-imperial. I forget the Latin: the
+translation was silly enough, _Bashful in youth, graceful in age_. The
+lady of the house made many apologies for the poorness of the
+performance, which she said was only oil-paper, painted by one of her
+servants; but it really was fine and pretty. The Duke of Kingston was in
+a frock, _comme chez lui_. Behind the house was a cenotaph for the
+Princess Elizabeth, a kind of illuminated cradle; the motto, _All the
+honours the dead can receive_. This burying-ground was a strange codicil
+to a festival; and, what was more strange, about one in the morning,
+this sarcophagus burst out into crackers and guns. The Margrave of
+Anspach began the ball with the Virgin. The supper was most sumptuous.
+
+[Footnote 1: In a subsequent letter he represents Mme. de Boufflers as
+giving them the same character, saying, "Dans ce pays-ci c'est un effort
+perpetuel pour sedivertir."]
+
+[Footnote 2: Miss Chudleigh, who had been one of the Princess Dowager's
+maids of honour, married Mr. Hervey, afterwards Earl of Bristol, but,
+having taken a dislike to him, she procured a divorce, and afterwards
+married the Duke of Kingston; but, after his death, his heirs, on the
+ground of some informality in the divorce, prosecuted her for bigamy,
+and she was convicted.]
+
+You ask, when do I propose to be at Park-place. I ask, shall not you
+come to the Duke of Richmond's masquerade, which is the 6th of June? I
+cannot well be with you till towards the end of that month.
+
+The enclosed is a letter which I wish you to read attentively, to give
+me your opinion upon it, and return it. It is from a sensible friend of
+mine in Scotland [Sir David Dalrymple], who has lately corresponded with
+me on the enclosed subjects, which I little understand; but I promised
+to communicate his ideas to George Grenville, if he would state
+them--are they practicable? I wish much that something could be done for
+those brave soldiers and sailors, who will all come to the gallows,
+unless some timely provision can be made for them.--The former part of
+his letter relates to a grievance he complains of, that men who have
+_not_ served are admitted into garrisons, and then into our hospitals,
+which were designed for meritorious sufferers. Adieu!
+
+
+_THE ORDINARY WAY OF LIFE IN ENGLAND--WILKES--C. TOWNSHEND--COUNT
+LALLY--LORD CLIVE--LORD NORTHINGTON--LOUIS LE BIEN AIMÉ--THE DRAMA IN
+FRANCE._
+
+TO THE EARL OF HERTFORD.
+
+ARLINGTON STREET, _Dec._ 29, 1763
+
+You are sensible, my dear lord, that any amusement from my letters must
+depend upon times and seasons. We are a very absurd nation (though the
+French are so good at present as to think us a very wise one, only
+because they, themselves, are now a very weak one); but then that
+absurdity depends upon the almanac. Posterity, who will know nothing of
+our intervals, will conclude that this age was a succession of events. I
+could tell them that we know as well when an event, as when Easter, will
+happen. Do but recollect these last ten years. The beginning of October,
+one is certain that everybody will be at Newmarket, and the Duke of
+Cumberland will lose, and Shafto win, two or three thousand pounds.
+After that, while people are preparing to come to town for the winter,
+the Ministry is suddenly changed, and all the world comes to learn how
+it happened, a fortnight sooner than they intended; and fully persuaded
+that the new arrangement cannot last a month. The Parliament opens;
+everybody is bribed; and the new establishment is perceived to be
+composed of adamant. November passes, with two or three self-murders,
+and a new play. Christmas arrives; everybody goes out of town; and a
+riot happens in one of the theatres. The Parliament meets again; taxes
+are warmly opposed; and some citizen makes his fortune by a
+subscription. The opposition languishes; balls and assemblies begin;
+some master and miss begin to get together, are talked of, and give
+occasion to forty more matches being invented; an unexpected debate
+starts up at the end of the session, that makes more noise than anything
+that was designed to make a noise, and subsides again in a new peerage
+or two. Ranelagh opens and Vauxhall; one produces scandal, and t'other a
+drunken quarrel. People separate, some to Tunbridge, and some to all the
+horse-races in England; and so the year comes again to October. I dare
+to prophesy, that if you keep this letter, you will find that my future
+correspondence will be but an illustration of this text; at least, it is
+an excuse for my having very little to tell you at present, and was the
+reason of my not writing to you last week.
+
+[Illustration: HORACE WALPOLE.
+
+_From a picture in the National Portrait Gallery, by Nathaniel Hone,
+R.A._]
+
+Before the Parliament adjourned, there was nothing but a trifling debate
+in an empty House, occasioned by a motion from the Ministry, to order
+another physician and surgeon to attend Wilkes:[1] it was carried by
+about seventy to thirty, and was only memorable by producing Mr. Charles
+Townshend, who, having sat silent through the question of privilege,
+found himself interested in the defence of Dr. Brocklesby![2] Charles
+ridiculed Lord North extremely, and had warm words with George
+Grenville. I do not look upon this as productive of consequential
+speaking for the opposition; on the contrary, I should expect him sooner
+in place, if the Ministry could be fools enough to restore weight to
+him, and could be ignorant that he can never hurt them so much as by
+being with them. Wilkes refused to see Heberden and Hawkins, whom the
+House commissioned to visit him; and to laugh at us more, sent for two
+Scotchmen, Duncan and Middleton. Well! but since that, he is gone off
+himself: however, as I did in D'Eon's case, I can now only ask news of
+him from you, not tell you any; for you have got him. I do not believe
+you will invite him, and make so much of him, as the Duke of Bedford
+did. Both sides pretend joy at his being gone; and for once I can
+believe both. You will be diverted, as I was, at the cordial esteem the
+ministers have for one another; Lord Waldegrave told my niece [Lady
+Waldegrave], this morning, that he had offered a shilling, to receive a
+hundred pounds when Sandwich shall lose his head! what a good opinion
+they have of one another! _apropos_ to losing heads, is Lally[3]
+beheaded?
+
+[Footnote 1: Wilkes had been wounded in a duel, and alleged his wound as
+a sufficient reason for not attending in his place in the House of
+Commons when summoned. Dr. Brocklesby, a physician of considerable
+eminence, reported that he was unable to attend; but the House of
+Commons, as if they distrusted his report, appointed two other
+physicians to examine the patient, Drs. Heberden and Hawkins.]
+
+[Footnote 2: Dr. Brocklesby is mentioned by Boswell as an especial
+friend of Johnson; having even offered him an annuity of £100 to relieve
+him from the necessity of writing to increase his income.]
+
+[Footnote 3: Count Lally, of an Irish family, his father or grandfather
+having been among those who, after the capitulation of Limerick,
+accompanied the gallant Sarsfield to France, had been the French
+governor in India; but, having failed in an attempt on Madras, and
+having been afterwards defeated at Wandewash by Colonel Coote, was
+recalled in disgrace, and brought to trial on a number of ridiculously
+false charges, convicted, and executed; his real offence being that by a
+somewhat intemperate zeal for the reformation of abuses, and the
+punishment of corruption which he detested, he had made a great number
+of personal enemies. He was the father of Count Lally Tollendal, who was
+a prominent character in the French Revolution.]
+
+The East India Company have come to an unanimous resolution of not
+paying Lord Clive the three hundred thousand pounds, which the Ministry
+had promised him in lieu of his Nabobical annuity. Just after the
+bargain was made, his old rustic of a father was at the King's levée;
+the King asked where his son was; he replied, "Sire, he is coming to
+town, and then your Majesty will have another vote." If you like these
+franknesses, I can tell you another. The Chancellor [Northington] is a
+chosen governor of St. Bartholomew's Hospital: a smart gentleman, who
+was sent with the staff, carried it in the evening, when the Chancellor
+happened to be drunk. "Well, Mr. Bartlemy," said his lordship, snuffing,
+"what have you to say?" The man, who had prepared a formal harangue, was
+transported to have so fair opportunity given him of uttering it, and
+with much dapper gesticulation congratulated his lordship on his health,
+and the nation on enjoying such great abilities. The Chancellor stopped
+him short, crying, "By God, it is a lie! I have neither health nor
+abilities; my bad health has destroyed my abilities."[1] The late
+Chancellor [Hardwicke] is much better.
+
+[Footnote 1: Lord Northington had been a very hard liver. He was a
+martyr to the gout; and one afternoon, as he was going downstairs out of
+his Court, he was heard to say to himself, "D--- these legs! If I had
+known they were to carry a Lord Chancellor, I would have taken better
+care of them;" and it was to relieve himself of the labours of the Court
+of Chancery that he co-operated with Mr. Pitt in the discreditable
+intrigue which in the summer of 1766 compelled the resignation of Lord
+Rockingham, Mr. Pitt having promised him the office of President of the
+Council in the new Ministry which he intended to form.]
+
+The last time the King was at Drury-lane, the play given out for the
+next night was "All in the Wrong:" the galleries clapped, and then cried
+out, "Let _us_ be all in the right! Wilkes and Liberty!" When the King
+comes to a theatre, or goes out, or goes to the House, there is not a
+single applause; to the Queen there is a little: in short, _Louis le
+bien aimé_[1] is not French at present for King George.
+
+[Footnote 1: "Le Bien aimé" was a designation conferred on Louis XV. by
+the people in their joy at his recovery from an illness which had
+threatened his life at Metz in 1744. Louis himself was surprised, and
+asked what he had done to deserve such a title; and, in truth, it was a
+question hard to answer; but it was an expression of praise for his
+leaving the capital to accompany his army in the campaign.]
+
+I read, last night, your new French play, "Le Comte de Warwic,"[1] which
+we hear has succeeded much. I must say, it does but confirm the cheap
+idea I have of you French: not to mention the preposterous perversion
+of history in so known a story, the Queen's ridiculous preference of old
+Warwick to a young King; the omission of the only thing she ever said or
+did in her whole life worth recording, which was thinking herself too
+low for his wife, and too high for his mistress; the romantic honour
+bestowed on two such savages as Edward and Warwick: besides these, and
+forty such glaring absurdities, there is but one scene that has any
+merit, that between Edward and Warwick in the third act. Indeed, indeed,
+I don't honour the modern French: it is making your son but a slender
+compliment, with his knowledge, for them to say it is extraordinary. The
+best proof I think they give of their taste, is liking you all three. I
+rejoice that your little boy is recovered. Your brother has been at
+Park-place this week, and stays a week longer: his hill is too high to
+be drowned.
+
+[Footnote 1: "Le Comte de Warwic" was by La Harpe, who was only
+twenty-three years of age. The answer here attributed to Elizabeth
+Woodville has been attributed to others also; and especially to Mdlle.
+de Montmorency, afterwards Princesse de Condé, when pursued by the
+solicitations of Henry IV.]
+
+Thank you for your kindness to Mr. Selwyn: if he had too much
+impatience, I am sure it proceeded only from his great esteem for you.
+
+I will endeavour to learn what you desire; and will answer, in another
+letter, that and some other passages in your last. Dr. Hunter is very
+good, and calls on me sometimes. You may guess whether we talk you over
+or not. Adieu!
+
+
+_A NEW YEAR'S PARTY AT LADY SUFFOLK'S--LADY TEMPLE POETESS LAUREATE TO
+THE MUSES_
+
+TO GEORGE MONTAGU, ESQ.
+
+ARLINGTON STREET, _Jan._ 11, 1764.
+
+It is an age, I own, since I wrote to you: but except politics, what was
+there to send you? and for politics, the present are too contemptible to
+be recorded by anybody but journalists, gazetteers, and such historians!
+The ordinary of Newgate, or Mr. ----, who write for their monthly
+half-crown, and who are indifferent whether Lord Bute, Lord Melcombe, or
+Maclean [the highwayman], is their hero, may swear they find diamonds on
+dunghills; but you will excuse _me_, if I let our correspondence lie
+dormant rather than deal in such trash. I am forced to send Lord
+Hertford and Sir Horace Mann such garbage, because they are out of
+England, and the sea softens and makes palatable any potion, as it does
+claret; but unless I can divert _you_, I had rather wait till we can
+laugh together; the best employment for friends, who do not mean to pick
+one another's pocket, nor make a property of either's frankness. Instead
+of politics, therefore, I shall amuse you to-day with a fairy tale.
+
+I was desired to be at my Lady Suffolk's on New-year's morn, where I
+found Lady Temple and others. On the toilet Miss Hotham spied a small
+round box. She seized it with all the eagerness and curiosity of eleven
+years. In it was wrapped up a heart-diamond ring, and a paper in which,
+in a hand as small as Buckinger's[1] who used to write the Lord's
+Prayer in the compass of a silver penny, were the following lines:--
+
+    Sent by a sylph, unheard, unseen,
+    A new-year's gift from Mab our queen:
+    But tell it not, for if you do,
+    You will be pinch'd all black and blue.
+    Consider well, what a disgrace,
+    To show abroad your mottled face:
+    Then seal your lips, put on the ring,
+    And sometimes think of Ob. the king.
+
+[Footnote 1: Buckinger was a dwarf born without hands or feet.]
+
+You will eagerly guess that Lady Temple was the poetess, and that we
+were delighted with the gentleness of the thought and execution. The
+child, you may imagine, was less transported with the poetry than the
+present. Her attention, however, was hurried backwards and forwards from
+the ring to a new coat, that she had been trying on when sent for down;
+impatient to revisit her coat, and to show the ring to her maid, she
+whisked upstairs; when she came down again, she found a letter sealed,
+and lying on the floor--new exclamations! Lady Suffolk bade her open it:
+here it is:--
+
+    Your tongue, too nimble for your sense,
+    Is guilty of a high offence;
+    Hath introduced unkind debate,
+    And topsy-turvy turn'd our state.
+    In gallantry I sent the ring,
+    The token of a love-sick king:
+    Under fair Mab's auspicious name
+    From me the trifling present came.
+    You blabb'd the news in Suffolk's ear;
+    The tattling zephyrs brought it here;
+    As Mab was indolently laid
+    Under a poppy's spreading shade.
+    The jealous queen started in rage;
+    She kick'd her crown, and beat her page:
+    "Bring me my magic wand," she cries;
+    "Under that primrose, there it lies;
+    I'll change the silly, saucy chit,
+    Into a flea, a louse, a nit,
+    A worm, a grasshopper, a rat,
+    An owl, a monkey, hedgehog, bat.
+    But hold, why not by fairy art
+    Transform the wretch into--
+    Ixion once a cloud embraced,
+    By Jove and jealousy well placed;
+    What sport to see proud Oberon stare,
+    And flirt it with a _pet en l'air_!"
+    Then thrice she stamp'd the trembling ground,
+    And thrice she waved her wand around;
+    When I, endow'd with greater skill,
+    And less inclined to do you ill,
+    Mutter'd some words, withheld her arm,
+    And kindly stopp'd the unfinish'd charm.
+    But though not changed to owl or bat,
+    Or something more indelicate;
+    Yet, as your tongue has run too fast,
+    Your boasted beauty must not last.
+    No more shall frolic Cupid lie
+    In ambuscade in either eye,
+    From thence to aim his keenest dart
+    To captivate each youthful heart:
+    No more shall envious misses pine
+    At charms now flown, that once were thine
+    No more, since you so ill behave,
+    Shall injured Oberon be your slave.
+
+There is one word which I could wish had not been there though it is
+prettily excused afterwards. The next day my Lady Suffolk desired I
+would write her a patent for appointing Lady Temple poet laureate to the
+fairies. I was excessively out of order with a pain in my stomach, which
+I had had for ten days, and was fitter to write verses like a Poet
+Laureate, than for making one; however, I was going home to dinner
+alone, and at six I sent her some lines, which you ought to have seen
+how sick I was, to excuse; but first I must tell you my tale
+methodically. The next morning by nine o'clock Miss Hotham (she must
+forgive me twenty years hence for saying she was eleven, for I recollect
+she is but ten), arrived at Lady Temple's, her face and neck all spotted
+with saffron, and limping. "Oh, Madam!" said she, "I am undone for ever
+if you do not assist me!" "Lord, child," cried my Lady Temple, "what is
+the matter?" thinking she had hurt herself, or lost the ring, and that
+she was stolen out before her aunt was up. "Oh, Madam," said the girl,
+"nobody but you can assist me!" My Lady Temple protests the child acted
+her part so well as to deceive her. "What can I do for you?" "Dear
+Madam, take this load from my back; nobody but you can." Lady Temple
+turned her round, and upon her back was tied a child's waggon. In it
+were three tiny purses of blue velvet; in one of them a silver cup, in
+another a crown of laurel, and in the third four new silver pennies,
+with the patent, signed at top, "Oberon Imperator;" and two sheets of
+warrants strung together with blue silk according to form; and at top an
+office seal of wax and a chaplet of cut paper on it. The Warrants were
+these:--
+
+     From the Royal Mews:
+
+     A waggon with the draught horses, delivered by command without fee.
+
+
+     From the Lord Chamberlain's Office:
+
+     A warrant with the royal sign manual, delivered by command without
+     fee, being first entered in the office books.
+
+     From the Lord Steward's Office:
+
+     A butt of sack, delivered without fee or gratuity, with an order
+     for returning the cask for the use of the office, by command.
+
+     From the Great Wardrobe:
+
+     Three velvet bags, delivered without fee, by command.
+
+     From the Treasurer of the Household's Office:
+
+     A year's salary paid free from land-tax, poundage, or any other
+     deduction whatever by command.
+
+     From the Jewel Office:
+
+     A silver butt, a silver cup, a wreath of bays, by command without
+     fee.
+
+Then came the Patent:
+
+    By these presents be it known,
+    To all who bend before our throne,
+    Fays and fairies, elves and sprites,
+    Beauteous dames and gallant knights,
+    That we, Oberon the grand,
+    Emperor of fairy land,
+    King of moonshine, prince of dreams,
+    Lord of Aganippe's streams,
+    Baron of the dimpled isles
+    That lie in pretty maiden's smiles,
+    Arch-treasurer of all the graces
+    Dispersed through fifty lovely faces,
+    Sovereign of the slipper's order,
+    With all the rites thereon that border,
+    Defender of the sylphic faith,
+    Declare--and thus your monarch saith:
+    Whereas there is a noble dame,
+    Whom mortals Countess Temple name,
+    To whom ourself did erst impart
+    The choicest secrets of our art,
+    Taught her to tune the harmonious line
+    To our own melody divine,
+    Taught her the graceful negligence,
+    Which, scorning art and veiling sense,
+    Achieves that conquest o'er the heart
+    Sense seldom gains, and never art:
+    This lady, 'tis our royal will
+    Our laureate's vacant seat should fill;
+    A chaplet of immortal bays
+    Shall crown her brow and guard her lays,
+    Of nectar sack an acorn cup
+    Be at her board each year filled up;
+    And as each quarter feast comes round
+    A silver penny shall be found
+    Within the compass of her shoe--
+    And so we bid you all adieu!
+
+     Given at our palace of Cowslip Castle, the shortest night of the
+     year.
+
+     OBERON.
+
+And underneath,
+
+     HOTHAMINA.
+
+How shall I tell you the greatest curiosity of the story? The whole plan
+and execution of the second act was laid and adjusted by my Lady Suffolk
+herself and Will. Chetwynd, Master of the Mint, Lord Bolingbroke's
+Oroonoko-Chetwynd;[1] he fourscore, she past seventy-six; and, what is
+more, much worse than I was, for added to her deafness, she has been
+confined these three weeks with the gout in her eyes, and was actually
+then in misery, and had been without sleep. What spirits, and
+cleverness, and imagination, at that age, and under those afflicting
+circumstances! You reconnoitre her old court knowledge, how charmingly
+she has applied it! Do you wonder I pass so many hours and evenings with
+her? Alas! I had like to have lost her this morning! They had poulticed
+her feet to draw the gout downwards, and began to succeed yesterday, but
+to-day it flew up into her head, and she was almost in convulsions with
+the agony, and screamed dreadfully; proof enough how ill she was, for
+her patience and good breeding makes her for ever sink and conceal what
+she feels. This evening the gout has been driven back to her foot, and I
+trust she is out of danger. Her loss will be irreparable to me at
+Twickenham, where she is by far the most rational and agreeable company
+I have.
+
+[Footnote 1: Oroonoko-Chetwynd, M.P. for Plymouth. He was called
+Oroonoko and sometimes "Black Will," from his dark complexion.]
+
+I don't tell you that the Hereditary Prince [of Brunswick][1] is still
+expected and not arrived. A royal wedding would be a flat episode after
+a _real_ fairy tale, though the bridegroom is a hero. I have not seen
+your brother General yet, but have called on him, When come you
+yourself? Never mind the town and its filthy politics; we can go to the
+Gallery at Strawberry--stay, I don't know whether we can or not, my hill
+is almost drowned, I don't know how your mountain is--well, we can take
+a boat, and always be gay there; I wish we may be so at seventy-six and
+eighty! I abominate politics more and more; we had glories, and would
+not keep them: well! content, that there was an end of blood; then perks
+prerogative its ass's ears up; we are always to be saving our liberties,
+and then staking them again! 'Tis wearisome! I hate the discussion, and
+yet one cannot always sit at a gaming-table and never make a bet. I wish
+for nothing, I care not a straw for the inns or the outs; I determine
+never to think of them, yet the contagion catches one; can you tell
+anything that will prevent infection? Well then, here I swear,--no, I
+won't swear, one always breaks one's oath. Oh, that I had been born to
+love a court like Sir William Breton! I should have lived and died with
+the comfort of thinking that courts there will be to all eternity, and
+the liberty of my country would never once have ruffled my smile, or
+spoiled my bow. I envy Sir William. Good night!
+
+[Footnote 1: The Duke of Brunswick, who was mortally wounded in 1806 at
+the battle of Jena. He had come, as is mentioned in the next letter, to
+marry the King's sister.]
+
+
+_MARRIAGE OF THE PRINCE OF BRUNSWICK: HIS POPULARITY._
+
+TO SIR HORACE MANN.
+
+ARLINGTON STREET, _Jan._ 18, 1764.
+
+Shall I tell you of all our crowds, and balls, and embroideries? Don't I
+grow too old to describe drawing-rooms? Surely I do, when I find myself
+too old to go into them. I forswore puppet-shows at the last
+coronation, and have kept my word to myself. However, being bound by a
+prior vow, to keep up the acquaintance between you and your own country,
+I will show you, what by the way I have not seen myself, the Prince of
+Brunswick. He arrived at Somerset House last Friday evening; at
+Chelmsford a quaker walked into the room, _did_ pull off his hat, and
+said, "Friend, my religion forbids me to fight, but I honour those that
+fight well." The Prince, though he does not speak English, understands
+it enough to be pleased with the compliment. He received another, very
+flattering. As he went next morning to St. James's, he spied in the
+crowd one of Elliot's light-horse and kissed his hand to the man.
+"What!" said the populace, "does he know you?" "Yes," replied the man;
+"he once led me into a scrape, which nothing but himself could have
+brought me out of again." You may guess how much this added to the
+Prince's popularity, which was at high-water mark before.
+
+When he had visited the King and Queen, he went to the Princess Dowager
+at Leicester House, and saw his mistress. He is very _galant_, and
+professes great satisfaction in his fortune, for he had not even seen
+her picture. He carries his good-breeding so far as to declare he would
+have returned unmarried, if she had not pleased him. He has had levées
+and dinners at Somerset House; to the latter, company was named for him.
+On Monday evening they were married by the Archbishop in the great
+drawing-room, with little ceremony; supped, and lay at Leicester House.
+Yesterday morning was a drawing-room at St. James's, and a ball at
+night; both repeated to-day, for the Queen's birthday. On Thursday they
+go to the play; on Friday the Queen gives them a ball and dinner at her
+house; on Saturday they dine with the Princess at Kew, and return for
+the Opera; and on Wednesday--why, they make their bow and curtsy, and
+sail.
+
+The Prince has pleased everybody; his manner is thought sensible and
+engaging; his person slim, genteel, and handsome enough; that is, not at
+all handsome, but martial, agreeably weather-worn. I should be able to
+swear to all this on Saturday, when I intend to see him; but, alas! the
+post departs on Friday, and, however material my testimony may be, he
+must want it.
+
+
+_GAMBLING QUARRELS--MR. CONWAY'S SPEECH._
+
+TO THE EARL OF HERTFORD.
+
+ARLINGTON STREET, _Feb._ 6, 1764.
+
+You have, I hope, long before this, my dear lord, received the immense
+letter that I sent you by old Monin. It explained much, and announced
+most part of which has already happened; for you will observe that when
+I tell you anything very positively, it is on good intelligence. I have
+another much bigger secret for you, but that will be delivered to you by
+word of mouth. I am not a little impatient for the long letter you
+promised me. In the mean time thank you for the account you give me of
+the King's extreme civility to you. It is like yourself to dwell on
+that, and to say little of M. de Chaulnes's dirtv behaviour; but
+Monsieur and Madame de Guerchy have told your brother and me all the
+particulars.
+
+I was but too good a prophet when I warned you to expect new
+extravagances from the Duc de Chaulnes's son. Some weeks ago he lost
+five hundred pounds to one Virette, an equivocal being, that you
+remember here. Paolucci, the Modenese minister, who is not in the odour
+of honesty, was of the party. The Duc de Pecquigny said to the latter,
+"Monsieur, ne jouez plus avec lui, si vous n'êtes pas de moitié." So far
+was very well. On Saturday, at the Maccaroni Club (which is composed of
+all the travelled young men who wear long curls and spying glasses),
+they played again: the Duc lost, but not much. In the passage at the
+Opera, the Duc saw Mr. Stuart talking to Virette, and told the former
+that Virette was a coquin, a fripon, &c., &c. Virette retired, saying
+only, "Voilà un fou." The Duc then desired Lord Tavistock to come and
+see him fight Virette, but the Marquis desired to be excused. After the
+Opera, Virette went to the Duc's lodgings, but found him gone to make
+his complaint to Monsieur de Guerchy, whither he followed him; and
+farther this deponent knoweth not. I pity the Count [de Guerchy], who is
+one of the best-natured amiable men in the world, for having this absurd
+boy upon his hands!
+
+Well! now for a little politics. The Cider Bill has not answered to the
+minority, though they ran the ministry hard; but last Friday was
+extraordinary. George Grenville was pushed upon some Navy Bills. I don't
+understand a syllable, you know, of money and accounts; but whatever
+was the matter, he was driven from entrenchment to entrenchment by Baker
+and Charles Townshend. After that affair was over, and many gone away,
+Sir W. Meredith moved for the depositions on which the warrant against
+Wilkes had been granted. The Ministers complained of the motion being
+made so late in the day; called it a surprise; and Rigby moved to
+adjourn, which was carried but by 73 to 60. Had a surprise been
+intended, you may imagine the minority would have been better provided
+with numbers; but it certainly had not been concerted: however, a
+majority, shrunk to thirteen, frightened them out of the small senses
+they possess. Heaven, Earth, and the Treasury, were moved to recover
+their ground to-day, when the question was renewed. For about two hours
+the debate hobbled on very lamely, when on a sudden your brother rose,
+and made such a speech[1]--but I wish anybody was to give you the
+account except me, whom you will think partial: but you will hear enough
+of it, to confirm anything I can say. Imagine fire, rapidity, argument,
+knowledge, wit, ridicule, grace, spirit; all pouring like a torrent, but
+without clashing. Imagine the House in a tumult of continued applause,
+imagine the Ministers thunderstruck; lawyers abashed and almost
+blushing, for it was on their quibbles and evasions he fell most
+heavily, at the same time answering a whole session of arguments on the
+side of the court. No, it was _unique_; you can neither conceive it, nor
+the exclamations it occasioned. Ellis, the Forlorn Hope, Ellis presented
+himself in the gap, till the ministers could recover themselves, when on
+a sudden Lord George Sackville _led up the Blues_; spoke with as much
+warmth as your brother had, and with great force continued the attack
+which he had begun. Did not I tell you he would take this part? I was
+made privy to it; but this is far from all you are to expect. Lord North
+in vain rumbled about his mustard-bowl, and endeavoured alone to outroar
+a whole party: him and Forrester, Charles Townshend took up, but less
+well than usual. His jealousy of your brother's success, which was very
+evident, did not help him to shine. There were several other speeches,
+and, upon the whole, it was a capital debate; but Plutus is so much more
+persuasive an orator than your brother or Lord George, that we divided
+but 122 against 217. Lord Strange, who had agreed to the question, did
+not dare to vote for it, and declared off; and George Townshend, who had
+actually voted for it on Friday, now voted against us. Well! upon the
+whole, I heartily wish this administration may last: both their
+characters and abilities are so contemptible, that I am sure we can be
+in no danger from prerogative when trusted to such hands!
+
+[Footnote 1: Walpole must have exaggerated the merits of this speech;
+for Conway was never remarkable for eloquence. Indeed, Walpole himself,
+in his "Memoirs of George II.," quotes Mr. Hutchinson, the Prime
+Serjeant in Ireland, contrasting him with Lord G. Sackville, "Lord
+George having parts, but no integrity; Conway integrity, but no parts:
+and now they were governed by one who had neither." And Walpole's
+comment on this comparison is: "There was more wit than truth in this
+description. Conway's parts, though not brilliant, were solid" (vol. ii.
+p. 246). In his "Life of Pitt" Lord Stanhope describes him as "a man
+who, in the course of a long public life, had shown little vigour or
+decision, but who was much respected for his honourable character and
+moderate counsels" (c. 5).]
+
+Before I have done with Charles Townshend, I must tell you one of his
+admirable _bon mots_. Miss Draycote, the great fortune, is grown very
+fat; he says her _tonnage_ is become equal to her _poundage_.
+
+
+_ACCOUNT OF THE DEBATE ON THE GENERAL WARRANT._
+
+TO THE EARL OF HERTFORD.
+
+ARLINGTON STREET, _Wednesday, Feb._ 15, 1764.
+
+My dear Lord,--You ought to be witness to the fatigue I am suffering,
+before you can estimate the merit I have in being writing to you at this
+moment. Cast up eleven hours in the House of Commons on Monday, and
+above seventeen hours yesterday,--ay, seventeen at length,--and then you
+may guess if I am tired! nay, you must add seventeen hours that I may
+possibly be there on Friday, and then calculate if I am weary. In short,
+yesterday was the longest day ever known in the House of Commons--why,
+on the Westminster election at the end of my father's reign, I was at
+home by six. On Alexander Murray's affair, I believe, by five--on the
+militia, twenty people, I think, sat till six, but then they were only
+among themselves, no heat, no noise, no roaring. It was half an hour
+after seven this morning before I was at home. Think of that, and then
+brag of your French parliaments!
+
+What is ten times greater, Leonidas and the Spartan _minority_ did not
+make such a stand at Thermopylae, as we did. Do you know, we had like to
+have been the _majority_? Xerxes[1] is frightened out of his senses;
+Sysigambis[1] has sent an express to Luton to forbid Phraates[1] coming
+to town to-morrow; Norton's[2] impudence has forsaken him; Bishop
+Warburton is at this moment reinstating Mr. Pitt's name in the
+dedication to his Sermons, which he had expunged for Sandwich's; and
+Sandwich himself is--at Paris, perhaps, by this time, for the first
+thing that I expect to hear to-morrow is, that he is gone off.
+
+[Footnote 1: "_Xerxes, Sysigambis, Phraates._" These names contain
+allusions to one of Mdlle. Scudéri's novels, which, as D'Israeli
+remarks, are "representations of what passed at the Court of France";
+but in this letter the scene of action is transferred to England. Xerxes
+is George III.; Sysigambis, the Princess Dowager; and Phraates is Lord
+Bute.]
+
+[Footnote 2: Sir Fletcher Norton, the Speaker.]
+
+Now are you mortally angry with me for trifling with you, and not
+telling you at once the particulars of this _almost-revolution_? You may
+be angry, but I shall take my own time, and shall give myself what airs
+I please both to you, my Lord Ambassador, and to you, my Lord Secretary
+of State, who will, I suppose, open this letter--if you have courage
+enough left. In the first place, I assume all the impertinence of a
+prophet,--aye, of that great curiosity, a prophet, who really prophesied
+before the event, and whose predictions have been accomplished. Have I,
+or have I not, announced to you the unexpected blows that would be given
+to the administration?--come, I will lay aside my dignity, and satisfy
+your impatience. There's moderation.
+
+We sat all Monday hearing evidence against Mr. Wood,[1] that dirty
+wretch Webb, and the messengers, for their illegal proceedings against
+Mr. Wilkes. At midnight, Mr. Grenville offered us to adjourn or proceed.
+Mr. Pitt humbly begged not to eat or sleep till so great a point should
+be decided. On a division, in which though many said _aye_ to
+adjourning, nobody would go out for fear of losing their seats, it was
+carried by 379 to 31, for proceeding--and then--half the House went
+away. The ministers representing the indecency of this, and Fitzherbert
+saying that many were within call, Stanley observed, that after voting
+against adjournment, a third part had adjourned themselves, when,
+instead of being within _call_, they ought to have been within
+_hearing_; this was unanswerable, and we adjourned.
+
+[Footnote 1: Mr. Wood and Mr. Webb were the Under-Secretary of State and
+the Solicitor of the Treasury; and, as such, the officers chiefly
+responsible for the _form_ of the warrant complained of.]
+
+Yesterday we fell to again. It was one in the morning before the
+evidence was closed. Carrington, the messenger, was alone examined for
+seven hours. This old man, the cleverest of all ministerial terriers,
+was pleased with recounting his achievements, yet perfectly guarded and
+betraying nothing. However, the _arcana imperii_ have been wofully laid
+open.
+
+I have heard Garrick, and other players, give themselves airs of fatigue
+after a long part--think of the Speaker, nay, think of the clerks
+taking most correct minutes for sixteen hours, and reading them over to
+every witness; and then let me hear of fatigue! Do you know, not only my
+Lord Temple,[1]--who you may swear never budged as spectator,--but old
+Will Chetwynd, now past eighty, and who had walked to the House, did not
+stir a single moment out of his place, from three in the afternoon till
+the division at seven in the morning. Nay, we had _patriotesses_, too,
+who stayed out the whole: Lady Rockingham and Lady Sondes the first day;
+both again the second day, with Miss Mary Pelham, Mrs. Fitzroy, and the
+Duchess of Richmond, as patriot as any of us. Lady Mary Coke, Mrs.
+George Pitt, and Lady Pembroke, came after the Opera, but I think did
+not stay above seven or eight hours at most.
+
+[Footnote 1: Lord Temple was Mr. Pitt's brother-in-law, a restless and
+impracticable intriguer. He had some such especial power of influencing
+Mr. Pitt--who, it is supposed, must have been under some pecuniary
+obligation to him--that he was able the next year to prevent his
+accepting the office of Prime Minister when the King pressed it on him.]
+
+At one, Sir W. Meredith moved a resolution of the illegality of the
+Warrant, and opened it well. He was seconded by old Darlington's
+brother, a convert to us. Mr. Wood, who had shone the preceding day by
+great modesty, decency, and ingenuity, forfeited these merits a good
+deal by starting up, (according to a Ministerial plan,) and very
+arrogantly, and repeatedly in the night, demanding justice and a
+previous acquittal, and telling the House he scorned to accept being
+merely _excused_; to which Mr. Pitt replied, that if he disdained to be
+_excused_, he would deserve to be _censured_. Mr. Charles Yorke (who,
+with his family, have come roundly to us for support against the Duke of
+Bedford on the Marriage Bill) proposed to adjourn. Grenville and the
+ministry would have agreed to adjourn the debate on the great question
+itself, but declared they would push this acquittal. This they announced
+haughtily enough--for as yet, they did not doubt of their strength. Lord
+Frederick Campbell was the most impetuous of all, so little he foresaw
+how much _wiser_ it would be to follow your brother. Pitt made a short
+speech, excellently argumentative, and not bombast, nor tedious, nor
+deviating from the question. He was supported by your brother, and
+Charles Townshend, and Lord George; the two last of whom are strangely
+firm, now they are got under the cannon of your brother:--Charles, who,
+as he must be extraordinary, is now so in romantic nicety of honour. His
+father, who is dying, or dead, at Bath, and from whom he hopes two
+thousand a year, has sent for him. He has refused to go--lest his
+_steadiness_ should be questioned. At a quarter after four we divided.
+_Our_ cry was so loud, that both we and the ministers thought we had
+carried it. It is not to be painted, the dismay of the latter--in good
+truth not without reason, for _we_ were 197, they but 207. Your
+experience can tell you, that a majority of _but_ ten is a defeat.
+Amidst a great defection from them, was even a white staff, Lord Charles
+Spencer--now you know still more of what I told you was preparing for
+them!
+
+Crest-fallen, the ministers then proposed simply to discharge the
+complaint; but the plumes which they had dropped, Pitt soon placed in
+his own beaver. He broke out on liberty, and, indeed, on whatever he
+pleased, uninterrupted. Rigby sat feeling the vice-treasureship slipping
+from under him. Nugent was not less pensive--Lord Strange, though not
+interested, did not like it. Everybody was too much taken up with his
+own concerns, or too much daunted, to give the least disturbance to the
+Pindaric. Grenville, however, dropped a few words, which did but
+heighten the flame. Pitt, with less modesty than ever he showed,
+pronounced a panegyric on his own administration, and from thence broke
+out on the _dismission of officers_. This increased the roar from us.
+Grenville replied, and very finely, very pathetically, very animated. He
+painted Wilkes and faction, and, with very little truth, denied the
+charge of menaces to officers. At that moment, General A'Court walked up
+the House--think what an impression such an incident must make, when
+passions, hopes, and fears, were all afloat--think, too, how your
+brother and I, had we been ungenerous, could have added to these
+sensations! There was a man not so delicate. Colonel Barré rose--and
+this attended with a striking circumstance; Sir Edward Deering, one of
+_our_ noisy fools, called out, "_Mr._ Barré."[1] The latter seized the
+thought with admirable quickness, and said to the Speaker, who, in
+pointing to him, had called him _Colonel_, "I beg your pardon, Sir, you
+have pointed to me by a title I have no right to," and then made a very
+artful and pathetic speech on his own services and dismission; with
+nothing bad but an awkward attempt towards an excuse to Mr. Pitt for his
+former behaviour. Lord North, who will not lose his _bellow_, though he
+may lose his place, endeavoured to roar up the courage of his comrades,
+but it would not do--the House grew tired, and we again divided at seven
+for adjournment; some of our people were gone, and we remained but 184,
+they 208; however, you will allow our affairs are mended, when we say,
+_but_ 184. _We_ then came away, and left the ministers to satisfy Wood,
+Webb, and themselves, as well as they could. It was eight this morning
+before I was in bed; and considering that, this is no very short letter.
+Mr. Pitt bore the fatigue with his usual spirit--and even old Onslow,
+the late Speaker, was sitting up, anxious for the event.
+
+[Footnote 1: Mr. Barré had lately been dismissed from the office of
+Adjutant-General, on account of some of his votes in Parliament. In 1784
+he was appointed Clerk of the Rolls, a place worth above £3,000 a year,
+by Mr. Pitt, who, with extraordinary disinterestedness, forbore from
+taking it himself, that he might relieve the nation from a pension of
+similar amount which had been improperly conferred on the Colonel by
+Lord Rockingham.]
+
+On Friday we are to have the great question, which would prevent my
+writing; and to-morrow I dine with Guerchy, at the Duke of Grafton's,
+besides twenty other engagements. To-day I have shut myself up; for with
+writing this, and taking notes yesterday all day, and all night, I have
+not an eye left to see out of--nay, for once in my life, I shall go to
+bed at ten o'clock....
+
+Adieu! pray tell Mr. Hume that I am ashamed to be thus writing the
+history of England, when he is with you!
+
+
+_LORD CLIVE--MR. HAMILTON, AMBASSADOR TO NAPLES--SPEECH OF LOUIS XV._
+
+TO SIR HORACE MANN.
+
+STRAWBERRY HILL, _June_ 8, 1764.
+
+Your Red Riband is certainly postponed. There was but one vacant, which
+was promised to General Draper, who, when he thought he felt the sword
+dubbing his shoulder, was told that my Lord Clive could not conquer the
+Indies a second time without being a Knight of the Bath. This, however,
+I think will be but a short parenthesis, for I expect that _heaven-born
+hero_[1] to return from whence he came, instead of bringing hither all
+the Mogul's pearls and rubies. Yet, before that happens there will
+probably be other vacancies to content both Draper and you.
+
+[Footnote 1: "That _heaven-born hero_" had been Lord Chatham's
+description of Lord Clive.]
+
+You have a new neighbour coming to you, Mr. William Hamilton,[1] one of
+the King's equerries, who succeeds Sir James Gray at Naples. Hamilton is
+a friend of mine, is son of Lady Archibald, and was aide-de-camp to Mr.
+Conway. He is picture-mad, and will ruin himself in virtù-land. His
+wife is as musical as he is connoisseur, but she is dying of an asthma.
+
+[Footnote 1: Mr. W. Hamilton, afterwards Sir William, was the husband of
+the celebrated Lady Hamilton.]
+
+I have never heard of the present[1] you mention of the box of essences.
+The secrets of that prison-house do not easily transpire, and the merit
+of any offering is generally assumed, I believe, by the officiating
+priests.
+
+[Footnote 1: A present from Sir Horace, I believe, to the
+Queen.--WALPOLE.]
+
+Lord Tavistock is to be married to-morrow to Lady Elizabeth Keppel, Lord
+Albemarle's sister.
+
+I love to tell you an anecdote of any of our old acquaintance, and I
+have now a delightful one, relating, yet indirectly, to one of them. You
+know, to be sure, that Madame de Craon's daughter, Madame de Boufflers,
+has the greatest power with King Stanislaus. Our old friend the Princess
+de Craon goes seldom to Luneville for this reason, not enduring to see
+her daughter on that throne which she so long filled with absolute
+empire. But Madame de Boufflers, who, from his Majesty's age, cannot
+occupy _all_ the places in the palace that her mother filled,
+indemnifies herself with his Majesty's Chancellor. One day the lively
+old monarch said, "Regardez, quel joli petit pied, et la belle jambe!
+Mon Chancellier vous dira le reste." You know this is the form when a
+King of France says a few words to his Parliament, and then refers them
+to his chancellor. I expect to hear a great deal soon of the princess,
+for Mr. Churchill and my sister are going to settle at Nancy for some
+time. Adieu!
+
+
+_THE KING OF POLAND--CATHERINE OF RUSSIA._
+
+TO SIR HORACE MANN.
+
+STRAWBERRY HILL, _Aug._ 13, 1764.
+
+I am afraid it is some thousands of days since I wrote to you; but woe
+is me! how could I help it? Summer will be summer, and peace peace. It
+is not the fashion to be married, or die in the former, nor to kill or
+be killed in the latter; and pray recollect if those are not the sources
+of correspondence. You may perhaps put in a caveat against my plea of
+peace, and quote Turks Island[1] upon me; why, to be sure the
+parenthesis is a little hostile, but we are like a good wife, and can
+wink at what we don't like to see; besides, the French, like a sensible
+husband, that has made a slip, have promised us a new topknot, so we
+have kissed and are very good friends.
+
+[Footnote 1: Turk's Island, called also Tortuga, is a small island near
+St. Domingo, of which a French squadron had dispossessed some British
+settlers; but the French Government disavowed the act, and compensated
+the settlers.]
+
+The Duke of York returned very abruptly. The town talks of remittances
+stopped; but as I know nothing of the matter, and you are not only a
+minister but have the honour of his good graces, I do not pretend to
+tell you what to be sure you know better than I do.
+
+Old Sir John Barnard is dead, which he had been to the world for some
+time; and Mr. Legge. The latter, who was heartily in the minority, said
+cheerfully just before he died, "that he was going to the majority."
+
+Let us talk a little of the north. Count Poniatowski, with whom I was
+acquainted when he was here, is King of Poland, and calls himself
+Stanislaus the Second. This is the sole instance, I believe, upon
+record, of a second of a name being on the throne while the first was
+living without having contributed to dethrone him.[1] Old Stanislaus
+lives to see a line of successors, like Macbeth in the cave of the
+witches. So much for Poland; don't let us go farther north; we shall
+find there Alecto herself. I have almost wept for poor Ivan! I shall
+soon begin to believe that Richard III. murdered as many folks as the
+Lancastrian historians say he did. I expect that this Fury will poison
+her son next, lest Semiramis should have the bloody honour of having
+been more unnatural. As Voltaire has unpoisoned so many persons of
+former ages, methinks he ought to do as much for the present time, and
+assure posterity that there never was such a lamb as Catherine II., and
+that, so far from assassinating her own husband and Czar Ivan,[2] she
+wept over every chicken that she had for dinner. How crimes, like
+fashions, flit from clime to clime! Murder reigns under the Pole, while
+you, who are in the very town where Catherine de' Medici was born, and
+within a stone's throw of Rome, where Borgia and his holy father sent
+cardinals to the other world by hecatombs, are surprised to hear that
+there is such an instrument as a stiletto. The papal is now a mere gouty
+chair, and the good old souls don't even waddle out of it to get a
+bastard.
+
+[Footnote 1: The first was Stanislaus Leczinski, father of the Queen of
+France. He had been driven from Poland by Peter the Great after the
+overthrow of Charles XII. of Sweden (_v. infra_, Letter 90).]
+
+[Footnote 2: Ivan, the Czar who had been deposed by the former Czarina,
+Elizabeth, had recently been murdered, while trying to escape from the
+confinement in which he had been so long detained.]
+
+Well, good night! I have no more monarchs to chat over; all the rest are
+the most Catholic or most Christian, or most something or other that is
+divine; and you know one can never talk long about folks that are only
+excellent. One can say no more about Stanislaus _the first_ than that he
+is the best of beings. I mean, unless they do not deserve it, and then
+their flatterers can hold forth upon their virtues by the hour.
+
+
+_MADAME DE BOUFFLERS' WRITINGS--KING JAMES'S JOURNAL._
+
+TO THE EARL OF HERTFORD.
+
+STRAWBERRY HILL, _Oct._ 5, 1764.
+
+My dear Lord,--Though I wrote to you but a few days ago, I must trouble
+you with another line now. Dr. Blanchard, a Cambridge divine, and who
+has a good paternal estate in Yorkshire, is on his travels, which he
+performs as a gentleman; and, therefore, wishes not to have his
+profession noticed. He is very desirous of paying his respects to you,
+and of being countenanced by you while he stays at Paris. It will much
+oblige a particular friend of mine, and consequently me, if you will
+favour him with your attention. Everybody experiences your goodness, but
+in the present case I wish to attribute it a little to my request.
+
+I asked you about two books, ascribed to Madame de Boufflers. If they
+are hers, I should be glad to know where she found, that Oliver Cromwell
+took orders and went over to Holland to fight the Dutch. As she has been
+on the spot where he reigned (which is generally very strong evidence),
+her countrymen will believe her in spite of our teeth; and Voltaire, who
+loves all anecdotes that never happened, _because_ they prove the
+manners of the times, will hurry it into the first history he publishes.
+I, therefore, enter my caveat against it; not as interested for Oliver's
+character, but to save the world from one more fable. I know Madame de
+Boufflers will attribute this scruple to my partiality to Cromwell (and,
+to be sure, if we must be ridden, there is some satisfaction when the
+man knows how to ride). I remember one night at the Duke of Grafton's, a
+bust of Cromwell was produced: Madame de Boufflers, without uttering a
+syllable, gave me the most speaking look imaginable, as much as to say,
+"Is it possible you can admire this man!" _Apropos_: I am sorry to say
+the reports do not cease about the separation, and yet I have heard
+nothing that confirms it.
+
+I once begged you to send me a book in three volumes, called "Essais sur
+les Moeurs;" forgive me if I put you in mind of it, and request you to
+send me that, or any other new book. I am wofully in want of reading,
+and sick to death of all our political stuff, which, as the Parliament
+is happily at the distance of three months, I would fain forget till I
+cannot help hearing of it. I am reduced to Guicciardin, and though the
+evenings are so long, I cannot get through one of his periods between
+dinner and supper. They tell me Mr. Hume has had sight of King James's
+journal;[1] I wish I could see all the trifling passages that he will
+not deign to admit into History. I do not love great folks till they
+have pulled off their buskins and put on their slippers, because I do
+not care sixpence for what they would be thought, but for what they are.
+
+[Footnote 1: This journal is understood to have been destroyed in the
+course of the French Revolution, but it had not only been previously
+seen by Hume, as Walpole mentions here, but Mr. Fox had also had access
+to it, and had made some notes or extracts from it, which were
+subsequently communicated to Lord Macaulay when he carried out the
+design of writing a "History of the Revolution of 1688," which Mr. Fox
+had contemplated.]
+
+Mr. Elliot brings us woful accounts of the French ladies, of the decency
+of their conversation, and the nastiness of their behaviour.
+
+Nobody is dead, married, or gone mad, since my last. Adieu!...
+
+
+END OF VOL. I.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Letters of Horace Walpole, by Horace Walpole
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 12073 ***
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+Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Letters of Horace Walpole, by Horace Walpole
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Letters of Horace Walpole
+       Volume I
+
+Author: Horace Walpole
+
+Release Date: April 18, 2004 [EBook #12073]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LETTERS OF HORACE WALPOLE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Ted Garvin, Linda Cantoni, and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+LETTERS
+
+OF
+
+HORACE WALPOLE
+
+
+SELECTED AND EDITED BY
+
+CHARLES DUKE YONGE, M.A.
+
+AUTHOR OF "THE HISTORY OF FRANCE UNDER THE BOURBONS," "A LIFE OF MARIE
+ANTOINETTE," ETC., ETC.
+
+
+WITH PORTRAITS AND ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+
+VOLUME I
+
+
+London
+
+T. FISHER UNWIN
+
+PATERNOSTER SQUARE
+
+NEW YORK: G.P. PUTNAM'S SONS
+
+MDCCCXC
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS.
+
+1736-1764.
+
+
+1. TO MONTAGU, _May_ 2, 1736.--Marriage of the Princess of Wales--Very
+lively
+
+2. TO THE SAME, _May_ 6, 1736.--Fondness for Old Stories--Reminiscences
+of Eton, etc.
+
+3. TO THE SAME, _March_ 20, 1737.--Wish to Travel--Superiority of French
+Manners to English in their manner to Ladies
+
+4. TO WEST, _April_ 21, 1739.--Theatres at Paris--St. Denis--Fondness of
+the French for Show, and for Gambling--Singular Signs--The Army the only
+Profession for Men of Gentle Birth--Splendour of the Public Buildings
+
+5. TO THE SAME, 1739.--Magnificence of Versailles--The Chartreux Relics
+
+6. TO THE SAME, _February_ 27, 1740.--The Carnival--The Florentines
+Civil, Good-natured, and Fond of the English--A Curious Challenge
+
+7. TO THE SAME, _June_ 14, 1740.--Herculaneum--Search should be made for
+other Submerged Cities--Quotations from Statius
+
+8. TO CONWAY, _July_ 5, 1740.--Danger of Malaria--Roman Catholic
+Relics--"Admiral Hosier's Ghost"--Contest for the Popedom
+
+9. TO THE SAME, _July_ 9, 1740
+
+10. TO WEST, _Oct._ 2, 1740.--A Florentine Wedding--Addison's
+Descriptions are Borrowed from Books--A Song of Bondelmonti's, with a
+Latin Version by Gray, and an English One by the Writer
+
+11. TO MANN, _Jan._ 22, 1742.--Debate on Pulteney's Motion for a
+Committee on Papers Relating to the War--Speeches of Pulteney, Pitt, Sir
+R. Walpole, Sir W. George, etc.--Smallness of the Ministerial Majority
+
+12. TO THE SAME, _May_ 26, 1742.--Ranelagh Gardens Opened--Garrick, "A
+Wine-merchant turned Player"--Defeat of the Indemnity Bill
+
+13. TO THE SAME, _Dec._ 9, 1742.--Debate on Disbanding the Hanoverian
+Troops--First Speech of Murray (afterwards Earl of Mansfield)--_Bon Mot_
+of Lord Chesterfield
+
+14. TO THE SAME, _Feb._ 24, 1743.--King Theodore--Handel Introduces
+Oratorios
+
+15. TO THE SAME, _July_ 4, 1743.--Battle of Dettingen--Death of Lord
+Wilmington
+
+16. TO THE SAME, _Sept._ 7, 1743.--French Actors at Clifden--A new Roman
+Catholic Miracle--Lady Mary Wortley
+
+17. TO THE SAME, _March_ 29, 1745.--Death of his Father--Matthews and
+Lestock in the Mediterranean--Thomson's "Tancred and
+Sigismunda"--Akenside's Odes--Conundrums in Fashion
+
+18. TO THE SAME, _May_ 11, 1745.--Battle of Fontenoy--The Ballad of the
+Prince of Wales
+
+19. TO MONTAGU, _August_ 1, 1745.--M. De Grignan--Livy's Patavinity--The
+Maréchal De Belleisle--Whiston Prophecies the Destruction of the
+World--The Duke of Newcastle
+
+20. TO MANN, _Sept._ 6, 1745.--Invasion of Scotland by the Young
+Pretender--Forces are said to be Preparing in France to join him
+
+21. TO THE SAME, _Sept._ 20, 1745.--This and the following Letters give
+a Lively Account of the Progress of the Rebellion till the Retreat from
+Derby, after which no particular interest attaches to it
+
+22. TO THE SAME, _Sept._ 27, 1745.--Defeat of Cope
+
+23. TO THE SAME, _Oct._ 21, 1745.--General Wade is Marching to
+Scotland--Violent Proclamation of the Pretender
+
+24. TO THE SAME, _Nov._ 22, 1745.--Gallant Resistance of Carlisle--Mr.
+Pitt attacks the Ministry
+
+25. TO THE SAME, _Dec._ 9, 1745.--The Rebel Army has Retreated from
+Derby--Expectation of a French Invasion
+
+26. TO THE SAME, _April_ 25, 1746.--Battle of Culloden
+
+27. TO THE SAME, _Aug._ 1, 1746.--Trial of the Rebel Lords Balmerino and
+Kilmarnock
+
+28. TO THE SAME, _Oct._ 14, 1746.--The Battle of Rancoux
+
+29. TO CONWAY, _Oct._ 24, 1746.--On Conway's Verses--No Scotch_man_ is
+capable of such Delicacy of Thought, though a Scotchwoman may
+be--Akenside's, Armstrong's, and Glover's Poems
+
+30. TO THE SAME, _June_ 8, 1747.--He has bought Strawberry Hill
+
+31. TO THE SAME, _Aug._ 29, 1748.--His Mode of
+Life--Planting--Prophecies of New Methods and New Discoveries in a
+Future Generation
+
+32. TO MANN, _May_ 3, 1749.--Rejoicings for the Peace--Masquerade at
+Ranelagh--Meeting of the Prince's Party and the Jacobites--Prevalence of
+Drinking and Gambling--Whitefield
+
+33. TO THE SAME, _March_ 11, 1750.--Earthquake in London--General
+Panic--Marriage of Casimir, King of Poland
+
+34. TO THE SAME, _April_ 2, 1750.--General Panic--Sherlock's Pastoral
+Letter--Predictions of more Earthquakes--A General Flight from
+London--Epigrams by Chute and Walpole himself--French Translation of
+Milton
+
+35. TO THE SAME, _April_ 1, 1751.--Death of Walpole's Brother, and of
+the Prince of Wales--Speech of the young Prince--Singular Sermon on His
+Death
+
+36. TO THE SAME, _June_ 18, 1751.--Changes in the Ministry and
+Household--The Miss Gunnings--Extravagance in London--Lord Harcourt,
+Governor of the Prince of Wales
+
+37. TO THE SAME, _June_ 12, 1753.--Description of Strawberry Hill--Bill
+to Prevent Clandestine Marriages
+
+38. TO MONTAGU, _May_ 19, 1756.--No News from France but what is
+Smuggled--The King's Delight at the Vote for the Hanover Troops--_Bon
+Mot_ of Lord Denbigh
+
+39. TO THE SAME, _Oct._ 17, 1756.--Victory of the King of Prussia at
+Lowositz--Singular Race--Quarrel of the Pretender with the Pope
+
+40. TO THE SAME, _Nov._ 4, 1756.--Ministerial Negotiations--Loss of
+Minorca--Disaster in North America
+
+41. TO THE EARL OF STRAFFORD, _July_ 4, 1757.--The King of Prussia's
+Victories--Voltaire's "Universal History"
+
+42. TO ZOUCH, _August_ 3, 1758.--His own "Royal and Noble Authors"
+
+43. TO THE SAME, _Oct._ 21, 1758.--His "Royal and Noble Authors"--Lord
+Clarendon--Sir R. Walpole and Lord Bolingbroke--The Duke of Leeds
+
+44. TO MANN, _Oct._ 24, 1758.--Walpole's Monument to Sir Horace's
+Brother--Attempted Assassination of the King of Portugal--Courtesy of
+the Duc D'Aiguillon to his English Prisoners
+
+45. TO ZOUCH, _Dec._ 9, 1758.--A New Edition of Lucan--Comparison of
+"Pharsalea"--Criticism on the Poet, with the Aeneid--Helvetius's Work,
+"De L'Esprit"
+
+46. TO CONWAY, _Jan._ 19, 1759.--State of the House of Commons
+
+47. TO DALRYMPLE, _Feb._ 25, 1759.--Robertson's "History of
+Scotland"--Comparison of Ramsay and Reynolds as Portrait-Painters--Sir
+David's "History of the Gowrie Conspiracy"
+
+48. TO THE SAME, _July_ 11, 1759.--Writers of History: Goodall, Hume,
+Robertson--Queen Christina
+
+49. TO CONWAY, _Aug._ 14, 1759.--The Battle of Minden--Lord G. Sackville
+
+50. TO MANN, _Sept._ 13, 1759.--Admiral Boscawen's Victory--Defeat of
+the King of Prussia--Lord G. Sackville
+
+51. TO MONTAGU, _Oct._ 21, 1759.--A Year of Triumphs
+
+52. TO THE SAME, _Nov._ 8, 1759.--French Bankruptcy--French Epigram
+
+53. TO THE SAME, _Jan._ 7, 1760.--He lives amongst Royalty--Commotions
+in Ireland
+
+54. TO THE SAME, _Jan._ 14, 1760.--Severity of the Weather--Scarcity in
+Germany--A Party at Prince Edward's--Charles Townsend's Comments on La
+Fontaine
+
+55. TO MANN, _Feb._ 28, 1760.--Capture of Carrickfergus
+
+56. TO DALRYMPLE, _April_ 4, 1760.--The Ballad of "Hardyknute"--Mr.
+Home's "Siege of Aquileia"--"Tristram Shandy"--Bishop Warburton's Praise
+of it
+
+57. TO THE SAME, _June_ 20, 1760.--Erse Poetry--"The Dialogues of the
+Dead"--"The Complete Angler"
+
+58. TO MONTAGU, _Sept._ 1, 1760.--Visits in the Midland
+Counties--Whichnovre--Sheffield--The new Art of
+Plating--Chatsworth--Haddon Hall--Hardwicke--Apartments of Mary Queen of
+Scots--Newstead--Althorp
+
+59. TO THE SAME, _April_ 16, 1761.--Gentleman's Dress--Influence of Lord
+Bute--Ode by Lord Middlesex--G. Selwyn's Quotation
+
+60. TO THE SAME, _May_ 5, 1761.--Capture of Belleisle--Gray's
+Poems--Hogarth's Vanity
+
+61. TO THE SAME, _May_ 22, 1761.--Intended Marriage of the King--Battles
+in Germany--Capture of Pondicherry--Burke
+
+62. TO MANN, _Sept._ 10, 1761.--Arrival of the Princess of
+Mecklenburgh--The Royal Wedding--The Queen's Appearance and Behaviour
+
+63. TO THE COUNTESS OF AILESBURY, _Sept._ 27, 1761.--The Coronation and
+subsequent Gaieties
+
+64. TO THE SAME, _Nov._ 28, 1761.--A Court Ball--Pamphlets on Mr.
+Pitt--A Song by Gray
+
+65. TO MANN, _Jan._ 29, 1762.--Death of the Czarina Elizabeth--The
+Cock-lane Ghost--Return to England of Lady Mary Wortley
+
+66. TO ZOUCH, _March_ 20, 1762.--His own "Anecdotes of Painting"--His
+Picture of the Wedding of Henry VII.--Burnet's Comparison of Tiberius
+and Charles II.--Addison's "Travels"
+
+67. TO MANN, _Aug._ 12, 1762.--Birth of the Prince of Wales--The
+Czarina--Voltaire's Historical Criticisms--Immense Value of the
+Treasures brought over in the _Hermione_
+
+68. TO CONWAY, _Sept._ 9, 1762.--Negotiations for Peace--Christening of
+the Prince of Wales
+
+69. TO MANN, _Oct._ 3, 1762.--Treasures from the Havannah--The Royal
+Visit to Eton--Death of Lady Mary--Concealment of Her Works--Voltaire's
+"Universal History"
+
+70. TO THE SAME, _April_ 30, 1763.--Resignation of Lord Bute--French
+Visitors--Walpole and No. 45
+
+71. TO MONTAGU, _May_ 17, 1763.--A Party at "Straberri"--Work of his
+Printing Press--Epigrams--A Garden Party at Esher
+
+72. TO CONWAY, _May_ 21, 1763.--General Character of the
+French--Festivities on the Queen's Birthday
+
+73. TO THE EARL OF HERTFORD, _Dec._ 29, 1763.--The ordinary way of Life
+in England--Wilkes--C. Townshend--Count Lally--Lord Clive--Lord
+Northington--Louis Le Bien Aimé--The Drama in France
+
+74. TO MONTAGU, _Jan._11, 1764.--A New Year's Party at Lady
+Suffolk's--Lady Temple, Poetess Laureate to the Muses
+
+75. TO MANN, _Jan._ 18, 1764.--Marriage of the Prince of Brunswick: His
+Popularity
+
+76. TO THE EARL OF HERTFORD, _Feb._ 6, 1764.--Gambling Quarrels--Mr.
+Conway's Speech
+
+77. TO THE SAME, _Feb._ 15, 1764.--Account of the Debate on the General
+Warrant
+
+78. TO MANN, _June_ 8, 1764.--Lord Clive--Mr. Hamilton, Ambassador to
+Naples--Speech of Louis XV.
+
+79. TO THE SAME, _Aug._ 13, 1764.--The King of Poland--Catherine of
+Russia
+
+80. TO THE EARL OF HERTFORD, _Oct._ 5, 1764.--Madame De Boufflers'
+Writings--King James's Journal
+
+
+
+
+LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.
+
+
+I. HORACE WALPOLE
+
+From an engraving after a sketch by Sir THOS. LAWRENCE, P.R.A.
+
+II. SIR HORACE MANN
+
+III. STRAWBERRY HILL, FROM THE SOUTH-EAST
+
+IV. GEORGE MONTAGU
+
+V. THE LIBRARY, STRAWBERRY HILL
+
+VI. HORACE WALPOLE
+
+From a picture in the National Portrait Gallery, by NATHANIEL HONE, R.A.
+
+
+
+
+INTRODUCTION.
+
+
+It is creditable to our English nobility, and a feature in their
+character that distinguishes them from their fellows of most other
+nations, that, from the first revival of learning, the study of
+literature has been extensively cultivated by men of high birth, even by
+many who did not require literary fame to secure them a lasting
+remembrance; and they have not contented themselves with showing their
+appreciation of intellectual excellence by their patronage of humbler
+scholars, but have themselves afforded examples to other labourers in
+the hive, taking upon themselves the toils, and earning no small nor
+undeserved share of the honours of authorship. The very earliest of our
+poets, Chaucer, must have been a man of gentle birth, since he was
+employed on embassies of importance, and was married to the daughter of
+a French knight of distinction, and sister of the Duchess of Lancaster.
+The long civil wars of the fifteenth century prevented his having any
+immediate followers; but the sixteenth opened more propitiously. The
+conqueror of Flodden was also "Surrey of the deathless lay";[1] and from
+his time to the present day there is hardly a break in the long line of
+authors who have shown their feeling that noble birth and high position
+are no excuses for idleness, but that the highest rank gains additional
+illustration when it is shown to be united with brilliant talents
+worthily exercised. The earliest of our tragic poets was Sackville Earl
+of Dorset. The preux chevalier of Elizabeth's Court, the accomplished
+and high-minded Sidney, took up the lyre of Surrey: Lord St. Albans,
+more generally known by his family name of Bacon, "took all learning for
+his province"; and, though peaceful studies were again for a while
+rudely interrupted by the "dark deeds of horrid war," the restoration of
+peace was, as it had been before, a signal for the resumption of their
+studies by many of the best-born of the land. Another Earl of Dorset
+displayed his hereditary talent not less than his martial gallantry.
+Lord Roscommon well deserved the praises which Dryden and Pope, after
+his death, liberally bestowed. The great Lord Chancellor Clarendon
+devoted his declining years to a work of a grander class, leaving us a
+History which will endure as long as the language itself; while ladies
+of the very highest rank, the Duchess of Newcastle and Lady Mary Wortley
+Montague, vindicated the claims of their sex to share with their
+brethren the honours of poetical fame.
+
+[Footnote 1: "Lay of the Last Minstrel," vi. 14.]
+
+Among this noble and accomplished brotherhood the author of these
+letters is by general consent allowed to be entitled to no low place.
+Horace Walpole, born in the autumn of 1717, was the youngest son of that
+wise minister, Sir Robert Walpole, who, though, as Burke afterwards
+described him, "not a genius of the first class," yet by his adoption
+of, and resolute adherence to a policy of peace throughout the greater
+part of his administration, in which he was fortunately assisted by the
+concurrence of Fleury of France, contributed in no slight degree to the
+permanent establishment of the present dynasty on the throne. He
+received his education at the greatest of English schools, Eton, to
+which throughout his life he preserved a warm attachment; and where he
+gave a strong indication of his preference for peaceful studies and his
+judicious appreciation of intellectual ability, by selecting as his most
+intimate friend Thomas Gray, hereafter to achieve a poetical immortality
+by the Bard and the Elegy. From Eton they both went to Cambridge, and,
+when they quitted the University, in 1738, joined in a travelling tour
+through France and Italy. They continued companions for something more
+than two years; but at the end of that time they separated, and in the
+spring of 1741 Gray returned to England. The cause of their parting was
+never distinctly avowed; Walpole took the blame, if blame there was, on
+himself; but, in fact, it probably lay in an innate difference of
+disposition, and consequently of object. Walpole being fond of society,
+and, from his position as the Minister's son, naturally courted by many
+of the chief men in the different cities which they visited; while Gray
+was of a reserved character shunning the notice of strangers, and fixing
+his attention on more serious subjects than Walpole found attractive.
+
+In the autumn of the same year Walpole himself returned home. He had
+become a member of Parliament at the General Election in the summer, and
+took his seat just in time to bear a part in the fierce contest which
+terminated in the dissolution of his father's Ministry. His maiden
+speech, almost the only one he ever made, was in defence of the
+character and policy of his father, who was no longer in the House of
+Commons to defend himself.[1] And the result of the conflict made no
+slight impression on his mind; but gave a colour to all his political
+views.
+
+He began almost immediately to come forward as an author: not, however,
+as--
+
+    Obliged by hunger and request of friends;
+
+for in his circumstances he was independent, and even opulent; but
+seeking to avenge his father by squibs on Mr. Pulteney (now Lord Bath),
+as having been the leader of the attacks on him, and on the new Ministry
+which had succeeded him. In one respect that age was a happy one for
+ministers and all connected with them. Pensions and preferments were
+distributed with a lavish hand; and, even while he was a schoolboy, he
+had received more than one "patent place," as such were called, in the
+Exchequer, to which before his father's resignation others were added,
+which after a time raised his income to above £5,000 a year, a fortune
+which in those times was exceeded by comparatively few, even of those
+regarded as wealthy. So rich, indeed, was he, that before he was thirty
+he was able to buy Strawberry Hill, "a small house near Twickenham," as
+he describes it at first, but which he gradually enlarged and
+embellished till it grew into something of a baronial castle on a small
+scale, somewhat as, under the affectionate diligence of a greater man,
+Abbotsford in the present century became one of the lions of the Tweed.
+
+[Footnote 1: The speech was made March 23, 1742; but Sir Robert had
+resigned office, and been created Earl of Orford in the February
+preceding.]
+
+From this time forth literary composition, with the acquisition of
+antiques and curiosities for the decoration of "Strawberry" occupied the
+greater part of his life. He erected a printing press, publishing not
+only most of his own writings, but some also of other authors, such as
+poems of Gray, with whom he kept up uninterrupted intercourse. But, in
+fact, his own works were sufficiently numerous to keep his printers
+fully employed. He was among the most voluminous writers of a voluminous
+age. In the course of the next twenty years he published seven volumes
+of memoirs of the last ten years of the reign of George II. and the
+first ten of George III.; five volumes of a work entitled "Royal and
+Noble Authors;" several more of "Anecdotes of Painting;" "The Mysterious
+Mother," a tragedy; "The Castle of Otranto," a romance; and a small
+volume to which he gave the name of "Historic Doubts on Richard III." Of
+all these not one is devoid of merit. He more than once explains that
+the "Memoirs" have no claim to the more respectable title of "History";
+and he apologises for introducing anecdotes which might be thought
+inconsistent with what Macaulay brands as "a vile phrase," the dignity
+of history. He excuses this, which he looked on as a new feature in
+historical composition, on the ground that, if trifles, "they are
+trifles relating to considerable people; such as all curious people have
+ever loved to read." "Such trifles," he says, "are valued, if relating
+to any reign one hundred and fifty years ago; and, if his book should
+live so long, these too might become acceptable." Readers of the present
+day will not think such apology was needed. The value of his "trifles"
+has been proved in a much shorter time; for there is no subsequent
+historian of that period who has not been indebted to him for many
+particulars of which no other trustworthy record existed. Walpole had in
+a great degree a historical mind; and perhaps there are few works which
+show a keener critical insight into the value of old traditions than the
+"Historic Doubts," directed to establish, not, indeed, Richard's
+innocence of the crimes charged against him, but the fact that, with
+respect to many of them, his guilt has never been proved by any evidence
+which is not open to the gravest impeachment. His "Royal and Noble
+Authors," and his "Anecdotes of Painting" are full of entertainment, not
+unmixed with instruction. "The Mysterious Mother" was never performed on
+the stage, nor is it calculated for representation; since he himself
+admits that the subject is disgusting. But dramas not intended for
+representation, and which therefore should perhaps be more fitly called
+dramatic poems, were a species of composition to which more than one
+writer of reputation had lately begun to turn their attention; though
+dramas not designed for the stage seem to most readers defective in
+their very conception, as lacking the stimulus which the intention of
+submitting them to the extemporaneous ocular judgement of the public can
+alone impart. Among such works, however, "The Mysterious Mother" is
+admitted to rank high for vigorous description and poetic imagery. A
+greater popularity, which even at the present day has not wholly passed
+away, since it is still occasionally reprinted, was achieved by "The
+Castle of Otranto," which, as he explains it in one of his letters, owed
+its origin to a dream. Novels had been a branch of literature which had
+slumbered for several years after the death of Defoe, but which the
+genius of Fielding and Smollett had again brought into fashion. But
+their tales purported to be pictures of the manners of the day. This was
+rather the forerunner of Mrs. Radcliffe's[1] weird tales of supernatural
+mystery, which for a time so engrossed the public attention as to lead
+that "wicked wag," Mr. George Coleman, to regard them as representatives
+of the class, and to describe how--
+
+    A novel now is nothing more
+    Than an old castle and a creaking door;
+         A distant hovel;
+    Clanking of chains, a gallery, a light,
+    Old armour, and a phantom all in white,
+         And there's a novel.
+
+[Footnote 1: "'The Castle of Otranto' was the father of that marvellous
+series which once overstocked the circulating library, and closed with
+Mrs. Radcliffe."--D'Israeli, "Curiosities of Literature," ii. 115.]
+
+He had published it anonymously as a tale that had been found in the
+library of an ancient family in the North of England; but it was not
+indebted solely to the mystery of its authorship for its favourable
+reception--since, after he acknowledged it as his own work in a second
+edition, the sale did not fall off. And it deserved success, for, though
+the day had passed when even the most credulous could place any faith in
+swords that required a hundred men to lift, and helmets which could only
+fit the champion whose single strength could wield such a weapon, the
+style was lively and attractive, and the dialogue was eminently dramatic
+and sparkling.
+
+But the interest of all these works has passed away. The "Memoirs" have
+served their turn as a guide and aid to more regular historians, and the
+composition which still keeps its author's fame alive is his
+Correspondence with some of his numerous friends, male and female, in
+England or abroad, which he maintained with an assiduity which showed
+how pleasurable he found the task, while the care with which he secured
+the preservation of his letters, begging his correspondents to retain
+them, in case at any future time he should desire their return, proves
+that he anticipated the possibility that they might hereafter be found
+interesting by other readers than to those to whom they were addressed.
+
+But he did not suffer either his writings or the enrichment of
+"Strawberry" with antiquarian treasures to engross the whole of his
+attention. For the first thirty years and more of his public life he was
+a zealous politician. And it is no slight proof how high was the
+reputation for sagacity and soundness of judgement which he enjoyed,
+that in the ministerial difficulties caused by Lord Chatham's illness,
+he was consulted by the leaders of more than one section of the Whig
+party, by Conway, the Duke of Bedford, the Duke of Grafton, Lord
+Holland, and others; that his advice more than once influenced their
+determinations; and that he himself drew more than one of the letters
+which passed between them. Even the King himself was not ignorant of the
+weight he had in their counsels, and, on one occasion at least,
+condescended to avail himself of it for a solution of some of the
+embarrassments with which their negotiations were beset.
+
+But after a time his attendance in Parliament, which had never been very
+regular, grew wearisome and distasteful to him. At the General Election
+of 1768 he declined to offer himself again as a candidate for Lynn,
+which he had represented for several years. And henceforth his mornings
+were chiefly occupied with literature; the continuation of his Memoirs;
+discussion of literary subjects with Gibbon, Voltaire, Mason, and
+others, while his evenings were passed in the society of his friends, a
+mode of enjoying his time in which he was eminently calculated to shine,
+since abundant testimony has come down to us from many competent judges
+of the charm of his conversation; the liveliness of his disposition
+acting as a most attractive frame to the extent and variety of his
+information.
+
+Among his distractions were his visits to France, which for some time
+were frequent. He had formed a somewhat singular intimacy with a blind
+old lady, the Marquise du Deffand, a lady whose character in her youth
+had been something less than doubtful, since she had been one of the
+Regent Duc d'Orléans's numerous mistresses; but who had retained in her
+old age much of the worldly acuteness and lively wit with which she had
+borne her part in that clever, shameless society. Her _salon_ was now
+the resort of many personages of the highest distinction, even of ladies
+themselves of the most unstained reputation, such as the Duchesse de
+Choiseul; and the rumours or opinions which he heard in their company
+enabled him to enrich his letters to his friends at home with comments
+on the conduct of the French Parliament, of Maupéon, Maurepas, Turgot,
+and the King himself, which, in many instances, attest the shrewdness
+with which he estimated the real bearing of the events which were taking
+place, and anticipated the possible character of some of those which
+were not unlikely to ensue.
+
+Thus, with a mind which, to the end, was so active and so happily
+constituted as to be able to take an interest in everything around him,
+and, even when more than seventy years old, to make new friends to
+replace those who had dropped off, he passed a long, a happy, and far
+from an useless life. When he was seventy-four he succeeded to his
+father's peerage, on the death of his elder brother; but he did not long
+enjoy the title, by which, indeed, he was not very careful to be
+distinguished, and in the spring of 1797 he died, within a few months
+of his eightieth birthday.
+
+A great writer of the last generation, whose studies were of a severer
+cast, and who, conscious perhaps of his own unfitness to shine at the
+tea-table of fashionable ladies, was led by that feeling to undervalue
+the lighter social gifts which formed conspicuous ingredients in
+Walpole's character, has denounced him not only as frivolous in his
+tastes, but scarcely above mediocrity in his abilities (a sentence to
+which Scott's description of him as "a man of great genius" may be
+successfully opposed); and is especially severe on what he terms his
+affectation in disclaiming the compliments bestowed on his learning by
+some of his friends. The expressed estimate of his acquirements and
+works which so offended Lord Macaulay was that "there is nobody so
+superficial, that, except a little history, a little poetry, a little
+painting, and some divinity, he knew nothing; he had always lived in the
+busy world; had always loved pleasure; played loo till two or three in
+the morning; haunted auctions--in short, did not know so much astronomy
+as would carry him to Knightsbridge; not more physic than a physician;
+nor, in short, anything that is called science. If it were not that he
+laid up a little provision in summer, like the ant, he should be as
+ignorant as the people he lived with."[1] In Lord Macaulay's view,
+Walpole was never less sincere than when pronouncing such a judgement on
+his works. He sees in it nothing but an affectation, fishing for
+further praises; and, fastening on his account of his ordinary
+occupations, he pronounces that a man of fifty should be ashamed of
+playing loo till after midnight.
+
+[Footnote 1: Letter to Mann, Feb. 6, 1760.]
+
+In spite, however, of Lord Macaulay's reproof, something may be said in
+favour of a man who, after giving his mornings to works which display no
+little industry as well as talent, unbent his bow in the evening at
+lively supper-parties, or even at the card-table with fair friends,
+where the play never degenerated into gambling. And his disparagement of
+his learning, which Lord Macaulay ridicules as affectation, a more
+candid judgement may fairly ascribe to sincere modesty. For it is plain
+from many other passages in his letters, that he really did undervalue
+his own writings; and that the feeling which he thus expressed was
+genuine is to a great extent proved by the patience, if not
+thankfulness, with which he allowed his friend Mann to alter passages in
+"The Mysterious Mother," and confessed the alterations to be
+improvements. It may be added that Lord Macaulay's disparagement of his
+judgement and his taste is not altogether consistent with his admission
+that Walpole's writings possessed an "irresistible charm" that "no man
+who has written so much is so seldom tiresome;" that, even in "The
+Castle of Otranto," which he ridicules, "the story never flags for a
+moment," and, what is more to our present purpose, he adds that "his
+letters are with reason considered his best performance;" and that those
+to his friend at Florence, Sir H. Mann, "contain much information
+concerning the history of that time: the portion of English History of
+which common readers know the least."
+
+Of these letters it remains for us now to speak. The value of such _pour
+servir_, to borrow a French expression, that is to say, to serve as
+materials to supply the historian of a nation or an age with an
+acquaintance with events, or persons, or manners, which would be sought
+for in vain among Parliamentary records, or ministerial despatches, has
+long been recognised.[1] Two thousand years ago, those of the greatest
+of Roman orators and statesmen were carefully preserved; and modern
+editors do not fear to claim for them a place "among the most valuable
+of all the remains of Roman literature; the specimens which they give of
+familiar intercourse, and of the public and private manners of society,
+drawing up for us the curtain from scenes of immense historical
+interest, and laying open the secret workings, the complications, and
+schemes of a great revolution period."[2] Such a description is
+singularly applicable to the letters of Walpole; and the care which he
+took for their preservation shows that he was not without a hope that
+they also would be regarded as interesting and valuable by future
+generations. He praises one of his correspondents for his diligence in
+collecting and publishing a volume of letters belonging to the reigns of
+James I. and Charles I., on the express ground that "nothing gives so
+just an idea of an age as genuine letters; nay, history waits for its
+last seal from them." And it is not too much to say that they are
+superior to journals and diaries as a mine to be worked by the judicious
+historian; while to the general public they will always be more
+attractive, from the scope they afford to elegance of style, at which
+the diary-keeper does not aim; and likewise from their frequently
+recording curious incidents, fashions, good sayings, and other things
+which, from their apparently trifling character, the grave diarist would
+not think worth preserving.
+
+[Footnote 1: D'Israeli has remarked that "the _gossiping_ of a profound
+politician, or a vivacious observer, in one of their letters, often by a
+spontaneous stroke reveals the individual, or by a simple incident
+unriddles a mysterious event;" and proceeds to quote Bolingbroke's
+estimate of the importance, from this point of view, of "that valuable
+collection of Cardinal d'Ossat's Memoirs" ("Curiosities of Literature,"
+iii. p. 381).]
+
+[Footnote 2: The Rev. J.E. Yonge, Preface to an edition of "Cicero's
+Letters."]
+
+He, however, was not the first among the moderns to achieve a reputation
+by his correspondence. In the generation before his birth, a French
+lady, Madame de Sévigné, had, with an affectionate industry, found her
+chief occupation and pleasure in keeping her daughters in the provinces
+fully acquainted with every event which interested or entertained Louis
+XIV. and his obsequious Court; and in the first years of the eighteenth
+century a noble English lady, whom we have already mentioned, did in
+like manner devote no small portion of her time to recording, for the
+amusement and information of her daughter, her sister, and her other
+friends at home, the various scenes and occurrences that came under her
+own notice in the foreign countries in which for many years her lot was
+cast, as the wife of an ambassador. In liveliness of style, Lady Mary
+Montague is little if at all inferior to her French prototype; while,
+since she was endowed with far more brilliant talents, and, from her
+foreign travels, had a wider range of observation, her letters have a
+far greater interest than could attach to those of a writer, however
+accomplished and sagacious, whose world was Paris, with bounds scarcely
+extending beyond Versailles on one side, and Compiègne on the other. To
+these fair and lively ladies Walpole was now to succeed as a third
+candidate for epistolary fame; though, with his habit of underrating his
+own talents, he never aspired to equal the gay Frenchwoman; (the English
+lady's correspondence was as yet unknown). There is evident sincerity in
+his reproof of one of his correspondents who had expressed a most
+flattering opinion: "You say such extravagant things of my letters,
+which are nothing but gossiping gazettes, that I cannot bear it; you
+have undone yourself with me, for you compare them to Madame de
+Sévigné's. Absolute treason! Do you know there is scarcely a book in the
+world I love so much as her letters?"
+
+Yet critics who should place him on an equality with her would not be
+without plausible grounds for their judgement. Many circumstances
+contributed to qualify him in a very special degree for the task which,
+looking at his letters in that light, he may be said to have undertaken.
+His birth, as the son of a great minister; his comparative opulence;
+even the indolent insignificance of his elder brothers, which caused him
+to be looked upon as his father's representative, and as such to be
+consulted by those who considered themselves as the heirs of his policy,
+while the leader of that party in the House of Commons, General Conway,
+was his cousin, and the man for whom he ever felt the strongest personal
+attachment,--were all advantages which fell to the lot of but few. And
+to these may be added the variety of his tastes, as attested by the
+variety of his published works. He was a man who observed everything,
+who took an interest in everything. His correspondents, too, were so
+various and different as to ensure a variety in his letters. Some were
+politicians, ministers at home, or envoys abroad; some were female
+leaders of fashion, planning balls and masquerades, summoning him to
+join an expedition to Ranelagh or Vauxhall; others were scholars, poets,
+or critics, inviting comments on Gray's poems, on Robertson's style, on
+Gibbon's boundless learning; or on the impostures of Macpherson and
+Chatterton; others, again, were antiquarians, to whom the helmet of
+Francis, or a pouncet-box of the fair Diana, were objects of far greater
+interest than the intrigues of a Secretary of State, or the expedients
+of a Chancellor of the Exchequer; and all such subjects are discussed by
+him with evidently equal willingness, equal clearness, and liveliness.
+
+It would not be fair to regard as a deduction from the value of those
+letters which bear on the politics of the day the necessity of
+confessing that they are not devoid of partiality--that they are
+coloured with his own views, both of measures and persons. Not only were
+political prejudices forced upon him by the peculiarities of his
+position, but it may be doubted whether any one ever has written, or can
+write, of transactions of national importance which are passing under
+his own eyes, as it were, with absolute impartiality. It may even be a
+question whether, if any one did so, it would not detract from his own
+character, at least as much as it might add to the value of his
+writings. In one of his letters, Byron enumerates among the merits of
+Mitford's "History of Greece," "wrath and partiality," explaining that
+such ingredients make a man write "in earnest." And, in Walpole's case,
+the dislike which he naturally felt towards those who had overthrown his
+father's administration by what, at a later day, they themselves
+admitted to have been a factious and blamable opposition, was sharpened
+by his friendship for his cousin Conway. At the same time we may remark
+in passing that his opinions and prejudices were not so invincible as to
+blind him to real genius and eminent public services; and the admirers
+of Lord Chatham may fairly draw an argument in favour of his policy from
+Walpole's admission of its value in raising the spirit of the people; an
+admission which, it may be supposed, it must have gone against his grain
+to make in favour of a follower of Pulteney.
+
+But from his letters on other topics, on literature and art, no such
+deduction has to be made. His judgement was generally sound and
+discriminating. He could appreciate the vast learning and stately
+grandiloquence of Gibbon, and the widely different style of Robertson.
+Nor is it greatly to his discredit that his disgust at what he considers
+Hume's needless parade of scepticism and infidelity, which did honour
+to his heart, blinded him in a great degree to the historian's
+unsurpassed acuteness and insight, and (to borrow the eulogy of Gibbon)
+"the careless inimitable felicities" of his narrative. He was among the
+first to recognize the peculiar genius of Crabbe, and to detect the
+impostures of Macpherson and Chatterton, while doing full justice to
+"the astonishing prematurity" of the latter's genius. And in matters of
+art, so independent as well as correct was his taste, that he not only,
+in one instance, ventured to differ from Reynolds, but also proved to be
+right in his opinion that a work extolled by Sir Joshua, was but a copy,
+and a poor one.
+
+On his qualifications to be a painter of the way of life, habits, and
+manners (_quorum pars magna fuit_) of the higher classes in his day, it
+would be superfluous to dwell. Scott, who was by no means a warm admirer
+of his character, does not hesitate to pronounce him "certainly the best
+letter-writer in the English language;" and the great poet who, next to
+Scott, holds the highest place in the literary history of the last two
+centuries, adds his testimony not only to the excellence of his letters,
+but also to his general ability as that of a high order. "It is the
+fashion to underrate Horace Walpole, firstly, because he was a nobleman,
+and, secondly, because he was a gentleman; but, to say nothing of the
+composition of his incomparable letters and of 'The Castle of Otranto,'
+he is the 'Ultimus Romanorum,' the author of 'The Mysterious Mother,' a
+tragedy of the highest order, and not a puling love-play. He is the
+father of the first romance, and the last tragedy in our language; and
+surely worthy of a higher place than any living writer, be he who he
+may."[1]
+
+[Footnote 1: Byron, Preface to "Marino Faliere." But in the last
+sentence the poet certainly exaggerated his admiration for Walpole;
+since it is sufficiently notorious from his own letters, and from more
+than one passage in his works, as where he ranks Scott as second to
+Shakespeare alone, that he deservedly admired him more than all their
+contemporaries put together.]
+
+And it seems not unnatural to entertain a hope that a selection from a
+correspondence which extorted such an eulogy from men whose own letters
+form no small part of the attraction of Lockhart's and Moore's
+biographies, will be acceptable to many who, while lacking courage, or
+perhaps leisure, to grapple with publications in many volumes, may
+welcome the opportunity thus here afforded them of forming an
+acquaintance, however partial, with works which, in their entire body,
+are deservedly reckoned among the masterpieces of our literature.[1]
+
+[Footnote 1: It may be proper to point out that, in some few instances,
+a letter is not given in its entirety; but, as in familiar
+correspondence, it must constantly happen that, while the incidents
+mentioned in one portion of a letter are full of interest, of
+others--such as marriages, deaths, &c.--the importance is of the most
+temporary and transitory character. It may be hoped that the liberty
+taken of leaving out such portions will be regarded as, if not
+commendable, at the least excusable.]
+
+
+
+
+A SELECTION
+
+FROM THE
+
+LETTERS OF HORACE WALPOLE.
+
+
+_MARRIAGE OF THE PRINCESS OF WALES--VERY LIVELY._[1]
+
+[Footnote 1: This letter, written before he was nineteen, is worth
+noticing as a proof how innate was his liveliness of style, since in
+that respect few of the productions of his maturer age surpasses it. It
+also shows how strong already was his expectations that his letters
+would hereafter be regarded as interesting and valuable.]
+
+TO GEORGE MONTAGU, ESQ.[1]
+
+[Footnote 1: George Montagu, Esq., of Roel, in the county of Gloucester,
+son of Brigadier-General Edward Montagu, and long M.P. for Northampton.
+He was the grandnephew of the first Earl of Halifax of the Montagu
+family, the statesman and poet, and was the contemporary at Eton of
+Walpole and Gray. When his cousin, the Earl of Halifax, was
+Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland, he was his secretary; and when Lord North
+was Chancellor of the Exchequer, he occupied the same position with him.
+He died May 10, 1780, leaving the bulk of his fortune to Lord North.
+Walpole's letters to him, 272 in number, and dating between 1736 and
+1770, were first published in 1818, "from the Originals in the
+possession of the Editor." There was a coolness between Walpole and
+Montagu several years before the latter's death, the correspondence
+dropping very abruptly. The cause is explained by Walpole in a letter to
+Cole, dated May 11, 1780. Mr. Montagu's brother, Edward, was killed at
+Fontenoy. His sister, Arabella, was married to a Mr. Wetenhall--a
+relation of the Wetenhall mentioned in De Grammont. "Of Mr. Montagu, it
+is only remembered that he was a gentleman-like body of the _vieille
+cour_, and that he was usually attended by his brother John (the Little
+John of Walpole's correspondence), who was a midshipman at the age of
+sixty, and found his chief occupation in carrying about his brother's
+snuff-box" (_Quarterly Rev._ for _April_, 1818, p. 131).]
+
+KING'S COLLEGE, _May_ 2, 1736.
+
+Dear Sir,--Unless I were to be married myself, I should despair ever
+being able to describe a wedding so well as you have done: had I known
+your talent before, I would have desired an epithalamium. I believe the
+Princess[1] will have more beauties bestowed on her by the occasional
+poets, than even a painter would afford her. They will cook up a new
+Pandora, and in the bottom of the box enclose Hope, that all they have
+said is true. A great many, out of excess of good breeding, having heard
+it was rude to talk Latin before women, propose complimenting her in
+English; which she will be much the better for. I doubt most of them,
+instead of fearing their compositions should not be understood, should
+fear they should: they write they don't know what, to be read by they
+don't know who. You have made me a very unreasonable request, which I
+will answer with another as extraordinary: you desire I would burn your
+letters: I desire you would keep mine. I know but of one way of making
+what I send you useful, which is, by sending you a blank sheet: sure
+you would not grudge threepence for a halfpenny sheet, when you give as
+much for one not worth a farthing. You drew this last paragraph on you
+by your exordium, as you call it, and conclusion. I hope, for the
+future, our correspondence will run a little more glibly, with dear
+George, and dear Harry [Conway]; not as formally as if we were playing a
+game at chess in Spain and Portugal; and Don Horatio was to have the
+honour of specifying to Don Georgio, by an epistle, whither he would
+move. In one point I would have our correspondence like a game at chess;
+it should last all our lives--but I hear you cry check; adieu!
+
+Dear George, yours ever.
+
+[Footnote 1: Augusta, younger daughter of Frederic II., Duke of
+Saxe-Gotha, married (27th April, 1736) to Frederick, Prince of Wales,
+father of George III.
+
+In 1736, I wrote a copy of Latin verses, published in the "Gratulatio
+Acad. Cantab.," on the marriage of Frederick, Prince of
+Wales.--_Walpole_ (_Short Notes_).]
+
+
+_FONDNESS FOR OLD STORIES--REMINISCENCES OF ETON, ETC._
+
+TO GEORGE MONTAGU, ESQ.
+
+KING'S COLLEGE, _May_ 6, 1736.
+
+Dear George,--I agree with you entirely in the pleasure you take in
+talking over old stories, but can't say but I meet every day with new
+circumstances, which will be still more pleasure to me to recollect. I
+think at our age 'tis excess of joy, to think, while we are running over
+past happinesses, that it is still in our power to enjoy as great.
+Narrations of the greatest actions of other people are tedious in
+comparison of the serious trifles that every man can call to mind of
+himself while he was learning those histories. Youthful passages of life
+are the chippings of Pitt's diamond, set into little heart-rings with
+mottoes; the stone itself more worth, the filings more gentle and
+agreeable.--Alexander, at the head of the world, never tasted the true
+pleasure that boys of his own age have enjoyed at the head of a school.
+Little intrigues, little schemes, and policies engage their thoughts;
+and, at the same time that they are laying the foundation for their
+middle age of life, the mimic republic they live in furnishes materials
+of conversation for their latter age; and old men cannot be said to be
+children a second time with greater truth from any one cause, than their
+living over again their childhood in imagination. To reflect on the
+season when first they felt the titillation of love, the budding
+passions, and the first dear object of their wishes! how unexperienced
+they gave credit to all the tales of romantic loves! Dear George, were
+not the playing fields at Eton food for all manner of flights? No old
+maid's gown, though it had been tormented into all the fashions from
+King James to King George, ever underwent so many transformations as
+those poor plains have in my idea. At first I was contented with tending
+a visionary flock, and sighing some pastoral name to the echo of the
+cascade under the bridge. How happy should I have been to have had a
+kingdom only for the pleasure of being driven from it, and living
+disguised in an humble vale! As I got further into Virgil and Clelia, I
+found myself transported from Arcadia to the garden of Italy; and saw
+Windsor Castle in no other view than the _Capitoli immobile saxum_. I
+wish a committee of the House of Commons may ever seem to be the senate;
+or a bill appear half so agreeable as a billet-doux. You see how deep
+you have carried me into old stories; I write of them with pleasure, but
+shall talk of them with more to you. I can't say I am sorry I was never
+quite a schoolboy: an expedition against bargemen, or a match at
+cricket, may be very pretty things to recollect; but, thank my stars, I
+can remember things that are very near as pretty. The beginning of my
+Roman history was spent in the asylum, or conversing in Egeria's
+hallowed grove; not in thumping and pummelling king Amulius's herdsmen.
+I was sometimes troubled with a rough creature or two from the plough;
+one, that one should have thought, had worked with his head, as well as
+his hands, they were both so callous. One of the most agreeable
+circumstances I can recollect is the Triumvirate, composed of yourself,
+Charles, and
+
+Your sincere friend.
+
+
+_WISH TO TRAVEL--SUPERIORITY OF FRENCH MANNERS TO ENGLISH IN THEIR
+MANNER TO LADIES._
+
+TO GEORGE MONTAGU, ESQ.
+
+KING'S COLLEGE, _March_ 20, 1737.
+
+Dear George,--The first paragraph in my letter must be in answer to the
+last in yours; though I should be glad to make you the return you ask,
+by waiting on you myself. 'Tis not in my power, from more circumstances
+than one, which are needless to tell you, to accompany you and Lord
+Conway to Italy: you add to the pleasure it would give me, by asking it
+so kindly. You I am infinitely obliged to, as I was capable, my dear
+George, of making you forget for a minute that you don't propose
+stirring from the dear place you are now in. Poppies indeed are the
+chief flowers in love nosegays, but they seldom bend towards the lady;
+at least not till the other flowers have been gathered. Prince
+Volscius's boots were made of love-leather, and honour leather; instead
+of honour, some people's are made of friendship: but since you have been
+so good to me as to draw on this, I can almost believe you are equipped
+for travelling farther than Rheims. 'Tis no little inducement to make me
+wish myself in France, that I hear gallantry is not left off there; that
+you may be polite, and not be thought awkward for it. You know the
+pretty men of the age in England use the women with no more deference
+than they do their coach-horses, and have not half the regard for them
+that they have for themselves. The little freedoms you tell me you use
+take off from formality, by avoiding which ridiculous extreme we are
+dwindled into the other barbarous one, rusticity. If you had been at
+Paris, I should have inquired about the new Spanish ambassadress, who,
+by the accounts we have thence, at her first audience of the queen, sat
+down with her at a distance that suited respect and conversation.
+
+Adieu, dear George,
+
+Yours most heartily.
+
+
+_THEATRES AT PARIS--ST. DENIS--FONDNESS OF THE FRENCH FOR SHOW, AND FOR
+GAMBLING--SINGULAR SIGNS--THE ARMY THE ONLY PROFESSION FOR MEN OF GENTLE
+BIRTH--SPLENDOUR OF THE PUBLIC BUILDINGS._
+
+TO RICHARD WEST, ESQ.
+
+PARIS, _April_ 21, N.S. 1739.[1]
+
+[Footnote 1: He is here dating according to the French custom. In
+England the calendar was not rectified by the disuse of the "Old Style"
+till 1752.]
+
+Dear West,--You figure us in a set of pleasures, which, believe me, we
+do not find; cards and eating are so universal, that they absorb all
+variation of pleasures. The operas, indeed, are much frequented three
+times a week; but to me they would be a greater penance than eating
+maigre: their music resembles a gooseberry tart as much as it does
+harmony. We have not yet been at the Italian playhouse; scarce any one
+goes there. Their best amusement, and which, in some parts, beats ours,
+is the comedy; three or four of the actors excel any we have: but then
+to this nobody goes, if it is not one of the fashionable nights; and
+then they go, be the play good or bad--except on Molière's nights, whose
+pieces they are quite weary of. Gray and I have been at the Avare
+to-night: I cannot at all commend their performance of it. Last night I
+was in the Place de Louis le Grand (a regular octagon, uniform, and the
+houses handsome, though not so large as Golden Square), to see what they
+reckoned one of the finest burials that ever was in France. It was the
+Duke de Tresmes, governor of Paris and marshal of France. It began on
+foot from his palace to his parish-church, and from thence in coaches to
+the opposite end of Paris, to be interred in the church of the
+Celestins, where is his family-vault. About a week ago we happened to
+see the grave digging, as we went to see the church, which is old and
+small, but fuller of fine ancient monuments than any, except St. Denis,
+which we saw on the road, and excels Westminster; for the windows are
+all painted in mosaic, and the tombs as fresh and well preserved as if
+they were of yesterday. In the Celestins' church is a votive column to
+Francis II., which says, that it is one assurance of his being
+immortalized, to have had the martyr Mary Stuart for his wife. After
+this long digression, I return to the burial, which was a most vile
+thing. A long procession of flambeaux and friars; no plumes, trophies,
+banners, led horses, scutcheons, or open chariots; nothing but
+
+                        friars,
+    White, black, and grey, with all their trumpery.
+
+This godly ceremony began at nine at night, and did not finish till
+three this morning; for, each church they passed, they stopped for a
+hymn and holy water. By the bye, some of these choice monks, who watched
+the body while it lay in state, fell asleep one night, and let the
+tapers catch fire of the rich velvet mantle lined with ermine and
+powdered with gold flower-de-luces, which melted the lead coffin, and
+burnt off the feet of the deceased before it wakened them. The French
+love show; but there is a meanness reigns through it all. At the house
+where I stood to see this procession, the room was hung with crimson
+damask and gold, and the windows were mended in ten or a dozen places
+with paper. At dinner they give you three courses; but a third of the
+dishes is patched up with salads, butter, puff-paste, or some such
+miscarriage of a dish. None, but Germans, wear fine clothes; but their
+coaches are tawdry enough for the wedding of Cupid and Psyche. You would
+laugh extremely at their signs: some live at the Y grec, some at Venus's
+toilette, and some at the sucking cat. You would not easily guess their
+notions of honour: I'll tell you one: it is very dishonourable for any
+gentleman not to be in the army, or in the king's service as they call
+it, and it is no dishonour to keep public gaming-houses: there are at
+least a hundred and fifty people of the first quality in Paris who live
+by it. You may go into their houses at all hours of the night, and find
+hazard, pharaoh, &c. The men who keep the hazard-table at the Duke de
+Gesvres' pay him twelve guineas each night for the privilege. Even the
+princesses of the blood are dirty enough to have shares in the banks
+kept at their houses. We have seen two or three of them; but they are
+not young, nor remarkable but for wearing their red of a deeper dye than
+other women, though all use it extravagantly.
+
+The weather is still so bad, that we have not made any excursions to see
+Versailles and the environs, not even walked in the Tuileries; but we
+have seen almost everything else that is worth seeing in Paris, though
+that is very considerable. They beat us vastly in buildings, both in
+number and magnificence. The tombs of Richelieu and Mazarin at the
+Sorbonne and the College de Quatre Nations are wonderfully fine,
+especially the former. We have seen very little of the people
+themselves, who are not inclined to be propitious to strangers,
+especially if they do not play and speak the language readily. There are
+many English here: Lord Holdernesse, Conway and Clinton, and Lord George
+Bentinck; Mr. Brand, Offley, Frederic, Frampton, Bonfoy, &c. Sir John
+Cotton's son and a Mr. Vernon of Cambridge passed through Paris last
+week. We shall stay here about a fortnight longer, and then go to Rheims
+with Mr. Conway for two or three months. When you have nothing else to
+do, we shall be glad to hear from you; and any news. If we did not
+remember there was such a place as England, we should know nothing of
+it: the French never mention it, unless it happens to be in one of their
+proverbs. Adieu!
+
+Yours ever.
+
+To-morrow we go to the Cid. They have no farces, but _petites pièces_
+like our 'Devil to Pay.'
+
+
+_MAGNIFICENCE OF VERSAILLES--THE CHARTREUX RELICS._
+
+TO RICHARD WEST, ESQ.
+
+FROM PARIS, 1739.
+
+Dear West,--I should think myself to blame not to try to divert you,
+when you tell me I can. From the air of your letter you seem to want
+amusement, that is, you want spirits. I would recommend to you certain
+little employments that I know of, and that belong to you, but that I
+imagine bodily exercise is more suitable to your complaint. If you would
+promise me to read them in the Temple garden, I would send you a little
+packet of plays and pamphlets that we have made up, and intend to
+dispatch to "Dick's"[1] the first opportunity.--Stand by, clear the way,
+make room for the pompous appearance of Versailles le Grand!----But no:
+it fell so short of my idea of it, mine, that I have resigned to Gray
+the office of writing its panegyric. He likes it. They say I am to like
+it better next Sunday; when the sun is to shine, the king is to be fine,
+the water-works are to play, and the new knights of the Holy Ghost are
+to be installed! Ever since Wednesday, the day we were there, we have
+done nothing but dispute about it. They say, we did not see it to
+advantage, that we ran through the apartments, saw the garden _en
+passant_, and slubbered over Trianon. I say, we saw nothing. However, we
+had time to see that the great front is a lumber of littleness, composed
+of black brick, stuck full of bad old busts, and fringed with gold
+rails. The rooms are all small, except the great gallery, which is
+noble, but totally wainscoted with looking-glass. The garden is littered
+with statues and fountains, each of which has its tutelary deity. In
+particular, the elementary god of fire solaces himself in one. In
+another, Enceladus, in lieu of a mountain, is overwhelmed with many
+waters. There are avenues of water-pots, who disport themselves much in
+squirting up cascadelins. In short, 'tis a garden for a great child.
+Such was Louis Quatorze, who is here seen in his proper colours, where
+he commanded in person, unassisted by his armies and generals, and left
+to the pursuit of his own puerile ideas of glory.
+
+[Footnote 1: A celebrated coffee-house, near the Temple Gate in Fleet
+Street, where quarto poems and pamphlets were taken in.]
+
+We saw last week a place of another kind, and which has more the air of
+what it would be, than anything I have yet met with: it was the convent
+of the Chartreux. All the conveniences, or rather (if there was such a
+word) all the _adaptments_ are assembled here, that melancholy,
+meditation, selfish devotion, and despair would require. But yet 'tis
+pleasing. Soften the terms, and mellow the uncouth horror that reigns
+here, but a little, and 'tis a charming solitude. It stands on a large
+space of ground, is old and irregular. The chapel is gloomy: behind it,
+through some dark passages, you pass into a large obscure hall, which
+looks like a combination-chamber for some hellish council. The large
+cloister surrounds their burying-ground. The cloisters are very narrow
+and very long, and let into the cells, which are built like little huts
+detached from each other. We were carried into one, where lived a
+middle-aged man not long initiated into the order. He was extremely
+civil, and called himself Dom Victor. We have promised to visit him
+often. Their habit is all white: but besides this he was infinitely
+clean in his person; and his apartment and garden, which he keeps and
+cultivates without any assistance, was neat to a degree. He has four
+little rooms, furnished in the prettiest manner, and hung with good
+prints. One of them is a library, and another a gallery. He has several
+canary-birds disposed in a pretty manner in breeding-cages. In his
+garden was a bed of good tulips in bloom, flowers and fruit-trees, and
+all neatly kept. They are permitted at certain hours to talk to
+strangers, but never to one another, or to go out of their convent. But
+what we chiefly went to see was the small cloister, with the history of
+St. Bruno, their founder, painted by Le Soeur. It consists of twenty-two
+pictures, the figures a good deal less than life. But sure they are
+amazing! I don't know what Raphael may be in Rome, but these pictures
+excel all I have seen in Paris and England. The figure of the dead man
+who spoke at his burial, contains all the strongest and horridest ideas,
+of ghastliness, hypocrisy discovered, and the height of damnation, pain
+and cursing. A Benedictine monk, who was there at the same time, said to
+me of this picture: _C'est une fable, mais on la croyoit autrefois._
+Another, who showed me relics in one of their churches, expressed as
+much ridicule for them. The pictures I have been speaking of are ill
+preserved, and some of the finest heads defaced, which was done at first
+by a rival of Le Soeur's. Adieu! dear West, take care of your health;
+and some time or other we will talk over all these things with more
+pleasure than I have had in seeing them.
+
+Yours ever.
+
+
+_THE CARNIVAL--THE FLORENTINES CIVIL, GOOD-NATURED, AND FOND OF THE
+ENGLISH--A CURIOUS CHALLENGE._
+
+TO RICHARD WEST, ESQ.
+
+FLORENCE, _February_ 27, 1740, N.S.
+
+Well, West, I have found a little unmasqued moment to write to you; but
+for this week past I have been so muffled up in my domino, that I have
+not had the command of my elbows. But what have you been doing all the
+mornings? Could you not write then?--No, then I was masqued too; I have
+done nothing but slip out of my domino into bed, and out of bed into my
+domino. The end of the Carnival is frantic, bacchanalian; all the morn
+one makes parties in masque to the shops and coffee-houses, and all the
+evening to the operas and balls. _Then I have danced, good gods! how
+have I danced!_ The Italians are fond to a degree of our country dances:
+_Cold and raw_ they only know by the tune; _Blowzybella_ is almost
+Italian, and _Buttered peas_ is _Pizelli al buro_. There are but three
+days more; but the two last are to have balls all the morning at the
+fine unfinished palace of the Strozzi; and the Tuesday night a
+masquerade after supper: they sup first, to eat _gras_, and not encroach
+upon Ash-Wednesday. What makes masquerading more agreeable here than in
+England, is the great deference that is showed to the disguised. Here
+they do not catch at those little dirty opportunities of saying any
+ill-natured thing they know of you, do not abuse you because they may,
+or talk gross bawdy to a woman of quality. I found the other day, by a
+play of Etheridge's, that we have had a sort of Carnival even since the
+Reformation; 'tis in _She would if She could_, they talk of going
+a-mumming in Shrove-tide.--
+
+After talking so much of diversions, I fear you will attribute to them
+the fondness I own I contract for Florence; but it has so many other
+charms, that I shall not want excuses for my taste. The freedom of the
+Carnival has given me opportunities to make several acquaintances; and
+if I have not found them refined, learned, polished, like some other
+cities, yet they are civil, good-natured, and fond of the English. Their
+little partiality for themselves, opposed to the violent vanity of the
+French, makes them very amiable in my eyes. I can give you a comical
+instance of their great prejudice about nobility; it happened yesterday.
+While we were at dinner at Mr. Mann's, word was brought by his
+secretary, that a cavalier demanded audience of him upon an affair of
+honour. Gray and I flew behind the curtain of the door. An elderly
+gentleman, whose attire was not certainly correspondent to the greatness
+of his birth, entered, and informed the British minister, that one
+Martin, an English painter, had left a challenge for him at his house,
+for having said Martin was no gentleman. He would by no means have spoke
+of the duel before the transaction of it, but that his honour, his
+blood, his &c. would never permit him to fight with one who was no
+cavalier; which was what he came to inquire of his excellency. We
+laughed loud laughs, but unheard: his fright or his nobility had closed
+his ears. But mark the sequel: the instant he was gone, my very English
+curiosity hurried me out of the gate St. Gallo; 'twas the place and hour
+appointed. We had not been driving about above ten minutes, but out
+popped a little figure, pale but cross, with beard unshaved and hair
+uncombed, a slouched hat, and a considerable red cloak, in which was
+wrapped, under his arm, the fatal sword that was to revenge the highly
+injured Mr. Martin, painter and defendant. I darted my head out of the
+coach, just ready to say, "Your servant, Mr. Martin," and talk about the
+architecture of the triumphal arch that was building there; but he would
+not know me, and walked off. We left him to wait for an hour, to grow
+very cold and very valiant the more it grew past the hour of
+appointment. We were figuring all the poor creature's huddle of
+thoughts, and confused hopes of victory or fame, of his unfinished
+pictures, or his situation upon bouncing into the next world. You will
+think us strange creatures; but 'twas a pleasant sight, as we knew the
+poor painter was safe. I have thought of it since, and am inclined to
+believe that nothing but two English could have been capable of such a
+jaunt. I remember, 'twas reported in London, that the plague was at a
+house in the city, and all the town went to see it.
+
+I have this instant received your letter. Lord! I am glad I thought of
+those parallel passages, since it made you translate them. 'Tis
+excessively near the original; and yet, I don't know, 'tis very easy
+too.--It snows here a little to-night, but it never lies but on the
+mountains. Adieu!
+
+Yours ever.
+
+P.S.--What is the history of the theatres this winter?
+
+
+_HERCULANEUM--SEARCH SHOULD BE MADE FOR OTHER SUBMERGED
+CITIES--QUOTATIONS FROM STATIUS._
+
+TO RICHARD WEST, ESQ.
+
+NAPLES, _June_ 14, 1740, N.S.
+
+Dear West,--One hates writing descriptions that are to be found in every
+book of travels; but we have seen something to-day that I am sure you
+never read of, and perhaps never heard of. Have you ever heard of a
+subterraneous town? a whole Roman town, with all its edifices, remaining
+under ground? Don't fancy the inhabitants buried it there to save it
+from the Goths: they were buried with it themselves; which is a caution
+we are not told that they ever took. You remember in Titus's time there
+were several cities destroyed by an eruption of Vesuvius, attended with
+an earthquake. Well, this was one of them, not very considerable, and
+then called Herculaneum. Above it has since been built Portici, about
+three miles from Naples, where the King has a villa. This underground
+city is perhaps one of the noblest curiosities that ever has been
+discovered. It was found out by chance, about a year and half ago. They
+began digging, they found statues; they dug further, they found more.
+Since that they have made a very considerable progress, and find
+continually. You may walk the compass of a mile; but by the misfortune
+of the modern town being overhead, they are obliged to proceed with
+great caution, lest they destroy both one and t'other. By this occasion
+the path is very narrow, just wide enough and high enough for one man to
+walk upright. They have hollowed, as they found it easiest to work, and
+have carried their streets not exactly where were the ancient ones, but
+sometimes before houses, sometimes through them. You would imagine that
+all the fabrics were crushed together; on the contrary, except some
+columns, they have found all the edifices standing upright in their
+proper situation. There is one inside of a temple quite perfect, with
+the middle arch, two columns, and two pilasters. It is built of brick
+plastered over, and painted with architecture: almost all the insides of
+the houses are in the same manner; and, what is very particular, the
+general ground of all the painting is red. Besides this temple, they
+make out very plainly an amphitheatre: the stairs, of white marble, and
+the seats are very perfect; the inside was painted in the same colour
+with the private houses, and great part cased with white marble. They
+have found among other things some fine statues, some human bones, some
+rice, medals, and a few paintings extremely fine. These latter are
+preferred to all the ancient paintings that have ever been discovered.
+We have not seen them yet, as they are kept in the King's apartment,
+whither all these curiosities are transplanted; and 'tis difficult to
+see them--but we shall. I forgot to tell you, that in several places the
+beams of the houses remain, but burnt to charcoal; so little damaged
+that they retain visibly the grain of the wood, but upon touching
+crumble to ashes. What is remarkable, there are no other marks or
+appearance of fire, but what are visible on these beams.
+
+There might certainly be collected great light from this reservoir of
+antiquities, if a man of learning had the inspection of it; if he
+directed the working, and would make a journal of the discoveries. But I
+believe there is no judicious choice made of directors. There is nothing
+of the kind known in the world; I mean a Roman city entire of that age,
+and that has not been corrupted with modern repairs. Besides
+scrutinising this very carefully, I should be inclined to search for
+the remains of the other towns that were partners with this in the
+general ruin.[1] 'Tis certainly an advantage to the learned world, that
+this has been laid up so long. Most of the discoveries in Rome were made
+in a barbarous age, where they only ransacked the ruins in quest of
+treasure, and had no regard to the form and being of the building; or to
+any circumstances that might give light into its use and history. I
+shall finish this long account with a passage which Gray has observed in
+Statius, and which directly pictures out this latent city:--
+
+    Haec ego Chalcidicis ad te, Marcelle, sonabam
+    Littoribus, fractas ubi Vestius egerit iras,
+    Aemula Trinacriis volvens incendia flammis.
+    Mira fides! credetne virûm ventura propago,
+    Cum segetes iterum, cum jam haec deserta virebunt,
+    Infra urbes populosque premi?
+
+    SYLV. lib. iv. epist. 4.
+
+Adieu, my dear West! and believe me yours ever.
+
+[Footnote 1: It was known from the account of Pliny that other towns had
+been destroyed by the same eruption as Herculaneum, and eight years
+after the date of this letter some fresh excavations led to the
+discovery of Pompeii. Matthews, in his "Diary of an Invalid," describes
+both, and his account explains why Pompeii, though the smaller town,
+presents more attractions to the scholar or the antiquarian. "On our way
+home we explored Herculaneum, which scarcely repays the labour. This
+town is filled up with lava, and with a cement caused by the large
+mixture of water with the shower of earth and ashes which destroyed it;
+and it is choked up as completely as if molten lead had been poured into
+it. Besides, it is forty feet below the surface, and another town is now
+built over it.... Pompeii, on the contrary, was destroyed by a shower of
+cinders in which there was a much less quantity of water. It lay for
+centuries only twelve feet below the surface, and, these cinders being
+easily removed, the town has been again restored to the light of day"
+(vol. i. p. 254).]
+
+
+_DANGER OF MALARIA--ROMAN CATHOLIC RELICS--"ADMIRAL HOSIER'S
+GHOST"--CONTEST FOR THE POPEDOM._
+
+TO THE HON. H.S. CONWAY.
+
+RÈ DI COFANO, vulg. RADICOFANI,
+
+_July_ 5, 1740, N.S.
+
+You will wonder, my dear Hal, to find me on the road from Rome: why,
+intend I did to stay for a new popedom, but the old eminences are cross
+and obstinate, and will not choose one, the Holy Ghost does not know
+when. There is a horrid thing called the malaria, that comes to Rome
+every summer, and kills one, and I did not care for being killed so far
+from Christian burial. We have been jolted to death; my servants let us
+come without springs to the chaise, and we are wore threadbare: to add
+to our disasters, I have sprained my ancle, and have brought it along,
+laid upon a little box of baubles that I have bought for presents in
+England. Perhaps I may pick you out some little trifle there, but don't
+depend upon it; you are a disagreeable creature, and may be I shall not
+care for you. Though I am so tired in this devil of a place, yet I have
+taken it into my head, that it is like Hamilton's Bawn,[1] and I must
+write to you. 'Tis the top of a black barren mountain, a vile little
+town at the foot of an old citadel: yet this, know you, was the
+residence of one of the three kings that went to Christ's birthday; his
+name was Alabaster, Abarasser, or some such thing; the other two were
+kings, one of the East, the other of Cologn. 'Tis this of Cofano, who
+was represented in an ancient painting, found in the Palatine Mount, now
+in the possession of Dr. Mead; he was crowned by Augustus. Well, but
+about writing--what do you think I write with? Nay, with a pen; there
+was never a one to be found in the whole circumference _but one_, and
+that was in the possession of the governor, and had been used time out
+of mind to write the parole with: I was forced to send to borrow it. It
+was sent me under the conduct of a serjeant and two Swiss, with desire
+to return it when I should have done with it. 'Tis a curiosity, and
+worthy to be laid up with the relics which we have just been seeing in a
+small hovel of Capucins on the side of the hill, and which were all
+brought by his Majesty from Jerusalem. Among other things of great
+sanctity there is a set of gnashing of teeth, the grinders very entire;
+a bit of the worm that never dies, preserved in spirits; a crow of St.
+Peter's cock, very useful against Easter; the crisping and curling,
+frizzling and frowncing of Mary Magdalen, which she cut off on growing
+devout. The good man that showed us all these commodities was got into
+such a train of calling them the blessed this, and the blessed that,
+that at last he showed us a bit of the blessed fig-tree that Christ
+cursed.
+
+[Footnote 1: Hamilton's Bawn is an old building near Richhill, in the
+County of Armagh, the subject of one of Swift's burlesque poems.]
+
+
+FLORENCE, _July_ 9.
+
+My dear Harry,--We are come hither, and I have received another letter
+from you with "Hosier's Ghost."[1] Your last put me in pain for you,
+when you talked of going to Ireland; but now I find your brother and
+sister go with you, I am not much concerned. Should I be? You have but
+to say, for my feelings are extremely at your service to dispose as you
+please. Let us see: you are to come back to stand for some place; that
+will be about April. 'Tis a sort of thing I should do, too; and then we
+should see one another, and that would be charming: but it is a sort of
+thing I have no mind to do; and then we shall not see one another,
+unless you would come hither--but that you cannot do: nay, I would not
+have you, for then I shall be gone.--So, there are many _ifs_ that just
+signify nothing at all. Return I must sooner than I shall like. I am
+happy here to a degree. I'll tell you my situation. I am lodged with Mr.
+Mann, the best of creatures. I have a terreno all to myself, with an
+open gallery on the Arno, where I am now writing to you. Over against me
+is the famous Gallery: and, on either hand, two fair bridges. Is not
+this charming and cool? The air is so serene, and so secure, that one
+sleeps with all the windows and doors thrown open to the river, and only
+covered with a slight gauze to keep away the gnats. Lady Pomfret has a
+charming conversation once a week. She has taken a vast palace and a
+vast garden, which is vastly commode, especially to the cicisbeo-part of
+mankind, who have free indulgence to wander in pairs about the arbours.
+You know her daughters: Lady Sophia is still, nay she must be, the
+beauty she was: Lady Charlotte is much improved, and is the cleverest
+girl in the world; speaks the purest Tuscan, like any Florentine. The
+Princess Craon has a constant pharaoh and supper every night, where one
+is quite at one's ease. I am going into the country with her and the
+prince for a little while, to a villa of the Great Duke's. The people
+are good-humoured here and easy; and what makes me pleased with them,
+they are pleased with me. One loves to find people care for one, when
+they can have no view in it.
+
+[Footnote 1: "Admiral Hosier's Ghost" is the title of a ballad by Glover
+on the death of Admiral Hosier, a distinguished admiral, who had been
+sent with a squadron to blockade the Spanish treasure-ships in Porto
+Bello, but was prohibited from attacking them in the harbour. He died in
+1727, according to the account that the poet adopted, of mortification
+at the inaction to which his orders compelled him; but according to
+another statement, more trustworthy if less poetical, of fever.]
+
+You see how glad I am to have reasons for not returning; I wish I had no
+better.
+
+As to "Hosier's Ghost," I think it very easy, and consequently pretty;
+but, from the ease, should never have guessed it Glover's. I delight in
+your, "the patriots cry it up, and the courtiers cry it down, and the
+hawkers cry it up and down," and your laconic history of the King and
+Sir Robert, on going to Hanover, and turning out the Duke of Argyle. The
+epigram, too, you sent me on the same occasion is charming.
+
+Unless I sent you back news that you and others send me, I can send you
+none. I have left the Conclave, which is the only stirring thing in this
+part of the world, except the child that the Queen of Naples is to be
+delivered of in August. There is no likelihood the Conclave will end,
+unless the messages take effect which 'tis said the Imperial and French
+ministers have sent to their respective courts for leave to quit the
+Corsini for the Albani faction: otherwise there will never be a pope.
+Corsini has lost the only one he could have ventured to make pope, and
+him he designed; 'twas Cenci, a relation of the Corsini's mistress. The
+last morning Corsini made him rise, stuffed a dish of chocolate down his
+throat, and would carry him to the scrutiny. The poor old creature went,
+came back, and died. I am sorry to have lost the sight of the Pope's
+coronation, but I might have staid for seeing it till I had been old
+enough to be pope myself.[1]
+
+[Footnote 1: The contest was caused by the death of Clement XII. The
+successful candidate was Benedict XIV.]
+
+Harry, what luck the Chancellor has! first, indeed, to be in himself so
+great a man; but then in accident: he is made Chief Justice and peer,
+when Talbot is made Chancellor and peer. Talbot dies in a twelvemonth,
+and leaves him the seals at an age when others are scarce made
+Solicitors:--then marries his son into one of the first families of
+Britain, obtains a patent for a Marquisate and eight thousand pounds a
+year after the Duke of Kent's death: the Duke dies in a fortnight, and
+leaves them all! People talk of Fortune's wheel, that is always
+rolling: troth, my Lord Hardwicke has overtaken her wheel, and rolled
+away with it.... Yours ever.
+
+
+_A FLORENTINE WEDDING--ADDISON'S DESCRIPTIONS ARE BORROWED FROM BOOKS--A
+SONG OF BONDELMONTI'S, WITH A LATIN VERSION BY GRAY, AND AN ENGLISH ONE
+BY THE WRITER._
+
+TO RICHARD WEST, ESQ.
+
+FLORENCE, _Oct._ 2, 1740, N.S.
+
+Dear West,--T'other night as we (you know who _we_ are) were walking on
+the charming bridge, just before going to a wedding assembly, we said,
+"Lord, I wish, just as we are got into the room, they would call us out,
+and say, West is arrived! We would make him dress instantly, and carry
+him back to the entertainment. How he would stare and wonder at a
+thousand things, that no longer strike us as odd!" Would not you? One
+agreed that you should have come directly by sea from Dover, and be set
+down at Leghorn, without setting foot in any other foreign town, and so
+land at _Us_, in all your first full amaze; for you are to know, that
+astonishment rubs off violently; we did not cry out Lord! half so much
+at Rome as at Calais, which to this hour I look upon as one of the most
+surprising cities in the universe. My dear child, what if you were to
+take this little sea-jaunt? One would recommend Sir John Norris's convoy
+to you, but one should be laughed at now for supposing that he is ever
+to sail beyond Torbay.[1] The Italians take Torbay for an English town
+in the hands of the Spaniards, after the fashion of Gibraltar, and
+imagine 'tis a wonderful strong place, by our fleet's having retired
+from before it so often, and so often returned.
+
+[Footnote 1: Sir John Norris was one of the most gallant and skilful
+seamen of his time; but an expedition in which he had had the command
+had lately proved fruitless. He had been instructed to cruise about the
+Bay of Biscay, in the hope of intercepting some of the Spanish
+treasure-ships; but the weather had been so uninterruptedly stormy that
+he had been compelled to return to port without having even seen an
+enemy. The following lines were addressed to him upon this occasion:
+
+    Homeward, oh! bend thy course; the seas are rough;
+    To the Land's End who sails, has sailed enough.]
+
+We went to this wedding that I told you of; 'twas a charming feast: a
+large palace finely illuminated; there were all the beauties, all the
+jewels, and all the sugar-plums of Florence. Servants loaded with great
+chargers full of comfits heap the tables with them, the women fall on
+with both hands, and stuff their pockets and every creek and corner
+about them. You would be as much amazed at us as at anything you saw:
+instead of being deep in the liberal arts, and being in the Gallery
+every morning, as I thought of course to be sure I would be, we are in
+all the idleness and amusements of the town. For me, I am grown so lazy,
+and so tired of seeing sights, that, though I have been at Florence six
+months, I have not seen Leghorn, Pisa, Lucca, or Pistoia; nay, not so
+much as one of the Great Duke's villas. I have contracted so great an
+aversion to inns and post-chaises, and have so absolutely lost all
+curiosity, that, except the towns in the straight road to Great Britain,
+I shall scarce see a jot more of a foreign land; and trust me, when I
+return, I will not visit Welsh mountains, like Mr. Williams. After Mount
+Cenis, the Boccheto, the Giogo, Radicofani, and the Appian Way, one has
+mighty little hunger after travelling. I shall be mighty apt to set up
+my staff at Hyde-park-corner: the alehouseman there at Hercules's
+Pillars[1] was certainly returned from his travels into foreign parts.
+
+[Footnote 1: The sign of the Hercules' Pillars remained in Piccadilly
+till very lately. It was situated on part of the ground now [1798]
+occupied by the houses of Mr. Drummond Smith and his brother.--MISS
+BERRY. That is, on the space between Hamilton Place and Apsley House. It
+was the inn mentioned in Fielding's "Tom Jones," and was notorious as a
+favourite resort of the Marquis of Granby.]
+
+Now I'll answer your questions.
+
+I have made no discoveries in ancient or modern arts. Mr. Addison
+travelled through the poets, and not through Italy; for all his ideas
+are borrowed from the descriptions, and not from the reality. He saw
+places as they were, not as they are.[1] I am very well acquainted with
+Doctor Cocchi;[2] he is a good sort of man, rather than a great man; he
+is a plain honest creature, with quiet knowledge, but I dare say all the
+English have told you, he has a very particular understanding: I really
+don't believe they meant to impose on you, for they thought so. As to
+Bondelmonti, he is much less; he is a low mimic; the brightest cast of
+his parts attains to the composition of a sonnet: he talks irreligion
+with English boys, sentiment with my sister [Lady Walpole], and bad
+French with any one that will hear him. I will transcribe you a little
+song that he made t'other day; 'tis pretty enough; Gray turned it into
+Latin, and I into English; you will honour him highly by putting it into
+French, and Ashton into Greek. Here 'tis.
+
+    Spesso Amor sotto la forma
+    D'amistà ride, e s'asconde;
+    Poi si mischia, e si confonde
+    Con lo sdegno e col rancor.
+
+    In pietade ei si trasforma,
+    Par trastullo e par dispetto,
+    Ma nel suo diverso aspetto,
+    Sempre egli è l'istesso Amor.
+
+    Risit amicitiae interdùm velatus amictu,
+      Et benè compositâ veste fefeliit Amor:
+    Mox irae assumpsit cultus faciemque minantem,
+      Inque odium versus, versus et in lacrymas:
+    Sudentem fuge, nec lacrymanti aut crede furenti;
+      Idem est dissimili semper in ore Deus.
+
+    Love often in the comely mien
+    Of friendship fancies to be seen;
+    Soon again he shifts his dress,
+    And wears disdain and rancour's face.
+
+    To gentle pity then he changes;
+    Thro' wantonness, thro' piques he ranges;
+    But in whatever shape he move,
+    He's still himself, and still is Love.
+
+[Footnote 1: Compare Letter to Zouch, March 20th, 1762. Fielding says
+("Voyage to Lisbon") that Addison, in his "Travels," is to be looked
+upon rather as a commentator on the classics, than as a writer of
+travels.]
+
+[Footnote 2: Antonio Cocchi, a learned physician and author at Florence,
+a particular friend of Mr. Mann.--WALPOLE. He died in 1758.]
+
+See how we trifle! but one can't pass one's youth too amusingly; for one
+must grow old, and that in England; two most serious circumstances
+either of which makes people grey in the twinkling of a bed-staff; for
+know you, there is not a country upon earth where there are so many old
+fools and so few young ones.
+
+Now I proceed with my answers.
+
+I made but small collections, and have only bought some bronzes and
+medals, a few busts, and two or three pictures; one of my busts is to be
+mentioned; 'tis the famous Vespasian in touchstone, reckoned the best in
+Rome, except the Caracalla of the Farnese: I gave but twenty-two pounds
+for it at Cardinal Ottoboni's sale. One of my medals is as great a
+curiosity: 'tis of Alexander Severus, with the amphitheatre in brass;
+this reverse is extant on medals of his, but mine is a _medagliuncino_,
+or small medallion, and the only one with this reverse known in the
+world: 'twas found by a peasant while I was in Rome, and sold by him for
+sixpence to an antiquarian, to whom I paid for it seven guineas and a
+half; but to virtuosi 'tis worth any sum.
+
+As to Tartini's[1] musical compositions, ask Gray; I know but little in
+music.
+
+[Footnote 1: Giuseppe Tartini, of Padua, the celebrated composer of the
+Devil's Sonata: in which he attempted to reproduce an air which he
+dreamt that Satan had played to him while he was asleep; but, in his own
+opinion, he failed so entirely, that he declared that if he had any
+other means of livelihood he would break his violin and give up music.]
+
+But for the Academy, I am not of it, but frequently in company with it:
+'tis all disjointed. Madame ----, who, though a learned lady, has not
+lost her modesty and character, is extremely scandalised with the other
+two dames, especially with Moll Worthless [Lady Mary Wortley], who knows
+no bounds. She is at rivalry with Lady W[alpole] for a certain Mr. ----,
+whom perhaps you knew at Oxford. If you did not, I'll tell you: he is a
+grave young man by temper, and a rich one by constitution; a shallow
+creature by nature, but a wit by the grace of our women here, whom he
+deals with as of old with the Oxford toasts. He fell into sentiments
+with my Lady W[alpole] and was happy to catch her at Platonic love: but
+as she seldom stops there, the poor man will be frightened out of his
+senses when she shall break the matter to him; for he never dreamt that
+her purposes were so naught. Lady Mary is so far gone, that to get him
+from the mouth of her antagonist she literally took him out to dance
+country dances last night at a formal ball, where there was no measure
+kept in laughing at her old, foul, tawdry, painted, plastered personage.
+She played at pharaoh two or three times at Princess Craon's, where she
+cheats horse and foot. She is really entertaining: I have been reading
+her works, which she lends out in manuscript, but they are too womanish:
+I like few of her performances. I forgot to tell you a good answer of
+Lady Pomfret to Mr. ----, who asked her if she did not approve Platonic
+love? "Lord, sir," says she, "I am sure any one that knows me never
+heard that I had any love but one, and there sit two proofs of it,"
+pointing to her two daughters.
+
+So I have given you a sketch of our employments, and answered your
+questions, and will with pleasure as many more as you have about you.
+
+Adieu! Was ever such a long letter? But 'tis nothing to what I shall
+have to say to you. I shall scold you for never telling us any news,
+public or private, no deaths, marriages, or mishaps; no account of new
+books: Oh, you are abominable! I could find it in my heart to hate you,
+if I did not love you so well; but we will quarrel now, that we may be
+the better friends when we meet: there is no danger of that, is there?
+Good-night, whether friend or foe! I am most sincerely
+
+Yours.
+
+
+_DEBATE ON PULTENEY'S MOTION FOR A COMMITTEE ON PAPERS RELATING TO THE
+WAR--SPEECHES OF PULTENEY, PITT, SIR R. WALPOLE, SIR W. GEORGE,
+ETC.--SMALLNESS OF THE MINISTERIAL MAJORITY._
+
+TO SIR HORACE MANN.[1]
+
+[Footnote 1: Sir H. Mann was an early friend of Walpole; and was
+Minister at Florence from 1740-1786.]
+
+[Illustration: SIR HORACE MANN.]
+
+_Friday, Jan._ 22, 1742.
+
+Don't wonder that I missed writing to you yesterday, my constant day:
+you will pity me when you hear that I was shut up in the House of
+Commons till one in the morning. I came away more dead than alive, and
+was forced to leave Sir R. at supper with my brothers: he was all alive
+and in spirits.[1] He says he is younger than me, and indeed I think
+so, in spite of his forty years more. My head aches to-night, but we
+rose early; and if I don't write to-night, when shall I find a moment to
+spare? Now you want to know what we did last night; stay, I will tell
+you presently in its place: it was well, and of infinite consequence--so
+far I tell you now.
+
+[Footnote 1: Sir Robert Wilmot also, in a letter to the Duke of
+Devonshire, written on the 12th, says, "Sir Robert was to-day observed
+to be more naturally gay and full of spirits than he has been for some
+time past."]
+
+Our recess finished last Monday, and never at school did I enjoy
+holidays so much--but, _les voilà finis jusqu'au printems_! Tuesday (for
+you see I write you an absolute journal) we sat on a Scotch election, a
+double return; their man was Hume Campbell[1], Lord Marchmont's brother,
+lately made solicitor to the Prince, for being as troublesome, as
+violent, and almost as able as his brother. They made a great point of
+it, and gained so many of our votes, that at ten at night we were forced
+to give it up without dividing. Sandys, who loves persecution, _even
+unto death_, moved to punish the sheriff; and as we dared not divide,
+they ordered him into custody, where by this time, I suppose, Sandys has
+eaten him.
+
+[Footnote 1: Hume Campbell, twin brother of Hugh, third Earl of
+Marchmont, the friend of Pope, and one of his executors. They were sons
+of Alexander, the second earl, who had quarrelled with Sir Robert
+Walpole at the time of the excise scheme in 1733. Sir Robert, in
+consequence, prevented him from being re-elected one of the sixteen
+representative Scotch peers in 1734; in requital for which, the old
+earl's two sons became the bitterest opponents of the minister. They
+were both men of considerable talents; extremely similar in their
+characters and dispositions, and so much so in their outward appearance,
+that it was very difficult to know them apart.]
+
+On Wednesday Sir Robert Godschall, the Lord Mayor, presented the
+Merchant's petition, signed by three hundred of them, and drawn up by
+_Leonidas_ Glover.[1] This is to be heard next Wednesday. This
+gold-chain came into parliament, cried up for his parts, but proves so
+dull, one would think he chewed opium. Earle says, "I have heard an
+oyster speak as well twenty times."...
+
+[Footnote 1: Mr. Glover, a London merchant, was the author of a poem
+entitled "Leonidas"; of a tragedy, "Boadicea"; and of the ode on
+"Admiral Hosier's Ghost," which is mentioned in the letter to Conway at
+p. 23.]
+
+On this Thursday, of which I was telling you, at three o'clock, Mr.
+Pulteney rose up, and moved for a secret committee of twenty-one. This
+inquisition, this council of ten, was to sit and examine whatever
+persons and papers they should please, and to meet when and where they
+pleased. He protested much on its not being intended against _any
+person_, but merely to give the King advice, and on this foot they
+fought it till ten at night, when Lord Perceval blundered out what they
+had been cloaking with so much art, and declared that he should vote for
+it as a committee of accusation. Sir Robert immediately rose, and
+protested that he should not have spoken, but for what he had heard
+last; but that now, he must take it to himself. He pourtrayed the malice
+of the Opposition, who, for twenty years, had not been able to touch
+him, and were now reduced to this infamous shift. He defied them to
+accuse him, and only desired that if they should, it might be in an open
+and fair manner; desired no favour, but to be acquainted with his
+accusation. He spoke of Mr. Dodington, who had called his administration
+infamous, as of a person of great self-mortification, who, for sixteen
+years, had condescended to bear part of the odium. For Mr. Pulteney, who
+had just spoken a second time, Sir R. said, he had begun the debate with
+great calmness, but give him his due, he had made amends for it in the
+end. In short, never was innocence so triumphant!
+
+There were several glorious speeches on both sides; Mr. Pulteney's two,
+W. Pitt's [Chatham's] and George Grenville's, Sir Robert's, Sir W.
+Yonge's, Harry Fox's [Lord Holland's], Mr. Chute's, and the
+Attorney-General's [Sir Dudley Ryder]. My friend Coke [Lovel], for the
+first time, spoke vastly well, and mentioned how great Sir Robert's
+character is abroad. Sir Francis Dashwood replied that he had found
+quite the reverse from Mr. Coke, and that foreigners always spoke with
+contempt of the Chevalier de Walpole. This was going too far, and he was
+called to order, but got off well enough, by saying, that he knew it was
+contrary to rule to name any member, but that he only mentioned it as
+spoken by an impertinent Frenchman.
+
+But of all speeches, none ever was so full of wit as Mr. Pulteney's
+last. He said, "I have heard this committee represented as a most
+dreadful spectre; it has been likened to all terrible things; it has
+been likened to the King; to the inquisition; it will be a committee of
+safety; it is a committee of danger; I don't know what it is to be! One
+gentleman, I think, called it _a cloud_! (this was the Attorney) _a
+cloud_! I remember Hamlet takes Lord Polonius by the hand shows him _a
+cloud_, and then asks him if he does not think it is like a whale."
+Well, in short, at eleven at night we divided, and threw out this famous
+committee by 253 to 250, the greatest number that ever was in the house,
+and the greatest number that ever _lost_ a question.[1]
+
+[Footnote 1: Lord Stanhope ("History of England," i. 24) gives a long
+account of this debate, mainly derived from this letter.]
+
+It was a most shocking sight to see the sick and dead brought in on both
+sides! Men on crutches, and Sir William Gordon from his bed, with a
+blister on his head, and flannel hanging out from under his wig. I could
+scarce pity him for his ingratitude. The day before the Westminster
+petition, Sir Charles Wager gave his son a ship, and the next day the
+father came down and voted against him. The son has since been cast
+away; but they concealed it from the father, that he might not absent
+himself. However, as we have our good-natured men too on our side, one
+of his own countrymen went and told him of it in the House. The old man,
+who looked like Lazarus at his resuscitation, bore it with great
+resolution, and said, he knew _why_ he was told of it, but when he
+thought his country in danger, he would not go away. As he is so near
+death, that it is indifferent to him whether he died two thousand years
+ago or to-morrow, it is unlucky for him not to have lived when such
+insensibility would have been a Roman virtue.
+
+There are no arts, no menaces, which the Opposition do not practise.
+They have threatened one gentleman to have a reversion cut off from his
+son, unless he will vote with them. To Totness there came a letter to
+the mayor from the Prince, and signed by two of his lords, to recommend
+a candidate in opposition to the Solicitor-General [Strange]. The mayor
+sent the letter to Sir Robert. They have turned the Scotch to the best
+account. There is a young Oswald, who had engaged to Sir R. but has
+voted against us. Sir R. sent a friend to reproach him; the moment the
+gentleman who had engaged for him came into the room, Oswald said, "You
+had like to have led me into a fine error! did you not tell me that Sir
+R. would have the majority?"
+
+When the debate was over, Mr. Pulteney owned that he had never heard so
+fine a debate on our side; and said to Sir Robert, "Well, nobody can do
+what you can!" "Yes," replied Sir R., "Yonge did better." Mr. Pulteney
+answered, "It was fine, but not of that weight with what you said." They
+all allow it; and now their plan is to persuade Sir Robert to retire
+with honour. All that evening there was a report about the town, that he
+and my uncle [_old_ Horace] were to be sent to the Tower, and people
+hired windows in the City to see them pass by--but for this time I
+believe we shall not exhibit so historical a parade....
+
+Sir Thomas Robinson [Long] is at last named to the government of
+Barbadoes; he has long prevented its being asked for, by declaring that
+he had the promise of it. Luckily for him, Lord Lincoln liked his house,
+and procured him this government on condition of hiring it.
+
+I have mentioned Lord Perceval's speeches; he has a set who has a
+rostrum at his house, and harangue there. A gentleman who came thither
+one evening was refused, but insisting that he was engaged to come, "Oh,
+Sir," said the porter, "what are you one of those who play at members of
+parliament?"...
+
+
+_RANELAGH GARDENS OPENED--GARRICK, "A WINE-MERCHANT TURNED
+PLAYER"--DEFEAT OF THE INDEMNITY BILL._
+
+TO SIR HORACE MANN.
+
+DOWNING STREET, _May_ 26, 1742.
+
+To-day calls itself May the 26th, as you perceive by the date; but I am
+writing to you by the fire-side, instead of going to Vauxhall. If we
+have one warm day in seven, "we bless our stars, and think it luxury."
+And yet we have as much water-works and fresco diversions, as if we lay
+ten degrees nearer warmth. Two nights ago Ranelagh-gardens were opened
+at Chelsea; the Prince, Princess, Duke, much nobility, and much mob
+besides, were there. There is a vast amphitheatre, finely gilt, painted,
+and illuminated, into which everybody that loves eating, drinking,
+staring, or crowding, is admitted for twelvepence. The building and
+disposition of the garden cost sixteen thousand pounds. Twice a-week
+there are to be Ridottos, at guinea-tickets, for which you are to have a
+supper and music. I was there last night, but did not find the joy of
+it. Vauxhall is a little better; for the garden is pleasanter, and one
+goes by water. Our operas are almost over; there were but
+three-and-forty people last night in the pit and boxes. There is a
+little simple farce at Drury Lane, called "Miss Lucy in Town," in which
+Mrs. Clive mimics the Muscovita admirably, and Beard, Amorevoli
+tolerably. But all the run is now after Garrick, a wine-merchant, who is
+turned player, at Goodman's fields. He plays all parts, and is a very
+good mimic. His acting I have seen, and may say to you, who will not
+tell it again here, I see nothing wonderful in it; but it is heresy to
+say so: the Duke of Argyll says, he is superior to Betterton. Now I talk
+of players, tell Mr. Chute, that his friend Bracegirdle breakfasted with
+me this morning. As she went out, and wanted her clogs, she turned to
+me, and said, "I remember at the playhouse, they used to call Mrs.
+Oldfield's chair! Mrs. Barry's clogs! and Mrs. Bracegirdle's pattens!"
+
+I did, indeed, design the letter of this post for Mr. Chute; but I have
+received two such charming long ones from you of the 15th and 20th of
+May (N.S.), that I must answer them, and beg him to excuse me till
+another post; so must the Prince [Craon], Princess, the Grifona, and
+Countess Galli. For the Princess's letter, I am not sure I shall answer
+it so soon, for hitherto I have not been able to read above every third
+word; however, you may thank her as much as if I understood it all. I am
+very happy that _mes bagatelles_ (for I still insist they were so)
+pleased. You, my dear child, are very good to be pleased with the
+snuff-box. I am much obliged to the superior _lumières_ of old Sarasin
+about the Indian ink: if she meant the black, I am sorry to say I had it
+into the bargain with the rest of the Japan: for coloured, it is only a
+curiosity, because it has seldom been brought over. I remember Sir Hans
+Sloane was the first who ever had any of it, and would on no account
+give my mother the least morsel of it. She afterwards got a good deal of
+it from China; and since that, more has come over; but it is even less
+valuable than the other, for we never could tell how to use it; however,
+let it make its figure.
+
+I am sure you hate me all this time, for chatting about so many trifles,
+and telling you no politics. I own to you, I am so wearied, so worn with
+them, that I scarce know how to turn my hand to them; but you shall know
+all I know. I told you of the meeting at the Fountain tavern: Pulteney
+had promised to be there, but was not; nor Carteret. As the Lords had
+put off the debate on the Indemnity Bill,[1] nothing material passed;
+but the meeting was very Jacobite. Yesterday the bill came on, and Lord
+Carteret took the lead against it, and about seven in the evening it
+was flung out by almost two to one, 92 to 47, and 17 proxies to 10.
+To-day we had a motion by the new Lord Hillsborough (for the father is
+just dead), and seconded by Lord Barrington, to examine the Lords'
+votes, to see what was become of the bill; this is the form. The
+Chancellor of the Exchequer, and all the new ministry, were with us
+against it; but they carried it, 164 to 159. It is to be reported
+to-morrow, and as we have notice, we may possibly throw it out; else
+they will hurry on to a breach with the Lords. Pulteney was not in the
+House: he was riding the other day, and met the King's coach;
+endeavouring to turn out of the way, his horse started, flung him, and
+fell upon him: he is much bruised; but not at all dangerously. On this
+occasion, there was an epigram fixed to a list, which I will explain to
+you afterwards: it is not known who wrote it, but it was addressed to
+him:
+
+    Thy horse does things by halves, like thee:
+      Thou, with irresolution,
+    Hurt'st friend and foe, thyself and me,
+      The King and Constitution.
+
+[Footnote 1: A previous letter describes this as a Bill "to indemnify
+all persons who should accuse themselves of any crime, provided they
+accuse Lord Orford [Sir R.W.]." It was carried in the House of Commons
+by 251 to 228, but, as this letter mentions, was thrown out by the Lords
+by 109 to 57. Lord Stanhope (c. 24) describes it as "a Bill which broke
+through the settled forms and safeguards of law, to strike at one
+obnoxious head."]
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I must tell you an ingenuity of Lord Raymond, an epitaph on the
+Indemnifying Bill--I believe you would guess the author:--
+
+    Interr'd beneath this marble stone doth lie
+         The Bill of Indemnity;
+    To show the good for which it was design'd,
+         It died itself to save mankind.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There has lately been published one of the most impudent things that
+ever was printed; it is called "The Irish Register," and is a list of
+all the unmarried women of any fashion in England, ranked in order,
+duchesses-dowager, ladies, widows, misses, &c., with their names at
+length, for the benefit of Irish fortune-hunters, or as it is said, for
+the incorporating and manufacturing of British commodities. Miss Edwards
+is the only one printed with a dash, because they have placed her among
+the widows. I will send you this, "Miss Lucy in Town," and the
+magazines, by the first opportunity, as I should the other things, but
+your brother tells me you have had them by another hand. I received the
+cedrati, for which I have already thanked you: but I have been so much
+thanked by several people to whom I gave some, that I can very well
+afford to thank you again....
+
+P.S.--I unseal my letter to tell you what a vast and, probably, final
+victory we have gained to-day. They moved, that the Lords flinging out
+the Bill of Indemnity was an obstruction of justice, and might prove
+fatal to the liberties of this country. We have sat till this moment,
+seven o'clock, and have rejected this motion by 245 to 193. The call of
+the House, which they have kept off from fortnight to fortnight, to keep
+people in town, was appointed for to-day. The moment the division was
+over, Sir John Cotton rose and said, "As I think the inquiry is at an
+end, you may do what you will with the call." We have put it off for two
+months. There's a noble postscript!
+
+
+_DEBATE ON DISBANDING THE HANOVERIAN TROOPS--FIRST SPEECH OF MURRAY
+(AFTERWARDS EARL OF MANSFIELD)--BON MOT OF LORD CHESTERFIELD._
+
+TO SIR HORACE MANN.
+
+ARLINGTON STREET, _Dec._ 9, 1742.
+
+I shall have quite a partiality for the post of Holland; it brought me
+two letters last week, and two more yesterday, of November 20th and
+27th; but I find you have your perpetual headaches--how can you say that
+you shall tire me with talking of them? you may make me suffer by your
+pains, but I will hear and insist upon your always telling me of your
+health. Do you think I only correspond with you to know the posture of
+the Spaniards or the _épuisements_ of the Princess! I am anxious, too,
+to know how poor Mr. Whithed does, and Mr. Chute's gout. I shall look
+upon our sea-captains with as much horror as the King of Naples can, if
+they bring gouts, fits, and headaches.
+
+You will have had a letter from me by this time, to give up sending the
+Dominichin by a man-of-war, and to propose its coming in a Dutch ship. I
+believe that will be safe.
+
+We have had another great day in the House on the army in Flanders,
+which the Opposition were for disbanding; but we carried it by a hundred
+and twenty. Murray spoke for the first time, with the greatest applause;
+Pitt answered him with all his force and art of language, but on an
+ill-founded argument. In all appearances, they will be great rivals.
+Shippen was in great rage at Murray's apostacy; if anything can really
+change his principles, possibly this competition may. To-morrow we shall
+have a tougher battle on the sixteen thousand Hanoverians. _Hanover_ is
+the word given out for this winter: there is a most bold pamphlet come
+out, said to be Lord Marchmont's, which affirms that in every treaty
+made since the accession of this family, England has been sacrificed to
+the interests of Hanover, and consequently insinuates the
+incompatibility of the two. Lord Chesterfield says "that if we have a
+mind effectually to prevent the Pretender from ever obtaining this
+crown, we should make him Elector of Hanover, for the people of England
+will never fetch another king from thence."
+
+Adieu! my dear child. I am sensible that I write you short letters, but
+I write you all I know. I don't know how it is, but _the wonderful_
+seems worn out. In this our day, we have no rabbit-women--no
+elopements--no epic poems, finer than Milton's--no contest about
+Harlequins and Polly Peachems. Jansen[1] has won no more estates, and
+the Duchess of Queensberry has grown as tame as her neighbours. Whist
+has spread an universal opium over the whole nation; it makes courtiers
+and patriots sit down to the same pack of cards. The only thing
+extraordinary, and which yet did not seem to surprise anybody, was the
+Barbarina's being attacked by four men masqued, the other night, as she
+came out of the Opera House, who would have forced her away; but she
+screamed, and the guard came. Nobody knows who set them on, and I
+believe nobody inquired.
+
+[Footnote 1: H. Jansen, a celebrated gamester, who cheated the Duke of
+Bedford of an immense sum: Pope hints at that affair in this line,
+
+    Or when a duke to Jansen punts at White's.]
+
+The Austrians in Flanders have separated from our troops a little out of
+humour, because it was impracticable for them to march without any
+preparatory provision for their reception. They will probably march in
+two months, if no peace prevents it. Adieu!
+
+
+_KING THEODORE--HANDEL INTRODUCES ORATORIOS._
+
+TO SIR HORACE MANN.
+
+ARLINGTON STREET, _Feb._ 24, 1743.
+
+I write to you in the greatest hurry in the world, but write I will.
+Besides, I must wish you joy: you are warriors; nay, conquerors[1]; two
+things quite novel in this war, for hitherto it has been armies without
+fighting, and deaths without killing. We talk of this battle as of a
+comet; "Have you heard of _the_ battle?" it is so strange a thing, that
+numbers imagine you may go and see it at Charing Cross. Indeed, our
+officers, who are going to Flanders, don't quite like it; they are
+afraid it should grow the fashion to fight, and that a pair of colours
+should no longer be a sinecure. I am quite unhappy about poor Mr. Chute:
+besides, it is cruel to find that abstinence is not a drug. If
+mortification ever ceases to be a medicine, or virtue to be a passport
+to carnivals in the other world, who will be a self-tormentor any
+longer--not, my child, that I am one; but, tell me, is he quite
+recovered?
+
+[Footnote 1: This alludes to an engagement, which took place on the 8th
+of February, near Bologna, between the Spaniards under M. de Gages, and
+the Austrians under General Traun, in which the latter were successful.]
+
+I thank you for King Theodore's declaration,[1] and wish him success
+with all my soul. I hate the Genoese; they make a commonwealth the most
+devilish of all tyrannies!
+
+[Footnote 1: With regard to Corsica, of which he had declared himself
+king. By this declaration, which was dated January 30, Theodore
+recalled, under pain of confiscation of their estates, all the Corsicans
+in foreign service, except that of the Queen of Hungary, and the Grand
+Duke of Tuscany. (See vol. ii. p. 74.)]
+
+We have every now and then motions for disbanding Hessians and
+Hanoverians,[1] alias mercenaries; but they come to nothing. To-day the
+party have declared that they have done for this session; so you will
+hear little more but of fine equipages for Flanders: our troops are
+actually marched, and the officers begin to follow them--I hope they
+know whither! You know in the last war in Spain, Lord Peterborough[2]
+rode galloping about to inquire for his army.
+
+[Footnote 1: The employment of Hessian and Hanoverian troops in this war
+was not only the subject of frequent complaints in Parliament, but was
+also the cause of very general dissatisfaction in the country, where it
+was commonly regarded as one of the numerous instances in which the
+Ministers sacrificed the interests of England from an unworthy desire to
+maintain their places by humouring the king's preference for his native
+land.]
+
+[Footnote 2: Lord Peterborough is celebrated by Pope as
+
+            taming the genius of the arid plain
+    Almost as quickly as he conquered Spain:
+
+not that he did conquer Spain; but by an extraordinary combination of
+hardihood and skill he took Barcelona, which had defied all previous
+attacks; and, in the confidence inspired by this important success, he
+offered Archduke Charles to escort him to Madrid, so that he might be
+crowned King of Spain in that capital. But the Archduke, under the
+advice of some of his own countrymen, who were jealous of his influence,
+rejected the plan.]
+
+But to come to more _real_ contests; Handel has set up an Oratorio
+against the Operas, and succeeds. He has hired all the goddesses from
+farces and the singers of _Roast Beef_[1] from between the acts at both
+theatres, with a man with one note in his voice, and a girl without ever
+an one; and so they sing, and make brave hallelujahs; and the good
+company encore the recitative, if it happens to have any cadence like
+what they call a tune. I was much diverted the other night at the opera;
+two gentlewomen sat before my sister, and not knowing her, discoursed at
+their ease. Says one, "Lord! how fine Mr. W. is!" "Yes," replied the
+other, with a tone of saying sentences, "some men love to be
+particularly so, your _petit-maîtres_--but they are not always the
+brightest of their sex."--Do thank me for this period! I am sure you
+will enjoy it as much as we did.
+
+[Footnote 1: It was customary at this time for the galleries to call for
+a ballad called "The Roast Beef of Old England" between the acts, or
+before or after the play.--WALPOLE.]
+
+I shall be very glad of my things, and approve entirely of your
+precautions; Sir R. will be quite happy, for there is no telling you how
+impatient he is for his Dominchin. Adieu!
+
+
+_BATTLE OF DETTINGEN--DEATH OF LORD WILMINGTON._
+
+TO SIR HORACE MANN.
+
+HOUGHTON, _July_ 4, 1743.
+
+I hear no particular news here, and I don't pretend to send you the
+common news; for as I must have it first from London, you will have it
+from thence sooner in the papers than in my letters. There have been
+great rejoicings for the victory; which I am convinced is very
+considerable by the pains the Jacobites take to persuade it is not. My
+Lord Carteret's Hanoverian articles have much offended; his express has
+been burlesqued a thousand ways. By all the letters that arrive, the
+loss of the French turns out more considerable than by the first
+accounts: they have dressed up the battle into a victory for
+themselves--I hope they will always have such! By their not having
+declared war with us, one should think they intended a peace. It is
+allowed that our fine horse did us no honour: the victory was gained by
+the foot. Two of their princes of the blood, the Prince de Dombes, and
+the Count d'Eu his brother, were wounded, and several of their first
+nobility. Our prisoners turn out but seventy-two officers, besides the
+private men; and by the printed catalogue, I don't think many of great
+family. Marshal Noailles' mortal wound is quite vanished, and Duc
+d'Aremberg's shrunk to a very slight one. The King's glory remains in
+its first bloom.
+
+Lord Wilmington is dead.[1] I believe the civil battle for his post will
+be tough. Now we shall see what service Lord Carteret's Hanoverians will
+do him. You don't think the crisis unlucky for him, do you? If you
+wanted a Treasury, should you choose to have been in Arlington Street,
+or driving by the battle of Dettingen? You may imagine our Court wishes
+for Mr. Pelham. I don't know any one who wishes for Lord Bath but
+himself--I believe that is a pretty substantial wish.
+
+[Footnote 1: Formerly Sir Spencer Compton, and successor of Sir R.
+Walpole at the Treasury. He was succeeded by Mr. Pelham, a brother of
+the Duke of Newcastle.]
+
+I have got the Life of King Theodore, but I don't know how to convey
+it--I will inquire for some way.
+
+We are quite alone. You never saw anything so unlike as being here five
+months out of place, to the congresses of a fortnight in place; but you
+know the "Justum et tenacem propositi virum"[1] can amuse himself
+without the "Civium ardor!" As I have not so much dignity of character
+to fill up my time, I could like a little more company. With all this
+leisure, you may imagine that I might as well be writing an ode or so
+upon the victory; but as I cannot build upon the Laureate's[2] place
+till I know whether Lord Carteret or Mr. Pelham will carry the
+Treasury, I have bounded my compliments to a slender collection of
+quotations against I should have any occasion for them. Here are some
+fine lines from Lord Halifax's[3] poem on the battle of the Boyne--
+
+    The King leads on, the King does all inflame,
+    The King;--and carries millions in the name.
+
+[Footnote 1: A quotation from Horace, Odes iii. 3.]
+
+[Footnote 2: The Poet Laureate was Colley Cibber.]
+
+[Footnote 3: The celebrated Chancellor of the Exchequer, Charles
+Montagu, was raised to the peerage as Earl of Halifax. In conjunction
+with Prior, he wrote the "Country and City Mouse," in ridicule of
+Dryden's "Hind and Panther."]
+
+Then follows a simile about a deluge, which you may imagine; but the
+next lines are very good:
+
+    So on the foe the firm battalions prest,
+    And he, like the tenth wave, drove on the rest.
+    Fierce, gallant, young, he shot through ev'ry place,
+    Urging their flight, and hurrying on the chase,
+    He hung upon their rear, or lighten'd in their face.
+
+The next are a magnificent compliment, and, as far as verse goes, to be
+sure very applicable.
+
+    Stop, stop! brave Prince, allay that generous flame;
+    Enough is given to England and to Fame.
+    Remember, Sir, you in the centre stand;
+    Europe's divided interests you command,
+    All their designs uniting in your hand.
+    Down from your throne descends the golden chain
+    Which does the fabric of our world sustain,
+    That once dissolved by any fatal stroke,
+    The scheme of all our happiness is broke.
+
+Adieu! my dear Sir; pray for peace!
+
+
+_FRENCH ACTORS AT CLIFDEN--A NEW ROMAN CATHOLIC MIRACLE--LADY MARY
+WORTLEY._
+
+TO SIR HORACE MANN.
+
+HOUGHTON, _Sept._ 7, 1743.
+
+My letters are now at their _ne plus ultra_ of nothingness; so you may
+hope they will grow better again. I shall certainly go to town soon, for
+my patience is worn out. Yesterday, the weather grew cold; I put on _a
+new_ waistcoat for its being winter's birthday--the season I am forced
+to love; for summer has no charms for me when I pass it in the country.
+
+We are expecting another battle, and a congress at the same time.
+Ministers seem to be flocking to Aix la Chapelle: and, what will much
+surprise you, unless you have lived long enough not to be surprised, is,
+that Lord Bolingbroke has hobbled the same way too--you will suppose, as
+a minister for France; I tell you, no. My uncle [_old_ Horace], who is
+here, was yesterday stumping along the gallery with a very political
+march: my Lord asked him whither he was going. Oh, said I, to Aix la
+Chapelle.
+
+You ask me about the marrying Princesses. I know not a tittle. Princess
+Louisa seems to be going, her clothes are bought; but marrying our
+daughters makes no conversation. For either of the other two, all
+thoughts seem to be dropped of it. The Senate of Sweden design
+themselves to choose a wife for their man of Lubeck.
+
+The City, and our supreme governors, the mob, are very angry that there
+is a troop of French players at Clifden. One of them was lately
+impertinent to a countryman, who thrashed him. His Royal Highness sent
+angrily to know the cause. The fellow replied, "he thought to have
+pleased his Highness in beating one of them, who had tried to kill his
+father and had wounded his brother." This was not easy to answer.
+
+I delight in Prince Craon's exact intelligence! For his satisfaction, I
+can tell him that numbers, even here, would believe any story full as
+absurd as that of the King and my Lord Stair; or that very one, if
+anybody will write it over. Our faith in politics will match any
+Neapolitan's in religion. A political missionary will make more converts
+in a county progress than a Jesuit in the whole empire of China, and
+will produce more preposterous miracles. Sir Watkin Williams, at the
+last Welsh races, convinced the whole principality (by reading a letter
+that affirmed it), that the King was not within two miles of the battle
+of Dettingen. We are not good at hitting off anti-miracles, the only way
+of defending one's own religion. I have read an admirable story of the
+Duke of Buckingham, who, when James II. sent a priest to him to persuade
+him to turn Papist, and was plied by him with miracles, told the doctor,
+that if miracles were proofs of a religion, the Protestant cause was as
+well supplied as theirs. We have lately had a very extraordinary one
+near my estate in the country. A very holy man, as you might be, Doctor,
+was travelling on foot, and was benighted. He came to the cottage of a
+poor dowager, who had nothing in the house for herself and daughter but
+a couple of eggs and a slice of bacon. However, as she was a pious
+widow, she made the good man welcome. In the morning, at taking leave,
+the saint made her over to God for payment, and prayed that whatever she
+should do as soon as he was gone she might continue to do all day. This
+was a very unlimited request, and, unless the saint was a prophet too,
+might not have been very pleasant retribution. The good woman, who
+minded her affairs, and was not to be put out of her way, went about her
+business. She had a piece of coarse cloth to make a couple of shifts for
+herself and child. She no sooner began to measure it but the yard fell
+a-measuring, and there was no stopping it. It was sunset before the good
+woman had time to take breath. She was almost stifled, for she was up to
+her ears in ten thousand yards of cloth. She could have afforded to have
+sold Lady Mary Wortley a clean shift, of the usual coarseness she wears,
+for a groat halfpenny.
+
+I wish you would tell the Princess this story. Madame Riccardi, or the
+little Countess d'Elbenino, will doat on it. I don't think it will be
+out of Pandolfini's way, if you tell it to the little Albizzi. You see I
+have not forgot the tone of my Florentine acquaintance. I know I should
+have translated it to them: you remember what admirable work I used to
+make of such stories in broken Italian. I have heard old Churchill tell
+Bussy English puns out of jest-books: particularly a reply about eating
+hare, which he translated, "j'ai mon ventre plein de poil." Adieu!
+
+
+_DEATH OF HIS FATHER--MATTHEWS AND LESTOCK IN THE
+MEDITERRANEAN--THOMSON'S "TANCRED AND SIGISMUNDA"--AKENSIDE'S
+ODES--CONUNDRUMS IN FASHION._
+
+TO SIR HORACE MANN.
+
+ARLINGTON STREET, _March_ 29, 1745.
+
+I begged your brother to tell you what it was impossible for me to tell
+you. You share nearly 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 moral; improper for me to write upon, and too
+distressful for us both!--a death is only to be felt, never to be talked
+over by those it touches!
+
+I had yesterday your letter of three sheets: I began to flatter myself
+that the storm was blown over, but I tremble to think of the danger you
+are in! a danger, in which even the protection of the great friend you
+have lost could have been of no service to you. How ridiculous it seems
+for me to renew protestations of my friendship for you, at an instant
+when my father is just dead, and the Spaniards just bursting into
+Tuscany! How empty a charm would my name have, when all my interest and
+significance are buried in my father's grave! All hopes of present
+peace, the only thing that could save you, seem vanished. We expect
+every day to hear of the French declaration of war against Holland. The
+new Elector of Bavaria is French, like his father; and the King of Spain
+is not dead. I don't know how to talk to you. I have not even a belief
+that the Spaniards will spare Tuscany. My dear child, what will become
+of you? whither will you retire till a peace restores you to your
+ministry? for upon that distant view alone I repose!
+
+We are every day nearer confusion. The King is in as bad humour as a
+monarch can be; he wants to go abroad, and is detained by the
+Mediterranean affair; the inquiry into which was moved by a Major
+Selwyn, a dirty pensioner, half-turned patriot, by the Court being
+overstocked with votes. This inquiry takes up the whole time of the
+House of Commons, but I don't see what conclusion it can have. My
+confinement has kept me from being there, except the first day; and all
+I know of what is yet come out is, as it was stated by a Scotch member
+the other day, "that there had been one (Matthews)[1] with a bad head,
+another (Lestock) with a worse heart, and four (the captains of the
+inactive ships) with na heart at all." Among the numerous visits of form
+that I have received, one was from my Lord Sandys: as we two could only
+converse upon general topics, we fell upon this of the Mediterranean,
+and I made _him_ allow, "that, to be sure, there is not so bad a court
+of justice in the world as the House of Commons; and how hard it is upon
+any man to have his cause tried there!"...
+
+[Footnote 1: Admiral Matthews, an officer of great courage and skill,
+was Commander-in-chief of the Mediterranean fleet. Lestock, his second
+in command, was also a skilful officer; but the two were on bad terms,
+and when, in February, 1744, Matthews attacked the Spanish fleet,
+Lestock disobeyed his signals, and by his misconduct deprived Matthews
+of a splendid victory, which was clearly within his grasp.
+Court-martials were held on the conduct of both officers; but the
+Admiralty was determined to crush Matthews, as being a member of the
+House of Commons and belonging to the party of Opposition, and the
+consequence was that, though Lestock's misconduct was clearly proved, he
+was acquitted, and Matthews was sentenced to be cashiered, and declared
+incapable of any further employment in his Majesty's service. The whole
+is perhaps the most disgraceful transaction in the history of the navy
+or of the country. (See the Editor's "History of the British Navy," i.
+203-214.)]
+
+The town flocks to a new play of Thomson's called "Tancred and
+Sigismunda:" it is very dull; I have read it. I cannot bear modern
+poetry; these refiners of the purity of the stage, and of the
+incorrectness of English verse, are most wofully insipid. I had rather
+have written the most absurd lines in Lee, than "Leonidas" or "The
+Seasons;" as I had rather be put into the round-house for a wrong-headed
+quarrel, than sup quietly at eight o'clock with my grandmother. There is
+another of these tame genius's, a Mr. Akenside, who writes Odes: in one
+he has lately published, he says, "Light the tapers, urge the fire."[1]
+Had not you rather make gods "jostle in the dark," than light the
+candles for fear they should break their heads? One Russel, a mimic, has
+a puppet-show to ridicule Operas; I hear, very dull, not to mention its
+being twenty years too late: it consists of three acts, with foolish
+Italian songs burlesqued in Italian.
+
+[Footnote 1: Walpole's quotation, however, is incorrect; the poet wrote:
+
+    Urge the warm bowl, and ruddy fire.]
+
+There is a very good quarrel 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 a trust."
+You know how mad she is, and how capable of such a stroke. 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.
+
+It is the present fashion to make conundrums: there are books of them
+printed, and produced at all assemblies: they are full silly enough to
+be made a fashion. I will tell you the most renowned: "Why is my uncle
+Horace like two people conversing?--Because he is both teller and
+auditor." This was Winnington's....
+
+I will take the first opportunity to send Dr. Cocchi his translated
+book; I have not yet seen it myself.
+
+Adieu! my dearest child! I write with a house full of relations, and
+must conclude. Heaven preserve you and Tuscany.
+
+
+_BATTLE OF FONTENOY--THE BALLAD OF THE PRINCE OF WALES._
+
+TO SIR HORACE MANN.
+
+ARLINGTON STREET, _May_ 11, 1745.
+
+I stayed till to-day, to be able to give you some account of the battle
+of Tournay: the outlines you will have heard already. We don't allow it
+to be a victory on the French side: but that is, just as a woman is not
+called _Mrs._ till she is married, though she may have had half-a-dozen
+natural children. In short, we remained upon the field of battle three
+hours; I fear, too many of us remain there still! without palliating, it
+is certainly a heavy stroke. We never lost near so many officers. I pity
+the Duke [of Cumberland], for it is almost the first battle of
+consequence that we ever lost. By the letters arrived to-day, we find
+that Tournay still holds out. There are certainly killed Sir James
+Campbell, General Ponsonby, Colonel Carpenter, Colonel Douglas, young
+Ross, Colonel Montagu, Gee, Berkeley, and Kellet. Mr. Vanburgh is since
+dead. Most of the young men of quality in the Guards are wounded. I have
+had the vast fortune to have nobody hurt, for whom I was in the least
+interested. Mr. Conway, in particular, has highly distinguished himself;
+he and Lord Petersham, who is slightly wounded, are most commended;
+though none behaved ill but the Dutch horse. There has been but very
+little consternation here: the King minded it so little, that being set
+out for Hanover, and blown back into Harwich roads since the news came,
+he could not be persuaded to return, but sailed yesterday with the fair
+wind. I believe you will have the _Gazette_ sent to-night; but lest it
+should not be printed time enough, here is a list of the numbers, as it
+came over this morning:
+
+British foot          1237 killed.
+Ditto horse             90 ditto.
+Ditto foot            1968 wounded.
+Ditto horse            232 ditto.
+Ditto foot             457 missing.
+Ditto horse             18 ditto.
+Hanoverian foot        432 killed.
+Ditto horse             78 ditto.
+Ditto foot             950 wounded.
+Ditto horse            192 ditto.
+Ditto horse and foot    53 missing.
+Dutch                  625 killed and wounded.
+Ditto                 1019 missing.
+
+So the whole _hors de combat_ is above seven thousand three hundred. The
+French own the loss of three thousand; I don't believe many more, for it
+was a most rash and desperate perseverance on our side. The Duke behaved
+very bravely and humanely; but this will not have advanced the peace.
+
+However coolly the Duke may have behaved, and coldly his father, at
+least his brother [the Prince of Wales] has outdone both. He not only
+went to the play the night the news came, but in two days made a ballad.
+It is in imitation of the Regent's style, and has miscarried in nothing
+but the language, the thoughts, and the poetry. Did not I tell you in my
+last that he was going to act Paris in Congreve's "Masque"? The song is
+addressed to the goddesses.
+
+    I.
+
+    Venez, mes chères Déesses,
+    Venez calmer mon chagrin;
+    Aidez, mes belles Princesses,
+    A le noyer dans le vin.
+    Poussons cette douce Ivresse
+    Jusqu'au milieu de la nuit,
+    Et n'écoutons que la tendresse
+    D'un charmant vis-à-vis.
+
+    II.
+
+    Quand le chagrin me dévore,
+    Vite à table je me mets,
+    Loin des objets que j'abhorre,
+    Avec joie j'y trouve la paix.
+    Peu d'amis, restes d'un naufrage
+    Je rassemble autour de moi,
+    Et je me ris de l'étalage
+    Qu'a chez lui toujours un Roi.
+
+    III.
+
+    Que m'importe, que l'Europe
+    Ait un, ou plusieurs tyrans?
+    Prions seulement Calliope,
+    Qu'elle inspire nos vers, nos chants
+    Laissons Mars et toute la gloire;
+    Livrons nous tous à l'amour;
+    Que Bacchus nous donne à boire;
+    A ces deux faisons la cour.
+
+    IV.
+
+    Passons ainsi notre vie,
+    Sans rêver à ce qui suit;
+    Avec ma chère Sylvie
+    Le tems trop vîte me fuit.
+    Mais si, par un malheur extrême,
+    Je perdois cet objet charmant,
+    Oui, cette compagnie même
+    Ne me tiendroit un moment.
+
+    V.
+
+    Me livrant à ma tristesse,
+    Toujours plein de mon chagrin,
+    Je n'aurois plus d'allégresse
+    Pour mettre Bathurst en train:
+    Ainsi pour vous tenir en joie
+    Invoquez toujours les Dieux,
+    Qu'elle vive et qu'elle soit
+    Avec nous toujours heureuse!
+
+Adieu! I am in great hurry.
+
+
+_M. DE GRIGNAN--LIVY'S PATAVINITY--THE MARÉCHAL DE BELLEISLE--WHISTON
+PROPHECIES THE DESTRUCTION OF THE WORLD--THE DUKE OF NEWCASTLE._
+
+TO GEORGE MONTAGU, ESQ.
+
+[_August_ 1, 1745.]
+
+Dear George,--I cannot help thinking you laugh at me when you say such
+very civil things of my letters, and yet, coming from you, I would fain
+not have it all flattery:
+
+    So much the more, as, from a little elf,
+    I've had a high opinion of myself,
+    Though sickly, slender, and not large of limb.
+
+With this modest prepossession, you may be sure I like to have you
+commend me, whom, after I have done with myself, I admire of all men
+living. I only beg that you will commend me no more: it is very
+ruinous; and praise, like other debts, ceases to be due on being paid.
+One comfort indeed is, that it is as seldom paid as other debts.
+
+I have been very fortunate lately: I have met with an extreme good print
+of M. de Grignan;[1] I am persuaded, very like; and then it has his
+_touffe ébourifée_; I don't, indeed, know what that was, but I am sure
+it is in the print. None of the critics could ever make out what Livy's
+Patavinity is; though they are all confident it is in his writings. I
+have heard within these few days what, for your sake, I wish I could
+have told you sooner--that there is in Belleisle's suite the Abbé
+Perrin, who published Madame Sévigné's letters, and who has the
+originals in his hands. How one should have liked to have known him! The
+Marshal[2] was privately in London last Friday. He is entertained to-day
+at Hampton Court by the Duke of Grafton. Don't you believe it was to
+settle the binding the scarlet thread in the window, when the French
+shall come in unto the land to possess it? I don't at all wonder at any
+shrewd observations the Marshal has made on our situation. The bringing
+him here at all--the sending him away now--in short, the whole series of
+our conduct convinces me, that we shall soon see as silent a change as
+that in "The Rehearsal," of King Usher and King Physician. It may well
+be so, when the disposition of the drama is in the hands of the Duke of
+Newcastle--those hands that are always groping and sprawling, and
+fluttering, and hurrying on the rest of his precipitate person. But
+there is no describing him but as M. Courcelle, a French prisoner, did
+t'other day: "Je ne scais pas," dit il, "je ne scaurois m'exprimer, mais
+il a un certain tatillonage." If one could conceive a dead body hung in
+chains, always wanting to be hung somewhere else, one should have a
+comparative idea of him.
+
+[Footnote 1: M. de Grignan son-in-law to Mme. de Sévigné, the greater
+part of whose letters are to his wife.]
+
+[Footnote 2: The Maréchal de Belleisle and his younger brother, the
+Comte de Belleisle, were the grandsons of Fouquet, the Finance Minister
+treated with such cruelty and injustice by Louis XIV. The Parisians
+nicknamed the two brothers "Imagination" and "Common Sense." The Marshal
+was joined with the Marshal de Broglie in the disastrous expedition
+against Prague in the winter of 1742; when, though they succeeded in
+taking and occupying the city for a time, they were afterwards forced to
+evacuate it; and though Belleisle conducted the retreat with great
+courage and skill, the army, which had numbered fifty thousand men when
+it crossed the Rhine, scarcely exceeded twelve thousand when it regained
+the French territory. (See the Editor's "History of France under the
+Bourbons," c. xxv.)]
+
+For my own part, I comfort myself with the humane reflection of the
+Irishman in the ship that was on fire--I am but a passenger! If I were
+not so indolent, I think I should rather put in practice the late
+Duchess of Bolton's geographical resolution of going to China, when
+Whiston told her the world would be burnt in three years. Have you any
+philosophy? Tell me what you think. It is quite the fashion to talk of
+the French coming here. Nobody sees it in any other light but as a thing
+to be talked of, not to be precautioned against. Don't you remember a
+report of the plague being in the City, and everybody went to the house
+where it was to see it? You see I laugh about it, for I would not for
+the world be so unenglished as to do otherwise. I am persuaded that
+when Count Saxe,[1] with ten thousand men, is within a day's march of
+London, people will be hiring windows at Charing-cross and Cheapside to
+see them pass by. 'Tis our characteristic to take dangers for sights,
+and evils for curiosities.
+
+[Footnote 1: The great Maréchal Saxe, Commander-in-chief of the French
+army in Flanders during the war of the Austrian succession.]
+
+Adieu! dear George: I am laying in scraps of Cato against it may be
+necessary to take leave of one's correspondents _à la Romaine_, and
+before the play itself is suppressed by a _lettre de cachet_ to the
+book-sellers.
+
+P.S.--Lord! 'tis the first of August,[1] 1745, a holiday that is going
+to be turned out of the almanack!
+
+[Footnote 1: August 1 was the anniversary of the accession of George I.]
+
+
+_INVASION OF SCOTLAND BY THE YOUNG PRETENDER--FORCES ARE SAID TO BE
+PREPARING IN FRANCE TO JOIN HIM._
+
+TO SIR HORACE MANN.
+
+ARLINGTON STREET, _Sept._ 6, 1745.
+
+It would have been inexcusable in me, in our present circumstances, and
+after all I have promised you, not to have written to you for this last
+month, if I had been in London; but I have been at Mount Edgecumbe, and
+so constantly upon the road, that I neither received your letters, had
+time to write, or knew what to write. I came back last night, and found
+three packets from you, which I have no time to answer, and but just
+time to read. The confusion I have found, and the danger we are in,
+prevent my talking of anything else. The young Pretender, at the head of
+three thousand men, has got a march on General Cope, who is not eighteen
+hundred strong; and when the last accounts came away, was fifty miles
+nearer Edinburgh than Cope, and by this time is there. The clans will
+not rise for the Government: the Dukes of Argyll and Athol are come post
+to town, not having been able to raise a man. The young Duke of Gordon
+sent for his uncle, and told him he must arm their clan. "They are in
+arms."--"They must march against the rebels."--"They will wait on the
+Prince of Wales." The Duke flew in a passion; his uncle pulled out a
+pistol, and told him it was in vain to dispute. Lord Loudon, Lord
+Fortrose, and Lord Panmure have been very zealous, and have raised some
+men; but I look upon Scotland as gone! I think of what King William said
+to Duke Hamilton, when he was extolling Scotland: "My Lord, I only wish
+it was a hundred thousand miles off, and that you was king of it!"
+
+There are two manifestoes published, signed Charles Prince, Regent for
+his father, King of Scotland, England, France, and Ireland. By one, he
+promises to preserve everybody in their just rights; and orders all
+persons who have public monies in their hands to bring it to him; and by
+the other dissolves the union between England and Scotland. But all this
+is not the worst! Notice came yesterday, that there are ten thousand
+men, thirty transports, and ten men-of-war at Dunkirk. Against this
+force we have--I don't know what--scarce fears! Three thousand Dutch we
+hope are by this time landed in Scotland; three more are coming hither.
+We have sent for ten regiments from Flanders, which may be here in a
+week, and we have fifteen men-of-war in the Downs. I am grieved to tell
+you all this; but when it is so, how can I avoid telling you? Your
+brother is just come in, who says he has written to you--I have not time
+to expiate.
+
+My Lady O[rford] is arrived; I hear she says, only to endeavour to get a
+certain allowance. Her mother has sent to offer her the use of her
+house. She is a poor weak woman. I can say nothing to Marquis Ricardi,
+nor think of him; only tell him that I will when I have time.
+
+My sister [Lady Maria Walpole] has married herself, that is, declared
+she will, to young Churchill. It is a foolish match; but I have nothing
+to do with it. Adieu! my dear Sir; excuse my haste, but you must imagine
+that one is not much at leisure to write long letters--hope if you can!
+
+
+_THIS AND THE FOLLOWING LETTERS GIVE A LIVELY ACCOUNT OF THE PROGRESS OF
+THE REBELLION TILL THE RETREAT FROM DERBY, AFTER WHICH NO PARTICULAR
+INTEREST ATTACHES TO IT._
+
+TO SIR HORACE MANN.
+
+ARLINGTON STREET, _Sept._ 20, 1745.
+
+One really don't know what to write to you: the accounts from Scotland
+vary perpetually, and at best are never very certain. I was just going
+to tell you that the rebels are in England; but my uncle [_old_ Horace]
+is this moment come in, and says, that an express came last night with
+an account of their being at Edinburgh to the number of five thousand.
+This sounds great, to have walked through a kingdom, and taken
+possession of the capital! But this capital is an open town; and the
+castle impregnable, and in our possession. There never was so
+extraordinary a sort of rebellion! One can't tell what assurances of
+support they may have from the Jacobites in England, or from the French;
+but nothing of either sort has yet appeared--and if there does not,
+never was so desperate an enterprise. One can hardly believe that the
+English are more disaffected than the Scotch; and among the latter, no
+persons of property have joined them: both nations seem to profess a
+neutrality. Their money is all gone, and they subsist merely by levying
+contributions. But, sure, banditti can never conquer a kingdom! On the
+other hand, what cannot any number of men do, who meet no opposition?
+They have hitherto taken no place but open towns, nor have they any
+artillery for a siege but one-pounders. Three battalions of Dutch are
+landed at Gravesend, and are ordered to Lancashire: we expect every
+moment to hear that the rest are got to Scotland; none of our own are
+come yet. Lord Granville and his faction persist in persuading the King,
+that it is an affair of no consequence; and for the Duke of Newcastle,
+he is glad when the rebels make any progress, in order to confute Lord
+Granville's assertions. The best of our situation is, our strength at
+sea: the Channel is well guarded, and twelve men-of-war more are arrived
+from Rowley. Vernon, that simple noisy creature, has hit upon a scheme
+that is of great service; he has laid Folkstone cutters all round the
+coast, which are continually relieved, and bring constant notice of
+everything that stirs. I just now hear that the Duke of Bedford declares
+that he will be amused no longer, but will ask the King's leave to raise
+a regiment. The Duke of Montagu has a troop of horse ready, and the Duke
+of Devonshire is raising men in Derbyshire. The Yorkshiremen, headed by
+the Archbishop [Herring] and Lord Malton, meet the gentlemen of the
+county the day after to-morrow, to defend that part of England. Unless
+we have more ill fortune than is conceivable, or the general supineness
+continues, it is impossible but we must get over this. You desire me to
+send you news: I confine myself to tell you nothing but what you may
+depend upon; and leave you in a fright rather than deceive you. I
+confess my own apprehensions are not near so strong as they were; and if
+we get over this, I shall believe that we never can be hurt; for we
+never can be more exposed to danger. Whatever disaffection there is to
+the present family, it plainly does not proceed from love to the other.
+
+My Lady O[rford] makes little progress in popularity. Neither the
+protection of my Lady Pomfret's prudery, nor of my Lady Townshend's
+libertinism, do her any service. The women stare at her, think her
+ugly, awkward, and disagreeable; and what is worse, the men think so
+too. For the height of mortification, the King has declared publicly to
+the Ministry, that he has been told of the great civilities which he was
+said to show to her at Hanover; that he protests he showed her only the
+common civilities due to any English lady that comes thither; that he
+never intended to take any particular notice of her; nor had, nor would
+let my Lady Yarmouth. In fact, my Lady Yarmouth peremptorily refused to
+carry her to court here; and when she did go with my Lady Pomfret, the
+King but just spoke to her. She declares her intention of staying in
+England, and protests against all lawsuits and violences; and says she
+only asks articles of separation, and to have her allowance settled by
+any two arbitrators chosen by my brother and herself. I have met her
+twice at my Lady Townshend's, just as I used at Florence. She dresses
+English and plays at whist. I forgot to tell a _bon-mot_ of Leheup on
+her first coming over; he was asked if he would not go and see her? He
+replied, "No, I never visit modest women." Adieu! my dear child! I
+flatter myself you will collect hopes from this letter.
+
+
+_DEFEAT OF COPE._
+
+TO SIR HORACE MANN.
+
+ARLINGTON STREET, _Sept._ 27, 1745.
+
+I can't doubt but the joy of the Jacobites has reached Florence before
+this letter. Your two or three Irish priests, I forget their names,
+will have set out to take possession of abbey lands here. I feel for
+what you will feel, and for the insulting things that will be said to
+you upon the battle we lost in Scotland; but all this is nothing to what
+it prefaces. The express came hither on Tuesday morning, but the Papists
+knew it on Sunday night. Cope lay in face of the rebels all Friday; he
+scarce two thousand strong, they vastly superior, though we don't know
+their numbers. The military people say that he should have attacked
+them. However, we are sadly convinced that they are not such raw
+ragamuffins as they were represented. The rotation that has been
+established in that country, to give all the Highlanders the benefit of
+serving in the independent companies, has trained and disciplined them.
+Macdonald (I suppose, he from Naples), who is reckoned a very
+experienced able officer, is said to have commanded them, and to be
+dangerously wounded. One does not hear the Boy's personal valour cried
+up; by which I conclude he was not in the action. Our dragoons most
+shamefully fled without striking a blow, and are with Cope, who escaped
+in a boat to Berwick. I pity poor him, who with no shining abilities,
+and no experience, and no force, was sent to fight for a crown! He never
+saw a battle but that of Dettingen, where he got his red ribbon:
+Churchill, whose led-captain he was, and my Lord Harrington, had pushed
+him up to his misfortune. We have lost all our artillery, five hundred
+men taken--and _three_ killed, and several officers, as you will see in
+the papers. This defeat has frightened everybody but those it rejoices,
+and those it should frighten most; but my Lord Granville still buoys up
+the King's spirits, and persuades him it is nothing. He uses his
+Ministers as ill as possible, and discourages everybody that would risk
+their lives and fortunes with him. Marshal Wade is marching against the
+rebels; but the King will not let him take above eight thousand men; so
+that if they come into England, another battle, with no advantage on our
+side, may determine our fate. Indeed, they don't seem so unwise as to
+risk their cause upon so precarious an event; but rather to design to
+establish themselves in Scotland, till they can be supported from
+France, and be set up with taking Edinburgh Castle, where there is to
+the value of a million, and which they would make a stronghold. It is
+scarcely victualled for a month, and must surely fall into their hands.
+Our coasts are greatly guarded, and London kept in awe by the arrival of
+the guards. I don't believe what I have been told this morning, that
+more troops are sent for from Flanders, and aid asked of Denmark.
+
+Prince Charles has called a Parliament in Scotland for the 7th of
+October; ours does not meet till the 17th, so that even in the show of
+liberty and laws they are beforehand with us. With all this, we hear of
+no men of quality or fortune having joined him but Lord Elcho, whom you
+have seen at Florence; and the Duke of Peith, a silly race horsing boy,
+who is said to be killed in this battle. But I gather no confidence
+from hence: my father always said, "If you see them come again, they
+will begin by their lowest people; their chiefs will not appear till the
+end." His prophecies verify every day!
+
+The town is still empty; on this point only the English act contrary to
+their custom, for they don't throng to see a Parliament, though it is
+likely to grow a curiosity!...
+
+
+_GENERAL WADE IS MARCHING TO SCOTLAND--VIOLENT PROCLAMATION OF THE
+PRETENDER._
+
+TO SIR HORACE MANN.
+
+ARLINGTON STREET, _Oct._ 21, 1745.
+
+I had been almost as long without any of your letters as you had without
+mine; but yesterday I received one, dated the 5th of this month, N.S.
+
+The rebels have not left their camp near Edinburgh, and, I suppose, will
+not now, unless to retreat into the Highlands. General Wade was to march
+yesterday from Doncaster for Scotland. By their not advancing, I
+conclude that either the Boy and his council could not prevail on the
+Highlanders to leave their own country, or that they were not strong
+enough, and still wait for foreign assistance, which, in a new
+declaration, he intimates that he still expects. One only ship, I
+believe, a Spanish one, is got to them with arms, and Lord John Drummond
+and some people of quality on board. We don't hear that the younger Boy
+is of the number. Four ships sailed from Corunna; the one that got to
+Scotland, one taken by a privateer of Bristol, and one lost on the Irish
+coast; the fourth is not heard of. At Edinburgh and thereabouts they
+commit the most horrid barbarities. We last night expected as bad here:
+information was given of an intended insurrection and massacre by the
+Papists; all the Guards were ordered out, and the Tower shut up at
+seven. I cannot be surprised at anything, considering the supineness of
+the Ministry--nobody has yet been taken up!
+
+The Parliament met on Thursday. I don't think, considering the crisis,
+that the House was very full. Indeed, many of the Scotch members cannot
+come if they would. The young Pretender had published a declaration,
+threatening to confiscate the estates of the Scotch that should come to
+Parliament, and making it treason for the English. The only points that
+have been before the House, the address and the suspension of the Habeas
+Corpus, met with obstructions from the Jacobites. By this we may expect
+what spirit they will show hereafter. With all this, I am far from
+thinking that they are so confident and sanguine as their friends at
+Rome. I blame the Chutes extremely for cockading themselves: why take a
+part, when they are only travelling? I should certainly retire to
+Florence on this occasion.
+
+You may imagine how little I like our situation; but I don't despair.
+The little use they made, or could make of their victory; their not
+having marched into England; their miscarriage at the Castle of
+Edinburgh; the arrival of our forces, and the non-arrival of any French
+or Spanish, make me conceive great hopes of getting over this ugly
+business. But it is still an affair wherein the chance of battles, or
+perhaps of one battle, may decide.
+
+I write you but short letters, considering the circumstances of the
+time; but I hate to send you paragraphs only to contradict them again: I
+still less choose to forge events; and, indeed, am glad I have so few to
+tell you.
+
+My Lady O[rford] has forced herself upon her mother, who receives her
+very coolly: she talks highly of her demands, and quietly of her
+methods: the fruitlessness of either will, I hope, soon send her back--I
+am sorry it must be to you!
+
+You mention Holdisworth:[1] he has had the confidence to come and visit
+me within these ten days; and (I suppose, from the overflowing of his
+joy) talked a great deal and quick--with as little sense as when he was
+more tedious.
+
+[Footnote 1: A nonjuror, who travelled with Mr. George Pitt.--WALPOLE.]
+
+Since I wrote this, I hear the Countess [of Orford] has told her mother,
+that she thinks her husband the best of our family, and me the
+worst--nobody so bad, except you! I don't wonder at my being so ill with
+her; but what have you done? or is it, that we are worse than anybody,
+because we know more of her than anybody does? Adieu!
+
+
+_GALLANT RESISTANCE OF CARLISLE--MR. PITT ATTACKS THE MINISTRY._
+
+TO SIR HORACE MANN.
+
+ARLINGTON STREET, _Nov._ 22, 1745.
+
+For these two days we have been expecting news of a battle. Wade marched
+last Saturday from Newcastle, and must have got up with the rebels if
+they stayed for him, though the roads are exceedingly bad and great
+quantities of snow have fallen. But last night there was some notice of
+a body of rebels being advanced to Penryth. We were put into great
+spirits by an heroic letter from the Mayor of Carlisle, who had fired on
+the rebels and made them retire; he concluded with saying, "And so I
+think the town of Carlisle has done his Majesty more service than the
+great city of Edinburgh, or than all Scotland together." But this hero,
+who was grown the whole fashion for four-and-twenty hours, had chosen to
+stop all other letters. The King spoke of him at his _levée_ with great
+encomiums; Lord Stair said, "Yes, sir, Mr. Patterson has behaved very
+bravely." The Duke of Bedford interrupted him; "My lord, his name is not
+_Paterson_; that is a Scotch name; his name is _Patinson_." But, alack!
+the next day the rebels returned, having placed the women and children
+of the country in waggons in front of their army, and forcing the
+peasants to fix the scaling-ladders. The great Mr. Pattinson, or
+Patterson (for now his name may be which one pleases), instantly
+surrendered the town, and agreed to pay two thousand pounds to save it
+from pillage. Well! then we were assured that the citadel could hold out
+seven or eight days; but did not so many hours. On mustering the
+militia, there were not found above four men in a company; and for two
+companies, which the ministry, on a report of Lord Albemarle, who said
+they were to be sent from Wade's army, thought were there, and did not
+know were not there, there was nothing but two of invalids. Colonel
+Durand, the governor, fled, because he would not sign the capitulation,
+by which the garrison, it is said, has sworn never to bear arms against
+the house of Stuart. The Colonel sent two expresses, one to Wade, and
+another to Ligonier at Preston; but the latter was playing at whist with
+Lord Harrington at Petersham. Such is our diligence and attention! All
+my hopes are in Wade, who was so sensible of the ignorance of our
+governors, that he refused to accept the command, till they consented
+that he should be subject to no kind of orders from hence. The rebels
+are reckoned up at thirteen thousand; Wade marches with about twelve;
+but if they come southward, the other army will probably be to fight
+them; the Duke is to command it, and sets out next week with another
+brigade of Guards, the Ligonier under him. There are great apprehensions
+for Chester from the Flintshire-men, who are ready to rise. A
+quartermaster, first sent to Carlisle, was seized and carried to Wade;
+he behaved most insolently; and being asked by the general, how many the
+rebels were, replied, "Enough to beat any army you have in England." A
+Mackintosh has been taken, who reduces their formidability, by being
+sent to raise two clans, and with orders, if they would not rise, at
+least to give out they had risen, for that three clans would leave the
+Pretender, unless joined by those two. Five hundred new rebels are
+arrived at Perth, where our prisoners are kept.
+
+I had this morning a subscription-book brought me for our parish; Lord
+Granville had refused to subscribe. This is in the style of his friend
+Lord Bath, who has absented himself whenever any act of authority was to
+be executed against the rebels.
+
+Five Scotch lords are going to raise regiments _à l'Angloise_! resident
+in London, while the rebels were in Scotland; they are to receive
+military emoluments for their neutrality!
+
+The _Fox_ man-of-war of 20 guns is lost off Dunbar. One Beavor, the
+captain, has done us notable service: the Pretender sent to commend his
+zeal and activity, and to tell him, that if he would return to his
+allegiance, he should soon have a flag. Beavor replied, "He never
+treated with any but principals; that if the Pretender would come on
+board him, he would talk with him." I must now tell you of our great
+Vernon: without once complaining to the Ministry, he has written to Sir
+John Philipps, a distinguished Jacobite, to complain of want of
+provisions; yet they do not venture to recall him! Yesterday they had
+another baiting from Pitt, who is ravenous for the place of Secretary at
+War: they would give it him; but as a preliminary, he insists on a
+declaration of our having nothing to do with the continent. He mustered
+his forces, but did not notify his intention; only at two o'clock
+Lyttelton said at the Treasury, that there would be business at the
+House. The motion was, to augment our naval force, which, Pitt said, was
+the only method of putting an end to the rebellion. Ships built a year
+hence to suppress an army of Highlanders, now marching through England!
+My uncle [_old_ Horace] attacked him, and congratulated his country on
+the wisdom of the modern young men; and said he had a son of
+two-and-twenty, who, he did not doubt, would come over wiser than any of
+them. Pitt was provoked, and retorted on his negotiations and
+_grey-headed_ experience. At those words, my uncle, as if he had been at
+Bartholomew fair, snatched off his wig, and showed his grey hairs, which
+made the _august senate_ laugh, and put Pitt out, who, after laughing
+himself, diverted his venom upon Mr. Pelham. Upon the question, Pitt's
+party amounted but to thirty-six: in short, he has nothing left but his
+words, and his haughtiness, and his Lytteltons, and his Grenvilles.
+Adieu!
+
+
+_THE REBEL ARMY HAS RETREATED FROM DERBY--EXPECTATION OF A FRENCH
+INVASION._
+
+TO SIR HORACE MANN.
+
+ARLINGTON STREET, _Dec._ 9, 1745.
+
+I am glad I did not write to you last post as I intended; I should have
+sent you an account that would have alarmed you, and the danger would
+have been over before the letter had crossed the sea. The Duke, from
+some strange want of intelligence, lay last week for four-and-twenty
+hours under arms at Stone, in Staffordshire, expecting the rebels every
+moment, while they were marching in all haste to Derby. The news of this
+threw the town into great consternation; but his Royal Highness repaired
+his mistake, and got to Northampton, between the Highlanders and London.
+They got nine thousand pounds at Derby, and had the books brought to
+them, and obliged everybody to give them what they had subscribed
+against them. Then they retreated a few miles, but returned again to
+Derby, got ten thousand pounds more, plundered the town, and burnt a
+house of the Countess of Exeter. They are gone again, and go back to
+Leake, in Staffordshire, but miserably harassed, and, it is said, have
+left all their cannon behind them, and twenty waggons of sick. The Duke
+has sent General Hawley with the dragoons to harass them in their
+retreat, and despatched Mr. Conway to Marshal Wade, to hasten his march
+upon the back of them. They must either go to North Wales, where they
+will probably all perish, or to Scotland, with great loss. We dread them
+no longer. We are threatened with great preparations for a French
+invasion, but the coast is exceedingly guarded; and for the people, the
+spirit against the rebels increases every day. Though they have marched
+thus into the heart of the kingdom, there has not been the least symptom
+of a rising, nor even in the great towns of which they possessed
+themselves. They have got no recruits since their first entry into
+England, excepting one gentleman in Lancashire, one hundred and fifty
+common men, and two parsons, at Manchester, and a physician from York.
+But here in London, the aversion to them is amazing: on some thoughts of
+the King's going to an encampment at Finchley,[1] the weavers not only
+offered him a thousand men, but the whole body of the Law formed
+themselves into a little army, under the command of Lord Chief Justice
+Willes, and were to have done duty at St. James's, to guard the royal
+family in the King's absence.
+
+[Footnote 1: The troops which were being collected for the Duke of
+Cumberland, as soon as he should arrive from the Continent, to march
+with against the Pretender, were in the meantime encamped on Finchley
+Common near London. The march of the Guards to the camp is the subject
+of one of Hogarth's best pictures.]
+
+But the greatest demonstration of loyalty appeared on the prisoners
+being brought to town from the Soleil prize: the young man is certainly
+Mr. Radcliffe's son; but the mob, persuaded of his being the youngest
+Pretender, could scarcely be restrained from tearing him to pieces all
+the way on the road, and at his arrival. He said he had heard of English
+mobs, but could not conceive they were so dreadful, and wished he had
+been shot at the battle of Dettingen, where he had been engaged. The
+father, whom they call Lord Derwentwater, said, on entering the Tower,
+that he had never expected to arrive there alive. For the young man, he
+must only be treated as a French captive; for the father, it is
+sufficient to produce him at the Old Bailey, and prove that he is the
+individual person condemned for the last Rebellion, and so to Tyburn.
+
+We begin to take up people, but it is with as much caution and timidity
+as women of quality begin to pawn their jewels; we have not ventured
+upon any great stone yet! The Provost of Edinburgh is in custody of a
+messenger; and the other day they seized an odd man, who goes by the
+name of Count St. Germain. He has been here these two years, and will
+not tell who he is, or whence, but professes that he does not go by his
+right name. He sings, plays on the violin wonderfully, composes, is mad,
+and not very sensible. He is called an Italian, a Spaniard, a Pole; a
+somebody that married a great fortune in Mexico, and ran away with her
+jewels to Constantinople; a priest, a fiddler, a vast nobleman. The
+Prince of Wales has had unsatiated curiosity about him, but in vain.
+However, nothing has been made out against him;[1] he is released; and,
+what convinces me that he is not a gentleman, stays here, and talks of
+his being taken up for a spy.
+
+[Footnote 1: In the beginning of the year 1755, on rumours of a great
+armament at Brest, one Virette, a Swiss, who had been a kind of
+toad-eater to this St. Germain, was denounced to Lord Holdernesse for a
+spy; but Mr. Stanley going pretty surlily to his lordship, on his
+suspecting a friend of his, Virette was declared innocent, and the
+penitent secretary of state made him the _amende honorable_ of a dinner
+in form. About the same time, a spy of ours was seized at Brest, but,
+not happening to be acquainted with Mr. Stanley, was broken upon the
+wheel.--WALPOLE.]
+
+I think these accounts, upon which you may depend, must raise your
+spirits, and figure in Mr. Chute's loyal journal.--But you don't get my
+letters: I have sent you eleven since I came to town; how many of these
+have you received? Adieu!
+
+
+_BATTLE OF CULLODEN._
+
+TO SIR HORACE MANN.
+
+ARLINGTON STREET, _April_ 25, 1746.
+
+You have bid me for some time to send you good news--well! I think I
+will. How good would you have it? must it be a total victory over the
+rebels; with not only the Boy, that is here, killed, but the other, that
+is not here, too; their whole army put to the sword, besides an infinite
+number of prisoners; all the Jacobite estates in England confiscated,
+and all those in Scotland--what would you have done with them?--or could
+you be content with something much under this? how much will you abate?
+will you compound for Lord John Drummond, taken by accident? or for
+three Presbyterian parsons, who have very poor livings, stoutly refusing
+to pay a large contribution to the rebels? Come, I will deal as well
+with you as I can, and for once, but not to make a practice of it, will
+let you have a victory! My friend, Lord Bury, arrived this morning from
+the Duke, though the news was got here before him; for, with all our
+victory, it was not thought safe to send him through the heart of
+Scotland; so he was shipped at Inverness, within an hour after the Duke
+entered the town, kept beating at sea five days, and then put on shore
+at North Berwick, from whence he came post in less than three days to
+London; but with a fever upon him, for which he had been twice blooded
+but the day before the battle; but he is young, and high in spirits, and
+I flatter myself will not suffer from this kindness of the Duke: the
+King has immediately ordered him a thousand pound, and I hear will make
+him his own aide-de-camp. My dear Mr. Chute, I beg your pardon; I have
+forgot you have the gout, and consequently not the same patience to wait
+for the battle, with which I, knowing the particulars, postpone it.
+
+On the 16th, the Duke, by forced marches, came up with the rebels, a
+little on this side Inverness--by the way, the battle is not christened
+yet; I only know that neither Prestonpans nor Falkirk are to be
+godfathers. The rebels, who fled from him after their victory, and durst
+not attack him, when so much exposed to them at his passage of the Spey,
+now stood him, they seven thousand, he ten. They broke through Barril's
+regiment, and killed Lord Robert Kerr, a handsome young gentleman, who
+was cut to pieces with above thirty wounds; but they were soon repulsed,
+and fled; the whole engagement not lasting above a quarter of an hour.
+The young Pretender escaped; Mr. Conway says, he hears, wounded: he
+certainly was in the rear. They have lost above a thousand men in the
+engagement and pursuit; and six hundred were already taken; among which
+latter are their French ambassador and Earl Kilmarnock. The Duke of
+Perth and Lord Ogilvie are said to be slain; Lord Elcho was in a
+salivation, and not there. Except Lord Robert Kerr, we lost nobody of
+note: Sir Robert Rich's eldest son has lost his hand, and about a
+hundred and thirty private men fell. The defeat is reckoned total, and
+the dispersion general; and all their artillery is taken. It is a brave
+young Duke! The town is all blazing round me, as I write, with fireworks
+and illuminations: I have some inclination to wrap up half a dozen
+sky-rockets, to make you drink the Duke's health. Mr. Dodington, on the
+first report, came out with a very pretty illumination; so pretty, that
+I believe he had it by him, ready for _any_ occasion....
+
+
+_TRIAL OF THE REBEL LORDS BALMERINO AND KILMARNOCK._
+
+TO SIR HORACE MANN.
+
+ARLINGTON STREET, _Aug._ 1, 1746.
+
+I am this moment come from the conclusion of the greatest and most
+melancholy scene I ever yet saw! You will easily guess it was the Trials
+of the rebel Lords. As it was the most interesting sight, it was the
+most solemn and fine: a coronation is a puppet-show, and all the
+splendour of it idle; but this sight at once feasted one's eyes and
+engaged all one's passions. It began last Monday; three parts of
+Westminster Hall were inclosed with galleries, and hung with scarlet;
+and the whole ceremony was conducted with the most awful solemnity and
+decency, except in the one point of leaving the prisoners at the bar,
+amidst the idle curiosity of some crowd, and even with the witnesses
+who had sworn against them, while the Lords adjourned to their own House
+to consult. No part of the royal family was there, which was a proper
+regard to the unhappy men, who were become their victims. One hundred
+and thirty-nine Lords were present, and made a noble sight on their
+benches _frequent and full_! The Chancellor [Hardwicke] was Lord High
+Steward; but though a most comely personage with a fine voice, his
+behaviour was mean, curiously searching for occasion to bow to the
+minister [Mr. Pelham] that is no peer, and consequently applying to the
+other ministers, in a manner, for their orders; and not even ready at
+the ceremonial. To the prisoners he was peevish; and instead of keeping
+up to the humane dignity of the law of England, whose character it is to
+point out favour to the criminal, he crossed them, and almost scolded at
+any offer they made towards defence. I had armed myself with all the
+resolution I could, with the thought of their crimes and of the danger
+past, and was assisted by the sight of the Marquis of Lothian in weepers
+for his son who fell at Culloden--but the first appearance of the
+prisoners shocked me! their behaviour melted me! Lord Kilmarnock and
+Lord Cromartie are both past forty, but look younger. Lord Kilmarnock is
+tall and slender, with an extreme fine person: his behaviour a most just
+mixture between dignity and submission; if in anything to be
+reprehended, a little affected, and his hair too exactly dressed for a
+man in his situation; but when I say it is not to find fault with him,
+but to show how little fault there was to be found. Lord Cromartie is
+an indifferent figure, appeared much dejected, and rather sullen: he
+dropped a few tears the first day, and swooned as soon as he got back to
+his cell. For Lord Balmerino, he is the most natural brave old fellow I
+ever saw: the highest intrepidity, even to indifference. At the bar he
+behaved like a soldier and a man; at the intervals of form, with
+carelessness and humour. He pressed extremely to have his wife, his
+pretty Peggy, with him in the Tower. Lady Cromartie only sees her
+husband through the grate, not choosing to be shut up with him, as she
+thinks she can serve him better by her intercession without: she is big
+with child and very handsome: so are their daughters. When they were to
+be brought from the Tower in separate coaches, there was some dispute in
+which the axe must go--old Balmerino cried, "Come, come, put it with
+me." At the bar, he plays with his fingers upon the axe, while he talks
+with the gentleman-gaoler; and one day somebody coming up to listen, he
+took the blade and held it like a fan between their faces. During the
+trial, a little boy was near him, but not tall enough to see; he made
+room for the child and placed him near himself.
+
+When the trial began, the two Earls pleaded guilty; Balmerino not
+guilty, saying he could prove his not being at the taking of the castle
+of Carlisle, as was laid in the indictment. Then the King's counsel
+opened, and Serjeant Skinner pronounced the most absurd speech
+imaginable; and mentioned the Duke of Perth, "who," said he, "I see by
+the papers is dead." Then some witnesses were examined, whom afterwards
+the old hero shook cordially by the hand. The Lords withdrew to their
+House, and returning, demanded of the judges, whether one point not
+being proved, though all the rest were, the indictment was false? to
+which they unanimously answered in the negative. Then the Lord High
+Steward asked the Peers severally, whether Lord Balmerino was guilty!
+All said, "guilty upon honour," and then adjourned, the prisoner having
+begged pardon for giving them so much trouble. While the Lords were
+withdrawn, the Solicitor-General Murray (brother of the Pretender's
+minister) officiously and insolently went up to Lord Balmerino, and
+asked him, how he could give the Lords so much trouble, when his
+solicitor had informed him that his plea could be of no use to him?
+Balmerino asked the bystanders who this person was? and being told he
+said, "Oh, Mr. Murray! I am extremely glad to see you; I have been with
+several of your relations; the good lady, your mother, was of great use
+to us at Perth." Are not you charmed with this speech? how just it was!
+As he went away, he said, "They call me Jacobite; I am no more a
+Jacobite than any that tried me: but if the Great Mogul had set up his
+standard, I should have followed it, for I could not starve." The worst
+of his case is, that after the battle of Dumblain, having a company in
+the Duke of Argyll's regiment, he deserted with it to the rebels, and
+has since been pardoned. Lord Kilmarnock is a Presbyterian, with four
+earldoms in him, but so poor since Lord Wilmington's stopping a pension
+that my father had given him, that he often wanted a dinner. Lord
+Cromartie was receiver of the rents of the King's second son in
+Scotland, which, it was understood, he should not account for; and by
+that means had six-hundred a-year from the Government: Lord Elibank, a
+very prating, impertinent Jacobite, was bound for him in nine thousand
+pounds, for which the Duke is determined to sue him.
+
+When the Peers were going to vote, Lord Foley withdrew, as too well a
+wisher; Lord Moray, as nephew of Lord Balmerino--and Lord Stair,--as, I
+believe, uncle to his great-grandfather. Lord Windsor, very affectedly,
+said, "I am sorry I must say, _guilty upon my honour_." Lord Stamford
+would not answer to the name of _Henry_, having been christened
+_Harry_--what a great way of thinking on such an occasion! I was
+diverted too with old Norsa, the father of my brother's concubine, an
+old Jew that kept a tavern; my brother [Orford], as Auditor of the
+Exchequer, has a gallery along one whole side of the court; I said, "I
+really feel for the prisoners!" old Issachar replied, "Feel for them!
+pray, if they had succeeded, what would have become of _all us_?" When
+my Lady Townsend heard her husband vote, she said, "I always knew _my_
+Lord was _guilty_, but I never thought he would own it _upon his
+honour_." Lord Balmerino said, that one of his reasons for pleading _not
+guilty_, was that so many ladies might not be disappointed of their
+show.
+
+On Wednesday they were again brought to Westminster Hall, to receive
+sentence; and being asked what they had to say, Lord Kilmarnock, with a
+very fine voice, read a very fine speech, confessing the extent of his
+crime, but offering his principles as some alleviation, having his
+eldest son (his second unluckily with him), in the Duke's army,
+_fighting for the liberties of his country at Culloden, where his
+unhappy father was in arms to destroy them_. He insisted much on his
+tenderness to the English prisoners, which some deny, and say that he
+was the man who proposed their being put to death, when General
+Stapleton urged that _he_ was come to fight, but not to butcher; and
+that if they acted any such barbarity, he would leave them with all his
+men. He very artfully mentioned Van Hoey's letter, and said how much he
+would scorn to owe his life to such intercession.[1] Lord Cromartie
+spoke much shorter, and so low, that he was not heard but by those who
+sat very near him; but they prefer his speech to the other. He mentioned
+his misfortune in having drawn in his eldest son, who is prisoner with
+him; and concluded with saying, "If no part of this bitter cup must pass
+from me, not mine, O God, but thy will be done!" If he had pleaded _not
+guilty_, there was ready to be produced against him a paper signed with
+his own hand, for putting the English prisoners to death.
+
+[Footnote 1: In a subsequent letter Walpole attributes Lord Kilmarnock's
+complicity in the rebellion partly to the influence of his mother, the
+Countess of Errol, and partly to his extreme poverty. He says: "I don't
+know whether I told you that the man at the tennis-court protests that
+he has known him dine with the man that sells pamphlets at Storey's
+Gate; 'and,' says he, 'he would often have been glad if I would have
+taken him home to dinner.' He was certainly so poor, that in one of his
+wife's intercepted letters she tells him she has plagued their steward
+for a fortnight for money, and can get but three shillings." One cannot
+help remembering, _Ibit eo quo vis qui zonam perdidit_. And afterwards,
+in relating his execution, he mentions a report that the Duke of
+Cumberland charging him (certainly on misinformation) with having
+promoted the adoption of "a resolution taken the day before the battle
+of Culloden" to put the English prisoners to death, "decided this
+unhappy man's fate" by preventing his obtaining a pardon.]
+
+Lord Leicester went up to the Duke of Newcastle, and said, "I never
+heard so great an orator as Lord Kilmarnock? if I was your grace I would
+pardon him, and make him _paymaster_."[1]
+
+[Footnote 1: "_I would make him paymaster._" The paymaster at this time
+was Mr. Pitt.]
+
+That morning a paper had been sent to the lieutenant of the Tower for
+the prisoners; he gave it to Lord Cornwallis, the governor, who carried
+it to the House of Lords. It was a plea for the prisoners, objecting
+that the late act for regulating the trials of rebels did not take place
+till after their crime was committed. The Lords very tenderly and
+rightly sent this plea to them, of which, as you have seen, the two
+Earls did not make use; but old Balmerino did, and demanded council on
+it. The High Steward, almost in a passion, told him, that when he had
+been offered council, he did not accept it. Do but think on the ridicule
+of sending them the plea, and then denying them council on it! The Duke
+of Newcastle, who never let slip an opportunity of being absurd, took it
+up as a ministerial point, in defence of his creature the Chancellor
+[Hardwicke]; but Lord Granville moved, according to order, to adjourn to
+debate in the chamber of Parliament, where the Duke of Bedford and many
+others spoke warmly for their having council; and it was granted. I said
+_their_, because the plea would have saved them all, and affected nine
+rebels who had been hanged that very morning; particularly one Morgan, a
+poetical lawyer. Lord Balmerino asked for Forester and Wilbraham; the
+latter a very able lawyer in the House of Commons, who, the Chancellor
+said privately, he was sure would as soon be hanged as plead such a
+cause. But he came as council to-day (the third day), when Lord
+Balmerino gave up his plea as invalid, and submitted, without any
+speech. The High Steward [Hardwicke] then made his, very long and very
+poor, with only one or two good passages; and then pronounced sentence!
+
+Great intercession is made for the two Earls: Duke Hamilton, who has
+never been at Court, designs to kiss the King's hand, and ask Lord
+Kilmarnock's life. The King is much inclined to some mercy; but the
+Duke, who has not so much of Caesar after a victory, as in gaining it,
+is for the utmost severity. It was lately proposed in the city to
+present him with the freedom of some company; one of the aldermen said
+aloud, "Then let it be of the _Butchers_!"[1] The Scotch and his Royal
+Highness are not at all guarded in their expressions of each other. When
+he went to Edinburgh, in his pursuit of the rebels, they would not
+admit his guards, alleging that it was contrary to their privileges; but
+they rode in, sword in hand; and the Duke, very justly incensed, refused
+to see any of the magistrates. He came with the utmost expedition to
+town, in order for Flanders; but found that the Court of Vienna had
+already sent Prince Charles thither, without the least notification, at
+which both King and Duke are greatly offended. When the latter waited on
+his brother, the Prince carried him into a room that hangs over the wall
+of St. James's Park, and stood there with his arm about his neck, to
+charm the gazing mob.
+
+[Footnote 1: "The Duke," says Sir Walter Scott, "was received with all
+the honours due to conquest; and all the incorporated bodies of the
+capital, from the Guild brethren to the Butchers, desired the acceptance
+of the freedom of their craft, or corporation." Billy the Butcher was
+one of his by-names.]
+
+Murray, the Pretender's secretary, has made ample confessions: the Earl
+of Traquair, and Mr. Barry, a physician, are apprehended, and more
+warrants are out; so much for rebels! Your friend, Lord Sandwich, is
+instantly going ambassador to Holland, to pray the Dutch to build more
+ships. I have received yours of July 19th, but you see have no more room
+left, only to say, that I conceive a good idea of my eagle, though the
+seal is a bad one. Adieu!
+
+P.S.--I have not room to say anything to the Tesi till next post; but,
+unless she will sing gratis, would advise her to drop this thought.
+
+
+_THE BATTLE OF RANCOUX._
+
+TO SIR HORACE MANN.
+
+ARLINGTON STREET, _Oct._ 14, 1746.
+
+You will have been alarmed with the news of another battle lost in
+Flanders, where we have no Kings of Sardinia. We make light of it; do
+not allow it to be a battle, but call it "the action near Liege." Then
+we have whittled down our loss extremely, and will not allow a man more
+than three hundred and fifty English slain out of the four thousand. The
+whole of it, as it appears to me, is, that we gave up eight battalions
+to avoid fighting; as at Newmarket people pay their forfeit when they
+foresee they should lose the race; though, if the whole army had fought,
+and we had lost the day, one might have hoped to have come off for eight
+battalions. Then they tell you that the French had
+four-and-twenty-pounders, and that they must beat us by the superiority
+of their cannon; so that to me it is grown a paradox, to war with a
+nation who have a mathematical certainty of beating you; or else it is
+still a stranger paradox, why you cannot have as large cannon as the
+French.[1] This loss was balanced by a pompous account of the triumphs
+of our invasion of Bretagne; which, in plain terms, I think, is reduced
+to burning two or three villages and reimbarking: at least, two or three
+of the transports are returned with this history, and know not what is
+become of Lestock and the rest of the invasion. The young Pretender is
+landed in France, with thirty Scotch, but in such a wretched condition
+that his Highland Highness had no breeches.
+
+[Footnote 1: Marshal Saxe had inspired his army with confidence that a
+day of battle was sure to be a day of victory, as was shown by the
+theatrical company which accompanied the camp. After the performance on
+the evening of October 10th the leading actress announced that there
+would be no performance on the morrow, because there was to be a battle,
+but on the 12th the company would have the honour of presenting "The
+Village Clock." (See the Editor's "France under the Bourbons," iii.
+26.)]
+
+I have received yours of the 27th of last month, with the capitulation
+of Genoa, and the kind conduct of the Austrians to us their allies, so
+extremely like their behaviour whenever they are fortunate. Pray, by the
+way, has there been any talk of my cousin, the Commodore, being
+blameable in letting slip some Spanish ships?--don't mention it as from
+me, but there are whispers of court-martial on him. They are all the
+fashion now; if you miss a post to me, I will have you tried by a
+court-martial. Cope is come off most gloriously, his courage
+ascertained, and even his conduct, which everybody had given up,
+justified. Folkes and Lascelles, two of his generals, are come off too;
+but not so happily in the opinion of the world. Oglethorpe's sentence is
+not yet public, but it is believed not to be favourable. He was always a
+bully, and is now tried for cowardice. Some little dash of the same sort
+is likely to mingle with the judgment on _il furibondo_ Matthews; though
+his party rises again a little, and Lestock's acquittal begins to pass
+for a party affair. In short, we are a wretched people, and have seen
+our best days!
+
+I must have lost a letter, if you really told me of the sale of the
+Duke of Modena's pictures, as you think you did; for when Mr. Chute told
+it me, it struck me as quite new. They are out of town, good souls; and
+I shall not see them this fortnight; for I am here only for two or three
+days, to inquire after the battle, in which not one of my friends were.
+Adieu!
+
+
+_ON CONWAY'S VERSES--NO SCOTCH_MAN_ IS CAPABLE OF SUCH DELICACY OF
+THOUGHT, THOUGH A SCOTCHWOMAN MAY BE--AKENSIDE'S, ARMSTRONG'S, AND
+GLOVER'S POEMS._
+
+TO THE HON. H.S. CONWAY.
+
+WINDSOR, _Oct._ 24, 1746.
+
+Well, Harry, Scotland is the last place on earth I should have thought
+of for turning anybody poet: but I begin to forgive it half its treasons
+in favour of your verses, for I suppose you don't think I am the dupe of
+the Highland story that you tell me: the only use I shall make of it is
+to commend the lines to you, as if they really were a Scotchman's. There
+is a melancholy harmony in them that is charming, and a delicacy in the
+thoughts that no Scotchman is capable of, though a _Scotchwoman_ might
+inspire it.[1] I beg, both for Cynthia's sake and my own, that you
+would continue your De Tristibus till I have an opportunity of seeing
+your muse, and she of rewarding her: _Reprens la musette, berger
+amoureux_! If Cynthia has ever travelled ten miles in fairy-land, she
+must be wondrous content with the person and qualifications of her
+knight, who in future story will be read of thus: Elmedorus was tall and
+perfectly well made, his face oval, and features regularly handsome, but
+not effeminate; his complexion sentimentally brown, with not much
+colour; his teeth fine, and forehead agreeably low, round which his
+black hair curled naturally and beautifully. His eyes were black too,
+but had nothing of fierce or insolent; on the contrary, a certain
+melancholy swimmingness, that described hopeless love rather than a
+natural amorous languish. His exploits in war, where he always fought by
+the side of the renowned Paladine William of England, have endeared his
+memory to all admirers of true chivalry, as the mournful elegies which
+he poured out among the desert rocks of Caledonia in honour of the
+peerless lady and his heart's idol, the incomparable Cynthia, will for
+ever preserve his name in the flowery annals of poesy.
+
+[Footnote 1: Walpole could not foresee the genius of Burns, that before
+his own death was to shed such glory on Scotland. His compliment to a
+Scotchwoman was an allusion to Lady Aylesbury (_née_ Miss Caroline
+Campbell), whom Conway married after her husband's death, which took
+place a few months after the date of this letter. Lady Aylesbury was no
+poetess, but his estimate of what might be accomplished by Scotch ladies
+was afterwards fully borne out by Lady Anne Lindsay, the authoress of
+"Auld Gray," and Lady Nairn.]
+
+What a pity it is I was not born in the golden age of Louis the
+Fourteenth, when it was not only the fashion to write folios, but to
+read them too! or rather, it is a pity the same fashion don't subsist
+now, when one need not be at the trouble of invention, nor of turning
+the whole Roman history into romance for want of proper heroes. Your
+campaign in Scotland, rolled out and well be-epitheted, would make a
+pompous work, and make one's fortune; at sixpence a number, one should
+have all the damsels within the liberties for subscribers: whereas now,
+if one has a mind to be read, one must write metaphysical poems in blank
+verse, which, though I own to be still easier, have not half the
+imagination of romances, and are dull without any agreeable absurdity.
+Only think of the gravity of this wise age, that have exploded
+"Cleopatra and Pharamond," and approve "The Pleasures of the
+Imagination," "The Art of Preserving Health," and "Leonidas!" I beg the
+age's pardon: it has done approving these poems, and has forgot them.
+
+Adieu! dear Harry. Thank you seriously for the poem. I am going to town
+for the birthday, and shall return hither till the Parliament meets; I
+suppose there is no doubt of our meeting then.
+
+Yours ever.
+
+P.S.--Now you are at Stirling, if you should meet with Drummond's
+History of the five King Jameses, pray look it over. I have lately read
+it, and like it much. It is wrote in imitation of Livy; the style
+masculine, and the whole very sensible; only he ascribes the misfortunes
+of one reign to the then king's loving architecture and
+
+    In trim gardens taking pleasure.
+
+
+_HE HAS BOUGHT STRAWBERRY HILL._
+
+TO THE HON. H.S. CONWAY.
+
+TWICKENHAM, _June_ 8, 1747.
+
+You perceive by my date that I am got into a new camp, and have left my
+tub at Windsor. It is a little plaything-house that I got out of Mrs.
+Chenevix's shop, and is the prettiest bauble you ever saw. It is set in
+enamelled meadows, with filigree hedges:
+
+    A small Euphrates through the piece is told,
+    And little finches wave their wings in gold.
+
+Two delightful roads, that you would call dusty, supply me continually
+with coaches and chaises: barges as solemn as Barons of the Exchequer
+move under my window; Richmond Hill and Ham walks bound my prospect;
+but, thank God! the Thames is between me and the Duchess of Queensberry.
+Dowagers as plenty as flounders inhabit all around, and Pope's ghost is
+just now skimming under my window by a most poetical moonlight. I have
+about land enough to keep such a farm as Noah's, when he set up in the
+ark with a pair of each kind; but my cottage is rather cleaner than I
+believe his was after they had been cooped up together forty days. The
+Chenevixes had tricked it out for themselves: up two pair of stairs is
+what they call Mr. Chenevix's library, furnished with three maps, one
+shelf, a bust of Sir Isaac Newton, and a lame telescope without any
+glasses. Lord John Sackville _predecessed_ me here, and instituted
+certain games called _cricketalia_, which have been celebrated this
+very evening in honour of him in a neighbouring meadow.
+
+You will think I have removed my philosophy from Windsor with my
+tea-things hither; for I am writing to you in all this tranquillity,
+while a Parliament is bursting about my ears. You know it is going to be
+dissolved: I am told, you are taken care of, though I don't know where,
+nor whether anybody that chooses you will quarrel with me because he
+does choose you, as that little bug the Marquis of Rockingham did; one
+of the calamities of my life which I have bore as abominably well as I
+do most about which I don't care. They say the Prince has taken up two
+hundred thousand pounds, to carry elections which he won't carry:--he
+had much better have saved it to buy the Parliament after it is chosen.
+A new set of peers are in embryo, to add more dignity to the silence of
+the House of Lords.
+
+I made no remarks on your campaign, because, as you say, you do nothing
+at all; which, though very proper nutriment for a thinking head, does
+not do quite so well to write upon. If any one of you can but contrive
+to be shot upon your post, it is all we desire, shall look upon it as a
+great curiosity, and will take care to set up a monument to the person
+so slain; as we are doing by vote to Captain Cornewall, who was killed
+at the beginning of the action in the Mediterranean four years ago. In
+the present dearth of glory, he is canonized; though, poor man! he had
+been tried twice the year before for cowardice.
+
+I could tell you much election news, none else; though not being
+thoroughly attentive to so important a subject, as to be sure one ought
+to be, I might now and then mistake, and give you a candidate for Durham
+in place of one for Southampton, or name the returning officer instead
+of the candidate. In general, I believe, it is much as usual--those sold
+in detail that afterwards will be sold in the representation--the
+ministers bribing Jacobites to choose friends of their own--the name of
+well-wishers to the present establishment, and patriots outbidding
+ministers that they may make the better market of their own
+patriotism:--in short, all England, under some name or other, is just
+now to be bought and sold; though, whenever we become posterity and
+forefathers, we shall be in high repute for wisdom and virtue. My
+great-great-grandchildren will figure me with a white beard down to my
+girdle; and Mr. Pitt's will believe him unspotted enough to have walked
+over nine hundred hot ploughshares, without hurting the sole of his
+foot. How merry my ghost will be, and shake its ears to hear itself
+quoted as a person of consummate prudence! Adieu, dear Harry!
+
+Yours ever.
+
+
+_HIS MODE OF LIFE--PLANTING--PROPHECIES OF NEW METHODS AND NEW
+DISCOVERIES IN A FUTURE GENERATION._
+
+TO THE HON. H.S. CONWAY.
+
+STRAWBERRY HILL, _Aug._ 29, 1748.
+
+Dear Harry,--Whatever you may think, a campaign at Twickenham furnishes
+as little matter for a letter as an abortive one in Flanders. I can't
+say indeed that my generals wear black wigs, but they have long
+full-bottomed hoods which cover as little entertainment to the full.
+
+[Illustration: STRAWBERRY HILL, FROM THE SOUTH EAST.]
+
+There's General my Lady Castlecomer, and General my Lady Dowager Ferris!
+Why, do you think I can extract more out of them than you can out of
+Hawley or Honeywood? Your old women dress, go to the Duke's levée, see
+that the soldiers cock their hats right, sleep after dinner, and soak
+with their led-captains till bed-time, and tell a thousand lies of what
+they never did in their youth. Change hats for head-clothes, the rounds
+for visits, and led-captains for toad-eaters, and the life is the very
+same. In short, these are the people I live in the midst of, though not
+with; and it is for want of more important histories that I have wrote
+to you seldom; not, I give you my word, from the least negligence. My
+present and sole occupation is planting, in which I have made great
+progress and talked very learnedly with the nurserymen, except that now
+and then a lettuce run to seed overturns all my botany, as I have more
+than once taken it for a curious West Indian flowering shrub. Then the
+deliberation with which trees grow, is extremely inconvenient to my
+natural impatience. I lament living in so barbarous an age, when we are
+come to so little perfection in gardening. I am persuaded that a hundred
+and fifty years hence it will be as common to remove oaks a hundred and
+fifty years old, as it is now to transplant tulip roots.[1] I have even
+begun a treatise or panegyric on the great discoveries made by posterity
+in all arts and sciences, wherein I shall particularly descant on the
+great and cheap convenience of making trout-rivers--one of the
+improvements which Mrs. Kerwood wondered Mr. Hedges would not make at
+his country-house, but which was not then quite so common as it will be.
+I shall talk of a secret for roasting a wild boar and a whole pack of
+hounds alive, without hurting them, so that the whole chase may be
+brought up to table; and for this secret, the Duke of Newcastle's
+grandson, if he can ever get a son, is to give a hundred thousand
+pounds. Then the delightfulness of having whole groves of humming-birds,
+tame tigers taught to fetch and carry, pocket spying-glasses to see
+all that is doing in China, with a thousand other toys, which we now
+look upon as impracticable, and which pert posterity would laugh in
+one's face for staring at, while they are offering rewards for
+perfecting discoveries, of the principles of which we have not the least
+conception! If ever this book should come forth, I must expect to have
+all the learned in arms against me, who measure all knowledge backward:
+some of them have discovered symptoms of all arts in Homer; and
+Pineda,[2] had so much faith in the accomplishments of his ancestors,
+that he believed Adam understood all sciences but politics. But as these
+great champions for our forefathers are dead, and Boileau not alive to
+hitch me into a verse with Perrault, I am determined to admire the
+learning of posterity, especially being convinced that half our present
+knowledge sprung from discovering the errors of what had formerly been
+called so. I don't think I shall ever make any great discoveries myself,
+and therefore shall be content to propose them to my descendants, like
+my Lord Bacon,[3] who, as Dr. Shaw says very prettily in his preface to
+Boyle, "had the art of inventing arts:" or rather like a Marquis of
+Worcester, of whom I have seen a little book which he calls "A Century
+of Inventions,"[4] where he has set down a hundred machines to do
+impossibilities with, and not a single direction how to make the
+machines themselves.
+
+[Footnote 1: It is worth noting that these predictions that "it will be
+common to remove oaks a hundred and fifty years old" has been verified
+many years since; at least, if not in the case of oaks, in that of large
+elms and ashtrees. In 1850 Mr. Paxton offered to a Committee of the
+House of Commons to undertake to remove the large elm which was standing
+on the ground proposed for the Crystal Palace of the Exhibition of 1851,
+and his master, the Duke of Devonshire, has since that time removed many
+trees of very large size from one part of his grounds to another; and
+similarly the "making of trout rivers" has been carried out in many
+places, even in our most distant colonies, by Mr. Buckland's method of
+raising the young fish from roe in boxes and distributing them in places
+where they were needed.]
+
+[Footnote 2: Pineda was a Spanish Jesuit of the seventeenth century, and
+a voluminous writer.]
+
+[Footnote 3: It is a singular thing that this most eminent man should be
+so constantly spoken of by a title which he never had. His first title
+in the peerage was Baron Verulam; his second, on a subsequent promotion,
+was Viscount St. Albans; yet the error is as old as Dryden, and is
+defended by Lord Macaulay in a sentence of pre-eminent absurdity:
+"Posterity has felt that the greatest of English philosophers could
+derive no accession of dignity from any title which power could bestow,
+and, in defiance of letters-patent, has obstinately refused to degrade
+Francis Bacon into Viscount St. Albans." But, without stopping to
+discuss the propriety of representing a Britiph peerage, honestly
+earned, and, in his case as Lord Chancellor, necessarily conferred, as a
+"degradation," the mistake made is not that of continuing to call him
+Francis Bacon, a name by which at one time he was known, but that of
+calling him "Lord Bacon," a title by which he was never known for a
+single moment in his lifetime; while, if a great philosopher was really
+"degraded" by a peerage, it is hard to see how the degradation would
+have been lessened by the title being Lord Bacon, which it was not,
+rather than Viscount St. Albans, which it was.]
+
+[Footnote 4: The "Biographie Universelle" (art. _Newcomen_) says of the
+Marquis: "Longtemps avant lui [Neucomen] on avait remarqué la grande
+force expansive de la vapeur, et on avait imaginé de l'employer comme
+puissance. On trouve déja cetté application proposée et même executée
+dans un ouvrage publié en 1663, par le Marquis de Worcester, sous le
+titre bizarre, 'A Century of Inventions.'"]
+
+If I happen to be less punctual in my correspondence than I intend to
+be, you must conclude I am writing my book, which being designed for a
+panegyric, will cost me a great deal of trouble. The dedication with
+your leave, shall be addressed to your son that is coming, or, with Lady
+Ailesbury's leave, to your ninth son, who will be unborn nearer to the
+time I am writing of; always provided that she does not bring three at
+once, like my Lady Berkeley.
+
+Well! I have here set you the example of writing nonsense when one has
+nothing to say, and shall take it ill if you don't keep up the
+correspondence on the same foot. Adieu!
+
+
+_REJOICINGS FOR THE PEACE--MASQUERADE AT RANELAGH--MEETING OF THE
+PRINCES PARTY AND THE JACOBITES--PREVALENCE OF DRINKING AND
+GAMBLING--WHITEFIELD._
+
+TO SIR HORACE MANN.
+
+STRAWBERRY HILL, _May_ 3, 1749.
+
+I am come hither for a few days, to repose myself after a torrent of
+diversions, and am writing to you in my charming bow-window with a
+tranquillity and satisfaction which, I fear, I am grown old enough to
+prefer to the hurry of amusements, in which the whole world has lived
+for this last week. We have at last celebrated the Peace, and that as
+much in extremes as we generally do everything, whether we have reason
+to be glad or sorry, pleased or angry. Last Tuesday it was proclaimed:
+the King did not go to St. Paul's, but at night the whole town was
+illuminated. The next day was what was called "a jubilee-masquerade in
+the Venetian manner" at Ranelagh: it had nothing Venetian in it, but was
+by far the best understood and the prettiest spectacle I ever saw:
+nothing in a fairy tale ever surpassed it. One of the proprietors, who
+is a German, and belongs to Court, had got my Lady Yarmouth to persuade
+the King to order it. It began at three o'clock, and, about five, people
+of fashion began to go. When you entered, you found the whole garden
+filled with masks and spread with tents, which remained all night _very
+commodely_. In one quarter, was a May-pole dressed with garlands, and
+people dancing round it to a tabor and pipe and rustic music, all
+masqued, as were all the various bands of music that were disposed in
+different parts of the garden; some like huntsmen with French horns,
+some like peasants, and a troop of harlequins and scaramouches in the
+little open temple on the mount. On the canal was a sort of gondola,
+adorned with flags and streamers, and filled with music, rowing about.
+All round the outside of the amphitheatre were shops, filled with
+Dresden china, japan, &c., and all the shopkeepers in mask. The
+amphitheatre was illuminated; and in the middle was a circular bower,
+composed of all kinds of firs in tubs, from twenty to thirty feet high:
+under them orange-trees, with small lamps in each orange, and below them
+all sorts of the finest auriculas in pots; and festoons of natural
+flowers hanging from tree to tree. Between the arches too were firs, and
+smaller ones in the balconies above. There were booths for tea and wine,
+gaming-tables and dancing, and about two thousand persons. In short, it
+pleased me more than anything I ever saw. It is to be once more, and
+probably finer as to dresses, as there has since been a subscription
+masquerade, and people will go in their rich habits. The next day were
+the fireworks, which by no means answered the expense, the length of
+preparation, and the expectation that had been raised; indeed, for a
+week before, the town was like a country fair, the streets filled from
+morning to night, scaffolds building wherever you could or could not
+see, and coaches arriving from every corner of the kingdom. This hurry
+and lively scene, with the sight of the immense crowd in the Park and on
+every house, the guards, and the machine itself, which was very
+beautiful, was all that was worth seeing. The rockets, and whatever was
+thrown up into the air, succeeded mighty well; but the wheels, and all
+that was to compose the principal part, were pitiful and ill-conducted,
+with no changes of coloured fires and shapes: the illumination was mean,
+and lighted so slowly that scarce anybody had patience to wait the
+finishing; and then, what contributed to the awkwardness of the whole,
+was the right pavilion catching fire, and being burnt down in the middle
+of the show. The King, the Duke, and Princess Emily saw it from the
+Library, with their courts: the Prince and Princess, with their
+children, from Lady Middlesex's; no place being provided for them, nor
+any invitation given to the library. The Lords and Commons had galleries
+built for them and the chief citizens along the rails of the Mall: the
+Lords had four tickets a-piece, and each Commoner, at first, but two,
+till the Speaker bounced and obtained a third. Very little mischief was
+done, and but two persons killed: at Paris, there were forty killed and
+near three hundred wounded, by a dispute between the French and Italians
+in the management, who, quarrelling for precedence in lighting the
+fires, both lighted at once and blew up the whole. Our mob was extremely
+tranquil, and very unlike those I remember in my father's time, when it
+was a measure in the Opposition to work up everything to mischief, the
+Excise and the French players, the Convention and the Gin Act. We are as
+much now in the opposite extreme, and in general so pleased with the
+peace, that I could not help being struck with a passage I read lately
+in Pasquier, an old French author, who says, "that in the time of
+Francis I. the French used to call their creditors 'Des Anglois,' from
+the facility with which the English gave credit to them in all treaties,
+though they had broken so many." On Saturday we had a serenta at the
+Opera-house, called Peace in Europe, but it was a wretched performance.
+On Monday there was a subscription masquerade, much fuller than that of
+last year, but not so agreeable or so various in dresses. The King was
+well disguised in an old-fashioned English habit, and much pleased with
+somebody who desired him to hold their cup as they were drinking tea.
+The Duke had a dress of the same kind, but was so immensely corpulent
+that he looked like Cacofogo, the drunken captain, in "Rule a Wife and
+have a Wife." The Duchess of Richmond was a Lady Mayoress in the time of
+James I.; and Lord Delawarr, Queen Elizabeth's porter, from a picture in
+the guard-chamber at Kensington: they were admirable masks. Lord
+Rochford, Miss Evelyn, Miss Bishop, Lady Stafford, and Mrs. Pitt, were
+in vast beauty; particularly the last, who had a red veil, which made
+her look gloriously handsome. I forgot Lady Kildare. Mr. Conway was the
+Duke in "Don Quixote," and the finest figure I ever saw. Miss Chudleigh
+was Iphigenia, but so naked that you would have taken her for Andromeda;
+and Lady Betty Smithson [Seymour] had such a pyramid of baubles upon her
+head, that she was exactly the Princess of Babylon in Grammont.
+
+You will conclude that, after all these diversions, people begin to
+think of going out of town--no such matter: the Parliament continues
+sitting, and will till the middle of June; Lord Egmont told us we should
+sit till Michaelmas. There are many private bills, no public ones of any
+fame. We were to have had some chastisement for Oxford, where, besides
+the late riots, the famous Dr. King,[1] the Pretender's great agent,
+made a most violent speech at the opening of the Ratcliffe Library. The
+ministry denounced judgment, but, in their old style, have grown
+frightened, and dropped it. However, this menace gave occasion to a
+meeting and union between the Prince's party and the Jacobites which
+Lord Egmont has been labouring all the winter. They met at the St.
+Alban's tavern, near Pall Mall, last Monday morning, a hundred and
+twelve Lords and Commoners. The Duke of Beaufort opened the assembly
+with a panegyric on the stand that had been made this winter against so
+corrupt an administration, and hoped it would continue, and desired
+harmony. Lord Egmont seconded this strongly, and begged they would come
+up to Parliament early next winter. Lord Oxford spoke next; and then
+Potter with great humour, and to the great abashment of the Jacobites,
+said he was very glad to see this union, and from thence hoped, that if
+another attack like the last Rebellion should be made on the Royal
+Family, they would all stand by them. No reply was made to this. Then
+Sir Watkyn Williams spoke, Sir Francis Dashwood,[2] and Tom Pitt, and
+the meeting broke up. I don't know what this coalition may produce: it
+will require time with no better heads than compose it at present,
+though the great Mr. Dodington had carried to the conference the
+assistance of his. In France a very favourable event has happened for
+us, the disgrace of Maurepas,[3] one of our bitterest enemies, and the
+greatest promoter of their marine. Just at the beginning of the war, in
+a very critical period, he had obtained a very large sum for that
+service, but which one of the other factions, lest he should gain glory
+and credit by it, got to be suddenly given away to the King of Prussia.
+
+[Footnote 1: Dr. King was Principal of St. Mary's Hall, Oxford, and one
+of the chief supports of the Jacobite party after 1745.]
+
+[Footnote 2: Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1761, through the influence
+of the Earl of Bute. He was the owner of Medmenham Abbey, on the Thames,
+and as such, the President of the profligate Club whose doings were made
+notorious by the proceedings against Wilkes, and who, in compliment to
+him, called themselves the Franciscans.]
+
+[Footnote 3: The Comte de Maurepas was the grandson of the Chancellor of
+France, M. de Pontchartrain. When only fourteen years old Louis had made
+him Secretary of State for the Marine, as a consolation to his
+grandfather for his dismissal; and he continued in office till the
+accession of Louis XVI., when he was appointed Prime Minister. He was
+not a man of any statesmanlike ability; but Lacretelle ascribes to him
+"les graces d'un esprit aimable et frivole qui avait le don d'amuser un
+vieillard toujours porté à un elegant badinage" (ii. 53); and in a
+subsequent letter speaks of him as a man of very lively powers of
+conversation.]
+
+Sir Charles Williams[1] is appointed envoy to this last King: here is an
+epigram which he has just sent over on Lord Egmont's opposition to the
+Mutiny Bill:
+
+    Why has Lord Egmont 'gainst this bill
+    So much declamatory skill
+       So tediously exerted?
+    The reason's plain: but t'other day
+    He mutinied himself for pay,
+       And he has twice deserted.
+
+[Footnote 1: Sir Charles Hanbury Williams had represented Monmouth in
+Parliament, but in 1744 was sent as ambassador to Berlin, and from
+thence to St. Petersburg. He was more celebrated in the fashionable
+world as the author of lyrical odes of a lively character.]
+
+I must tell you a _bon-mot_ that was made the other night at the
+serenata of "Peace in Europe" by Wall,[1] who is much in fashion, and a
+kind of Gondomar. Grossatesta, the Modenese minister, a very low fellow,
+with all the jackpuddinghood of an Italian, asked, "Mais qui est ce qui
+représente mon maître?" Wall replied, "Mais, mon Dieu! L'abbé, ne sçavez
+vous pas que ce n'est pas un opéra boufon?" and here is another
+_bon-mot_ of my Lady Townshend: we were talking of Methodists; somebody
+said, "Pray, Madam, is it true that Whitfield[2] has _recanted_?" "No,
+sir, he has only _canted_."
+
+[Footnote 1: General Wall was the Spanish ambassador, as Gondomar had
+been in the reign of James I.]
+
+[Footnote 2: Whitefield, while an undergraduate at Oxford, joined
+Wesley, who had recently founded a sect which soon became known as the
+Methodists. But, after a time, Whitefield, who was of a less moderate
+temper than Wesley, adopted the views known as Calvinistic, and,
+breaking off from the Wesleyans, established a sect more rigid and less
+friendly to the Church.]
+
+If you ever think of returning to England, as I hope it will be long
+first, you must prepare yourself with Methodism. I really believe that
+by that time it will be necessary: this sect increases as fast as almost
+ever any religious nonsense did. Lady Fanny Shirley has chosen this way
+of bestowing the dregs of her beauty; and Mr. Lyttelton is very near
+making the same sacrifice of the dregs of all those various characters
+that he has worn. The Methodists love your big sinners, as proper
+subjects to work upon--and indeed they have a plentiful harvest--I think
+what you call flagrancy was never more in fashion. Drinking is at the
+highest wine-mark; and gaming joined with it so violent, that at the
+last Newmarket meeting, in the rapidity of both, a bank-bill was thrown
+down, and nobody immediately claiming it, they agreed to give it to a
+man that was standing by....
+
+
+_EARTHQUAKE IN LONDON--GENERAL PANIC--MARRIAGE OF CASIMIR, KING OF
+POLAND._
+
+TO SIR HORACE MANN.
+
+ARLINGTON STREET, _March_ 11, 1750.
+
+    Portents and prodigies are grown so frequent,
+    That they have lost their name.
+
+My text is not literally true; but as far as earthquakes go towards
+lowering the price of wonderful commodities, to be sure we are
+overstocked. We have had a second, much more violent than the first; and
+you must not be surprised if by next post you hear of a burning mountain
+sprung up in Smithfield. In the night between Wednesday and Thursday
+last (exactly a month since the first shock), the earth had a shivering
+fit between one and two; but so slight that, if no more had followed, I
+don't believe it would have been noticed. I had been awake, and had
+scarce dozed again--on a sudden I felt my bolster lift up my head; I
+thought somebody was getting from under my bed, but soon found it was a
+strong earthquake, that lasted near half a minute, with a violent
+vibration and great roaring. I rang my bell; my servant came in,
+frightened out of his senses: in an instant we heard all the windows in
+the neighbourhood flung up. I got up and found people running into the
+streets, but saw no mischief done: there has been some; two old houses
+flung down, several chimneys, and much chinaware. The bells rung in
+several houses. Admiral Knowles, who has lived long in Jamaica, and felt
+seven there, says this was more violent than any of them: Francesco
+prefers it to the dreadful one at Leghorn. The wise say,[1] that if we
+have not rain soon, we shall certainly have more. Several people are
+going out of town, for it has nowhere reached above ten miles from
+London: they say, they are not frightened, but that it is such fine
+weather, "Lord! one can't help going into the country!" The only visible
+effect it has had, was on the Ridotto, at which, being the following
+night, there were but four hundred people. A parson, who came into
+White's the morning of earthquake the first, and heard bets laid on
+whether it was an earthquake or the blowing up of powder mills, went
+away exceedingly scandalized, and said, "I protest, they are such an
+impious set of people, that I believe if the last trumpet was to sound,
+they would bet puppet-show against Judgment." If we get any nearer
+still to the torrid zone, I shall pique myself on sending you a present
+of cedrati and orange-flower water: I am already planning a _terreno_
+for Strawberry Hill.
+
+[Footnote 1: In an earlier letter Walpole mentions that Sir I. Newton
+had foretold a great alteration in the English climate in 1750.]
+
+The Middlesex election is carried against the Court: the Prince, in a
+green frock (and I won't swear, but in a Scotch plaid waistcoat), sat
+under the Park-wall in his chair, and hallooed the voters on to
+Brentford. The Jacobites are so transported, that they are opening
+subscriptions for all boroughs that shall be vacant--this is wise! They
+will spend their money to carry a few more seats in a Parliament where
+they will never have the majority, and so have none to carry the general
+elections. The omen, however, is bad for Westminster; the High Bailiff
+went to vote for the Opposition.
+
+I now jump to another topic; I find all this letter will be detached
+scraps; I can't at all contrive to hide the seams: but I don't care. I
+began my letter merely to tell you of the earthquake, and I don't pique
+myself upon doing any more than telling you what you would be glad to
+have told you. I told you too how pleased I was with the triumphs of
+another old beauty, our friend the Princess. Do you know, I have found a
+history that has great resemblance to hers; that is, that will be very
+like hers, if hers is but like it. I will tell it you in as few words as
+I can. Madame la Maréchale l'Hôpital was the daughter of a seamstress; a
+young gentleman fell in love with her, and was going to be married to
+her, but the match was broken off. An old fermier-general, who had
+retired into the province where this happened, hearing the story, had a
+curiosity to see the victim; he liked her, married her, died, and left
+her enough not to care for her inconstant. She came to Paris, where the
+Maréchal de l'Hôpital married her for her riches. After the Maréchal's
+death, Casimir, the abdicated King of Poland, who was retired into
+France, fell in love with the Maréchale, and privately married her. If
+the event ever happens, I shall certainly travel to Nancy, to hear her
+talk of _ma belle fille la Reine de France_. What pains my Lady Pomfret
+would take to prove that an abdicated King's wife did not take place of
+an English countess; and how the Princess herself would grow still
+fonder of the Pretender for the similitude of his fortune with that of
+_le Roi mon mari_! Her daughter, Mirepoix, was frightened the other
+night, with Mrs. Nugent's calling out, _un voleur! un voleur_! The
+ambassadress had heard so much of robbing, that she did not doubt but
+_dans ce pais cy_, they robbed in the middle of an assembly. It turned
+out to be a _thief in the candle_! Good night!
+
+
+GENERAL PANIC--SHERLOCK'S PASTORAL LETTER--PREDICTIONS OF MORE
+EARTHQUAKES--A GENERAL FLIGHT FROM LONDON--EPIGRAMS BY CHUTE AND WALPOLE
+HIMSELF--FRENCH TRANSLATION OF MILTON.
+
+TO SIR HORACE MANN.
+
+ARLINGTON STREET, _April_ 2, 1750.
+
+You will not wonder so much at our earthquakes as at the effects they
+have had. All the women in town have taken them up upon the foot of
+_Judgments_; and the clergy, who have had no windfalls of a long season,
+have driven horse and foot into this opinion. There has been a shower of
+sermons and exhortations: Seeker, the Jesuitical Bishop of Oxford, began
+the mode. He heard the women were all going out of town to avoid the
+next shock; and so, for fear of losing his Easter offerings, he set
+himself to advise them to await God's good pleasure in fear and
+trembling. But what is more astonishing, Sherlock, who has much better
+sense, and much less of the Popish confessor, has been running a race
+with him for the old ladies, and has written a pastoral letter, of which
+ten thousand were sold in two days; and fifty thousand have been
+subscribed for, since the two first editions.
+
+I told you the women talked of going out of town: several families are
+literally gone, and many more going to-day and to-morrow; for what adds
+to the absurdity, is, that the second shock having happened exactly a
+month after the former, it prevails that there will be a third on
+Thursday next, another month, which is to swallow up London. I am almost
+ready to burn my letter now I have begun it, lest you should think I am
+laughing at you: but it is so true, that Arthur of White's told me last
+night, that he should put off the last ridotto, which was to be on
+Thursday, because he hears nobody would come to it. I have advised
+several, who are going to keep their next earthquake in the country, to
+take the bark for it, as it is so periodic.[1] Dick Leveson and Mr.
+Rigby, who had supped and stayed late at Bedford House the other night,
+knocked at several doors, and in a watchman's voice cried, "Past four
+o'clock, and a dreadful earthquake!"...
+
+[Footnote 1: "I remember," says Addison, in the 240th _Tatler_, "when
+our whole island was shaken with an earthquake some years ago, that
+there was an impudent mountebank who sold pills, which, as he told the
+country people, were 'very good against an earthquake.'"]
+
+This frantic terror prevails so much, that within these three days seven
+hundred and thirty coaches have been counted passing Hyde Park corner,
+with whole parties removing into the country. Here is a good
+advertisement which I cut out of the papers to-day:--
+
+     "On Monday next will be published (price 6_d._) A true and exact
+     List of all the Nobility and Gentry who have left, or shall leave,
+     this place through fear of another Earthquake."
+
+Several women have made earthquake gowns; that is, warm gowns to sit out
+of doors all to-night. These are of the more courageous. One woman,
+still more heroic, is come to town on purpose: she says, all her friends
+are in London, and she will not survive them. But what will you think of
+Lady Catherine Pelham, Lady Frances Arundel, and Lord and Lady Galway,
+who go this evening to an inn ten miles out of town, where they are to
+play at brag till five in the morning, and then come back--I suppose, to
+look for the bones of their husbands and families under the rubbish. The
+prophet of all this (next to the Bishop of London) is a trooper of Lord
+Delawar's, who was yesterday sent to Bedlam. His _colonel_ sent to the
+man's wife, and asked her if her husband had ever been disordered
+before. She cried, "Oh dear! my lord, he is not mad now; if your
+_lordship_ would but get any _sensible_ man to examine him, you would
+find he is quite in his right mind."...
+
+I shall now go and show you Mr. Chute in a different light from
+heraldry, and in one in which I believe you never saw him. He will shine
+as usual; but, as a little more severely than his good-nature is
+accustomed to, I must tell you that he was provoked by the most
+impertinent usage. It is an epigram on Lady Caroline Petersham, whose
+present fame, by the way, is coupled with young Harry Vane.
+
+    WHO IS THIS?
+
+    Her face has beauty, we must all confess,
+    But beauty on the brink of ugliness:
+    Her mouth's a rabbit feeding on a rose;
+    With eyes--ten times too good for such a nose!
+    Her blooming cheeks--what paint could ever draw 'em?
+    That paint, for which no mortal ever saw 'em.
+    Air without shape--of royal race divine--
+    'Tis Emily--oh! fie!--'tis Caroline.
+
+Do but think of my beginning a third sheet! but as the Parliament is
+rising, and I shall probably not write you a tolerably long letter again
+these eight months, I will lay in a stock of merit with you to last me
+so long. Mr. Chute has set me too upon making epigrams; but as I have
+not his art mine is almost a copy of verses: the story he told me, and
+is literally true, of an old Lady Bingley:
+
+    Celia now had completed some thirty campaigns,
+    And for new generations was hammering chains;
+    When whetting those terrible weapons, her eyes,
+    To Jenny, her handmaid, in anger she cries,
+    "Careless creature! did mortal e'er see such a glass!
+    Who that saw me in this, could e'er guess what I was!
+    Much you mind what I say! pray how oft have I bid you
+    Provide me a new one? how oft have I chid you?"
+    "Lord, Madam!" cried Jane, "you're so hard to be pleased!
+    I am sure every glassman in town I have teased:
+    I have hunted each shop from Pall Mall to Cheapside:
+    Both Miss Carpenter's man, and Miss Banks's I've tried."
+    "Don't tell me of those girls!--all I know, to my cost,
+    Is, the looking-glass art must be certainly lost!
+    One used to have mirrors so smooth and so bright,
+    They did one's eyes justice, they heightened one's white,
+    And fresh roses diffused o'er one's bloom--but, alas!
+    In the glasses made now, one detests one's own face;
+    They pucker one's cheeks up and furrow one's brow,
+    And one's skin looks as yellow as that of Miss Howe!"
+
+After an epigram that seems to have found out the longitude, I shall
+tell you but one more, and that wondrous short. It is said to be made by
+a cow. You must not wonder; we tell as many strange stories as Baker and
+Livy:
+
+    A warm winter, a dry spring,
+    A hot summer, a new King.
+
+Though the sting is very epigrammatic, the whole of the distich has more
+of the truth than becomes prophecy; that is, it is false, for the spring
+is wet and cold.
+
+There is come from France a Madame Bocage,[1] who has translated Milton:
+my Lord Chesterfield prefers the copy to the original; but that is not
+uncommon for him to do, who is the patron of bad authors and bad actors.
+She has written a play too, which was damned, and worthy my lord's
+approbation. You would be more diverted with a Mrs. Holman, whose
+passion is keeping an assembly, and inviting literally everybody to it.
+She goes to the drawing-room to watch for sneezes; whips out a curtsey,
+and then sends next morning to know how your cold does, and to desire
+your company next Thursday.
+
+[Footnote 1: Madame du Boccage published a poem in imitation of Milton,
+and another founded on Gesner's "Death of Abel." She also translated
+Pope's "Temple of Fame;" but her principal work was "La Columbiade." It
+was at the house of this lady, at Paris, in 1775, that Johnson was
+annoyed at her footman's taking the sugar in his fingers and throwing it
+into his coffee. "I was going," says the Doctor, "to put it aside, but
+hearing it was made on purpose for me, I e'en tasted Tom's fingers." She
+died in 1802.]
+
+Mr. Whithed has taken my Lord Pembroke's house at Whitehall; a glorious
+situation, but as madly built as my lord himself was. He has bought some
+delightful pictures too, of Claude, Caspar and good masters, to the
+amount of four hundred pounds.
+
+Good night! I have nothing more to tell you, but that I have lately seen
+a Sir William Boothby, who saw you about a year ago, and adores you, as
+all the English you receive ought to do. He is much in my favour.
+
+
+_DEATH OF WALPOLE'S BROTHER, AND OF THE PRINCE OF WALES--SPEECH OF THE
+YOUNG PRINCE--SINGULAR SERMON ON HIS DEATH._
+
+TO SIR HORACE MANN.
+
+ARLINGTON STREET, _April_ 1, 1751.
+
+How shall I begin a letter that will--that must--give you as much pain
+as I feel myself? I must interrupt the story of the Prince's death, to
+tell you of _two_ more, much more important, God knows! to you and me!
+One I had prepared you for--but how will you be shocked to hear that our
+poor Mr. Whithed is dead as well as my brother!...
+
+I now must mention my own misfortune. Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday
+mornings, the physicians and _all the family of painful death_ (to alter
+Gray's phrase), were persuaded and persuaded me, that the bark, which
+took great place, would save my brother's life--but he relapsed at three
+o'clock on Thursday, and died last night. He ordered to be drawn and
+executed his will with the greatest tranquillity and satisfaction on
+Saturday morning. His spoils are prodigious--not to his own family!
+indeed I think his son the most ruined young man in England. My loss, I
+fear, may be considerable, which is not the only motive of my concern,
+though, as you know, I had much to forgive, before I could regret: but
+indeed I do regret. It is no small addition to my concern, to fear or
+foresee that Houghton and all the remains of my father's glory will be
+pulled to pieces! The widow-Countess immediately marries--not Richcourt,
+but Shirley, and triumphs in advancing her son's ruin by enjoying her
+own estate, and tearing away great part of his.
+
+Now I will divert your private grief by talking to you of what is called
+the public. The King and Princess are grown as fond as if they had never
+been of different parties, or rather as people who always had been of
+different. She discountenances all opposition, and he _all ambition_.
+Prince George, who, with his two eldest brothers, is to be lodged at St.
+James's, is speedily to be created Prince of Wales. Ayscough, his tutor,
+is to be removed with her entire inclination as well as with everybody's
+approbation. They talk of a Regency to be established (in case of a
+minority) by authority of Parliament, even this session, with the
+Princess at the head of it. She and Dr. Lee, the only one she consults
+of the late cabal, very sensibly burned the late Prince's papers the
+moment he was dead. Lord Egmont, by seven o'clock the next morning,
+summoned (not very decently) the faction to his house: all was whisper!
+at last he hinted something of taking the Princess and her children
+under their protection, and something of the necessity of harmony. No
+answer was made to the former proposal. Somebody said, it was very
+likely indeed they should agree now, when the Prince could never bring
+it about; and so everybody went away to take care of himself. The
+imposthumation is supposed to have proceeded, not from his fall last
+year, but from a blow with a tennis-ball some years ago. The grief for
+the dead brother is affectedly displayed. They cried about an elegy,[1]
+and added, "Oh, that it were but his brother!" On 'Change they said,
+"Oh, that it were but the butcher[2]!"
+
+[Footnote 1: The elegy alluded to, was probably the effusion of some
+Jacobite royalist. That faction could not forgive the Duke of Cumberland
+his excesses or successes in Scotland; and, not contented with branding
+the parliamentary government of the country as usurpation, indulged in
+frequent unfeeling and scurrilous personalities on every branch of the
+reigning family:
+
+       Here lies Fred,
+    Who was alive and is dead:
+       Had it been his father,
+       I had much rather;
+       Had it been his brother,
+       Still better than another;
+       Had it been his sister,
+       No one would have missed her;
+       Had it been the whole generation,
+       Still better for the nation:
+       But since 'tis only Fred,
+    Who was alive and is dead--
+       There's no more to be said.
+
+Walpole's _Memoirs of George II._]
+
+[Footnote 2: A name given to the Duke of Cumberland for his severities
+to his prisoners after the battle of Culloden.]
+
+The Houses sit, but no business will be done till after the holidays.
+Anstruther's affair will go on, but not with much spirit. One wants to
+see faces about again! Dick Lyttelton, one of the patriot officers, had
+collected depositions on oath against the Duke for his behaviour in
+Scotland, but I suppose he will now throw his papers into Hamlet's
+grave?
+
+Prince George, who has a most amiable countenance, behaved excessively
+well on his father's death. When they told him of it, he turned pale,
+and laid his hand on his breast. Ayscough said, "I am afraid, Sir, you
+are not well!"--he replied, "I feel something here, just as I did when I
+saw the two workmen fall from the scaffold at Kew." Prince Edward is a
+very plain boy, with strange loose eyes, but was much the favourite. He
+is a sayer of things! Two men were heard lamenting the death in
+Leicester Fields: one said, "He has left a great many small
+children!"--"Ay," replied the other, "and what is worse, they belong to
+our parish!" But the most extraordinary reflections on his death were
+set forth in a sermon at Mayfair chapel. "He had no great parts (pray
+mind, this was the parson said so, not I), but he had great virtues;
+indeed, they degenerated into vices: he was very generous, but I hear
+his generosity has ruined a great many people: and then his
+condescension was such, that he kept very bad company."
+
+Adieu! my dear child; I have tried, you see, to blend so much public
+history with our private griefs, as may help to interrupt your too great
+attention to the calamities in the former part of my letter. You will,
+with the properest good-nature in the world, break the news to the poor
+girl, whom I pity, though I never saw. Miss Nicoll is, I am told,
+extremely to be pitied too; but so is everybody that knew Whithed! Bear
+it yourself as well as you can!
+
+
+_CHANGES IN THE MINISTRY AND HOUSEHOLD--THE MISS GUNNINGS--EXTRAVAGANCE
+IN LONDON--LORD HARCOURT, GOVERNOR OF THE PRINCE OF WALES._
+
+TO SIR HORACE MANN.
+
+ARLINGTON STREET, _June_ 18, 1751.
+
+I send my letter as usual from the Secretary's office, but of what
+Secretary I don't know. Lord Sandwich last week received his dismission,
+on which the Duke of Bedford resigned the next day, and Lord Trentham
+with him, both breaking with old Gower, who is entirely in the hands of
+the Pelhams, and made to declare his quarrel with Lord Sandwich (who
+gave away his daughter to Colonel Waldegrave) the foundation of
+detaching himself from the Bedfords. Your friend Lord Fane comforts Lord
+Sandwich with an annuity of a thousand a-year--scarcely for his handsome
+behaviour to his sister; Lord Hartington is to be Master of the Horse,
+and Lord Albemarle Groom of the Stole; Lord Granville[1] is actually
+Lord President, and, by all outward and visible signs, something
+more--in short, if he don't overshoot himself, the Pelhams have; the
+King's favour to him is visible, and so much credited, that all the
+incense is offered to him. It is believed that Impresario Holdernesse
+will succeed the Bedford in the foreign seals, and Lord Halifax in
+those for the plantations. If the former does, you will have ample
+instructions to negotiate for singers and dancers! Here is an epigram
+made upon his directorship:
+
+[Footnote 1: Lord Granville, known as Lord Carteret during the lifetime
+of his mother, was a statesman of the very highest ability, and was
+regarded with special favour by the King for his power of conversing in
+German, then a very rare accomplishment.]
+
+    That secrecy will now prevail
+      In politics, is certain;
+    Since Holdernesse, who gets the seals,
+      Was bred behind the curtain.
+
+The Admirals Rowley and Boscawen are brought into the Admiralty under
+Lord Anson, who is advanced to the head of the board. Seamen are
+tractable fishes! especially it will be Boscawen's case, whose name in
+Cornish signifies obstinacy, and who brings along with him a good
+quantity of resentment to Anson. In short, the whole present system is
+equally formed for duration!
+
+Since I began my letter, Lord Holdernesse has kissed hands for the
+seals. It is said that Lord Halifax is to be made easy, by the
+plantations being put under the Board of Trade. Lord Granville comes
+into power as boisterously as ever, and dashes at everything. His
+lieutenants already beat up for volunteers; but he disclaims all
+connexions with Lord Bath, who, he says, forced him upon the famous
+ministry of twenty-four hours, and by which he says he paid all his
+debts to him. This will soon grow a turbulent scene--it is not
+unpleasant to sit upon the beach and see it; but few people have the
+curiosity to step out to the sight. You, who knew England in other
+times, will find it difficult, to conceive what an indifference reigns
+with regard to ministers and their squabbles. The two Miss Gunnings,[1]
+and a late extravagant dinner at White's, are twenty times more the
+subject of conversation than the two brothers [Newcastle and Pelham] and
+Lord Granville. These are two Irish girls, of no fortune, who are
+declared the handsomest women alive. I think their being two so handsome
+and both such perfect figures is their chief excellence, for singly I
+have seen much handsomer women than either; however, they can't walk in
+the park or go to Vauxhall, but such mobs follow them that they are
+generally driven away. The dinner was a folly of seven young men, who
+bespoke it to the utmost extent of expense: one article was a tart made
+of duke cherries from a hot-house; and another, that they tasted but one
+glass out of each bottle of champagne. The bill of fare is got into
+print, and with good people has produced the apprehension of another
+earthquake. Your friend St. Leger was at the head of these luxurious
+heroes--he is the hero of all fashion. I never saw more dashing vivacity
+and absurdity, with some flashes of parts. He had a cause the other day
+for ducking a sharper, and was going to swear: the judge said to him, "I
+see, Sir, you are very ready to take an oath." "Yes, my lord," replied
+St. Leger, "my father was a judge."
+
+[Footnote 1: One of the Miss Gunnings had singular fortune. She was
+married to two Dukes--the Duke of Hamilton, and, after his death, the
+Duke of Argyll. She refused a third, the Duke of Bridgewater; and she
+was the mother of four--two Dukes of Hamilton and two Dukes of Argyll.
+Her sister married the Earl of Coventry. In his "Memoirs of George III."
+Walpole mentions that they were so poor while in Dublin that they could
+not have been presented to the Lord-Lieutenant if Peg Woffington, the
+celebrated actress, had not lent them some clothes.]
+
+We have been overwhelmed with lamentable Cambridge and Oxford dirges on
+the Prince's death: there is but one tolerable copy; it is by a young
+Lord Stormont, a nephew of Murray, who is much commended. You may
+imagine what incense is offered to Stone by the people of Christchurch:
+they have hooked in, too, poor Lord Harcourt, and call him _Harcourt the
+Wise_! his wisdom has already disgusted the young Prince; "Sir, pray
+hold up your head. Sir, for God's sake, turn out your toes!" Such are
+Mentor's precepts!
+
+I am glad you receive my letters; as I knew I had been punctual, it
+mortified me that you should think me remiss. Thank you for the
+transcript from _Bubb[1] de tristibus_! I will keep your secret, though
+I am persuaded that a man who had composed such a funeral oration on his
+master and himself fully intended that its flowers should not bloom and
+wither in obscurity.
+
+[Footnote 1: Bubb means Mr. Bubb Doddington, afterwards Lord Melcombe,
+who had written Mr. Mann a letter of most extravagant lamentation on the
+death of the Prince of Wales. He was member for Winchelsea, and left
+behind him a diary, which was published some years after his death, and
+which throws a good deal of light on the political intrigues of the
+day.]
+
+We have already begun to sell the pictures that had not found place at
+Houghton: the sale gives no great encouragement to proceed (though I
+fear it must come to that!); the large pictures were thrown away; the
+whole-length Vandykes went for a song! I am mortified now at having
+printed the catalogue. Gideon the Jew, and Blakiston the independent
+grocer, have been the chief purchasers of the pictures sold
+already--there, if you love moralizing!
+
+Adieu! I have no more articles to-day for my literary gazette.
+
+
+_DESCRIPTION OF STRAWBERRY HILL--BILL TO PREVENT CLANDESTINE MARRIAGES._
+
+TO SIR HORACE MANN.
+
+STRAWBERRY HILL, _June_ 12, 1753.
+
+I could not rest any longer with the thought of your having no idea of a
+place of which you hear so much, and therefore desired Mr. Bentley to
+draw you as much idea of it as the post would be persuaded to carry from
+Twickenham to Florence. The enclosed enchanted little landscape, then,
+is Strawberry Hill; and I will try to explain so much of it to you as
+will help to let you know whereabouts we are when we are talking to you;
+for it is uncomfortable in so intimate a correspondence as ours not to
+be exactly master of every spot where one another is writing, or
+reading, or sauntering. This view of the castle is what I have just
+finished, and is the only side that will be at all regular. Directly
+before it is an open grove, through which you see a field, which is
+bounded by a serpentine wood of all kind of trees, and flowering shrubs,
+and flowers. The lawn before the house is situated on the top of a small
+hill, from whence to the left you see the town and church of Twickenham
+encircling a turn of the river, that looks exactly like a seaport in
+miniature. The opposite shore is a most delicious meadow, bounded by
+Richmond Hill, which loses itself in the noble woods of the park to the
+end of the prospect on the right, where is another turn of the river,
+and the suburbs of Kingston as luckily placed as Twickenham is on the
+left: and a natural terrace on the brow of my hill, with meadows of my
+own down to the river, commands both extremities. Is not this a
+tolerable prospect? You must figure that all this is perpetually
+enlivened by a navigation of boats and barges, and by a road below my
+terrace, with coaches, post-chaises, waggons, and horsemen constantly in
+motion, and the fields speckled with cows, horses, and sheep. Now you
+shall walk into the house. The bow-window below leads into a little
+parlour hung with a stone-colour Gothic paper and Jackson's Venetian
+prints, which I could never endure while they pretended, infamous as
+they are, to be after Titian, &c., but when I gave them this air of
+barbarous bas-reliefs, they succeeded to a miracle: it is impossible at
+first sight not to conclude that they contain the history of Attila or
+Tottila, done about the very aera. From hence, under two gloomy arches,
+you come to the hall and staircase, which it is impossible to describe
+to you, as it is the most particular and chief beauty of the castle.
+Imagine the walls covered with (I call it paper, but it is really paper
+painted in perspective to represent) Gothic fretwork: the lightest
+Gothic balustrade to the staircase, adorned with antelopes (our
+supporters) bearing shields; lean windows fattened with rich saints in
+painted glass, and a vestibule open with three arches on the
+landing-place, and niches full of trophies of old coats of mail, Indian
+shields made of rhinoceros's hides, broadswords, quivers, longbows,
+arrows, and spears--all _supposed_ to be taken by Sir Terry Robsart in
+the holy wars. But as none of this regards the enclosed drawing, I will
+pass to that. The room on the ground-floor nearest to you is a
+bedchamber, hung with yellow paper and prints, framed in a new manner,
+invented by Lord Cardigan; that is, with black and white borders
+printed. Over this is Mr. Chute's bedchamber, hung with red in the same
+manner. The bow-window room one pair of stairs is not yet finished; but
+in the tower beyond it is the charming closet where I am now writing to
+you. It is hung with green paper and water-colour pictures; has two
+windows; the one in the drawing looks to the garden, the other to the
+beautiful prospect; and the top of each glutted with the richest painted
+glass of the arms of England, crimson roses, and twenty other pieces of
+green, purple, and historic bits. I must tell you, by the way, that the
+castle, when finished, will have two-and-thirty windows enriched with
+painted glass. In this closet, which is Mr. Chute's college of Arms, are
+two presses with books of heraldry and antiquities, Madame Sévigné's
+Letters, and any French books that relate to her and her acquaintance.
+Out of this closet is the room where we always live, hung with a blue
+and white paper in stripes adorned with festoons, and a thousand plump
+chairs, couches, and luxurious settees covered with linen of the same
+pattern, and with a bow-window commanding the prospect, and gloomed
+with limes that shade half each window, already darkened with painted
+glass in chiaroscuro, set in deep blue glass. Under this room is a cool
+little hall, where we generally dine, hung with paper to imitate Dutch
+tiles.
+
+I have described so much, that you will begin to think that all the
+accounts I used to give you of the diminutiveness of our habitation were
+fabulous; but it is really incredible how small most of the rooms are.
+The only two good chambers I shall have are not yet built: they will be
+an eating-room and a library, each twenty by thirty, and the latter
+fifteen feet high. For the rest of the house I could send it you in this
+letter as easily as the drawing, only that I should have nowhere to live
+till the return of the post. The Chinese summer-house, which you may
+distinguish in the distant landscape, belongs to my Lord Radnor. We
+pique ourselves upon nothing but simplicity, and have no carvings,
+gildings, paintings, inlayings, or tawdry businesses.
+
+You will not be sorry, I believe, by this time to have done with
+Strawberry Hill, and to hear a little news. The end of a very dreaming
+session has been extremely enlivened by an accidental bill which has
+opened great quarrels, and those not unlikely to be attended with
+interesting circumstances. A bill to prevent clandestine marriages,[1]
+so drawn by the Judges as to clog all matrimony in general, was
+inadvertently espoused by the Chancellor; and having been strongly
+attacked in the House of Commons by Nugent, the Speaker, Mr. Fox, and
+others, the last went very great lengths of severity on the whole body
+of the law, and on its chieftain in particular, which, however, at the
+last reading, he softened and explained off extremely. This did not
+appease: but on the return of the bill to the House of Lords, where our
+amendments were to be read, the Chancellor in the most personal terms
+harangued against Fox, and concluded with saying that "he despised his
+scurrility as much as his adulation and recantation." As Christian
+charity is not one of the oaths taken by privy-counsellors, and as it is
+not the most eminent virtue in either of the champions, this quarrel is
+not likely to be soon reconciled. There are natures whose disposition it
+is to patch up political breaches, but whether they will succeed, or try
+to succeed in healing this, can I tell you?
+
+[Footnote 1: These clandestine marriages were often called "Fleet
+marriages." Lord Stanhope, describing this Act, states that "there was
+ever ready a band of degraded and outcast clergymen, prisoners for debt
+or for crime, who hovered about the verge of the Fleet prison soliciting
+customers, and plying, like porters, for employment.... One of these
+wretches, named Keith, had gained a kind of pre-eminence in infamy. On
+being told there was a scheme on foot to stop his lucrative traffic, he
+declared, with many oaths, he would still be revenged of the Bishops,
+that he would buy a piece of ground and outbury them!" ("History of
+England," c. 31).]
+
+The match for Lord Granville, which I announced to you, is not
+concluded: the flames are cooled in that quarter as well as in others.
+
+I begin a new sheet to you, which does not match with the other, for I
+have no more of the same paper here. Dr. Cameron is executed, and died
+with the greatest firmness. His parting with his wife the night before
+was heroic and tender: he let her stay till the last moment, when being
+aware that the gates of the Tower would be locked, he told her so; she
+fell at his feet in agonies: he said, "Madam, this was not what you
+promised me," and embracing her, forced her to retire: then with the
+same coolness looked at the window till her coach was out of sight,
+after which he turned about and wept. His only concern seemed to be at
+the ignominy of Tyburn: he was not disturbed at the dresser for his
+body, or at the fire to burn his bowels.[1] The crowd was so great, that
+a friend who attended him could not get away, but was forced to stay and
+behold the execution; but what will you say to the minister or priest
+that accompanied him? The wretch, after taking leave, went into a
+landau, where, not content with seeing the Doctor hanged, he let down
+the top of the landau for the better convenience of seeing him
+embowelled! I cannot tell you positively that what I hinted of this
+Cameron being commissioned from Prussia was true, but so it is believed.
+Adieu! my dear child; I think this is a very tolerable letter for
+summer!
+
+[Footnote 1: "The populace," says Smollett, "though not very subject to
+tender emotions, were moved to compassion, and even to tears, by his
+behaviour at the place of execution; and many sincere well-wishers of
+the present establishment thought that the sacrifice of this victim, at
+such a juncture, could not redound either to its honour or security."]
+
+[Illustration: GEORGE MONTAGU.]
+
+
+_NO NEWS FROM FRANCE BUT WHAT IS SMUGGLED--THE KING'S DELIGHT AT THE
+VOTE FOR THE HANOVER TROOPS--BON MOT OF LORD DENBIGH._
+
+TO GEORGE MONTAGU, ESQ.
+
+ARLINGTON STREET, _May_ 19, 1756.
+
+Nothing will be more agreeable to me than to see you at Strawberry Hill;
+the weather does not seem to be of my mind, and will not invite you. I
+believe the French have taken the sun. Among other captures, I hear the
+King has taken another English mistress, a Mrs. Pope, who took her
+degrees in gallantry some years ago. She went to Versailles with the
+famous Mrs. Quon: the King took notice of them; he was told they were
+not so rigid as _all_ other English women are--mind, I don't give you
+any part of this history for authentic; you know we can have no news
+from France but what we run.[1] I have rambled so that I forgot what I
+intended to say; if ever we can have spring, it must be soon: I propose
+to expect you any day you please after Sunday se'nnight, the 30th: let
+me know your resolution, and pray tell me in what magazine is the
+Strawberry ballad? I should have proposed an earlier day to you, but
+next week the Prince of Nassau is to breakfast at Strawberry Hill, and I
+know your aversion to clashing with grandeur.
+
+[Footnote 1: "During the winter England was stirred with constantly
+recurring alarms of a French invasion.... Addresses were moved in both
+Houses entreating or empowering the King to summon over for our defence
+some of his Hanoverian troops, and also some of hired Hessians--an
+ignominious vote, but carried by large majorities" (Lord Stanhope,
+"History of England," c. 22).]
+
+As I have already told you one mob story of a King, I will tell you
+another: _they say_, that the night the Hanover troops were voted, _he_
+sent Schutz for his German cook, and said, "Get me a very good supper;
+get me all de varieties; I don't mind expense."
+
+I tremble lest his Hanoverians should be encamped at Hounslow;
+Strawberry would become an inn; all the Misses would breakfast there, to
+go and see the camp!
+
+My Lord Denbigh is going to marry a fortune, I forget her name; my Lord
+Gower asked him how long the honey-moon would last? He replied, "Don't
+tell me of the honey-moon; it is harvest moon with me." Adieu!
+
+
+_VICTORY OF THE KING OF PRUSSIA AT LOWOSITZ--SINGULAR RACE--QUARREL OF
+THE PRETENDER WITH THE POPE._
+
+TO SIR HORACE MANN.
+
+STRAWBERRY HILL, _Oct._ 17, 1756.
+
+Lentulus (I am going to tell you no old Roman tale; he is the King of
+Prussia's aid-de-camp) arrived yesterday, with ample confirmation of the
+victory in Bohemia.[1]--Are not you glad that we have got a victory that
+we can at least call _Cousin_? Between six and seven thousand Austrians
+were killed: eight Prussian squadrons sustained the _acharnement_, which
+is said to have been extreme, of thirty-two squadrons of Austrians: the
+pursuit lasted from Friday noon till Monday morning; both our
+countrymen, Brown and Keith, performed wonders--we seem to flourish much
+when transplanted to Germany--but Germans don't make good manure here!
+The Prussian King writes that both Brown and Piccolomini are too
+strongly intrenched to be attacked. His Majesty ran _to_ this victory;
+not _à la_ Molwitz. He affirms having found in the King of Poland's
+cabinet ample justification of his treatment of Saxony--should not one
+query whether he had not these proofs in his hands antecedent to the
+cabinet? The Dauphiness[2] is said to have flung herself at the King of
+France's feet and begged his protection for her father; that he promised
+"qu'il le rendroit au centuple au Roi de Prusse."
+
+[Footnote 1: On the 1st of the month Frederic II. had defeated the
+Austrian general, Marshal Brown, at Lowositz. It was the first battle of
+the Seven Years' War, and was of great political importance as leading
+to the capture of Dresden and of laying all Saxony at the mercy of the
+conqueror. "_À la_ Molwitz" is an allusion to the first battle in the
+war of the Austrian Succession, April 10, 1741, in which Frederic showed
+that he was not what Voltaire and Mr. Pitt called "a heaven-born
+general;" since on the repulse of his cavalry he gave up all for lost,
+and rode from the field, to learn at night that, after his flight, his
+second in command, the veteran Marshal Schwerin, had rallied the broken
+squadrons, and had obtained a decisive victory.]
+
+[Footnote 2: The Dauphiness was the daughter of Augustus, King of Poland
+and Elector of Saxony.]
+
+Peace is made between the courts of Kensington and Kew:[1] Lord Bute,
+who had no visible employment at the latter, and yet whose office was
+certainly no _sinecure_, is to be Groom of the Stole to the Prince of
+Wales; which satisfies. The rest of the family will be named before the
+birthday--but I don't know how, as soon as one wound is closed, another
+breaks out! Mr. Fox, extremely discontent at having no power, no
+confidence, no favour (all entirely engrossed by the old monopolist),
+has asked leave to resign. It is not yet granted. If Mr. Pitt will--or
+can, accept the seals, probably Mr. Fox will be indulged,--if Mr. Pitt
+will not, why then, it is impossible to tell you what will happen.
+Whatever happens on such an emergency, with the Parliament so near, with
+no time for considering measures, with so bad a past, and so much worse
+a future, there certainly is no duration or good in prospect. Unless the
+King of Prussia will take our affairs at home as well as abroad to
+nurse, I see no possible recovery for us--and you may believe, when a
+doctor like him is necessary, I should be full as willing to die of the
+distemper.
+
+[Footnote 1: "The courts of Kensington and Kew"--in other words, of the
+King and the Prince of Wales and his mother, to whom George II. was not
+very friendly. A scandal, which had no foundation, imputed to the
+Princess undue intimacy with the Earl of Bute, who, however, did stand
+high in her good graces, and who probably was indebted to them for his
+appointment in the next reign to the office of Prime Minister, for which
+he had no qualification whatever.]
+
+Well! and so you think we are undone!--not at all; if folly and
+extravagance are symptoms of a nation's being at the height of their
+glory, as after-observers pretend that they are forerunners of its ruin,
+we never were in a more flourishing situation. My Lord Rockingham and my
+nephew Lord Orford have made a match of five hundred pounds, between
+five turkeys and five geese, to run from Norwich to London. Don't you
+believe in the transmigration of souls? And are not you convinced that
+this race is between Marquis Sardanapalus and Earl Heliogabalus? And
+don't you pity the poor Asiatics and Italians who comforted themselves
+on their resurrection with their being geese and turkeys?
+
+Here's another symptom of our glory! The Irish Speaker Mr. Ponsonby has
+been _reposing_ himself at _Newmarket_: George Selwyn, seeing him toss
+about bank-bills at the hazard-table said, "How easily the Speaker
+passes the money-bills!"
+
+You, who live at Florence among vulgar vices and tame slavery, will
+stare at these accounts. Pray be acquainted with your own country, while
+it is in its lustre. In a regular monarchy the folly of the Prince gives
+the tone; in a downright tyranny, folly dares give itself no airs; it is
+in a wanton overgrown commonwealth that whim and debauchery intrigue
+best together. Ask me which of these governments I prefer--oh! the
+last--only I fear it is the least durable.
+
+I have not yet thanked you for your letter of September 18th, with the
+accounts of the Genoese treaty and of the Pretender's quarrel with the
+Pope--it is a squabble worthy a Stuart. Were he, here, as absolute as
+any Stuart ever wished to be, who knows with all his bigotry but he
+might favour us with a reformation and the downfall of the mass? The
+ambition of making a Duke of York vice-chancellor of holy church would
+be as good a reason for breaking with holy church, as Harry the Eighth's
+was for quarrelling with it, because it would not excuse him from going
+to bed to his sister after it had given him leave.
+
+I wish I could tell you that your brother mends! indeed I don't think he
+does: nor do I know what to say to him; I have exhausted both arguments
+and entreaties, and yet if I thought either would avail, I would gladly
+recommence them. Adieu!
+
+
+_MINISTERIAL NEGOTIATIONS--LOSS OF MINORCA--DISASTER IN NORTH AMERICA._
+
+TO SIR HORACE MANN.
+
+ARLINGTON STREET, _Nov._ 4, 1756.
+
+I desired your brother last week to tell you that it was in vain for me
+to write while everything was in such confusion. The chaos is just as
+far from being dispersed now; I only write to tell you what has been its
+motions. One of the Popes, I think, said soon after his accession, he
+did not think it had been so easy to govern. What would he have thought
+of such a nation as this, engaged in a formidable war, without any
+government at all, literally, for above a fortnight! The foreign
+ministers have not attempted to transact any business since yesterday
+fortnight. For God's sake, what do other countries say of us?--but hear
+the progress of our interministerium.
+
+When Mr. Fox had declared his determination of resigning, great offers
+were sent to Mr. Pitt; his demands were much greater, accompanied with a
+total exclusion of the Duke of Newcastle. Some of the latter's friends
+would have persuaded him, as the House of Commons is at his devotion, to
+have undertaken the government against both Pitt and Fox; but fears
+preponderated. Yesterday se'nnight his grace declared his resolution of
+retiring, with all that satisfaction of mind which must attend a man
+whom not one man of sense will trust any longer. The King sent for Mr.
+Fox, and bid him try if Mr. Pitt would join him. The latter, without any
+hesitation, refused. In this perplexity the King ordered the Duke of
+Devonshire to try to compose some Ministry for him, and sent him to
+Pitt, to try to accommodate with Fox. Pitt, with a list of terms a
+little modified, was ready to engage, but on condition that Fox should
+have no employment in the cabinet. Upon this plan negotiations have been
+carrying on for this week. Mr. Pitt and Mr. Legge, whose whole party
+consists of from twelve to sixteen persons, exclusive of Leicester House
+(of that presently), concluded they were entering on the government as
+Secretary of State and Chancellor of the Exchequer: but there is so
+great unwillingness to give it up totally into their hands, that all
+manner of expedients have been projected to get rid of their proposals,
+or to limit their power. Thus the case stands at this instant: the
+Parliament has been put off for a fortnight, to gain time; the Lord
+knows whether that will suffice to bring on any sort of temper! In the
+meantime the government stands still; pray Heaven the war may too! You
+will wonder how fifteen or sixteen persons can be of such importance. In
+the first place, their importance has been conferred on them, and has
+been notified to the nation by these concessions and messages; next,
+Minorca[1] is gone; Oswego gone;[2] the nation is in a ferment; some
+very great indiscretions in delivering a Hanoverian soldier from prison
+by a warrant from the Secretary of State have raised great difficulties;
+instructions from counties, boroughs, especially from the City of
+London, in the style of 1641, and really in the spirit of 1715 and 1745,
+have raised a great flame; and lastly, the countenance of Leicester
+House, which Mr. Pitt is supposed to have, and which Mr. Legge thinks he
+has, all these tell Pitt that he may command such numbers without doors
+as may make the majorities within the House tremble.
+
+[Footnote 1: Minorca had been taken by the Duc de Richelieu; Admiral
+Byng, after an indecisive action with the French fleet, having adopted
+the idea that he should not be able to save it, for which, as is too
+well known, he was condemned to death by a court-martial.]
+
+[Footnote 2: "_Oswego gone._" "A detachment of the enemy was defeated by
+Colonel Broadstreet on the river Onondaga; on the other hand, the small
+forts of Ontario and Oswego were reduced by the French" (Lord Stanhope,
+"History of England," c. 33).]
+
+Leicester House[1] is by some thought inclined to more pacific measures.
+Lord Bute's being established Groom of the Stole has satisfied. They
+seem more occupied in disobliging all their new court than in disturbing
+the King's. Lord Huntingdon, the new Master of the Horse to the Prince,
+and Lord Pembroke, one of his Lords, have not been spoken to. Alas! if
+the present storms should blow over, what seeds for new! You must guess
+at the sense of this paragraph, which it is difficult, at least
+improper, to explain to you; though you could not go into a coffee-house
+here where it would not be interpreted to you. One would think all those
+little politicians had been reading the Memoirs of the minority of Louis
+XIV.
+
+[Footnote 1: Leicester House was the London residence of the young
+Prince of Wales.]
+
+There has been another great difficulty: the season obliging all camps
+to break up, the poor Hanoverians have been forced to continue soaking
+in theirs. The county magistrates have been advised that they are not
+obliged by law to billet foreigners on public-houses, and have refused.
+Transports were yesterday ordered to carry away the Hanoverians! There
+are eight thousand men taken from America; for I am sure we can spare
+none from hence. The negligence and dilatoriness of the ministers at
+home, the wickedness of our West Indian governors, and the little-minded
+quarrels of the regulars and irregular forces, have reduced our affairs
+in that part of the world to a most deplorable state. Oswego, of ten
+times more importance even than Minorca, is so annihilated that we
+cannot learn the particulars.
+
+My dear Sir, what a present and future picture have I given you! The
+details are infinite, and what I have neither time, nor, for many
+reasons, the imprudence to send by the post: your good sense will but
+too well lead you to develop them. The crisis is most melancholy and
+alarming. I remember two or three years ago I wished for more active
+times, and for events to furnish our correspondence. I think I could
+write you a letter almost as big as my Lord Clarendon's History. What a
+bold man is he who shall undertake the administration! How much shall we
+be obliged to him! How mad is he, whoever is ambitious of it! Adieu!
+
+
+_THE KING OF PRUSSIA'S VICTORIES--VOLTAIRE'S "UNIVERSAL HISTORY."_
+
+TO THE EARL OF STRAFFORD.
+
+STRAWBERRY HILL, _July_ 4, 1757.
+
+My Dear Lord,--It is well I have not obeyed you sooner, as I have often
+been going to do: what a heap of lies and contradictions I should have
+sent you! What joint ministries and sole ministries! What acceptances
+and resignations!--Viziers and bowstrings never succeeded one another
+quicker. Luckily I have stayed till we have got an administration that
+will last a little more than for ever. There is such content and harmony
+in it, that I don't know whether it is not as perfect as a plan which I
+formed for Charles Stanhope, after he had plagued me for two days for
+news. I told him the Duke of Newcastle was to take orders, and have the
+reversion of the bishopric of Winchester; that Mr. Pitt was to have a
+regiment, and go over to the Duke; and Mr. Fox to be chamberlain to the
+Princess, in the room of Sir William Irby. Of all the new system I
+believe the happiest is Offley; though in great humility he says he only
+takes the bedchamber _to accommodate_. Next to him in joy is the Earl of
+Holdernesse--who has not got the garter. My Lord Waldegrave has; and
+the garter by this time I believe has got fifty spots.
+
+Had I written sooner, I should have told your lordship, too, of the King
+of Prussia's triumphs[1]--but they are addled too! I hoped to have had a
+few bricks from Prague to send you towards building Mr. Bentley's
+design, but I fear none will come from thence this summer. Thank God,
+the happiness of the menagerie does not depend upon administrations or
+victories! The happiest of beings in this part of the world is my Lady
+Suffolk: I really think her acquisition and conclusion of her law-suit
+will lengthen her life ten years. You may be sure I am not so satisfied,
+as Lady Mary [Coke] has left Sudbroke.
+
+[Footnote 1: On the 6th of May Frederic defeated the Austrian army under
+Prince Charles of Lorraine and Marshal Brown in the battle of Prague.
+Brown was killed, as also was the Prussian Marshal, Schwerin; indeed,
+the King lost eighteen thousand men--nearly as many as had fallen on the
+side of the enemy; and the Austrian disaster was more than retrieved by
+the great victory of Kolin, gained by Marshal Daun, June 18th, to which
+Walpole probably alludes when he says Frederic's "triumphs are addled."]
+
+Are your charming lawns burnt up like our humble hills? Is your sweet
+river as low as our deserted Thames?--I am wishing for a handful or two
+of those floods that drowned me last year all the way from Wentworth
+Castle. I beg my best compliments to my lady, and my best wishes that
+every pheasant egg and peacock egg may produce as many colours as a
+harlequin-jacket.
+
+
+_Tuesday, July 5th._
+
+Luckily, my good lord, my conscience had saved its distance. I had writ
+the above last night, when I received the honour of your kind letter
+this morning. You had, as I did not doubt, received accounts of all our
+strange histories. For that of the pretty Countess [of Coventry], I fear
+there is too much truth in all you have heard: but you don't seem to
+know that Lord Corydon and Captain Corydon his brother have been most
+abominable. I don't care to write scandal; but when I see you, I will
+tell you how much the chits deserve to be whipped. Our favourite general
+[Conway] is at his camp: Lady Ailesbury don't go to him these three
+weeks. I expect the pleasure of seeing her and Miss Rich and Fred.
+Campbell here soon for a few days. I don't wonder your lordship likes
+St. Philippe better than Torcy:[1] except a few passages interesting to
+Englishmen, there cannot be a more dry narration than the latter. There
+is an addition of seven volumes of Universal History to Voltaire's
+Works, which I think will charm you: I almost like it the best of his
+works. It is what you have seen extended, and the Memoirs of Louis XIV.
+_refondues_ in it. He is a little tiresome with contradicting La
+Beaumelle and Voltaire, one remains with scarce a fixed idea about that
+time. I wish they would produce their authorities and proofs; without
+which, I am grown to believe neither. From mistakes in the English part,
+I suppose there are great ones in the more distant histories; yet
+altogether it is a fine work. He is, as one might believe, worst
+informed on the present times.--He says eight hundred persons were put
+to death for the last Rebellion--I don't believe a quarter of the number
+were: and he makes the first Lord Derwentwater--who, poor man! was in no
+such high-spirited mood--bring his son, who by the way was not above a
+year and a half old, upon the scaffold to be sprinkled with his
+blood.--However, he is in the right to expect to be believed: for he
+believes all the romances in Lord Anson's Voyage, and how Admiral
+Almanzor made one man-of-war box the ears of the whole empire of
+China!--I know nothing else new but a new edition of Dr. Young's Works.
+If your lordship thinks like me, who hold that even in his most frantic
+rhapsodies there are innumerable fine things, you will like to have this
+edition. Adieu, once more, my best lord!
+
+[Footnote 1: Torcy had been Secretary of State in the time of Louis
+XIV., and was the diplomatist who arranged the details of the First
+Partition Treaty with William III.]
+
+
+_HIS OWN "ROYAL AND NOBLE AUTHORS."_
+
+TO THE REV. HENRY ZOUCH.[1]
+
+[Footnote 1: Mr. Zouch was the squire and vicar of Sandhill, in
+Yorkshire.]
+
+STRAWBERRY HILL, _August_ 3, 1758.
+
+Sir,--I have received, with much pleasure and surprise, the favour of
+your remarks upon my Catalogue; and whenever I have the opportunity of
+being better known to you, I shall endeavour to express my gratitude for
+the trouble you have given yourself in contributing to perfect a work,
+which, notwithstanding your obliging expressions, I fear you found very
+little worthy the attention of so much good sense and knowledge, Sir, as
+you possess.
+
+I am extremely thankful for all the information you have given me; I had
+already met with a few of the same lights as I have received, Sir, from
+you, as I shall mention in their place. The very curious accounts of
+Lord Fairfax were entirely new and most acceptable to me. If I decline
+making use of one or two of your hints, I believe I can explain my
+reasons to your satisfaction. I will, with your leave, go regularly
+through your letter.
+
+As Caxton[1] laboured in the monastery of Westminster, it is not at all
+unlikely that he should wear the habit, nor, considering how vague our
+knowledge of that age is, impossible but he might enter the order.
+
+[Footnote 1: Mr. Zouch had expressed a doubt whether a portrait of a man
+in a clerical garb could possibly be meant for Caxton, and Mr. Cole and
+three of Walpole's literary correspondents suggested that it was
+probably a portrait of Jehan de Jeonville, Provost of Paris.]
+
+I have met with Henry's institution of a Christian, and shall give you
+an account of it in my next edition. In that, too, I shall mention, that
+Lord Cobham's allegiance professed at his death to Richard II., probably
+means to Richard and his right heirs whom he had abandoned for the house
+of Lancaster. As the article is printed off, it is too late to say
+anything more about his works.
+
+In all the old books of genealogy you will find, Sir, that young Richard
+Duke of York was solemnly married to a child of his own age, Anne
+Mowbray, the heiress of Norfolk, who died young as well as he.
+
+The article of the Duke of Somerset is printed off too; besides, I
+should imagine the letter you mention not to be of his own composition,
+for, though not illiterate, he certainly could not write anything like
+classic Latin. I may, too, possibly have inclusively mentioned the very
+letter; I have not Ascham's book, to see from what copy the letter was
+taken, but probably from one of those which I have said is in Bennet
+Library.
+
+The Catalogue of Lord Brooke's works is taken from the volume of his
+works; such pieces of his as I found doubted, particularly the tragedy
+of Cicero, I have taken notice of as doubtful.
+
+In my next edition you will see, Sir, a note on Lord Herbert, who,
+besides being with the King at York, had offended the peers by a speech
+in his Majesty's defence. Mr. Wolseley's preface I shall mention, from
+your information. Lord Rochester's letters to his son are letters to a
+child, bidding him mind his book and his grandmother. I had already been
+told, Sir, what you tell me of Marchmont Needham.
+
+Matthew Clifford I have altered to Martin, as you prescribed; the
+blunder was my own, as well as a more considerable one, that of Lord
+Sandwich's death--which was occasioned by my supposing, at first, that
+the translation of Barba was made by the second Earl, whose death I had
+marked in the list, and forgot to alter, after I had writ the account of
+the father. I shall take care to set this right, as the second volume
+is not yet begun to be printed.
+
+Lord Halifax's Maxims I have already marked down, as I shall Lord
+Dorset's share in Pompey.
+
+The account of the Duke of Wharton's death I had from a very good
+hand--Captain Willoughby; who, in the convent where the Duke died, saw a
+picture of him in the habit. If it was a Bernardine convent, the
+gentleman might confound them; but, considering that there is no life of
+the Duke but bookseller's trash, it is much more likely that they
+mistook.
+
+I have no doubts about Lord Belhaven's speeches; but unless I could
+verify their being published by himself, it were contrary to my rule to
+insert them.
+
+If you look, Sir, into Lord Clarendon's account of Montrose's death, you
+will perceive that there is no probability of the book of his actions
+being composed by himself.
+
+I will consult Sir James Ware's book on Lord Totness's translation; and
+I will mention the Earl of Cork's Memoirs.
+
+Lord Leppington is the Earl of Monmouth, in whose article I have taken
+notice of his Romulus and Tarquin.
+
+Lord Berkeley's book I have actually got, and shall give him an article.
+
+There is one more passage, Sir, in your letter, which I cannot answer,
+without putting you to new trouble--a liberty which all your indulgence
+cannot justify me in taking; else I would beg to know on what authority
+you attribute to Laurence Earl of Rochester[1] the famous preface to
+his father's history, which I have always heard ascribed to Atterbury,
+Smallridge, and Aldridge.[2] The knowledge of this would be an
+additional favour; it would be a much greater, Sir, if coming this way,
+you would ever let me have the honour of seeing a gentleman to whom I am
+so much obliged.
+
+[Footnote 1: The Earl of Rochester was the second son of the Earl of
+Clarendon. He was Lord Treasurer under James II., but was dismissed
+because he refused to change his religion (Macaulay's "History of
+England," c. 6).]
+
+[Footnote 2: Atterbury was the celebrated Bishop of Rochester,
+Smallridge was Bishop of Bristol, and Aldridge (usually written Aldrich)
+was Dean of Christchurch, Oxford, equally well known for his treatise on
+Logic and his five reasons for drinking--
+
+    Good wine, a friend, or being dry;
+    Or lest you should be by and by,
+    Or any other reason why--]
+
+
+_HIS "ROYAL AND NOBLE AUTHORS"--LORD CLARENDON--SIR R. WALPOLE AND LORD
+BOLINGBROKE--THE DUKE OF LEEDS._
+
+TO THE REV. HENRY ZOUCH.
+
+STRAWBERRY HILL, _Oct._ 21, 1758.
+
+Sir,--Every letter I receive from you is a new obligation, bringing me
+new information: but, sure, my Catalogue was not worthy of giving you so
+much trouble. Lord Fortescue is quite new to me; I have sent him to the
+press. Lord Dorset's[1] poem it will be unnecessary to mention
+separately, as I have already said that his works are to be found among
+those of the minor poets.
+
+[Footnote 1: Lord Dorset, Lord Chamberlain under Charles II., author of
+the celebrated ballad "To all you ladies now on land," and patron of
+Dryden and other literary men, was honourably mentioned as such by
+Macaulay in c. 8 of his "History," and also for his refusal, as
+Lord-Lieutenant of Essex, to comply with some of James's illegal
+orders.]
+
+I don't wonder, Sir, that you prefer Lord Clarendon to Polybius[1]; nor
+can two authors well be more unlike: the _former_ wrote a general
+history in a most obscure and almost unintelligible style; the _latter_,
+a portion of private history, in the noblest style in the world. Whoever
+made the comparison, I will do them the justice to believe that they
+understood bad Greek better than their own language in its elevation.
+For Dr. Jortin's[2] Erasmus, which I have very nearly finished, it has
+given me a good opinion of the author, and he has given me a very bad
+one of his subject. By the Doctor's labour and impartiality, Erasmus
+appears a begging parasite, who had parts enough to discover truth, and
+not courage enough to profess it: whose vanity made him always writing;
+yet his writings ought to have cured his vanity, as they were the most
+abject things in the world. _Good Erasmus's honest mean_ was alternate
+time-serving. I never had thought much about him, and now heartily
+despise him.
+
+[Footnote 1: "_You prefer Lord Clarendon to Polybius._" It is hard to
+understand this sentence. Lord Clarendon did _not_ write a general
+history, but an account of a single event, "The Great Rebellion." It was
+Polybius who wrote a "Universal History," of which, however, only five
+books have been preserved, the most interesting portion of which is a
+narrative of Hannibal's invasion of Italy and march over the Alps in the
+Second Punic War.]
+
+[Footnote 2: Dr. Jortin was Archdeacon of London; and, among other
+works, had recently published a life of the celebrated Erasmus, the
+mention of whom by Pope, which Walpole presently quotes, is not very
+unfairly interpreted by Walpole.]
+
+When I speak my opinion to you, Sir, about what I dare say you care as
+little for as I do, (for what is the merit of a mere man of letters?) it
+is but fit I should answer you as sincerely on a question about which
+you are so good as to interest yourself. That my father's life is likely
+to be written, I have no grounds for believing. I mean I know nobody
+that thinks of it. For, myself, I certainly shall not, for many reasons,
+which you must have the patience to hear. A reason to me myself is, that
+I think too highly of him, and too meanly of myself, to presume I am
+equal to the task. They who do not agree with me in the former part of
+my position, will undoubtedly allow the latter part. In the next place,
+the very truths that I should relate would be so much imputed to
+partiality, that he would lose of his due praise by the suspicion of my
+prejudice. In the next place, I was born too late in his life to be
+acquainted with him in the active part of it. Then I was at school, at
+the university, abroad, and returned not till the last moments of his
+administration. What I know of him I could only learn from his own mouth
+in the last three years of his life; when, to my shame, I was so idle,
+and young, and thoughtless, that I by no means profited of his leisure
+as I might have done; and, indeed, I have too much impartiality in my
+nature to care, if I could, to give the world a history, collected
+solely from the person himself of whom I should write. With the utmost
+veneration for his truth, I can easily conceive, that a man who had
+lived a life of party, and who had undergone such persecution from
+party, should have had greater bias than he himself could be sensible
+of. The last, and that a reason which must be admitted, if all the
+others are not--his papers are lost. Between the confusion of his
+affairs, and the indifference of my elder brother to things of that
+sort, they were either lost, burnt, or what we rather think, were stolen
+by a favourite servant of my brother, who proved a great rogue, and was
+dismissed in my brother's life; and the papers were not discovered to be
+missing till after my brother's death. Thus, Sir, I should want vouchers
+for many things I could say of much importance. I have another personal
+reason that discourages me from attempting this task, or any other,
+besides the great reluctance that I have to being a voluminous author.
+Though I am by no means the learned man you are so good as to call me in
+compliment; though, on the contrary, nothing can be more superficial
+than my knowledge, or more trifling than my reading,--yet, I have so
+much strained my eyes, that it is often painful to me to read even a
+newspaper by daylight. In short, Sir, having led a very dissipated life,
+in all the hurry of the world of pleasure, I scarce ever read but by
+candlelight, after I have come home late at nights. As my eyes have
+never had the least inflammation or humour, I am assured I may still
+recover them by care and repose. I own I prefer my eyes to anything I
+could ever read, much more to anything I could write. However, after
+all I have said, perhaps I may now and then, by degrees, throw together
+some short anecdotes of my father's private life and particular story,
+and leave his public history to more proper and more able hands, if such
+will undertake it. Before I finish on this chapter, I can assure you he
+did forgive my Lord Bolingbroke[1]--his nature was forgiving: after all
+was over, and he had nothing to fear or disguise, I can say with truth,
+that there were not _three_ men of whom he ever dropped a word with
+rancour. What I meant of the clergy not forgiving Lord Bolingbroke,
+alluded not to his doctrines, but to the direct attack and war he made
+on the whole body. And now, Sir, I will confess my own weakness to you.
+I do not think so highly of that writer, as I seem to do in my book; but
+I thought it would be imputed to prejudice in me, if I appeared to
+undervalue an author of whom so many persons of sense still think
+highly. My being Sir Robert Walpole's son warped me to praise, instead
+of censuring Lord Bolingbroke. With regard to the Duke of Leeds,[2] I
+think you have misconstrued the decency of my expression. I said,
+_Burnet_[3] _had treated him severely_; that is, I chose that Burnet
+should say so, rather than myself. I have never praised where my heart
+condemned. Little attentions, perhaps, to worthy descendants, were
+excusable in a work of so extensive a nature, and that approached so
+near to these times. I may, perhaps, have an opportunity, at one day or
+other of showing you some passages suppressed on these motives, which
+yet I do not intend to destroy.
+
+[Footnote 1: Sir R. Walpole was so far from having any personal quarrel
+with Bolingbroke, that he took off so much of his outlawry as banished
+him, though he would not allow him to take his seat in the House of
+Peers.]
+
+[Footnote 2: This celebrated statesman was originally Sir Thomas
+Osborne. On the dissolution of the Cabal Ministry he was raised to the
+peerage as Earl of Danby, and was appointed Lord Treasurer. An attempt
+to impeach him, which was prompted by Louis XIV., was baffled by
+Charles. Under William III. he was appointed President of the Council,
+being the recognised leader of the Tory section of the Ministry; and in
+the course of the reign he was twice promoted--first to be Marquis of
+Carmarthen, and subsequently to be Duke of Leeds.]
+
+[Footnote 3: Burnet, the Bishop of Salisbury, to whose "Memoirs of His
+Own Time" all subsequent historians are greatly indebted. He accompanied
+William to England as his chaplain.]
+
+Crew,[1] Bishop of Durham, was as abject a tool as possible. I would be
+very certain he is an author before I should think him worth mentioning.
+If ever you should touch on Lord Willoughby's sermon, I should be
+obliged for a hint of it. I actually have a printed copy of verses by
+his son, on the marriage of the Princess Royal; but they are so
+ridiculously unlike measure, and the man was so mad and so poor, that I
+determined not to mention him.
+
+[Footnote 1: Crew was Bishop of Durham. He is branded by Macaulay (c. 6)
+as "mean, vain, and cowardly." He accepted a seat on James's
+Ecclesiastical Commission, and when "some of his friends represented to
+him the risk which he ran by sitting on an illegal tribunal, he was not
+ashamed to answer that he could not live out of the royal smile."]
+
+If these details, Sir, which I should have thought interesting to no
+mortal but myself, should happen to amuse you, I shall be glad; if they
+do not, you will learn not to question a man who thinks it his duty to
+satisfy the curiosity of men of sense and honour, and who, being of too
+little consequence to have secrets, is not ambitious of the less
+consequence of appearing to have any.
+
+P.S.--I must ask you one question, but to be answered entirely at your
+leisure. I have a play in rhyme called "Saul," said to be written by a
+peer. I guess Lord Orrery. If ever you happen to find out, be so good to
+tell me.
+
+
+_WALPOLE'S MONUMENT TO SIR HORACE'S BROTHER--ATTEMPTED ASSASSINATION OF
+THE KING OF PORTUGAL--COURTESY OF THE DUC D'AIGUILLON TO HIS ENGLISH
+PRISONERS._
+
+TO SIR HORACE MANN.
+
+STRAWBERRY HILL, _Oct._ 24, 1758.
+
+It is a very melancholy present I send you here, my dear Sir; yet,
+considering the misfortune that has befallen us, perhaps the most
+agreeable I could send you. You will not think it the bitterest tear you
+have shed when you drop one over this plan of an urn inscribed with the
+name of your dear brother, and with the testimonial of my eternal
+affection to him! This little monument is at last placed over the pew of
+your family at Linton [in Kent], and I doubt whether any tomb was ever
+erected that spoke so much truth of the departed, and flowed from so
+much sincere friendship in the living. The thought was my own, adopted
+from the antique columbaria, and applied to Gothic. The execution of the
+design was Mr. Bentley's, who alone, of all mankind, could unite the
+grace of Grecian architecture and the irregular lightness and solemnity
+of Gothic. Kent and many of our builders sought this, but have never
+found it. Mr. Chute, who has as much taste as Mr. Bentley, thinks this
+little sketch a perfect model. The soffite is more beautiful than
+anything of either style separate. There is a little error in the
+inscription; it should be _Horatius Walpole posuit_. The urn is of
+marble, richly polished; the rest of stone. On the whole, I think there
+is simplicity and decency, with a degree of ornament that destroys
+neither.
+
+What do you say in Italy on the assassination of the King of
+Portugal?[1] Do you believe that Portuguese subjects lift their hand
+against a monarch for gallantry? Do you believe that when a slave
+murders an absolute prince, he goes a walking with his wife the next
+morning and murders her too? Do you believe the dead King is alive? and
+that the Jesuits are as _wrongfully_ suspected of this assassination as
+they have been of many others they have committed? If you do believe
+this, and all this, you are not very near turning Protestants. It is
+scarce talked of here, and to save trouble, we admit just what the
+Portuguese Minister is ordered to publish. The King of Portugal
+murdered, throws us two hundred years back--the King of Prussia _not_
+murdered, carries us two hundred years forward again.
+
+[Footnote 1: The Duke of Aveiro was offended with the King of Portugal
+for interfering to prevent his son's marriage, and, in revenge, he
+plotted his assassination. He procured the co-operation of some other
+nobles, especially the Marquis and Marchioness of Tavora, and also of
+some of the chief Jesuits in the country, who promised absolution to any
+assassin. The attempt was made on September 3rd, when the King was fired
+at and severely wounded. The conspirators were all convicted and
+executed, and the Jesuits were expelled from the country.]
+
+Another King, I know, has had a little blow: the Prince de Soubise has
+beat some Isenbourgs and Obergs, and is going to be Elector of Hanover
+this winter. There has been a great sickness among our troops in the
+other German army; the Duke of Marlborough has been in great danger, and
+some officers are dead. Lord Frederick Cavendish is returned from
+France. He confirms and adds to the amiable accounts we had received of
+the Duc d'Aiguillon's[1] behaviour to our prisoners. You yourself, the
+pattern of attentions and tenderness, could not refine on what he has
+done both in good-nature and good-breeding: he even forbad any ringing
+of bells or rejoicings wherever they passed--but how your representative
+blood will curdle when you hear of the absurdity of one of your
+countrymen: the night after the massacre at St. Cas, the Duc d'Aiguillon
+gave a magnificent supper of eighty covers to our prisoners--a Colonel
+Lambert got up at the bottom of the table, and asking for a bumper,
+called out to the Duc, "My Lord Duke, here's the Roy de Franse!" You
+must put all the English you can crowd into the accent. _My Lord Duke_
+was so confounded at this preposterous compliment, which it was
+impossible for him to return, that he absolutely sank back into his
+chair and could not utter a syllable: our own people did not seem to
+feel more.
+
+[Footnote 1: The Duc d'Aiguillon was governor of Brittany when the
+disastrous attempt of the Duke of Marlborough on St. Cast was repulsed.
+But he did not get much credit for the defeat. Lacretelle mentions that:
+"Les Bretons qui le considérent comme leur tyran prétendent qu'il
+l'était tenu caché pendant le combat" (iii. 345). He was subsequently
+prosecuted on charges of peculation and subornation, which the
+Parliament declared to be fully established, but Mme. de Barri persuaded
+Louis to cancel their resolution.]
+
+You will read and hear that we have another expedition sailing,
+somewhither in the West Indies. Hobson, the commander, has in his whole
+life had but one stroke of a palsy, so possibly may retain half of his
+understanding at least. There is a great tranquillity at home, but I
+should think not promising duration. The disgust in the army on the late
+frantic measures will furnish some warmth probably to Parliament--and if
+the French should think of returning our visits, should you wonder?
+There are even rumours of some stirring among your little neighbours at
+Albano--keep your eye on them--if you could discover anything in time,
+it would do you great credit. _Apropos_ to _them_, I will send you an
+epigram that I made the other day on Mr. Chute's asking why Taylor the
+oculist called himself Chevalier?[1]
+
+[Footnote 1: Walpole was proud of the epigram, for the week before he
+had sent it to Lady Hervey. It was--
+
+    Why Taylor the quack calls himself Chevalier
+     'Tis not easy a reason to render,
+    Unless blinding eyes that he thinks to make clear
+      Demonstrates he's but a _Pretender_.
+
+Le Chevalier was the name commonly given in courtesy by both parties to
+Prince Charles Edward in 1745. Colonel Talbot says: "'Well, I never
+thought to have been so much indebted to the Pretend--' 'To the Prince,'
+said Waverley, smiling. 'To the Chevalier,' said the Colonel; 'it is a
+good travelling name which we may both freely use'" ("Waverley," c.
+55).]
+
+
+_A NEW EDITION OF LUCAN--COMPARISON OF "PHARSALEA"--CRITICISM ON THE
+POET, WITH THE AENEID--HELVETIUS'S WORK, "DE L'ESPRIT."_
+
+TO THE REV. HENRY ZOUCH.
+
+ARLINGTON STREET, _Dec._ 9, 1758.
+
+Sir,--I have desired Mr. Whiston to convey to you the second edition of
+my Catalogue, not so complete as it might have been, if great part had
+not been printed before I received your remarks, but yet more correct
+than the first sketch with which I troubled you. Indeed, a thing of this
+slight and idle nature does not deserve to have much more pains employed
+upon it.
+
+I am just undertaking an edition of Lucan, my friend Mr. Bentley having
+in his possession his father's notes and emendations on the first seven
+books. Perhaps a partiality for the original author concurs a little
+with this circumstance of the notes, to make me fond of printing, at
+Strawberry Hill, the works of a man who, alone of all the classics, was
+thought to breathe too brave and honest a spirit for the perusal of the
+Dauphin and the French. I don't think that a good or bad taste in poetry
+is of so serious a nature, that I should be afraid of owning too, that,
+with that great judge Corneille, and with that, perhaps, _no_ judge
+Heinsius, I prefer Lucan to Virgil. To speak fairly, I prefer great
+sense, to poetry with little sense. There are hemistichs in Lucan that
+go to one's soul and one's heart;--for a mere epic poem, a fabulous
+tissue of uninteresting battles that don't teach one even to fight, I
+know nothing more tedious. The poetic images, the versification and
+language of the Aeneid are delightful; but take the story by itself, and
+can anything be more silly and unaffecting? There are a few gods without
+power, heroes without character, heaven-directed wars without justice,
+inventions without probability, and a hero who betrays one woman with a
+kingdom that he might have had, to force himself upon another woman and
+another kingdom to which he had no pretensions, and all this to show his
+obedience to the gods! In short, I have always admired his numbers so
+much, and his meaning so little, that I think I should like Virgil
+better if I understood him less.
+
+Have you seen, Sir, a book which has made some noise--"Helvetius de
+l'Esprit"[1]? The author is so good and moral a man, that I grieve he
+should have published a system of as relaxed morality as can well be
+imagined: 'tis a large quarto, and in general a very superficial one.
+His philosophy may be new in France, but it greatly exhausted here. He
+tries to imitate Montesquieu,[2] and has heaped common-places upon
+common-places, which supply or overwhelm his reasoning; yet he has
+often wit, happy allusions, and sometimes writes finely: there is merit
+enough to give an obscure man fame; flimsiness enough to depreciate a
+great man. After his book was licensed, they forced him to retract it by
+a most abject recantation. Then why print this work? If zeal for his
+system pushed him to propagate it, did not he consider that a
+recantation would hurt his cause more than his arguments could support
+it?
+
+[Footnote 1: Helvetius was the son of the French king's physician. His
+book was condemned by the Parliament of Paris as derogatory to the
+nature of man.]
+
+[Footnote 2: Montesquieu was President of the Parliament of Bordeaux. He
+was a voluminous writer, his most celebrated work being his "L'Esprit
+des Lois." Burke described him as "A genius not born in every country,
+or every time: with a Herculean robustness of mind; and nerves not to be
+broken by labour."]
+
+We are promised Lord Clarendon in February from Oxford, but I hear shall
+have the surreptitious edition from Holland much sooner.
+
+You see, Sir, I am a sceptic as well as Helvetius, but of a more
+moderate complexion. There is no harm in telling mankind that there is
+not so much divinity in the Aeneid as they imagine; but, even if I
+thought so, I would not preach that virtue and friendship are mere
+names, and resolvable into self-interest; because there are numbers that
+would remember the grounds of the principle, and forget what was to be
+engrafted on it. Adieu!
+
+
+_STATE OF THE HOUSE OF COMMONS._
+
+TO THE HON. H.S. CONWAY.
+
+ARLINGTON STREET, _Jan._ 19, 1759.
+
+I hope the treaty of Sluys[1] advances rapidly. Considering that your
+own court is as new to you as Monsieur de Bareil and his, you cannot be
+very well entertained: the joys of a Dutch fishing town and the
+incidents of a cartel will not compose a very agreeable history. In the
+mean time you do not lose much; though the Parliament is met, no
+politics are come to town; one may describe the House of Commons like
+the price of stocks--Debates, nothing done. Votes, under par. Patriots,
+no price. Oratory, books shut. Love and war are as much at a stand;
+neither the Duchess of Hamilton, nor the expeditions are gone off yet.
+Prince Edward has asked to go to Quebec, and has been refused. If I was
+sure they would refuse me, I would ask to go thither too. I should not
+dislike about as much laurel as I could stick in my window at Christmas.
+
+[Footnote 1: Treaty of Sluys. Conway was engaged at Sluys negotiating
+with the French envoy, M. de Bareil, for an exchange of prisoners.]
+
+We are next week to have a serenata at the Opera-house for the King of
+Prussia's birthday; it is to begin, "Viva Georgio, e Frederigo viva!" It
+will, I own, divert me to see my Lord Temple whispering _for_ this
+alliance, on the same bench on which I have so often seen him whisper
+_against_ all Germany. The new opera pleases universally, and I hope
+will yet hold up its head. Since Vanneschi is cunning enough to make us
+sing _the roast beef of old Germany_, I am persuaded it will revive;
+politics are the only hot-bed for keeping such a tender plant as Italian
+music alive in England.
+
+You are so thoughtless about your dress, that I cannot help giving you a
+little warning against your return. Remember, everybody that comes from
+abroad is _censé_ to come from France, and whatever they wear at their
+first reappearance immediately grows the fashion. Now if, as is very
+likely, you should through inadvertence change hats with a master of a
+Dutch smack, Offley will be upon the watch, will conclude you took your
+pattern from M. de Bareil, and in a week's time we shall all be equipped
+like Dutch skippers. You see I speak very disinterestedly; for, as I
+never wear a hat myself, it is indifferent to me what sort of hat I
+don't wear. Adieu! I hope nothing in this letter, if it is opened, will
+affect _the conferences_, nor hasten our rupture with Holland. Lest it
+should, I send it to Lord Holdernesse's office; concluding, like Lady
+Betty Waldegrave, that the Government never suspect what they send under
+their own covers.
+
+
+_ROBERTSON'S "HISTORY OF SCOTLAND"--COMPARISON OF RAMSAY AND REYNOLDS AS
+PORTRAIT-PAINTERS--SIR DAVID'S "HISTORY OF THE GOWRIE CONSPIRACY."_
+
+TO SIR DAVID DALRYMPLE.
+
+STRAWBERRY HILL, _Feb._ 25, 1759.
+
+I think, Sir, I have perceived enough of the amiable benignity of your
+mind, to be sure that you will like to hear the praises of your
+friend.[1] Indeed, there is but one opinion about Mr. Robertson's
+"History [of Scotland]." I don't remember any other work that ever met
+universal approbation. Since the Romans and the Greeks, who have _now_
+an exclusive charter for being the best writers in every kind, he is the
+historian that pleases me best; and though what he has been so indulgent
+as to say of me ought to shut my mouth, I own I have been unmeasured in
+my commendations. I have forfeited my own modesty rather than not do
+justice to him. I did send him my opinion some time ago, and hope he
+received it. I can add, with the strictest truth, that he is regarded
+here as one of the greatest men that this island has produced. I say
+_island_, but you know, Sir, that I am disposed to say _Scotland_. I
+have discovered another very agreeable writer among your countrymen, and
+in a profession where I did not look for an author; it is Mr. Ramsay,
+the painter, whose pieces being anonymous, have been overlooked. He has
+a great deal of genuine wit, and a very just manner of reasoning. In his
+own walk, he has great merit. He and Mr. Reynolds are our favourite
+painters, and two of the very best we ever had. Indeed, the number of
+good has been very small, considering the numbers there are. A very few
+years ago there were computed two thousand portrait-painters in London;
+I do not exaggerate the computation, but diminish it; though I think it
+must have been exaggerated. Mr. Reynolds and Mr. Ramsay can scarce be
+rivals; their manners are so different. The former is bold, and has a
+kind of tempestuous colouring, yet with dignity and grace; the latter is
+all delicacy. Mr. Reynolds seldom succeeds in women; Mr. Ramsay is
+formed to paint them.
+
+[Footnote 1: Sir David was himself a historical writer of some
+importance. Macaulay was greatly indebted to his "Memoirs of Great
+Britain and Ireland from the Restoration to the Battle of La Hogue." The
+secret history and object of the strange attempt on James VI.
+(afterwards James I. of England) have been discussed by many writers,
+but without any of them succeeding in any very clear or certain
+elucidation of the transaction.]
+
+I fear I neglected, Sir, to thank you for your present of the history of
+the "Conspiracy of the Gowries"; but I shall never forget all the
+obligations I have to you. I don't doubt but in Scotland you approve
+what is liked here almost as much as Mr. Robertson's History; I mean the
+marriage of Colonel Campbell and the Duchess of Hamilton. If her fortune
+is singular, so is her merit. Such uncommon noise as her beauty made has
+not at all impaired the modesty of her behaviour. Adieu!
+
+
+_WRITERS OF HISTORY: GOODALL, HUME, ROBERTSON--QUEEN CHRISTINA._
+
+TO SIR DAVID DALRYMPLE.
+
+STRAWBERRY HILL, _July_ 11, 1759.
+
+You will repent, Sir, I fear, having drawn such a correspondent upon
+yourself. An author flattered and encouraged is not easily shaken off
+again; but if the interests of my book did not engage me to trouble you,
+while you are so good as to write me the most entertaining letters in
+the world, it is very natural for me to lay snares to inveigle more of
+them. However, Sir, excuse me this once, and I will be more modest for
+the future in trespassing on your kindness. Yet, before I break out on
+my new wants, it will be but decent, Sir, to answer some particulars of
+your letter.
+
+I have lately read Mr. Goodall's[1] book. There is certainly ingenuity
+in parts of his defence; but I believe one seldom thinks a defence
+_ingenious_ without meaning that it is unsatisfactory. His work left me
+fully convinced of what he endeavoured to disprove; and showed me, that
+the piece you mention is not the only one that he has written against
+moderation.
+
+[Footnote 1: Mr. Goodall had published an Essay on the letters put
+forward as written by Queen Mary to Bothwell, branding them as
+forgeries. The question of their genuineness has been examined with
+great acuteness by more than one subsequent writer, and the arguments
+against their genuineness are certainly very strong.]
+
+I have lately got Lord Cromerty's "Vindication of the legitimacy of King
+Robert [the Third]," and his "Synopsis Apocalyptica," and thank you
+much, Sir, for the notice of any of his pieces. But if you expect that
+his works should lessen my esteem for the writers of Scotland, you will
+please to recollect, that the letter which paints Lord Cromerty's pieces
+in so ridiculous a light, is more than a counterbalance in favour of the
+writers of your country; and of all men living, Sir, you are the last
+who will destroy my partiality for Scotland.
+
+There is another point, Sir, on which, with all your address, you will
+persuade me as little. Can I think that we want writers of history while
+Mr. Hume and Mr. Robertson are living? It is a truth, and not a
+compliment, that I never heard objections made to Mr. Hume's History
+without endeavouring to convince the persons who found fault with it,
+of its great merit and beauty; and for what I saw of Mr. Robertson's
+work, it is one of the purest styles, and of the greatest impartiality,
+that I ever read. It is impossible for me to recommend a subject to him;
+because I cannot judge of what materials he can obtain. His present
+performance will undoubtedly make him so well known and esteemed, that
+he will have credit to obtain many new lights for a future history; but
+surely those relating to his own country will always lie most open to
+him. This is much my way of thinking with regard to myself. Though the
+Life of Christina[1] is a pleasing and a most uncommon subject, yet,
+totally unacquainted as I am with Sweden and its language, how could I
+flatter myself with saying anything new of her? And when original
+letters and authentic papers shall hereafter appear, may not they
+contradict half one should relate on the authority of what is already
+published? for though Memoirs _written_ nearest to the time are likely
+to be the truest, those _published_ nearest to it are generally the
+falsest.
+
+[Footnote 1: Queen Christina of Sweden was the daughter and heiress of
+the great Gustavus Adolphus. After a time she abdicated the throne and
+lived for some time in Paris, where she acted in one respect as if still
+possessed of royal authority, actually causing her equerry, Monaldeschi,
+to be hung in one of her sitting-rooms.]
+
+But, indeed, Sir, I am now making you only civil excuses; the real one
+is, I have no kind of intention of continuing to write. I could not
+expect to succeed again with so much luck,--indeed, I think it so,--as I
+have done; it would mortify me more now, after a little success, to be
+despised, than it would have done before; and if I could please as much
+as I should wish to do, I think one should dread being a voluminous
+author. My own idleness, too, bids me desist. If I continued, I should
+certainly take more pains than I did in my Catalogue; the trouble would
+not only be more than I care to encounter, but would probably destroy
+what I believe the only merit of my last work, the ease. If I could
+incite you to tread in steps which I perceive you don't condemn, and for
+which it is evident you are so well qualified, from your knowledge, the
+grace, facility, and humour of your expression and manner, I shall have
+done a real service, where I expected at best to amuse.
+
+
+_THE BATTLE OF MINDEN--LORD G. SACKVILLE._
+
+TO THE HON. H.S. CONWAY.
+
+ARLINGTON STREET, _Aug._ 14, 1759.
+
+I am here in the most unpleasant way in the world, attending poor Mrs.
+Leneve's death-bed, a spectator of all the horrors of tedious suffering
+and clear sense, and with no one soul to speak to--but I will not tire
+you with a description of what has quite worn me out.
+
+Probably by this time you have seen the Duke of Richmond or Fitzroy--but
+lest you should not, I will tell you all I can learn, and a wonderful
+history it is. Admiral Byng was not more unpopular than Lord George
+Sackville.[1] I should scruple repeating his story if Betty and the
+waiters at Arthur's did not talk of it publicly, and thrust Prince
+Ferdinand's orders into one's hand.
+
+[Footnote 1: Lord George was brought to court-martial for disobedience
+of orders, and most deservedly cashiered--a sentence which was, not very
+becomingly, oveilooked some years afterwards, when, having changed his
+name to Germaine on succeeding to a large fortune, and having become a
+member of the House of Commons, he was made a Secretary of State by Lord
+North.]
+
+You have heard, I suppose, of the violent animosities that have reigned
+for the whole campaign between him and Lord Granby--in which some other
+warm persons have been very warm too. In the heat of the battle, the
+Prince, finding thirty-six squadrons of French coming down upon our
+army, sent Ligonier to order our thirty-two squadrons, under Lord
+George, to advance. During that transaction, the French appeared to
+waver; and Prince Ferdinand, willing, as it is supposed, to give the
+honour to the British horse of terminating the day, sent Fitzroy to bid
+Lord George bring up only the British cavalry. Ligonier had but just
+delivered his message, when Fitzroy came with his.--Lord George said,
+"This can't be so--would he have me break the line? here is some
+mistake." Fitzroy replied, he had not argued upon the orders, but those
+were the orders. "Well!" said Lord George, "but I want a guide." Fitzroy
+said, he would be his guide. Lord George, "Where is the Prince?"
+Fitzroy, "I left him at the head of the left wing, I don't know where he
+is now." Lord George said he would go seek him, and have this explained.
+Smith then asked Fitzroy to repeat the orders to him; which being done,
+Smith went and whispered Lord George, who says he then bid Smith carry
+up the cavalry. Smith is come, and says he is ready to answer anybody
+any question. Lord George says, Prince Ferdinand's behaviour to him has
+been most infamous, has asked leave to resign his command, and to come
+over, which is granted. Prince Ferdinand's behaviour is summed up in the
+enclosed extraordinary paper: which you will doubt as I did, but which
+is certainly genuine. I doubted, because, in the military, I thought
+direct disobedience of orders was punished with an immediate arrest, and
+because the last paragraph seemed to me very foolish. The going out of
+the way to compliment Lord Granby with what he would have done, seems to
+take off a little from the compliments paid to those that have done
+something; but, in short, Prince Ferdinand or Lord George, one of them,
+is most outrageously in the wrong, and the latter has much the least
+chance of being thought in the right.
+
+The particulars I tell you, I collected from the most _accurate_
+authorities.--I make no comments on Lord George, it would look like a
+little dirty court to you; and the best compliment I can make you, is to
+think, as I do, that you will be the last man to enjoy this revenge.
+
+You will be sorry for poor M'Kinsey and Lady Betty, who have lost their
+only child at Turin. Adieu!
+
+
+_ADMIRAL BOSCAWEN'S VICTORY--DEFEAT OF THE KING OF PRUSSIA--LORD G.
+SACKVILLE._
+
+TO SIR HORACE MANN.
+
+ARLINGTON STREET, _Sept._ 13, 1759.
+
+With your unathletic constitution I think you will have a greater weight
+of glory to represent than you can bear. You will be as _épuisé_ as
+Princess Craon with all the triumphs over Niagara, Ticonderoga,
+Crown-point, and such a parcel of long names. You will ruin yourself in
+French horns, to exceed those of Marshal Botta, who has certainly found
+out a pleasant way of announcing victories. Besides, _all_ the West
+Indies, which we have taken by a panic, there is Admiral Boscawen has
+demolished the Toulon squadron, and has made _you_ Viceroy of the
+Mediterranean. I really believe the French will come hither now, for
+they can be safe nowhere else. If the King of Prussia should be totally
+undone in Germany,[1] we can afford to give him an appanage, as a
+younger son of England, of some hundred thousand miles on the Ohio. Sure
+universal monarchy was never so put to shame as that of France! What a
+figure do they make! They seem to have no ministers, no generals, no
+soldiers! If anything could be more ridiculous than their behaviour in
+the field, it would be in the cabinet! Their invasion appears not to
+have been designed against us, but against their own people, who, they
+fear, will mutiny, and to quiet whom they disperse expresses, with
+accounts of the progress of their arms in England. They actually have
+established posts, to whom people are directed to send their letters for
+their friends _in England_. If, therefore, you hear that the French have
+established themselves at Exeter or at Norwich, don't be alarmed, nor
+undeceive the poor women who are writing to their husbands for English
+baubles.
+
+[Footnote 1: Frederic the Great had sustained a severe defeat at
+Hochkirch in October, 1758, and a still more terrible one in August of
+this year from Marshals Laudon and Soltikof at Kunersdorf. It seemed so
+irreparable that for a moment he even contemplated putting an end to his
+life; but he was saved from the worst consequences of the blow by
+jealousies which sprang up between the Austrian and Russian commanders,
+and preventing them from profiting by their victory as they might have
+done.]
+
+We have lost another Princess, Lady Elizabeth.[1] She died of an
+inflammation in her bowels in two days. Her figure was so very
+unfortunate, that it would have been difficult for her to be happy, but
+her parts and application were extraordinary. I saw her act in "Cato" at
+eight years old, (when she could not stand alone, but was forced to lean
+against the side-scene,) better than any of her brothers and sisters.
+She had been so unhealthy, that at that age she had not been taught to
+read, but had learned the part of Lucia by hearing the others study
+their parts. She went to her father and mother, and begged she might
+act. They put her off as gently as they could--she desired leave to
+repeat her part, and when she did, it was with so much sense, that there
+was no denying her.
+
+[Footnote 1: Second daughter of Frederick, Prince of Wales.--WALPOLE.]
+
+I receive yours of August 25. To all your alarms for the King of
+Prussia I subscribe. With little Brandenburgh he could not exhaust all
+the forces of Bohemia, Hungary, Austria, Muscovy, Siberia, Tartary,
+Sweden, &c., &c., &c.--but not to politicize too much, I believe the
+world will come to be fought for somewhere between the North of Germany
+and the back of Canada, between Count Daun and Sir William Johnson.[1]
+
+[Footnote 1: Our General in America--WALPOLE.]
+
+You guessed right about the King of Spain; he is dead, and the Queen
+Dowager may once more have an opportunity of embroiling the little of
+Europe that remains unembroiled.
+
+Thank you, my dear Sir, for the Herculaneum and Caserta that you are
+sending me. I wish the watch may arrive safe, to show you that I am not
+insensible to all your attentions for me, but endeavour, at a great
+distance, to imitate you in the execution of commissions.
+
+I would keep this letter back for a post, that I might have but one
+trouble of sending you Quebec too; but when one has taken so many
+places, it is not worth while to wait for one more.
+
+Lord George Sackville, the hero of all conversation, if one can be so
+for not being a hero, is arrived. He immediately applied for a
+Court-Martial, but was told it was impossible now, as the officers
+necessary are in Germany. This was in writing from Lord Holdernesse--but
+Lord Ligonier in words was more squab--"If he wanted a Court-Martial, he
+might go seek it in Germany." All that could be taken from him, is, his
+regiment, above two thousand pounds a year: commander in Germany at ten
+pounds a day, between three and four thousand pounds: lieutenant-general
+of the ordnance, one thousand five hundred pounds: a fort, three hundred
+pounds. He remains with a patent place in Ireland of one thousand two
+hundred pounds, and about two thousand pounds a year of his own and
+wife's. With his parts and ambition it cannot end here; he calls himself
+ruined, but when the Parliament meets, he will probably attempt some
+sort of revenge.
+
+They attribute, I don't know with what grounds, a sensible kind of plan
+to the French; that De la Clue was to have pushed for Ireland, Thurot
+for Scotland, and the Brest fleet for England--but before they lay such
+great plans, they should take care of proper persons to execute them.[1]
+
+[Footnote 1: De la Clue and the French were this year making unusual
+efforts to establish a naval superiority over us, which they never had
+done, and never will do. As is mentioned in this letter, one powerful
+fleet was placed under De la Clue, another under Conflans, and a strong
+squadron under Commodore Thurot. De la Clue, however, for many weeks
+kept close in Toulon, resisting every endeavour of Boscawen to tempt him
+out, till the English admiral was compelled to retire to Gibraltar for
+the repair of some of his ships. De la Clue, not knowing which way he
+had gone, thought he could steal through the Straits to join Conflans,
+according to his original orders. But Boscawen caught him off Cape
+Lagos, and gave him a decisive defeat, capturing five sail of the line,
+and among them the flagship _L'Océan_ (80). Before the end of the year
+Hawke almost destroyed the fleet of Conflans, capturing five and driving
+the rest on shore; while Thurot, who at first had a gleam of success,
+making one or two descents on the northern coast of Ireland, and even
+capturing Carrickfergus, had, in the end, worse fortune than either of
+his superior officers, being overtaken at the mouth of Belfast Lough by
+Captain Elliott with a squadron of nearly equal force, when the whole of
+the French squadron was taken and he himself was killed (the Editor's
+"History of the British Navy," c. 12).]
+
+I cannot help smiling at the great objects of our letters. We never
+converse on a less topic than a kingdom. We are a kind of citizens of
+the world, and battles and revolutions are the common incidents of our
+neighbourhood. But that is and must be the case of distant
+correspondences: Kings and Empresses that we never saw, are the only
+persons we can be acquainted with in common. We can have no more
+familiarity than the _Daily Advertiser_ would have if it wrote to the
+_Florentine Gazette_. Adieu! My compliments to any monarch that lives
+within five hundred miles of you.
+
+
+_A YEAR OF TRIUMPHS._
+
+TO GEORGE MONTAGU, ESQ.
+
+STRAWBERRY HILL, _Oct._ 21, 1759.
+
+Your pictures shall be sent as soon as any of us go to London, but I
+think that will not be till the Parliament meets. Can we easily leave
+the remains of such a year as this? It is still all gold.[1] I have not
+dined or gone to bed by a fire till the day before yesterday. Instead of
+the glorious and ever-memorable year 1759, as the newspapers call it, I
+call it this ever-warm and victorious year. We have not had more
+conquest than fine weather: one would think we had plundered East and
+West Indies of sunshine. Our bells are worn threadbare with ringing for
+victories. I believe it will require ten votes of the House of Commons
+before people will believe it is the Duke of Newcastle that has done
+this, and not Mr. Pitt. One thing is very fatiguing--all the world is
+made knights or generals. Adieu! I don't know a word of news less than
+the conquest of America. Adieu! yours ever.
+
+[Footnote 1: The immediate cause of this exultation was the battle
+(September 14th) and subsequent capture of Quebec. On the other side of
+the world Colonel Forde had inflicted severe defeats on the French and
+Dutch, and had taken Masulipatam; and besides these triumphs there were
+our naval successes mentioned in the last letter, and the battle of
+Minden.]
+
+P.S.--You shall hear from me again if we take Mexico or China before
+Christmas.
+
+2nd P.S.--I had sealed my letter, but break it open again, having forgot
+to tell you that Mr. Cowslade has the pictures of Lord and Lady Cutts,
+and is willing to sell them.
+
+
+_FRENCH BANKRUPTCY--FRENCH EPIGRAM._
+
+TO GEORGE MONTAGU, ESQ.
+
+ARLINGTON STREET, _Nov._ 8, 1759.
+
+Your pictures will set out on Saturday; I give you notice, that you may
+inquire for them. I did not intend to be here these three days, but my
+Lord Bath taking the trouble to send a man and horse to ask me to dinner
+yesterday, I did not know how to refuse; and besides, as Mr. Bentley
+said to me, "you know he was an old friend of your father."
+
+The town is empty, but is coming to dress itself for Saturday. My Lady
+Coventry showed George Selwyn her clothes; they are blue, with spots of
+silver, of the size of a shilling, and a silver trimming, and cost--my
+lord will know what. She asked George how he liked them; he replied,
+"Why, you will be change for a guinea."
+
+I find nothing talked of but the French bankruptcy;[1] Sir Robert Brown,
+I hear--and am glad to hear--will be a great sufferer. They put gravely
+into the article of bankrupts in the newspaper, "Louis le Petit, of the
+city of Paris, peace-breaker, dealer, and chapman;" it would have been
+still better if they had said, "Louis Bourbon of petty France." We don't
+know what is become of their Monsieur Thurot, of whom we had still a
+little mind to be afraid. I should think he would do like Sir Thomas
+Hanmer, make a faint effort, beg pardon of the Scotch for their
+disappointment, and retire. Here are some pretty verses just arrived.
+
+    Pourquoi le baton à Soubise,
+    Puisque Chevert est le vainqueur?[2]
+    C'est de la cour une méprise,
+    Ou bien le but de la faveur.
+    Je ne vois rien là qui m'étonne,
+    Repond aussitot un railleur;
+    C'est à l'aveugle qu'on le donne,
+    Et non pas au conducteur.
+
+[Footnote 1: In 1759 M. Bertin was Finance Minister--the fourth who had
+held that office in four years; and among his expedients for raising
+money he had been compelled to have recourse to the measure of stopping
+the payment of the interest on a large portion of the National Debt.]
+
+[Footnote 2: "_Chevert est le vainqueur._" He was one of the most
+brilliant officers in the French army. It was he who, under the orders
+of Saxe, surprised Prague in 1744, and it was to him that Maréchal
+d'Estrées was principally indebted for his victory of Hastenbeck.]
+
+Lady Meadows has left nine thousand pounds in reversion after her
+husband to Lord Sandwich's daughter. _Apropos_ to my Lady Meadows's
+maiden name, a name I believe you have sometimes heard; I was diverted
+t'other day with a story of a lady of that name,[1] and a lord, whose
+initial is no farther from hers than he himself is sometimes supposed to
+be. Her postillion, a lad of sixteen, said, "I am not such a child but I
+can guess something: whenever my Lord Lyttelton comes to my lady, she
+orders the porter to let in nobody else, and then they call for a pen
+and ink, and say they are going to write history." Is not this _finesse_
+so like him? Do you know that I am persuaded, now he is parted, that he
+will forget he is married, and propose himself in form to some woman or
+other.
+
+[Footnote 1: Mrs. Montagu was the foundress of "The Blue-stocking Club."
+She was the authoress of three "Dialogues of the Dead," to which Walpole
+is alluding here, and which she published with some others by Lord
+Lyttelton.]
+
+When do you come? if it is not soon, you will find a new town. I stared
+to-day at Piccadilly like a country squire; there are twenty new stone
+houses: at first I concluded that all the grooms, that used to live
+there, had got estates, and built palaces. One young gentleman, who was
+getting an estate, but was so indiscreet as to step out of his way to
+rob a comrade, is convicted, and to be transported; in short, one of the
+waiters at Arthur's. George Selwyn says, "What a horrid idea he will
+give of us to the people in Newgate!"
+
+I was still more surprised t'other day, than at seeing Piccadilly, by
+receiving a letter from the north of Ireland from a clergyman, with
+violent encomiums on my "Catalogue of Noble Authors"--and this when I
+thought it quite forgot. It puts me in mind of the queen[1] that sunk at
+Charing Cross and rose at Queenhithe.
+
+[Footnote 1: Queen Eleanor, wife of Edward I., who erected the cross at
+Charing, and others at the different places where her body had stopped
+on the way from the North to Westminster.]
+
+Mr. Chute has got his commission to inquire about your Cutts, but he
+thinks the lady is not your grandmother. You are very ungenerous to
+hoard tales from me of your ancestry: what relation have I spared? If
+your grandfathers were knaves, will your bottling up their bad blood
+mend it? Do you only take a cup of it now and then by yourself, and then
+come down to your parson, and boast of it, as if it was pure old
+metheglin? I sat last night with the Mater Gracchorum--oh! 'tis a Mater
+Jagorum; if her descendants taste any of her black blood, they surely
+will make as wry faces at it as the servant in Don John does when the
+ghost decants a corpse. Good night! I am just returning to Strawberry,
+to husband my two last days and to avoid all the pomp of the birthday.
+Oh! I had forgot, there is a Miss Wynne coming forth, that is to be
+handsomer than my Lady Coventry; but I have known one threatened with
+such every summer for these seven years, and they are always addled by
+winter!
+
+
+_HE LIVES AMONGST ROYALTY--COMMOTIONS IN IRELAND._
+
+TO GEORGE MONTAGU, ESQ.
+
+ARLINGTON STREET, _Jan._ 7, 1760.
+
+You must not wonder I have not written to you a long time; a person of
+my consequence! I am now almost ready to say, _We_, instead of _I_. In
+short, I live amongst royalty--considering the plenty, that is no great
+wonder. All the world lives with them, and they with all the world.
+Princes and Princesses open shops, in every corner of the town, and the
+whole town deals with them. As I have gone to one, I chose to frequent
+all, that I might not be particular, and seem to have views; and yet it
+went so much against me, that I came to town on purpose a month ago for
+the Duke's levée, and had engaged Brand to go with me--and then could
+not bring myself to it. At last, I went to him and Princess Emily
+yesterday. It was well I had not flattered myself with being still in my
+bloom; I am grown so old since they saw me, that neither of them knew
+me. When they were told, he just spoke to me (I forgive him; he is not
+out of my debt, even with that): she was exceedingly gracious, and
+commended Strawberry to the skies. To-night, I was asked to their party
+at Norfolk House. These parties are wonderfully select and dignified:
+one might sooner be a knight of Malta than qualified for them; I don't
+know how the Duchess of Devonshire, Mr. Fox, and I, were forgiven some
+of our ancestors. There were two tables at loo, two at whist, and a
+quadrille. I was commanded to the Duke's loo; he was sat down: not to
+make him wait, I threw my hat upon the marble table, and broke four
+pieces off a great crystal chandelier. I stick to my etiquette, and
+treat them with great respect; not as I do my friend, the Duke of York.
+But don't let us talk any more of Princes. My Lucan appears to-morrow; I
+must say it is a noble volume. Shall I send it to you--or won't you come
+and fetch it?
+
+There is nothing new of public, but the violent commotions in
+Ireland,[1] whither the Duke of Bedford still persists in going. Aeolus
+to quell a storm!
+
+[Footnote 1: "In 1759 reports that a Legislative Union was contemplated
+led to some furious Protestant riots in Dublin. The Chancellor and some
+of the Bishops were violently attacked. A judge in a law case warned the
+Roman Catholics that 'the laws did not presume a Papist to exist in the
+kingdom'; nor could they breathe without the connivance of the
+Government" (Lecky, "History of England," ii. 436). Gray, in a letter to
+Dr. Wharton, mentions that they forced their way into the House of
+Lords, and "placed an old woman on the throne, and called for pipes and
+tobacco." He especially mentions the Bishops of Killaloe and Waterford
+as exposed to ardent ill-treatment, and concludes: "The notion that had
+possessed the crowd was that an union was to be voted between the two
+nations, and they should have no more Parliaments in Dublin."]
+
+I am in great concern for my old friend, poor Lady Harry Beauclerc; her
+lord dropped down dead two nights ago, as he was sitting with her and
+all their children. Admiral Boscawen is dead by this time. Mrs.
+Osborn[1] and I are not much afflicted: Lady Jane Coke too is dead,
+exceedingly rich; I have not heard her will yet.
+
+[Footnote 1: Boscawen had been a member of the court martial which had
+found Admiral Byng guilty. Mrs. Osborn was Byng's sister.]
+
+If you don't come to town soon, I give you warning, I will be a lord of
+the bedchamber, or a gentleman usher. If you will, I will be nothing but
+what I have been so many years--my own and yours ever.
+
+
+_SEVERITY OF THE WEATHER--SCARCITY IN GERMANY--A PARTY AT PRINCE
+EDWARD'S--CHARLES TOWNSEND'S COMMENTS ON LA FONTAINE._
+
+TO GEORGE MONTAGU, ESQ.
+
+ARLINGTON STREET, _Jan._ 14, 1760.
+
+How do you contrive to exist on your mountain in this rude season? Sure
+you must be become a snowball! As I was not in England in forty-one, I
+had no notion of such cold. The streets are abandoned; nothing appears
+in them: the Thames is almost as solid. Then think what a campaign must
+be in such a season! Our army was under arms for fourteen hours on the
+twenty-third, expecting the French; and several of the men were frozen
+when they should have dismounted. What milksops the Marlboroughs and
+Turennes, the Blakes and the Van Tromps appear now, who whipped into
+winter quarters and into port, the moment their noses looked blue. Sir
+Cloudesley Shovel said that an admiral would deserve to be broke, who
+kept great ships out after the end of September, and to be shot if after
+October. There is Hawke in the bay weathering _this_ winter, after
+conquering in a storm. For my part, I scarce venture to make a campaign
+in the Opera-house; for if I once begin to freeze, I shall be frozen
+through in a moment. I am amazed, with such weather, such ravages, and
+distress, that there is anything left in Germany, but money; for
+thither, half the treasure of Europe goes: England, France, Russia, and
+all the Empress can squeeze from Italy and Hungary, all is sent thither,
+and yet the wretched people have not subsistence. A pound of bread sells
+at Dresden for eleven-pence. We are going to send many more troops
+thither; and it is so much the fashion to raise regiments, that I wish
+there were such a neutral kind of beings in England as abbés,[1] that
+one might have an excuse for not growing military mad, when one has
+turned the heroic corner of one's age. I am ashamed of being a young
+rake, when my seniors are covering their grey toupees with helmets and
+feathers, and accoutering their pot-bellies with cuirasses and martial
+masquerade habits. Yet rake I am, and abominably so, for a person that
+begins to wrinkle reverendly. I have sat up twice this week till between
+two and three with the Duchess of Grafton, at loo, who, by the way, has
+got a pam-child this morning, and on Saturday night I supped with Prince
+Edward at my Lady Rochford's, and we stayed till half an hour past
+three. My favour with that Highness continues, or rather increases. He
+makes everybody make suppers for him to meet me, for I still hold out
+against going to court. In short, if he were twenty years older, or I
+could make myself twenty years younger, I might carry him to Campden
+House, and be as impertinent as ever my Lady Churchill was; but, as I
+dread being ridiculous, I shall give my Lord Bute no uneasiness. My Lady
+Maynard, who divides the favour of this tiny court with me, supped with
+us. Did you know she sings French ballads very prettily? Lord Rochford
+played on the guitar, and the Prince sung; there were my two nieces, and
+Lord Waldegrave, Lord Huntingdon, and Mr. Morrison the groom, and the
+evening was pleasant; but I had a much more agreeable supper last night
+at Mrs. Clive's, with Miss West, my niece Cholmondeley, and Murphy, the
+writing actor, who is very good company, and two or three more. Mrs.
+Cholmondeley is very lively; you know how entertaining the Clive is, and
+Miss West is an absolute original.
+
+[Footnote 1: French chroniclers remark that the title Abbé had long
+since ceased in France to denote the possession of any ecclesiastical
+preferment, but had become a courteous denomination of unemployed
+ecclesiastics; and they compare it to the use of the term "Esquire" in
+England.]
+
+There is nothing new, but a very dull pamphlet written by Lord Bath, and
+his chaplain Douglas, called a "Letter to Two Great Men." It is a plan
+for the peace, and much adopted by the City, and much admired by all who
+are too humble to judge for themselves.
+
+I was much diverted the other morning with another volume on birds by
+Edwards, who has published four or five. The poor man, who is grown very
+old and devout, begs God to take from him the love of natural
+philosophy; and having observed some heterodox proceedings among bantam
+cocks, he proposes that all schools of girls and boys should be
+promiscuous, lest, if separated, they should learn wayward passions. But
+what struck me most were his dedications, the last was to God; this is
+to Lord Bute, as if he was determined to make his fortune in one world
+or the other.
+
+Pray read Fontaine's fable of the lion grown old; don't it put you in
+mind of anything? No! not when his shaggy majesty has borne the insults
+of the tiger and the horse, &c., and the ass comes last, kicks out his
+only remaining fang, and asks for a blue bridle? _Apropos_, I will tell
+you the turn Charles Townshend gave to this fable. "My lord," said he,
+"has quite mistaken the thing; he soars too high at first: people often
+miscarry by not preceding by degrees; he went and at once asked for my
+_Lord_ Carlisle's garter--if he would have been contented to ask first
+for my _Lady_ Carlisle's garter, I don't know but he would have obtained
+it!" Adieu!
+
+
+_CAPTURE OF CARRICKFERGUS._
+
+TO SIR HORACE MANN.
+
+ARLINGTON STREET, _Feb._ 28, 1760.
+
+The next time you see Marshal Botta, and are to act King of Great
+Britain, France, and Ireland, you must abate about a hundredth
+thousandth part of the dignity of your crown. You are no more monarch
+of _all_ Ireland, than King O'Neil, or King Macdermoch is. Louis XV. is
+sovereign of France, Navarre, and Carrickfergus. You will be mistaken if
+you think the peace is made, and that we cede this Hibernian town, in
+order to recover Minorca, or to keep Quebec and Louisbourg. To be sure,
+it is natural you should think so: how should so victorious and heroic a
+nation cease to enjoy any of its possessions, but to save Christian
+blood? Oh! I know you will suppose there has been another insurrection,
+and that it is King John of Bedford, and not King George of Brunswick,
+that has lost this town. Why, I own you are a great politician, and see
+things in a moment--and no wonder, considering how long you have been
+employed in negotiations; but for once all your sagacity is mistaken.
+Indeed, considering the total destruction of the maritime force of
+France, and that the great mechanics and mathematicians of this age have
+not invented a flying bridge to fling over the sea and land from the
+coast of France to the north of Ireland, it was not easy to conceive how
+the French should conquer Carrickfergus--and yet they have. But how I
+run on! not reflecting that by this time the old Pretender must have
+hobbled through Florence on his way to Ireland, to take possession of
+this scrap of his recovered domains; but I may as well tell you at once,
+for to be sure you and the loyal body of English in Tuscany will slip
+over all this exordium to come to the account of so extraordinary a
+revolution. Well, here it is. Last week Monsieur Thurot--oh! now you
+are _au fait_!--Monsieur Thurot, as I was saying, landed last week in
+the isle of Islay, the capital province belonging to a great Scotch
+King, who is so good as generally to pass the winter with his friends
+here in London. Monsieur Thurot had three ships, the crews of which
+burnt two ships belonging to King George, and a house belonging to his
+friend the King of Argyll--pray don't mistake; by _his friend_, I mean
+King George's, not Thurot's friend. When they had finished this
+campaign, they sailed to Carrickfergus, a poorish town, situate in the
+heart of the Protestant cantons. They immediately made a moderate demand
+of about twenty articles of provisions, promising to pay for them; for
+you know it is the way of modern invasions to make them cost as much as
+possible to oneself, and as little to those one invades. If this was not
+complied with, they threatened to burn the town, and then march to
+Belfast, which is much richer. We were sensible of this civil
+proceeding, and not to be behindhand, agreed to it; but somehow or other
+this capitulation was broken; on which a detachment (the whole invasion
+consists of one thousand men) attack the place. We shut the gates, but
+after the battle of Quebec, it is impossible that so great a people
+should attend to such trifles as locks and bolts, accordingly there were
+none--and as if there were no gates neither, the two armies fired
+through them--if this is a blunder, remember I am describing an _Irish_
+war. I forgot to give you the numbers of the Irish army. It consisted of
+four companies--indeed they consisted but of seventy-two men, under
+Lieut.-colonel Jennings, a wonderful brave man--too brave, in short, to
+be very judicious. Unluckily our ammunition was soon spent, for it is
+not above a year that there have been any apprehensions for Ireland, and
+as all that part of the country are most protestantly loyal, it was not
+thought necessary to arm people who would fight till they die for their
+religion. When the artillery was silenced, the garrison thought the best
+way of saving the town was by flinging it at the heads of the besiegers;
+according they poured volleys of brickbats at the French, whose
+commander, Monsieur Flobert, was mortally knocked down, and his troops
+began to give way. However, General Jennings thought it most prudent to
+retreat to the castle, and the French again advanced. Four or five raw
+recruits still bravely kept the gates, when the garrison, finding no
+more gunpowder in the castle than they had had in the town, and not near
+so good a brick-kiln, sent to desire to surrender. General Thurot
+accordingly made them prisoners of war, and plundered the town.
+
+
+_THE BALLAD OF "HARDYKNUTE"--MR. HOME'S "SIEGE OF AQUILEIA"--"TRISTRAM
+SHANDY"--BISHOP WARBURTON'S PRAISE OF IT._
+
+TO SIR DAVID DALRYMPLE.
+
+STRAWBERRY HILL, _April_ 4, 1760.
+
+Sir,--As I have very little at present to trouble you with myself, I
+should have deferred writing till a better opportunity, if it were not
+to satisfy the curiosity of a friend; a friend whom you, Sir, will be
+glad to have made curious, as you originally pointed him out as a likely
+person to be charmed with the old Irish poetry you sent me. It is Mr.
+Gray, who is an enthusiast about those poems, and begs me to put the
+following queries to you; which I will do in his own words, and I may
+say truly, _Poeta loquitur_.
+
+"I am so charmed with the two specimens of Erse poetry, that I cannot
+help giving you the trouble to inquire a little farther about them, and
+should wish to see a few lines of the original, that I may form some
+slight idea of the language, the measure, and the rhythm.
+
+"Is there anything known of the author or authors, and of what antiquity
+are they supposed to be?
+
+"Is there any more to be had of equal beauty, or at all approaching to
+it?
+
+"I have been often told, that the poem called Hardykanute[1] (which I
+always admired and still admire) was the work of somebody that lived a
+few years ago. This I do not at all believe, though it has evidently
+been retouched in places by some modern hand; but, however, I am
+authorised by this report to ask, whether the two poems in question are
+certainly antique and genuine. I make this inquiry in quality of an
+antiquary, and am not otherwise concerned about it; for if I were sure
+that any one now living in Scotland had written them, to divert himself
+and laugh at the credulity of the world, I would undertake a journey
+into the Highlands only for the pleasure of seeing him."
+
+[Footnote 1: "Hardyknute" was an especial favourite of Sir W. Scott. In
+his "Life of Mr. Lockhart" he mentions having found in one of his books
+a mention that "he was taught 'Hardyknute' by heart before he could read
+the ballad itself; it was the first poem he ever learnt, the last he
+should ever forget" (c. 2). And in the very last year of his life, while
+at Malta, in a discussion on ballads in general, "he greatly lamented
+his friend Mr. Frere's heresy in not esteeming highly enough that of
+'Hardyknute.' He admitted that it was not a veritable old ballad, but
+'just old enough,' and a noble imitation of the best style." In fact, it
+was the composition of a lady, Mrs. Hachet, of Wardlaw.]
+
+You see, Sir, how easily you may make our greatest southern bard travel
+northward to visit a brother. The young translator has nothing to do but
+to own a forgery, and Mr. Gray is ready to pack up his lyre, saddle
+Pegasus, and set out directly. But seriously, he, Mr. Mason, my Lord
+Lyttelton, and one or two more, whose taste the world allows, are in
+love with your Erse elegies: I cannot say in general they are so much
+admired--but Mr. Gray alone is worth satisfying.
+
+The "Siege of Aquileia," of which you ask, pleased less than Mr. Home's
+other plays.[1] In my own opinion, "Douglas" far exceeds both the
+other. Mr. Home seems to have a beautiful talent for painting genuine
+nature and the manners of his country. There was so little of nature in
+the manners of both Greeks and Romans, that I do not wonder at his
+success being less brilliant when he tried those subjects; and, to say
+the truth, one is a little weary of them. At present, nothing is talked
+of, nothing admired, but what I cannot help calling a very insipid and
+tedious performance: it is a kind of novel, called "The Life and
+Opinions of Tristram Shandy;"[2] the great humour of which consists in
+the whole narration always going backwards. I can conceive a man saying
+that it would be droll to write a book in that manner, but have no
+notion of his persevering in executing it. It makes one smile two or
+three times at the beginning, but in recompense makes one yawn for two
+hours. The characters are tolerably kept up, but the humour is for ever
+attempted and missed. The best thing in it is a Sermon, oddly coupled
+with a good deal of coarseness, and both the composition of a clergyman.
+The man's head, indeed, was a little turned before, now topsy-turvy with
+his success and fame. Dodsley has given him six hundred and fifty pounds
+for the second edition and two more volumes (which I suppose will reach
+backwards to his great-great-grandfather); Lord Fauconberg, a donative
+of one hundred and sixty pounds a-year; and Bishop Warburton[3] gave him
+a purse of gold and this compliment (which happened to be a
+contradiction), "that it was quite an original composition, and in the
+true Cervantic vein:" the only copy that ever was an original, except in
+painting, where they all pretend to be so. Warburton, however, not
+content with this, recommended the book to the bench of bishops, and
+told them Mr. Sterne, the author, was the English Rabelais. They had
+never heard of such a writer. Adieu!
+
+[Footnote 1: "_Mr. Home's other plays._" Mr. Home was a Presbyterian
+minister. His first play was "The Tragedy of Douglas," which D'Israeli
+describes as a drama which, "by awakening the piety of domestic
+affections with the nobler passions, would elevate and purify the mind;"
+and proceeds, with no little indignation, to relate how nearly it cost
+the author dear. The "Glasgow divines, with the monastic spirit of the
+darkest ages, published a paper, which I abridge for the contemplation
+of the reader, who may wonder to see such a composition written in the
+eighteenth century: 'On Wednesday, February 2, 1757, the Presbytery of
+Glasgow came to the following resolution: They, having seen a printed
+paper intituled an admonition and exhortation of the reverend Presbytery
+of Edinburgh, which, among other evils prevailing, observed the
+following _melancholy_ but _notorious_ facts, that one who is a minister
+of the Church of Scotland did _himself_ write and compose _a stage
+play_, intituled 'The Tragedy of Douglas,' and got it to be acted at the
+theatre of Edinburgh; and that he, with several other ministers of the
+Church, were present, and _some_ of them _oftener than once_, at the
+acting of the said play before a numerous audience. The presbytery being
+_deeply affected_ with this new and strange appearance, do publish these
+sentiments,'" &c., &c.--sentiments with which I will not disgust the
+reader.]
+
+[Footnote 2: Walpole's criticism is worth preserving as a singular proof
+how far prejudice can obscure the judgement of a generally shrewd
+observer, and it is the more remarkable since he selects as its especial
+fault the failure of the author's attempts at humour; while all other
+critics, from Macaulay to Thackeray, agree in placing it among those
+works in which the humour is most conspicuous and most attractive. Even
+Johnson, when Boswell once, thinking perhaps that his "illustrious
+friend" might be offended with its occasional coarseness, pronounced
+Sterne to be "a dull fellow," was at once met with, "Why no, Sir."]
+
+[Footnote 3: Bishop Warburton was Bishop of Gloucester, a prelate whose
+vast learning was in some degree tarnished by unepiscopal violence of
+temper. He was a voluminous author; his most important work being an
+essay on "The Divine Legation of Moses." In one of his letters to
+Garrick he praises "Tristram Shandy" highly, priding himself on having
+recommended it to all the best company in town.]
+
+
+_ERSE POETRY--"THE DIALOGUES OF THE DEAD"--"THE COMPLETE ANGLER."_
+
+TO SIR DAVID DALRYMPLE.
+
+_June_ 20, 1760.
+
+I am obliged to you, Sir, for the volume of Erse poetry: all of it has
+merit; but I am sorry not to see in it the six descriptions of night
+with which you favoured me before, and which I like as much as any of
+the pieces. I can, however, by no means agree with the publisher, that
+they seem to be parts of an heroic poem; nothing to me can be more
+unlike. I should as soon take all the epitaphs in Westminster Abbey, and
+say it was an epic poem on the History of England. The greatest part are
+evidently elegies; and though I should not expect a bard to write by the
+rules of Aristotle, I would not, on the other hand, give to any work a
+title that must convey so different an idea to every common reader. I
+could wish, too, that the authenticity had been more largely stated. A
+man who knows Dr. Blair's character will undoubtedly take his word; but
+the gross of mankind, considering how much it is the fashion to be
+sceptical in reading, will demand proofs, not assertions.
+
+I am glad to find, Sir, that we agree so much on "The Dialogues of the
+Dead;"[1] indeed, there are very few that differ from us. It is well for
+the author, that none of his critics have undertaken to ruin his book
+by improving it, as you have done in the lively little specimen you sent
+me. Dr. Brown has writ a dull dialogue, called "Pericles and Aristides,"
+which will have a different effect from what yours would have. One of
+the most objectionable passages in Lord Lyttelton's book is, in my
+opinion, his apologising for the _moderate_ government of Augustus. A
+man who had exhausted tyranny in the most lawless and unjustifiable
+excesses is to be excused, because, out of weariness or policy, he grows
+less sanguinary at last!
+
+[Footnote 1: "The Dialogues of the Dead" were by Lord Lyttelton. In an
+earlier letter Walpole pronounces them "not very lively or striking."]
+
+There is a little book coming out, that will amuse you. It is a new
+edition of Isaac Walton's "Complete Angler,"[1] full of anecdotes and
+historic notes. It is published by Mr. Hawkins,[2] a very worthy
+gentleman in my neighbourhood, but who, I could wish, did not think
+angling so very _innocent_ an amusement. We cannot live without
+destroying animals, but shall we torture them for our sport--sport in
+their destruction? I met a rough officer at his house t'other day, who
+said he knew such a person was turning Methodist; for, in the middle of
+conversation, he rose, and opened the window to let out a moth. I told
+him I did not know that the Methodists had any principle so good, and
+that I, who am certainly not on the point of becoming one, always did so
+too. One of the bravest and best men I ever knew, Sir Charles Wager, I
+have often heard declare he never killed a fly willingly. It is a
+comfortable reflection to me, that all the victories of last year have
+been gained since the suppression of the Bear Garden and prize-fighting;
+as it is plain, and nothing else would have made it so, that our valour
+did not singly and solely depend upon these two Universities. Adieu!
+
+[Footnote 1: "The Complete Angler" is one of those rare books which
+retain its popularity 250 years after its publication--not for the value
+of its practical instructions to fishermen, for in this point of view it
+is valueless (Walton himself being only a worm or livebait fisherman,
+and the chapters on fly-fishing being by Cotton), but for its healthy
+tone and love of country scenery and simple country amusements which are
+seldom more attractively displayed.]
+
+[Footnote 2: Afterwards Sir John Hawkins, the executor and biographer of
+Dr. Johnson.]
+
+
+_VISITS IN THE MIDLAND COUNTIES--WHICHNOVRE--SHEFFIELD--THE NEW ART OF
+PLATING--CHATSWORTH--HADDON HALL--HARDWICKE--APARTMENTS OF MARY QUEEN OF
+SCOTS--NEWSTEAD--ALTHORP._
+
+TO GEORGE MONTAGU, ESQ.
+
+ARLINGTON STREET, _Sept._ 1, 1760.
+
+I was disappointed at your not being at home as I returned from my
+expedition.
+
+My tour has been extremely agreeable. I set out with winning a good deal
+at Loo at Ragley; the Duke of Grafton was not so successful, and had
+some high words with Pam. I went from thence to Offley's at
+Whichnovre[1], the individual manor of the flitch of bacon, which has
+been growing rusty for these thirty years in his hall. I don't wonder; I
+have no notion that one could keep in good humour with one's wife for a
+year and a day, unless one was to live on the very spot, which is one of
+the sweetest scenes I ever saw. It is the brink of a high hill; the
+Trent wriggles through at the foot; Lichfield and twenty other churches
+and mansions decorate the view. Mr. Anson has bought an estate
+[Shugborough] close by, whence my Lord used to cast many a wishful eye,
+though without the least pretensions even to a bit of lard.
+
+[Footnote 1: The manor of Whichnovre, near Lichfield, is held (like the
+better-known Dunmow, in Essex) on the singular custom of the Lord of the
+Manor "keeping ready, all times of the year but Lent, one bacon-flyke
+hanging in his hall, to be given to every man or woman who demanded it a
+year and a day after marriage, upon their swearing that they would not
+have changed for none other, fairer nor fouler, richer nor poorer, nor
+for no other descended of great lineage sleeping nor waking at no
+time."]
+
+I saw Lichfield Cathedral, which has been rich, but my friend Lord
+Brooke and his soldiery treated poor St. Chad[1] with so little
+ceremony, that it is in a most naked condition. In a niche at the very
+summit they have crowded a statue of Charles the Second, with a special
+pair of shoe-strings, big enough for a weathercock. As I went to Lord
+Strafford's I passed through Sheffield, which is one of the foulest
+towns in England in the most charming situation; there are
+two-and-twenty thousand inhabitants making knives and scissors: they
+remit eleven thousand pounds a week to London. One man there has
+discovered the art of plating copper with silver; I bought a pair of
+candlesticks for two guineas that are quite pretty. Lord Strafford has
+erected the little Gothic building, which I got Mr. Bentley to draw; I
+took the idea from Chichester Cross. It stands on a high bank in the
+menagerie, between a pond and a vale, totally bowered over with oaks. I
+went with the Straffords to Chatsworth and stayed there four days; there
+were Lady Mary Coke, Lord Besborough and his daughters, Lord Thomond,
+Mr. Boufoy, the Duke, the old Duchess, and two of his brothers. Would
+you believe that nothing was ever better humoured than the ancient
+Grace? She stayed every evening till it was dark in the skittle-ground,
+keeping the score; and one night, that the servants had a ball for Lady
+Dorothy's birthday, we fetched the fiddler into the drawing-room, and
+the dowager herself danced with us! I never was more disappointed than
+at Chatsworth,[2] which, ever since I was born, I have condemned. It is
+a glorious situation; the vale rich in corn and verdure, vast woods hang
+down the hills, which are green to the top, and the immense rocks only
+serve to dignify the prospect. The river runs before the door, and
+serpentises more than you can conceive in the vale. The Duke is widening
+it, and will make it the middle of his park; but I don't approve an idea
+they are going to execute, of a fine bridge with statues under a noble
+cliff. If they will have a bridge (which by the way will crowd the
+scene), it should be composed of rude fragments, such as the giant of
+the Peak would step upon, that he might not be wetshod. The expense of
+the works now carrying on will amount to forty thousand pounds. A heavy
+quadrangle of stables is part of the plan, is very cumbrous, and
+standing higher than the house, is ready to overwhelm it. The principal
+front of the house is beautiful, and executed with the neatness of
+wrought plate; the inside is most sumptuous, but did not please me; the
+heathen gods, goddesses, Christian virtues, and allegoric gentlefolks,
+are crowded into every room, as if Mrs. Holman had been in heaven and
+invited everybody she saw. The great apartment is first; painted
+ceilings, inlaid floors, and unpainted wainscots make every room
+_sombre_. The tapestries are fine, but not fine enough, and there are
+few portraits. The chapel is charming. The great _jet d'eau_ I like, nor
+would I remove it; whatever is magnificent of the kind in the time it
+was done, I would retain, else all gardens and houses wear a tiresome
+resemblance. I except that absurdity of a cascade tumbling down marble
+steps, which reduces the steps to be of no use at all. I saw Haddon, an
+abandoned old castle of the Rutlands, in a romantic situation, but which
+never could have composed a tolerable dwelling. The Duke sent Lord John
+[Cavendish] with me to Hardwicke, where I was again disappointed; but I
+will not take relations from others; they either don't see for
+themselves, or can't see for me. How I had been promised that I should
+be charmed with Hardwicke,[3] and told that the Devonshires ought to
+have established there! never was I less charmed in my life. The house
+is not Gothic, but of that betweenity, that intervened when Gothic
+declined and Paladian was creeping in--rather, this is totally naked of
+either. It has vast chambers--aye, vast, such as the nobility of that
+time delighted in, and did not know how to furnish. The great apartment
+is exactly what it was when the Queen of Scots was kept there. Her
+council-chamber, the council-chamber of a poor woman, who had only two
+secretaries, a gentleman-usher, an apothecary, a confessor, and three
+maids, is so outrageously spacious, that you would take it for King
+David's, who thought, contrary to all modern experience, that in the
+multitude of counsellors there is wisdom. At the upper end is the state,
+with a long table, covered with a sumptuous cloth, embroidered and
+embossed with gold,--at least what was gold; so are all the tables.
+Round the top of the chamber runs a monstrous frieze, ten or twelve feet
+deep, representing stag-hunting in miserable plastered relief. The next
+is her dressing-room, hung with patch-work on black velvet; then her
+state bedchamber. The bed has been rich beyond description, and now
+hangs in costly golden tatters. The hangings, part of which they say her
+Majesty worked, are composed of figures as large as life, sewed and
+embroidered on black velvet, white satin, &c., and represent the virtues
+that were necessary for her, or that she was forced to have, as Patience
+and Temperance, &c. The fire-screens are particular; pieces of yellow
+velvet, fringed with gold, hang on a cross-bar of wood, which is fixed
+on the top of a single stick, that rises from the foot. The only
+furniture which has any appearance of taste are the table and cabinets,
+which are all of oak, richly carved. There is a private chamber within,
+where she lay, her arms and style over the door; the arras hangs over
+all the doors; the gallery is sixty yards long, covered with bad
+tapestry, and wretched pictures of Mary herself, Elizabeth in a gown of
+sea-monsters, Lord Darnley, James the Fifth and his Queen, curious, and
+a whole history of Kings of England, not worth sixpence a-piece. There
+is an original of old Bess of Hardwicke herself, who built the house.
+Her estates were then reckoned at sixty thousand pounds a-year, and now
+let for two hundred thousand pounds. Lord John Cavendish told me, that
+the tradition in the family is, that it had been prophesied to her that
+she should never die as long as she was building; and that at last she
+died in a hard frost, when the labourers could not work. There is a fine
+bank of old oaks in the park over a lake; nothing else pleased me there.
+However, I was so diverted with this old beldam and her magnificence,
+that I made this epitaph for her:--
+
+    Four times the nuptial bed she warm'd,
+    And every time so well perform'd,
+    That when death spoil'd each husband's billing,
+    He left the widow every shilling.
+    Fond was the dame, but not dejected;
+    Five stately mansions she erected
+    With more than royal pomp, to vary
+    The prison of her captive Mary.
+    When Hardwicke's towers shall bow their head,
+    Nor mass be more in Worksop said;
+    When Bolsover's fair fame shall tend
+    Like Olcotes, to its mouldering end;
+    When Chatsworth tastes no Ca'ndish bounties,
+    Let fame forget this costly countess.
+
+[Footnote 1: Scott alludes to Lord Brooke's violation of St. Chad's
+Cathedral in "Marmion," whose tomb
+
+    Was levelled when fanatic Brooke
+    The fair cathedral stormed and took,
+    But thanks to Heaven and good St. Chad
+    A guerdon meet the spoiler had (c. vi. 36).
+
+And the poet adds in a note that Lord Brooke himself, "who commanded the
+assailants, was shot with a musket-ball through the visor of his helmet;
+and the royalists remarked that he was killed by a shot fired from St.
+Chad's Cathedral on St. Chad's Day, and received his wound in the very
+eye with which, he had said, he hoped to see the ruin of all the
+cathedrals in England."]
+
+[Footnote 2: "_Disappointed with Chatsworth._" In a letter, however, to
+Lord Strafford three days afterwards he says: "Chatsworth surpassed his
+expectations; there is such richness and variety of prospect."]
+
+[Footnote 3: Hardwicke was one of what Home calls "the gentleman's
+houses," to which the unfortunate Queen was removed between the times of
+her detention at Tutbury and Fotheringay. It is not mentioned by
+Burton.]
+
+As I returned, I saw Newstead[1] and Althorpe: I like both. The former
+is the very abbey. The great east window of the church remains, and
+connects with the house; the hall entire, the refectory entire, the
+cloister untouched, with the ancient cistern of the convent, and their
+arms on it; a private chapel quite perfect. The park, which is still
+charming, has not been so much unprofaned; the present Lord has lost
+large sums, and paid part in old oaks, five thousand pounds of which
+have been cut near the house. In recompense he has built two baby forts,
+to pay his country in castles for the damage done to the navy, and
+planted a handful of Scotch firs, that look like ploughboys dressed in
+old family liveries for a public day. In the hall is a very good
+collection of pictures, all animals; the refectory, now the great
+drawing-room, is full of Byrons; the vaulted roof remaining, but the
+windows have new dresses making for them by a Venetian tailor. Althorpe
+has several very fine pictures by the best Italian hands, and a gallery
+of all one's acquaintance by Vandyke and Lely. I wonder you never saw
+it; it is but six miles from Northampton. Well, good night; I have writ
+you such a volume, that you see I am forced to page it. The Duke [of
+Cumberland] has had a stroke of the palsy, but is quite recovered,
+except in some letters, which he cannot pronounce; and it is still
+visible in the contraction of one side of his mouth. My compliments to
+your family.
+
+[Footnote 1: Newstead, since Walpole's time immortalised as the seat of
+the illustrious Byron. Evelyn had compared it, for its situation, to
+Fontainebleau, and particularly extolled "the front of a glorious Abbey
+Church" and its "brave woods and streams;" and Byron himself has given
+an elaborate description of it under the name of "Norman Abbey," not
+overlooking its woods:
+
+      It stood embosomed in a happy valley
+    Crowned by high woodlands, where the Druid-oak
+      Stood like Caractacus in act to rally
+    His host, with broad arms, 'gainst the thunderstroke--
+
+nor the streams:
+
+      Before the mansion lay a lucid lake
+    Broad as transparent, deep, and freshly fed
+      By a river, which its softened way did take
+    In currents through the calmer waters spread
+      Around--
+
+nor the abbey front:
+
+      A glorious remnant of the Gothic pile
+    While yet the church was Rome's, stood half apart
+      In a grand arch, which once screened many an angle.
+
+("Don Juan," xiii. 56-59.)]
+
+
+_GENTLEMAN'S DRESS--INFLUENCE OF LORD BUTE--ODE BY LORD MIDDLESEX--G.
+SELWYN'S QUOTATION._
+
+
+TO GEORGE MONTAGU, ESQ.
+
+ARLINGTON STREET, _April_ 16, 1761.
+
+You are a very mule; one offers you a handsome stall and manger in
+Berkeley Square, and you will not accept it. I have chosen your coat, a
+claret colour, to suit the complexion of the country you are going to
+visit; but I have fixed nothing about the lace. Barrett had none of
+gauze, but what were as broad as the Irish Channel. Your tailor found a
+very reputable one at another place, but I would not determine rashly;
+it will be two or three-and-twenty shillings the yard; you might have a
+very substantial real lace, which would wear like your buffet, for
+twenty. The second order of gauzes are frippery, none above twelve
+shillings, and those tarnished, for the species is out of fashion. You
+will have time to sit in judgment upon these important points; for
+Hamilton your secretary told me at the Opera two nights ago, that he had
+taken a house near Bushy, and hoped to be in my neighbourhood for four
+months.
+
+I was last night at your plump Countess's, who is so shrunk, that she
+does not seem to be composed of above a dozen hassocs. Lord Guildford
+rejoiced mightily over your preferment. The Duchess of Argyle was
+playing there, not knowing that the great Pam was just dead, to wit,
+her brother-in-law. He was abroad in the morning, was seized with a
+palpitation after dinner and was dead before the surgeon could arrive.
+There's the crown of Scotland too fallen upon my Lord Bute's head![1]
+Poor Lord Edgecumbe is still alive, and may be so for some days; the
+physicians, who no longer ago than Friday se'nnight persisted that he
+had no dropsy, in order to prevent his having Ward, on Monday last
+proposed that Ward should be called in, and at length they owned they
+thought the mortification begun. It is not clear it is yet; at times he
+is in his senses, and entirely so, composed, clear, and rational; talks
+of his death, and but yesterday, after such a conversation with his
+brother, asked for a pencil to amuse himself with drawing. What parts,
+genius, and agreeableness thrown away at a hazard table, and not
+permitted the chance of being saved by the villainy of physicians!
+
+[Footnote 1: Lord Bute used his influence in favour of Scotchmen with so
+little moderation that he raised a prejudice against the whole nation,
+which found a vent in Wilkes's _North Briton_ and Churchill's bitter and
+powerful satire, "The Prophecy of Famine."]
+
+You will be pleased with the Anacreontic, written by Lord Middlesex upon
+Sir Harry Bellendine: I have not seen anything so antique for ages; it
+has all the fire, poetry, and simplicity of Horace.
+
+    Ye sons of Bacchus, come and join
+    In solemn dirge, while tapers shine
+    Around the grape-embossed shrine
+    Of honest Harry Bellendine.
+
+    Pour the rich juice of Bourdeaux's wine,
+    Mix'd with your falling tears of brine,
+    In full libation o'er the shrine
+    Of honest Harry Bellendine.
+
+    Your brows let ivy chaplets twine,
+    While you push round the sparkling wine,
+    And let your table be the shrine
+    Of honest Harry Bellendine.
+
+He died in his vocation, of a high fever, after the celebration of some
+orgies. Though but six hours in his senses, he gave a proof of his usual
+good humour, making it his last request to the sister Tuftons to be
+reconciled; which they are. His pretty villa, in my neighbourhood, I
+fancy he has left to the new Lord Lorn. I must tell you an admirable
+_bon mot_ of George Selwyn, though not a new one; when there was a
+malicious report that the eldest Tufton was to marry Dr. Duncan, Selwyn
+said, "How often will she repeat that line of Shakspeare,
+
+    Wake Duncan with this knocking--would thou couldst!"
+
+I enclose the receipt from your lawyer. Adieu!
+
+
+_CAPTURE OF BELLEISLE--GRAY'S POEMS--HOGARTH'S VANITY._
+
+TO GEORGE MONTAGU, ESQ.
+
+ARLINGTON STREET, _May_ 5, 1761.
+
+We have lost a young genius, Sir William Williams; an express from
+Belleisle, arrived this morning, brings nothing but his death. He was
+shot very unnecessarily, riding too near a battery; in sum, he is a
+sacrifice to his own rashness, and to ours. For what are we taking
+Belleisle?[1] I rejoiced at the little loss we had on landing; for the
+glory, I leave it the common council. I am very willing to leave London
+to them too, and do pass half the week at Strawberry, where my two
+passions, lilacs and nightingales, are in full bloom. I spent Sunday as
+if it were Apollo's birthday; Gray and Mason were with me, and we
+listened to the nightingales till one o'clock in the morning. Gray has
+translated two noble incantations from the Lord knows who, a Danish
+Gray, who lived the Lord knows when. They are to be enchased in a
+history of English bards, which Mason and he are writing; but of which
+the former has not written a word yet, and of which the latter, if he
+rides Pegasus at his usual footpace, will finish the first page two
+years hence.
+
+[Footnote 1: Belleisle was of no value to us to keep; but Pitt sent an
+expedition against it, that in any future treaty of peace he might be
+able to exchange it for Minorca.]
+
+But the true frantic Oestus resides at present with Mr. Hogarth; I went
+t'other morning to see a portrait he is painting of Mr. Fox. Hogarth
+told me he had promised, if Mr. Fox would sit as he liked, to make as
+good a picture as Vandyke or Rubens could. I was silent--"Why now," said
+he, "you think this very vain, but why should not one speak truth?" This
+_truth_ was uttered in the face of his own Sigismonda, which is exactly
+a maudlin street-walker, tearing off the trinkets that her keeper had
+given her, to fling at his head. She has her father's picture in a
+bracelet on her arm, and her fingers are bloody with the heart, as if
+she had just bought a sheep's pluck in St. James's Market. As I was
+going, Hogarth put on a very grave face, and said, "Mr. Walpole, I want
+to speak to you." I sat down, and said, I was ready to receive his
+commands. For shortness, I will mark this wonderful dialogue by initial
+letters.
+
+H. I am told you are going to entertain the town with something in our
+way. W. Not very soon, Mr. Hogarth. H. I wish you would let me have it,
+to correct; I should be very sorry to have you expose yourself to
+censure; we painters must know more of those things than other people.
+W. Do you think nobody understands painting but painters? H. Oh! so far
+from it, there's Reynolds, who certainly has genius; why, but t'other
+day he offered a hundred pounds for a picture, that I would not hang in
+my cellar; and indeed, to say truth, I have generally found, that
+persons who had studied painting least were the best judges of it; but
+what I particularly wished to say to you was about Sir James Thornhill
+(you know he married Sir James's daughter): I would not have you say
+anything against him; there was a book published some time ago, abusing
+him, and it gave great offence. He was the first that attempted
+_history_ in England, and, I assure you, some Germans have said that he
+was a very great painter. W. My work will go no lower than the year one
+thousand seven hundred, and I really have not considered whether Sir J.
+Thornhill will come within my plan or not; if he does, I fear you and I
+shall not agree upon his merits. H. I wish you would let me correct it;
+besides, I am writing something of the same kind myself; I should be
+sorry we should clash. W. I believe it is not much known what my work
+is, very few persons have seen it. H. Why, it is a critical history of
+painting, is not it? W. No, it is an antiquarian history of it in
+England; I bought Mr. Vertue's MSS., and, I believe, the work will not
+give much offence; besides, if it does, I cannot help it; when I publish
+anything, I give it to the world to think of it as they please. H. Oh!
+if it is an antiquarian work, we shall not clash; mine is a critical
+work; I don't know whether I shall ever publish it. It is rather an
+apology for painters. I think it is owing to the good sense of the
+English that they have not painted better. W. My dear Mr. Hogarth, I
+must take my leave of you, you now grow too wild--and I left him. If I
+had stayed, there remained nothing but for him to bite me. I give you my
+honour this conversation is literal, and, perhaps, as long as you have
+known Englishmen and painters, you never met with anything so
+distracted. I had consecrated a line to his genius (I mean, for wit) in
+my Preface; I shall not erase it; but I hope nobody will ask me if he is
+not mad. Adieu!
+
+
+_INTENDED MARRIAGE OF THE KING--BATTLES IN GERMANY--CAPTURE OF
+PONDICHERRY--BURKE._
+
+TO GEORGE MONTAGU, ESQ.
+
+STRAWBERRY HILL, _July_ 22, 1761.
+
+For my part, I believe Mademoiselle Scudéri[1] drew the plan of this
+year. It is all royal marriages, coronations, and victories; they come
+tumbling so over one another from distant parts of the globe, that it
+looks just like the handywork of a lady romance writer, whom it costs
+nothing but a little false geography to make the Great Mogul in love
+with a Princess of Mecklenburgh, and defeat two marshals of France[2] as
+he rides post on an elephant to his nuptials. I don't know where I am. I
+had scarce found Mecklenburg Strelitz with a magnifying-glass before I
+am whisked to Pondicherry--well, I take it, and raze it. I begin to grow
+acquainted with Colonel Coote,[3] and figure him packing up chests of
+diamonds, and sending them to his wife against the King's
+wedding--thunder go to the Tower guns, and behold, Broglie and Soubise
+are totally defeated; if the mob have not much stronger heads and
+quicker conceptions than I have, they will conclude my Lord Granby is
+become nabob. How the deuce in two days can one digest all this? Why is
+not Pondicherry in Westphalia? I don't know how the Romans did, but I
+cannot support two victories every week. Well, but you will want to know
+the particulars. Broglie and Soubise united, attacked our army on the
+15th, but were repulsed; the next day, the Prince Mahomet Alli Cawn--no,
+no, I mean Prince Ferdinand, returned the attack, and the French threw
+down their arms and fled, run over my Lord Harcourt, who was going to
+fetch the new Queen; in short, I don't know how it was, but Mr. Conway
+is safe, and I am as happy as Mr. Pitt himself. We have only lost a
+Lieutenant-colonel Keith; Colonel Marlay and Harry Townshend are
+wounded.
+
+[Footnote 1: Mdlle. Scudéri and her brother were writers of romances of
+enormous length, and, in their time, of great popularity (see
+D'Israeli's account of them, "Curiosities of Literature," i. 105).]
+
+[Footnote 2: "_Defeat two French marshals_"--they were Maréchal de
+Broglie and the Prince de Soubise. The action, which, however, was of
+but little importance, is called by Lacretelle "Le Combat de
+Fillingshausen."]
+
+[Footnote 3: Colonel Eyre Coote, the best soldier next to Clive himself
+that India had yet seen, had defeated the French Governor, Count Lally,
+at Wandewash in January, 1760; and the capture of Pondicherry was one
+important fruit of the victory.]
+
+I could beat myself for not having a flag ready to display on my round
+tower, and guns mounted on all my battlements. Instead of that, I have
+been foolishly trying on my new pictures upon my gallery. However, the
+oratory of our Lady of Strawberry shall be dedicated next year on the
+anniversary of Mr. Conway's safety. Think with his intrepidity, and
+delicacy of honour wounded, what I had to apprehend; you shall
+absolutely be here on the sixteenth of next July. Mr. Hamilton tells me
+your King does not set out for his new dominions till the day after the
+Coronation; if you will come to it, I can give you a very good place for
+the procession; where, is a profound secret, because, if known, I should
+be teased to death, and none but my first friends shall be admitted. I
+dined with your secretary [Single-speech Hamilton] yesterday; there were
+Garrick and a young Mr. Burke[1]--who wrote a book in the style of Lord
+Bolingbroke, that was much admired. He is a sensible man, but has not
+worn off his authorism yet, and thinks there is nothing so charming as
+writers, and to be one. He will know better one of these days. I like
+Hamilton's little Marly; we walked in the great _allée_, and drank tea
+in the arbour of treillage; they talked of Shakspeare and Booth, of
+Swift and my Lord Bath, and I was thinking of Madame Sévigné. Good
+night--I have a dozen other letters to write; I must tell my friends how
+happy I am--not as an Englishman, but as a cousin.
+
+[Footnote 1: Mr. Burke's book was "A Vindication of Natural Society,"
+and was regarded as a very successful imitation of the style of Lord
+Bolingbroke.]
+
+
+_ARRIVAL OF THE PRINCESS OF MECKLENBURGH--THE ROYAL WEDDING--THE QUEEN'S
+APPEARANCE AND BEHAVIOUR._
+
+TO SIR HORACE MANN.
+
+ARLINGTON STREET, _Sept._ 10, 1761.
+
+When we least expected the Queen, she came, after being ten days at sea,
+but without sickness for above half-an-hour. She was gay the whole
+voyage, sung to her harpsichord, and left the door of her cabin open.
+They made the coast of Suffolk last Saturday, and on Monday morning she
+landed at Harwich; so prosperously has his Majesty's chief eunuch, as
+they have made the Tripoline ambassador call Lord Anson, executed his
+commission. She lay that night at your old friend Lord Abercorn's, at
+Witham [in Essex]; and, if she judged by her host, must have thought she
+was coming to reign in the realm of taciturnity. She arrived at St.
+James's a quarter after three on Tuesday the 8th. When she first saw the
+Palace she turned pale: the Duchess of Hamilton smiled. "My dear
+Duchess," said the Princess, "_you_ may laugh; you have been married
+twice; but it is no joke to me." Is this a bad proof of her sense? On
+the journey they wanted her to curl her toupet. "No, indeed," said she,
+"I think it looks as well as those of the ladies who have been sent for
+me: if the King would have me wear a periwig, I will; otherwise I shall
+let myself alone." The Duke of York gave her his hand at the
+garden-gate: her lips trembled, but she jumped out with spirit. In the
+garden the King met her; she would have fallen at his feet; he prevented
+and embraced her, and led her into the apartments, where she was
+received by the Princess of Wales and Lady Augusta: these three
+princesses only dined with the King. At ten the procession went to
+chapel, preceded by unmarried daughters of peers, and peeresses in
+plenty. The new Princess was led by the Duke of York and Prince William;
+the Archbishop married them; the King talked to her the whole time with
+great good humour, and the Duke of Cumberland gave her away. She is not
+tall, nor a beauty; pale, and very thin; but looks sensible; and is
+genteel. Her hair is darkish and fine; her forehead low, her nose very
+well, except the nostrils spreading too wide; her mouth has the same
+fault, but her teeth are good. She talks a good deal, and French
+tolerably; possesses herself, is frank, but with great respect to the
+King. After the ceremony, the whole company came into the drawing-room
+for about ten minutes, but nobody was presented that night. The Queen
+was in white and silver; an endless mantle of violet-coloured velvet,
+lined with ermine, and attempted to be fastened on her shoulder by a
+bunch of large pearls, dragged itself and almost the rest of her clothes
+halfway down her waist. On her head was a beautiful little tiara of
+diamonds; a diamond necklace, and a stomacher of diamonds, worth three
+score thousand pounds, which she is to wear at the Coronation too. Her
+train was borne by the ten bridesmaids, Lady Sarah Lenox,[1] Lady
+Caroline Russell, Lady Caroline Montagu, Lady Harriot Bentinck, Lady
+Anne Hamilton, Lady Essex Kerr (daughters of Dukes of Richmond, Bedford,
+Manchester, Portland, Hamilton, and Roxburgh); and four daughters of the
+Earls of Albemarle, Brook, Harcourt, and Ilchester--Lady Elizabeth
+Keppel, Louisa Greville, Elizabeth Harcourt, and Susan Fox Strangways:
+their heads crowned with diamonds, and in robes of white and silver.
+Lady Caroline Russell is extremely handsome; Lady Elizabeth Keppel very
+pretty; but with neither features nor air, nothing ever looked so
+charming as Lady Sarah Lenox; she has all the glow of beauty peculiar to
+her family. As supper was not ready, the Queen sat down, sung, and
+played on the harpsichord to the Royal Family, who all supped with her
+in private. They talked of the different German dialects; the King asked
+if the Hanoverian was not pure--"Oh, no, Sir," said the Queen; "it is
+the worst of all."--She will not be unpopular.
+
+[Footnote 1: Lady Sarah Lennox, in an account of a theatrical
+performance at Holland House in a previous letter, is described by
+Walpole as "more beautiful than you can conceive." The King himself
+admired her so greatly that he is believed to have had serious thoughts
+of choosing her to be his queen. She afterwards married Major G. Napier,
+and became the mother of Sir William and Sir Charles Napier.]
+
+The Duke of Cumberland told the King that himself and Lady Augusta were
+sleepy. The Queen was very averse to leave the company, and at last
+articled that nobody should accompany her but the Princess of Wales and
+her own two German women, and that nobody should be admitted afterwards
+but the King--they did not retire till between two and three.
+
+The next morning the King had a levée. He said to Lord Hardwicke, "It is
+a very fine day:" that old gossip replied, "Yes, Sir, and it was a very
+fine night." Lord Bute had told the King that Lord Orford had betted his
+having a child before Sir James Lowther, who had been married the night
+before to Lord Bute's eldest daughter; the King told Lord Orford he
+should be glad to go his halves. The bet was made with Mr. Rigby.
+Somebody asked the latter how he could be so bad a courtier as to bet
+against the King? He replied, "Not at all a bad courtier; I betted Lord
+Bute's daughter against him."
+
+After the King's Levee there was a Drawing-room; the Queen stood under
+the throne: the women were presented to her by the Duchess of Hamilton,
+and then the men by the Duke of Manchester; but as she knew nobody, she
+was not to speak. At night there was a ball, drawing-rooms yesterday and
+to-day, and then a cessation of ceremony till the Coronation, except
+next Monday, when she is to receive the address of the Lord Mayor and
+Aldermen, sitting on the throne attended by the bridesmaids. A
+ridiculous circumstance happened yesterday; Lord Westmoreland, not very
+young nor clear-sighted, mistook Lady Sarah Lenox for the Queen, kneeled
+to her, and would have kissed her hand if she had not prevented him.
+People think that a Chancellor of Oxford was naturally attracted by the
+blood of Stuart. It is as comical to see Kitty Dashwood, the famous old
+beauty of the Oxfordshire Jacobites, living in the palace as Duenna to
+the Queen. She and Mrs. Boughton, Lord Lyttelton's ancient Delia, are
+revived again in a young court that never heard of them. There, I think,
+you could not have had a more circumstantial account of a royal wedding
+from the Heralds' Office. Adieu!
+
+Yours to serve you,
+
+HORACE SANDFORD.
+
+Mecklenburgh King-at-Arms.
+
+
+_THE CORONATION AND SUBSEQUENT GAIETIES._
+
+TO THE COUNTESS OF AILESBURY.
+
+STRAWBERRY HILL, _Sept._ 27, 1761.
+
+You are a mean, mercenary woman. If you did not want histories of
+weddings and coronations, and had not jobs to be executed about muslins,
+and a bit of china, and counterband goods, one should never hear of you.
+When you don't want a body, you can frisk about with greffiers and
+burgomasters, and be as merry in a dyke as my lady frog herself. The
+moment your curiosity is agog, or your cambric seized, you recollect a
+good cousin in England, and, as folks said two hundred years ago, begin
+to write "upon the knees of your heart." Well! I am a sweet-tempered
+creature, I forgive you.
+
+[Illustration: THE LIBRARY, STRAWBERRY HILL]
+
+My heraldry was much more offended at the Coronation with the ladies
+that did walk, than with those that walked out of their place; yet I was
+not so _perilously_ angry as my Lady Cowper, who refused to set a foot
+with my Lady Macclesfield; and when she was at last obliged to associate
+with her, set out on a round trot, as if she designed to prove the
+antiquity of her family by marching as lustily as a maid of honour of
+Queen Gwiniver. It was in truth a brave sight. The sea of heads in
+Palace-yard, the guards, horse and foot, the scaffolds, balconies, and
+procession exceeded imagination. The Hall, when once illuminated, was
+noble; but they suffered the whole parade to return into it in the
+dark, that his Majesty might be surprised with the quickness with which
+the sconces catched fire. The Champion acted well; the other Paladins
+had neither the grace nor alertness of Rinaldo. Lord Effingham and the
+Duke of Bedford were but untoward knights errant; and Lord Talbot had
+not much more dignity than the figure of General Monk in the Abbey. The
+habit of the peers is unbecoming to the last degree; but the peeresses
+made amends for all defects. Your daughter Richmond, Lady Kildare, and
+Lady Pembroke were as handsome as the Graces. Lady Rochford, Lady
+Holdernesse, and Lady Lyttelton looked exceedingly well in that their
+day; and for those of the day before, the Duchess of Queensbury, Lady
+Westmoreland and Lady Albemarle were surprising. Lady Harrington was
+noble at a distance, and so covered with diamonds, that you would have
+thought she had bid somebody or other, like Falstaff, _rob me the
+Exchequer_. Lady Northampton was very magnificent too, and looked
+prettier than I have seen her of late. Lady Spencer and Lady Bolingbroke
+were not the worst figures there. The Duchess of Ancaster [Mistress of
+the Robes] marched alone after the Queen with much majesty; and there
+were two new Scotch peeresses that pleased everybody, Lady Sutherland
+and Lady Dunmore. _Per contra_, were Lady P----, who had put a wig on,
+and old E----, who had scratched hers off; Lady S----, the Dowager
+E----, and a Lady Say and Sele, with her tresses coal-black, and her
+hair coal-white. Well! it was all delightful, but not half so charming
+as its being over. The gabble one heard about it for six weeks before,
+and the fatigue of the day, could not well be compensated by a mere
+puppet-show; for puppet-show it was, though it cost a million. The Queen
+is so gay that we shall not want sights; she has been at the Opera, the
+Beggar's Opera and the Rehearsal, and two nights ago carried the King to
+Ranelagh.
+
+Some of the peeresses were so fond of their robes, that they graciously
+exhibited themselves for a whole day before to all the company their
+servants could invite to see them. A maid from Richmond begged leave to
+stay in town because the Duchess of Montrose was only to be seen from
+two to four. The Heralds were so ignorant of their business, that,
+though pensioned for nothing but to register lords and ladies, and what
+belongs to them, they advertised in the newspaper for the Christian
+names and places of abode of the peeresses. The King complained of such
+omissions and of the want of precedent; Lord Effingham, the Earl
+Marshal, told him, it was true there had been great neglect in that
+office, but he had now taken such care of registering directions, that
+_next coronation_ would be conducted with the greatest order imaginable.
+The King was so diverted with this _flattering_ speech that he made the
+earl repeat it several times.
+
+On this occasion one saw to how high-water-mark extravagance is risen in
+England. At the Coronation of George II. my mother gave forty guineas
+for a dining-room, scaffold, and bedchamber. An exactly parallel
+apartment, only with rather a worse view, was this time set at three
+hundred and fifty guineas--a tolerable rise in thirty-three years! The
+platform from St. Margaret's Roundhouse to the church-door, which
+formerly let for forty pounds, went this time for two thousand four
+hundred pounds. Still more was given for the inside of the Abbey. The
+prebends would like a Coronation every year. The King paid nine thousand
+pounds for the hire of jewels; indeed, last time, it cost my father
+fourteen hundred to bejewel my Lady Orford.
+
+
+_A COURT BALL--PAMPHLETS ON MR. PITT--A SONG BY GRAY._
+
+TO THE COUNTESS OF AILESBURY.
+
+ARLINGTON STREET, _Nov._ 28, 1761.
+
+Dear Madam,--You are so bad and so good, that I don't know how to treat
+you. You give me every mark of kindness but letting me hear from you.
+You send me charming drawings the moment I trouble you with a
+commission, and you give Lady Cecilia [Johnston] commissions for trifles
+of my writing, in the most obliging manner. I have taken the latter off
+her hands. The Fugitive Pieces, and the "Catalogue of Royal and Noble
+Authors" shall be conveyed to you directly. Lady Cecilia and I agree how
+we lament the charming suppers there, every time we pass the corner of
+Warwick Street! We have a little comfort for your sake and our own, in
+believing that the campaign is at an end, at least for this year--but
+they tell us, it is to recommence here or in Ireland. You have nothing
+to do with that. Our politics, I think, will soon be as warm as our war.
+Charles Townshend is to be lieutenant-general to Mr. Pitt. The Duke of
+Bedford is privy seal; Lord Thomond, cofferer; Lord George Cavendish,
+comptroller.
+
+Diversions, you know, Madam, are never at high-water mark before
+Christmas; yet operas flourish pretty well: those on Tuesdays are
+removed to Mondays, because the Queen likes the burlettas, and the King
+cannot go on Tuesdays, his post-days. On those nights we have the middle
+front box, railed in, where Lady Mary [Coke] and I sit in triste state
+like a Lord Mayor and Lady Mayoress. The night before last there was a
+private ball at court, which began at half an hour after six, lasted
+till one, and finished without a supper. The King danced the whole time
+with the Queen,--Lady Augusta with her four younger brothers. The other
+performers were: the two Duchesses of Ancaster and Hamilton, who danced
+little; Lady Effingham and Lady Egremont, who danced much; the six maids
+of honour; Lady Susan Stewart, as attending Lady Augusta; and Lady
+Caroline Russel, and Lady Jane Stuart, the only women not of the family.
+Lady Northumberland is at Bath; Lady Weymouth lies in; Lady Bolingbroke
+was there in waiting, but in black gloves, so did not dance. The men,
+besides the royals, were Lords March and Eglintoun, of the bedchamber;
+Lord Cantelupe, vice-chamberlain; Lord Huntingdon; and four strangers,
+Lord Mandeville, Lord Northampton, Lord Suffolk, and Lord Grey. No
+sitters-by, but the Princess, the Duchess of Bedford, and Lady Bute.
+
+If it had not been for this ball, I don't know how I should have
+furnished a decent letter. Pamphlets on Mr. Pitt[1] are the whole
+conversation, and none of them worth sending cross the water: at least
+I, who am said to write some of them, think so; by which you may
+perceive I am not much flattered with the imputation. There must be new
+personages, at least, before I write on any side.--Mr. Pitt and the Duke
+of Newcastle! I should as soon think of informing the world that Miss
+Chudleigh is no vestal. You will like better to see some words which Mr.
+Gray has writ, at Miss Speed's request, to an old air of Geminiani; the
+thought is from the French.
+
+    I.
+
+    Thyrsis, when we parted, swore
+      Ere the spring he would return.
+    Ah! what means yon violet flower,
+      And the bud that decks the thorn!
+    'Twas the lark that upward sprung,
+    'Twas the nightingale that sung.
+
+    II.
+
+    Idle notes! untimely green!
+      Why this unavailing haste!
+    Western gales and skies serene
+      Speak not always winter past.
+    Cease my doubts, my fears to move;
+    Spare the honour of my love.
+
+Adieu, Madam, your most faithful servant.
+
+[Footnote 1: Mr. Pitt had lately resigned the office of Secretary of
+State, on being outvoted in the Cabinet, which rejected his proposal to
+declare war against Spain; and he had accepted a pension of £3,000 a
+year and a peerage for his wife--acts which Walpole condemns in more
+than one letter, and which provoked comments in many quarters.]
+
+
+_DEATH OF THE CZARINA ELIZABETH--THE COCK-LANE GHOST--RETURN TO ENGLAND
+OF LADY MARY WORTLEY._
+
+TO SIR HORACE MANN.
+
+ARLINGTON STREET, _Jan._ 29, 1762.
+
+I wish you joy, sir minister; the Czarina [Elizabeth] is dead. As _we
+conquered America in Germany_,[1] I hope we shall overrun Spain by this
+burial at Petersburg. Yet, don't let us plume ourselves too fast;
+nothing is so like a Queen as a King, nothing so like a predecessor as a
+successor. The favourites of the Prince Royal of Prussia, who had
+suffered so much for him, were wofully disappointed, when he became the
+present glorious Monarch; they found the English maxim true, that the
+King never dies; that is, the dignity and passions of the Crown never
+die. We were not much less defeated of our hopes on the decease of
+Philip V. The Grand Duke[2] [Peter III.] has been proclaimed Czar at the
+army in Pomerania; he may love conquest like that army, or not know it
+is conquering, like his aunt. However, we cannot suffer more by this
+event. I would part with the Empress Queen, on no better a prospect.
+
+[Footnote 1: "_We conquered America in Germany._" This is a quotation
+from a boastful speech of Mr. Pitt's on the conquest of Canada.]
+
+[Footnote 2: The Grand Duke (Peter III.) was married, for his
+misfortune, to Catharine, a princess of Anhalt-Zerbzt, whose lover,
+Count Orloff, murdered him before the end of the summer, at his wife's
+command; and in August she assumed the government, and was crowned with
+all due solemnity as Czarina or Empress. Walpole had some reason for
+saying that "nothing was so like a predecessor as a successor," since in
+character Elizabeth closely resembled Catharine.]
+
+We have not yet taken the galleons, nor destroyed the Spanish fleet. Nor
+have they enslaved Portugal, nor you made a triumphant entry into
+Naples. My dear sir, you see how lucky you were not to go thither; you
+don't envy Sir James Grey, do you? Pray don't make any categorical
+demands to Marshal Botta,[1] and be obliged to retire to Leghorn,
+because they are not answered. We want allies; preserve us our friend
+the Great Duke of Tuscany. I like your answer to Botta exceedingly, but
+I fear the Court of Vienna is shame-proof. The Apostolic and Religious
+Empress is not a whit a better Christian, not a jot less a woman, than
+the late Russian Empress, who gave such proofs of her being a _woman_.
+
+[Footnote 1: Marshal Botta was the Commander-in-chief in Tuscany.]
+
+We have a mighty expedition on the point of sailing; the destination not
+disclosed. The German War loses ground daily; however, all is still in
+embryo. My subsequent letters are not likely to be so barren, and
+indecisive. I write more to prove there is nothing, than to tell you
+anything.
+
+You were mistaken, I believe, about the Graftons; they do not remove
+from Turin, till George Pitt arrives to occupy their house there. I am
+really anxious about the fate of my letter to the Duchess [of Grafton];
+I should be hurt if it had miscarried; she would have reason to think me
+very ungrateful.
+
+I have given your letter to Mr. T[homas] Pitt; he has been very
+unfortunate since his arrival--has lost his favourite sister in
+child-bed. Lord Tavistock, I hear, has written accounts of you that give
+me much pleasure.
+
+I am ashamed to tell you that we are again dipped into an egregious
+scene of folly. The reigning fashion is a ghost[1]--a ghost, that would
+not pass muster in the paltriest convent in the Apennine. It only knocks
+and scratches; does not pretend to appear or to speak. The clergy give
+it their benediction; and all the world, whether believers or infidels,
+go to hear it. I, in which number you may guess, go to-morrow; for it is
+as much the mode to visit the ghost as the Prince of Mecklenburgh, who
+is just arrived. I have not seen him yet, though I have left my name for
+him. But I will tell you who is come too--Lady Mary Wortley.[2] I went
+last night to visit her; I give you my honour, and you who know her,
+would credit me without it, the following is a faithful description. I
+found her in a little miserable bedchamber of a ready-furnished house,
+with two tallow candles, and a bureau covered with pots and pans. On her
+head, in full of all accounts, she had an old black-laced hood, wrapped
+entirely round, so as to conceal all hair or want of hair. No
+handkerchief, but up to her chin a kind of horseman's riding-coat,
+calling itself a pet-en-l'air, made of a dark green (green I think it
+had been) brocade, with coloured and silver flowers, and lined with
+furs; boddice laced, a foul dimity petticoat sprig'd, velvet muffeteens
+on her arms, grey stockings and slippers. Her face less changed in
+twenty years than I could have imagined; I told her so, and she was not
+so tolerable twenty years ago that she needed have taken it for
+flattery, but she did, and literally gave me a box on the ear. She is
+very lively, all her senses perfect, her languages as imperfect as ever,
+her avarice greater. She entertained me at first with nothing but the
+dearness of provisions at Helvoet. With nothing but an Italian, a
+French, and a Prussian, all men servants, and something she calls an
+_old_ secretary, but whose age till he appears will be doubtful; she
+receives all the world, who go to homage her as Queen Mother,[3] and
+crams them into this kennel. The Duchess of Hamilton, who came in just
+after me, was so astonished and diverted, that she could not speak to
+her for laughing. She says that she has left all her clothes at Venice.
+I really pity Lady Bute; what will the progress be of such a
+commencement!
+
+[Footnote 1: It was known as the Cock-lane Ghost. A girl in that lane
+asserted that she was nightly visited by a ghost, who could reveal a
+murder, and who gave her tokens of his (or its) presence by knocks and
+scratches, which were audible to others in the room besides herself; and
+at last she went so far as to declare that the ghost had promised to
+attend a witness, who might be selected, into the vault under the Church
+of St. John's, Clerkenwell, where the body of the supposed victim was
+buried. Her story caused such excitement, that at last Dr. Johnson, Dr.
+Douglas (afterwards Bishop of Salisbury), and one or two other
+gentlemen, undertook an investigation of the affair, which proved beyond
+all doubt that it was a trick, though they could not discover how it was
+performed, nor could they make the girl confess; and Johnson wrote an
+account of their investigations and verdict, which was published in _The
+Gentleman's Magazine_ and the newspapers of the day (Boswell's "Life of
+Johnson," ann. 1763).]
+
+[Footnote 2: Lady Mary Wortley was a daughter of the Duke of Kingston
+and wife of Mr. Wortley, our ambassador at Constantinople. She was the
+most accomplished lady of the eighteenth century. Christian Europe is
+indebted to her for the introduction of the practice of inoculation for
+the smallpox, of which she heard during her residence in Turkey, and of
+the efficacy of which she was so convinced that she caused her own
+children to be inoculated; and, by publishing its success in their case,
+she led to its general adoption. It saved innumerable lives in the
+eighteenth century, and was, in fact, the parent of the vaccination
+which has superseded it, and which is merely inoculation with matter
+derived from another source, the cow. She was also an authoress of
+considerable repute for lyric odes and _vers de société_, &c., and,
+above all, for her letters, most of which are to her daughter, Lady Bute
+(as Mme. de Sévigné's are to her daughter, Mme. de Grignan), and which
+are in no respect inferior to those of the French lady in sprightly wit,
+while in the variety of their subjects they are far superior, as giving
+the account of Turkish scenery and manners, and also of those of other
+countries which her husband visited on various diplomatic missions,
+while Mme. de Sévigné's are for the greater part confined to the gossip
+of the coteries of Paris. Her works occupy five volumes; but what we
+have is but a small part of what we might have had. D'Israeli points out
+that "we have lost much valuable literature by the illiberal or
+malignant descendants of learned and ingenious persons. Many of Lady
+Mary Wortley Montague's letters have been destroyed, I am informed, by
+her daughters, who imagined that the family honours were lowered by the
+addition of those of literature. Some of her best letters, recently
+published, were found buried in an old trunk. It would have mortified
+her ladyship's daughter to have heard that her mother was the Sévigné of
+Britain" ("Curiosities of Literature," i. 54); and, as will be seen in a
+subsequent letter (No. 67), Walpole corroborates D'Israeli. Lady Mary
+was at one time a friend and correspondent of Pope, who afterwards, for
+some unknown reason, quarrelled with her, and made her the subject of
+some of the most disgraceful libels that ever proceeded from even his
+pen.]
+
+[Footnote 3: She was mother of Lady Bute, wife of the Prime
+Minister.--WALPOLE.]
+
+The King of France has avowed a natural son,[1] and given him the estate
+which came from Marshal Belleisle, with the title of Comte de Gisors.
+The mother I think is called Matignon or Maquignon. Madame Pompadour
+was the Bathsheba that introduced this Abishag. Adieu, my dear sir!
+
+[Footnote 1: This was a false report.--WALPOLE.]
+
+
+_HIS OWN "ANECDOTES OF PAINTING"--HIS PICTURE OF THE WEDDING OF HENRY
+VII.--BURNET'S COMPARISON OF TIBERIUS AND CHARLES II.--ADDISON'S
+"TRAVELS."_
+
+TO THE REV. HENRY ZOUCH.
+
+ARLINGTON STREET, _March_ 20, 1762.
+
+I am glad you are pleased, Sir, with my "Anecdotes of Painting;" but I
+doubt you praise me too much: it was an easy task when I had the
+materials collected, and I would not have the labours of forty years,
+which was Vertue's case, depreciated in compliment to the work of four
+months, which is almost my whole merit. Style is become, in a manner, a
+mechanical affair, and if to much ancient lore our antiquaries would add
+a little modern reading, to polish their language and correct their
+prejudices, I do not see why books of antiquities should not be made as
+amusing as writings on any other subject. If Tom Hearne had lived in the
+world, he might have writ an agreeable history of dancing; at least, I
+am sure that many modern volumes are read for no reason but for their
+being penned in the dialect of the age.
+
+I am much beholden to you, dear Sir, for your remarks; they shall have
+their due place whenever the work proceeds to a second edition, for that
+the nature of it as a record will ensure to it. A few of your notes
+demand a present answer: the Bishop of Imola pronounced the nuptial
+benediction at the marriage of Henry VII., which made me suppose him the
+person represented.[1]
+
+[Footnote 1: In a previous letter Walpole mentions that Vertue (the
+engraver) had disputed the subject of this picture, because the face of
+the King did not resemble other pictures of him; but Walpole was
+convinced of the correctness of his description of it, because it does
+resemble the face on Henry's shillings, "which are more authentic than
+pictures."]
+
+Burnet, who was more a judge of characters than statues, mentions the
+resemblance between Tiberius and Charles II.; but, as far as
+countenances went, there could not be a more ridiculous prepossession;
+Charles had a long face, with very strong lines, and a narrowish brow;
+Tiberius a very square face, and flat forehead, with features rather
+delicate in proportion. I have examined this imaginary likeness, and see
+no kind of foundation for it. It is like Mr. Addison's Travels,[1] of
+which it was so truly said, he might have composed them without stirring
+out of England. There are a kind of naturalists who have sorted out the
+qualities of the mind, and allotted particular turns of features and
+complexions to them. It would be much easier to prove that every form
+has been endowed with every vice. One has heard much of the vigour of
+Burnet himself; yet I dare to say, he did not think himself like Charles
+II.
+
+[Footnote 1: It is Fielding who, in his "Voyage to Lisbon," gave this
+character to Addison's "Travels."]
+
+I am grieved, Sir, to hear that your eyes suffer; take care of them;
+nothing can replace the satisfaction they afford: one should hoard them,
+as the only friend that will not be tired of one when one grows old,
+and when one should least choose to depend on others for entertainment.
+I most sincerely wish you happiness and health in that and every other
+instance.
+
+
+_BIRTH OF THE PRINCE OF WALES--THE CZARINA--VOLTAIRE'S HISTORICAL
+CRITICISMS--IMMENSE VALUE OF THE TREASURES BROUGHT OVER IN THE
+"HERMIONE."_
+
+TO SIR HORACE MANN.
+
+ARLINGTON STREET, _Aug._ 12, 1762.
+
+A Prince of Wales [George IV.] was born this morning; the prospect of
+your old neighbour [the Pretender] at Rome does not improve; the House
+of Hanover will have numbers in its own family sufficient to defend
+their crown--unless they marry a Princess of Anhalt Zerbst. What a
+shocking tragedy that has proved already! There is a manifesto arrived
+to-day that makes one shudder! This northern Athaliah, who has the
+modesty not to name her murdered _husband_ in that light, calls him _her
+neighbour_; and, as if all the world were savages, like Russians,
+pretends that he died suddenly of a distemper that never was
+expeditious; mocks Heaven with pretensions to charity and piety; and
+heaps the additional inhumanity on the man she has dethroned and
+assassinated, of imputing his death to a judgment from Providence. In
+short, it is the language of usurpation and blood, counselled and
+apologised for by clergymen! It is Brunehault[1] and an archbishop!
+
+[Footnote 1: Brunehault (in modern English histories called Brunhild)
+was the wife of Sigebert, King of Austrasia (that district of France
+which lies between the Meuse and the Rhine) and son of Clotaire I. The
+"Biographie Universelle" says of her: "This Princess, attractive by her
+beauty, her wit, and her carriage, had the misfortune to possess a great
+ascendency over her husband, and to have lost sight of the fact that
+even sovereigns cannot always avenge themselves with impunity." Her
+sister, Galswith, the wife of Chilperic, King of Neustria, between the
+Loire and the Meuse, had been assassinated by Fredegonde, and
+Brunehault, determined to avenge her, induced Sigebert to make war on
+Chilperic, who had married Fredegonde. He gained a victory; but
+Fredegonde contrived to have him also assassinated, and Brunehault
+became Fredegonde's prisoner. But Murovée, son of Chilperic, fell in
+love with her, and married her, and escaping from Rouen, fled into
+Austrasia. At last, in 595, Fredegonde died, and Brunehault subdued the
+greater part of Neustria, and ruled with great but unscrupulous energy.
+She encouraged St. Augustine in his mission to England; she built
+hospitals and churches, earning by her zeal in such works a letter of
+panegyric from Pope Gregory the Great. But, old as she was, she at the
+same time gave herself up to a life of outrageous license. It was not,
+however, her dissolute life which proved fatal to her, but the design
+which she showed to erect a firm monarchy in Austrasia and Neustria, by
+putting down the overgrown power of the nobles. They raised an army to
+attack her; she was defeated, and with four of her great-grandchildren,
+the sons of her grandson, King Theodoric, who had been left to her
+guardianship, fell into the hands of the nobles, who put her to death
+with every circumstance of cruelty and indignity. (See Kitchin's
+"History of France," i. 91.)]
+
+I have seen Mr. Keith's first despatch; in general, my account was
+tolerably correct; but he does not mention Ivan. The conspiracy advanced
+by one of the gang being seized, though for another crime; they thought
+themselves discovered. Orloff, one of them, hurried to the Czarina, and
+told her she had no time to lose. She was ready for anything; nay,
+marched herself at the head of fourteen thousand men and a train of
+artillery against her husband, but not being the only Alecto in Muscovy,
+she had been aided by a Princess Daschkaw, a nymph under twenty, and
+sister to the Czar's mistress. It was not the latter, as I told you, but
+the Chancellor's wife, who offered up the order of St. Catherine. I do
+not know how my Lord Buckingham [the English Minister at St. Petersburg]
+feels, but unless to conjure up a tempest against this fury of the
+north, nothing could bribe me to set my foot in her dominions. Had she
+been priestess of the Scythian Diana, she would have sacrificed her
+brother by choice. It seems she does not degenerate; her mother was
+ambitious and passionate for intrigues; she went to Paris, and dabbled
+in politics with all her might.
+
+The world had been civilising itself till one began to doubt whether
+ancient histories were not ancient legends. Voltaire had unpoisoned half
+the victims to the Church and to ambition. Oh! there never was such a
+man as Borgia[1]; the league seemed a romance. For the honour of poor
+historians, the assassinations of the Kings of France and Portugal,
+majesties still living in spite of Damien and the Jesuits, and the
+dethronement and murder of the Czar, have restored some credibility to
+the annals of former ages. Tacitus recovers his character by the edition
+of Petersburg.
+
+[Footnote 1: Borgia, the father, was Pope Sextus VI.; Caesar Borgia was
+the son--both equally infamous for their crimes, and especially their
+murders by poison.]
+
+We expect the definitive courier from Paris every day. Now it is said
+that they ask time to send to Spain. What? to ask leave to desert them!
+The Spaniards, not so expeditious in usurpation as the Muscovites, have
+made no progress in Portugal. Their absurd manifestoes appeared too
+soon. The Czarina and Princess Daschkaw stay till the stroke is struck.
+Really, my dear Sir, your Italy is growing unfashionably innocent,--if
+you don't take care, the Archbishop of Novgorod will deserve, by his
+crimes, to be at the head of the _Christian_ Church.[1] I fear my
+friend, good Benedict, infected you all with his virtues.
+
+[Footnote 1: That is, Pope Benedict XIV.]
+
+You see how this Russian revolution has seized every cell in my head--a
+Prince of Wales is passed over in a line, the peace in another line. I
+have not even told you that the treasure of the _Hermione_,[1] reckoned
+eight hundred thousand pounds, passed the end of my street this morning
+in one-and-twenty waggons. Of the Havannah I could tell you nothing if I
+would; people grow impatient at not hearing from thence. Adieu!
+
+[Footnote 1: In August, 1761, Sir G. Pocock took Havannah, the capital
+of Cuba. In September Commodore Cornish and Colonel Draper took Manilla,
+the principal of the Philippine Islands; and the treasures found in
+Manilla alone exceeded the sum here mentioned by Walpole, and yet did
+not equal those brought home from the Havannah, as Walpole mentions in a
+subsequent letter.]
+
+You see I am a punctual correspondent when Empresses commit murders.
+
+
+_NEGOTIATIONS FOR PEACE--CHRISTENING OF THE PRINCE OF WALES._
+
+TO THE HON. H.S. CONWAY.
+
+STRAWBERRY HILL, _Sept._ 9, 1762.
+
+    Nondum laurus erat, longoque decentia crine
+    Tempora cingebat de quâlibet arbore Phoebus.[1]
+
+[Footnote 1: The quotation is from Ovid, Met. i. 450.]
+
+This is a hint to you, that as Phoebus, who was certainly your superior,
+could take up with a chestnut garland, or any crown he found, you must
+have the humility to be content without laurels, when none are to be
+had: you have hunted far and near for them, and taken true pains to the
+last in that old nursery-garden Germany, and by the way have made me
+shudder with your last journal: but you must be easy with _quâlibet_
+other _arbore_; you must come home to your own plantations. The Duke of
+Bedford is gone in a fury to make peace,[1] for he cannot be even
+pacific with temper; and by this time I suppose the Duke de Nivernois is
+unpacking his portion of olive _dans la rue de Suffolk Street_. I say, I
+suppose--for I do not, like my friends at Arthur's, whip into my
+post-chaise to see every novelty. My two sovereigns, the Duchess of
+Grafton and Lady Mary Coke, are arrived, and yet I have seen neither
+Polly nor Lucy. The former, I hear, is entirely French; the latter as
+absolutely English.
+
+[Footnote 1: "On the 6th of September the Duke of Bedford embarked as
+ambassador from England; on the 12th the Duc de Nivernois landed as
+ambassador from France. Of these two noblemen, Bedford, though well
+versed in affairs, was perhaps by his hasty temper in some degree
+disqualified for the profession of a Temple or a Gondomar; and Nivernois
+was only celebrated for his graceful manners and his pretty songs" (Lord
+Stanhope, "History of England," c. 38).]
+
+Well! but if you insist on not doffing your cuirass, you may find an
+opportunity of wearing it. The storm thickens. The City of London are
+ready to hoist their standard; treason is the bon-ton at that end of the
+town; seditious papers pasted up at every corner: nay, my neighbourhood
+is not unfashionable; we have had them at Brentford and Kingston. The
+Peace is the cry;[1] but to make weight, they throw in all the abusive
+ingredients they can collect. They talk of your friend the Duke of
+Devonshire's resigning; and, for the Duke of Newcastle, it puts him so
+much in mind of the end of Queen Anne's time, that I believe he hopes to
+be Minister again for another forty years.
+
+[Footnote 1: "_The Peace is the cry._" This was the peace of Paris, not
+absolutely concluded till February of the next year. The conditions in
+our favour were so inadequate to our successes in the war, that the
+treaty caused general indignation; so great, indeed, that Lord Bute, the
+Prime Minister, was afraid to face the meeting of Parliament, and
+resigned his office, in which he was succeeded by Mr. George Grenville.
+It was the subject of severe, but not undeserved comment in the
+celebrated _North Briton_, No. 45, by Wilkes.]
+
+In the mean time, there are but dark news from the Havannah; the
+_Gazette_, who would not fib for the world, says, we have lost but four
+officers; the World, who is not quite so scrupulous, says, our loss is
+heavy.--But what shocking notice to those who have _Harry Conways_
+there! The _Gazette_ breaks off with saying, that they were to storm the
+next day! Upon the whole, it is regarded as a preparative to worse news.
+
+Our next monarch [George IV.] was christened last night, George Augustus
+Frederick; the Princess, the Duke of Cumberland, and Duke of
+Mecklenburgh, sponsors; the ceremony performed by the Bishop of London.
+The Queen's bed, magnificent, and they say in taste, was placed in the
+great drawing-room: though she is not to see company in form, yet it
+looks as if they had intended people should have been there, as all who
+presented themselves were admitted, which were very few, for it had not
+been notified; I suppose to prevent too great a crowd: all I have heard
+named, besides those in waiting, were the Duchess of Queensberry, Lady
+Dalkeith, Mrs. Grenville, and about four more ladies.
+
+
+_TREASURES FROM THE HAVANNAH--THE ROYAL VISIT TO ETON--DEATH OF LADY
+MARY--CONCEALMENT OF HER WORKS--VOLTAIRE'S "UNIVERSAL HISTORY."_
+
+TO SIR HORACE MANN.
+
+STRAWBERRY HILL, _Oct._ 3, 1762.
+
+I am now only the peace in your debt, for here is the Havannah. Here it
+is, following despair and accompanied by glory, riches, and twelve
+ships-of-the-line; not all in person, for four are destroyed. The
+booty--that is an undignified term--I should say, the plunder, or the
+spoils, which is a more classic word for such heroes as we are, amounts
+to at least a million and a half. Lord Albemarle's share will be about
+£140,000. I wish I knew how much that makes in _talents_ or _great
+sesterces_. What to me is better than all, we have lost but sixteen
+hundred men; _but_, alas! Most of the sick recovered! What an affecting
+object my Lady Albemarle would make in a triumph, surrounded by her
+three victorious sons; for she had three at stake! My friend Lady
+Hervey,[1] too, is greatly happy; her son Augustus distinguished himself
+particularly, brought home the news, and on his way took a rich French
+ship going to Newfoundland with military stores. I do not surely mean to
+detract from him, who set all this spirit on float, but you see we can
+conquer, though Mr. Pitt is at his plough.
+
+[Footnote 1: Lady Hervey, the widow of Pope's Lord Fanny and Sporus, had
+been the beautiful "Molly Lepel," celebrated by Lord Chesterfield.
+
+    Had I Hanover, Bremen, and Verden
+      And likewise the Duchy of Zell,
+    I would part with them all for a farden,
+      Compared with sweet Molly Lepel.
+
+Three of her sons succeeded to the Earldom of Bristol.]
+
+The express arrived while the Duke de Nivernois was at dinner with Lord
+Bute. The world says, that the joy of the company showed itself with too
+little politeness--I hope not; I would not exult to a single man, and a
+minister of peace; it should be in the face of Europe, if I assumed that
+dominion which the French used to arrogate; nor do I believe it
+happened; all the company are not so charmed with the event. They are
+not quite convinced that it will facilitate the pacification, nor am I
+clear it will. The City of London will not lower their hopes, and views,
+and expectations, on this acquisition. Well, if we can steer wisely
+between insolence from success and impatience for peace, we may secure
+our safety and tranquillity for many years. But they are _not_ yet
+arrived, nor hear I anything that tells me the peace will certainly be
+made. France _wants_ peace; I question if she _wishes_ it. How his
+Catholic royalty will take this, one cannot guess. My good friend, we
+are not at table with Monsieur de Nivernois, so we may smile at this
+consequence of the family-compact. Twelve ships-of-the-line and the
+Havannah!--it becomes people who cannot keep their own, to divide the
+world between them!
+
+Your nephew Foote has made a charming figure; the King and Queen went
+from Windsor to see Eton; he is captain of the Oppidans, and made a
+speech to them with great applause. It was in English, which was right;
+why should we talk Latin to our Kings rather than Russ or Iroquois? Is
+this a season for being ashamed of our country? Dr. Barnard, the master,
+is the Pitt of masters, and has raised the school to the most
+flourishing state it ever knew.
+
+Lady Mary Wortley[1] has left twenty-one large volumes in prose and
+verse, in manuscript; nineteen are fallen to Lady Bute, and will not see
+the light in haste. The other two Lady Mary in her passage gave to
+somebody in Holland, and at her death expressed great anxiety to have
+them published. Her family are in terrors lest they should be, and have
+tried to get them: hitherto the man is inflexible. Though I do not doubt
+but they are an olio of lies and scandal, I should like to see them. She
+had parts, and had seen much. Truth is often at bottom of such
+compositions, and places itself here and there without the intention of
+the mother. I dare say in general, these works are like Madame del
+Pozzo's _Memoires_. Lady Mary had more wit, and something more delicacy;
+their manners and morals were a good deal more alike.
+
+[Footnote 1: In a note to this letter, subsequently added by Walpole, he
+reduces this statement to seventeen, saying: "It was true that Lady Mary
+did leave seventeen volumes of her works and memories. She gave her
+letters from Constantinople to Mr. Sowden, minister of the English
+Church at Rotterdam, who published them; and, the day before she died,
+she gave him those seventeen volumes, with injunctions to publish them
+too; but in two days the man had a crown living from Lord Bute, and Lady
+Bute had the seventeen volumes."]
+
+There is a lad, a waiter at St. James's coffee-house, of thirteen years
+old, who says he does not wonder we beat the French, for he himself
+could thrash Monsieur de Nivernois. This duke is so thin and small, that
+when minister at Berlin, at a time that France was not in favour there,
+the King of Prussia said, if his eyes were a little older, he should
+want a glass to see the embassador. I do not admire this bon-mot.
+Voltaire is continuing his "Universal History"; he showed the Duke of
+Grafton a chapter, to which the title is, _Les Anglois vainqueurs dans
+les Quatres Parties du Monde_. There have been minutes in the course of
+our correspondence when you and I did not expect to see this chapter. It
+is bigger by a quarter than our predecessors the Romans had any
+pretensions to, and larger than I hope our descendants will see written
+of them, for conquest, unless by necessity, as ours has been, is an
+odious glory; witness my hand
+
+H. WALPOLE.
+
+P.S.--I recollect that my last letter was a little melancholy; this, to
+be sure, has a grain or two of national vanity; why, I must own I am a
+miserable philosopher; the weather of the hour does affect me. I cannot
+here, at a distance from the world and unconcerned in it, help feeling a
+little satisfaction when my country is successful; yet, tasting its
+honours and elated with them, I heartily, seriously wish they had their
+_quietus_. What is the fame of men compared to their happiness? Who
+gives a nation peace, gives tranquillity to all. How many must be
+wretched, before one can be renowned! A hero bets the lives and fortunes
+of thousands, whom he has no right to game with: but alas! Caesars have
+little regard to their fish and counters!
+
+
+_RESIGNATION OF LORD BUTE--FRENCH VISITORS--WALPOLE AND NO. 45._
+
+TO SIR HORACE MANN.
+
+STRAWBERRY HILL, _April_ 30, 1763.
+
+The papers have told you all the formal changes; the real one consists
+solely in Lord Bute being out of office, for, having recovered his
+fright, he is still as much Minister as ever, and consequently does not
+find his unpopularity decrease. On the contrary, I think his situation
+more dangerous than ever: he has done enough to terrify his friends,
+and encourage his enemies, and has acquired no new strength; rather has
+lost strength, by the disappearance of Mr. Fox from the scene. His
+deputies, too, will not long care to stand all the risk for him, when
+they perceive, as they must already, that they have neither credit nor
+confidence. Indeed the new administration is a general joke, and will
+scarce want a violent death to put an end to it. Lord Bute is very
+blamable for embarking the King so deep in measures that may have so
+serious a termination. The longer the Court can stand its ground, the
+more firmly will the opposition be united, and the more inflamed. I have
+ever thought this would be a turbulent reign, and nothing has happened
+to make me alter my opinion.
+
+Mr. Fox's exit has been very unpleasant. He would not venture to accept
+the Treasury, which Lord Bute would have bequeathed to him; and could
+not obtain an earldom, for which he thought he had stipulated; but some
+of the negotiators asserting that he had engaged to resign the
+Paymaster's place, which he vehemently denies, he has been forced to
+take up with a barony, and has broken with his associates--I do not say
+friends, for with the chief of _them_[1] he had quarrelled when he
+embarked in the new system. He meets with little pity, and yet has found
+as much ingratitude as he had had power of doing service.
+
+[Footnote 1: "_The chief of them._" Walpole himself explains in a note
+that he means the Dukes of Cumberland and Devonshire.]
+
+I am glad you are going to have a great duke; it will amuse you, and a
+new Court will make Florence lively, the only beauty it wants. You
+divert me with my friend the Duke of Modena's conscientious match: if
+the Duchess had outlived him, she would not have been so scrupulous.
+But, for Hymen's sake, who is that Madame Simonetti? I trust, not that
+old painted, gaming, debauched Countess from Milan, whom I saw at the
+fair of Reggio!
+
+I surprise myself with being able to write two pages of pure English; I
+do nothing but deal in broken French. The two nations are crossing over
+and figuring-in. We have had a Count d'Usson and his wife these six
+weeks; and last Saturday arrived a Madame de Boufflers, _sçavante,
+galante_, a great friend of the Prince of Conti, and a passionate
+admirer _de nous autres Anglois_. I am forced to live much with _tout
+ça_, as they are perpetually at my Lady Hervey's; and as my Lord
+Hertford goes ambassador to Paris, where I shall certainly make him a
+visit next year--don't you think I shall be computing how far it is to
+Florence? There is coming, too, a Marquis de Fleury,[1] who is to be
+consigned to me, as a political relation, _vû l'amitié entre le Cardinal
+son oncle et feu monsieur mon père_. However, as my cousin Fleury is not
+above six-and-twenty, I had much rather be excused from such a
+commission as showing the Tombs and the Lions, and the King and Queen,
+and my Lord Bute, and the Waxwork, to a boy. All this breaks in upon my
+plan of withdrawing by little and little from the world, for I hate to
+tire it with an old lean face, and which promises to be an old lean face
+for thirty years longer, for I am as well again as ever. The Duc de
+Nivernois called here the other day in his way from Hampton Court; but,
+as the most sensible French never have eyes to see anything, unless they
+see it every day and see it in fashion, I cannot say he flattered me
+much, or was much struck with Strawberry. When I carried him into the
+Cabinet, which I have told you is formed upon the idea of a Catholic
+chapel, he pulled off his hat, but perceiving his error, he said, "_Ce
+n'est pas une chapelle pourtant_," and seemed a little displeased.
+
+[Footnote 1: Cardinal Fleury, Prime Minister of France from 1727 to
+1742. Pope celebrated his love of peace--
+
+    Peace is my dear delight, not Fleury's more;
+
+and by his resolute maintenance of peace during the first seven years of
+his administration he had so revived the resources and restored the
+power of his country, that when the question of going to war with France
+was discussed in the Council of Vienna the veteran Prince Eugene warned
+the Ministers that his wise and prudent administration had been so
+beneficial to his country that the Empire was no longer a match for it.]
+
+My poor niece [Lady Waldegrave] does not forget her Lord, though by this
+time I suppose the world has. She has taken a house here, at Twickenham,
+to be near me. Madame de Boufflers has heard so much of her beauty, that
+she told me she should be glad to peep through a grate anywhere to get a
+glimpse of her,--but at present it would not answer. I never saw so
+great an alteration in so short a period; but she is too young not to
+recover her beauty, only dimmed by grief that must be temporary. Adieu!
+my dear Sir.
+
+
+_Monday, May 2nd_, ARLINGTON STREET.
+
+The plot thickens: Mr. Wilkes is sent to the Tower for the last _North
+Briton_;[1] a paper whose fame must have reached you. It said Lord Bute
+had made the King utter a gross falsehood in his last speech. This hero
+is as bad a fellow as ever hero was, abominable in private life, dull in
+Parliament, but, they say, very entertaining in a room, and certainly no
+bad writer, besides having had the honour of contributing a great deal
+to Lord Bute's fall. Wilkes fought Lord Talbot in the autumn, whom he
+had abused; and lately in Calais, when the Prince de Croy, the Governor,
+asked how far the liberty of the press extended in England, replied, I
+cannot tell, but I am trying to know. I don't believe this will be the
+only paragraph I shall send you on this affair.
+
+[Footnote 1: The celebrated No. 45 which attacked the speech with which
+the King had opened Parliament; asserting that it was the speech not of
+the King, but of the Ministers; and that as such he had a right to
+criticise it, and to denounce its panegyric of the late speech as
+founded on falsehood.]
+
+
+_A PARTY AT "STRABERRI"--WORK OF HIS PRINTING PRESS--EPIGRAMS--A GARDEN
+PARTY AT ESHER._
+
+TO GEORGE MONTAGU, ESQ.
+
+STRAWBERRY HILL, _May_ 17, 1763.
+
+"On vient de nous donner une très jolie fête au château de Straberri:
+tout étoit tapissé de narcisses, de tulipes, et de lilacs; des cors de
+chasse, des clarionettes; des petits vers galants faits par des fées, et
+qui se trouvoient sous la presse; des fruits à la glace, du thé, du
+caffé, des biscuits, et force hot-rolls."--This is not the beginning of
+a letter to you, but of one that I might suppose sets out to-night for
+Paris, or rather, which I do not suppose will set out thither; for
+though the narrative is circumstantially true, I don't believe the
+actors were pleased enough with the scene, to give so favourable an
+account of it.
+
+The French do not come hither to see. _À l'Anglaise_ happened to be the
+word in fashion; and half a dozen of the most fashionable people have
+been the dupes of it. I take for granted that their next mode will be _à
+l'Iroquaise_, that they may be under no obligation of realising their
+pretensions. Madame de Boufflers[1] I think will die a martyr to a
+taste, which she fancied she had, and finds she has not. Never having
+stirred ten miles from Paris, and having only rolled in an easy coach
+from one hotel to another on a gliding pavement, she is already worn out
+with being hurried from morning till night from one sight to another.
+She rises every morning so fatigued with the toils of the preceding
+day, that she has not strength, if she had inclination, to observe the
+least, or the finest thing she sees! She came hither to-day to a great
+breakfast I made for her, with her eyes a foot deep in her head, her
+hands dangling, and scarce able to support her knitting-bag. She had
+been yesterday to see a ship launched, and went from Greenwich by water
+to Ranelagh. Madame Dusson, who is Dutch-built, and whose muscles are
+pleasure-proof, came with her; there were besides, Lady Mary Coke, Lord
+and Lady Holdernesse, the Duke and Duchess of Grafton, Lord Hertford,
+Lord Villiers, Offley, Messieurs de Fleury, D'Eon,[2] et Duclos.[3] The
+latter is author of the Life of Louis Onze; dresses like a dissenting
+minister, which I suppose is the livery of a _bel esprit_, and is much
+more impetuous than agreeable. We breakfasted in the great parlour, and
+I had filled the hall and large cloister by turns with French horns and
+clarionettes. As the French ladies had never seen a printing-house, I
+carried them into mine; they found something ready set, and desiring to
+see what it was, it proved as follows:--
+
+The Press speaks--
+
+FOR MADAME DE BOUFFLERS.
+
+    The graceful fair, who loves to know,
+    Nor dreads the north's inclement snow;
+    Who bids her polish'd accent wear
+    The British diction's harsher air;
+    Shall read her praise in every clime
+    Where types can speak or poets rhyme.
+
+FOR MADAME DUSSON.
+
+    Feign not an ignorance of what I speak;
+    You could not miss my meaning were it Greek:
+    'Tis the same language Belgium utter'd first,
+    The same which from admiring Gallia burst.
+    True sentiment a like expression pours;
+    Each country says the same to eyes like yours.
+
+[Footnote 1: Boswell records Mr. Beauclerk's account of his introduction
+of this lady to Johnson: "When Mme. de Boufflers was first in England
+she was desirous to see Johnson. I accordingly went with her to his
+chambers in the Temple, where she was entertained with his conversation
+for some time. When our visit was over, she and I left him, and were got
+into Inner Temple Lane, when, all at once, I heard a noise like thunder.
+This was occasioned by Johnson, who, it seems, upon a little
+recollection, had taken it into his head that he ought to have done the
+honours of his literary residence to a foreign lady of quality, and,
+eager to show himself a man of gallantry, was hurrying down the
+staircase in evident agitation. He overtook us before we reached the
+Temple Gate, and brushing in between me and Mme. de Boufflers, seized
+her hand and conducted her to her coach. His dress was a rusty brown
+morning suit, a pair of old shoes by way of slippers, a little
+shrivelled wig sticking on the top of his head, and the sleeves of his
+shirt and the knees of his breeches hanging loose. A considerable crowd
+of people gathered round, and were not a little struck by this singular
+appearance" (vol. ii., ann. 1775.)]
+
+[Footnote 2: This gentleman was at this time secretary to the Duc de
+Nivernois. For many years he dressed in woman's clothes, and the
+question of his sex was made the subject of many wagers and trials both
+in England and France.]
+
+[Footnote 3: M. Duclos was an author of good repute as a novelist, and
+one of the contributors to the "Dictionnaire de l'Academie."]
+
+You will comprehend that the first speaks English, and that the second
+does not; that the second is handsome, and the first not; and that the
+second was born in Holland. This little gentilesse pleased, and atoned
+for the popery of my house, which was not serious enough for Madame de
+Boufflers, who is Montmorency, _et du sang du premier Chrétien_; and too
+serious for Madame Dusson, who is a Dutch Calvinist. The latter's
+husband was not here, nor Drumgold, who have both got fevers, nor the
+Duc de Nivernois, who dined at Claremont. The Gallery is not advanced
+enough to give them any idea at all, as they are not apt to go out of
+their way for one; but the Cabinet, and the glory of yellow glass at
+top, which had a charming sun for a foil, did surmount their
+indifference, especially as they were animated by the Duchess of
+Grafton, who had never happened to be here before, and who perfectly
+entered into the air of enchantment and fairyism, which is the tone of
+the place, and was peculiarly so to-day--_apropos_, when do you design
+to come hither? Let me know, that I may have no measures to interfere
+with receiving you and your grandsons.
+
+Before Lord Bute ran away, he made Mr. Bentley[1] a Commissioner of the
+Lottery; I don't know whether a single or a double one: the latter,
+which I hope it is, is two hundred a-year.
+
+[Footnote 1: Mr. Bentley, who was an occasional correspondent of
+Walpole, was a son of the great Master of Trinity College, Cambridge.]
+
+
+_Thursday 19th_.
+
+I am ashamed of myself to have nothing but a journal of pleasures to
+send you; I never passed a more agreeable day than yesterday. Miss
+Pelham gave the French an entertainment at Esher;[1] but they have been
+so feasted and amused, that none of them were well enough, or reposed
+enough, to come, but Nivernois and Madame Dusson. The rest of the
+company were, the Graftons, Lady Rockingham, Lord and Lady Pembroke,
+Lord and Lady Holdernesse, Lord Villiers, Count Woronzow the Russian
+minister, Lady Sondes, Mr. and Miss Mary Pelham, Lady Mary Coke, Mrs.
+Anne Pitt, and Mr. Shelley. The day was delightful, the scene
+transporting; the trees, lawns, concaves, all in the perfection in which
+the ghost of Kent[2] would joy to see them. At twelve we made the tour
+of the farm in eight chaises and calashes, horsemen, and footmen,
+setting out like a picture of Wouverman's. My lot fell in the lap of
+Mrs. Anne Pitt, which I could have excused, as she was not at all in
+the style of the day, romantic, but political. We had a magnificent
+dinner, cloaked in the modesty of earthenware; French horns and hautboys
+on the lawn. We walked to the Belvidere on the summit of the hill, where
+a theatrical storm only served to heighten the beauty of the landscape,
+a rainbow on a dark cloud falling precisely behind the tower of a
+neighbouring church, between another tower and the building at
+Claremont. Monsieur de Nivernois, who had been absorbed all day, and
+lagging behind, translating my verses, was delivered of his version, and
+of some more lines which he wrote on Miss Pelham in the Belvidere, while
+we drank tea and coffee. From thence we passed into the wood, and the
+ladies formed a circle on chairs before the mouth of the cave, which was
+overhung to a vast height with woodbines, lilacs, and laburnums, and
+dignified by the tall shapely cypresses. On the descent of the hill were
+placed the French horns; the abigails, servants, and neighbours
+wandering below by the river; in short, it was Parnassus, as Watteau
+would have painted it. Here we had a rural syllabub, and part of the
+company returned to town; but were replaced by Giardini and Onofrio, who
+with Nivernois on the violin, and Lord Pembroke on the bass, accompanied
+Miss Pelham, Lady Rockingham, and the Duchess of Grafton, who sang. This
+little concert lasted till past ten; then there were minuets, and as we
+had seven couple left, it concluded with a country dance. I blush again,
+for I danced, but was kept in countenance by Nivernois, who has one
+wrinkle more than I have. A quarter after twelve they sat down to
+supper, and I came home by a charming moonlight. I am going to dine in
+town, and to a great ball with fireworks at Miss Chudleigh's, but I
+return hither on Sunday, to bid adieu to this abominable Arcadian life;
+for really when one is not young, one ought to do nothing but
+_s'ennuyer_; I will try, but I always go about it awkwardly. Adieu!
+
+[Footnote 1: "_Esher._" Claremont, at Esher, now the property of the
+Queen, and residence of the Duchess of Albany, at this time belonged to
+the Duke of Newcastle, Miss Pelham's uncle.]
+
+[Footnote 2: Kent was the great landscape gardener of the last
+generation.]
+
+P.S.--I enclose a copy of both the English and French verses.
+
+    À MADAME DE BOUFFLERS.
+
+    Boufflers, qu'embellissent les graces,
+    Et qui plairoit sans le vouloir,
+    Elle à qui l'amour du sçavoir
+    Fit braver le Nord et les glaces;
+    Boufflers se plait en nos vergers,
+    Et veut à nos sons étrangers
+    Plier sa voix enchanteresse.
+    Répétons son nom mille fois,
+    Sur tous les coeurs Boufflers aura des droits,
+    Par tout où la rime et la Presse
+    A l'amour prêteront leur voix.
+
+    À MADAME D'USSON.
+
+    Ne feignez point, Iris, de ne pas nous entendre;
+    Ce que vous inspirez, en Grec doit se comprendre.
+      On vous l'a dit d'abord en Hollandois,
+      Et dans un langage plus tendre
+      Paris vous l'a répété mille fois.
+      C'est de nos coeurs l'expression sincere;
+    En tout climat, Iris, à toute heure, en tous lieux,
+      Par tout où brilleront vos yeux,
+    Vous apprendrez combien ils sçavent plaire.
+
+
+_GENERAL CHARACTER OF THE FRENCH--FESTIVITIES ON THE QUEEN'S BIRTHDAY._
+
+TO THE HON. H.S. CONWAY.
+
+ARLINGTON STREET, _May_ 21, 1763.
+
+You have now seen the celebrated Madame de Boufflers. I dare say you
+could in that short time perceive that she is agreeable, but I dare say
+too that you will agree with me that vivacity[1] is by no means the
+_partage_ of the French--bating the _étourderie_ of the _mousquetaires_
+and of a high-dried _petit-maítre_ or two, they appear to me more
+lifeless than Germans. I cannot comprehend how they came by the
+character of a lively people. Charles Townshend has more _sal volatile_
+in him than the whole nation. Their King is taciturnity itself, Mirepoix
+was a walking mummy, Nivernois has about as much life as a sick
+favourite child, and M. Dusson is a good-humoured country gentleman, who
+has been drunk the day before, and is upon his good behaviour. If I have
+the gout next year, and am thoroughly humbled by it again, I will go to
+Paris, that I may be upon a level with them: at present, I am _trop fou_
+to keep them company. Mind, I do not insist that, to have spirits, a
+nation should be as frantic as poor Fanny Pelham, as absurd as the
+Duchess of Queensberry, or as dashing as the Virgin Chudleigh.[2] Oh,
+that you had been at her ball t'other night! History could never
+describe it and keep its countenance. The Queen's real birthday, you
+know, is not kept: this Maid of Honour kept it--nay, while the Court is
+in mourning, expected people to be out of mourning; the Queen's family
+really was so, Lady Northumberland having desired leave for them. A
+scaffold was erected in Hyde-park for fireworks. To show the
+illuminations without to more advantage, the company were received in an
+apartment totally dark, where they remained for two hours.--If they gave
+rise to any more birthdays, who could help it? The fireworks were fine,
+and succeeded well. On each side of the court were two large scaffolds
+for the Virgin's tradespeople. When the fireworks ceased, a large scene
+was lighted in the court, representing their Majesties; on each side of
+which were six obelisks, painted with emblems, and illuminated; mottoes
+beneath in Latin and English: 1. For the Prince of Wales, a ship,
+_Multorum spes_. 2. For the Princess Dowager, a bird of paradise, and
+_two_ little ones, _Meos ad sidera tollo_. People smiled. 3. Duke of
+York, a temple, _Virtuti et honori_. 4. Princess Augusta, a bird of
+paradise, _Non habet parem_--unluckily this was translated, _I have no
+peer_. People laughed out, considering where this was exhibited. 5. The
+three younger princes, an orange tree, _Promittit et dat_. 6. The two
+younger princesses, the flower crown-imperial. I forget the Latin: the
+translation was silly enough, _Bashful in youth, graceful in age_. The
+lady of the house made many apologies for the poorness of the
+performance, which she said was only oil-paper, painted by one of her
+servants; but it really was fine and pretty. The Duke of Kingston was in
+a frock, _comme chez lui_. Behind the house was a cenotaph for the
+Princess Elizabeth, a kind of illuminated cradle; the motto, _All the
+honours the dead can receive_. This burying-ground was a strange codicil
+to a festival; and, what was more strange, about one in the morning,
+this sarcophagus burst out into crackers and guns. The Margrave of
+Anspach began the ball with the Virgin. The supper was most sumptuous.
+
+[Footnote 1: In a subsequent letter he represents Mme. de Boufflers as
+giving them the same character, saying, "Dans ce pays-ci c'est un effort
+perpetuel pour sedivertir."]
+
+[Footnote 2: Miss Chudleigh, who had been one of the Princess Dowager's
+maids of honour, married Mr. Hervey, afterwards Earl of Bristol, but,
+having taken a dislike to him, she procured a divorce, and afterwards
+married the Duke of Kingston; but, after his death, his heirs, on the
+ground of some informality in the divorce, prosecuted her for bigamy,
+and she was convicted.]
+
+You ask, when do I propose to be at Park-place. I ask, shall not you
+come to the Duke of Richmond's masquerade, which is the 6th of June? I
+cannot well be with you till towards the end of that month.
+
+The enclosed is a letter which I wish you to read attentively, to give
+me your opinion upon it, and return it. It is from a sensible friend of
+mine in Scotland [Sir David Dalrymple], who has lately corresponded with
+me on the enclosed subjects, which I little understand; but I promised
+to communicate his ideas to George Grenville, if he would state
+them--are they practicable? I wish much that something could be done for
+those brave soldiers and sailors, who will all come to the gallows,
+unless some timely provision can be made for them.--The former part of
+his letter relates to a grievance he complains of, that men who have
+_not_ served are admitted into garrisons, and then into our hospitals,
+which were designed for meritorious sufferers. Adieu!
+
+
+_THE ORDINARY WAY OF LIFE IN ENGLAND--WILKES--C. TOWNSHEND--COUNT
+LALLY--LORD CLIVE--LORD NORTHINGTON--LOUIS LE BIEN AIMÉ--THE DRAMA IN
+FRANCE._
+
+TO THE EARL OF HERTFORD.
+
+ARLINGTON STREET, _Dec._ 29, 1763
+
+You are sensible, my dear lord, that any amusement from my letters must
+depend upon times and seasons. We are a very absurd nation (though the
+French are so good at present as to think us a very wise one, only
+because they, themselves, are now a very weak one); but then that
+absurdity depends upon the almanac. Posterity, who will know nothing of
+our intervals, will conclude that this age was a succession of events. I
+could tell them that we know as well when an event, as when Easter, will
+happen. Do but recollect these last ten years. The beginning of October,
+one is certain that everybody will be at Newmarket, and the Duke of
+Cumberland will lose, and Shafto win, two or three thousand pounds.
+After that, while people are preparing to come to town for the winter,
+the Ministry is suddenly changed, and all the world comes to learn how
+it happened, a fortnight sooner than they intended; and fully persuaded
+that the new arrangement cannot last a month. The Parliament opens;
+everybody is bribed; and the new establishment is perceived to be
+composed of adamant. November passes, with two or three self-murders,
+and a new play. Christmas arrives; everybody goes out of town; and a
+riot happens in one of the theatres. The Parliament meets again; taxes
+are warmly opposed; and some citizen makes his fortune by a
+subscription. The opposition languishes; balls and assemblies begin;
+some master and miss begin to get together, are talked of, and give
+occasion to forty more matches being invented; an unexpected debate
+starts up at the end of the session, that makes more noise than anything
+that was designed to make a noise, and subsides again in a new peerage
+or two. Ranelagh opens and Vauxhall; one produces scandal, and t'other a
+drunken quarrel. People separate, some to Tunbridge, and some to all the
+horse-races in England; and so the year comes again to October. I dare
+to prophesy, that if you keep this letter, you will find that my future
+correspondence will be but an illustration of this text; at least, it is
+an excuse for my having very little to tell you at present, and was the
+reason of my not writing to you last week.
+
+[Illustration: HORACE WALPOLE.
+
+_From a picture in the National Portrait Gallery, by Nathaniel Hone,
+R.A._]
+
+Before the Parliament adjourned, there was nothing but a trifling debate
+in an empty House, occasioned by a motion from the Ministry, to order
+another physician and surgeon to attend Wilkes:[1] it was carried by
+about seventy to thirty, and was only memorable by producing Mr. Charles
+Townshend, who, having sat silent through the question of privilege,
+found himself interested in the defence of Dr. Brocklesby![2] Charles
+ridiculed Lord North extremely, and had warm words with George
+Grenville. I do not look upon this as productive of consequential
+speaking for the opposition; on the contrary, I should expect him sooner
+in place, if the Ministry could be fools enough to restore weight to
+him, and could be ignorant that he can never hurt them so much as by
+being with them. Wilkes refused to see Heberden and Hawkins, whom the
+House commissioned to visit him; and to laugh at us more, sent for two
+Scotchmen, Duncan and Middleton. Well! but since that, he is gone off
+himself: however, as I did in D'Eon's case, I can now only ask news of
+him from you, not tell you any; for you have got him. I do not believe
+you will invite him, and make so much of him, as the Duke of Bedford
+did. Both sides pretend joy at his being gone; and for once I can
+believe both. You will be diverted, as I was, at the cordial esteem the
+ministers have for one another; Lord Waldegrave told my niece [Lady
+Waldegrave], this morning, that he had offered a shilling, to receive a
+hundred pounds when Sandwich shall lose his head! what a good opinion
+they have of one another! _apropos_ to losing heads, is Lally[3]
+beheaded?
+
+[Footnote 1: Wilkes had been wounded in a duel, and alleged his wound as
+a sufficient reason for not attending in his place in the House of
+Commons when summoned. Dr. Brocklesby, a physician of considerable
+eminence, reported that he was unable to attend; but the House of
+Commons, as if they distrusted his report, appointed two other
+physicians to examine the patient, Drs. Heberden and Hawkins.]
+
+[Footnote 2: Dr. Brocklesby is mentioned by Boswell as an especial
+friend of Johnson; having even offered him an annuity of £100 to relieve
+him from the necessity of writing to increase his income.]
+
+[Footnote 3: Count Lally, of an Irish family, his father or grandfather
+having been among those who, after the capitulation of Limerick,
+accompanied the gallant Sarsfield to France, had been the French
+governor in India; but, having failed in an attempt on Madras, and
+having been afterwards defeated at Wandewash by Colonel Coote, was
+recalled in disgrace, and brought to trial on a number of ridiculously
+false charges, convicted, and executed; his real offence being that by a
+somewhat intemperate zeal for the reformation of abuses, and the
+punishment of corruption which he detested, he had made a great number
+of personal enemies. He was the father of Count Lally Tollendal, who was
+a prominent character in the French Revolution.]
+
+The East India Company have come to an unanimous resolution of not
+paying Lord Clive the three hundred thousand pounds, which the Ministry
+had promised him in lieu of his Nabobical annuity. Just after the
+bargain was made, his old rustic of a father was at the King's levée;
+the King asked where his son was; he replied, "Sire, he is coming to
+town, and then your Majesty will have another vote." If you like these
+franknesses, I can tell you another. The Chancellor [Northington] is a
+chosen governor of St. Bartholomew's Hospital: a smart gentleman, who
+was sent with the staff, carried it in the evening, when the Chancellor
+happened to be drunk. "Well, Mr. Bartlemy," said his lordship, snuffing,
+"what have you to say?" The man, who had prepared a formal harangue, was
+transported to have so fair opportunity given him of uttering it, and
+with much dapper gesticulation congratulated his lordship on his health,
+and the nation on enjoying such great abilities. The Chancellor stopped
+him short, crying, "By God, it is a lie! I have neither health nor
+abilities; my bad health has destroyed my abilities."[1] The late
+Chancellor [Hardwicke] is much better.
+
+[Footnote 1: Lord Northington had been a very hard liver. He was a
+martyr to the gout; and one afternoon, as he was going downstairs out of
+his Court, he was heard to say to himself, "D--- these legs! If I had
+known they were to carry a Lord Chancellor, I would have taken better
+care of them;" and it was to relieve himself of the labours of the Court
+of Chancery that he co-operated with Mr. Pitt in the discreditable
+intrigue which in the summer of 1766 compelled the resignation of Lord
+Rockingham, Mr. Pitt having promised him the office of President of the
+Council in the new Ministry which he intended to form.]
+
+The last time the King was at Drury-lane, the play given out for the
+next night was "All in the Wrong:" the galleries clapped, and then cried
+out, "Let _us_ be all in the right! Wilkes and Liberty!" When the King
+comes to a theatre, or goes out, or goes to the House, there is not a
+single applause; to the Queen there is a little: in short, _Louis le
+bien aimé_[1] is not French at present for King George.
+
+[Footnote 1: "Le Bien aimé" was a designation conferred on Louis XV. by
+the people in their joy at his recovery from an illness which had
+threatened his life at Metz in 1744. Louis himself was surprised, and
+asked what he had done to deserve such a title; and, in truth, it was a
+question hard to answer; but it was an expression of praise for his
+leaving the capital to accompany his army in the campaign.]
+
+I read, last night, your new French play, "Le Comte de Warwic,"[1] which
+we hear has succeeded much. I must say, it does but confirm the cheap
+idea I have of you French: not to mention the preposterous perversion
+of history in so known a story, the Queen's ridiculous preference of old
+Warwick to a young King; the omission of the only thing she ever said or
+did in her whole life worth recording, which was thinking herself too
+low for his wife, and too high for his mistress; the romantic honour
+bestowed on two such savages as Edward and Warwick: besides these, and
+forty such glaring absurdities, there is but one scene that has any
+merit, that between Edward and Warwick in the third act. Indeed, indeed,
+I don't honour the modern French: it is making your son but a slender
+compliment, with his knowledge, for them to say it is extraordinary. The
+best proof I think they give of their taste, is liking you all three. I
+rejoice that your little boy is recovered. Your brother has been at
+Park-place this week, and stays a week longer: his hill is too high to
+be drowned.
+
+[Footnote 1: "Le Comte de Warwic" was by La Harpe, who was only
+twenty-three years of age. The answer here attributed to Elizabeth
+Woodville has been attributed to others also; and especially to Mdlle.
+de Montmorency, afterwards Princesse de Condé, when pursued by the
+solicitations of Henry IV.]
+
+Thank you for your kindness to Mr. Selwyn: if he had too much
+impatience, I am sure it proceeded only from his great esteem for you.
+
+I will endeavour to learn what you desire; and will answer, in another
+letter, that and some other passages in your last. Dr. Hunter is very
+good, and calls on me sometimes. You may guess whether we talk you over
+or not. Adieu!
+
+
+_A NEW YEAR'S PARTY AT LADY SUFFOLK'S--LADY TEMPLE POETESS LAUREATE TO
+THE MUSES_
+
+TO GEORGE MONTAGU, ESQ.
+
+ARLINGTON STREET, _Jan._ 11, 1764.
+
+It is an age, I own, since I wrote to you: but except politics, what was
+there to send you? and for politics, the present are too contemptible to
+be recorded by anybody but journalists, gazetteers, and such historians!
+The ordinary of Newgate, or Mr. ----, who write for their monthly
+half-crown, and who are indifferent whether Lord Bute, Lord Melcombe, or
+Maclean [the highwayman], is their hero, may swear they find diamonds on
+dunghills; but you will excuse _me_, if I let our correspondence lie
+dormant rather than deal in such trash. I am forced to send Lord
+Hertford and Sir Horace Mann such garbage, because they are out of
+England, and the sea softens and makes palatable any potion, as it does
+claret; but unless I can divert _you_, I had rather wait till we can
+laugh together; the best employment for friends, who do not mean to pick
+one another's pocket, nor make a property of either's frankness. Instead
+of politics, therefore, I shall amuse you to-day with a fairy tale.
+
+I was desired to be at my Lady Suffolk's on New-year's morn, where I
+found Lady Temple and others. On the toilet Miss Hotham spied a small
+round box. She seized it with all the eagerness and curiosity of eleven
+years. In it was wrapped up a heart-diamond ring, and a paper in which,
+in a hand as small as Buckinger's[1] who used to write the Lord's
+Prayer in the compass of a silver penny, were the following lines:--
+
+    Sent by a sylph, unheard, unseen,
+    A new-year's gift from Mab our queen:
+    But tell it not, for if you do,
+    You will be pinch'd all black and blue.
+    Consider well, what a disgrace,
+    To show abroad your mottled face:
+    Then seal your lips, put on the ring,
+    And sometimes think of Ob. the king.
+
+[Footnote 1: Buckinger was a dwarf born without hands or feet.]
+
+You will eagerly guess that Lady Temple was the poetess, and that we
+were delighted with the gentleness of the thought and execution. The
+child, you may imagine, was less transported with the poetry than the
+present. Her attention, however, was hurried backwards and forwards from
+the ring to a new coat, that she had been trying on when sent for down;
+impatient to revisit her coat, and to show the ring to her maid, she
+whisked upstairs; when she came down again, she found a letter sealed,
+and lying on the floor--new exclamations! Lady Suffolk bade her open it:
+here it is:--
+
+    Your tongue, too nimble for your sense,
+    Is guilty of a high offence;
+    Hath introduced unkind debate,
+    And topsy-turvy turn'd our state.
+    In gallantry I sent the ring,
+    The token of a love-sick king:
+    Under fair Mab's auspicious name
+    From me the trifling present came.
+    You blabb'd the news in Suffolk's ear;
+    The tattling zephyrs brought it here;
+    As Mab was indolently laid
+    Under a poppy's spreading shade.
+    The jealous queen started in rage;
+    She kick'd her crown, and beat her page:
+    "Bring me my magic wand," she cries;
+    "Under that primrose, there it lies;
+    I'll change the silly, saucy chit,
+    Into a flea, a louse, a nit,
+    A worm, a grasshopper, a rat,
+    An owl, a monkey, hedgehog, bat.
+    But hold, why not by fairy art
+    Transform the wretch into--
+    Ixion once a cloud embraced,
+    By Jove and jealousy well placed;
+    What sport to see proud Oberon stare,
+    And flirt it with a _pet en l'air_!"
+    Then thrice she stamp'd the trembling ground,
+    And thrice she waved her wand around;
+    When I, endow'd with greater skill,
+    And less inclined to do you ill,
+    Mutter'd some words, withheld her arm,
+    And kindly stopp'd the unfinish'd charm.
+    But though not changed to owl or bat,
+    Or something more indelicate;
+    Yet, as your tongue has run too fast,
+    Your boasted beauty must not last.
+    No more shall frolic Cupid lie
+    In ambuscade in either eye,
+    From thence to aim his keenest dart
+    To captivate each youthful heart:
+    No more shall envious misses pine
+    At charms now flown, that once were thine
+    No more, since you so ill behave,
+    Shall injured Oberon be your slave.
+
+There is one word which I could wish had not been there though it is
+prettily excused afterwards. The next day my Lady Suffolk desired I
+would write her a patent for appointing Lady Temple poet laureate to the
+fairies. I was excessively out of order with a pain in my stomach, which
+I had had for ten days, and was fitter to write verses like a Poet
+Laureate, than for making one; however, I was going home to dinner
+alone, and at six I sent her some lines, which you ought to have seen
+how sick I was, to excuse; but first I must tell you my tale
+methodically. The next morning by nine o'clock Miss Hotham (she must
+forgive me twenty years hence for saying she was eleven, for I recollect
+she is but ten), arrived at Lady Temple's, her face and neck all spotted
+with saffron, and limping. "Oh, Madam!" said she, "I am undone for ever
+if you do not assist me!" "Lord, child," cried my Lady Temple, "what is
+the matter?" thinking she had hurt herself, or lost the ring, and that
+she was stolen out before her aunt was up. "Oh, Madam," said the girl,
+"nobody but you can assist me!" My Lady Temple protests the child acted
+her part so well as to deceive her. "What can I do for you?" "Dear
+Madam, take this load from my back; nobody but you can." Lady Temple
+turned her round, and upon her back was tied a child's waggon. In it
+were three tiny purses of blue velvet; in one of them a silver cup, in
+another a crown of laurel, and in the third four new silver pennies,
+with the patent, signed at top, "Oberon Imperator;" and two sheets of
+warrants strung together with blue silk according to form; and at top an
+office seal of wax and a chaplet of cut paper on it. The Warrants were
+these:--
+
+     From the Royal Mews:
+
+     A waggon with the draught horses, delivered by command without fee.
+
+
+     From the Lord Chamberlain's Office:
+
+     A warrant with the royal sign manual, delivered by command without
+     fee, being first entered in the office books.
+
+     From the Lord Steward's Office:
+
+     A butt of sack, delivered without fee or gratuity, with an order
+     for returning the cask for the use of the office, by command.
+
+     From the Great Wardrobe:
+
+     Three velvet bags, delivered without fee, by command.
+
+     From the Treasurer of the Household's Office:
+
+     A year's salary paid free from land-tax, poundage, or any other
+     deduction whatever by command.
+
+     From the Jewel Office:
+
+     A silver butt, a silver cup, a wreath of bays, by command without
+     fee.
+
+Then came the Patent:
+
+    By these presents be it known,
+    To all who bend before our throne,
+    Fays and fairies, elves and sprites,
+    Beauteous dames and gallant knights,
+    That we, Oberon the grand,
+    Emperor of fairy land,
+    King of moonshine, prince of dreams,
+    Lord of Aganippe's streams,
+    Baron of the dimpled isles
+    That lie in pretty maiden's smiles,
+    Arch-treasurer of all the graces
+    Dispersed through fifty lovely faces,
+    Sovereign of the slipper's order,
+    With all the rites thereon that border,
+    Defender of the sylphic faith,
+    Declare--and thus your monarch saith:
+    Whereas there is a noble dame,
+    Whom mortals Countess Temple name,
+    To whom ourself did erst impart
+    The choicest secrets of our art,
+    Taught her to tune the harmonious line
+    To our own melody divine,
+    Taught her the graceful negligence,
+    Which, scorning art and veiling sense,
+    Achieves that conquest o'er the heart
+    Sense seldom gains, and never art:
+    This lady, 'tis our royal will
+    Our laureate's vacant seat should fill;
+    A chaplet of immortal bays
+    Shall crown her brow and guard her lays,
+    Of nectar sack an acorn cup
+    Be at her board each year filled up;
+    And as each quarter feast comes round
+    A silver penny shall be found
+    Within the compass of her shoe--
+    And so we bid you all adieu!
+
+     Given at our palace of Cowslip Castle, the shortest night of the
+     year.
+
+     OBERON.
+
+And underneath,
+
+     HOTHAMINA.
+
+How shall I tell you the greatest curiosity of the story? The whole plan
+and execution of the second act was laid and adjusted by my Lady Suffolk
+herself and Will. Chetwynd, Master of the Mint, Lord Bolingbroke's
+Oroonoko-Chetwynd;[1] he fourscore, she past seventy-six; and, what is
+more, much worse than I was, for added to her deafness, she has been
+confined these three weeks with the gout in her eyes, and was actually
+then in misery, and had been without sleep. What spirits, and
+cleverness, and imagination, at that age, and under those afflicting
+circumstances! You reconnoitre her old court knowledge, how charmingly
+she has applied it! Do you wonder I pass so many hours and evenings with
+her? Alas! I had like to have lost her this morning! They had poulticed
+her feet to draw the gout downwards, and began to succeed yesterday, but
+to-day it flew up into her head, and she was almost in convulsions with
+the agony, and screamed dreadfully; proof enough how ill she was, for
+her patience and good breeding makes her for ever sink and conceal what
+she feels. This evening the gout has been driven back to her foot, and I
+trust she is out of danger. Her loss will be irreparable to me at
+Twickenham, where she is by far the most rational and agreeable company
+I have.
+
+[Footnote 1: Oroonoko-Chetwynd, M.P. for Plymouth. He was called
+Oroonoko and sometimes "Black Will," from his dark complexion.]
+
+I don't tell you that the Hereditary Prince [of Brunswick][1] is still
+expected and not arrived. A royal wedding would be a flat episode after
+a _real_ fairy tale, though the bridegroom is a hero. I have not seen
+your brother General yet, but have called on him, When come you
+yourself? Never mind the town and its filthy politics; we can go to the
+Gallery at Strawberry--stay, I don't know whether we can or not, my hill
+is almost drowned, I don't know how your mountain is--well, we can take
+a boat, and always be gay there; I wish we may be so at seventy-six and
+eighty! I abominate politics more and more; we had glories, and would
+not keep them: well! content, that there was an end of blood; then perks
+prerogative its ass's ears up; we are always to be saving our liberties,
+and then staking them again! 'Tis wearisome! I hate the discussion, and
+yet one cannot always sit at a gaming-table and never make a bet. I wish
+for nothing, I care not a straw for the inns or the outs; I determine
+never to think of them, yet the contagion catches one; can you tell
+anything that will prevent infection? Well then, here I swear,--no, I
+won't swear, one always breaks one's oath. Oh, that I had been born to
+love a court like Sir William Breton! I should have lived and died with
+the comfort of thinking that courts there will be to all eternity, and
+the liberty of my country would never once have ruffled my smile, or
+spoiled my bow. I envy Sir William. Good night!
+
+[Footnote 1: The Duke of Brunswick, who was mortally wounded in 1806 at
+the battle of Jena. He had come, as is mentioned in the next letter, to
+marry the King's sister.]
+
+
+_MARRIAGE OF THE PRINCE OF BRUNSWICK: HIS POPULARITY._
+
+TO SIR HORACE MANN.
+
+ARLINGTON STREET, _Jan._ 18, 1764.
+
+Shall I tell you of all our crowds, and balls, and embroideries? Don't I
+grow too old to describe drawing-rooms? Surely I do, when I find myself
+too old to go into them. I forswore puppet-shows at the last
+coronation, and have kept my word to myself. However, being bound by a
+prior vow, to keep up the acquaintance between you and your own country,
+I will show you, what by the way I have not seen myself, the Prince of
+Brunswick. He arrived at Somerset House last Friday evening; at
+Chelmsford a quaker walked into the room, _did_ pull off his hat, and
+said, "Friend, my religion forbids me to fight, but I honour those that
+fight well." The Prince, though he does not speak English, understands
+it enough to be pleased with the compliment. He received another, very
+flattering. As he went next morning to St. James's, he spied in the
+crowd one of Elliot's light-horse and kissed his hand to the man.
+"What!" said the populace, "does he know you?" "Yes," replied the man;
+"he once led me into a scrape, which nothing but himself could have
+brought me out of again." You may guess how much this added to the
+Prince's popularity, which was at high-water mark before.
+
+When he had visited the King and Queen, he went to the Princess Dowager
+at Leicester House, and saw his mistress. He is very _galant_, and
+professes great satisfaction in his fortune, for he had not even seen
+her picture. He carries his good-breeding so far as to declare he would
+have returned unmarried, if she had not pleased him. He has had levées
+and dinners at Somerset House; to the latter, company was named for him.
+On Monday evening they were married by the Archbishop in the great
+drawing-room, with little ceremony; supped, and lay at Leicester House.
+Yesterday morning was a drawing-room at St. James's, and a ball at
+night; both repeated to-day, for the Queen's birthday. On Thursday they
+go to the play; on Friday the Queen gives them a ball and dinner at her
+house; on Saturday they dine with the Princess at Kew, and return for
+the Opera; and on Wednesday--why, they make their bow and curtsy, and
+sail.
+
+The Prince has pleased everybody; his manner is thought sensible and
+engaging; his person slim, genteel, and handsome enough; that is, not at
+all handsome, but martial, agreeably weather-worn. I should be able to
+swear to all this on Saturday, when I intend to see him; but, alas! the
+post departs on Friday, and, however material my testimony may be, he
+must want it.
+
+
+_GAMBLING QUARRELS--MR. CONWAY'S SPEECH._
+
+TO THE EARL OF HERTFORD.
+
+ARLINGTON STREET, _Feb._ 6, 1764.
+
+You have, I hope, long before this, my dear lord, received the immense
+letter that I sent you by old Monin. It explained much, and announced
+most part of which has already happened; for you will observe that when
+I tell you anything very positively, it is on good intelligence. I have
+another much bigger secret for you, but that will be delivered to you by
+word of mouth. I am not a little impatient for the long letter you
+promised me. In the mean time thank you for the account you give me of
+the King's extreme civility to you. It is like yourself to dwell on
+that, and to say little of M. de Chaulnes's dirtv behaviour; but
+Monsieur and Madame de Guerchy have told your brother and me all the
+particulars.
+
+I was but too good a prophet when I warned you to expect new
+extravagances from the Duc de Chaulnes's son. Some weeks ago he lost
+five hundred pounds to one Virette, an equivocal being, that you
+remember here. Paolucci, the Modenese minister, who is not in the odour
+of honesty, was of the party. The Duc de Pecquigny said to the latter,
+"Monsieur, ne jouez plus avec lui, si vous n'êtes pas de moitié." So far
+was very well. On Saturday, at the Maccaroni Club (which is composed of
+all the travelled young men who wear long curls and spying glasses),
+they played again: the Duc lost, but not much. In the passage at the
+Opera, the Duc saw Mr. Stuart talking to Virette, and told the former
+that Virette was a coquin, a fripon, &c., &c. Virette retired, saying
+only, "Voilà un fou." The Duc then desired Lord Tavistock to come and
+see him fight Virette, but the Marquis desired to be excused. After the
+Opera, Virette went to the Duc's lodgings, but found him gone to make
+his complaint to Monsieur de Guerchy, whither he followed him; and
+farther this deponent knoweth not. I pity the Count [de Guerchy], who is
+one of the best-natured amiable men in the world, for having this absurd
+boy upon his hands!
+
+Well! now for a little politics. The Cider Bill has not answered to the
+minority, though they ran the ministry hard; but last Friday was
+extraordinary. George Grenville was pushed upon some Navy Bills. I don't
+understand a syllable, you know, of money and accounts; but whatever
+was the matter, he was driven from entrenchment to entrenchment by Baker
+and Charles Townshend. After that affair was over, and many gone away,
+Sir W. Meredith moved for the depositions on which the warrant against
+Wilkes had been granted. The Ministers complained of the motion being
+made so late in the day; called it a surprise; and Rigby moved to
+adjourn, which was carried but by 73 to 60. Had a surprise been
+intended, you may imagine the minority would have been better provided
+with numbers; but it certainly had not been concerted: however, a
+majority, shrunk to thirteen, frightened them out of the small senses
+they possess. Heaven, Earth, and the Treasury, were moved to recover
+their ground to-day, when the question was renewed. For about two hours
+the debate hobbled on very lamely, when on a sudden your brother rose,
+and made such a speech[1]--but I wish anybody was to give you the
+account except me, whom you will think partial: but you will hear enough
+of it, to confirm anything I can say. Imagine fire, rapidity, argument,
+knowledge, wit, ridicule, grace, spirit; all pouring like a torrent, but
+without clashing. Imagine the House in a tumult of continued applause,
+imagine the Ministers thunderstruck; lawyers abashed and almost
+blushing, for it was on their quibbles and evasions he fell most
+heavily, at the same time answering a whole session of arguments on the
+side of the court. No, it was _unique_; you can neither conceive it, nor
+the exclamations it occasioned. Ellis, the Forlorn Hope, Ellis presented
+himself in the gap, till the ministers could recover themselves, when on
+a sudden Lord George Sackville _led up the Blues_; spoke with as much
+warmth as your brother had, and with great force continued the attack
+which he had begun. Did not I tell you he would take this part? I was
+made privy to it; but this is far from all you are to expect. Lord North
+in vain rumbled about his mustard-bowl, and endeavoured alone to outroar
+a whole party: him and Forrester, Charles Townshend took up, but less
+well than usual. His jealousy of your brother's success, which was very
+evident, did not help him to shine. There were several other speeches,
+and, upon the whole, it was a capital debate; but Plutus is so much more
+persuasive an orator than your brother or Lord George, that we divided
+but 122 against 217. Lord Strange, who had agreed to the question, did
+not dare to vote for it, and declared off; and George Townshend, who had
+actually voted for it on Friday, now voted against us. Well! upon the
+whole, I heartily wish this administration may last: both their
+characters and abilities are so contemptible, that I am sure we can be
+in no danger from prerogative when trusted to such hands!
+
+[Footnote 1: Walpole must have exaggerated the merits of this speech;
+for Conway was never remarkable for eloquence. Indeed, Walpole himself,
+in his "Memoirs of George II.," quotes Mr. Hutchinson, the Prime
+Serjeant in Ireland, contrasting him with Lord G. Sackville, "Lord
+George having parts, but no integrity; Conway integrity, but no parts:
+and now they were governed by one who had neither." And Walpole's
+comment on this comparison is: "There was more wit than truth in this
+description. Conway's parts, though not brilliant, were solid" (vol. ii.
+p. 246). In his "Life of Pitt" Lord Stanhope describes him as "a man
+who, in the course of a long public life, had shown little vigour or
+decision, but who was much respected for his honourable character and
+moderate counsels" (c. 5).]
+
+Before I have done with Charles Townshend, I must tell you one of his
+admirable _bon mots_. Miss Draycote, the great fortune, is grown very
+fat; he says her _tonnage_ is become equal to her _poundage_.
+
+
+_ACCOUNT OF THE DEBATE ON THE GENERAL WARRANT._
+
+TO THE EARL OF HERTFORD.
+
+ARLINGTON STREET, _Wednesday, Feb._ 15, 1764.
+
+My dear Lord,--You ought to be witness to the fatigue I am suffering,
+before you can estimate the merit I have in being writing to you at this
+moment. Cast up eleven hours in the House of Commons on Monday, and
+above seventeen hours yesterday,--ay, seventeen at length,--and then you
+may guess if I am tired! nay, you must add seventeen hours that I may
+possibly be there on Friday, and then calculate if I am weary. In short,
+yesterday was the longest day ever known in the House of Commons--why,
+on the Westminster election at the end of my father's reign, I was at
+home by six. On Alexander Murray's affair, I believe, by five--on the
+militia, twenty people, I think, sat till six, but then they were only
+among themselves, no heat, no noise, no roaring. It was half an hour
+after seven this morning before I was at home. Think of that, and then
+brag of your French parliaments!
+
+What is ten times greater, Leonidas and the Spartan _minority_ did not
+make such a stand at Thermopylae, as we did. Do you know, we had like to
+have been the _majority_? Xerxes[1] is frightened out of his senses;
+Sysigambis[1] has sent an express to Luton to forbid Phraates[1] coming
+to town to-morrow; Norton's[2] impudence has forsaken him; Bishop
+Warburton is at this moment reinstating Mr. Pitt's name in the
+dedication to his Sermons, which he had expunged for Sandwich's; and
+Sandwich himself is--at Paris, perhaps, by this time, for the first
+thing that I expect to hear to-morrow is, that he is gone off.
+
+[Footnote 1: "_Xerxes, Sysigambis, Phraates._" These names contain
+allusions to one of Mdlle. Scudéri's novels, which, as D'Israeli
+remarks, are "representations of what passed at the Court of France";
+but in this letter the scene of action is transferred to England. Xerxes
+is George III.; Sysigambis, the Princess Dowager; and Phraates is Lord
+Bute.]
+
+[Footnote 2: Sir Fletcher Norton, the Speaker.]
+
+Now are you mortally angry with me for trifling with you, and not
+telling you at once the particulars of this _almost-revolution_? You may
+be angry, but I shall take my own time, and shall give myself what airs
+I please both to you, my Lord Ambassador, and to you, my Lord Secretary
+of State, who will, I suppose, open this letter--if you have courage
+enough left. In the first place, I assume all the impertinence of a
+prophet,--aye, of that great curiosity, a prophet, who really prophesied
+before the event, and whose predictions have been accomplished. Have I,
+or have I not, announced to you the unexpected blows that would be given
+to the administration?--come, I will lay aside my dignity, and satisfy
+your impatience. There's moderation.
+
+We sat all Monday hearing evidence against Mr. Wood,[1] that dirty
+wretch Webb, and the messengers, for their illegal proceedings against
+Mr. Wilkes. At midnight, Mr. Grenville offered us to adjourn or proceed.
+Mr. Pitt humbly begged not to eat or sleep till so great a point should
+be decided. On a division, in which though many said _aye_ to
+adjourning, nobody would go out for fear of losing their seats, it was
+carried by 379 to 31, for proceeding--and then--half the House went
+away. The ministers representing the indecency of this, and Fitzherbert
+saying that many were within call, Stanley observed, that after voting
+against adjournment, a third part had adjourned themselves, when,
+instead of being within _call_, they ought to have been within
+_hearing_; this was unanswerable, and we adjourned.
+
+[Footnote 1: Mr. Wood and Mr. Webb were the Under-Secretary of State and
+the Solicitor of the Treasury; and, as such, the officers chiefly
+responsible for the _form_ of the warrant complained of.]
+
+Yesterday we fell to again. It was one in the morning before the
+evidence was closed. Carrington, the messenger, was alone examined for
+seven hours. This old man, the cleverest of all ministerial terriers,
+was pleased with recounting his achievements, yet perfectly guarded and
+betraying nothing. However, the _arcana imperii_ have been wofully laid
+open.
+
+I have heard Garrick, and other players, give themselves airs of fatigue
+after a long part--think of the Speaker, nay, think of the clerks
+taking most correct minutes for sixteen hours, and reading them over to
+every witness; and then let me hear of fatigue! Do you know, not only my
+Lord Temple,[1]--who you may swear never budged as spectator,--but old
+Will Chetwynd, now past eighty, and who had walked to the House, did not
+stir a single moment out of his place, from three in the afternoon till
+the division at seven in the morning. Nay, we had _patriotesses_, too,
+who stayed out the whole: Lady Rockingham and Lady Sondes the first day;
+both again the second day, with Miss Mary Pelham, Mrs. Fitzroy, and the
+Duchess of Richmond, as patriot as any of us. Lady Mary Coke, Mrs.
+George Pitt, and Lady Pembroke, came after the Opera, but I think did
+not stay above seven or eight hours at most.
+
+[Footnote 1: Lord Temple was Mr. Pitt's brother-in-law, a restless and
+impracticable intriguer. He had some such especial power of influencing
+Mr. Pitt--who, it is supposed, must have been under some pecuniary
+obligation to him--that he was able the next year to prevent his
+accepting the office of Prime Minister when the King pressed it on him.]
+
+At one, Sir W. Meredith moved a resolution of the illegality of the
+Warrant, and opened it well. He was seconded by old Darlington's
+brother, a convert to us. Mr. Wood, who had shone the preceding day by
+great modesty, decency, and ingenuity, forfeited these merits a good
+deal by starting up, (according to a Ministerial plan,) and very
+arrogantly, and repeatedly in the night, demanding justice and a
+previous acquittal, and telling the House he scorned to accept being
+merely _excused_; to which Mr. Pitt replied, that if he disdained to be
+_excused_, he would deserve to be _censured_. Mr. Charles Yorke (who,
+with his family, have come roundly to us for support against the Duke of
+Bedford on the Marriage Bill) proposed to adjourn. Grenville and the
+ministry would have agreed to adjourn the debate on the great question
+itself, but declared they would push this acquittal. This they announced
+haughtily enough--for as yet, they did not doubt of their strength. Lord
+Frederick Campbell was the most impetuous of all, so little he foresaw
+how much _wiser_ it would be to follow your brother. Pitt made a short
+speech, excellently argumentative, and not bombast, nor tedious, nor
+deviating from the question. He was supported by your brother, and
+Charles Townshend, and Lord George; the two last of whom are strangely
+firm, now they are got under the cannon of your brother:--Charles, who,
+as he must be extraordinary, is now so in romantic nicety of honour. His
+father, who is dying, or dead, at Bath, and from whom he hopes two
+thousand a year, has sent for him. He has refused to go--lest his
+_steadiness_ should be questioned. At a quarter after four we divided.
+_Our_ cry was so loud, that both we and the ministers thought we had
+carried it. It is not to be painted, the dismay of the latter--in good
+truth not without reason, for _we_ were 197, they but 207. Your
+experience can tell you, that a majority of _but_ ten is a defeat.
+Amidst a great defection from them, was even a white staff, Lord Charles
+Spencer--now you know still more of what I told you was preparing for
+them!
+
+Crest-fallen, the ministers then proposed simply to discharge the
+complaint; but the plumes which they had dropped, Pitt soon placed in
+his own beaver. He broke out on liberty, and, indeed, on whatever he
+pleased, uninterrupted. Rigby sat feeling the vice-treasureship slipping
+from under him. Nugent was not less pensive--Lord Strange, though not
+interested, did not like it. Everybody was too much taken up with his
+own concerns, or too much daunted, to give the least disturbance to the
+Pindaric. Grenville, however, dropped a few words, which did but
+heighten the flame. Pitt, with less modesty than ever he showed,
+pronounced a panegyric on his own administration, and from thence broke
+out on the _dismission of officers_. This increased the roar from us.
+Grenville replied, and very finely, very pathetically, very animated. He
+painted Wilkes and faction, and, with very little truth, denied the
+charge of menaces to officers. At that moment, General A'Court walked up
+the House--think what an impression such an incident must make, when
+passions, hopes, and fears, were all afloat--think, too, how your
+brother and I, had we been ungenerous, could have added to these
+sensations! There was a man not so delicate. Colonel Barré rose--and
+this attended with a striking circumstance; Sir Edward Deering, one of
+_our_ noisy fools, called out, "_Mr._ Barré."[1] The latter seized the
+thought with admirable quickness, and said to the Speaker, who, in
+pointing to him, had called him _Colonel_, "I beg your pardon, Sir, you
+have pointed to me by a title I have no right to," and then made a very
+artful and pathetic speech on his own services and dismission; with
+nothing bad but an awkward attempt towards an excuse to Mr. Pitt for his
+former behaviour. Lord North, who will not lose his _bellow_, though he
+may lose his place, endeavoured to roar up the courage of his comrades,
+but it would not do--the House grew tired, and we again divided at seven
+for adjournment; some of our people were gone, and we remained but 184,
+they 208; however, you will allow our affairs are mended, when we say,
+_but_ 184. _We_ then came away, and left the ministers to satisfy Wood,
+Webb, and themselves, as well as they could. It was eight this morning
+before I was in bed; and considering that, this is no very short letter.
+Mr. Pitt bore the fatigue with his usual spirit--and even old Onslow,
+the late Speaker, was sitting up, anxious for the event.
+
+[Footnote 1: Mr. Barré had lately been dismissed from the office of
+Adjutant-General, on account of some of his votes in Parliament. In 1784
+he was appointed Clerk of the Rolls, a place worth above £3,000 a year,
+by Mr. Pitt, who, with extraordinary disinterestedness, forbore from
+taking it himself, that he might relieve the nation from a pension of
+similar amount which had been improperly conferred on the Colonel by
+Lord Rockingham.]
+
+On Friday we are to have the great question, which would prevent my
+writing; and to-morrow I dine with Guerchy, at the Duke of Grafton's,
+besides twenty other engagements. To-day I have shut myself up; for with
+writing this, and taking notes yesterday all day, and all night, I have
+not an eye left to see out of--nay, for once in my life, I shall go to
+bed at ten o'clock....
+
+Adieu! pray tell Mr. Hume that I am ashamed to be thus writing the
+history of England, when he is with you!
+
+
+_LORD CLIVE--MR. HAMILTON, AMBASSADOR TO NAPLES--SPEECH OF LOUIS XV._
+
+TO SIR HORACE MANN.
+
+STRAWBERRY HILL, _June_ 8, 1764.
+
+Your Red Riband is certainly postponed. There was but one vacant, which
+was promised to General Draper, who, when he thought he felt the sword
+dubbing his shoulder, was told that my Lord Clive could not conquer the
+Indies a second time without being a Knight of the Bath. This, however,
+I think will be but a short parenthesis, for I expect that _heaven-born
+hero_[1] to return from whence he came, instead of bringing hither all
+the Mogul's pearls and rubies. Yet, before that happens there will
+probably be other vacancies to content both Draper and you.
+
+[Footnote 1: "That _heaven-born hero_" had been Lord Chatham's
+description of Lord Clive.]
+
+You have a new neighbour coming to you, Mr. William Hamilton,[1] one of
+the King's equerries, who succeeds Sir James Gray at Naples. Hamilton is
+a friend of mine, is son of Lady Archibald, and was aide-de-camp to Mr.
+Conway. He is picture-mad, and will ruin himself in virtù-land. His
+wife is as musical as he is connoisseur, but she is dying of an asthma.
+
+[Footnote 1: Mr. W. Hamilton, afterwards Sir William, was the husband of
+the celebrated Lady Hamilton.]
+
+I have never heard of the present[1] you mention of the box of essences.
+The secrets of that prison-house do not easily transpire, and the merit
+of any offering is generally assumed, I believe, by the officiating
+priests.
+
+[Footnote 1: A present from Sir Horace, I believe, to the
+Queen.--WALPOLE.]
+
+Lord Tavistock is to be married to-morrow to Lady Elizabeth Keppel, Lord
+Albemarle's sister.
+
+I love to tell you an anecdote of any of our old acquaintance, and I
+have now a delightful one, relating, yet indirectly, to one of them. You
+know, to be sure, that Madame de Craon's daughter, Madame de Boufflers,
+has the greatest power with King Stanislaus. Our old friend the Princess
+de Craon goes seldom to Luneville for this reason, not enduring to see
+her daughter on that throne which she so long filled with absolute
+empire. But Madame de Boufflers, who, from his Majesty's age, cannot
+occupy _all_ the places in the palace that her mother filled,
+indemnifies herself with his Majesty's Chancellor. One day the lively
+old monarch said, "Regardez, quel joli petit pied, et la belle jambe!
+Mon Chancellier vous dira le reste." You know this is the form when a
+King of France says a few words to his Parliament, and then refers them
+to his chancellor. I expect to hear a great deal soon of the princess,
+for Mr. Churchill and my sister are going to settle at Nancy for some
+time. Adieu!
+
+
+_THE KING OF POLAND--CATHERINE OF RUSSIA._
+
+TO SIR HORACE MANN.
+
+STRAWBERRY HILL, _Aug._ 13, 1764.
+
+I am afraid it is some thousands of days since I wrote to you; but woe
+is me! how could I help it? Summer will be summer, and peace peace. It
+is not the fashion to be married, or die in the former, nor to kill or
+be killed in the latter; and pray recollect if those are not the sources
+of correspondence. You may perhaps put in a caveat against my plea of
+peace, and quote Turks Island[1] upon me; why, to be sure the
+parenthesis is a little hostile, but we are like a good wife, and can
+wink at what we don't like to see; besides, the French, like a sensible
+husband, that has made a slip, have promised us a new topknot, so we
+have kissed and are very good friends.
+
+[Footnote 1: Turk's Island, called also Tortuga, is a small island near
+St. Domingo, of which a French squadron had dispossessed some British
+settlers; but the French Government disavowed the act, and compensated
+the settlers.]
+
+The Duke of York returned very abruptly. The town talks of remittances
+stopped; but as I know nothing of the matter, and you are not only a
+minister but have the honour of his good graces, I do not pretend to
+tell you what to be sure you know better than I do.
+
+Old Sir John Barnard is dead, which he had been to the world for some
+time; and Mr. Legge. The latter, who was heartily in the minority, said
+cheerfully just before he died, "that he was going to the majority."
+
+Let us talk a little of the north. Count Poniatowski, with whom I was
+acquainted when he was here, is King of Poland, and calls himself
+Stanislaus the Second. This is the sole instance, I believe, upon
+record, of a second of a name being on the throne while the first was
+living without having contributed to dethrone him.[1] Old Stanislaus
+lives to see a line of successors, like Macbeth in the cave of the
+witches. So much for Poland; don't let us go farther north; we shall
+find there Alecto herself. I have almost wept for poor Ivan! I shall
+soon begin to believe that Richard III. murdered as many folks as the
+Lancastrian historians say he did. I expect that this Fury will poison
+her son next, lest Semiramis should have the bloody honour of having
+been more unnatural. As Voltaire has unpoisoned so many persons of
+former ages, methinks he ought to do as much for the present time, and
+assure posterity that there never was such a lamb as Catherine II., and
+that, so far from assassinating her own husband and Czar Ivan,[2] she
+wept over every chicken that she had for dinner. How crimes, like
+fashions, flit from clime to clime! Murder reigns under the Pole, while
+you, who are in the very town where Catherine de' Medici was born, and
+within a stone's throw of Rome, where Borgia and his holy father sent
+cardinals to the other world by hecatombs, are surprised to hear that
+there is such an instrument as a stiletto. The papal is now a mere gouty
+chair, and the good old souls don't even waddle out of it to get a
+bastard.
+
+[Footnote 1: The first was Stanislaus Leczinski, father of the Queen of
+France. He had been driven from Poland by Peter the Great after the
+overthrow of Charles XII. of Sweden (_v. infra_, Letter 90).]
+
+[Footnote 2: Ivan, the Czar who had been deposed by the former Czarina,
+Elizabeth, had recently been murdered, while trying to escape from the
+confinement in which he had been so long detained.]
+
+Well, good night! I have no more monarchs to chat over; all the rest are
+the most Catholic or most Christian, or most something or other that is
+divine; and you know one can never talk long about folks that are only
+excellent. One can say no more about Stanislaus _the first_ than that he
+is the best of beings. I mean, unless they do not deserve it, and then
+their flatterers can hold forth upon their virtues by the hour.
+
+
+_MADAME DE BOUFFLERS' WRITINGS--KING JAMES'S JOURNAL._
+
+TO THE EARL OF HERTFORD.
+
+STRAWBERRY HILL, _Oct._ 5, 1764.
+
+My dear Lord,--Though I wrote to you but a few days ago, I must trouble
+you with another line now. Dr. Blanchard, a Cambridge divine, and who
+has a good paternal estate in Yorkshire, is on his travels, which he
+performs as a gentleman; and, therefore, wishes not to have his
+profession noticed. He is very desirous of paying his respects to you,
+and of being countenanced by you while he stays at Paris. It will much
+oblige a particular friend of mine, and consequently me, if you will
+favour him with your attention. Everybody experiences your goodness, but
+in the present case I wish to attribute it a little to my request.
+
+I asked you about two books, ascribed to Madame de Boufflers. If they
+are hers, I should be glad to know where she found, that Oliver Cromwell
+took orders and went over to Holland to fight the Dutch. As she has been
+on the spot where he reigned (which is generally very strong evidence),
+her countrymen will believe her in spite of our teeth; and Voltaire, who
+loves all anecdotes that never happened, _because_ they prove the
+manners of the times, will hurry it into the first history he publishes.
+I, therefore, enter my caveat against it; not as interested for Oliver's
+character, but to save the world from one more fable. I know Madame de
+Boufflers will attribute this scruple to my partiality to Cromwell (and,
+to be sure, if we must be ridden, there is some satisfaction when the
+man knows how to ride). I remember one night at the Duke of Grafton's, a
+bust of Cromwell was produced: Madame de Boufflers, without uttering a
+syllable, gave me the most speaking look imaginable, as much as to say,
+"Is it possible you can admire this man!" _Apropos_: I am sorry to say
+the reports do not cease about the separation, and yet I have heard
+nothing that confirms it.
+
+I once begged you to send me a book in three volumes, called "Essais sur
+les Moeurs;" forgive me if I put you in mind of it, and request you to
+send me that, or any other new book. I am wofully in want of reading,
+and sick to death of all our political stuff, which, as the Parliament
+is happily at the distance of three months, I would fain forget till I
+cannot help hearing of it. I am reduced to Guicciardin, and though the
+evenings are so long, I cannot get through one of his periods between
+dinner and supper. They tell me Mr. Hume has had sight of King James's
+journal;[1] I wish I could see all the trifling passages that he will
+not deign to admit into History. I do not love great folks till they
+have pulled off their buskins and put on their slippers, because I do
+not care sixpence for what they would be thought, but for what they are.
+
+[Footnote 1: This journal is understood to have been destroyed in the
+course of the French Revolution, but it had not only been previously
+seen by Hume, as Walpole mentions here, but Mr. Fox had also had access
+to it, and had made some notes or extracts from it, which were
+subsequently communicated to Lord Macaulay when he carried out the
+design of writing a "History of the Revolution of 1688," which Mr. Fox
+had contemplated.]
+
+Mr. Elliot brings us woful accounts of the French ladies, of the decency
+of their conversation, and the nastiness of their behaviour.
+
+Nobody is dead, married, or gone mad, since my last. Adieu!...
+
+
+END OF VOL. I.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Letters of Horace Walpole, by Horace Walpole
+
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Letters of Horace Walpole, by Horace Walpole
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Letters of Horace Walpole
+       Volume I
+
+Author: Horace Walpole
+
+Release Date: April 18, 2004 [EBook #12073]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LETTERS OF HORACE WALPOLE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Ted Garvin, Linda Cantoni, and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+LETTERS
+
+OF
+
+HORACE WALPOLE
+
+
+SELECTED AND EDITED BY
+
+CHARLES DUKE YONGE, M.A.
+
+AUTHOR OF "THE HISTORY OF FRANCE UNDER THE BOURBONS," "A LIFE OF MARIE
+ANTOINETTE," ETC., ETC.
+
+
+WITH PORTRAITS AND ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+
+VOLUME I
+
+
+London
+
+T. FISHER UNWIN
+
+PATERNOSTER SQUARE
+
+NEW YORK: G.P. PUTNAM'S SONS
+
+MDCCCXC
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS.
+
+1736-1764.
+
+
+1. TO MONTAGU, _May_ 2, 1736.--Marriage of the Princess of Wales--Very
+lively
+
+2. TO THE SAME, _May_ 6, 1736.--Fondness for Old Stories--Reminiscences
+of Eton, etc.
+
+3. TO THE SAME, _March_ 20, 1737.--Wish to Travel--Superiority of French
+Manners to English in their manner to Ladies
+
+4. TO WEST, _April_ 21, 1739.--Theatres at Paris--St. Denis--Fondness of
+the French for Show, and for Gambling--Singular Signs--The Army the only
+Profession for Men of Gentle Birth--Splendour of the Public Buildings
+
+5. TO THE SAME, 1739.--Magnificence of Versailles--The Chartreux Relics
+
+6. TO THE SAME, _February_ 27, 1740.--The Carnival--The Florentines
+Civil, Good-natured, and Fond of the English--A Curious Challenge
+
+7. TO THE SAME, _June_ 14, 1740.--Herculaneum--Search should be made for
+other Submerged Cities--Quotations from Statius
+
+8. TO CONWAY, _July_ 5, 1740.--Danger of Malaria--Roman Catholic
+Relics--"Admiral Hosier's Ghost"--Contest for the Popedom
+
+9. TO THE SAME, _July_ 9, 1740
+
+10. TO WEST, _Oct._ 2, 1740.--A Florentine Wedding--Addison's
+Descriptions are Borrowed from Books--A Song of Bondelmonti's, with a
+Latin Version by Gray, and an English One by the Writer
+
+11. TO MANN, _Jan._ 22, 1742.--Debate on Pulteney's Motion for a
+Committee on Papers Relating to the War--Speeches of Pulteney, Pitt, Sir
+R. Walpole, Sir W. George, etc.--Smallness of the Ministerial Majority
+
+12. TO THE SAME, _May_ 26, 1742.--Ranelagh Gardens Opened--Garrick, "A
+Wine-merchant turned Player"--Defeat of the Indemnity Bill
+
+13. TO THE SAME, _Dec._ 9, 1742.--Debate on Disbanding the Hanoverian
+Troops--First Speech of Murray (afterwards Earl of Mansfield)--_Bon Mot_
+of Lord Chesterfield
+
+14. TO THE SAME, _Feb._ 24, 1743.--King Theodore--Handel Introduces
+Oratorios
+
+15. TO THE SAME, _July_ 4, 1743.--Battle of Dettingen--Death of Lord
+Wilmington
+
+16. TO THE SAME, _Sept._ 7, 1743.--French Actors at Clifden--A new Roman
+Catholic Miracle--Lady Mary Wortley
+
+17. TO THE SAME, _March_ 29, 1745.--Death of his Father--Matthews and
+Lestock in the Mediterranean--Thomson's "Tancred and
+Sigismunda"--Akenside's Odes--Conundrums in Fashion
+
+18. TO THE SAME, _May_ 11, 1745.--Battle of Fontenoy--The Ballad of the
+Prince of Wales
+
+19. TO MONTAGU, _August_ 1, 1745.--M. De Grignan--Livy's Patavinity--The
+Marechal De Belleisle--Whiston Prophecies the Destruction of the
+World--The Duke of Newcastle
+
+20. TO MANN, _Sept._ 6, 1745.--Invasion of Scotland by the Young
+Pretender--Forces are said to be Preparing in France to join him
+
+21. TO THE SAME, _Sept._ 20, 1745.--This and the following Letters give
+a Lively Account of the Progress of the Rebellion till the Retreat from
+Derby, after which no particular interest attaches to it
+
+22. TO THE SAME, _Sept._ 27, 1745.--Defeat of Cope
+
+23. TO THE SAME, _Oct._ 21, 1745.--General Wade is Marching to
+Scotland--Violent Proclamation of the Pretender
+
+24. TO THE SAME, _Nov._ 22, 1745.--Gallant Resistance of Carlisle--Mr.
+Pitt attacks the Ministry
+
+25. TO THE SAME, _Dec._ 9, 1745.--The Rebel Army has Retreated from
+Derby--Expectation of a French Invasion
+
+26. TO THE SAME, _April_ 25, 1746.--Battle of Culloden
+
+27. TO THE SAME, _Aug._ 1, 1746.--Trial of the Rebel Lords Balmerino and
+Kilmarnock
+
+28. TO THE SAME, _Oct._ 14, 1746.--The Battle of Rancoux
+
+29. TO CONWAY, _Oct._ 24, 1746.--On Conway's Verses--No Scotch_man_ is
+capable of such Delicacy of Thought, though a Scotchwoman may
+be--Akenside's, Armstrong's, and Glover's Poems
+
+30. TO THE SAME, _June_ 8, 1747.--He has bought Strawberry Hill
+
+31. TO THE SAME, _Aug._ 29, 1748.--His Mode of
+Life--Planting--Prophecies of New Methods and New Discoveries in a
+Future Generation
+
+32. TO MANN, _May_ 3, 1749.--Rejoicings for the Peace--Masquerade at
+Ranelagh--Meeting of the Prince's Party and the Jacobites--Prevalence of
+Drinking and Gambling--Whitefield
+
+33. TO THE SAME, _March_ 11, 1750.--Earthquake in London--General
+Panic--Marriage of Casimir, King of Poland
+
+34. TO THE SAME, _April_ 2, 1750.--General Panic--Sherlock's Pastoral
+Letter--Predictions of more Earthquakes--A General Flight from
+London--Epigrams by Chute and Walpole himself--French Translation of
+Milton
+
+35. TO THE SAME, _April_ 1, 1751.--Death of Walpole's Brother, and of
+the Prince of Wales--Speech of the young Prince--Singular Sermon on His
+Death
+
+36. TO THE SAME, _June_ 18, 1751.--Changes in the Ministry and
+Household--The Miss Gunnings--Extravagance in London--Lord Harcourt,
+Governor of the Prince of Wales
+
+37. TO THE SAME, _June_ 12, 1753.--Description of Strawberry Hill--Bill
+to Prevent Clandestine Marriages
+
+38. TO MONTAGU, _May_ 19, 1756.--No News from France but what is
+Smuggled--The King's Delight at the Vote for the Hanover Troops--_Bon
+Mot_ of Lord Denbigh
+
+39. TO THE SAME, _Oct._ 17, 1756.--Victory of the King of Prussia at
+Lowositz--Singular Race--Quarrel of the Pretender with the Pope
+
+40. TO THE SAME, _Nov._ 4, 1756.--Ministerial Negotiations--Loss of
+Minorca--Disaster in North America
+
+41. TO THE EARL OF STRAFFORD, _July_ 4, 1757.--The King of Prussia's
+Victories--Voltaire's "Universal History"
+
+42. TO ZOUCH, _August_ 3, 1758.--His own "Royal and Noble Authors"
+
+43. TO THE SAME, _Oct._ 21, 1758.--His "Royal and Noble Authors"--Lord
+Clarendon--Sir R. Walpole and Lord Bolingbroke--The Duke of Leeds
+
+44. TO MANN, _Oct._ 24, 1758.--Walpole's Monument to Sir Horace's
+Brother--Attempted Assassination of the King of Portugal--Courtesy of
+the Duc D'Aiguillon to his English Prisoners
+
+45. TO ZOUCH, _Dec._ 9, 1758.--A New Edition of Lucan--Comparison of
+"Pharsalea"--Criticism on the Poet, with the Aeneid--Helvetius's Work,
+"De L'Esprit"
+
+46. TO CONWAY, _Jan._ 19, 1759.--State of the House of Commons
+
+47. TO DALRYMPLE, _Feb._ 25, 1759.--Robertson's "History of
+Scotland"--Comparison of Ramsay and Reynolds as Portrait-Painters--Sir
+David's "History of the Gowrie Conspiracy"
+
+48. TO THE SAME, _July_ 11, 1759.--Writers of History: Goodall, Hume,
+Robertson--Queen Christina
+
+49. TO CONWAY, _Aug._ 14, 1759.--The Battle of Minden--Lord G. Sackville
+
+50. TO MANN, _Sept._ 13, 1759.--Admiral Boscawen's Victory--Defeat of
+the King of Prussia--Lord G. Sackville
+
+51. TO MONTAGU, _Oct._ 21, 1759.--A Year of Triumphs
+
+52. TO THE SAME, _Nov._ 8, 1759.--French Bankruptcy--French Epigram
+
+53. TO THE SAME, _Jan._ 7, 1760.--He lives amongst Royalty--Commotions
+in Ireland
+
+54. TO THE SAME, _Jan._ 14, 1760.--Severity of the Weather--Scarcity in
+Germany--A Party at Prince Edward's--Charles Townsend's Comments on La
+Fontaine
+
+55. TO MANN, _Feb._ 28, 1760.--Capture of Carrickfergus
+
+56. TO DALRYMPLE, _April_ 4, 1760.--The Ballad of "Hardyknute"--Mr.
+Home's "Siege of Aquileia"--"Tristram Shandy"--Bishop Warburton's Praise
+of it
+
+57. TO THE SAME, _June_ 20, 1760.--Erse Poetry--"The Dialogues of the
+Dead"--"The Complete Angler"
+
+58. TO MONTAGU, _Sept._ 1, 1760.--Visits in the Midland
+Counties--Whichnovre--Sheffield--The new Art of
+Plating--Chatsworth--Haddon Hall--Hardwicke--Apartments of Mary Queen of
+Scots--Newstead--Althorp
+
+59. TO THE SAME, _April_ 16, 1761.--Gentleman's Dress--Influence of Lord
+Bute--Ode by Lord Middlesex--G. Selwyn's Quotation
+
+60. TO THE SAME, _May_ 5, 1761.--Capture of Belleisle--Gray's
+Poems--Hogarth's Vanity
+
+61. TO THE SAME, _May_ 22, 1761.--Intended Marriage of the King--Battles
+in Germany--Capture of Pondicherry--Burke
+
+62. TO MANN, _Sept._ 10, 1761.--Arrival of the Princess of
+Mecklenburgh--The Royal Wedding--The Queen's Appearance and Behaviour
+
+63. TO THE COUNTESS OF AILESBURY, _Sept._ 27, 1761.--The Coronation and
+subsequent Gaieties
+
+64. TO THE SAME, _Nov._ 28, 1761.--A Court Ball--Pamphlets on Mr.
+Pitt--A Song by Gray
+
+65. TO MANN, _Jan._ 29, 1762.--Death of the Czarina Elizabeth--The
+Cock-lane Ghost--Return to England of Lady Mary Wortley
+
+66. TO ZOUCH, _March_ 20, 1762.--His own "Anecdotes of Painting"--His
+Picture of the Wedding of Henry VII.--Burnet's Comparison of Tiberius
+and Charles II.--Addison's "Travels"
+
+67. TO MANN, _Aug._ 12, 1762.--Birth of the Prince of Wales--The
+Czarina--Voltaire's Historical Criticisms--Immense Value of the
+Treasures brought over in the _Hermione_
+
+68. TO CONWAY, _Sept._ 9, 1762.--Negotiations for Peace--Christening of
+the Prince of Wales
+
+69. TO MANN, _Oct._ 3, 1762.--Treasures from the Havannah--The Royal
+Visit to Eton--Death of Lady Mary--Concealment of Her Works--Voltaire's
+"Universal History"
+
+70. TO THE SAME, _April_ 30, 1763.--Resignation of Lord Bute--French
+Visitors--Walpole and No. 45
+
+71. TO MONTAGU, _May_ 17, 1763.--A Party at "Straberri"--Work of his
+Printing Press--Epigrams--A Garden Party at Esher
+
+72. TO CONWAY, _May_ 21, 1763.--General Character of the
+French--Festivities on the Queen's Birthday
+
+73. TO THE EARL OF HERTFORD, _Dec._ 29, 1763.--The ordinary way of Life
+in England--Wilkes--C. Townshend--Count Lally--Lord Clive--Lord
+Northington--Louis Le Bien Aime--The Drama in France
+
+74. TO MONTAGU, _Jan._11, 1764.--A New Year's Party at Lady
+Suffolk's--Lady Temple, Poetess Laureate to the Muses
+
+75. TO MANN, _Jan._ 18, 1764.--Marriage of the Prince of Brunswick: His
+Popularity
+
+76. TO THE EARL OF HERTFORD, _Feb._ 6, 1764.--Gambling Quarrels--Mr.
+Conway's Speech
+
+77. TO THE SAME, _Feb._ 15, 1764.--Account of the Debate on the General
+Warrant
+
+78. TO MANN, _June_ 8, 1764.--Lord Clive--Mr. Hamilton, Ambassador to
+Naples--Speech of Louis XV.
+
+79. TO THE SAME, _Aug._ 13, 1764.--The King of Poland--Catherine of
+Russia
+
+80. TO THE EARL OF HERTFORD, _Oct._ 5, 1764.--Madame De Boufflers'
+Writings--King James's Journal
+
+
+
+
+LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.
+
+
+I. HORACE WALPOLE
+
+From an engraving after a sketch by Sir THOS. LAWRENCE, P.R.A.
+
+II. SIR HORACE MANN
+
+III. STRAWBERRY HILL, FROM THE SOUTH-EAST
+
+IV. GEORGE MONTAGU
+
+V. THE LIBRARY, STRAWBERRY HILL
+
+VI. HORACE WALPOLE
+
+From a picture in the National Portrait Gallery, by NATHANIEL HONE, R.A.
+
+
+
+
+INTRODUCTION.
+
+
+It is creditable to our English nobility, and a feature in their
+character that distinguishes them from their fellows of most other
+nations, that, from the first revival of learning, the study of
+literature has been extensively cultivated by men of high birth, even by
+many who did not require literary fame to secure them a lasting
+remembrance; and they have not contented themselves with showing their
+appreciation of intellectual excellence by their patronage of humbler
+scholars, but have themselves afforded examples to other labourers in
+the hive, taking upon themselves the toils, and earning no small nor
+undeserved share of the honours of authorship. The very earliest of our
+poets, Chaucer, must have been a man of gentle birth, since he was
+employed on embassies of importance, and was married to the daughter of
+a French knight of distinction, and sister of the Duchess of Lancaster.
+The long civil wars of the fifteenth century prevented his having any
+immediate followers; but the sixteenth opened more propitiously. The
+conqueror of Flodden was also "Surrey of the deathless lay";[1] and from
+his time to the present day there is hardly a break in the long line of
+authors who have shown their feeling that noble birth and high position
+are no excuses for idleness, but that the highest rank gains additional
+illustration when it is shown to be united with brilliant talents
+worthily exercised. The earliest of our tragic poets was Sackville Earl
+of Dorset. The preux chevalier of Elizabeth's Court, the accomplished
+and high-minded Sidney, took up the lyre of Surrey: Lord St. Albans,
+more generally known by his family name of Bacon, "took all learning for
+his province"; and, though peaceful studies were again for a while
+rudely interrupted by the "dark deeds of horrid war," the restoration of
+peace was, as it had been before, a signal for the resumption of their
+studies by many of the best-born of the land. Another Earl of Dorset
+displayed his hereditary talent not less than his martial gallantry.
+Lord Roscommon well deserved the praises which Dryden and Pope, after
+his death, liberally bestowed. The great Lord Chancellor Clarendon
+devoted his declining years to a work of a grander class, leaving us a
+History which will endure as long as the language itself; while ladies
+of the very highest rank, the Duchess of Newcastle and Lady Mary Wortley
+Montague, vindicated the claims of their sex to share with their
+brethren the honours of poetical fame.
+
+[Footnote 1: "Lay of the Last Minstrel," vi. 14.]
+
+Among this noble and accomplished brotherhood the author of these
+letters is by general consent allowed to be entitled to no low place.
+Horace Walpole, born in the autumn of 1717, was the youngest son of that
+wise minister, Sir Robert Walpole, who, though, as Burke afterwards
+described him, "not a genius of the first class," yet by his adoption
+of, and resolute adherence to a policy of peace throughout the greater
+part of his administration, in which he was fortunately assisted by the
+concurrence of Fleury of France, contributed in no slight degree to the
+permanent establishment of the present dynasty on the throne. He
+received his education at the greatest of English schools, Eton, to
+which throughout his life he preserved a warm attachment; and where he
+gave a strong indication of his preference for peaceful studies and his
+judicious appreciation of intellectual ability, by selecting as his most
+intimate friend Thomas Gray, hereafter to achieve a poetical immortality
+by the Bard and the Elegy. From Eton they both went to Cambridge, and,
+when they quitted the University, in 1738, joined in a travelling tour
+through France and Italy. They continued companions for something more
+than two years; but at the end of that time they separated, and in the
+spring of 1741 Gray returned to England. The cause of their parting was
+never distinctly avowed; Walpole took the blame, if blame there was, on
+himself; but, in fact, it probably lay in an innate difference of
+disposition, and consequently of object. Walpole being fond of society,
+and, from his position as the Minister's son, naturally courted by many
+of the chief men in the different cities which they visited; while Gray
+was of a reserved character shunning the notice of strangers, and fixing
+his attention on more serious subjects than Walpole found attractive.
+
+In the autumn of the same year Walpole himself returned home. He had
+become a member of Parliament at the General Election in the summer, and
+took his seat just in time to bear a part in the fierce contest which
+terminated in the dissolution of his father's Ministry. His maiden
+speech, almost the only one he ever made, was in defence of the
+character and policy of his father, who was no longer in the House of
+Commons to defend himself.[1] And the result of the conflict made no
+slight impression on his mind; but gave a colour to all his political
+views.
+
+He began almost immediately to come forward as an author: not, however,
+as--
+
+    Obliged by hunger and request of friends;
+
+for in his circumstances he was independent, and even opulent; but
+seeking to avenge his father by squibs on Mr. Pulteney (now Lord Bath),
+as having been the leader of the attacks on him, and on the new Ministry
+which had succeeded him. In one respect that age was a happy one for
+ministers and all connected with them. Pensions and preferments were
+distributed with a lavish hand; and, even while he was a schoolboy, he
+had received more than one "patent place," as such were called, in the
+Exchequer, to which before his father's resignation others were added,
+which after a time raised his income to above L5,000 a year, a fortune
+which in those times was exceeded by comparatively few, even of those
+regarded as wealthy. So rich, indeed, was he, that before he was thirty
+he was able to buy Strawberry Hill, "a small house near Twickenham," as
+he describes it at first, but which he gradually enlarged and
+embellished till it grew into something of a baronial castle on a small
+scale, somewhat as, under the affectionate diligence of a greater man,
+Abbotsford in the present century became one of the lions of the Tweed.
+
+[Footnote 1: The speech was made March 23, 1742; but Sir Robert had
+resigned office, and been created Earl of Orford in the February
+preceding.]
+
+From this time forth literary composition, with the acquisition of
+antiques and curiosities for the decoration of "Strawberry" occupied the
+greater part of his life. He erected a printing press, publishing not
+only most of his own writings, but some also of other authors, such as
+poems of Gray, with whom he kept up uninterrupted intercourse. But, in
+fact, his own works were sufficiently numerous to keep his printers
+fully employed. He was among the most voluminous writers of a voluminous
+age. In the course of the next twenty years he published seven volumes
+of memoirs of the last ten years of the reign of George II. and the
+first ten of George III.; five volumes of a work entitled "Royal and
+Noble Authors;" several more of "Anecdotes of Painting;" "The Mysterious
+Mother," a tragedy; "The Castle of Otranto," a romance; and a small
+volume to which he gave the name of "Historic Doubts on Richard III." Of
+all these not one is devoid of merit. He more than once explains that
+the "Memoirs" have no claim to the more respectable title of "History";
+and he apologises for introducing anecdotes which might be thought
+inconsistent with what Macaulay brands as "a vile phrase," the dignity
+of history. He excuses this, which he looked on as a new feature in
+historical composition, on the ground that, if trifles, "they are
+trifles relating to considerable people; such as all curious people have
+ever loved to read." "Such trifles," he says, "are valued, if relating
+to any reign one hundred and fifty years ago; and, if his book should
+live so long, these too might become acceptable." Readers of the present
+day will not think such apology was needed. The value of his "trifles"
+has been proved in a much shorter time; for there is no subsequent
+historian of that period who has not been indebted to him for many
+particulars of which no other trustworthy record existed. Walpole had in
+a great degree a historical mind; and perhaps there are few works which
+show a keener critical insight into the value of old traditions than the
+"Historic Doubts," directed to establish, not, indeed, Richard's
+innocence of the crimes charged against him, but the fact that, with
+respect to many of them, his guilt has never been proved by any evidence
+which is not open to the gravest impeachment. His "Royal and Noble
+Authors," and his "Anecdotes of Painting" are full of entertainment, not
+unmixed with instruction. "The Mysterious Mother" was never performed on
+the stage, nor is it calculated for representation; since he himself
+admits that the subject is disgusting. But dramas not intended for
+representation, and which therefore should perhaps be more fitly called
+dramatic poems, were a species of composition to which more than one
+writer of reputation had lately begun to turn their attention; though
+dramas not designed for the stage seem to most readers defective in
+their very conception, as lacking the stimulus which the intention of
+submitting them to the extemporaneous ocular judgement of the public can
+alone impart. Among such works, however, "The Mysterious Mother" is
+admitted to rank high for vigorous description and poetic imagery. A
+greater popularity, which even at the present day has not wholly passed
+away, since it is still occasionally reprinted, was achieved by "The
+Castle of Otranto," which, as he explains it in one of his letters, owed
+its origin to a dream. Novels had been a branch of literature which had
+slumbered for several years after the death of Defoe, but which the
+genius of Fielding and Smollett had again brought into fashion. But
+their tales purported to be pictures of the manners of the day. This was
+rather the forerunner of Mrs. Radcliffe's[1] weird tales of supernatural
+mystery, which for a time so engrossed the public attention as to lead
+that "wicked wag," Mr. George Coleman, to regard them as representatives
+of the class, and to describe how--
+
+    A novel now is nothing more
+    Than an old castle and a creaking door;
+         A distant hovel;
+    Clanking of chains, a gallery, a light,
+    Old armour, and a phantom all in white,
+         And there's a novel.
+
+[Footnote 1: "'The Castle of Otranto' was the father of that marvellous
+series which once overstocked the circulating library, and closed with
+Mrs. Radcliffe."--D'Israeli, "Curiosities of Literature," ii. 115.]
+
+He had published it anonymously as a tale that had been found in the
+library of an ancient family in the North of England; but it was not
+indebted solely to the mystery of its authorship for its favourable
+reception--since, after he acknowledged it as his own work in a second
+edition, the sale did not fall off. And it deserved success, for, though
+the day had passed when even the most credulous could place any faith in
+swords that required a hundred men to lift, and helmets which could only
+fit the champion whose single strength could wield such a weapon, the
+style was lively and attractive, and the dialogue was eminently dramatic
+and sparkling.
+
+But the interest of all these works has passed away. The "Memoirs" have
+served their turn as a guide and aid to more regular historians, and the
+composition which still keeps its author's fame alive is his
+Correspondence with some of his numerous friends, male and female, in
+England or abroad, which he maintained with an assiduity which showed
+how pleasurable he found the task, while the care with which he secured
+the preservation of his letters, begging his correspondents to retain
+them, in case at any future time he should desire their return, proves
+that he anticipated the possibility that they might hereafter be found
+interesting by other readers than to those to whom they were addressed.
+
+But he did not suffer either his writings or the enrichment of
+"Strawberry" with antiquarian treasures to engross the whole of his
+attention. For the first thirty years and more of his public life he was
+a zealous politician. And it is no slight proof how high was the
+reputation for sagacity and soundness of judgement which he enjoyed,
+that in the ministerial difficulties caused by Lord Chatham's illness,
+he was consulted by the leaders of more than one section of the Whig
+party, by Conway, the Duke of Bedford, the Duke of Grafton, Lord
+Holland, and others; that his advice more than once influenced their
+determinations; and that he himself drew more than one of the letters
+which passed between them. Even the King himself was not ignorant of the
+weight he had in their counsels, and, on one occasion at least,
+condescended to avail himself of it for a solution of some of the
+embarrassments with which their negotiations were beset.
+
+But after a time his attendance in Parliament, which had never been very
+regular, grew wearisome and distasteful to him. At the General Election
+of 1768 he declined to offer himself again as a candidate for Lynn,
+which he had represented for several years. And henceforth his mornings
+were chiefly occupied with literature; the continuation of his Memoirs;
+discussion of literary subjects with Gibbon, Voltaire, Mason, and
+others, while his evenings were passed in the society of his friends, a
+mode of enjoying his time in which he was eminently calculated to shine,
+since abundant testimony has come down to us from many competent judges
+of the charm of his conversation; the liveliness of his disposition
+acting as a most attractive frame to the extent and variety of his
+information.
+
+Among his distractions were his visits to France, which for some time
+were frequent. He had formed a somewhat singular intimacy with a blind
+old lady, the Marquise du Deffand, a lady whose character in her youth
+had been something less than doubtful, since she had been one of the
+Regent Duc d'Orleans's numerous mistresses; but who had retained in her
+old age much of the worldly acuteness and lively wit with which she had
+borne her part in that clever, shameless society. Her _salon_ was now
+the resort of many personages of the highest distinction, even of ladies
+themselves of the most unstained reputation, such as the Duchesse de
+Choiseul; and the rumours or opinions which he heard in their company
+enabled him to enrich his letters to his friends at home with comments
+on the conduct of the French Parliament, of Maupeon, Maurepas, Turgot,
+and the King himself, which, in many instances, attest the shrewdness
+with which he estimated the real bearing of the events which were taking
+place, and anticipated the possible character of some of those which
+were not unlikely to ensue.
+
+Thus, with a mind which, to the end, was so active and so happily
+constituted as to be able to take an interest in everything around him,
+and, even when more than seventy years old, to make new friends to
+replace those who had dropped off, he passed a long, a happy, and far
+from an useless life. When he was seventy-four he succeeded to his
+father's peerage, on the death of his elder brother; but he did not long
+enjoy the title, by which, indeed, he was not very careful to be
+distinguished, and in the spring of 1797 he died, within a few months
+of his eightieth birthday.
+
+A great writer of the last generation, whose studies were of a severer
+cast, and who, conscious perhaps of his own unfitness to shine at the
+tea-table of fashionable ladies, was led by that feeling to undervalue
+the lighter social gifts which formed conspicuous ingredients in
+Walpole's character, has denounced him not only as frivolous in his
+tastes, but scarcely above mediocrity in his abilities (a sentence to
+which Scott's description of him as "a man of great genius" may be
+successfully opposed); and is especially severe on what he terms his
+affectation in disclaiming the compliments bestowed on his learning by
+some of his friends. The expressed estimate of his acquirements and
+works which so offended Lord Macaulay was that "there is nobody so
+superficial, that, except a little history, a little poetry, a little
+painting, and some divinity, he knew nothing; he had always lived in the
+busy world; had always loved pleasure; played loo till two or three in
+the morning; haunted auctions--in short, did not know so much astronomy
+as would carry him to Knightsbridge; not more physic than a physician;
+nor, in short, anything that is called science. If it were not that he
+laid up a little provision in summer, like the ant, he should be as
+ignorant as the people he lived with."[1] In Lord Macaulay's view,
+Walpole was never less sincere than when pronouncing such a judgement on
+his works. He sees in it nothing but an affectation, fishing for
+further praises; and, fastening on his account of his ordinary
+occupations, he pronounces that a man of fifty should be ashamed of
+playing loo till after midnight.
+
+[Footnote 1: Letter to Mann, Feb. 6, 1760.]
+
+In spite, however, of Lord Macaulay's reproof, something may be said in
+favour of a man who, after giving his mornings to works which display no
+little industry as well as talent, unbent his bow in the evening at
+lively supper-parties, or even at the card-table with fair friends,
+where the play never degenerated into gambling. And his disparagement of
+his learning, which Lord Macaulay ridicules as affectation, a more
+candid judgement may fairly ascribe to sincere modesty. For it is plain
+from many other passages in his letters, that he really did undervalue
+his own writings; and that the feeling which he thus expressed was
+genuine is to a great extent proved by the patience, if not
+thankfulness, with which he allowed his friend Mann to alter passages in
+"The Mysterious Mother," and confessed the alterations to be
+improvements. It may be added that Lord Macaulay's disparagement of his
+judgement and his taste is not altogether consistent with his admission
+that Walpole's writings possessed an "irresistible charm" that "no man
+who has written so much is so seldom tiresome;" that, even in "The
+Castle of Otranto," which he ridicules, "the story never flags for a
+moment," and, what is more to our present purpose, he adds that "his
+letters are with reason considered his best performance;" and that those
+to his friend at Florence, Sir H. Mann, "contain much information
+concerning the history of that time: the portion of English History of
+which common readers know the least."
+
+Of these letters it remains for us now to speak. The value of such _pour
+servir_, to borrow a French expression, that is to say, to serve as
+materials to supply the historian of a nation or an age with an
+acquaintance with events, or persons, or manners, which would be sought
+for in vain among Parliamentary records, or ministerial despatches, has
+long been recognised.[1] Two thousand years ago, those of the greatest
+of Roman orators and statesmen were carefully preserved; and modern
+editors do not fear to claim for them a place "among the most valuable
+of all the remains of Roman literature; the specimens which they give of
+familiar intercourse, and of the public and private manners of society,
+drawing up for us the curtain from scenes of immense historical
+interest, and laying open the secret workings, the complications, and
+schemes of a great revolution period."[2] Such a description is
+singularly applicable to the letters of Walpole; and the care which he
+took for their preservation shows that he was not without a hope that
+they also would be regarded as interesting and valuable by future
+generations. He praises one of his correspondents for his diligence in
+collecting and publishing a volume of letters belonging to the reigns of
+James I. and Charles I., on the express ground that "nothing gives so
+just an idea of an age as genuine letters; nay, history waits for its
+last seal from them." And it is not too much to say that they are
+superior to journals and diaries as a mine to be worked by the judicious
+historian; while to the general public they will always be more
+attractive, from the scope they afford to elegance of style, at which
+the diary-keeper does not aim; and likewise from their frequently
+recording curious incidents, fashions, good sayings, and other things
+which, from their apparently trifling character, the grave diarist would
+not think worth preserving.
+
+[Footnote 1: D'Israeli has remarked that "the _gossiping_ of a profound
+politician, or a vivacious observer, in one of their letters, often by a
+spontaneous stroke reveals the individual, or by a simple incident
+unriddles a mysterious event;" and proceeds to quote Bolingbroke's
+estimate of the importance, from this point of view, of "that valuable
+collection of Cardinal d'Ossat's Memoirs" ("Curiosities of Literature,"
+iii. p. 381).]
+
+[Footnote 2: The Rev. J.E. Yonge, Preface to an edition of "Cicero's
+Letters."]
+
+He, however, was not the first among the moderns to achieve a reputation
+by his correspondence. In the generation before his birth, a French
+lady, Madame de Sevigne, had, with an affectionate industry, found her
+chief occupation and pleasure in keeping her daughters in the provinces
+fully acquainted with every event which interested or entertained Louis
+XIV. and his obsequious Court; and in the first years of the eighteenth
+century a noble English lady, whom we have already mentioned, did in
+like manner devote no small portion of her time to recording, for the
+amusement and information of her daughter, her sister, and her other
+friends at home, the various scenes and occurrences that came under her
+own notice in the foreign countries in which for many years her lot was
+cast, as the wife of an ambassador. In liveliness of style, Lady Mary
+Montague is little if at all inferior to her French prototype; while,
+since she was endowed with far more brilliant talents, and, from her
+foreign travels, had a wider range of observation, her letters have a
+far greater interest than could attach to those of a writer, however
+accomplished and sagacious, whose world was Paris, with bounds scarcely
+extending beyond Versailles on one side, and Compiegne on the other. To
+these fair and lively ladies Walpole was now to succeed as a third
+candidate for epistolary fame; though, with his habit of underrating his
+own talents, he never aspired to equal the gay Frenchwoman; (the English
+lady's correspondence was as yet unknown). There is evident sincerity in
+his reproof of one of his correspondents who had expressed a most
+flattering opinion: "You say such extravagant things of my letters,
+which are nothing but gossiping gazettes, that I cannot bear it; you
+have undone yourself with me, for you compare them to Madame de
+Sevigne's. Absolute treason! Do you know there is scarcely a book in the
+world I love so much as her letters?"
+
+Yet critics who should place him on an equality with her would not be
+without plausible grounds for their judgement. Many circumstances
+contributed to qualify him in a very special degree for the task which,
+looking at his letters in that light, he may be said to have undertaken.
+His birth, as the son of a great minister; his comparative opulence;
+even the indolent insignificance of his elder brothers, which caused him
+to be looked upon as his father's representative, and as such to be
+consulted by those who considered themselves as the heirs of his policy,
+while the leader of that party in the House of Commons, General Conway,
+was his cousin, and the man for whom he ever felt the strongest personal
+attachment,--were all advantages which fell to the lot of but few. And
+to these may be added the variety of his tastes, as attested by the
+variety of his published works. He was a man who observed everything,
+who took an interest in everything. His correspondents, too, were so
+various and different as to ensure a variety in his letters. Some were
+politicians, ministers at home, or envoys abroad; some were female
+leaders of fashion, planning balls and masquerades, summoning him to
+join an expedition to Ranelagh or Vauxhall; others were scholars, poets,
+or critics, inviting comments on Gray's poems, on Robertson's style, on
+Gibbon's boundless learning; or on the impostures of Macpherson and
+Chatterton; others, again, were antiquarians, to whom the helmet of
+Francis, or a pouncet-box of the fair Diana, were objects of far greater
+interest than the intrigues of a Secretary of State, or the expedients
+of a Chancellor of the Exchequer; and all such subjects are discussed by
+him with evidently equal willingness, equal clearness, and liveliness.
+
+It would not be fair to regard as a deduction from the value of those
+letters which bear on the politics of the day the necessity of
+confessing that they are not devoid of partiality--that they are
+coloured with his own views, both of measures and persons. Not only were
+political prejudices forced upon him by the peculiarities of his
+position, but it may be doubted whether any one ever has written, or can
+write, of transactions of national importance which are passing under
+his own eyes, as it were, with absolute impartiality. It may even be a
+question whether, if any one did so, it would not detract from his own
+character, at least as much as it might add to the value of his
+writings. In one of his letters, Byron enumerates among the merits of
+Mitford's "History of Greece," "wrath and partiality," explaining that
+such ingredients make a man write "in earnest." And, in Walpole's case,
+the dislike which he naturally felt towards those who had overthrown his
+father's administration by what, at a later day, they themselves
+admitted to have been a factious and blamable opposition, was sharpened
+by his friendship for his cousin Conway. At the same time we may remark
+in passing that his opinions and prejudices were not so invincible as to
+blind him to real genius and eminent public services; and the admirers
+of Lord Chatham may fairly draw an argument in favour of his policy from
+Walpole's admission of its value in raising the spirit of the people; an
+admission which, it may be supposed, it must have gone against his grain
+to make in favour of a follower of Pulteney.
+
+But from his letters on other topics, on literature and art, no such
+deduction has to be made. His judgement was generally sound and
+discriminating. He could appreciate the vast learning and stately
+grandiloquence of Gibbon, and the widely different style of Robertson.
+Nor is it greatly to his discredit that his disgust at what he considers
+Hume's needless parade of scepticism and infidelity, which did honour
+to his heart, blinded him in a great degree to the historian's
+unsurpassed acuteness and insight, and (to borrow the eulogy of Gibbon)
+"the careless inimitable felicities" of his narrative. He was among the
+first to recognize the peculiar genius of Crabbe, and to detect the
+impostures of Macpherson and Chatterton, while doing full justice to
+"the astonishing prematurity" of the latter's genius. And in matters of
+art, so independent as well as correct was his taste, that he not only,
+in one instance, ventured to differ from Reynolds, but also proved to be
+right in his opinion that a work extolled by Sir Joshua, was but a copy,
+and a poor one.
+
+On his qualifications to be a painter of the way of life, habits, and
+manners (_quorum pars magna fuit_) of the higher classes in his day, it
+would be superfluous to dwell. Scott, who was by no means a warm admirer
+of his character, does not hesitate to pronounce him "certainly the best
+letter-writer in the English language;" and the great poet who, next to
+Scott, holds the highest place in the literary history of the last two
+centuries, adds his testimony not only to the excellence of his letters,
+but also to his general ability as that of a high order. "It is the
+fashion to underrate Horace Walpole, firstly, because he was a nobleman,
+and, secondly, because he was a gentleman; but, to say nothing of the
+composition of his incomparable letters and of 'The Castle of Otranto,'
+he is the 'Ultimus Romanorum,' the author of 'The Mysterious Mother,' a
+tragedy of the highest order, and not a puling love-play. He is the
+father of the first romance, and the last tragedy in our language; and
+surely worthy of a higher place than any living writer, be he who he
+may."[1]
+
+[Footnote 1: Byron, Preface to "Marino Faliere." But in the last
+sentence the poet certainly exaggerated his admiration for Walpole;
+since it is sufficiently notorious from his own letters, and from more
+than one passage in his works, as where he ranks Scott as second to
+Shakespeare alone, that he deservedly admired him more than all their
+contemporaries put together.]
+
+And it seems not unnatural to entertain a hope that a selection from a
+correspondence which extorted such an eulogy from men whose own letters
+form no small part of the attraction of Lockhart's and Moore's
+biographies, will be acceptable to many who, while lacking courage, or
+perhaps leisure, to grapple with publications in many volumes, may
+welcome the opportunity thus here afforded them of forming an
+acquaintance, however partial, with works which, in their entire body,
+are deservedly reckoned among the masterpieces of our literature.[1]
+
+[Footnote 1: It may be proper to point out that, in some few instances,
+a letter is not given in its entirety; but, as in familiar
+correspondence, it must constantly happen that, while the incidents
+mentioned in one portion of a letter are full of interest, of
+others--such as marriages, deaths, &c.--the importance is of the most
+temporary and transitory character. It may be hoped that the liberty
+taken of leaving out such portions will be regarded as, if not
+commendable, at the least excusable.]
+
+
+
+
+A SELECTION
+
+FROM THE
+
+LETTERS OF HORACE WALPOLE.
+
+
+_MARRIAGE OF THE PRINCESS OF WALES--VERY LIVELY._[1]
+
+[Footnote 1: This letter, written before he was nineteen, is worth
+noticing as a proof how innate was his liveliness of style, since in
+that respect few of the productions of his maturer age surpasses it. It
+also shows how strong already was his expectations that his letters
+would hereafter be regarded as interesting and valuable.]
+
+TO GEORGE MONTAGU, ESQ.[1]
+
+[Footnote 1: George Montagu, Esq., of Roel, in the county of Gloucester,
+son of Brigadier-General Edward Montagu, and long M.P. for Northampton.
+He was the grandnephew of the first Earl of Halifax of the Montagu
+family, the statesman and poet, and was the contemporary at Eton of
+Walpole and Gray. When his cousin, the Earl of Halifax, was
+Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland, he was his secretary; and when Lord North
+was Chancellor of the Exchequer, he occupied the same position with him.
+He died May 10, 1780, leaving the bulk of his fortune to Lord North.
+Walpole's letters to him, 272 in number, and dating between 1736 and
+1770, were first published in 1818, "from the Originals in the
+possession of the Editor." There was a coolness between Walpole and
+Montagu several years before the latter's death, the correspondence
+dropping very abruptly. The cause is explained by Walpole in a letter to
+Cole, dated May 11, 1780. Mr. Montagu's brother, Edward, was killed at
+Fontenoy. His sister, Arabella, was married to a Mr. Wetenhall--a
+relation of the Wetenhall mentioned in De Grammont. "Of Mr. Montagu, it
+is only remembered that he was a gentleman-like body of the _vieille
+cour_, and that he was usually attended by his brother John (the Little
+John of Walpole's correspondence), who was a midshipman at the age of
+sixty, and found his chief occupation in carrying about his brother's
+snuff-box" (_Quarterly Rev._ for _April_, 1818, p. 131).]
+
+KING'S COLLEGE, _May_ 2, 1736.
+
+Dear Sir,--Unless I were to be married myself, I should despair ever
+being able to describe a wedding so well as you have done: had I known
+your talent before, I would have desired an epithalamium. I believe the
+Princess[1] will have more beauties bestowed on her by the occasional
+poets, than even a painter would afford her. They will cook up a new
+Pandora, and in the bottom of the box enclose Hope, that all they have
+said is true. A great many, out of excess of good breeding, having heard
+it was rude to talk Latin before women, propose complimenting her in
+English; which she will be much the better for. I doubt most of them,
+instead of fearing their compositions should not be understood, should
+fear they should: they write they don't know what, to be read by they
+don't know who. You have made me a very unreasonable request, which I
+will answer with another as extraordinary: you desire I would burn your
+letters: I desire you would keep mine. I know but of one way of making
+what I send you useful, which is, by sending you a blank sheet: sure
+you would not grudge threepence for a halfpenny sheet, when you give as
+much for one not worth a farthing. You drew this last paragraph on you
+by your exordium, as you call it, and conclusion. I hope, for the
+future, our correspondence will run a little more glibly, with dear
+George, and dear Harry [Conway]; not as formally as if we were playing a
+game at chess in Spain and Portugal; and Don Horatio was to have the
+honour of specifying to Don Georgio, by an epistle, whither he would
+move. In one point I would have our correspondence like a game at chess;
+it should last all our lives--but I hear you cry check; adieu!
+
+Dear George, yours ever.
+
+[Footnote 1: Augusta, younger daughter of Frederic II., Duke of
+Saxe-Gotha, married (27th April, 1736) to Frederick, Prince of Wales,
+father of George III.
+
+In 1736, I wrote a copy of Latin verses, published in the "Gratulatio
+Acad. Cantab.," on the marriage of Frederick, Prince of
+Wales.--_Walpole_ (_Short Notes_).]
+
+
+_FONDNESS FOR OLD STORIES--REMINISCENCES OF ETON, ETC._
+
+TO GEORGE MONTAGU, ESQ.
+
+KING'S COLLEGE, _May_ 6, 1736.
+
+Dear George,--I agree with you entirely in the pleasure you take in
+talking over old stories, but can't say but I meet every day with new
+circumstances, which will be still more pleasure to me to recollect. I
+think at our age 'tis excess of joy, to think, while we are running over
+past happinesses, that it is still in our power to enjoy as great.
+Narrations of the greatest actions of other people are tedious in
+comparison of the serious trifles that every man can call to mind of
+himself while he was learning those histories. Youthful passages of life
+are the chippings of Pitt's diamond, set into little heart-rings with
+mottoes; the stone itself more worth, the filings more gentle and
+agreeable.--Alexander, at the head of the world, never tasted the true
+pleasure that boys of his own age have enjoyed at the head of a school.
+Little intrigues, little schemes, and policies engage their thoughts;
+and, at the same time that they are laying the foundation for their
+middle age of life, the mimic republic they live in furnishes materials
+of conversation for their latter age; and old men cannot be said to be
+children a second time with greater truth from any one cause, than their
+living over again their childhood in imagination. To reflect on the
+season when first they felt the titillation of love, the budding
+passions, and the first dear object of their wishes! how unexperienced
+they gave credit to all the tales of romantic loves! Dear George, were
+not the playing fields at Eton food for all manner of flights? No old
+maid's gown, though it had been tormented into all the fashions from
+King James to King George, ever underwent so many transformations as
+those poor plains have in my idea. At first I was contented with tending
+a visionary flock, and sighing some pastoral name to the echo of the
+cascade under the bridge. How happy should I have been to have had a
+kingdom only for the pleasure of being driven from it, and living
+disguised in an humble vale! As I got further into Virgil and Clelia, I
+found myself transported from Arcadia to the garden of Italy; and saw
+Windsor Castle in no other view than the _Capitoli immobile saxum_. I
+wish a committee of the House of Commons may ever seem to be the senate;
+or a bill appear half so agreeable as a billet-doux. You see how deep
+you have carried me into old stories; I write of them with pleasure, but
+shall talk of them with more to you. I can't say I am sorry I was never
+quite a schoolboy: an expedition against bargemen, or a match at
+cricket, may be very pretty things to recollect; but, thank my stars, I
+can remember things that are very near as pretty. The beginning of my
+Roman history was spent in the asylum, or conversing in Egeria's
+hallowed grove; not in thumping and pummelling king Amulius's herdsmen.
+I was sometimes troubled with a rough creature or two from the plough;
+one, that one should have thought, had worked with his head, as well as
+his hands, they were both so callous. One of the most agreeable
+circumstances I can recollect is the Triumvirate, composed of yourself,
+Charles, and
+
+Your sincere friend.
+
+
+_WISH TO TRAVEL--SUPERIORITY OF FRENCH MANNERS TO ENGLISH IN THEIR
+MANNER TO LADIES._
+
+TO GEORGE MONTAGU, ESQ.
+
+KING'S COLLEGE, _March_ 20, 1737.
+
+Dear George,--The first paragraph in my letter must be in answer to the
+last in yours; though I should be glad to make you the return you ask,
+by waiting on you myself. 'Tis not in my power, from more circumstances
+than one, which are needless to tell you, to accompany you and Lord
+Conway to Italy: you add to the pleasure it would give me, by asking it
+so kindly. You I am infinitely obliged to, as I was capable, my dear
+George, of making you forget for a minute that you don't propose
+stirring from the dear place you are now in. Poppies indeed are the
+chief flowers in love nosegays, but they seldom bend towards the lady;
+at least not till the other flowers have been gathered. Prince
+Volscius's boots were made of love-leather, and honour leather; instead
+of honour, some people's are made of friendship: but since you have been
+so good to me as to draw on this, I can almost believe you are equipped
+for travelling farther than Rheims. 'Tis no little inducement to make me
+wish myself in France, that I hear gallantry is not left off there; that
+you may be polite, and not be thought awkward for it. You know the
+pretty men of the age in England use the women with no more deference
+than they do their coach-horses, and have not half the regard for them
+that they have for themselves. The little freedoms you tell me you use
+take off from formality, by avoiding which ridiculous extreme we are
+dwindled into the other barbarous one, rusticity. If you had been at
+Paris, I should have inquired about the new Spanish ambassadress, who,
+by the accounts we have thence, at her first audience of the queen, sat
+down with her at a distance that suited respect and conversation.
+
+Adieu, dear George,
+
+Yours most heartily.
+
+
+_THEATRES AT PARIS--ST. DENIS--FONDNESS OF THE FRENCH FOR SHOW, AND FOR
+GAMBLING--SINGULAR SIGNS--THE ARMY THE ONLY PROFESSION FOR MEN OF GENTLE
+BIRTH--SPLENDOUR OF THE PUBLIC BUILDINGS._
+
+TO RICHARD WEST, ESQ.
+
+PARIS, _April_ 21, N.S. 1739.[1]
+
+[Footnote 1: He is here dating according to the French custom. In
+England the calendar was not rectified by the disuse of the "Old Style"
+till 1752.]
+
+Dear West,--You figure us in a set of pleasures, which, believe me, we
+do not find; cards and eating are so universal, that they absorb all
+variation of pleasures. The operas, indeed, are much frequented three
+times a week; but to me they would be a greater penance than eating
+maigre: their music resembles a gooseberry tart as much as it does
+harmony. We have not yet been at the Italian playhouse; scarce any one
+goes there. Their best amusement, and which, in some parts, beats ours,
+is the comedy; three or four of the actors excel any we have: but then
+to this nobody goes, if it is not one of the fashionable nights; and
+then they go, be the play good or bad--except on Moliere's nights, whose
+pieces they are quite weary of. Gray and I have been at the Avare
+to-night: I cannot at all commend their performance of it. Last night I
+was in the Place de Louis le Grand (a regular octagon, uniform, and the
+houses handsome, though not so large as Golden Square), to see what they
+reckoned one of the finest burials that ever was in France. It was the
+Duke de Tresmes, governor of Paris and marshal of France. It began on
+foot from his palace to his parish-church, and from thence in coaches to
+the opposite end of Paris, to be interred in the church of the
+Celestins, where is his family-vault. About a week ago we happened to
+see the grave digging, as we went to see the church, which is old and
+small, but fuller of fine ancient monuments than any, except St. Denis,
+which we saw on the road, and excels Westminster; for the windows are
+all painted in mosaic, and the tombs as fresh and well preserved as if
+they were of yesterday. In the Celestins' church is a votive column to
+Francis II., which says, that it is one assurance of his being
+immortalized, to have had the martyr Mary Stuart for his wife. After
+this long digression, I return to the burial, which was a most vile
+thing. A long procession of flambeaux and friars; no plumes, trophies,
+banners, led horses, scutcheons, or open chariots; nothing but
+
+                        friars,
+    White, black, and grey, with all their trumpery.
+
+This godly ceremony began at nine at night, and did not finish till
+three this morning; for, each church they passed, they stopped for a
+hymn and holy water. By the bye, some of these choice monks, who watched
+the body while it lay in state, fell asleep one night, and let the
+tapers catch fire of the rich velvet mantle lined with ermine and
+powdered with gold flower-de-luces, which melted the lead coffin, and
+burnt off the feet of the deceased before it wakened them. The French
+love show; but there is a meanness reigns through it all. At the house
+where I stood to see this procession, the room was hung with crimson
+damask and gold, and the windows were mended in ten or a dozen places
+with paper. At dinner they give you three courses; but a third of the
+dishes is patched up with salads, butter, puff-paste, or some such
+miscarriage of a dish. None, but Germans, wear fine clothes; but their
+coaches are tawdry enough for the wedding of Cupid and Psyche. You would
+laugh extremely at their signs: some live at the Y grec, some at Venus's
+toilette, and some at the sucking cat. You would not easily guess their
+notions of honour: I'll tell you one: it is very dishonourable for any
+gentleman not to be in the army, or in the king's service as they call
+it, and it is no dishonour to keep public gaming-houses: there are at
+least a hundred and fifty people of the first quality in Paris who live
+by it. You may go into their houses at all hours of the night, and find
+hazard, pharaoh, &c. The men who keep the hazard-table at the Duke de
+Gesvres' pay him twelve guineas each night for the privilege. Even the
+princesses of the blood are dirty enough to have shares in the banks
+kept at their houses. We have seen two or three of them; but they are
+not young, nor remarkable but for wearing their red of a deeper dye than
+other women, though all use it extravagantly.
+
+The weather is still so bad, that we have not made any excursions to see
+Versailles and the environs, not even walked in the Tuileries; but we
+have seen almost everything else that is worth seeing in Paris, though
+that is very considerable. They beat us vastly in buildings, both in
+number and magnificence. The tombs of Richelieu and Mazarin at the
+Sorbonne and the College de Quatre Nations are wonderfully fine,
+especially the former. We have seen very little of the people
+themselves, who are not inclined to be propitious to strangers,
+especially if they do not play and speak the language readily. There are
+many English here: Lord Holdernesse, Conway and Clinton, and Lord George
+Bentinck; Mr. Brand, Offley, Frederic, Frampton, Bonfoy, &c. Sir John
+Cotton's son and a Mr. Vernon of Cambridge passed through Paris last
+week. We shall stay here about a fortnight longer, and then go to Rheims
+with Mr. Conway for two or three months. When you have nothing else to
+do, we shall be glad to hear from you; and any news. If we did not
+remember there was such a place as England, we should know nothing of
+it: the French never mention it, unless it happens to be in one of their
+proverbs. Adieu!
+
+Yours ever.
+
+To-morrow we go to the Cid. They have no farces, but _petites pieces_
+like our 'Devil to Pay.'
+
+
+_MAGNIFICENCE OF VERSAILLES--THE CHARTREUX RELICS._
+
+TO RICHARD WEST, ESQ.
+
+FROM PARIS, 1739.
+
+Dear West,--I should think myself to blame not to try to divert you,
+when you tell me I can. From the air of your letter you seem to want
+amusement, that is, you want spirits. I would recommend to you certain
+little employments that I know of, and that belong to you, but that I
+imagine bodily exercise is more suitable to your complaint. If you would
+promise me to read them in the Temple garden, I would send you a little
+packet of plays and pamphlets that we have made up, and intend to
+dispatch to "Dick's"[1] the first opportunity.--Stand by, clear the way,
+make room for the pompous appearance of Versailles le Grand!----But no:
+it fell so short of my idea of it, mine, that I have resigned to Gray
+the office of writing its panegyric. He likes it. They say I am to like
+it better next Sunday; when the sun is to shine, the king is to be fine,
+the water-works are to play, and the new knights of the Holy Ghost are
+to be installed! Ever since Wednesday, the day we were there, we have
+done nothing but dispute about it. They say, we did not see it to
+advantage, that we ran through the apartments, saw the garden _en
+passant_, and slubbered over Trianon. I say, we saw nothing. However, we
+had time to see that the great front is a lumber of littleness, composed
+of black brick, stuck full of bad old busts, and fringed with gold
+rails. The rooms are all small, except the great gallery, which is
+noble, but totally wainscoted with looking-glass. The garden is littered
+with statues and fountains, each of which has its tutelary deity. In
+particular, the elementary god of fire solaces himself in one. In
+another, Enceladus, in lieu of a mountain, is overwhelmed with many
+waters. There are avenues of water-pots, who disport themselves much in
+squirting up cascadelins. In short, 'tis a garden for a great child.
+Such was Louis Quatorze, who is here seen in his proper colours, where
+he commanded in person, unassisted by his armies and generals, and left
+to the pursuit of his own puerile ideas of glory.
+
+[Footnote 1: A celebrated coffee-house, near the Temple Gate in Fleet
+Street, where quarto poems and pamphlets were taken in.]
+
+We saw last week a place of another kind, and which has more the air of
+what it would be, than anything I have yet met with: it was the convent
+of the Chartreux. All the conveniences, or rather (if there was such a
+word) all the _adaptments_ are assembled here, that melancholy,
+meditation, selfish devotion, and despair would require. But yet 'tis
+pleasing. Soften the terms, and mellow the uncouth horror that reigns
+here, but a little, and 'tis a charming solitude. It stands on a large
+space of ground, is old and irregular. The chapel is gloomy: behind it,
+through some dark passages, you pass into a large obscure hall, which
+looks like a combination-chamber for some hellish council. The large
+cloister surrounds their burying-ground. The cloisters are very narrow
+and very long, and let into the cells, which are built like little huts
+detached from each other. We were carried into one, where lived a
+middle-aged man not long initiated into the order. He was extremely
+civil, and called himself Dom Victor. We have promised to visit him
+often. Their habit is all white: but besides this he was infinitely
+clean in his person; and his apartment and garden, which he keeps and
+cultivates without any assistance, was neat to a degree. He has four
+little rooms, furnished in the prettiest manner, and hung with good
+prints. One of them is a library, and another a gallery. He has several
+canary-birds disposed in a pretty manner in breeding-cages. In his
+garden was a bed of good tulips in bloom, flowers and fruit-trees, and
+all neatly kept. They are permitted at certain hours to talk to
+strangers, but never to one another, or to go out of their convent. But
+what we chiefly went to see was the small cloister, with the history of
+St. Bruno, their founder, painted by Le Soeur. It consists of twenty-two
+pictures, the figures a good deal less than life. But sure they are
+amazing! I don't know what Raphael may be in Rome, but these pictures
+excel all I have seen in Paris and England. The figure of the dead man
+who spoke at his burial, contains all the strongest and horridest ideas,
+of ghastliness, hypocrisy discovered, and the height of damnation, pain
+and cursing. A Benedictine monk, who was there at the same time, said to
+me of this picture: _C'est une fable, mais on la croyoit autrefois._
+Another, who showed me relics in one of their churches, expressed as
+much ridicule for them. The pictures I have been speaking of are ill
+preserved, and some of the finest heads defaced, which was done at first
+by a rival of Le Soeur's. Adieu! dear West, take care of your health;
+and some time or other we will talk over all these things with more
+pleasure than I have had in seeing them.
+
+Yours ever.
+
+
+_THE CARNIVAL--THE FLORENTINES CIVIL, GOOD-NATURED, AND FOND OF THE
+ENGLISH--A CURIOUS CHALLENGE._
+
+TO RICHARD WEST, ESQ.
+
+FLORENCE, _February_ 27, 1740, N.S.
+
+Well, West, I have found a little unmasqued moment to write to you; but
+for this week past I have been so muffled up in my domino, that I have
+not had the command of my elbows. But what have you been doing all the
+mornings? Could you not write then?--No, then I was masqued too; I have
+done nothing but slip out of my domino into bed, and out of bed into my
+domino. The end of the Carnival is frantic, bacchanalian; all the morn
+one makes parties in masque to the shops and coffee-houses, and all the
+evening to the operas and balls. _Then I have danced, good gods! how
+have I danced!_ The Italians are fond to a degree of our country dances:
+_Cold and raw_ they only know by the tune; _Blowzybella_ is almost
+Italian, and _Buttered peas_ is _Pizelli al buro_. There are but three
+days more; but the two last are to have balls all the morning at the
+fine unfinished palace of the Strozzi; and the Tuesday night a
+masquerade after supper: they sup first, to eat _gras_, and not encroach
+upon Ash-Wednesday. What makes masquerading more agreeable here than in
+England, is the great deference that is showed to the disguised. Here
+they do not catch at those little dirty opportunities of saying any
+ill-natured thing they know of you, do not abuse you because they may,
+or talk gross bawdy to a woman of quality. I found the other day, by a
+play of Etheridge's, that we have had a sort of Carnival even since the
+Reformation; 'tis in _She would if She could_, they talk of going
+a-mumming in Shrove-tide.--
+
+After talking so much of diversions, I fear you will attribute to them
+the fondness I own I contract for Florence; but it has so many other
+charms, that I shall not want excuses for my taste. The freedom of the
+Carnival has given me opportunities to make several acquaintances; and
+if I have not found them refined, learned, polished, like some other
+cities, yet they are civil, good-natured, and fond of the English. Their
+little partiality for themselves, opposed to the violent vanity of the
+French, makes them very amiable in my eyes. I can give you a comical
+instance of their great prejudice about nobility; it happened yesterday.
+While we were at dinner at Mr. Mann's, word was brought by his
+secretary, that a cavalier demanded audience of him upon an affair of
+honour. Gray and I flew behind the curtain of the door. An elderly
+gentleman, whose attire was not certainly correspondent to the greatness
+of his birth, entered, and informed the British minister, that one
+Martin, an English painter, had left a challenge for him at his house,
+for having said Martin was no gentleman. He would by no means have spoke
+of the duel before the transaction of it, but that his honour, his
+blood, his &c. would never permit him to fight with one who was no
+cavalier; which was what he came to inquire of his excellency. We
+laughed loud laughs, but unheard: his fright or his nobility had closed
+his ears. But mark the sequel: the instant he was gone, my very English
+curiosity hurried me out of the gate St. Gallo; 'twas the place and hour
+appointed. We had not been driving about above ten minutes, but out
+popped a little figure, pale but cross, with beard unshaved and hair
+uncombed, a slouched hat, and a considerable red cloak, in which was
+wrapped, under his arm, the fatal sword that was to revenge the highly
+injured Mr. Martin, painter and defendant. I darted my head out of the
+coach, just ready to say, "Your servant, Mr. Martin," and talk about the
+architecture of the triumphal arch that was building there; but he would
+not know me, and walked off. We left him to wait for an hour, to grow
+very cold and very valiant the more it grew past the hour of
+appointment. We were figuring all the poor creature's huddle of
+thoughts, and confused hopes of victory or fame, of his unfinished
+pictures, or his situation upon bouncing into the next world. You will
+think us strange creatures; but 'twas a pleasant sight, as we knew the
+poor painter was safe. I have thought of it since, and am inclined to
+believe that nothing but two English could have been capable of such a
+jaunt. I remember, 'twas reported in London, that the plague was at a
+house in the city, and all the town went to see it.
+
+I have this instant received your letter. Lord! I am glad I thought of
+those parallel passages, since it made you translate them. 'Tis
+excessively near the original; and yet, I don't know, 'tis very easy
+too.--It snows here a little to-night, but it never lies but on the
+mountains. Adieu!
+
+Yours ever.
+
+P.S.--What is the history of the theatres this winter?
+
+
+_HERCULANEUM--SEARCH SHOULD BE MADE FOR OTHER SUBMERGED
+CITIES--QUOTATIONS FROM STATIUS._
+
+TO RICHARD WEST, ESQ.
+
+NAPLES, _June_ 14, 1740, N.S.
+
+Dear West,--One hates writing descriptions that are to be found in every
+book of travels; but we have seen something to-day that I am sure you
+never read of, and perhaps never heard of. Have you ever heard of a
+subterraneous town? a whole Roman town, with all its edifices, remaining
+under ground? Don't fancy the inhabitants buried it there to save it
+from the Goths: they were buried with it themselves; which is a caution
+we are not told that they ever took. You remember in Titus's time there
+were several cities destroyed by an eruption of Vesuvius, attended with
+an earthquake. Well, this was one of them, not very considerable, and
+then called Herculaneum. Above it has since been built Portici, about
+three miles from Naples, where the King has a villa. This underground
+city is perhaps one of the noblest curiosities that ever has been
+discovered. It was found out by chance, about a year and half ago. They
+began digging, they found statues; they dug further, they found more.
+Since that they have made a very considerable progress, and find
+continually. You may walk the compass of a mile; but by the misfortune
+of the modern town being overhead, they are obliged to proceed with
+great caution, lest they destroy both one and t'other. By this occasion
+the path is very narrow, just wide enough and high enough for one man to
+walk upright. They have hollowed, as they found it easiest to work, and
+have carried their streets not exactly where were the ancient ones, but
+sometimes before houses, sometimes through them. You would imagine that
+all the fabrics were crushed together; on the contrary, except some
+columns, they have found all the edifices standing upright in their
+proper situation. There is one inside of a temple quite perfect, with
+the middle arch, two columns, and two pilasters. It is built of brick
+plastered over, and painted with architecture: almost all the insides of
+the houses are in the same manner; and, what is very particular, the
+general ground of all the painting is red. Besides this temple, they
+make out very plainly an amphitheatre: the stairs, of white marble, and
+the seats are very perfect; the inside was painted in the same colour
+with the private houses, and great part cased with white marble. They
+have found among other things some fine statues, some human bones, some
+rice, medals, and a few paintings extremely fine. These latter are
+preferred to all the ancient paintings that have ever been discovered.
+We have not seen them yet, as they are kept in the King's apartment,
+whither all these curiosities are transplanted; and 'tis difficult to
+see them--but we shall. I forgot to tell you, that in several places the
+beams of the houses remain, but burnt to charcoal; so little damaged
+that they retain visibly the grain of the wood, but upon touching
+crumble to ashes. What is remarkable, there are no other marks or
+appearance of fire, but what are visible on these beams.
+
+There might certainly be collected great light from this reservoir of
+antiquities, if a man of learning had the inspection of it; if he
+directed the working, and would make a journal of the discoveries. But I
+believe there is no judicious choice made of directors. There is nothing
+of the kind known in the world; I mean a Roman city entire of that age,
+and that has not been corrupted with modern repairs. Besides
+scrutinising this very carefully, I should be inclined to search for
+the remains of the other towns that were partners with this in the
+general ruin.[1] 'Tis certainly an advantage to the learned world, that
+this has been laid up so long. Most of the discoveries in Rome were made
+in a barbarous age, where they only ransacked the ruins in quest of
+treasure, and had no regard to the form and being of the building; or to
+any circumstances that might give light into its use and history. I
+shall finish this long account with a passage which Gray has observed in
+Statius, and which directly pictures out this latent city:--
+
+    Haec ego Chalcidicis ad te, Marcelle, sonabam
+    Littoribus, fractas ubi Vestius egerit iras,
+    Aemula Trinacriis volvens incendia flammis.
+    Mira fides! credetne virum ventura propago,
+    Cum segetes iterum, cum jam haec deserta virebunt,
+    Infra urbes populosque premi?
+
+    SYLV. lib. iv. epist. 4.
+
+Adieu, my dear West! and believe me yours ever.
+
+[Footnote 1: It was known from the account of Pliny that other towns had
+been destroyed by the same eruption as Herculaneum, and eight years
+after the date of this letter some fresh excavations led to the
+discovery of Pompeii. Matthews, in his "Diary of an Invalid," describes
+both, and his account explains why Pompeii, though the smaller town,
+presents more attractions to the scholar or the antiquarian. "On our way
+home we explored Herculaneum, which scarcely repays the labour. This
+town is filled up with lava, and with a cement caused by the large
+mixture of water with the shower of earth and ashes which destroyed it;
+and it is choked up as completely as if molten lead had been poured into
+it. Besides, it is forty feet below the surface, and another town is now
+built over it.... Pompeii, on the contrary, was destroyed by a shower of
+cinders in which there was a much less quantity of water. It lay for
+centuries only twelve feet below the surface, and, these cinders being
+easily removed, the town has been again restored to the light of day"
+(vol. i. p. 254).]
+
+
+_DANGER OF MALARIA--ROMAN CATHOLIC RELICS--"ADMIRAL HOSIER'S
+GHOST"--CONTEST FOR THE POPEDOM._
+
+TO THE HON. H.S. CONWAY.
+
+RE DI COFANO, vulg. RADICOFANI,
+
+_July_ 5, 1740, N.S.
+
+You will wonder, my dear Hal, to find me on the road from Rome: why,
+intend I did to stay for a new popedom, but the old eminences are cross
+and obstinate, and will not choose one, the Holy Ghost does not know
+when. There is a horrid thing called the malaria, that comes to Rome
+every summer, and kills one, and I did not care for being killed so far
+from Christian burial. We have been jolted to death; my servants let us
+come without springs to the chaise, and we are wore threadbare: to add
+to our disasters, I have sprained my ancle, and have brought it along,
+laid upon a little box of baubles that I have bought for presents in
+England. Perhaps I may pick you out some little trifle there, but don't
+depend upon it; you are a disagreeable creature, and may be I shall not
+care for you. Though I am so tired in this devil of a place, yet I have
+taken it into my head, that it is like Hamilton's Bawn,[1] and I must
+write to you. 'Tis the top of a black barren mountain, a vile little
+town at the foot of an old citadel: yet this, know you, was the
+residence of one of the three kings that went to Christ's birthday; his
+name was Alabaster, Abarasser, or some such thing; the other two were
+kings, one of the East, the other of Cologn. 'Tis this of Cofano, who
+was represented in an ancient painting, found in the Palatine Mount, now
+in the possession of Dr. Mead; he was crowned by Augustus. Well, but
+about writing--what do you think I write with? Nay, with a pen; there
+was never a one to be found in the whole circumference _but one_, and
+that was in the possession of the governor, and had been used time out
+of mind to write the parole with: I was forced to send to borrow it. It
+was sent me under the conduct of a serjeant and two Swiss, with desire
+to return it when I should have done with it. 'Tis a curiosity, and
+worthy to be laid up with the relics which we have just been seeing in a
+small hovel of Capucins on the side of the hill, and which were all
+brought by his Majesty from Jerusalem. Among other things of great
+sanctity there is a set of gnashing of teeth, the grinders very entire;
+a bit of the worm that never dies, preserved in spirits; a crow of St.
+Peter's cock, very useful against Easter; the crisping and curling,
+frizzling and frowncing of Mary Magdalen, which she cut off on growing
+devout. The good man that showed us all these commodities was got into
+such a train of calling them the blessed this, and the blessed that,
+that at last he showed us a bit of the blessed fig-tree that Christ
+cursed.
+
+[Footnote 1: Hamilton's Bawn is an old building near Richhill, in the
+County of Armagh, the subject of one of Swift's burlesque poems.]
+
+
+FLORENCE, _July_ 9.
+
+My dear Harry,--We are come hither, and I have received another letter
+from you with "Hosier's Ghost."[1] Your last put me in pain for you,
+when you talked of going to Ireland; but now I find your brother and
+sister go with you, I am not much concerned. Should I be? You have but
+to say, for my feelings are extremely at your service to dispose as you
+please. Let us see: you are to come back to stand for some place; that
+will be about April. 'Tis a sort of thing I should do, too; and then we
+should see one another, and that would be charming: but it is a sort of
+thing I have no mind to do; and then we shall not see one another,
+unless you would come hither--but that you cannot do: nay, I would not
+have you, for then I shall be gone.--So, there are many _ifs_ that just
+signify nothing at all. Return I must sooner than I shall like. I am
+happy here to a degree. I'll tell you my situation. I am lodged with Mr.
+Mann, the best of creatures. I have a terreno all to myself, with an
+open gallery on the Arno, where I am now writing to you. Over against me
+is the famous Gallery: and, on either hand, two fair bridges. Is not
+this charming and cool? The air is so serene, and so secure, that one
+sleeps with all the windows and doors thrown open to the river, and only
+covered with a slight gauze to keep away the gnats. Lady Pomfret has a
+charming conversation once a week. She has taken a vast palace and a
+vast garden, which is vastly commode, especially to the cicisbeo-part of
+mankind, who have free indulgence to wander in pairs about the arbours.
+You know her daughters: Lady Sophia is still, nay she must be, the
+beauty she was: Lady Charlotte is much improved, and is the cleverest
+girl in the world; speaks the purest Tuscan, like any Florentine. The
+Princess Craon has a constant pharaoh and supper every night, where one
+is quite at one's ease. I am going into the country with her and the
+prince for a little while, to a villa of the Great Duke's. The people
+are good-humoured here and easy; and what makes me pleased with them,
+they are pleased with me. One loves to find people care for one, when
+they can have no view in it.
+
+[Footnote 1: "Admiral Hosier's Ghost" is the title of a ballad by Glover
+on the death of Admiral Hosier, a distinguished admiral, who had been
+sent with a squadron to blockade the Spanish treasure-ships in Porto
+Bello, but was prohibited from attacking them in the harbour. He died in
+1727, according to the account that the poet adopted, of mortification
+at the inaction to which his orders compelled him; but according to
+another statement, more trustworthy if less poetical, of fever.]
+
+You see how glad I am to have reasons for not returning; I wish I had no
+better.
+
+As to "Hosier's Ghost," I think it very easy, and consequently pretty;
+but, from the ease, should never have guessed it Glover's. I delight in
+your, "the patriots cry it up, and the courtiers cry it down, and the
+hawkers cry it up and down," and your laconic history of the King and
+Sir Robert, on going to Hanover, and turning out the Duke of Argyle. The
+epigram, too, you sent me on the same occasion is charming.
+
+Unless I sent you back news that you and others send me, I can send you
+none. I have left the Conclave, which is the only stirring thing in this
+part of the world, except the child that the Queen of Naples is to be
+delivered of in August. There is no likelihood the Conclave will end,
+unless the messages take effect which 'tis said the Imperial and French
+ministers have sent to their respective courts for leave to quit the
+Corsini for the Albani faction: otherwise there will never be a pope.
+Corsini has lost the only one he could have ventured to make pope, and
+him he designed; 'twas Cenci, a relation of the Corsini's mistress. The
+last morning Corsini made him rise, stuffed a dish of chocolate down his
+throat, and would carry him to the scrutiny. The poor old creature went,
+came back, and died. I am sorry to have lost the sight of the Pope's
+coronation, but I might have staid for seeing it till I had been old
+enough to be pope myself.[1]
+
+[Footnote 1: The contest was caused by the death of Clement XII. The
+successful candidate was Benedict XIV.]
+
+Harry, what luck the Chancellor has! first, indeed, to be in himself so
+great a man; but then in accident: he is made Chief Justice and peer,
+when Talbot is made Chancellor and peer. Talbot dies in a twelvemonth,
+and leaves him the seals at an age when others are scarce made
+Solicitors:--then marries his son into one of the first families of
+Britain, obtains a patent for a Marquisate and eight thousand pounds a
+year after the Duke of Kent's death: the Duke dies in a fortnight, and
+leaves them all! People talk of Fortune's wheel, that is always
+rolling: troth, my Lord Hardwicke has overtaken her wheel, and rolled
+away with it.... Yours ever.
+
+
+_A FLORENTINE WEDDING--ADDISON'S DESCRIPTIONS ARE BORROWED FROM BOOKS--A
+SONG OF BONDELMONTI'S, WITH A LATIN VERSION BY GRAY, AND AN ENGLISH ONE
+BY THE WRITER._
+
+TO RICHARD WEST, ESQ.
+
+FLORENCE, _Oct._ 2, 1740, N.S.
+
+Dear West,--T'other night as we (you know who _we_ are) were walking on
+the charming bridge, just before going to a wedding assembly, we said,
+"Lord, I wish, just as we are got into the room, they would call us out,
+and say, West is arrived! We would make him dress instantly, and carry
+him back to the entertainment. How he would stare and wonder at a
+thousand things, that no longer strike us as odd!" Would not you? One
+agreed that you should have come directly by sea from Dover, and be set
+down at Leghorn, without setting foot in any other foreign town, and so
+land at _Us_, in all your first full amaze; for you are to know, that
+astonishment rubs off violently; we did not cry out Lord! half so much
+at Rome as at Calais, which to this hour I look upon as one of the most
+surprising cities in the universe. My dear child, what if you were to
+take this little sea-jaunt? One would recommend Sir John Norris's convoy
+to you, but one should be laughed at now for supposing that he is ever
+to sail beyond Torbay.[1] The Italians take Torbay for an English town
+in the hands of the Spaniards, after the fashion of Gibraltar, and
+imagine 'tis a wonderful strong place, by our fleet's having retired
+from before it so often, and so often returned.
+
+[Footnote 1: Sir John Norris was one of the most gallant and skilful
+seamen of his time; but an expedition in which he had had the command
+had lately proved fruitless. He had been instructed to cruise about the
+Bay of Biscay, in the hope of intercepting some of the Spanish
+treasure-ships; but the weather had been so uninterruptedly stormy that
+he had been compelled to return to port without having even seen an
+enemy. The following lines were addressed to him upon this occasion:
+
+    Homeward, oh! bend thy course; the seas are rough;
+    To the Land's End who sails, has sailed enough.]
+
+We went to this wedding that I told you of; 'twas a charming feast: a
+large palace finely illuminated; there were all the beauties, all the
+jewels, and all the sugar-plums of Florence. Servants loaded with great
+chargers full of comfits heap the tables with them, the women fall on
+with both hands, and stuff their pockets and every creek and corner
+about them. You would be as much amazed at us as at anything you saw:
+instead of being deep in the liberal arts, and being in the Gallery
+every morning, as I thought of course to be sure I would be, we are in
+all the idleness and amusements of the town. For me, I am grown so lazy,
+and so tired of seeing sights, that, though I have been at Florence six
+months, I have not seen Leghorn, Pisa, Lucca, or Pistoia; nay, not so
+much as one of the Great Duke's villas. I have contracted so great an
+aversion to inns and post-chaises, and have so absolutely lost all
+curiosity, that, except the towns in the straight road to Great Britain,
+I shall scarce see a jot more of a foreign land; and trust me, when I
+return, I will not visit Welsh mountains, like Mr. Williams. After Mount
+Cenis, the Boccheto, the Giogo, Radicofani, and the Appian Way, one has
+mighty little hunger after travelling. I shall be mighty apt to set up
+my staff at Hyde-park-corner: the alehouseman there at Hercules's
+Pillars[1] was certainly returned from his travels into foreign parts.
+
+[Footnote 1: The sign of the Hercules' Pillars remained in Piccadilly
+till very lately. It was situated on part of the ground now [1798]
+occupied by the houses of Mr. Drummond Smith and his brother.--MISS
+BERRY. That is, on the space between Hamilton Place and Apsley House. It
+was the inn mentioned in Fielding's "Tom Jones," and was notorious as a
+favourite resort of the Marquis of Granby.]
+
+Now I'll answer your questions.
+
+I have made no discoveries in ancient or modern arts. Mr. Addison
+travelled through the poets, and not through Italy; for all his ideas
+are borrowed from the descriptions, and not from the reality. He saw
+places as they were, not as they are.[1] I am very well acquainted with
+Doctor Cocchi;[2] he is a good sort of man, rather than a great man; he
+is a plain honest creature, with quiet knowledge, but I dare say all the
+English have told you, he has a very particular understanding: I really
+don't believe they meant to impose on you, for they thought so. As to
+Bondelmonti, he is much less; he is a low mimic; the brightest cast of
+his parts attains to the composition of a sonnet: he talks irreligion
+with English boys, sentiment with my sister [Lady Walpole], and bad
+French with any one that will hear him. I will transcribe you a little
+song that he made t'other day; 'tis pretty enough; Gray turned it into
+Latin, and I into English; you will honour him highly by putting it into
+French, and Ashton into Greek. Here 'tis.
+
+    Spesso Amor sotto la forma
+    D'amista ride, e s'asconde;
+    Poi si mischia, e si confonde
+    Con lo sdegno e col rancor.
+
+    In pietade ei si trasforma,
+    Par trastullo e par dispetto,
+    Ma nel suo diverso aspetto,
+    Sempre egli e l'istesso Amor.
+
+    Risit amicitiae interdum velatus amictu,
+      Et bene composita veste fefeliit Amor:
+    Mox irae assumpsit cultus faciemque minantem,
+      Inque odium versus, versus et in lacrymas:
+    Sudentem fuge, nec lacrymanti aut crede furenti;
+      Idem est dissimili semper in ore Deus.
+
+    Love often in the comely mien
+    Of friendship fancies to be seen;
+    Soon again he shifts his dress,
+    And wears disdain and rancour's face.
+
+    To gentle pity then he changes;
+    Thro' wantonness, thro' piques he ranges;
+    But in whatever shape he move,
+    He's still himself, and still is Love.
+
+[Footnote 1: Compare Letter to Zouch, March 20th, 1762. Fielding says
+("Voyage to Lisbon") that Addison, in his "Travels," is to be looked
+upon rather as a commentator on the classics, than as a writer of
+travels.]
+
+[Footnote 2: Antonio Cocchi, a learned physician and author at Florence,
+a particular friend of Mr. Mann.--WALPOLE. He died in 1758.]
+
+See how we trifle! but one can't pass one's youth too amusingly; for one
+must grow old, and that in England; two most serious circumstances
+either of which makes people grey in the twinkling of a bed-staff; for
+know you, there is not a country upon earth where there are so many old
+fools and so few young ones.
+
+Now I proceed with my answers.
+
+I made but small collections, and have only bought some bronzes and
+medals, a few busts, and two or three pictures; one of my busts is to be
+mentioned; 'tis the famous Vespasian in touchstone, reckoned the best in
+Rome, except the Caracalla of the Farnese: I gave but twenty-two pounds
+for it at Cardinal Ottoboni's sale. One of my medals is as great a
+curiosity: 'tis of Alexander Severus, with the amphitheatre in brass;
+this reverse is extant on medals of his, but mine is a _medagliuncino_,
+or small medallion, and the only one with this reverse known in the
+world: 'twas found by a peasant while I was in Rome, and sold by him for
+sixpence to an antiquarian, to whom I paid for it seven guineas and a
+half; but to virtuosi 'tis worth any sum.
+
+As to Tartini's[1] musical compositions, ask Gray; I know but little in
+music.
+
+[Footnote 1: Giuseppe Tartini, of Padua, the celebrated composer of the
+Devil's Sonata: in which he attempted to reproduce an air which he
+dreamt that Satan had played to him while he was asleep; but, in his own
+opinion, he failed so entirely, that he declared that if he had any
+other means of livelihood he would break his violin and give up music.]
+
+But for the Academy, I am not of it, but frequently in company with it:
+'tis all disjointed. Madame ----, who, though a learned lady, has not
+lost her modesty and character, is extremely scandalised with the other
+two dames, especially with Moll Worthless [Lady Mary Wortley], who knows
+no bounds. She is at rivalry with Lady W[alpole] for a certain Mr. ----,
+whom perhaps you knew at Oxford. If you did not, I'll tell you: he is a
+grave young man by temper, and a rich one by constitution; a shallow
+creature by nature, but a wit by the grace of our women here, whom he
+deals with as of old with the Oxford toasts. He fell into sentiments
+with my Lady W[alpole] and was happy to catch her at Platonic love: but
+as she seldom stops there, the poor man will be frightened out of his
+senses when she shall break the matter to him; for he never dreamt that
+her purposes were so naught. Lady Mary is so far gone, that to get him
+from the mouth of her antagonist she literally took him out to dance
+country dances last night at a formal ball, where there was no measure
+kept in laughing at her old, foul, tawdry, painted, plastered personage.
+She played at pharaoh two or three times at Princess Craon's, where she
+cheats horse and foot. She is really entertaining: I have been reading
+her works, which she lends out in manuscript, but they are too womanish:
+I like few of her performances. I forgot to tell you a good answer of
+Lady Pomfret to Mr. ----, who asked her if she did not approve Platonic
+love? "Lord, sir," says she, "I am sure any one that knows me never
+heard that I had any love but one, and there sit two proofs of it,"
+pointing to her two daughters.
+
+So I have given you a sketch of our employments, and answered your
+questions, and will with pleasure as many more as you have about you.
+
+Adieu! Was ever such a long letter? But 'tis nothing to what I shall
+have to say to you. I shall scold you for never telling us any news,
+public or private, no deaths, marriages, or mishaps; no account of new
+books: Oh, you are abominable! I could find it in my heart to hate you,
+if I did not love you so well; but we will quarrel now, that we may be
+the better friends when we meet: there is no danger of that, is there?
+Good-night, whether friend or foe! I am most sincerely
+
+Yours.
+
+
+_DEBATE ON PULTENEY'S MOTION FOR A COMMITTEE ON PAPERS RELATING TO THE
+WAR--SPEECHES OF PULTENEY, PITT, SIR R. WALPOLE, SIR W. GEORGE,
+ETC.--SMALLNESS OF THE MINISTERIAL MAJORITY._
+
+TO SIR HORACE MANN.[1]
+
+[Footnote 1: Sir H. Mann was an early friend of Walpole; and was
+Minister at Florence from 1740-1786.]
+
+[Illustration: SIR HORACE MANN.]
+
+_Friday, Jan._ 22, 1742.
+
+Don't wonder that I missed writing to you yesterday, my constant day:
+you will pity me when you hear that I was shut up in the House of
+Commons till one in the morning. I came away more dead than alive, and
+was forced to leave Sir R. at supper with my brothers: he was all alive
+and in spirits.[1] He says he is younger than me, and indeed I think
+so, in spite of his forty years more. My head aches to-night, but we
+rose early; and if I don't write to-night, when shall I find a moment to
+spare? Now you want to know what we did last night; stay, I will tell
+you presently in its place: it was well, and of infinite consequence--so
+far I tell you now.
+
+[Footnote 1: Sir Robert Wilmot also, in a letter to the Duke of
+Devonshire, written on the 12th, says, "Sir Robert was to-day observed
+to be more naturally gay and full of spirits than he has been for some
+time past."]
+
+Our recess finished last Monday, and never at school did I enjoy
+holidays so much--but, _les voila finis jusqu'au printems_! Tuesday (for
+you see I write you an absolute journal) we sat on a Scotch election, a
+double return; their man was Hume Campbell[1], Lord Marchmont's brother,
+lately made solicitor to the Prince, for being as troublesome, as
+violent, and almost as able as his brother. They made a great point of
+it, and gained so many of our votes, that at ten at night we were forced
+to give it up without dividing. Sandys, who loves persecution, _even
+unto death_, moved to punish the sheriff; and as we dared not divide,
+they ordered him into custody, where by this time, I suppose, Sandys has
+eaten him.
+
+[Footnote 1: Hume Campbell, twin brother of Hugh, third Earl of
+Marchmont, the friend of Pope, and one of his executors. They were sons
+of Alexander, the second earl, who had quarrelled with Sir Robert
+Walpole at the time of the excise scheme in 1733. Sir Robert, in
+consequence, prevented him from being re-elected one of the sixteen
+representative Scotch peers in 1734; in requital for which, the old
+earl's two sons became the bitterest opponents of the minister. They
+were both men of considerable talents; extremely similar in their
+characters and dispositions, and so much so in their outward appearance,
+that it was very difficult to know them apart.]
+
+On Wednesday Sir Robert Godschall, the Lord Mayor, presented the
+Merchant's petition, signed by three hundred of them, and drawn up by
+_Leonidas_ Glover.[1] This is to be heard next Wednesday. This
+gold-chain came into parliament, cried up for his parts, but proves so
+dull, one would think he chewed opium. Earle says, "I have heard an
+oyster speak as well twenty times."...
+
+[Footnote 1: Mr. Glover, a London merchant, was the author of a poem
+entitled "Leonidas"; of a tragedy, "Boadicea"; and of the ode on
+"Admiral Hosier's Ghost," which is mentioned in the letter to Conway at
+p. 23.]
+
+On this Thursday, of which I was telling you, at three o'clock, Mr.
+Pulteney rose up, and moved for a secret committee of twenty-one. This
+inquisition, this council of ten, was to sit and examine whatever
+persons and papers they should please, and to meet when and where they
+pleased. He protested much on its not being intended against _any
+person_, but merely to give the King advice, and on this foot they
+fought it till ten at night, when Lord Perceval blundered out what they
+had been cloaking with so much art, and declared that he should vote for
+it as a committee of accusation. Sir Robert immediately rose, and
+protested that he should not have spoken, but for what he had heard
+last; but that now, he must take it to himself. He pourtrayed the malice
+of the Opposition, who, for twenty years, had not been able to touch
+him, and were now reduced to this infamous shift. He defied them to
+accuse him, and only desired that if they should, it might be in an open
+and fair manner; desired no favour, but to be acquainted with his
+accusation. He spoke of Mr. Dodington, who had called his administration
+infamous, as of a person of great self-mortification, who, for sixteen
+years, had condescended to bear part of the odium. For Mr. Pulteney, who
+had just spoken a second time, Sir R. said, he had begun the debate with
+great calmness, but give him his due, he had made amends for it in the
+end. In short, never was innocence so triumphant!
+
+There were several glorious speeches on both sides; Mr. Pulteney's two,
+W. Pitt's [Chatham's] and George Grenville's, Sir Robert's, Sir W.
+Yonge's, Harry Fox's [Lord Holland's], Mr. Chute's, and the
+Attorney-General's [Sir Dudley Ryder]. My friend Coke [Lovel], for the
+first time, spoke vastly well, and mentioned how great Sir Robert's
+character is abroad. Sir Francis Dashwood replied that he had found
+quite the reverse from Mr. Coke, and that foreigners always spoke with
+contempt of the Chevalier de Walpole. This was going too far, and he was
+called to order, but got off well enough, by saying, that he knew it was
+contrary to rule to name any member, but that he only mentioned it as
+spoken by an impertinent Frenchman.
+
+But of all speeches, none ever was so full of wit as Mr. Pulteney's
+last. He said, "I have heard this committee represented as a most
+dreadful spectre; it has been likened to all terrible things; it has
+been likened to the King; to the inquisition; it will be a committee of
+safety; it is a committee of danger; I don't know what it is to be! One
+gentleman, I think, called it _a cloud_! (this was the Attorney) _a
+cloud_! I remember Hamlet takes Lord Polonius by the hand shows him _a
+cloud_, and then asks him if he does not think it is like a whale."
+Well, in short, at eleven at night we divided, and threw out this famous
+committee by 253 to 250, the greatest number that ever was in the house,
+and the greatest number that ever _lost_ a question.[1]
+
+[Footnote 1: Lord Stanhope ("History of England," i. 24) gives a long
+account of this debate, mainly derived from this letter.]
+
+It was a most shocking sight to see the sick and dead brought in on both
+sides! Men on crutches, and Sir William Gordon from his bed, with a
+blister on his head, and flannel hanging out from under his wig. I could
+scarce pity him for his ingratitude. The day before the Westminster
+petition, Sir Charles Wager gave his son a ship, and the next day the
+father came down and voted against him. The son has since been cast
+away; but they concealed it from the father, that he might not absent
+himself. However, as we have our good-natured men too on our side, one
+of his own countrymen went and told him of it in the House. The old man,
+who looked like Lazarus at his resuscitation, bore it with great
+resolution, and said, he knew _why_ he was told of it, but when he
+thought his country in danger, he would not go away. As he is so near
+death, that it is indifferent to him whether he died two thousand years
+ago or to-morrow, it is unlucky for him not to have lived when such
+insensibility would have been a Roman virtue.
+
+There are no arts, no menaces, which the Opposition do not practise.
+They have threatened one gentleman to have a reversion cut off from his
+son, unless he will vote with them. To Totness there came a letter to
+the mayor from the Prince, and signed by two of his lords, to recommend
+a candidate in opposition to the Solicitor-General [Strange]. The mayor
+sent the letter to Sir Robert. They have turned the Scotch to the best
+account. There is a young Oswald, who had engaged to Sir R. but has
+voted against us. Sir R. sent a friend to reproach him; the moment the
+gentleman who had engaged for him came into the room, Oswald said, "You
+had like to have led me into a fine error! did you not tell me that Sir
+R. would have the majority?"
+
+When the debate was over, Mr. Pulteney owned that he had never heard so
+fine a debate on our side; and said to Sir Robert, "Well, nobody can do
+what you can!" "Yes," replied Sir R., "Yonge did better." Mr. Pulteney
+answered, "It was fine, but not of that weight with what you said." They
+all allow it; and now their plan is to persuade Sir Robert to retire
+with honour. All that evening there was a report about the town, that he
+and my uncle [_old_ Horace] were to be sent to the Tower, and people
+hired windows in the City to see them pass by--but for this time I
+believe we shall not exhibit so historical a parade....
+
+Sir Thomas Robinson [Long] is at last named to the government of
+Barbadoes; he has long prevented its being asked for, by declaring that
+he had the promise of it. Luckily for him, Lord Lincoln liked his house,
+and procured him this government on condition of hiring it.
+
+I have mentioned Lord Perceval's speeches; he has a set who has a
+rostrum at his house, and harangue there. A gentleman who came thither
+one evening was refused, but insisting that he was engaged to come, "Oh,
+Sir," said the porter, "what are you one of those who play at members of
+parliament?"...
+
+
+_RANELAGH GARDENS OPENED--GARRICK, "A WINE-MERCHANT TURNED
+PLAYER"--DEFEAT OF THE INDEMNITY BILL._
+
+TO SIR HORACE MANN.
+
+DOWNING STREET, _May_ 26, 1742.
+
+To-day calls itself May the 26th, as you perceive by the date; but I am
+writing to you by the fire-side, instead of going to Vauxhall. If we
+have one warm day in seven, "we bless our stars, and think it luxury."
+And yet we have as much water-works and fresco diversions, as if we lay
+ten degrees nearer warmth. Two nights ago Ranelagh-gardens were opened
+at Chelsea; the Prince, Princess, Duke, much nobility, and much mob
+besides, were there. There is a vast amphitheatre, finely gilt, painted,
+and illuminated, into which everybody that loves eating, drinking,
+staring, or crowding, is admitted for twelvepence. The building and
+disposition of the garden cost sixteen thousand pounds. Twice a-week
+there are to be Ridottos, at guinea-tickets, for which you are to have a
+supper and music. I was there last night, but did not find the joy of
+it. Vauxhall is a little better; for the garden is pleasanter, and one
+goes by water. Our operas are almost over; there were but
+three-and-forty people last night in the pit and boxes. There is a
+little simple farce at Drury Lane, called "Miss Lucy in Town," in which
+Mrs. Clive mimics the Muscovita admirably, and Beard, Amorevoli
+tolerably. But all the run is now after Garrick, a wine-merchant, who is
+turned player, at Goodman's fields. He plays all parts, and is a very
+good mimic. His acting I have seen, and may say to you, who will not
+tell it again here, I see nothing wonderful in it; but it is heresy to
+say so: the Duke of Argyll says, he is superior to Betterton. Now I talk
+of players, tell Mr. Chute, that his friend Bracegirdle breakfasted with
+me this morning. As she went out, and wanted her clogs, she turned to
+me, and said, "I remember at the playhouse, they used to call Mrs.
+Oldfield's chair! Mrs. Barry's clogs! and Mrs. Bracegirdle's pattens!"
+
+I did, indeed, design the letter of this post for Mr. Chute; but I have
+received two such charming long ones from you of the 15th and 20th of
+May (N.S.), that I must answer them, and beg him to excuse me till
+another post; so must the Prince [Craon], Princess, the Grifona, and
+Countess Galli. For the Princess's letter, I am not sure I shall answer
+it so soon, for hitherto I have not been able to read above every third
+word; however, you may thank her as much as if I understood it all. I am
+very happy that _mes bagatelles_ (for I still insist they were so)
+pleased. You, my dear child, are very good to be pleased with the
+snuff-box. I am much obliged to the superior _lumieres_ of old Sarasin
+about the Indian ink: if she meant the black, I am sorry to say I had it
+into the bargain with the rest of the Japan: for coloured, it is only a
+curiosity, because it has seldom been brought over. I remember Sir Hans
+Sloane was the first who ever had any of it, and would on no account
+give my mother the least morsel of it. She afterwards got a good deal of
+it from China; and since that, more has come over; but it is even less
+valuable than the other, for we never could tell how to use it; however,
+let it make its figure.
+
+I am sure you hate me all this time, for chatting about so many trifles,
+and telling you no politics. I own to you, I am so wearied, so worn with
+them, that I scarce know how to turn my hand to them; but you shall know
+all I know. I told you of the meeting at the Fountain tavern: Pulteney
+had promised to be there, but was not; nor Carteret. As the Lords had
+put off the debate on the Indemnity Bill,[1] nothing material passed;
+but the meeting was very Jacobite. Yesterday the bill came on, and Lord
+Carteret took the lead against it, and about seven in the evening it
+was flung out by almost two to one, 92 to 47, and 17 proxies to 10.
+To-day we had a motion by the new Lord Hillsborough (for the father is
+just dead), and seconded by Lord Barrington, to examine the Lords'
+votes, to see what was become of the bill; this is the form. The
+Chancellor of the Exchequer, and all the new ministry, were with us
+against it; but they carried it, 164 to 159. It is to be reported
+to-morrow, and as we have notice, we may possibly throw it out; else
+they will hurry on to a breach with the Lords. Pulteney was not in the
+House: he was riding the other day, and met the King's coach;
+endeavouring to turn out of the way, his horse started, flung him, and
+fell upon him: he is much bruised; but not at all dangerously. On this
+occasion, there was an epigram fixed to a list, which I will explain to
+you afterwards: it is not known who wrote it, but it was addressed to
+him:
+
+    Thy horse does things by halves, like thee:
+      Thou, with irresolution,
+    Hurt'st friend and foe, thyself and me,
+      The King and Constitution.
+
+[Footnote 1: A previous letter describes this as a Bill "to indemnify
+all persons who should accuse themselves of any crime, provided they
+accuse Lord Orford [Sir R.W.]." It was carried in the House of Commons
+by 251 to 228, but, as this letter mentions, was thrown out by the Lords
+by 109 to 57. Lord Stanhope (c. 24) describes it as "a Bill which broke
+through the settled forms and safeguards of law, to strike at one
+obnoxious head."]
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I must tell you an ingenuity of Lord Raymond, an epitaph on the
+Indemnifying Bill--I believe you would guess the author:--
+
+    Interr'd beneath this marble stone doth lie
+         The Bill of Indemnity;
+    To show the good for which it was design'd,
+         It died itself to save mankind.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There has lately been published one of the most impudent things that
+ever was printed; it is called "The Irish Register," and is a list of
+all the unmarried women of any fashion in England, ranked in order,
+duchesses-dowager, ladies, widows, misses, &c., with their names at
+length, for the benefit of Irish fortune-hunters, or as it is said, for
+the incorporating and manufacturing of British commodities. Miss Edwards
+is the only one printed with a dash, because they have placed her among
+the widows. I will send you this, "Miss Lucy in Town," and the
+magazines, by the first opportunity, as I should the other things, but
+your brother tells me you have had them by another hand. I received the
+cedrati, for which I have already thanked you: but I have been so much
+thanked by several people to whom I gave some, that I can very well
+afford to thank you again....
+
+P.S.--I unseal my letter to tell you what a vast and, probably, final
+victory we have gained to-day. They moved, that the Lords flinging out
+the Bill of Indemnity was an obstruction of justice, and might prove
+fatal to the liberties of this country. We have sat till this moment,
+seven o'clock, and have rejected this motion by 245 to 193. The call of
+the House, which they have kept off from fortnight to fortnight, to keep
+people in town, was appointed for to-day. The moment the division was
+over, Sir John Cotton rose and said, "As I think the inquiry is at an
+end, you may do what you will with the call." We have put it off for two
+months. There's a noble postscript!
+
+
+_DEBATE ON DISBANDING THE HANOVERIAN TROOPS--FIRST SPEECH OF MURRAY
+(AFTERWARDS EARL OF MANSFIELD)--BON MOT OF LORD CHESTERFIELD._
+
+TO SIR HORACE MANN.
+
+ARLINGTON STREET, _Dec._ 9, 1742.
+
+I shall have quite a partiality for the post of Holland; it brought me
+two letters last week, and two more yesterday, of November 20th and
+27th; but I find you have your perpetual headaches--how can you say that
+you shall tire me with talking of them? you may make me suffer by your
+pains, but I will hear and insist upon your always telling me of your
+health. Do you think I only correspond with you to know the posture of
+the Spaniards or the _epuisements_ of the Princess! I am anxious, too,
+to know how poor Mr. Whithed does, and Mr. Chute's gout. I shall look
+upon our sea-captains with as much horror as the King of Naples can, if
+they bring gouts, fits, and headaches.
+
+You will have had a letter from me by this time, to give up sending the
+Dominichin by a man-of-war, and to propose its coming in a Dutch ship. I
+believe that will be safe.
+
+We have had another great day in the House on the army in Flanders,
+which the Opposition were for disbanding; but we carried it by a hundred
+and twenty. Murray spoke for the first time, with the greatest applause;
+Pitt answered him with all his force and art of language, but on an
+ill-founded argument. In all appearances, they will be great rivals.
+Shippen was in great rage at Murray's apostacy; if anything can really
+change his principles, possibly this competition may. To-morrow we shall
+have a tougher battle on the sixteen thousand Hanoverians. _Hanover_ is
+the word given out for this winter: there is a most bold pamphlet come
+out, said to be Lord Marchmont's, which affirms that in every treaty
+made since the accession of this family, England has been sacrificed to
+the interests of Hanover, and consequently insinuates the
+incompatibility of the two. Lord Chesterfield says "that if we have a
+mind effectually to prevent the Pretender from ever obtaining this
+crown, we should make him Elector of Hanover, for the people of England
+will never fetch another king from thence."
+
+Adieu! my dear child. I am sensible that I write you short letters, but
+I write you all I know. I don't know how it is, but _the wonderful_
+seems worn out. In this our day, we have no rabbit-women--no
+elopements--no epic poems, finer than Milton's--no contest about
+Harlequins and Polly Peachems. Jansen[1] has won no more estates, and
+the Duchess of Queensberry has grown as tame as her neighbours. Whist
+has spread an universal opium over the whole nation; it makes courtiers
+and patriots sit down to the same pack of cards. The only thing
+extraordinary, and which yet did not seem to surprise anybody, was the
+Barbarina's being attacked by four men masqued, the other night, as she
+came out of the Opera House, who would have forced her away; but she
+screamed, and the guard came. Nobody knows who set them on, and I
+believe nobody inquired.
+
+[Footnote 1: H. Jansen, a celebrated gamester, who cheated the Duke of
+Bedford of an immense sum: Pope hints at that affair in this line,
+
+    Or when a duke to Jansen punts at White's.]
+
+The Austrians in Flanders have separated from our troops a little out of
+humour, because it was impracticable for them to march without any
+preparatory provision for their reception. They will probably march in
+two months, if no peace prevents it. Adieu!
+
+
+_KING THEODORE--HANDEL INTRODUCES ORATORIOS._
+
+TO SIR HORACE MANN.
+
+ARLINGTON STREET, _Feb._ 24, 1743.
+
+I write to you in the greatest hurry in the world, but write I will.
+Besides, I must wish you joy: you are warriors; nay, conquerors[1]; two
+things quite novel in this war, for hitherto it has been armies without
+fighting, and deaths without killing. We talk of this battle as of a
+comet; "Have you heard of _the_ battle?" it is so strange a thing, that
+numbers imagine you may go and see it at Charing Cross. Indeed, our
+officers, who are going to Flanders, don't quite like it; they are
+afraid it should grow the fashion to fight, and that a pair of colours
+should no longer be a sinecure. I am quite unhappy about poor Mr. Chute:
+besides, it is cruel to find that abstinence is not a drug. If
+mortification ever ceases to be a medicine, or virtue to be a passport
+to carnivals in the other world, who will be a self-tormentor any
+longer--not, my child, that I am one; but, tell me, is he quite
+recovered?
+
+[Footnote 1: This alludes to an engagement, which took place on the 8th
+of February, near Bologna, between the Spaniards under M. de Gages, and
+the Austrians under General Traun, in which the latter were successful.]
+
+I thank you for King Theodore's declaration,[1] and wish him success
+with all my soul. I hate the Genoese; they make a commonwealth the most
+devilish of all tyrannies!
+
+[Footnote 1: With regard to Corsica, of which he had declared himself
+king. By this declaration, which was dated January 30, Theodore
+recalled, under pain of confiscation of their estates, all the Corsicans
+in foreign service, except that of the Queen of Hungary, and the Grand
+Duke of Tuscany. (See vol. ii. p. 74.)]
+
+We have every now and then motions for disbanding Hessians and
+Hanoverians,[1] alias mercenaries; but they come to nothing. To-day the
+party have declared that they have done for this session; so you will
+hear little more but of fine equipages for Flanders: our troops are
+actually marched, and the officers begin to follow them--I hope they
+know whither! You know in the last war in Spain, Lord Peterborough[2]
+rode galloping about to inquire for his army.
+
+[Footnote 1: The employment of Hessian and Hanoverian troops in this war
+was not only the subject of frequent complaints in Parliament, but was
+also the cause of very general dissatisfaction in the country, where it
+was commonly regarded as one of the numerous instances in which the
+Ministers sacrificed the interests of England from an unworthy desire to
+maintain their places by humouring the king's preference for his native
+land.]
+
+[Footnote 2: Lord Peterborough is celebrated by Pope as
+
+            taming the genius of the arid plain
+    Almost as quickly as he conquered Spain:
+
+not that he did conquer Spain; but by an extraordinary combination of
+hardihood and skill he took Barcelona, which had defied all previous
+attacks; and, in the confidence inspired by this important success, he
+offered Archduke Charles to escort him to Madrid, so that he might be
+crowned King of Spain in that capital. But the Archduke, under the
+advice of some of his own countrymen, who were jealous of his influence,
+rejected the plan.]
+
+But to come to more _real_ contests; Handel has set up an Oratorio
+against the Operas, and succeeds. He has hired all the goddesses from
+farces and the singers of _Roast Beef_[1] from between the acts at both
+theatres, with a man with one note in his voice, and a girl without ever
+an one; and so they sing, and make brave hallelujahs; and the good
+company encore the recitative, if it happens to have any cadence like
+what they call a tune. I was much diverted the other night at the opera;
+two gentlewomen sat before my sister, and not knowing her, discoursed at
+their ease. Says one, "Lord! how fine Mr. W. is!" "Yes," replied the
+other, with a tone of saying sentences, "some men love to be
+particularly so, your _petit-maitres_--but they are not always the
+brightest of their sex."--Do thank me for this period! I am sure you
+will enjoy it as much as we did.
+
+[Footnote 1: It was customary at this time for the galleries to call for
+a ballad called "The Roast Beef of Old England" between the acts, or
+before or after the play.--WALPOLE.]
+
+I shall be very glad of my things, and approve entirely of your
+precautions; Sir R. will be quite happy, for there is no telling you how
+impatient he is for his Dominchin. Adieu!
+
+
+_BATTLE OF DETTINGEN--DEATH OF LORD WILMINGTON._
+
+TO SIR HORACE MANN.
+
+HOUGHTON, _July_ 4, 1743.
+
+I hear no particular news here, and I don't pretend to send you the
+common news; for as I must have it first from London, you will have it
+from thence sooner in the papers than in my letters. There have been
+great rejoicings for the victory; which I am convinced is very
+considerable by the pains the Jacobites take to persuade it is not. My
+Lord Carteret's Hanoverian articles have much offended; his express has
+been burlesqued a thousand ways. By all the letters that arrive, the
+loss of the French turns out more considerable than by the first
+accounts: they have dressed up the battle into a victory for
+themselves--I hope they will always have such! By their not having
+declared war with us, one should think they intended a peace. It is
+allowed that our fine horse did us no honour: the victory was gained by
+the foot. Two of their princes of the blood, the Prince de Dombes, and
+the Count d'Eu his brother, were wounded, and several of their first
+nobility. Our prisoners turn out but seventy-two officers, besides the
+private men; and by the printed catalogue, I don't think many of great
+family. Marshal Noailles' mortal wound is quite vanished, and Duc
+d'Aremberg's shrunk to a very slight one. The King's glory remains in
+its first bloom.
+
+Lord Wilmington is dead.[1] I believe the civil battle for his post will
+be tough. Now we shall see what service Lord Carteret's Hanoverians will
+do him. You don't think the crisis unlucky for him, do you? If you
+wanted a Treasury, should you choose to have been in Arlington Street,
+or driving by the battle of Dettingen? You may imagine our Court wishes
+for Mr. Pelham. I don't know any one who wishes for Lord Bath but
+himself--I believe that is a pretty substantial wish.
+
+[Footnote 1: Formerly Sir Spencer Compton, and successor of Sir R.
+Walpole at the Treasury. He was succeeded by Mr. Pelham, a brother of
+the Duke of Newcastle.]
+
+I have got the Life of King Theodore, but I don't know how to convey
+it--I will inquire for some way.
+
+We are quite alone. You never saw anything so unlike as being here five
+months out of place, to the congresses of a fortnight in place; but you
+know the "Justum et tenacem propositi virum"[1] can amuse himself
+without the "Civium ardor!" As I have not so much dignity of character
+to fill up my time, I could like a little more company. With all this
+leisure, you may imagine that I might as well be writing an ode or so
+upon the victory; but as I cannot build upon the Laureate's[2] place
+till I know whether Lord Carteret or Mr. Pelham will carry the
+Treasury, I have bounded my compliments to a slender collection of
+quotations against I should have any occasion for them. Here are some
+fine lines from Lord Halifax's[3] poem on the battle of the Boyne--
+
+    The King leads on, the King does all inflame,
+    The King;--and carries millions in the name.
+
+[Footnote 1: A quotation from Horace, Odes iii. 3.]
+
+[Footnote 2: The Poet Laureate was Colley Cibber.]
+
+[Footnote 3: The celebrated Chancellor of the Exchequer, Charles
+Montagu, was raised to the peerage as Earl of Halifax. In conjunction
+with Prior, he wrote the "Country and City Mouse," in ridicule of
+Dryden's "Hind and Panther."]
+
+Then follows a simile about a deluge, which you may imagine; but the
+next lines are very good:
+
+    So on the foe the firm battalions prest,
+    And he, like the tenth wave, drove on the rest.
+    Fierce, gallant, young, he shot through ev'ry place,
+    Urging their flight, and hurrying on the chase,
+    He hung upon their rear, or lighten'd in their face.
+
+The next are a magnificent compliment, and, as far as verse goes, to be
+sure very applicable.
+
+    Stop, stop! brave Prince, allay that generous flame;
+    Enough is given to England and to Fame.
+    Remember, Sir, you in the centre stand;
+    Europe's divided interests you command,
+    All their designs uniting in your hand.
+    Down from your throne descends the golden chain
+    Which does the fabric of our world sustain,
+    That once dissolved by any fatal stroke,
+    The scheme of all our happiness is broke.
+
+Adieu! my dear Sir; pray for peace!
+
+
+_FRENCH ACTORS AT CLIFDEN--A NEW ROMAN CATHOLIC MIRACLE--LADY MARY
+WORTLEY._
+
+TO SIR HORACE MANN.
+
+HOUGHTON, _Sept._ 7, 1743.
+
+My letters are now at their _ne plus ultra_ of nothingness; so you may
+hope they will grow better again. I shall certainly go to town soon, for
+my patience is worn out. Yesterday, the weather grew cold; I put on _a
+new_ waistcoat for its being winter's birthday--the season I am forced
+to love; for summer has no charms for me when I pass it in the country.
+
+We are expecting another battle, and a congress at the same time.
+Ministers seem to be flocking to Aix la Chapelle: and, what will much
+surprise you, unless you have lived long enough not to be surprised, is,
+that Lord Bolingbroke has hobbled the same way too--you will suppose, as
+a minister for France; I tell you, no. My uncle [_old_ Horace], who is
+here, was yesterday stumping along the gallery with a very political
+march: my Lord asked him whither he was going. Oh, said I, to Aix la
+Chapelle.
+
+You ask me about the marrying Princesses. I know not a tittle. Princess
+Louisa seems to be going, her clothes are bought; but marrying our
+daughters makes no conversation. For either of the other two, all
+thoughts seem to be dropped of it. The Senate of Sweden design
+themselves to choose a wife for their man of Lubeck.
+
+The City, and our supreme governors, the mob, are very angry that there
+is a troop of French players at Clifden. One of them was lately
+impertinent to a countryman, who thrashed him. His Royal Highness sent
+angrily to know the cause. The fellow replied, "he thought to have
+pleased his Highness in beating one of them, who had tried to kill his
+father and had wounded his brother." This was not easy to answer.
+
+I delight in Prince Craon's exact intelligence! For his satisfaction, I
+can tell him that numbers, even here, would believe any story full as
+absurd as that of the King and my Lord Stair; or that very one, if
+anybody will write it over. Our faith in politics will match any
+Neapolitan's in religion. A political missionary will make more converts
+in a county progress than a Jesuit in the whole empire of China, and
+will produce more preposterous miracles. Sir Watkin Williams, at the
+last Welsh races, convinced the whole principality (by reading a letter
+that affirmed it), that the King was not within two miles of the battle
+of Dettingen. We are not good at hitting off anti-miracles, the only way
+of defending one's own religion. I have read an admirable story of the
+Duke of Buckingham, who, when James II. sent a priest to him to persuade
+him to turn Papist, and was plied by him with miracles, told the doctor,
+that if miracles were proofs of a religion, the Protestant cause was as
+well supplied as theirs. We have lately had a very extraordinary one
+near my estate in the country. A very holy man, as you might be, Doctor,
+was travelling on foot, and was benighted. He came to the cottage of a
+poor dowager, who had nothing in the house for herself and daughter but
+a couple of eggs and a slice of bacon. However, as she was a pious
+widow, she made the good man welcome. In the morning, at taking leave,
+the saint made her over to God for payment, and prayed that whatever she
+should do as soon as he was gone she might continue to do all day. This
+was a very unlimited request, and, unless the saint was a prophet too,
+might not have been very pleasant retribution. The good woman, who
+minded her affairs, and was not to be put out of her way, went about her
+business. She had a piece of coarse cloth to make a couple of shifts for
+herself and child. She no sooner began to measure it but the yard fell
+a-measuring, and there was no stopping it. It was sunset before the good
+woman had time to take breath. She was almost stifled, for she was up to
+her ears in ten thousand yards of cloth. She could have afforded to have
+sold Lady Mary Wortley a clean shift, of the usual coarseness she wears,
+for a groat halfpenny.
+
+I wish you would tell the Princess this story. Madame Riccardi, or the
+little Countess d'Elbenino, will doat on it. I don't think it will be
+out of Pandolfini's way, if you tell it to the little Albizzi. You see I
+have not forgot the tone of my Florentine acquaintance. I know I should
+have translated it to them: you remember what admirable work I used to
+make of such stories in broken Italian. I have heard old Churchill tell
+Bussy English puns out of jest-books: particularly a reply about eating
+hare, which he translated, "j'ai mon ventre plein de poil." Adieu!
+
+
+_DEATH OF HIS FATHER--MATTHEWS AND LESTOCK IN THE
+MEDITERRANEAN--THOMSON'S "TANCRED AND SIGISMUNDA"--AKENSIDE'S
+ODES--CONUNDRUMS IN FASHION._
+
+TO SIR HORACE MANN.
+
+ARLINGTON STREET, _March_ 29, 1745.
+
+I begged your brother to tell you what it was impossible for me to tell
+you. You share nearly 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 moral; improper for me to write upon, and too
+distressful for us both!--a death is only to be felt, never to be talked
+over by those it touches!
+
+I had yesterday your letter of three sheets: I began to flatter myself
+that the storm was blown over, but I tremble to think of the danger you
+are in! a danger, in which even the protection of the great friend you
+have lost could have been of no service to you. How ridiculous it seems
+for me to renew protestations of my friendship for you, at an instant
+when my father is just dead, and the Spaniards just bursting into
+Tuscany! How empty a charm would my name have, when all my interest and
+significance are buried in my father's grave! All hopes of present
+peace, the only thing that could save you, seem vanished. We expect
+every day to hear of the French declaration of war against Holland. The
+new Elector of Bavaria is French, like his father; and the King of Spain
+is not dead. I don't know how to talk to you. I have not even a belief
+that the Spaniards will spare Tuscany. My dear child, what will become
+of you? whither will you retire till a peace restores you to your
+ministry? for upon that distant view alone I repose!
+
+We are every day nearer confusion. The King is in as bad humour as a
+monarch can be; he wants to go abroad, and is detained by the
+Mediterranean affair; the inquiry into which was moved by a Major
+Selwyn, a dirty pensioner, half-turned patriot, by the Court being
+overstocked with votes. This inquiry takes up the whole time of the
+House of Commons, but I don't see what conclusion it can have. My
+confinement has kept me from being there, except the first day; and all
+I know of what is yet come out is, as it was stated by a Scotch member
+the other day, "that there had been one (Matthews)[1] with a bad head,
+another (Lestock) with a worse heart, and four (the captains of the
+inactive ships) with na heart at all." Among the numerous visits of form
+that I have received, one was from my Lord Sandys: as we two could only
+converse upon general topics, we fell upon this of the Mediterranean,
+and I made _him_ allow, "that, to be sure, there is not so bad a court
+of justice in the world as the House of Commons; and how hard it is upon
+any man to have his cause tried there!"...
+
+[Footnote 1: Admiral Matthews, an officer of great courage and skill,
+was Commander-in-chief of the Mediterranean fleet. Lestock, his second
+in command, was also a skilful officer; but the two were on bad terms,
+and when, in February, 1744, Matthews attacked the Spanish fleet,
+Lestock disobeyed his signals, and by his misconduct deprived Matthews
+of a splendid victory, which was clearly within his grasp.
+Court-martials were held on the conduct of both officers; but the
+Admiralty was determined to crush Matthews, as being a member of the
+House of Commons and belonging to the party of Opposition, and the
+consequence was that, though Lestock's misconduct was clearly proved, he
+was acquitted, and Matthews was sentenced to be cashiered, and declared
+incapable of any further employment in his Majesty's service. The whole
+is perhaps the most disgraceful transaction in the history of the navy
+or of the country. (See the Editor's "History of the British Navy," i.
+203-214.)]
+
+The town flocks to a new play of Thomson's called "Tancred and
+Sigismunda:" it is very dull; I have read it. I cannot bear modern
+poetry; these refiners of the purity of the stage, and of the
+incorrectness of English verse, are most wofully insipid. I had rather
+have written the most absurd lines in Lee, than "Leonidas" or "The
+Seasons;" as I had rather be put into the round-house for a wrong-headed
+quarrel, than sup quietly at eight o'clock with my grandmother. There is
+another of these tame genius's, a Mr. Akenside, who writes Odes: in one
+he has lately published, he says, "Light the tapers, urge the fire."[1]
+Had not you rather make gods "jostle in the dark," than light the
+candles for fear they should break their heads? One Russel, a mimic, has
+a puppet-show to ridicule Operas; I hear, very dull, not to mention its
+being twenty years too late: it consists of three acts, with foolish
+Italian songs burlesqued in Italian.
+
+[Footnote 1: Walpole's quotation, however, is incorrect; the poet wrote:
+
+    Urge the warm bowl, and ruddy fire.]
+
+There is a very good quarrel 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 a trust."
+You know how mad she is, and how capable of such a stroke. 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.
+
+It is the present fashion to make conundrums: there are books of them
+printed, and produced at all assemblies: they are full silly enough to
+be made a fashion. I will tell you the most renowned: "Why is my uncle
+Horace like two people conversing?--Because he is both teller and
+auditor." This was Winnington's....
+
+I will take the first opportunity to send Dr. Cocchi his translated
+book; I have not yet seen it myself.
+
+Adieu! my dearest child! I write with a house full of relations, and
+must conclude. Heaven preserve you and Tuscany.
+
+
+_BATTLE OF FONTENOY--THE BALLAD OF THE PRINCE OF WALES._
+
+TO SIR HORACE MANN.
+
+ARLINGTON STREET, _May_ 11, 1745.
+
+I stayed till to-day, to be able to give you some account of the battle
+of Tournay: the outlines you will have heard already. We don't allow it
+to be a victory on the French side: but that is, just as a woman is not
+called _Mrs._ till she is married, though she may have had half-a-dozen
+natural children. In short, we remained upon the field of battle three
+hours; I fear, too many of us remain there still! without palliating, it
+is certainly a heavy stroke. We never lost near so many officers. I pity
+the Duke [of Cumberland], for it is almost the first battle of
+consequence that we ever lost. By the letters arrived to-day, we find
+that Tournay still holds out. There are certainly killed Sir James
+Campbell, General Ponsonby, Colonel Carpenter, Colonel Douglas, young
+Ross, Colonel Montagu, Gee, Berkeley, and Kellet. Mr. Vanburgh is since
+dead. Most of the young men of quality in the Guards are wounded. I have
+had the vast fortune to have nobody hurt, for whom I was in the least
+interested. Mr. Conway, in particular, has highly distinguished himself;
+he and Lord Petersham, who is slightly wounded, are most commended;
+though none behaved ill but the Dutch horse. There has been but very
+little consternation here: the King minded it so little, that being set
+out for Hanover, and blown back into Harwich roads since the news came,
+he could not be persuaded to return, but sailed yesterday with the fair
+wind. I believe you will have the _Gazette_ sent to-night; but lest it
+should not be printed time enough, here is a list of the numbers, as it
+came over this morning:
+
+British foot          1237 killed.
+Ditto horse             90 ditto.
+Ditto foot            1968 wounded.
+Ditto horse            232 ditto.
+Ditto foot             457 missing.
+Ditto horse             18 ditto.
+Hanoverian foot        432 killed.
+Ditto horse             78 ditto.
+Ditto foot             950 wounded.
+Ditto horse            192 ditto.
+Ditto horse and foot    53 missing.
+Dutch                  625 killed and wounded.
+Ditto                 1019 missing.
+
+So the whole _hors de combat_ is above seven thousand three hundred. The
+French own the loss of three thousand; I don't believe many more, for it
+was a most rash and desperate perseverance on our side. The Duke behaved
+very bravely and humanely; but this will not have advanced the peace.
+
+However coolly the Duke may have behaved, and coldly his father, at
+least his brother [the Prince of Wales] has outdone both. He not only
+went to the play the night the news came, but in two days made a ballad.
+It is in imitation of the Regent's style, and has miscarried in nothing
+but the language, the thoughts, and the poetry. Did not I tell you in my
+last that he was going to act Paris in Congreve's "Masque"? The song is
+addressed to the goddesses.
+
+    I.
+
+    Venez, mes cheres Deesses,
+    Venez calmer mon chagrin;
+    Aidez, mes belles Princesses,
+    A le noyer dans le vin.
+    Poussons cette douce Ivresse
+    Jusqu'au milieu de la nuit,
+    Et n'ecoutons que la tendresse
+    D'un charmant vis-a-vis.
+
+    II.
+
+    Quand le chagrin me devore,
+    Vite a table je me mets,
+    Loin des objets que j'abhorre,
+    Avec joie j'y trouve la paix.
+    Peu d'amis, restes d'un naufrage
+    Je rassemble autour de moi,
+    Et je me ris de l'etalage
+    Qu'a chez lui toujours un Roi.
+
+    III.
+
+    Que m'importe, que l'Europe
+    Ait un, ou plusieurs tyrans?
+    Prions seulement Calliope,
+    Qu'elle inspire nos vers, nos chants
+    Laissons Mars et toute la gloire;
+    Livrons nous tous a l'amour;
+    Que Bacchus nous donne a boire;
+    A ces deux faisons la cour.
+
+    IV.
+
+    Passons ainsi notre vie,
+    Sans rever a ce qui suit;
+    Avec ma chere Sylvie
+    Le tems trop vite me fuit.
+    Mais si, par un malheur extreme,
+    Je perdois cet objet charmant,
+    Oui, cette compagnie meme
+    Ne me tiendroit un moment.
+
+    V.
+
+    Me livrant a ma tristesse,
+    Toujours plein de mon chagrin,
+    Je n'aurois plus d'allegresse
+    Pour mettre Bathurst en train:
+    Ainsi pour vous tenir en joie
+    Invoquez toujours les Dieux,
+    Qu'elle vive et qu'elle soit
+    Avec nous toujours heureuse!
+
+Adieu! I am in great hurry.
+
+
+_M. DE GRIGNAN--LIVY'S PATAVINITY--THE MARECHAL DE BELLEISLE--WHISTON
+PROPHECIES THE DESTRUCTION OF THE WORLD--THE DUKE OF NEWCASTLE._
+
+TO GEORGE MONTAGU, ESQ.
+
+[_August_ 1, 1745.]
+
+Dear George,--I cannot help thinking you laugh at me when you say such
+very civil things of my letters, and yet, coming from you, I would fain
+not have it all flattery:
+
+    So much the more, as, from a little elf,
+    I've had a high opinion of myself,
+    Though sickly, slender, and not large of limb.
+
+With this modest prepossession, you may be sure I like to have you
+commend me, whom, after I have done with myself, I admire of all men
+living. I only beg that you will commend me no more: it is very
+ruinous; and praise, like other debts, ceases to be due on being paid.
+One comfort indeed is, that it is as seldom paid as other debts.
+
+I have been very fortunate lately: I have met with an extreme good print
+of M. de Grignan;[1] I am persuaded, very like; and then it has his
+_touffe ebourifee_; I don't, indeed, know what that was, but I am sure
+it is in the print. None of the critics could ever make out what Livy's
+Patavinity is; though they are all confident it is in his writings. I
+have heard within these few days what, for your sake, I wish I could
+have told you sooner--that there is in Belleisle's suite the Abbe
+Perrin, who published Madame Sevigne's letters, and who has the
+originals in his hands. How one should have liked to have known him! The
+Marshal[2] was privately in London last Friday. He is entertained to-day
+at Hampton Court by the Duke of Grafton. Don't you believe it was to
+settle the binding the scarlet thread in the window, when the French
+shall come in unto the land to possess it? I don't at all wonder at any
+shrewd observations the Marshal has made on our situation. The bringing
+him here at all--the sending him away now--in short, the whole series of
+our conduct convinces me, that we shall soon see as silent a change as
+that in "The Rehearsal," of King Usher and King Physician. It may well
+be so, when the disposition of the drama is in the hands of the Duke of
+Newcastle--those hands that are always groping and sprawling, and
+fluttering, and hurrying on the rest of his precipitate person. But
+there is no describing him but as M. Courcelle, a French prisoner, did
+t'other day: "Je ne scais pas," dit il, "je ne scaurois m'exprimer, mais
+il a un certain tatillonage." If one could conceive a dead body hung in
+chains, always wanting to be hung somewhere else, one should have a
+comparative idea of him.
+
+[Footnote 1: M. de Grignan son-in-law to Mme. de Sevigne, the greater
+part of whose letters are to his wife.]
+
+[Footnote 2: The Marechal de Belleisle and his younger brother, the
+Comte de Belleisle, were the grandsons of Fouquet, the Finance Minister
+treated with such cruelty and injustice by Louis XIV. The Parisians
+nicknamed the two brothers "Imagination" and "Common Sense." The Marshal
+was joined with the Marshal de Broglie in the disastrous expedition
+against Prague in the winter of 1742; when, though they succeeded in
+taking and occupying the city for a time, they were afterwards forced to
+evacuate it; and though Belleisle conducted the retreat with great
+courage and skill, the army, which had numbered fifty thousand men when
+it crossed the Rhine, scarcely exceeded twelve thousand when it regained
+the French territory. (See the Editor's "History of France under the
+Bourbons," c. xxv.)]
+
+For my own part, I comfort myself with the humane reflection of the
+Irishman in the ship that was on fire--I am but a passenger! If I were
+not so indolent, I think I should rather put in practice the late
+Duchess of Bolton's geographical resolution of going to China, when
+Whiston told her the world would be burnt in three years. Have you any
+philosophy? Tell me what you think. It is quite the fashion to talk of
+the French coming here. Nobody sees it in any other light but as a thing
+to be talked of, not to be precautioned against. Don't you remember a
+report of the plague being in the City, and everybody went to the house
+where it was to see it? You see I laugh about it, for I would not for
+the world be so unenglished as to do otherwise. I am persuaded that
+when Count Saxe,[1] with ten thousand men, is within a day's march of
+London, people will be hiring windows at Charing-cross and Cheapside to
+see them pass by. 'Tis our characteristic to take dangers for sights,
+and evils for curiosities.
+
+[Footnote 1: The great Marechal Saxe, Commander-in-chief of the French
+army in Flanders during the war of the Austrian succession.]
+
+Adieu! dear George: I am laying in scraps of Cato against it may be
+necessary to take leave of one's correspondents _a la Romaine_, and
+before the play itself is suppressed by a _lettre de cachet_ to the
+book-sellers.
+
+P.S.--Lord! 'tis the first of August,[1] 1745, a holiday that is going
+to be turned out of the almanack!
+
+[Footnote 1: August 1 was the anniversary of the accession of George I.]
+
+
+_INVASION OF SCOTLAND BY THE YOUNG PRETENDER--FORCES ARE SAID TO BE
+PREPARING IN FRANCE TO JOIN HIM._
+
+TO SIR HORACE MANN.
+
+ARLINGTON STREET, _Sept._ 6, 1745.
+
+It would have been inexcusable in me, in our present circumstances, and
+after all I have promised you, not to have written to you for this last
+month, if I had been in London; but I have been at Mount Edgecumbe, and
+so constantly upon the road, that I neither received your letters, had
+time to write, or knew what to write. I came back last night, and found
+three packets from you, which I have no time to answer, and but just
+time to read. The confusion I have found, and the danger we are in,
+prevent my talking of anything else. The young Pretender, at the head of
+three thousand men, has got a march on General Cope, who is not eighteen
+hundred strong; and when the last accounts came away, was fifty miles
+nearer Edinburgh than Cope, and by this time is there. The clans will
+not rise for the Government: the Dukes of Argyll and Athol are come post
+to town, not having been able to raise a man. The young Duke of Gordon
+sent for his uncle, and told him he must arm their clan. "They are in
+arms."--"They must march against the rebels."--"They will wait on the
+Prince of Wales." The Duke flew in a passion; his uncle pulled out a
+pistol, and told him it was in vain to dispute. Lord Loudon, Lord
+Fortrose, and Lord Panmure have been very zealous, and have raised some
+men; but I look upon Scotland as gone! I think of what King William said
+to Duke Hamilton, when he was extolling Scotland: "My Lord, I only wish
+it was a hundred thousand miles off, and that you was king of it!"
+
+There are two manifestoes published, signed Charles Prince, Regent for
+his father, King of Scotland, England, France, and Ireland. By one, he
+promises to preserve everybody in their just rights; and orders all
+persons who have public monies in their hands to bring it to him; and by
+the other dissolves the union between England and Scotland. But all this
+is not the worst! Notice came yesterday, that there are ten thousand
+men, thirty transports, and ten men-of-war at Dunkirk. Against this
+force we have--I don't know what--scarce fears! Three thousand Dutch we
+hope are by this time landed in Scotland; three more are coming hither.
+We have sent for ten regiments from Flanders, which may be here in a
+week, and we have fifteen men-of-war in the Downs. I am grieved to tell
+you all this; but when it is so, how can I avoid telling you? Your
+brother is just come in, who says he has written to you--I have not time
+to expiate.
+
+My Lady O[rford] is arrived; I hear she says, only to endeavour to get a
+certain allowance. Her mother has sent to offer her the use of her
+house. She is a poor weak woman. I can say nothing to Marquis Ricardi,
+nor think of him; only tell him that I will when I have time.
+
+My sister [Lady Maria Walpole] has married herself, that is, declared
+she will, to young Churchill. It is a foolish match; but I have nothing
+to do with it. Adieu! my dear Sir; excuse my haste, but you must imagine
+that one is not much at leisure to write long letters--hope if you can!
+
+
+_THIS AND THE FOLLOWING LETTERS GIVE A LIVELY ACCOUNT OF THE PROGRESS OF
+THE REBELLION TILL THE RETREAT FROM DERBY, AFTER WHICH NO PARTICULAR
+INTEREST ATTACHES TO IT._
+
+TO SIR HORACE MANN.
+
+ARLINGTON STREET, _Sept._ 20, 1745.
+
+One really don't know what to write to you: the accounts from Scotland
+vary perpetually, and at best are never very certain. I was just going
+to tell you that the rebels are in England; but my uncle [_old_ Horace]
+is this moment come in, and says, that an express came last night with
+an account of their being at Edinburgh to the number of five thousand.
+This sounds great, to have walked through a kingdom, and taken
+possession of the capital! But this capital is an open town; and the
+castle impregnable, and in our possession. There never was so
+extraordinary a sort of rebellion! One can't tell what assurances of
+support they may have from the Jacobites in England, or from the French;
+but nothing of either sort has yet appeared--and if there does not,
+never was so desperate an enterprise. One can hardly believe that the
+English are more disaffected than the Scotch; and among the latter, no
+persons of property have joined them: both nations seem to profess a
+neutrality. Their money is all gone, and they subsist merely by levying
+contributions. But, sure, banditti can never conquer a kingdom! On the
+other hand, what cannot any number of men do, who meet no opposition?
+They have hitherto taken no place but open towns, nor have they any
+artillery for a siege but one-pounders. Three battalions of Dutch are
+landed at Gravesend, and are ordered to Lancashire: we expect every
+moment to hear that the rest are got to Scotland; none of our own are
+come yet. Lord Granville and his faction persist in persuading the King,
+that it is an affair of no consequence; and for the Duke of Newcastle,
+he is glad when the rebels make any progress, in order to confute Lord
+Granville's assertions. The best of our situation is, our strength at
+sea: the Channel is well guarded, and twelve men-of-war more are arrived
+from Rowley. Vernon, that simple noisy creature, has hit upon a scheme
+that is of great service; he has laid Folkstone cutters all round the
+coast, which are continually relieved, and bring constant notice of
+everything that stirs. I just now hear that the Duke of Bedford declares
+that he will be amused no longer, but will ask the King's leave to raise
+a regiment. The Duke of Montagu has a troop of horse ready, and the Duke
+of Devonshire is raising men in Derbyshire. The Yorkshiremen, headed by
+the Archbishop [Herring] and Lord Malton, meet the gentlemen of the
+county the day after to-morrow, to defend that part of England. Unless
+we have more ill fortune than is conceivable, or the general supineness
+continues, it is impossible but we must get over this. You desire me to
+send you news: I confine myself to tell you nothing but what you may
+depend upon; and leave you in a fright rather than deceive you. I
+confess my own apprehensions are not near so strong as they were; and if
+we get over this, I shall believe that we never can be hurt; for we
+never can be more exposed to danger. Whatever disaffection there is to
+the present family, it plainly does not proceed from love to the other.
+
+My Lady O[rford] makes little progress in popularity. Neither the
+protection of my Lady Pomfret's prudery, nor of my Lady Townshend's
+libertinism, do her any service. The women stare at her, think her
+ugly, awkward, and disagreeable; and what is worse, the men think so
+too. For the height of mortification, the King has declared publicly to
+the Ministry, that he has been told of the great civilities which he was
+said to show to her at Hanover; that he protests he showed her only the
+common civilities due to any English lady that comes thither; that he
+never intended to take any particular notice of her; nor had, nor would
+let my Lady Yarmouth. In fact, my Lady Yarmouth peremptorily refused to
+carry her to court here; and when she did go with my Lady Pomfret, the
+King but just spoke to her. She declares her intention of staying in
+England, and protests against all lawsuits and violences; and says she
+only asks articles of separation, and to have her allowance settled by
+any two arbitrators chosen by my brother and herself. I have met her
+twice at my Lady Townshend's, just as I used at Florence. She dresses
+English and plays at whist. I forgot to tell a _bon-mot_ of Leheup on
+her first coming over; he was asked if he would not go and see her? He
+replied, "No, I never visit modest women." Adieu! my dear child! I
+flatter myself you will collect hopes from this letter.
+
+
+_DEFEAT OF COPE._
+
+TO SIR HORACE MANN.
+
+ARLINGTON STREET, _Sept._ 27, 1745.
+
+I can't doubt but the joy of the Jacobites has reached Florence before
+this letter. Your two or three Irish priests, I forget their names,
+will have set out to take possession of abbey lands here. I feel for
+what you will feel, and for the insulting things that will be said to
+you upon the battle we lost in Scotland; but all this is nothing to what
+it prefaces. The express came hither on Tuesday morning, but the Papists
+knew it on Sunday night. Cope lay in face of the rebels all Friday; he
+scarce two thousand strong, they vastly superior, though we don't know
+their numbers. The military people say that he should have attacked
+them. However, we are sadly convinced that they are not such raw
+ragamuffins as they were represented. The rotation that has been
+established in that country, to give all the Highlanders the benefit of
+serving in the independent companies, has trained and disciplined them.
+Macdonald (I suppose, he from Naples), who is reckoned a very
+experienced able officer, is said to have commanded them, and to be
+dangerously wounded. One does not hear the Boy's personal valour cried
+up; by which I conclude he was not in the action. Our dragoons most
+shamefully fled without striking a blow, and are with Cope, who escaped
+in a boat to Berwick. I pity poor him, who with no shining abilities,
+and no experience, and no force, was sent to fight for a crown! He never
+saw a battle but that of Dettingen, where he got his red ribbon:
+Churchill, whose led-captain he was, and my Lord Harrington, had pushed
+him up to his misfortune. We have lost all our artillery, five hundred
+men taken--and _three_ killed, and several officers, as you will see in
+the papers. This defeat has frightened everybody but those it rejoices,
+and those it should frighten most; but my Lord Granville still buoys up
+the King's spirits, and persuades him it is nothing. He uses his
+Ministers as ill as possible, and discourages everybody that would risk
+their lives and fortunes with him. Marshal Wade is marching against the
+rebels; but the King will not let him take above eight thousand men; so
+that if they come into England, another battle, with no advantage on our
+side, may determine our fate. Indeed, they don't seem so unwise as to
+risk their cause upon so precarious an event; but rather to design to
+establish themselves in Scotland, till they can be supported from
+France, and be set up with taking Edinburgh Castle, where there is to
+the value of a million, and which they would make a stronghold. It is
+scarcely victualled for a month, and must surely fall into their hands.
+Our coasts are greatly guarded, and London kept in awe by the arrival of
+the guards. I don't believe what I have been told this morning, that
+more troops are sent for from Flanders, and aid asked of Denmark.
+
+Prince Charles has called a Parliament in Scotland for the 7th of
+October; ours does not meet till the 17th, so that even in the show of
+liberty and laws they are beforehand with us. With all this, we hear of
+no men of quality or fortune having joined him but Lord Elcho, whom you
+have seen at Florence; and the Duke of Peith, a silly race horsing boy,
+who is said to be killed in this battle. But I gather no confidence
+from hence: my father always said, "If you see them come again, they
+will begin by their lowest people; their chiefs will not appear till the
+end." His prophecies verify every day!
+
+The town is still empty; on this point only the English act contrary to
+their custom, for they don't throng to see a Parliament, though it is
+likely to grow a curiosity!...
+
+
+_GENERAL WADE IS MARCHING TO SCOTLAND--VIOLENT PROCLAMATION OF THE
+PRETENDER._
+
+TO SIR HORACE MANN.
+
+ARLINGTON STREET, _Oct._ 21, 1745.
+
+I had been almost as long without any of your letters as you had without
+mine; but yesterday I received one, dated the 5th of this month, N.S.
+
+The rebels have not left their camp near Edinburgh, and, I suppose, will
+not now, unless to retreat into the Highlands. General Wade was to march
+yesterday from Doncaster for Scotland. By their not advancing, I
+conclude that either the Boy and his council could not prevail on the
+Highlanders to leave their own country, or that they were not strong
+enough, and still wait for foreign assistance, which, in a new
+declaration, he intimates that he still expects. One only ship, I
+believe, a Spanish one, is got to them with arms, and Lord John Drummond
+and some people of quality on board. We don't hear that the younger Boy
+is of the number. Four ships sailed from Corunna; the one that got to
+Scotland, one taken by a privateer of Bristol, and one lost on the Irish
+coast; the fourth is not heard of. At Edinburgh and thereabouts they
+commit the most horrid barbarities. We last night expected as bad here:
+information was given of an intended insurrection and massacre by the
+Papists; all the Guards were ordered out, and the Tower shut up at
+seven. I cannot be surprised at anything, considering the supineness of
+the Ministry--nobody has yet been taken up!
+
+The Parliament met on Thursday. I don't think, considering the crisis,
+that the House was very full. Indeed, many of the Scotch members cannot
+come if they would. The young Pretender had published a declaration,
+threatening to confiscate the estates of the Scotch that should come to
+Parliament, and making it treason for the English. The only points that
+have been before the House, the address and the suspension of the Habeas
+Corpus, met with obstructions from the Jacobites. By this we may expect
+what spirit they will show hereafter. With all this, I am far from
+thinking that they are so confident and sanguine as their friends at
+Rome. I blame the Chutes extremely for cockading themselves: why take a
+part, when they are only travelling? I should certainly retire to
+Florence on this occasion.
+
+You may imagine how little I like our situation; but I don't despair.
+The little use they made, or could make of their victory; their not
+having marched into England; their miscarriage at the Castle of
+Edinburgh; the arrival of our forces, and the non-arrival of any French
+or Spanish, make me conceive great hopes of getting over this ugly
+business. But it is still an affair wherein the chance of battles, or
+perhaps of one battle, may decide.
+
+I write you but short letters, considering the circumstances of the
+time; but I hate to send you paragraphs only to contradict them again: I
+still less choose to forge events; and, indeed, am glad I have so few to
+tell you.
+
+My Lady O[rford] has forced herself upon her mother, who receives her
+very coolly: she talks highly of her demands, and quietly of her
+methods: the fruitlessness of either will, I hope, soon send her back--I
+am sorry it must be to you!
+
+You mention Holdisworth:[1] he has had the confidence to come and visit
+me within these ten days; and (I suppose, from the overflowing of his
+joy) talked a great deal and quick--with as little sense as when he was
+more tedious.
+
+[Footnote 1: A nonjuror, who travelled with Mr. George Pitt.--WALPOLE.]
+
+Since I wrote this, I hear the Countess [of Orford] has told her mother,
+that she thinks her husband the best of our family, and me the
+worst--nobody so bad, except you! I don't wonder at my being so ill with
+her; but what have you done? or is it, that we are worse than anybody,
+because we know more of her than anybody does? Adieu!
+
+
+_GALLANT RESISTANCE OF CARLISLE--MR. PITT ATTACKS THE MINISTRY._
+
+TO SIR HORACE MANN.
+
+ARLINGTON STREET, _Nov._ 22, 1745.
+
+For these two days we have been expecting news of a battle. Wade marched
+last Saturday from Newcastle, and must have got up with the rebels if
+they stayed for him, though the roads are exceedingly bad and great
+quantities of snow have fallen. But last night there was some notice of
+a body of rebels being advanced to Penryth. We were put into great
+spirits by an heroic letter from the Mayor of Carlisle, who had fired on
+the rebels and made them retire; he concluded with saying, "And so I
+think the town of Carlisle has done his Majesty more service than the
+great city of Edinburgh, or than all Scotland together." But this hero,
+who was grown the whole fashion for four-and-twenty hours, had chosen to
+stop all other letters. The King spoke of him at his _levee_ with great
+encomiums; Lord Stair said, "Yes, sir, Mr. Patterson has behaved very
+bravely." The Duke of Bedford interrupted him; "My lord, his name is not
+_Paterson_; that is a Scotch name; his name is _Patinson_." But, alack!
+the next day the rebels returned, having placed the women and children
+of the country in waggons in front of their army, and forcing the
+peasants to fix the scaling-ladders. The great Mr. Pattinson, or
+Patterson (for now his name may be which one pleases), instantly
+surrendered the town, and agreed to pay two thousand pounds to save it
+from pillage. Well! then we were assured that the citadel could hold out
+seven or eight days; but did not so many hours. On mustering the
+militia, there were not found above four men in a company; and for two
+companies, which the ministry, on a report of Lord Albemarle, who said
+they were to be sent from Wade's army, thought were there, and did not
+know were not there, there was nothing but two of invalids. Colonel
+Durand, the governor, fled, because he would not sign the capitulation,
+by which the garrison, it is said, has sworn never to bear arms against
+the house of Stuart. The Colonel sent two expresses, one to Wade, and
+another to Ligonier at Preston; but the latter was playing at whist with
+Lord Harrington at Petersham. Such is our diligence and attention! All
+my hopes are in Wade, who was so sensible of the ignorance of our
+governors, that he refused to accept the command, till they consented
+that he should be subject to no kind of orders from hence. The rebels
+are reckoned up at thirteen thousand; Wade marches with about twelve;
+but if they come southward, the other army will probably be to fight
+them; the Duke is to command it, and sets out next week with another
+brigade of Guards, the Ligonier under him. There are great apprehensions
+for Chester from the Flintshire-men, who are ready to rise. A
+quartermaster, first sent to Carlisle, was seized and carried to Wade;
+he behaved most insolently; and being asked by the general, how many the
+rebels were, replied, "Enough to beat any army you have in England." A
+Mackintosh has been taken, who reduces their formidability, by being
+sent to raise two clans, and with orders, if they would not rise, at
+least to give out they had risen, for that three clans would leave the
+Pretender, unless joined by those two. Five hundred new rebels are
+arrived at Perth, where our prisoners are kept.
+
+I had this morning a subscription-book brought me for our parish; Lord
+Granville had refused to subscribe. This is in the style of his friend
+Lord Bath, who has absented himself whenever any act of authority was to
+be executed against the rebels.
+
+Five Scotch lords are going to raise regiments _a l'Angloise_! resident
+in London, while the rebels were in Scotland; they are to receive
+military emoluments for their neutrality!
+
+The _Fox_ man-of-war of 20 guns is lost off Dunbar. One Beavor, the
+captain, has done us notable service: the Pretender sent to commend his
+zeal and activity, and to tell him, that if he would return to his
+allegiance, he should soon have a flag. Beavor replied, "He never
+treated with any but principals; that if the Pretender would come on
+board him, he would talk with him." I must now tell you of our great
+Vernon: without once complaining to the Ministry, he has written to Sir
+John Philipps, a distinguished Jacobite, to complain of want of
+provisions; yet they do not venture to recall him! Yesterday they had
+another baiting from Pitt, who is ravenous for the place of Secretary at
+War: they would give it him; but as a preliminary, he insists on a
+declaration of our having nothing to do with the continent. He mustered
+his forces, but did not notify his intention; only at two o'clock
+Lyttelton said at the Treasury, that there would be business at the
+House. The motion was, to augment our naval force, which, Pitt said, was
+the only method of putting an end to the rebellion. Ships built a year
+hence to suppress an army of Highlanders, now marching through England!
+My uncle [_old_ Horace] attacked him, and congratulated his country on
+the wisdom of the modern young men; and said he had a son of
+two-and-twenty, who, he did not doubt, would come over wiser than any of
+them. Pitt was provoked, and retorted on his negotiations and
+_grey-headed_ experience. At those words, my uncle, as if he had been at
+Bartholomew fair, snatched off his wig, and showed his grey hairs, which
+made the _august senate_ laugh, and put Pitt out, who, after laughing
+himself, diverted his venom upon Mr. Pelham. Upon the question, Pitt's
+party amounted but to thirty-six: in short, he has nothing left but his
+words, and his haughtiness, and his Lytteltons, and his Grenvilles.
+Adieu!
+
+
+_THE REBEL ARMY HAS RETREATED FROM DERBY--EXPECTATION OF A FRENCH
+INVASION._
+
+TO SIR HORACE MANN.
+
+ARLINGTON STREET, _Dec._ 9, 1745.
+
+I am glad I did not write to you last post as I intended; I should have
+sent you an account that would have alarmed you, and the danger would
+have been over before the letter had crossed the sea. The Duke, from
+some strange want of intelligence, lay last week for four-and-twenty
+hours under arms at Stone, in Staffordshire, expecting the rebels every
+moment, while they were marching in all haste to Derby. The news of this
+threw the town into great consternation; but his Royal Highness repaired
+his mistake, and got to Northampton, between the Highlanders and London.
+They got nine thousand pounds at Derby, and had the books brought to
+them, and obliged everybody to give them what they had subscribed
+against them. Then they retreated a few miles, but returned again to
+Derby, got ten thousand pounds more, plundered the town, and burnt a
+house of the Countess of Exeter. They are gone again, and go back to
+Leake, in Staffordshire, but miserably harassed, and, it is said, have
+left all their cannon behind them, and twenty waggons of sick. The Duke
+has sent General Hawley with the dragoons to harass them in their
+retreat, and despatched Mr. Conway to Marshal Wade, to hasten his march
+upon the back of them. They must either go to North Wales, where they
+will probably all perish, or to Scotland, with great loss. We dread them
+no longer. We are threatened with great preparations for a French
+invasion, but the coast is exceedingly guarded; and for the people, the
+spirit against the rebels increases every day. Though they have marched
+thus into the heart of the kingdom, there has not been the least symptom
+of a rising, nor even in the great towns of which they possessed
+themselves. They have got no recruits since their first entry into
+England, excepting one gentleman in Lancashire, one hundred and fifty
+common men, and two parsons, at Manchester, and a physician from York.
+But here in London, the aversion to them is amazing: on some thoughts of
+the King's going to an encampment at Finchley,[1] the weavers not only
+offered him a thousand men, but the whole body of the Law formed
+themselves into a little army, under the command of Lord Chief Justice
+Willes, and were to have done duty at St. James's, to guard the royal
+family in the King's absence.
+
+[Footnote 1: The troops which were being collected for the Duke of
+Cumberland, as soon as he should arrive from the Continent, to march
+with against the Pretender, were in the meantime encamped on Finchley
+Common near London. The march of the Guards to the camp is the subject
+of one of Hogarth's best pictures.]
+
+But the greatest demonstration of loyalty appeared on the prisoners
+being brought to town from the Soleil prize: the young man is certainly
+Mr. Radcliffe's son; but the mob, persuaded of his being the youngest
+Pretender, could scarcely be restrained from tearing him to pieces all
+the way on the road, and at his arrival. He said he had heard of English
+mobs, but could not conceive they were so dreadful, and wished he had
+been shot at the battle of Dettingen, where he had been engaged. The
+father, whom they call Lord Derwentwater, said, on entering the Tower,
+that he had never expected to arrive there alive. For the young man, he
+must only be treated as a French captive; for the father, it is
+sufficient to produce him at the Old Bailey, and prove that he is the
+individual person condemned for the last Rebellion, and so to Tyburn.
+
+We begin to take up people, but it is with as much caution and timidity
+as women of quality begin to pawn their jewels; we have not ventured
+upon any great stone yet! The Provost of Edinburgh is in custody of a
+messenger; and the other day they seized an odd man, who goes by the
+name of Count St. Germain. He has been here these two years, and will
+not tell who he is, or whence, but professes that he does not go by his
+right name. He sings, plays on the violin wonderfully, composes, is mad,
+and not very sensible. He is called an Italian, a Spaniard, a Pole; a
+somebody that married a great fortune in Mexico, and ran away with her
+jewels to Constantinople; a priest, a fiddler, a vast nobleman. The
+Prince of Wales has had unsatiated curiosity about him, but in vain.
+However, nothing has been made out against him;[1] he is released; and,
+what convinces me that he is not a gentleman, stays here, and talks of
+his being taken up for a spy.
+
+[Footnote 1: In the beginning of the year 1755, on rumours of a great
+armament at Brest, one Virette, a Swiss, who had been a kind of
+toad-eater to this St. Germain, was denounced to Lord Holdernesse for a
+spy; but Mr. Stanley going pretty surlily to his lordship, on his
+suspecting a friend of his, Virette was declared innocent, and the
+penitent secretary of state made him the _amende honorable_ of a dinner
+in form. About the same time, a spy of ours was seized at Brest, but,
+not happening to be acquainted with Mr. Stanley, was broken upon the
+wheel.--WALPOLE.]
+
+I think these accounts, upon which you may depend, must raise your
+spirits, and figure in Mr. Chute's loyal journal.--But you don't get my
+letters: I have sent you eleven since I came to town; how many of these
+have you received? Adieu!
+
+
+_BATTLE OF CULLODEN._
+
+TO SIR HORACE MANN.
+
+ARLINGTON STREET, _April_ 25, 1746.
+
+You have bid me for some time to send you good news--well! I think I
+will. How good would you have it? must it be a total victory over the
+rebels; with not only the Boy, that is here, killed, but the other, that
+is not here, too; their whole army put to the sword, besides an infinite
+number of prisoners; all the Jacobite estates in England confiscated,
+and all those in Scotland--what would you have done with them?--or could
+you be content with something much under this? how much will you abate?
+will you compound for Lord John Drummond, taken by accident? or for
+three Presbyterian parsons, who have very poor livings, stoutly refusing
+to pay a large contribution to the rebels? Come, I will deal as well
+with you as I can, and for once, but not to make a practice of it, will
+let you have a victory! My friend, Lord Bury, arrived this morning from
+the Duke, though the news was got here before him; for, with all our
+victory, it was not thought safe to send him through the heart of
+Scotland; so he was shipped at Inverness, within an hour after the Duke
+entered the town, kept beating at sea five days, and then put on shore
+at North Berwick, from whence he came post in less than three days to
+London; but with a fever upon him, for which he had been twice blooded
+but the day before the battle; but he is young, and high in spirits, and
+I flatter myself will not suffer from this kindness of the Duke: the
+King has immediately ordered him a thousand pound, and I hear will make
+him his own aide-de-camp. My dear Mr. Chute, I beg your pardon; I have
+forgot you have the gout, and consequently not the same patience to wait
+for the battle, with which I, knowing the particulars, postpone it.
+
+On the 16th, the Duke, by forced marches, came up with the rebels, a
+little on this side Inverness--by the way, the battle is not christened
+yet; I only know that neither Prestonpans nor Falkirk are to be
+godfathers. The rebels, who fled from him after their victory, and durst
+not attack him, when so much exposed to them at his passage of the Spey,
+now stood him, they seven thousand, he ten. They broke through Barril's
+regiment, and killed Lord Robert Kerr, a handsome young gentleman, who
+was cut to pieces with above thirty wounds; but they were soon repulsed,
+and fled; the whole engagement not lasting above a quarter of an hour.
+The young Pretender escaped; Mr. Conway says, he hears, wounded: he
+certainly was in the rear. They have lost above a thousand men in the
+engagement and pursuit; and six hundred were already taken; among which
+latter are their French ambassador and Earl Kilmarnock. The Duke of
+Perth and Lord Ogilvie are said to be slain; Lord Elcho was in a
+salivation, and not there. Except Lord Robert Kerr, we lost nobody of
+note: Sir Robert Rich's eldest son has lost his hand, and about a
+hundred and thirty private men fell. The defeat is reckoned total, and
+the dispersion general; and all their artillery is taken. It is a brave
+young Duke! The town is all blazing round me, as I write, with fireworks
+and illuminations: I have some inclination to wrap up half a dozen
+sky-rockets, to make you drink the Duke's health. Mr. Dodington, on the
+first report, came out with a very pretty illumination; so pretty, that
+I believe he had it by him, ready for _any_ occasion....
+
+
+_TRIAL OF THE REBEL LORDS BALMERINO AND KILMARNOCK._
+
+TO SIR HORACE MANN.
+
+ARLINGTON STREET, _Aug._ 1, 1746.
+
+I am this moment come from the conclusion of the greatest and most
+melancholy scene I ever yet saw! You will easily guess it was the Trials
+of the rebel Lords. As it was the most interesting sight, it was the
+most solemn and fine: a coronation is a puppet-show, and all the
+splendour of it idle; but this sight at once feasted one's eyes and
+engaged all one's passions. It began last Monday; three parts of
+Westminster Hall were inclosed with galleries, and hung with scarlet;
+and the whole ceremony was conducted with the most awful solemnity and
+decency, except in the one point of leaving the prisoners at the bar,
+amidst the idle curiosity of some crowd, and even with the witnesses
+who had sworn against them, while the Lords adjourned to their own House
+to consult. No part of the royal family was there, which was a proper
+regard to the unhappy men, who were become their victims. One hundred
+and thirty-nine Lords were present, and made a noble sight on their
+benches _frequent and full_! The Chancellor [Hardwicke] was Lord High
+Steward; but though a most comely personage with a fine voice, his
+behaviour was mean, curiously searching for occasion to bow to the
+minister [Mr. Pelham] that is no peer, and consequently applying to the
+other ministers, in a manner, for their orders; and not even ready at
+the ceremonial. To the prisoners he was peevish; and instead of keeping
+up to the humane dignity of the law of England, whose character it is to
+point out favour to the criminal, he crossed them, and almost scolded at
+any offer they made towards defence. I had armed myself with all the
+resolution I could, with the thought of their crimes and of the danger
+past, and was assisted by the sight of the Marquis of Lothian in weepers
+for his son who fell at Culloden--but the first appearance of the
+prisoners shocked me! their behaviour melted me! Lord Kilmarnock and
+Lord Cromartie are both past forty, but look younger. Lord Kilmarnock is
+tall and slender, with an extreme fine person: his behaviour a most just
+mixture between dignity and submission; if in anything to be
+reprehended, a little affected, and his hair too exactly dressed for a
+man in his situation; but when I say it is not to find fault with him,
+but to show how little fault there was to be found. Lord Cromartie is
+an indifferent figure, appeared much dejected, and rather sullen: he
+dropped a few tears the first day, and swooned as soon as he got back to
+his cell. For Lord Balmerino, he is the most natural brave old fellow I
+ever saw: the highest intrepidity, even to indifference. At the bar he
+behaved like a soldier and a man; at the intervals of form, with
+carelessness and humour. He pressed extremely to have his wife, his
+pretty Peggy, with him in the Tower. Lady Cromartie only sees her
+husband through the grate, not choosing to be shut up with him, as she
+thinks she can serve him better by her intercession without: she is big
+with child and very handsome: so are their daughters. When they were to
+be brought from the Tower in separate coaches, there was some dispute in
+which the axe must go--old Balmerino cried, "Come, come, put it with
+me." At the bar, he plays with his fingers upon the axe, while he talks
+with the gentleman-gaoler; and one day somebody coming up to listen, he
+took the blade and held it like a fan between their faces. During the
+trial, a little boy was near him, but not tall enough to see; he made
+room for the child and placed him near himself.
+
+When the trial began, the two Earls pleaded guilty; Balmerino not
+guilty, saying he could prove his not being at the taking of the castle
+of Carlisle, as was laid in the indictment. Then the King's counsel
+opened, and Serjeant Skinner pronounced the most absurd speech
+imaginable; and mentioned the Duke of Perth, "who," said he, "I see by
+the papers is dead." Then some witnesses were examined, whom afterwards
+the old hero shook cordially by the hand. The Lords withdrew to their
+House, and returning, demanded of the judges, whether one point not
+being proved, though all the rest were, the indictment was false? to
+which they unanimously answered in the negative. Then the Lord High
+Steward asked the Peers severally, whether Lord Balmerino was guilty!
+All said, "guilty upon honour," and then adjourned, the prisoner having
+begged pardon for giving them so much trouble. While the Lords were
+withdrawn, the Solicitor-General Murray (brother of the Pretender's
+minister) officiously and insolently went up to Lord Balmerino, and
+asked him, how he could give the Lords so much trouble, when his
+solicitor had informed him that his plea could be of no use to him?
+Balmerino asked the bystanders who this person was? and being told he
+said, "Oh, Mr. Murray! I am extremely glad to see you; I have been with
+several of your relations; the good lady, your mother, was of great use
+to us at Perth." Are not you charmed with this speech? how just it was!
+As he went away, he said, "They call me Jacobite; I am no more a
+Jacobite than any that tried me: but if the Great Mogul had set up his
+standard, I should have followed it, for I could not starve." The worst
+of his case is, that after the battle of Dumblain, having a company in
+the Duke of Argyll's regiment, he deserted with it to the rebels, and
+has since been pardoned. Lord Kilmarnock is a Presbyterian, with four
+earldoms in him, but so poor since Lord Wilmington's stopping a pension
+that my father had given him, that he often wanted a dinner. Lord
+Cromartie was receiver of the rents of the King's second son in
+Scotland, which, it was understood, he should not account for; and by
+that means had six-hundred a-year from the Government: Lord Elibank, a
+very prating, impertinent Jacobite, was bound for him in nine thousand
+pounds, for which the Duke is determined to sue him.
+
+When the Peers were going to vote, Lord Foley withdrew, as too well a
+wisher; Lord Moray, as nephew of Lord Balmerino--and Lord Stair,--as, I
+believe, uncle to his great-grandfather. Lord Windsor, very affectedly,
+said, "I am sorry I must say, _guilty upon my honour_." Lord Stamford
+would not answer to the name of _Henry_, having been christened
+_Harry_--what a great way of thinking on such an occasion! I was
+diverted too with old Norsa, the father of my brother's concubine, an
+old Jew that kept a tavern; my brother [Orford], as Auditor of the
+Exchequer, has a gallery along one whole side of the court; I said, "I
+really feel for the prisoners!" old Issachar replied, "Feel for them!
+pray, if they had succeeded, what would have become of _all us_?" When
+my Lady Townsend heard her husband vote, she said, "I always knew _my_
+Lord was _guilty_, but I never thought he would own it _upon his
+honour_." Lord Balmerino said, that one of his reasons for pleading _not
+guilty_, was that so many ladies might not be disappointed of their
+show.
+
+On Wednesday they were again brought to Westminster Hall, to receive
+sentence; and being asked what they had to say, Lord Kilmarnock, with a
+very fine voice, read a very fine speech, confessing the extent of his
+crime, but offering his principles as some alleviation, having his
+eldest son (his second unluckily with him), in the Duke's army,
+_fighting for the liberties of his country at Culloden, where his
+unhappy father was in arms to destroy them_. He insisted much on his
+tenderness to the English prisoners, which some deny, and say that he
+was the man who proposed their being put to death, when General
+Stapleton urged that _he_ was come to fight, but not to butcher; and
+that if they acted any such barbarity, he would leave them with all his
+men. He very artfully mentioned Van Hoey's letter, and said how much he
+would scorn to owe his life to such intercession.[1] Lord Cromartie
+spoke much shorter, and so low, that he was not heard but by those who
+sat very near him; but they prefer his speech to the other. He mentioned
+his misfortune in having drawn in his eldest son, who is prisoner with
+him; and concluded with saying, "If no part of this bitter cup must pass
+from me, not mine, O God, but thy will be done!" If he had pleaded _not
+guilty_, there was ready to be produced against him a paper signed with
+his own hand, for putting the English prisoners to death.
+
+[Footnote 1: In a subsequent letter Walpole attributes Lord Kilmarnock's
+complicity in the rebellion partly to the influence of his mother, the
+Countess of Errol, and partly to his extreme poverty. He says: "I don't
+know whether I told you that the man at the tennis-court protests that
+he has known him dine with the man that sells pamphlets at Storey's
+Gate; 'and,' says he, 'he would often have been glad if I would have
+taken him home to dinner.' He was certainly so poor, that in one of his
+wife's intercepted letters she tells him she has plagued their steward
+for a fortnight for money, and can get but three shillings." One cannot
+help remembering, _Ibit eo quo vis qui zonam perdidit_. And afterwards,
+in relating his execution, he mentions a report that the Duke of
+Cumberland charging him (certainly on misinformation) with having
+promoted the adoption of "a resolution taken the day before the battle
+of Culloden" to put the English prisoners to death, "decided this
+unhappy man's fate" by preventing his obtaining a pardon.]
+
+Lord Leicester went up to the Duke of Newcastle, and said, "I never
+heard so great an orator as Lord Kilmarnock? if I was your grace I would
+pardon him, and make him _paymaster_."[1]
+
+[Footnote 1: "_I would make him paymaster._" The paymaster at this time
+was Mr. Pitt.]
+
+That morning a paper had been sent to the lieutenant of the Tower for
+the prisoners; he gave it to Lord Cornwallis, the governor, who carried
+it to the House of Lords. It was a plea for the prisoners, objecting
+that the late act for regulating the trials of rebels did not take place
+till after their crime was committed. The Lords very tenderly and
+rightly sent this plea to them, of which, as you have seen, the two
+Earls did not make use; but old Balmerino did, and demanded council on
+it. The High Steward, almost in a passion, told him, that when he had
+been offered council, he did not accept it. Do but think on the ridicule
+of sending them the plea, and then denying them council on it! The Duke
+of Newcastle, who never let slip an opportunity of being absurd, took it
+up as a ministerial point, in defence of his creature the Chancellor
+[Hardwicke]; but Lord Granville moved, according to order, to adjourn to
+debate in the chamber of Parliament, where the Duke of Bedford and many
+others spoke warmly for their having council; and it was granted. I said
+_their_, because the plea would have saved them all, and affected nine
+rebels who had been hanged that very morning; particularly one Morgan, a
+poetical lawyer. Lord Balmerino asked for Forester and Wilbraham; the
+latter a very able lawyer in the House of Commons, who, the Chancellor
+said privately, he was sure would as soon be hanged as plead such a
+cause. But he came as council to-day (the third day), when Lord
+Balmerino gave up his plea as invalid, and submitted, without any
+speech. The High Steward [Hardwicke] then made his, very long and very
+poor, with only one or two good passages; and then pronounced sentence!
+
+Great intercession is made for the two Earls: Duke Hamilton, who has
+never been at Court, designs to kiss the King's hand, and ask Lord
+Kilmarnock's life. The King is much inclined to some mercy; but the
+Duke, who has not so much of Caesar after a victory, as in gaining it,
+is for the utmost severity. It was lately proposed in the city to
+present him with the freedom of some company; one of the aldermen said
+aloud, "Then let it be of the _Butchers_!"[1] The Scotch and his Royal
+Highness are not at all guarded in their expressions of each other. When
+he went to Edinburgh, in his pursuit of the rebels, they would not
+admit his guards, alleging that it was contrary to their privileges; but
+they rode in, sword in hand; and the Duke, very justly incensed, refused
+to see any of the magistrates. He came with the utmost expedition to
+town, in order for Flanders; but found that the Court of Vienna had
+already sent Prince Charles thither, without the least notification, at
+which both King and Duke are greatly offended. When the latter waited on
+his brother, the Prince carried him into a room that hangs over the wall
+of St. James's Park, and stood there with his arm about his neck, to
+charm the gazing mob.
+
+[Footnote 1: "The Duke," says Sir Walter Scott, "was received with all
+the honours due to conquest; and all the incorporated bodies of the
+capital, from the Guild brethren to the Butchers, desired the acceptance
+of the freedom of their craft, or corporation." Billy the Butcher was
+one of his by-names.]
+
+Murray, the Pretender's secretary, has made ample confessions: the Earl
+of Traquair, and Mr. Barry, a physician, are apprehended, and more
+warrants are out; so much for rebels! Your friend, Lord Sandwich, is
+instantly going ambassador to Holland, to pray the Dutch to build more
+ships. I have received yours of July 19th, but you see have no more room
+left, only to say, that I conceive a good idea of my eagle, though the
+seal is a bad one. Adieu!
+
+P.S.--I have not room to say anything to the Tesi till next post; but,
+unless she will sing gratis, would advise her to drop this thought.
+
+
+_THE BATTLE OF RANCOUX._
+
+TO SIR HORACE MANN.
+
+ARLINGTON STREET, _Oct._ 14, 1746.
+
+You will have been alarmed with the news of another battle lost in
+Flanders, where we have no Kings of Sardinia. We make light of it; do
+not allow it to be a battle, but call it "the action near Liege." Then
+we have whittled down our loss extremely, and will not allow a man more
+than three hundred and fifty English slain out of the four thousand. The
+whole of it, as it appears to me, is, that we gave up eight battalions
+to avoid fighting; as at Newmarket people pay their forfeit when they
+foresee they should lose the race; though, if the whole army had fought,
+and we had lost the day, one might have hoped to have come off for eight
+battalions. Then they tell you that the French had
+four-and-twenty-pounders, and that they must beat us by the superiority
+of their cannon; so that to me it is grown a paradox, to war with a
+nation who have a mathematical certainty of beating you; or else it is
+still a stranger paradox, why you cannot have as large cannon as the
+French.[1] This loss was balanced by a pompous account of the triumphs
+of our invasion of Bretagne; which, in plain terms, I think, is reduced
+to burning two or three villages and reimbarking: at least, two or three
+of the transports are returned with this history, and know not what is
+become of Lestock and the rest of the invasion. The young Pretender is
+landed in France, with thirty Scotch, but in such a wretched condition
+that his Highland Highness had no breeches.
+
+[Footnote 1: Marshal Saxe had inspired his army with confidence that a
+day of battle was sure to be a day of victory, as was shown by the
+theatrical company which accompanied the camp. After the performance on
+the evening of October 10th the leading actress announced that there
+would be no performance on the morrow, because there was to be a battle,
+but on the 12th the company would have the honour of presenting "The
+Village Clock." (See the Editor's "France under the Bourbons," iii.
+26.)]
+
+I have received yours of the 27th of last month, with the capitulation
+of Genoa, and the kind conduct of the Austrians to us their allies, so
+extremely like their behaviour whenever they are fortunate. Pray, by the
+way, has there been any talk of my cousin, the Commodore, being
+blameable in letting slip some Spanish ships?--don't mention it as from
+me, but there are whispers of court-martial on him. They are all the
+fashion now; if you miss a post to me, I will have you tried by a
+court-martial. Cope is come off most gloriously, his courage
+ascertained, and even his conduct, which everybody had given up,
+justified. Folkes and Lascelles, two of his generals, are come off too;
+but not so happily in the opinion of the world. Oglethorpe's sentence is
+not yet public, but it is believed not to be favourable. He was always a
+bully, and is now tried for cowardice. Some little dash of the same sort
+is likely to mingle with the judgment on _il furibondo_ Matthews; though
+his party rises again a little, and Lestock's acquittal begins to pass
+for a party affair. In short, we are a wretched people, and have seen
+our best days!
+
+I must have lost a letter, if you really told me of the sale of the
+Duke of Modena's pictures, as you think you did; for when Mr. Chute told
+it me, it struck me as quite new. They are out of town, good souls; and
+I shall not see them this fortnight; for I am here only for two or three
+days, to inquire after the battle, in which not one of my friends were.
+Adieu!
+
+
+_ON CONWAY'S VERSES--NO SCOTCH_MAN_ IS CAPABLE OF SUCH DELICACY OF
+THOUGHT, THOUGH A SCOTCHWOMAN MAY BE--AKENSIDE'S, ARMSTRONG'S, AND
+GLOVER'S POEMS._
+
+TO THE HON. H.S. CONWAY.
+
+WINDSOR, _Oct._ 24, 1746.
+
+Well, Harry, Scotland is the last place on earth I should have thought
+of for turning anybody poet: but I begin to forgive it half its treasons
+in favour of your verses, for I suppose you don't think I am the dupe of
+the Highland story that you tell me: the only use I shall make of it is
+to commend the lines to you, as if they really were a Scotchman's. There
+is a melancholy harmony in them that is charming, and a delicacy in the
+thoughts that no Scotchman is capable of, though a _Scotchwoman_ might
+inspire it.[1] I beg, both for Cynthia's sake and my own, that you
+would continue your De Tristibus till I have an opportunity of seeing
+your muse, and she of rewarding her: _Reprens la musette, berger
+amoureux_! If Cynthia has ever travelled ten miles in fairy-land, she
+must be wondrous content with the person and qualifications of her
+knight, who in future story will be read of thus: Elmedorus was tall and
+perfectly well made, his face oval, and features regularly handsome, but
+not effeminate; his complexion sentimentally brown, with not much
+colour; his teeth fine, and forehead agreeably low, round which his
+black hair curled naturally and beautifully. His eyes were black too,
+but had nothing of fierce or insolent; on the contrary, a certain
+melancholy swimmingness, that described hopeless love rather than a
+natural amorous languish. His exploits in war, where he always fought by
+the side of the renowned Paladine William of England, have endeared his
+memory to all admirers of true chivalry, as the mournful elegies which
+he poured out among the desert rocks of Caledonia in honour of the
+peerless lady and his heart's idol, the incomparable Cynthia, will for
+ever preserve his name in the flowery annals of poesy.
+
+[Footnote 1: Walpole could not foresee the genius of Burns, that before
+his own death was to shed such glory on Scotland. His compliment to a
+Scotchwoman was an allusion to Lady Aylesbury (_nee_ Miss Caroline
+Campbell), whom Conway married after her husband's death, which took
+place a few months after the date of this letter. Lady Aylesbury was no
+poetess, but his estimate of what might be accomplished by Scotch ladies
+was afterwards fully borne out by Lady Anne Lindsay, the authoress of
+"Auld Gray," and Lady Nairn.]
+
+What a pity it is I was not born in the golden age of Louis the
+Fourteenth, when it was not only the fashion to write folios, but to
+read them too! or rather, it is a pity the same fashion don't subsist
+now, when one need not be at the trouble of invention, nor of turning
+the whole Roman history into romance for want of proper heroes. Your
+campaign in Scotland, rolled out and well be-epitheted, would make a
+pompous work, and make one's fortune; at sixpence a number, one should
+have all the damsels within the liberties for subscribers: whereas now,
+if one has a mind to be read, one must write metaphysical poems in blank
+verse, which, though I own to be still easier, have not half the
+imagination of romances, and are dull without any agreeable absurdity.
+Only think of the gravity of this wise age, that have exploded
+"Cleopatra and Pharamond," and approve "The Pleasures of the
+Imagination," "The Art of Preserving Health," and "Leonidas!" I beg the
+age's pardon: it has done approving these poems, and has forgot them.
+
+Adieu! dear Harry. Thank you seriously for the poem. I am going to town
+for the birthday, and shall return hither till the Parliament meets; I
+suppose there is no doubt of our meeting then.
+
+Yours ever.
+
+P.S.--Now you are at Stirling, if you should meet with Drummond's
+History of the five King Jameses, pray look it over. I have lately read
+it, and like it much. It is wrote in imitation of Livy; the style
+masculine, and the whole very sensible; only he ascribes the misfortunes
+of one reign to the then king's loving architecture and
+
+    In trim gardens taking pleasure.
+
+
+_HE HAS BOUGHT STRAWBERRY HILL._
+
+TO THE HON. H.S. CONWAY.
+
+TWICKENHAM, _June_ 8, 1747.
+
+You perceive by my date that I am got into a new camp, and have left my
+tub at Windsor. It is a little plaything-house that I got out of Mrs.
+Chenevix's shop, and is the prettiest bauble you ever saw. It is set in
+enamelled meadows, with filigree hedges:
+
+    A small Euphrates through the piece is told,
+    And little finches wave their wings in gold.
+
+Two delightful roads, that you would call dusty, supply me continually
+with coaches and chaises: barges as solemn as Barons of the Exchequer
+move under my window; Richmond Hill and Ham walks bound my prospect;
+but, thank God! the Thames is between me and the Duchess of Queensberry.
+Dowagers as plenty as flounders inhabit all around, and Pope's ghost is
+just now skimming under my window by a most poetical moonlight. I have
+about land enough to keep such a farm as Noah's, when he set up in the
+ark with a pair of each kind; but my cottage is rather cleaner than I
+believe his was after they had been cooped up together forty days. The
+Chenevixes had tricked it out for themselves: up two pair of stairs is
+what they call Mr. Chenevix's library, furnished with three maps, one
+shelf, a bust of Sir Isaac Newton, and a lame telescope without any
+glasses. Lord John Sackville _predecessed_ me here, and instituted
+certain games called _cricketalia_, which have been celebrated this
+very evening in honour of him in a neighbouring meadow.
+
+You will think I have removed my philosophy from Windsor with my
+tea-things hither; for I am writing to you in all this tranquillity,
+while a Parliament is bursting about my ears. You know it is going to be
+dissolved: I am told, you are taken care of, though I don't know where,
+nor whether anybody that chooses you will quarrel with me because he
+does choose you, as that little bug the Marquis of Rockingham did; one
+of the calamities of my life which I have bore as abominably well as I
+do most about which I don't care. They say the Prince has taken up two
+hundred thousand pounds, to carry elections which he won't carry:--he
+had much better have saved it to buy the Parliament after it is chosen.
+A new set of peers are in embryo, to add more dignity to the silence of
+the House of Lords.
+
+I made no remarks on your campaign, because, as you say, you do nothing
+at all; which, though very proper nutriment for a thinking head, does
+not do quite so well to write upon. If any one of you can but contrive
+to be shot upon your post, it is all we desire, shall look upon it as a
+great curiosity, and will take care to set up a monument to the person
+so slain; as we are doing by vote to Captain Cornewall, who was killed
+at the beginning of the action in the Mediterranean four years ago. In
+the present dearth of glory, he is canonized; though, poor man! he had
+been tried twice the year before for cowardice.
+
+I could tell you much election news, none else; though not being
+thoroughly attentive to so important a subject, as to be sure one ought
+to be, I might now and then mistake, and give you a candidate for Durham
+in place of one for Southampton, or name the returning officer instead
+of the candidate. In general, I believe, it is much as usual--those sold
+in detail that afterwards will be sold in the representation--the
+ministers bribing Jacobites to choose friends of their own--the name of
+well-wishers to the present establishment, and patriots outbidding
+ministers that they may make the better market of their own
+patriotism:--in short, all England, under some name or other, is just
+now to be bought and sold; though, whenever we become posterity and
+forefathers, we shall be in high repute for wisdom and virtue. My
+great-great-grandchildren will figure me with a white beard down to my
+girdle; and Mr. Pitt's will believe him unspotted enough to have walked
+over nine hundred hot ploughshares, without hurting the sole of his
+foot. How merry my ghost will be, and shake its ears to hear itself
+quoted as a person of consummate prudence! Adieu, dear Harry!
+
+Yours ever.
+
+
+_HIS MODE OF LIFE--PLANTING--PROPHECIES OF NEW METHODS AND NEW
+DISCOVERIES IN A FUTURE GENERATION._
+
+TO THE HON. H.S. CONWAY.
+
+STRAWBERRY HILL, _Aug._ 29, 1748.
+
+Dear Harry,--Whatever you may think, a campaign at Twickenham furnishes
+as little matter for a letter as an abortive one in Flanders. I can't
+say indeed that my generals wear black wigs, but they have long
+full-bottomed hoods which cover as little entertainment to the full.
+
+[Illustration: STRAWBERRY HILL, FROM THE SOUTH EAST.]
+
+There's General my Lady Castlecomer, and General my Lady Dowager Ferris!
+Why, do you think I can extract more out of them than you can out of
+Hawley or Honeywood? Your old women dress, go to the Duke's levee, see
+that the soldiers cock their hats right, sleep after dinner, and soak
+with their led-captains till bed-time, and tell a thousand lies of what
+they never did in their youth. Change hats for head-clothes, the rounds
+for visits, and led-captains for toad-eaters, and the life is the very
+same. In short, these are the people I live in the midst of, though not
+with; and it is for want of more important histories that I have wrote
+to you seldom; not, I give you my word, from the least negligence. My
+present and sole occupation is planting, in which I have made great
+progress and talked very learnedly with the nurserymen, except that now
+and then a lettuce run to seed overturns all my botany, as I have more
+than once taken it for a curious West Indian flowering shrub. Then the
+deliberation with which trees grow, is extremely inconvenient to my
+natural impatience. I lament living in so barbarous an age, when we are
+come to so little perfection in gardening. I am persuaded that a hundred
+and fifty years hence it will be as common to remove oaks a hundred and
+fifty years old, as it is now to transplant tulip roots.[1] I have even
+begun a treatise or panegyric on the great discoveries made by posterity
+in all arts and sciences, wherein I shall particularly descant on the
+great and cheap convenience of making trout-rivers--one of the
+improvements which Mrs. Kerwood wondered Mr. Hedges would not make at
+his country-house, but which was not then quite so common as it will be.
+I shall talk of a secret for roasting a wild boar and a whole pack of
+hounds alive, without hurting them, so that the whole chase may be
+brought up to table; and for this secret, the Duke of Newcastle's
+grandson, if he can ever get a son, is to give a hundred thousand
+pounds. Then the delightfulness of having whole groves of humming-birds,
+tame tigers taught to fetch and carry, pocket spying-glasses to see
+all that is doing in China, with a thousand other toys, which we now
+look upon as impracticable, and which pert posterity would laugh in
+one's face for staring at, while they are offering rewards for
+perfecting discoveries, of the principles of which we have not the least
+conception! If ever this book should come forth, I must expect to have
+all the learned in arms against me, who measure all knowledge backward:
+some of them have discovered symptoms of all arts in Homer; and
+Pineda,[2] had so much faith in the accomplishments of his ancestors,
+that he believed Adam understood all sciences but politics. But as these
+great champions for our forefathers are dead, and Boileau not alive to
+hitch me into a verse with Perrault, I am determined to admire the
+learning of posterity, especially being convinced that half our present
+knowledge sprung from discovering the errors of what had formerly been
+called so. I don't think I shall ever make any great discoveries myself,
+and therefore shall be content to propose them to my descendants, like
+my Lord Bacon,[3] who, as Dr. Shaw says very prettily in his preface to
+Boyle, "had the art of inventing arts:" or rather like a Marquis of
+Worcester, of whom I have seen a little book which he calls "A Century
+of Inventions,"[4] where he has set down a hundred machines to do
+impossibilities with, and not a single direction how to make the
+machines themselves.
+
+[Footnote 1: It is worth noting that these predictions that "it will be
+common to remove oaks a hundred and fifty years old" has been verified
+many years since; at least, if not in the case of oaks, in that of large
+elms and ashtrees. In 1850 Mr. Paxton offered to a Committee of the
+House of Commons to undertake to remove the large elm which was standing
+on the ground proposed for the Crystal Palace of the Exhibition of 1851,
+and his master, the Duke of Devonshire, has since that time removed many
+trees of very large size from one part of his grounds to another; and
+similarly the "making of trout rivers" has been carried out in many
+places, even in our most distant colonies, by Mr. Buckland's method of
+raising the young fish from roe in boxes and distributing them in places
+where they were needed.]
+
+[Footnote 2: Pineda was a Spanish Jesuit of the seventeenth century, and
+a voluminous writer.]
+
+[Footnote 3: It is a singular thing that this most eminent man should be
+so constantly spoken of by a title which he never had. His first title
+in the peerage was Baron Verulam; his second, on a subsequent promotion,
+was Viscount St. Albans; yet the error is as old as Dryden, and is
+defended by Lord Macaulay in a sentence of pre-eminent absurdity:
+"Posterity has felt that the greatest of English philosophers could
+derive no accession of dignity from any title which power could bestow,
+and, in defiance of letters-patent, has obstinately refused to degrade
+Francis Bacon into Viscount St. Albans." But, without stopping to
+discuss the propriety of representing a Britiph peerage, honestly
+earned, and, in his case as Lord Chancellor, necessarily conferred, as a
+"degradation," the mistake made is not that of continuing to call him
+Francis Bacon, a name by which at one time he was known, but that of
+calling him "Lord Bacon," a title by which he was never known for a
+single moment in his lifetime; while, if a great philosopher was really
+"degraded" by a peerage, it is hard to see how the degradation would
+have been lessened by the title being Lord Bacon, which it was not,
+rather than Viscount St. Albans, which it was.]
+
+[Footnote 4: The "Biographie Universelle" (art. _Newcomen_) says of the
+Marquis: "Longtemps avant lui [Neucomen] on avait remarque la grande
+force expansive de la vapeur, et on avait imagine de l'employer comme
+puissance. On trouve deja cette application proposee et meme executee
+dans un ouvrage publie en 1663, par le Marquis de Worcester, sous le
+titre bizarre, 'A Century of Inventions.'"]
+
+If I happen to be less punctual in my correspondence than I intend to
+be, you must conclude I am writing my book, which being designed for a
+panegyric, will cost me a great deal of trouble. The dedication with
+your leave, shall be addressed to your son that is coming, or, with Lady
+Ailesbury's leave, to your ninth son, who will be unborn nearer to the
+time I am writing of; always provided that she does not bring three at
+once, like my Lady Berkeley.
+
+Well! I have here set you the example of writing nonsense when one has
+nothing to say, and shall take it ill if you don't keep up the
+correspondence on the same foot. Adieu!
+
+
+_REJOICINGS FOR THE PEACE--MASQUERADE AT RANELAGH--MEETING OF THE
+PRINCES PARTY AND THE JACOBITES--PREVALENCE OF DRINKING AND
+GAMBLING--WHITEFIELD._
+
+TO SIR HORACE MANN.
+
+STRAWBERRY HILL, _May_ 3, 1749.
+
+I am come hither for a few days, to repose myself after a torrent of
+diversions, and am writing to you in my charming bow-window with a
+tranquillity and satisfaction which, I fear, I am grown old enough to
+prefer to the hurry of amusements, in which the whole world has lived
+for this last week. We have at last celebrated the Peace, and that as
+much in extremes as we generally do everything, whether we have reason
+to be glad or sorry, pleased or angry. Last Tuesday it was proclaimed:
+the King did not go to St. Paul's, but at night the whole town was
+illuminated. The next day was what was called "a jubilee-masquerade in
+the Venetian manner" at Ranelagh: it had nothing Venetian in it, but was
+by far the best understood and the prettiest spectacle I ever saw:
+nothing in a fairy tale ever surpassed it. One of the proprietors, who
+is a German, and belongs to Court, had got my Lady Yarmouth to persuade
+the King to order it. It began at three o'clock, and, about five, people
+of fashion began to go. When you entered, you found the whole garden
+filled with masks and spread with tents, which remained all night _very
+commodely_. In one quarter, was a May-pole dressed with garlands, and
+people dancing round it to a tabor and pipe and rustic music, all
+masqued, as were all the various bands of music that were disposed in
+different parts of the garden; some like huntsmen with French horns,
+some like peasants, and a troop of harlequins and scaramouches in the
+little open temple on the mount. On the canal was a sort of gondola,
+adorned with flags and streamers, and filled with music, rowing about.
+All round the outside of the amphitheatre were shops, filled with
+Dresden china, japan, &c., and all the shopkeepers in mask. The
+amphitheatre was illuminated; and in the middle was a circular bower,
+composed of all kinds of firs in tubs, from twenty to thirty feet high:
+under them orange-trees, with small lamps in each orange, and below them
+all sorts of the finest auriculas in pots; and festoons of natural
+flowers hanging from tree to tree. Between the arches too were firs, and
+smaller ones in the balconies above. There were booths for tea and wine,
+gaming-tables and dancing, and about two thousand persons. In short, it
+pleased me more than anything I ever saw. It is to be once more, and
+probably finer as to dresses, as there has since been a subscription
+masquerade, and people will go in their rich habits. The next day were
+the fireworks, which by no means answered the expense, the length of
+preparation, and the expectation that had been raised; indeed, for a
+week before, the town was like a country fair, the streets filled from
+morning to night, scaffolds building wherever you could or could not
+see, and coaches arriving from every corner of the kingdom. This hurry
+and lively scene, with the sight of the immense crowd in the Park and on
+every house, the guards, and the machine itself, which was very
+beautiful, was all that was worth seeing. The rockets, and whatever was
+thrown up into the air, succeeded mighty well; but the wheels, and all
+that was to compose the principal part, were pitiful and ill-conducted,
+with no changes of coloured fires and shapes: the illumination was mean,
+and lighted so slowly that scarce anybody had patience to wait the
+finishing; and then, what contributed to the awkwardness of the whole,
+was the right pavilion catching fire, and being burnt down in the middle
+of the show. The King, the Duke, and Princess Emily saw it from the
+Library, with their courts: the Prince and Princess, with their
+children, from Lady Middlesex's; no place being provided for them, nor
+any invitation given to the library. The Lords and Commons had galleries
+built for them and the chief citizens along the rails of the Mall: the
+Lords had four tickets a-piece, and each Commoner, at first, but two,
+till the Speaker bounced and obtained a third. Very little mischief was
+done, and but two persons killed: at Paris, there were forty killed and
+near three hundred wounded, by a dispute between the French and Italians
+in the management, who, quarrelling for precedence in lighting the
+fires, both lighted at once and blew up the whole. Our mob was extremely
+tranquil, and very unlike those I remember in my father's time, when it
+was a measure in the Opposition to work up everything to mischief, the
+Excise and the French players, the Convention and the Gin Act. We are as
+much now in the opposite extreme, and in general so pleased with the
+peace, that I could not help being struck with a passage I read lately
+in Pasquier, an old French author, who says, "that in the time of
+Francis I. the French used to call their creditors 'Des Anglois,' from
+the facility with which the English gave credit to them in all treaties,
+though they had broken so many." On Saturday we had a serenta at the
+Opera-house, called Peace in Europe, but it was a wretched performance.
+On Monday there was a subscription masquerade, much fuller than that of
+last year, but not so agreeable or so various in dresses. The King was
+well disguised in an old-fashioned English habit, and much pleased with
+somebody who desired him to hold their cup as they were drinking tea.
+The Duke had a dress of the same kind, but was so immensely corpulent
+that he looked like Cacofogo, the drunken captain, in "Rule a Wife and
+have a Wife." The Duchess of Richmond was a Lady Mayoress in the time of
+James I.; and Lord Delawarr, Queen Elizabeth's porter, from a picture in
+the guard-chamber at Kensington: they were admirable masks. Lord
+Rochford, Miss Evelyn, Miss Bishop, Lady Stafford, and Mrs. Pitt, were
+in vast beauty; particularly the last, who had a red veil, which made
+her look gloriously handsome. I forgot Lady Kildare. Mr. Conway was the
+Duke in "Don Quixote," and the finest figure I ever saw. Miss Chudleigh
+was Iphigenia, but so naked that you would have taken her for Andromeda;
+and Lady Betty Smithson [Seymour] had such a pyramid of baubles upon her
+head, that she was exactly the Princess of Babylon in Grammont.
+
+You will conclude that, after all these diversions, people begin to
+think of going out of town--no such matter: the Parliament continues
+sitting, and will till the middle of June; Lord Egmont told us we should
+sit till Michaelmas. There are many private bills, no public ones of any
+fame. We were to have had some chastisement for Oxford, where, besides
+the late riots, the famous Dr. King,[1] the Pretender's great agent,
+made a most violent speech at the opening of the Ratcliffe Library. The
+ministry denounced judgment, but, in their old style, have grown
+frightened, and dropped it. However, this menace gave occasion to a
+meeting and union between the Prince's party and the Jacobites which
+Lord Egmont has been labouring all the winter. They met at the St.
+Alban's tavern, near Pall Mall, last Monday morning, a hundred and
+twelve Lords and Commoners. The Duke of Beaufort opened the assembly
+with a panegyric on the stand that had been made this winter against so
+corrupt an administration, and hoped it would continue, and desired
+harmony. Lord Egmont seconded this strongly, and begged they would come
+up to Parliament early next winter. Lord Oxford spoke next; and then
+Potter with great humour, and to the great abashment of the Jacobites,
+said he was very glad to see this union, and from thence hoped, that if
+another attack like the last Rebellion should be made on the Royal
+Family, they would all stand by them. No reply was made to this. Then
+Sir Watkyn Williams spoke, Sir Francis Dashwood,[2] and Tom Pitt, and
+the meeting broke up. I don't know what this coalition may produce: it
+will require time with no better heads than compose it at present,
+though the great Mr. Dodington had carried to the conference the
+assistance of his. In France a very favourable event has happened for
+us, the disgrace of Maurepas,[3] one of our bitterest enemies, and the
+greatest promoter of their marine. Just at the beginning of the war, in
+a very critical period, he had obtained a very large sum for that
+service, but which one of the other factions, lest he should gain glory
+and credit by it, got to be suddenly given away to the King of Prussia.
+
+[Footnote 1: Dr. King was Principal of St. Mary's Hall, Oxford, and one
+of the chief supports of the Jacobite party after 1745.]
+
+[Footnote 2: Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1761, through the influence
+of the Earl of Bute. He was the owner of Medmenham Abbey, on the Thames,
+and as such, the President of the profligate Club whose doings were made
+notorious by the proceedings against Wilkes, and who, in compliment to
+him, called themselves the Franciscans.]
+
+[Footnote 3: The Comte de Maurepas was the grandson of the Chancellor of
+France, M. de Pontchartrain. When only fourteen years old Louis had made
+him Secretary of State for the Marine, as a consolation to his
+grandfather for his dismissal; and he continued in office till the
+accession of Louis XVI., when he was appointed Prime Minister. He was
+not a man of any statesmanlike ability; but Lacretelle ascribes to him
+"les graces d'un esprit aimable et frivole qui avait le don d'amuser un
+vieillard toujours porte a un elegant badinage" (ii. 53); and in a
+subsequent letter speaks of him as a man of very lively powers of
+conversation.]
+
+Sir Charles Williams[1] is appointed envoy to this last King: here is an
+epigram which he has just sent over on Lord Egmont's opposition to the
+Mutiny Bill:
+
+    Why has Lord Egmont 'gainst this bill
+    So much declamatory skill
+       So tediously exerted?
+    The reason's plain: but t'other day
+    He mutinied himself for pay,
+       And he has twice deserted.
+
+[Footnote 1: Sir Charles Hanbury Williams had represented Monmouth in
+Parliament, but in 1744 was sent as ambassador to Berlin, and from
+thence to St. Petersburg. He was more celebrated in the fashionable
+world as the author of lyrical odes of a lively character.]
+
+I must tell you a _bon-mot_ that was made the other night at the
+serenata of "Peace in Europe" by Wall,[1] who is much in fashion, and a
+kind of Gondomar. Grossatesta, the Modenese minister, a very low fellow,
+with all the jackpuddinghood of an Italian, asked, "Mais qui est ce qui
+represente mon maitre?" Wall replied, "Mais, mon Dieu! L'abbe, ne scavez
+vous pas que ce n'est pas un opera boufon?" and here is another
+_bon-mot_ of my Lady Townshend: we were talking of Methodists; somebody
+said, "Pray, Madam, is it true that Whitfield[2] has _recanted_?" "No,
+sir, he has only _canted_."
+
+[Footnote 1: General Wall was the Spanish ambassador, as Gondomar had
+been in the reign of James I.]
+
+[Footnote 2: Whitefield, while an undergraduate at Oxford, joined
+Wesley, who had recently founded a sect which soon became known as the
+Methodists. But, after a time, Whitefield, who was of a less moderate
+temper than Wesley, adopted the views known as Calvinistic, and,
+breaking off from the Wesleyans, established a sect more rigid and less
+friendly to the Church.]
+
+If you ever think of returning to England, as I hope it will be long
+first, you must prepare yourself with Methodism. I really believe that
+by that time it will be necessary: this sect increases as fast as almost
+ever any religious nonsense did. Lady Fanny Shirley has chosen this way
+of bestowing the dregs of her beauty; and Mr. Lyttelton is very near
+making the same sacrifice of the dregs of all those various characters
+that he has worn. The Methodists love your big sinners, as proper
+subjects to work upon--and indeed they have a plentiful harvest--I think
+what you call flagrancy was never more in fashion. Drinking is at the
+highest wine-mark; and gaming joined with it so violent, that at the
+last Newmarket meeting, in the rapidity of both, a bank-bill was thrown
+down, and nobody immediately claiming it, they agreed to give it to a
+man that was standing by....
+
+
+_EARTHQUAKE IN LONDON--GENERAL PANIC--MARRIAGE OF CASIMIR, KING OF
+POLAND._
+
+TO SIR HORACE MANN.
+
+ARLINGTON STREET, _March_ 11, 1750.
+
+    Portents and prodigies are grown so frequent,
+    That they have lost their name.
+
+My text is not literally true; but as far as earthquakes go towards
+lowering the price of wonderful commodities, to be sure we are
+overstocked. We have had a second, much more violent than the first; and
+you must not be surprised if by next post you hear of a burning mountain
+sprung up in Smithfield. In the night between Wednesday and Thursday
+last (exactly a month since the first shock), the earth had a shivering
+fit between one and two; but so slight that, if no more had followed, I
+don't believe it would have been noticed. I had been awake, and had
+scarce dozed again--on a sudden I felt my bolster lift up my head; I
+thought somebody was getting from under my bed, but soon found it was a
+strong earthquake, that lasted near half a minute, with a violent
+vibration and great roaring. I rang my bell; my servant came in,
+frightened out of his senses: in an instant we heard all the windows in
+the neighbourhood flung up. I got up and found people running into the
+streets, but saw no mischief done: there has been some; two old houses
+flung down, several chimneys, and much chinaware. The bells rung in
+several houses. Admiral Knowles, who has lived long in Jamaica, and felt
+seven there, says this was more violent than any of them: Francesco
+prefers it to the dreadful one at Leghorn. The wise say,[1] that if we
+have not rain soon, we shall certainly have more. Several people are
+going out of town, for it has nowhere reached above ten miles from
+London: they say, they are not frightened, but that it is such fine
+weather, "Lord! one can't help going into the country!" The only visible
+effect it has had, was on the Ridotto, at which, being the following
+night, there were but four hundred people. A parson, who came into
+White's the morning of earthquake the first, and heard bets laid on
+whether it was an earthquake or the blowing up of powder mills, went
+away exceedingly scandalized, and said, "I protest, they are such an
+impious set of people, that I believe if the last trumpet was to sound,
+they would bet puppet-show against Judgment." If we get any nearer
+still to the torrid zone, I shall pique myself on sending you a present
+of cedrati and orange-flower water: I am already planning a _terreno_
+for Strawberry Hill.
+
+[Footnote 1: In an earlier letter Walpole mentions that Sir I. Newton
+had foretold a great alteration in the English climate in 1750.]
+
+The Middlesex election is carried against the Court: the Prince, in a
+green frock (and I won't swear, but in a Scotch plaid waistcoat), sat
+under the Park-wall in his chair, and hallooed the voters on to
+Brentford. The Jacobites are so transported, that they are opening
+subscriptions for all boroughs that shall be vacant--this is wise! They
+will spend their money to carry a few more seats in a Parliament where
+they will never have the majority, and so have none to carry the general
+elections. The omen, however, is bad for Westminster; the High Bailiff
+went to vote for the Opposition.
+
+I now jump to another topic; I find all this letter will be detached
+scraps; I can't at all contrive to hide the seams: but I don't care. I
+began my letter merely to tell you of the earthquake, and I don't pique
+myself upon doing any more than telling you what you would be glad to
+have told you. I told you too how pleased I was with the triumphs of
+another old beauty, our friend the Princess. Do you know, I have found a
+history that has great resemblance to hers; that is, that will be very
+like hers, if hers is but like it. I will tell it you in as few words as
+I can. Madame la Marechale l'Hopital was the daughter of a seamstress; a
+young gentleman fell in love with her, and was going to be married to
+her, but the match was broken off. An old fermier-general, who had
+retired into the province where this happened, hearing the story, had a
+curiosity to see the victim; he liked her, married her, died, and left
+her enough not to care for her inconstant. She came to Paris, where the
+Marechal de l'Hopital married her for her riches. After the Marechal's
+death, Casimir, the abdicated King of Poland, who was retired into
+France, fell in love with the Marechale, and privately married her. If
+the event ever happens, I shall certainly travel to Nancy, to hear her
+talk of _ma belle fille la Reine de France_. What pains my Lady Pomfret
+would take to prove that an abdicated King's wife did not take place of
+an English countess; and how the Princess herself would grow still
+fonder of the Pretender for the similitude of his fortune with that of
+_le Roi mon mari_! Her daughter, Mirepoix, was frightened the other
+night, with Mrs. Nugent's calling out, _un voleur! un voleur_! The
+ambassadress had heard so much of robbing, that she did not doubt but
+_dans ce pais cy_, they robbed in the middle of an assembly. It turned
+out to be a _thief in the candle_! Good night!
+
+
+GENERAL PANIC--SHERLOCK'S PASTORAL LETTER--PREDICTIONS OF MORE
+EARTHQUAKES--A GENERAL FLIGHT FROM LONDON--EPIGRAMS BY CHUTE AND WALPOLE
+HIMSELF--FRENCH TRANSLATION OF MILTON.
+
+TO SIR HORACE MANN.
+
+ARLINGTON STREET, _April_ 2, 1750.
+
+You will not wonder so much at our earthquakes as at the effects they
+have had. All the women in town have taken them up upon the foot of
+_Judgments_; and the clergy, who have had no windfalls of a long season,
+have driven horse and foot into this opinion. There has been a shower of
+sermons and exhortations: Seeker, the Jesuitical Bishop of Oxford, began
+the mode. He heard the women were all going out of town to avoid the
+next shock; and so, for fear of losing his Easter offerings, he set
+himself to advise them to await God's good pleasure in fear and
+trembling. But what is more astonishing, Sherlock, who has much better
+sense, and much less of the Popish confessor, has been running a race
+with him for the old ladies, and has written a pastoral letter, of which
+ten thousand were sold in two days; and fifty thousand have been
+subscribed for, since the two first editions.
+
+I told you the women talked of going out of town: several families are
+literally gone, and many more going to-day and to-morrow; for what adds
+to the absurdity, is, that the second shock having happened exactly a
+month after the former, it prevails that there will be a third on
+Thursday next, another month, which is to swallow up London. I am almost
+ready to burn my letter now I have begun it, lest you should think I am
+laughing at you: but it is so true, that Arthur of White's told me last
+night, that he should put off the last ridotto, which was to be on
+Thursday, because he hears nobody would come to it. I have advised
+several, who are going to keep their next earthquake in the country, to
+take the bark for it, as it is so periodic.[1] Dick Leveson and Mr.
+Rigby, who had supped and stayed late at Bedford House the other night,
+knocked at several doors, and in a watchman's voice cried, "Past four
+o'clock, and a dreadful earthquake!"...
+
+[Footnote 1: "I remember," says Addison, in the 240th _Tatler_, "when
+our whole island was shaken with an earthquake some years ago, that
+there was an impudent mountebank who sold pills, which, as he told the
+country people, were 'very good against an earthquake.'"]
+
+This frantic terror prevails so much, that within these three days seven
+hundred and thirty coaches have been counted passing Hyde Park corner,
+with whole parties removing into the country. Here is a good
+advertisement which I cut out of the papers to-day:--
+
+     "On Monday next will be published (price 6_d._) A true and exact
+     List of all the Nobility and Gentry who have left, or shall leave,
+     this place through fear of another Earthquake."
+
+Several women have made earthquake gowns; that is, warm gowns to sit out
+of doors all to-night. These are of the more courageous. One woman,
+still more heroic, is come to town on purpose: she says, all her friends
+are in London, and she will not survive them. But what will you think of
+Lady Catherine Pelham, Lady Frances Arundel, and Lord and Lady Galway,
+who go this evening to an inn ten miles out of town, where they are to
+play at brag till five in the morning, and then come back--I suppose, to
+look for the bones of their husbands and families under the rubbish. The
+prophet of all this (next to the Bishop of London) is a trooper of Lord
+Delawar's, who was yesterday sent to Bedlam. His _colonel_ sent to the
+man's wife, and asked her if her husband had ever been disordered
+before. She cried, "Oh dear! my lord, he is not mad now; if your
+_lordship_ would but get any _sensible_ man to examine him, you would
+find he is quite in his right mind."...
+
+I shall now go and show you Mr. Chute in a different light from
+heraldry, and in one in which I believe you never saw him. He will shine
+as usual; but, as a little more severely than his good-nature is
+accustomed to, I must tell you that he was provoked by the most
+impertinent usage. It is an epigram on Lady Caroline Petersham, whose
+present fame, by the way, is coupled with young Harry Vane.
+
+    WHO IS THIS?
+
+    Her face has beauty, we must all confess,
+    But beauty on the brink of ugliness:
+    Her mouth's a rabbit feeding on a rose;
+    With eyes--ten times too good for such a nose!
+    Her blooming cheeks--what paint could ever draw 'em?
+    That paint, for which no mortal ever saw 'em.
+    Air without shape--of royal race divine--
+    'Tis Emily--oh! fie!--'tis Caroline.
+
+Do but think of my beginning a third sheet! but as the Parliament is
+rising, and I shall probably not write you a tolerably long letter again
+these eight months, I will lay in a stock of merit with you to last me
+so long. Mr. Chute has set me too upon making epigrams; but as I have
+not his art mine is almost a copy of verses: the story he told me, and
+is literally true, of an old Lady Bingley:
+
+    Celia now had completed some thirty campaigns,
+    And for new generations was hammering chains;
+    When whetting those terrible weapons, her eyes,
+    To Jenny, her handmaid, in anger she cries,
+    "Careless creature! did mortal e'er see such a glass!
+    Who that saw me in this, could e'er guess what I was!
+    Much you mind what I say! pray how oft have I bid you
+    Provide me a new one? how oft have I chid you?"
+    "Lord, Madam!" cried Jane, "you're so hard to be pleased!
+    I am sure every glassman in town I have teased:
+    I have hunted each shop from Pall Mall to Cheapside:
+    Both Miss Carpenter's man, and Miss Banks's I've tried."
+    "Don't tell me of those girls!--all I know, to my cost,
+    Is, the looking-glass art must be certainly lost!
+    One used to have mirrors so smooth and so bright,
+    They did one's eyes justice, they heightened one's white,
+    And fresh roses diffused o'er one's bloom--but, alas!
+    In the glasses made now, one detests one's own face;
+    They pucker one's cheeks up and furrow one's brow,
+    And one's skin looks as yellow as that of Miss Howe!"
+
+After an epigram that seems to have found out the longitude, I shall
+tell you but one more, and that wondrous short. It is said to be made by
+a cow. You must not wonder; we tell as many strange stories as Baker and
+Livy:
+
+    A warm winter, a dry spring,
+    A hot summer, a new King.
+
+Though the sting is very epigrammatic, the whole of the distich has more
+of the truth than becomes prophecy; that is, it is false, for the spring
+is wet and cold.
+
+There is come from France a Madame Bocage,[1] who has translated Milton:
+my Lord Chesterfield prefers the copy to the original; but that is not
+uncommon for him to do, who is the patron of bad authors and bad actors.
+She has written a play too, which was damned, and worthy my lord's
+approbation. You would be more diverted with a Mrs. Holman, whose
+passion is keeping an assembly, and inviting literally everybody to it.
+She goes to the drawing-room to watch for sneezes; whips out a curtsey,
+and then sends next morning to know how your cold does, and to desire
+your company next Thursday.
+
+[Footnote 1: Madame du Boccage published a poem in imitation of Milton,
+and another founded on Gesner's "Death of Abel." She also translated
+Pope's "Temple of Fame;" but her principal work was "La Columbiade." It
+was at the house of this lady, at Paris, in 1775, that Johnson was
+annoyed at her footman's taking the sugar in his fingers and throwing it
+into his coffee. "I was going," says the Doctor, "to put it aside, but
+hearing it was made on purpose for me, I e'en tasted Tom's fingers." She
+died in 1802.]
+
+Mr. Whithed has taken my Lord Pembroke's house at Whitehall; a glorious
+situation, but as madly built as my lord himself was. He has bought some
+delightful pictures too, of Claude, Caspar and good masters, to the
+amount of four hundred pounds.
+
+Good night! I have nothing more to tell you, but that I have lately seen
+a Sir William Boothby, who saw you about a year ago, and adores you, as
+all the English you receive ought to do. He is much in my favour.
+
+
+_DEATH OF WALPOLE'S BROTHER, AND OF THE PRINCE OF WALES--SPEECH OF THE
+YOUNG PRINCE--SINGULAR SERMON ON HIS DEATH._
+
+TO SIR HORACE MANN.
+
+ARLINGTON STREET, _April_ 1, 1751.
+
+How shall I begin a letter that will--that must--give you as much pain
+as I feel myself? I must interrupt the story of the Prince's death, to
+tell you of _two_ more, much more important, God knows! to you and me!
+One I had prepared you for--but how will you be shocked to hear that our
+poor Mr. Whithed is dead as well as my brother!...
+
+I now must mention my own misfortune. Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday
+mornings, the physicians and _all the family of painful death_ (to alter
+Gray's phrase), were persuaded and persuaded me, that the bark, which
+took great place, would save my brother's life--but he relapsed at three
+o'clock on Thursday, and died last night. He ordered to be drawn and
+executed his will with the greatest tranquillity and satisfaction on
+Saturday morning. His spoils are prodigious--not to his own family!
+indeed I think his son the most ruined young man in England. My loss, I
+fear, may be considerable, which is not the only motive of my concern,
+though, as you know, I had much to forgive, before I could regret: but
+indeed I do regret. It is no small addition to my concern, to fear or
+foresee that Houghton and all the remains of my father's glory will be
+pulled to pieces! The widow-Countess immediately marries--not Richcourt,
+but Shirley, and triumphs in advancing her son's ruin by enjoying her
+own estate, and tearing away great part of his.
+
+Now I will divert your private grief by talking to you of what is called
+the public. The King and Princess are grown as fond as if they had never
+been of different parties, or rather as people who always had been of
+different. She discountenances all opposition, and he _all ambition_.
+Prince George, who, with his two eldest brothers, is to be lodged at St.
+James's, is speedily to be created Prince of Wales. Ayscough, his tutor,
+is to be removed with her entire inclination as well as with everybody's
+approbation. They talk of a Regency to be established (in case of a
+minority) by authority of Parliament, even this session, with the
+Princess at the head of it. She and Dr. Lee, the only one she consults
+of the late cabal, very sensibly burned the late Prince's papers the
+moment he was dead. Lord Egmont, by seven o'clock the next morning,
+summoned (not very decently) the faction to his house: all was whisper!
+at last he hinted something of taking the Princess and her children
+under their protection, and something of the necessity of harmony. No
+answer was made to the former proposal. Somebody said, it was very
+likely indeed they should agree now, when the Prince could never bring
+it about; and so everybody went away to take care of himself. The
+imposthumation is supposed to have proceeded, not from his fall last
+year, but from a blow with a tennis-ball some years ago. The grief for
+the dead brother is affectedly displayed. They cried about an elegy,[1]
+and added, "Oh, that it were but his brother!" On 'Change they said,
+"Oh, that it were but the butcher[2]!"
+
+[Footnote 1: The elegy alluded to, was probably the effusion of some
+Jacobite royalist. That faction could not forgive the Duke of Cumberland
+his excesses or successes in Scotland; and, not contented with branding
+the parliamentary government of the country as usurpation, indulged in
+frequent unfeeling and scurrilous personalities on every branch of the
+reigning family:
+
+       Here lies Fred,
+    Who was alive and is dead:
+       Had it been his father,
+       I had much rather;
+       Had it been his brother,
+       Still better than another;
+       Had it been his sister,
+       No one would have missed her;
+       Had it been the whole generation,
+       Still better for the nation:
+       But since 'tis only Fred,
+    Who was alive and is dead--
+       There's no more to be said.
+
+Walpole's _Memoirs of George II._]
+
+[Footnote 2: A name given to the Duke of Cumberland for his severities
+to his prisoners after the battle of Culloden.]
+
+The Houses sit, but no business will be done till after the holidays.
+Anstruther's affair will go on, but not with much spirit. One wants to
+see faces about again! Dick Lyttelton, one of the patriot officers, had
+collected depositions on oath against the Duke for his behaviour in
+Scotland, but I suppose he will now throw his papers into Hamlet's
+grave?
+
+Prince George, who has a most amiable countenance, behaved excessively
+well on his father's death. When they told him of it, he turned pale,
+and laid his hand on his breast. Ayscough said, "I am afraid, Sir, you
+are not well!"--he replied, "I feel something here, just as I did when I
+saw the two workmen fall from the scaffold at Kew." Prince Edward is a
+very plain boy, with strange loose eyes, but was much the favourite. He
+is a sayer of things! Two men were heard lamenting the death in
+Leicester Fields: one said, "He has left a great many small
+children!"--"Ay," replied the other, "and what is worse, they belong to
+our parish!" But the most extraordinary reflections on his death were
+set forth in a sermon at Mayfair chapel. "He had no great parts (pray
+mind, this was the parson said so, not I), but he had great virtues;
+indeed, they degenerated into vices: he was very generous, but I hear
+his generosity has ruined a great many people: and then his
+condescension was such, that he kept very bad company."
+
+Adieu! my dear child; I have tried, you see, to blend so much public
+history with our private griefs, as may help to interrupt your too great
+attention to the calamities in the former part of my letter. You will,
+with the properest good-nature in the world, break the news to the poor
+girl, whom I pity, though I never saw. Miss Nicoll is, I am told,
+extremely to be pitied too; but so is everybody that knew Whithed! Bear
+it yourself as well as you can!
+
+
+_CHANGES IN THE MINISTRY AND HOUSEHOLD--THE MISS GUNNINGS--EXTRAVAGANCE
+IN LONDON--LORD HARCOURT, GOVERNOR OF THE PRINCE OF WALES._
+
+TO SIR HORACE MANN.
+
+ARLINGTON STREET, _June_ 18, 1751.
+
+I send my letter as usual from the Secretary's office, but of what
+Secretary I don't know. Lord Sandwich last week received his dismission,
+on which the Duke of Bedford resigned the next day, and Lord Trentham
+with him, both breaking with old Gower, who is entirely in the hands of
+the Pelhams, and made to declare his quarrel with Lord Sandwich (who
+gave away his daughter to Colonel Waldegrave) the foundation of
+detaching himself from the Bedfords. Your friend Lord Fane comforts Lord
+Sandwich with an annuity of a thousand a-year--scarcely for his handsome
+behaviour to his sister; Lord Hartington is to be Master of the Horse,
+and Lord Albemarle Groom of the Stole; Lord Granville[1] is actually
+Lord President, and, by all outward and visible signs, something
+more--in short, if he don't overshoot himself, the Pelhams have; the
+King's favour to him is visible, and so much credited, that all the
+incense is offered to him. It is believed that Impresario Holdernesse
+will succeed the Bedford in the foreign seals, and Lord Halifax in
+those for the plantations. If the former does, you will have ample
+instructions to negotiate for singers and dancers! Here is an epigram
+made upon his directorship:
+
+[Footnote 1: Lord Granville, known as Lord Carteret during the lifetime
+of his mother, was a statesman of the very highest ability, and was
+regarded with special favour by the King for his power of conversing in
+German, then a very rare accomplishment.]
+
+    That secrecy will now prevail
+      In politics, is certain;
+    Since Holdernesse, who gets the seals,
+      Was bred behind the curtain.
+
+The Admirals Rowley and Boscawen are brought into the Admiralty under
+Lord Anson, who is advanced to the head of the board. Seamen are
+tractable fishes! especially it will be Boscawen's case, whose name in
+Cornish signifies obstinacy, and who brings along with him a good
+quantity of resentment to Anson. In short, the whole present system is
+equally formed for duration!
+
+Since I began my letter, Lord Holdernesse has kissed hands for the
+seals. It is said that Lord Halifax is to be made easy, by the
+plantations being put under the Board of Trade. Lord Granville comes
+into power as boisterously as ever, and dashes at everything. His
+lieutenants already beat up for volunteers; but he disclaims all
+connexions with Lord Bath, who, he says, forced him upon the famous
+ministry of twenty-four hours, and by which he says he paid all his
+debts to him. This will soon grow a turbulent scene--it is not
+unpleasant to sit upon the beach and see it; but few people have the
+curiosity to step out to the sight. You, who knew England in other
+times, will find it difficult, to conceive what an indifference reigns
+with regard to ministers and their squabbles. The two Miss Gunnings,[1]
+and a late extravagant dinner at White's, are twenty times more the
+subject of conversation than the two brothers [Newcastle and Pelham] and
+Lord Granville. These are two Irish girls, of no fortune, who are
+declared the handsomest women alive. I think their being two so handsome
+and both such perfect figures is their chief excellence, for singly I
+have seen much handsomer women than either; however, they can't walk in
+the park or go to Vauxhall, but such mobs follow them that they are
+generally driven away. The dinner was a folly of seven young men, who
+bespoke it to the utmost extent of expense: one article was a tart made
+of duke cherries from a hot-house; and another, that they tasted but one
+glass out of each bottle of champagne. The bill of fare is got into
+print, and with good people has produced the apprehension of another
+earthquake. Your friend St. Leger was at the head of these luxurious
+heroes--he is the hero of all fashion. I never saw more dashing vivacity
+and absurdity, with some flashes of parts. He had a cause the other day
+for ducking a sharper, and was going to swear: the judge said to him, "I
+see, Sir, you are very ready to take an oath." "Yes, my lord," replied
+St. Leger, "my father was a judge."
+
+[Footnote 1: One of the Miss Gunnings had singular fortune. She was
+married to two Dukes--the Duke of Hamilton, and, after his death, the
+Duke of Argyll. She refused a third, the Duke of Bridgewater; and she
+was the mother of four--two Dukes of Hamilton and two Dukes of Argyll.
+Her sister married the Earl of Coventry. In his "Memoirs of George III."
+Walpole mentions that they were so poor while in Dublin that they could
+not have been presented to the Lord-Lieutenant if Peg Woffington, the
+celebrated actress, had not lent them some clothes.]
+
+We have been overwhelmed with lamentable Cambridge and Oxford dirges on
+the Prince's death: there is but one tolerable copy; it is by a young
+Lord Stormont, a nephew of Murray, who is much commended. You may
+imagine what incense is offered to Stone by the people of Christchurch:
+they have hooked in, too, poor Lord Harcourt, and call him _Harcourt the
+Wise_! his wisdom has already disgusted the young Prince; "Sir, pray
+hold up your head. Sir, for God's sake, turn out your toes!" Such are
+Mentor's precepts!
+
+I am glad you receive my letters; as I knew I had been punctual, it
+mortified me that you should think me remiss. Thank you for the
+transcript from _Bubb[1] de tristibus_! I will keep your secret, though
+I am persuaded that a man who had composed such a funeral oration on his
+master and himself fully intended that its flowers should not bloom and
+wither in obscurity.
+
+[Footnote 1: Bubb means Mr. Bubb Doddington, afterwards Lord Melcombe,
+who had written Mr. Mann a letter of most extravagant lamentation on the
+death of the Prince of Wales. He was member for Winchelsea, and left
+behind him a diary, which was published some years after his death, and
+which throws a good deal of light on the political intrigues of the
+day.]
+
+We have already begun to sell the pictures that had not found place at
+Houghton: the sale gives no great encouragement to proceed (though I
+fear it must come to that!); the large pictures were thrown away; the
+whole-length Vandykes went for a song! I am mortified now at having
+printed the catalogue. Gideon the Jew, and Blakiston the independent
+grocer, have been the chief purchasers of the pictures sold
+already--there, if you love moralizing!
+
+Adieu! I have no more articles to-day for my literary gazette.
+
+
+_DESCRIPTION OF STRAWBERRY HILL--BILL TO PREVENT CLANDESTINE MARRIAGES._
+
+TO SIR HORACE MANN.
+
+STRAWBERRY HILL, _June_ 12, 1753.
+
+I could not rest any longer with the thought of your having no idea of a
+place of which you hear so much, and therefore desired Mr. Bentley to
+draw you as much idea of it as the post would be persuaded to carry from
+Twickenham to Florence. The enclosed enchanted little landscape, then,
+is Strawberry Hill; and I will try to explain so much of it to you as
+will help to let you know whereabouts we are when we are talking to you;
+for it is uncomfortable in so intimate a correspondence as ours not to
+be exactly master of every spot where one another is writing, or
+reading, or sauntering. This view of the castle is what I have just
+finished, and is the only side that will be at all regular. Directly
+before it is an open grove, through which you see a field, which is
+bounded by a serpentine wood of all kind of trees, and flowering shrubs,
+and flowers. The lawn before the house is situated on the top of a small
+hill, from whence to the left you see the town and church of Twickenham
+encircling a turn of the river, that looks exactly like a seaport in
+miniature. The opposite shore is a most delicious meadow, bounded by
+Richmond Hill, which loses itself in the noble woods of the park to the
+end of the prospect on the right, where is another turn of the river,
+and the suburbs of Kingston as luckily placed as Twickenham is on the
+left: and a natural terrace on the brow of my hill, with meadows of my
+own down to the river, commands both extremities. Is not this a
+tolerable prospect? You must figure that all this is perpetually
+enlivened by a navigation of boats and barges, and by a road below my
+terrace, with coaches, post-chaises, waggons, and horsemen constantly in
+motion, and the fields speckled with cows, horses, and sheep. Now you
+shall walk into the house. The bow-window below leads into a little
+parlour hung with a stone-colour Gothic paper and Jackson's Venetian
+prints, which I could never endure while they pretended, infamous as
+they are, to be after Titian, &c., but when I gave them this air of
+barbarous bas-reliefs, they succeeded to a miracle: it is impossible at
+first sight not to conclude that they contain the history of Attila or
+Tottila, done about the very aera. From hence, under two gloomy arches,
+you come to the hall and staircase, which it is impossible to describe
+to you, as it is the most particular and chief beauty of the castle.
+Imagine the walls covered with (I call it paper, but it is really paper
+painted in perspective to represent) Gothic fretwork: the lightest
+Gothic balustrade to the staircase, adorned with antelopes (our
+supporters) bearing shields; lean windows fattened with rich saints in
+painted glass, and a vestibule open with three arches on the
+landing-place, and niches full of trophies of old coats of mail, Indian
+shields made of rhinoceros's hides, broadswords, quivers, longbows,
+arrows, and spears--all _supposed_ to be taken by Sir Terry Robsart in
+the holy wars. But as none of this regards the enclosed drawing, I will
+pass to that. The room on the ground-floor nearest to you is a
+bedchamber, hung with yellow paper and prints, framed in a new manner,
+invented by Lord Cardigan; that is, with black and white borders
+printed. Over this is Mr. Chute's bedchamber, hung with red in the same
+manner. The bow-window room one pair of stairs is not yet finished; but
+in the tower beyond it is the charming closet where I am now writing to
+you. It is hung with green paper and water-colour pictures; has two
+windows; the one in the drawing looks to the garden, the other to the
+beautiful prospect; and the top of each glutted with the richest painted
+glass of the arms of England, crimson roses, and twenty other pieces of
+green, purple, and historic bits. I must tell you, by the way, that the
+castle, when finished, will have two-and-thirty windows enriched with
+painted glass. In this closet, which is Mr. Chute's college of Arms, are
+two presses with books of heraldry and antiquities, Madame Sevigne's
+Letters, and any French books that relate to her and her acquaintance.
+Out of this closet is the room where we always live, hung with a blue
+and white paper in stripes adorned with festoons, and a thousand plump
+chairs, couches, and luxurious settees covered with linen of the same
+pattern, and with a bow-window commanding the prospect, and gloomed
+with limes that shade half each window, already darkened with painted
+glass in chiaroscuro, set in deep blue glass. Under this room is a cool
+little hall, where we generally dine, hung with paper to imitate Dutch
+tiles.
+
+I have described so much, that you will begin to think that all the
+accounts I used to give you of the diminutiveness of our habitation were
+fabulous; but it is really incredible how small most of the rooms are.
+The only two good chambers I shall have are not yet built: they will be
+an eating-room and a library, each twenty by thirty, and the latter
+fifteen feet high. For the rest of the house I could send it you in this
+letter as easily as the drawing, only that I should have nowhere to live
+till the return of the post. The Chinese summer-house, which you may
+distinguish in the distant landscape, belongs to my Lord Radnor. We
+pique ourselves upon nothing but simplicity, and have no carvings,
+gildings, paintings, inlayings, or tawdry businesses.
+
+You will not be sorry, I believe, by this time to have done with
+Strawberry Hill, and to hear a little news. The end of a very dreaming
+session has been extremely enlivened by an accidental bill which has
+opened great quarrels, and those not unlikely to be attended with
+interesting circumstances. A bill to prevent clandestine marriages,[1]
+so drawn by the Judges as to clog all matrimony in general, was
+inadvertently espoused by the Chancellor; and having been strongly
+attacked in the House of Commons by Nugent, the Speaker, Mr. Fox, and
+others, the last went very great lengths of severity on the whole body
+of the law, and on its chieftain in particular, which, however, at the
+last reading, he softened and explained off extremely. This did not
+appease: but on the return of the bill to the House of Lords, where our
+amendments were to be read, the Chancellor in the most personal terms
+harangued against Fox, and concluded with saying that "he despised his
+scurrility as much as his adulation and recantation." As Christian
+charity is not one of the oaths taken by privy-counsellors, and as it is
+not the most eminent virtue in either of the champions, this quarrel is
+not likely to be soon reconciled. There are natures whose disposition it
+is to patch up political breaches, but whether they will succeed, or try
+to succeed in healing this, can I tell you?
+
+[Footnote 1: These clandestine marriages were often called "Fleet
+marriages." Lord Stanhope, describing this Act, states that "there was
+ever ready a band of degraded and outcast clergymen, prisoners for debt
+or for crime, who hovered about the verge of the Fleet prison soliciting
+customers, and plying, like porters, for employment.... One of these
+wretches, named Keith, had gained a kind of pre-eminence in infamy. On
+being told there was a scheme on foot to stop his lucrative traffic, he
+declared, with many oaths, he would still be revenged of the Bishops,
+that he would buy a piece of ground and outbury them!" ("History of
+England," c. 31).]
+
+The match for Lord Granville, which I announced to you, is not
+concluded: the flames are cooled in that quarter as well as in others.
+
+I begin a new sheet to you, which does not match with the other, for I
+have no more of the same paper here. Dr. Cameron is executed, and died
+with the greatest firmness. His parting with his wife the night before
+was heroic and tender: he let her stay till the last moment, when being
+aware that the gates of the Tower would be locked, he told her so; she
+fell at his feet in agonies: he said, "Madam, this was not what you
+promised me," and embracing her, forced her to retire: then with the
+same coolness looked at the window till her coach was out of sight,
+after which he turned about and wept. His only concern seemed to be at
+the ignominy of Tyburn: he was not disturbed at the dresser for his
+body, or at the fire to burn his bowels.[1] The crowd was so great, that
+a friend who attended him could not get away, but was forced to stay and
+behold the execution; but what will you say to the minister or priest
+that accompanied him? The wretch, after taking leave, went into a
+landau, where, not content with seeing the Doctor hanged, he let down
+the top of the landau for the better convenience of seeing him
+embowelled! I cannot tell you positively that what I hinted of this
+Cameron being commissioned from Prussia was true, but so it is believed.
+Adieu! my dear child; I think this is a very tolerable letter for
+summer!
+
+[Footnote 1: "The populace," says Smollett, "though not very subject to
+tender emotions, were moved to compassion, and even to tears, by his
+behaviour at the place of execution; and many sincere well-wishers of
+the present establishment thought that the sacrifice of this victim, at
+such a juncture, could not redound either to its honour or security."]
+
+[Illustration: GEORGE MONTAGU.]
+
+
+_NO NEWS FROM FRANCE BUT WHAT IS SMUGGLED--THE KING'S DELIGHT AT THE
+VOTE FOR THE HANOVER TROOPS--BON MOT OF LORD DENBIGH._
+
+TO GEORGE MONTAGU, ESQ.
+
+ARLINGTON STREET, _May_ 19, 1756.
+
+Nothing will be more agreeable to me than to see you at Strawberry Hill;
+the weather does not seem to be of my mind, and will not invite you. I
+believe the French have taken the sun. Among other captures, I hear the
+King has taken another English mistress, a Mrs. Pope, who took her
+degrees in gallantry some years ago. She went to Versailles with the
+famous Mrs. Quon: the King took notice of them; he was told they were
+not so rigid as _all_ other English women are--mind, I don't give you
+any part of this history for authentic; you know we can have no news
+from France but what we run.[1] I have rambled so that I forgot what I
+intended to say; if ever we can have spring, it must be soon: I propose
+to expect you any day you please after Sunday se'nnight, the 30th: let
+me know your resolution, and pray tell me in what magazine is the
+Strawberry ballad? I should have proposed an earlier day to you, but
+next week the Prince of Nassau is to breakfast at Strawberry Hill, and I
+know your aversion to clashing with grandeur.
+
+[Footnote 1: "During the winter England was stirred with constantly
+recurring alarms of a French invasion.... Addresses were moved in both
+Houses entreating or empowering the King to summon over for our defence
+some of his Hanoverian troops, and also some of hired Hessians--an
+ignominious vote, but carried by large majorities" (Lord Stanhope,
+"History of England," c. 22).]
+
+As I have already told you one mob story of a King, I will tell you
+another: _they say_, that the night the Hanover troops were voted, _he_
+sent Schutz for his German cook, and said, "Get me a very good supper;
+get me all de varieties; I don't mind expense."
+
+I tremble lest his Hanoverians should be encamped at Hounslow;
+Strawberry would become an inn; all the Misses would breakfast there, to
+go and see the camp!
+
+My Lord Denbigh is going to marry a fortune, I forget her name; my Lord
+Gower asked him how long the honey-moon would last? He replied, "Don't
+tell me of the honey-moon; it is harvest moon with me." Adieu!
+
+
+_VICTORY OF THE KING OF PRUSSIA AT LOWOSITZ--SINGULAR RACE--QUARREL OF
+THE PRETENDER WITH THE POPE._
+
+TO SIR HORACE MANN.
+
+STRAWBERRY HILL, _Oct._ 17, 1756.
+
+Lentulus (I am going to tell you no old Roman tale; he is the King of
+Prussia's aid-de-camp) arrived yesterday, with ample confirmation of the
+victory in Bohemia.[1]--Are not you glad that we have got a victory that
+we can at least call _Cousin_? Between six and seven thousand Austrians
+were killed: eight Prussian squadrons sustained the _acharnement_, which
+is said to have been extreme, of thirty-two squadrons of Austrians: the
+pursuit lasted from Friday noon till Monday morning; both our
+countrymen, Brown and Keith, performed wonders--we seem to flourish much
+when transplanted to Germany--but Germans don't make good manure here!
+The Prussian King writes that both Brown and Piccolomini are too
+strongly intrenched to be attacked. His Majesty ran _to_ this victory;
+not _a la_ Molwitz. He affirms having found in the King of Poland's
+cabinet ample justification of his treatment of Saxony--should not one
+query whether he had not these proofs in his hands antecedent to the
+cabinet? The Dauphiness[2] is said to have flung herself at the King of
+France's feet and begged his protection for her father; that he promised
+"qu'il le rendroit au centuple au Roi de Prusse."
+
+[Footnote 1: On the 1st of the month Frederic II. had defeated the
+Austrian general, Marshal Brown, at Lowositz. It was the first battle of
+the Seven Years' War, and was of great political importance as leading
+to the capture of Dresden and of laying all Saxony at the mercy of the
+conqueror. "_A la_ Molwitz" is an allusion to the first battle in the
+war of the Austrian Succession, April 10, 1741, in which Frederic showed
+that he was not what Voltaire and Mr. Pitt called "a heaven-born
+general;" since on the repulse of his cavalry he gave up all for lost,
+and rode from the field, to learn at night that, after his flight, his
+second in command, the veteran Marshal Schwerin, had rallied the broken
+squadrons, and had obtained a decisive victory.]
+
+[Footnote 2: The Dauphiness was the daughter of Augustus, King of Poland
+and Elector of Saxony.]
+
+Peace is made between the courts of Kensington and Kew:[1] Lord Bute,
+who had no visible employment at the latter, and yet whose office was
+certainly no _sinecure_, is to be Groom of the Stole to the Prince of
+Wales; which satisfies. The rest of the family will be named before the
+birthday--but I don't know how, as soon as one wound is closed, another
+breaks out! Mr. Fox, extremely discontent at having no power, no
+confidence, no favour (all entirely engrossed by the old monopolist),
+has asked leave to resign. It is not yet granted. If Mr. Pitt will--or
+can, accept the seals, probably Mr. Fox will be indulged,--if Mr. Pitt
+will not, why then, it is impossible to tell you what will happen.
+Whatever happens on such an emergency, with the Parliament so near, with
+no time for considering measures, with so bad a past, and so much worse
+a future, there certainly is no duration or good in prospect. Unless the
+King of Prussia will take our affairs at home as well as abroad to
+nurse, I see no possible recovery for us--and you may believe, when a
+doctor like him is necessary, I should be full as willing to die of the
+distemper.
+
+[Footnote 1: "The courts of Kensington and Kew"--in other words, of the
+King and the Prince of Wales and his mother, to whom George II. was not
+very friendly. A scandal, which had no foundation, imputed to the
+Princess undue intimacy with the Earl of Bute, who, however, did stand
+high in her good graces, and who probably was indebted to them for his
+appointment in the next reign to the office of Prime Minister, for which
+he had no qualification whatever.]
+
+Well! and so you think we are undone!--not at all; if folly and
+extravagance are symptoms of a nation's being at the height of their
+glory, as after-observers pretend that they are forerunners of its ruin,
+we never were in a more flourishing situation. My Lord Rockingham and my
+nephew Lord Orford have made a match of five hundred pounds, between
+five turkeys and five geese, to run from Norwich to London. Don't you
+believe in the transmigration of souls? And are not you convinced that
+this race is between Marquis Sardanapalus and Earl Heliogabalus? And
+don't you pity the poor Asiatics and Italians who comforted themselves
+on their resurrection with their being geese and turkeys?
+
+Here's another symptom of our glory! The Irish Speaker Mr. Ponsonby has
+been _reposing_ himself at _Newmarket_: George Selwyn, seeing him toss
+about bank-bills at the hazard-table said, "How easily the Speaker
+passes the money-bills!"
+
+You, who live at Florence among vulgar vices and tame slavery, will
+stare at these accounts. Pray be acquainted with your own country, while
+it is in its lustre. In a regular monarchy the folly of the Prince gives
+the tone; in a downright tyranny, folly dares give itself no airs; it is
+in a wanton overgrown commonwealth that whim and debauchery intrigue
+best together. Ask me which of these governments I prefer--oh! the
+last--only I fear it is the least durable.
+
+I have not yet thanked you for your letter of September 18th, with the
+accounts of the Genoese treaty and of the Pretender's quarrel with the
+Pope--it is a squabble worthy a Stuart. Were he, here, as absolute as
+any Stuart ever wished to be, who knows with all his bigotry but he
+might favour us with a reformation and the downfall of the mass? The
+ambition of making a Duke of York vice-chancellor of holy church would
+be as good a reason for breaking with holy church, as Harry the Eighth's
+was for quarrelling with it, because it would not excuse him from going
+to bed to his sister after it had given him leave.
+
+I wish I could tell you that your brother mends! indeed I don't think he
+does: nor do I know what to say to him; I have exhausted both arguments
+and entreaties, and yet if I thought either would avail, I would gladly
+recommence them. Adieu!
+
+
+_MINISTERIAL NEGOTIATIONS--LOSS OF MINORCA--DISASTER IN NORTH AMERICA._
+
+TO SIR HORACE MANN.
+
+ARLINGTON STREET, _Nov._ 4, 1756.
+
+I desired your brother last week to tell you that it was in vain for me
+to write while everything was in such confusion. The chaos is just as
+far from being dispersed now; I only write to tell you what has been its
+motions. One of the Popes, I think, said soon after his accession, he
+did not think it had been so easy to govern. What would he have thought
+of such a nation as this, engaged in a formidable war, without any
+government at all, literally, for above a fortnight! The foreign
+ministers have not attempted to transact any business since yesterday
+fortnight. For God's sake, what do other countries say of us?--but hear
+the progress of our interministerium.
+
+When Mr. Fox had declared his determination of resigning, great offers
+were sent to Mr. Pitt; his demands were much greater, accompanied with a
+total exclusion of the Duke of Newcastle. Some of the latter's friends
+would have persuaded him, as the House of Commons is at his devotion, to
+have undertaken the government against both Pitt and Fox; but fears
+preponderated. Yesterday se'nnight his grace declared his resolution of
+retiring, with all that satisfaction of mind which must attend a man
+whom not one man of sense will trust any longer. The King sent for Mr.
+Fox, and bid him try if Mr. Pitt would join him. The latter, without any
+hesitation, refused. In this perplexity the King ordered the Duke of
+Devonshire to try to compose some Ministry for him, and sent him to
+Pitt, to try to accommodate with Fox. Pitt, with a list of terms a
+little modified, was ready to engage, but on condition that Fox should
+have no employment in the cabinet. Upon this plan negotiations have been
+carrying on for this week. Mr. Pitt and Mr. Legge, whose whole party
+consists of from twelve to sixteen persons, exclusive of Leicester House
+(of that presently), concluded they were entering on the government as
+Secretary of State and Chancellor of the Exchequer: but there is so
+great unwillingness to give it up totally into their hands, that all
+manner of expedients have been projected to get rid of their proposals,
+or to limit their power. Thus the case stands at this instant: the
+Parliament has been put off for a fortnight, to gain time; the Lord
+knows whether that will suffice to bring on any sort of temper! In the
+meantime the government stands still; pray Heaven the war may too! You
+will wonder how fifteen or sixteen persons can be of such importance. In
+the first place, their importance has been conferred on them, and has
+been notified to the nation by these concessions and messages; next,
+Minorca[1] is gone; Oswego gone;[2] the nation is in a ferment; some
+very great indiscretions in delivering a Hanoverian soldier from prison
+by a warrant from the Secretary of State have raised great difficulties;
+instructions from counties, boroughs, especially from the City of
+London, in the style of 1641, and really in the spirit of 1715 and 1745,
+have raised a great flame; and lastly, the countenance of Leicester
+House, which Mr. Pitt is supposed to have, and which Mr. Legge thinks he
+has, all these tell Pitt that he may command such numbers without doors
+as may make the majorities within the House tremble.
+
+[Footnote 1: Minorca had been taken by the Duc de Richelieu; Admiral
+Byng, after an indecisive action with the French fleet, having adopted
+the idea that he should not be able to save it, for which, as is too
+well known, he was condemned to death by a court-martial.]
+
+[Footnote 2: "_Oswego gone._" "A detachment of the enemy was defeated by
+Colonel Broadstreet on the river Onondaga; on the other hand, the small
+forts of Ontario and Oswego were reduced by the French" (Lord Stanhope,
+"History of England," c. 33).]
+
+Leicester House[1] is by some thought inclined to more pacific measures.
+Lord Bute's being established Groom of the Stole has satisfied. They
+seem more occupied in disobliging all their new court than in disturbing
+the King's. Lord Huntingdon, the new Master of the Horse to the Prince,
+and Lord Pembroke, one of his Lords, have not been spoken to. Alas! if
+the present storms should blow over, what seeds for new! You must guess
+at the sense of this paragraph, which it is difficult, at least
+improper, to explain to you; though you could not go into a coffee-house
+here where it would not be interpreted to you. One would think all those
+little politicians had been reading the Memoirs of the minority of Louis
+XIV.
+
+[Footnote 1: Leicester House was the London residence of the young
+Prince of Wales.]
+
+There has been another great difficulty: the season obliging all camps
+to break up, the poor Hanoverians have been forced to continue soaking
+in theirs. The county magistrates have been advised that they are not
+obliged by law to billet foreigners on public-houses, and have refused.
+Transports were yesterday ordered to carry away the Hanoverians! There
+are eight thousand men taken from America; for I am sure we can spare
+none from hence. The negligence and dilatoriness of the ministers at
+home, the wickedness of our West Indian governors, and the little-minded
+quarrels of the regulars and irregular forces, have reduced our affairs
+in that part of the world to a most deplorable state. Oswego, of ten
+times more importance even than Minorca, is so annihilated that we
+cannot learn the particulars.
+
+My dear Sir, what a present and future picture have I given you! The
+details are infinite, and what I have neither time, nor, for many
+reasons, the imprudence to send by the post: your good sense will but
+too well lead you to develop them. The crisis is most melancholy and
+alarming. I remember two or three years ago I wished for more active
+times, and for events to furnish our correspondence. I think I could
+write you a letter almost as big as my Lord Clarendon's History. What a
+bold man is he who shall undertake the administration! How much shall we
+be obliged to him! How mad is he, whoever is ambitious of it! Adieu!
+
+
+_THE KING OF PRUSSIA'S VICTORIES--VOLTAIRE'S "UNIVERSAL HISTORY."_
+
+TO THE EARL OF STRAFFORD.
+
+STRAWBERRY HILL, _July_ 4, 1757.
+
+My Dear Lord,--It is well I have not obeyed you sooner, as I have often
+been going to do: what a heap of lies and contradictions I should have
+sent you! What joint ministries and sole ministries! What acceptances
+and resignations!--Viziers and bowstrings never succeeded one another
+quicker. Luckily I have stayed till we have got an administration that
+will last a little more than for ever. There is such content and harmony
+in it, that I don't know whether it is not as perfect as a plan which I
+formed for Charles Stanhope, after he had plagued me for two days for
+news. I told him the Duke of Newcastle was to take orders, and have the
+reversion of the bishopric of Winchester; that Mr. Pitt was to have a
+regiment, and go over to the Duke; and Mr. Fox to be chamberlain to the
+Princess, in the room of Sir William Irby. Of all the new system I
+believe the happiest is Offley; though in great humility he says he only
+takes the bedchamber _to accommodate_. Next to him in joy is the Earl of
+Holdernesse--who has not got the garter. My Lord Waldegrave has; and
+the garter by this time I believe has got fifty spots.
+
+Had I written sooner, I should have told your lordship, too, of the King
+of Prussia's triumphs[1]--but they are addled too! I hoped to have had a
+few bricks from Prague to send you towards building Mr. Bentley's
+design, but I fear none will come from thence this summer. Thank God,
+the happiness of the menagerie does not depend upon administrations or
+victories! The happiest of beings in this part of the world is my Lady
+Suffolk: I really think her acquisition and conclusion of her law-suit
+will lengthen her life ten years. You may be sure I am not so satisfied,
+as Lady Mary [Coke] has left Sudbroke.
+
+[Footnote 1: On the 6th of May Frederic defeated the Austrian army under
+Prince Charles of Lorraine and Marshal Brown in the battle of Prague.
+Brown was killed, as also was the Prussian Marshal, Schwerin; indeed,
+the King lost eighteen thousand men--nearly as many as had fallen on the
+side of the enemy; and the Austrian disaster was more than retrieved by
+the great victory of Kolin, gained by Marshal Daun, June 18th, to which
+Walpole probably alludes when he says Frederic's "triumphs are addled."]
+
+Are your charming lawns burnt up like our humble hills? Is your sweet
+river as low as our deserted Thames?--I am wishing for a handful or two
+of those floods that drowned me last year all the way from Wentworth
+Castle. I beg my best compliments to my lady, and my best wishes that
+every pheasant egg and peacock egg may produce as many colours as a
+harlequin-jacket.
+
+
+_Tuesday, July 5th._
+
+Luckily, my good lord, my conscience had saved its distance. I had writ
+the above last night, when I received the honour of your kind letter
+this morning. You had, as I did not doubt, received accounts of all our
+strange histories. For that of the pretty Countess [of Coventry], I fear
+there is too much truth in all you have heard: but you don't seem to
+know that Lord Corydon and Captain Corydon his brother have been most
+abominable. I don't care to write scandal; but when I see you, I will
+tell you how much the chits deserve to be whipped. Our favourite general
+[Conway] is at his camp: Lady Ailesbury don't go to him these three
+weeks. I expect the pleasure of seeing her and Miss Rich and Fred.
+Campbell here soon for a few days. I don't wonder your lordship likes
+St. Philippe better than Torcy:[1] except a few passages interesting to
+Englishmen, there cannot be a more dry narration than the latter. There
+is an addition of seven volumes of Universal History to Voltaire's
+Works, which I think will charm you: I almost like it the best of his
+works. It is what you have seen extended, and the Memoirs of Louis XIV.
+_refondues_ in it. He is a little tiresome with contradicting La
+Beaumelle and Voltaire, one remains with scarce a fixed idea about that
+time. I wish they would produce their authorities and proofs; without
+which, I am grown to believe neither. From mistakes in the English part,
+I suppose there are great ones in the more distant histories; yet
+altogether it is a fine work. He is, as one might believe, worst
+informed on the present times.--He says eight hundred persons were put
+to death for the last Rebellion--I don't believe a quarter of the number
+were: and he makes the first Lord Derwentwater--who, poor man! was in no
+such high-spirited mood--bring his son, who by the way was not above a
+year and a half old, upon the scaffold to be sprinkled with his
+blood.--However, he is in the right to expect to be believed: for he
+believes all the romances in Lord Anson's Voyage, and how Admiral
+Almanzor made one man-of-war box the ears of the whole empire of
+China!--I know nothing else new but a new edition of Dr. Young's Works.
+If your lordship thinks like me, who hold that even in his most frantic
+rhapsodies there are innumerable fine things, you will like to have this
+edition. Adieu, once more, my best lord!
+
+[Footnote 1: Torcy had been Secretary of State in the time of Louis
+XIV., and was the diplomatist who arranged the details of the First
+Partition Treaty with William III.]
+
+
+_HIS OWN "ROYAL AND NOBLE AUTHORS."_
+
+TO THE REV. HENRY ZOUCH.[1]
+
+[Footnote 1: Mr. Zouch was the squire and vicar of Sandhill, in
+Yorkshire.]
+
+STRAWBERRY HILL, _August_ 3, 1758.
+
+Sir,--I have received, with much pleasure and surprise, the favour of
+your remarks upon my Catalogue; and whenever I have the opportunity of
+being better known to you, I shall endeavour to express my gratitude for
+the trouble you have given yourself in contributing to perfect a work,
+which, notwithstanding your obliging expressions, I fear you found very
+little worthy the attention of so much good sense and knowledge, Sir, as
+you possess.
+
+I am extremely thankful for all the information you have given me; I had
+already met with a few of the same lights as I have received, Sir, from
+you, as I shall mention in their place. The very curious accounts of
+Lord Fairfax were entirely new and most acceptable to me. If I decline
+making use of one or two of your hints, I believe I can explain my
+reasons to your satisfaction. I will, with your leave, go regularly
+through your letter.
+
+As Caxton[1] laboured in the monastery of Westminster, it is not at all
+unlikely that he should wear the habit, nor, considering how vague our
+knowledge of that age is, impossible but he might enter the order.
+
+[Footnote 1: Mr. Zouch had expressed a doubt whether a portrait of a man
+in a clerical garb could possibly be meant for Caxton, and Mr. Cole and
+three of Walpole's literary correspondents suggested that it was
+probably a portrait of Jehan de Jeonville, Provost of Paris.]
+
+I have met with Henry's institution of a Christian, and shall give you
+an account of it in my next edition. In that, too, I shall mention, that
+Lord Cobham's allegiance professed at his death to Richard II., probably
+means to Richard and his right heirs whom he had abandoned for the house
+of Lancaster. As the article is printed off, it is too late to say
+anything more about his works.
+
+In all the old books of genealogy you will find, Sir, that young Richard
+Duke of York was solemnly married to a child of his own age, Anne
+Mowbray, the heiress of Norfolk, who died young as well as he.
+
+The article of the Duke of Somerset is printed off too; besides, I
+should imagine the letter you mention not to be of his own composition,
+for, though not illiterate, he certainly could not write anything like
+classic Latin. I may, too, possibly have inclusively mentioned the very
+letter; I have not Ascham's book, to see from what copy the letter was
+taken, but probably from one of those which I have said is in Bennet
+Library.
+
+The Catalogue of Lord Brooke's works is taken from the volume of his
+works; such pieces of his as I found doubted, particularly the tragedy
+of Cicero, I have taken notice of as doubtful.
+
+In my next edition you will see, Sir, a note on Lord Herbert, who,
+besides being with the King at York, had offended the peers by a speech
+in his Majesty's defence. Mr. Wolseley's preface I shall mention, from
+your information. Lord Rochester's letters to his son are letters to a
+child, bidding him mind his book and his grandmother. I had already been
+told, Sir, what you tell me of Marchmont Needham.
+
+Matthew Clifford I have altered to Martin, as you prescribed; the
+blunder was my own, as well as a more considerable one, that of Lord
+Sandwich's death--which was occasioned by my supposing, at first, that
+the translation of Barba was made by the second Earl, whose death I had
+marked in the list, and forgot to alter, after I had writ the account of
+the father. I shall take care to set this right, as the second volume
+is not yet begun to be printed.
+
+Lord Halifax's Maxims I have already marked down, as I shall Lord
+Dorset's share in Pompey.
+
+The account of the Duke of Wharton's death I had from a very good
+hand--Captain Willoughby; who, in the convent where the Duke died, saw a
+picture of him in the habit. If it was a Bernardine convent, the
+gentleman might confound them; but, considering that there is no life of
+the Duke but bookseller's trash, it is much more likely that they
+mistook.
+
+I have no doubts about Lord Belhaven's speeches; but unless I could
+verify their being published by himself, it were contrary to my rule to
+insert them.
+
+If you look, Sir, into Lord Clarendon's account of Montrose's death, you
+will perceive that there is no probability of the book of his actions
+being composed by himself.
+
+I will consult Sir James Ware's book on Lord Totness's translation; and
+I will mention the Earl of Cork's Memoirs.
+
+Lord Leppington is the Earl of Monmouth, in whose article I have taken
+notice of his Romulus and Tarquin.
+
+Lord Berkeley's book I have actually got, and shall give him an article.
+
+There is one more passage, Sir, in your letter, which I cannot answer,
+without putting you to new trouble--a liberty which all your indulgence
+cannot justify me in taking; else I would beg to know on what authority
+you attribute to Laurence Earl of Rochester[1] the famous preface to
+his father's history, which I have always heard ascribed to Atterbury,
+Smallridge, and Aldridge.[2] The knowledge of this would be an
+additional favour; it would be a much greater, Sir, if coming this way,
+you would ever let me have the honour of seeing a gentleman to whom I am
+so much obliged.
+
+[Footnote 1: The Earl of Rochester was the second son of the Earl of
+Clarendon. He was Lord Treasurer under James II., but was dismissed
+because he refused to change his religion (Macaulay's "History of
+England," c. 6).]
+
+[Footnote 2: Atterbury was the celebrated Bishop of Rochester,
+Smallridge was Bishop of Bristol, and Aldridge (usually written Aldrich)
+was Dean of Christchurch, Oxford, equally well known for his treatise on
+Logic and his five reasons for drinking--
+
+    Good wine, a friend, or being dry;
+    Or lest you should be by and by,
+    Or any other reason why--]
+
+
+_HIS "ROYAL AND NOBLE AUTHORS"--LORD CLARENDON--SIR R. WALPOLE AND LORD
+BOLINGBROKE--THE DUKE OF LEEDS._
+
+TO THE REV. HENRY ZOUCH.
+
+STRAWBERRY HILL, _Oct._ 21, 1758.
+
+Sir,--Every letter I receive from you is a new obligation, bringing me
+new information: but, sure, my Catalogue was not worthy of giving you so
+much trouble. Lord Fortescue is quite new to me; I have sent him to the
+press. Lord Dorset's[1] poem it will be unnecessary to mention
+separately, as I have already said that his works are to be found among
+those of the minor poets.
+
+[Footnote 1: Lord Dorset, Lord Chamberlain under Charles II., author of
+the celebrated ballad "To all you ladies now on land," and patron of
+Dryden and other literary men, was honourably mentioned as such by
+Macaulay in c. 8 of his "History," and also for his refusal, as
+Lord-Lieutenant of Essex, to comply with some of James's illegal
+orders.]
+
+I don't wonder, Sir, that you prefer Lord Clarendon to Polybius[1]; nor
+can two authors well be more unlike: the _former_ wrote a general
+history in a most obscure and almost unintelligible style; the _latter_,
+a portion of private history, in the noblest style in the world. Whoever
+made the comparison, I will do them the justice to believe that they
+understood bad Greek better than their own language in its elevation.
+For Dr. Jortin's[2] Erasmus, which I have very nearly finished, it has
+given me a good opinion of the author, and he has given me a very bad
+one of his subject. By the Doctor's labour and impartiality, Erasmus
+appears a begging parasite, who had parts enough to discover truth, and
+not courage enough to profess it: whose vanity made him always writing;
+yet his writings ought to have cured his vanity, as they were the most
+abject things in the world. _Good Erasmus's honest mean_ was alternate
+time-serving. I never had thought much about him, and now heartily
+despise him.
+
+[Footnote 1: "_You prefer Lord Clarendon to Polybius._" It is hard to
+understand this sentence. Lord Clarendon did _not_ write a general
+history, but an account of a single event, "The Great Rebellion." It was
+Polybius who wrote a "Universal History," of which, however, only five
+books have been preserved, the most interesting portion of which is a
+narrative of Hannibal's invasion of Italy and march over the Alps in the
+Second Punic War.]
+
+[Footnote 2: Dr. Jortin was Archdeacon of London; and, among other
+works, had recently published a life of the celebrated Erasmus, the
+mention of whom by Pope, which Walpole presently quotes, is not very
+unfairly interpreted by Walpole.]
+
+When I speak my opinion to you, Sir, about what I dare say you care as
+little for as I do, (for what is the merit of a mere man of letters?) it
+is but fit I should answer you as sincerely on a question about which
+you are so good as to interest yourself. That my father's life is likely
+to be written, I have no grounds for believing. I mean I know nobody
+that thinks of it. For, myself, I certainly shall not, for many reasons,
+which you must have the patience to hear. A reason to me myself is, that
+I think too highly of him, and too meanly of myself, to presume I am
+equal to the task. They who do not agree with me in the former part of
+my position, will undoubtedly allow the latter part. In the next place,
+the very truths that I should relate would be so much imputed to
+partiality, that he would lose of his due praise by the suspicion of my
+prejudice. In the next place, I was born too late in his life to be
+acquainted with him in the active part of it. Then I was at school, at
+the university, abroad, and returned not till the last moments of his
+administration. What I know of him I could only learn from his own mouth
+in the last three years of his life; when, to my shame, I was so idle,
+and young, and thoughtless, that I by no means profited of his leisure
+as I might have done; and, indeed, I have too much impartiality in my
+nature to care, if I could, to give the world a history, collected
+solely from the person himself of whom I should write. With the utmost
+veneration for his truth, I can easily conceive, that a man who had
+lived a life of party, and who had undergone such persecution from
+party, should have had greater bias than he himself could be sensible
+of. The last, and that a reason which must be admitted, if all the
+others are not--his papers are lost. Between the confusion of his
+affairs, and the indifference of my elder brother to things of that
+sort, they were either lost, burnt, or what we rather think, were stolen
+by a favourite servant of my brother, who proved a great rogue, and was
+dismissed in my brother's life; and the papers were not discovered to be
+missing till after my brother's death. Thus, Sir, I should want vouchers
+for many things I could say of much importance. I have another personal
+reason that discourages me from attempting this task, or any other,
+besides the great reluctance that I have to being a voluminous author.
+Though I am by no means the learned man you are so good as to call me in
+compliment; though, on the contrary, nothing can be more superficial
+than my knowledge, or more trifling than my reading,--yet, I have so
+much strained my eyes, that it is often painful to me to read even a
+newspaper by daylight. In short, Sir, having led a very dissipated life,
+in all the hurry of the world of pleasure, I scarce ever read but by
+candlelight, after I have come home late at nights. As my eyes have
+never had the least inflammation or humour, I am assured I may still
+recover them by care and repose. I own I prefer my eyes to anything I
+could ever read, much more to anything I could write. However, after
+all I have said, perhaps I may now and then, by degrees, throw together
+some short anecdotes of my father's private life and particular story,
+and leave his public history to more proper and more able hands, if such
+will undertake it. Before I finish on this chapter, I can assure you he
+did forgive my Lord Bolingbroke[1]--his nature was forgiving: after all
+was over, and he had nothing to fear or disguise, I can say with truth,
+that there were not _three_ men of whom he ever dropped a word with
+rancour. What I meant of the clergy not forgiving Lord Bolingbroke,
+alluded not to his doctrines, but to the direct attack and war he made
+on the whole body. And now, Sir, I will confess my own weakness to you.
+I do not think so highly of that writer, as I seem to do in my book; but
+I thought it would be imputed to prejudice in me, if I appeared to
+undervalue an author of whom so many persons of sense still think
+highly. My being Sir Robert Walpole's son warped me to praise, instead
+of censuring Lord Bolingbroke. With regard to the Duke of Leeds,[2] I
+think you have misconstrued the decency of my expression. I said,
+_Burnet_[3] _had treated him severely_; that is, I chose that Burnet
+should say so, rather than myself. I have never praised where my heart
+condemned. Little attentions, perhaps, to worthy descendants, were
+excusable in a work of so extensive a nature, and that approached so
+near to these times. I may, perhaps, have an opportunity, at one day or
+other of showing you some passages suppressed on these motives, which
+yet I do not intend to destroy.
+
+[Footnote 1: Sir R. Walpole was so far from having any personal quarrel
+with Bolingbroke, that he took off so much of his outlawry as banished
+him, though he would not allow him to take his seat in the House of
+Peers.]
+
+[Footnote 2: This celebrated statesman was originally Sir Thomas
+Osborne. On the dissolution of the Cabal Ministry he was raised to the
+peerage as Earl of Danby, and was appointed Lord Treasurer. An attempt
+to impeach him, which was prompted by Louis XIV., was baffled by
+Charles. Under William III. he was appointed President of the Council,
+being the recognised leader of the Tory section of the Ministry; and in
+the course of the reign he was twice promoted--first to be Marquis of
+Carmarthen, and subsequently to be Duke of Leeds.]
+
+[Footnote 3: Burnet, the Bishop of Salisbury, to whose "Memoirs of His
+Own Time" all subsequent historians are greatly indebted. He accompanied
+William to England as his chaplain.]
+
+Crew,[1] Bishop of Durham, was as abject a tool as possible. I would be
+very certain he is an author before I should think him worth mentioning.
+If ever you should touch on Lord Willoughby's sermon, I should be
+obliged for a hint of it. I actually have a printed copy of verses by
+his son, on the marriage of the Princess Royal; but they are so
+ridiculously unlike measure, and the man was so mad and so poor, that I
+determined not to mention him.
+
+[Footnote 1: Crew was Bishop of Durham. He is branded by Macaulay (c. 6)
+as "mean, vain, and cowardly." He accepted a seat on James's
+Ecclesiastical Commission, and when "some of his friends represented to
+him the risk which he ran by sitting on an illegal tribunal, he was not
+ashamed to answer that he could not live out of the royal smile."]
+
+If these details, Sir, which I should have thought interesting to no
+mortal but myself, should happen to amuse you, I shall be glad; if they
+do not, you will learn not to question a man who thinks it his duty to
+satisfy the curiosity of men of sense and honour, and who, being of too
+little consequence to have secrets, is not ambitious of the less
+consequence of appearing to have any.
+
+P.S.--I must ask you one question, but to be answered entirely at your
+leisure. I have a play in rhyme called "Saul," said to be written by a
+peer. I guess Lord Orrery. If ever you happen to find out, be so good to
+tell me.
+
+
+_WALPOLE'S MONUMENT TO SIR HORACE'S BROTHER--ATTEMPTED ASSASSINATION OF
+THE KING OF PORTUGAL--COURTESY OF THE DUC D'AIGUILLON TO HIS ENGLISH
+PRISONERS._
+
+TO SIR HORACE MANN.
+
+STRAWBERRY HILL, _Oct._ 24, 1758.
+
+It is a very melancholy present I send you here, my dear Sir; yet,
+considering the misfortune that has befallen us, perhaps the most
+agreeable I could send you. You will not think it the bitterest tear you
+have shed when you drop one over this plan of an urn inscribed with the
+name of your dear brother, and with the testimonial of my eternal
+affection to him! This little monument is at last placed over the pew of
+your family at Linton [in Kent], and I doubt whether any tomb was ever
+erected that spoke so much truth of the departed, and flowed from so
+much sincere friendship in the living. The thought was my own, adopted
+from the antique columbaria, and applied to Gothic. The execution of the
+design was Mr. Bentley's, who alone, of all mankind, could unite the
+grace of Grecian architecture and the irregular lightness and solemnity
+of Gothic. Kent and many of our builders sought this, but have never
+found it. Mr. Chute, who has as much taste as Mr. Bentley, thinks this
+little sketch a perfect model. The soffite is more beautiful than
+anything of either style separate. There is a little error in the
+inscription; it should be _Horatius Walpole posuit_. The urn is of
+marble, richly polished; the rest of stone. On the whole, I think there
+is simplicity and decency, with a degree of ornament that destroys
+neither.
+
+What do you say in Italy on the assassination of the King of
+Portugal?[1] Do you believe that Portuguese subjects lift their hand
+against a monarch for gallantry? Do you believe that when a slave
+murders an absolute prince, he goes a walking with his wife the next
+morning and murders her too? Do you believe the dead King is alive? and
+that the Jesuits are as _wrongfully_ suspected of this assassination as
+they have been of many others they have committed? If you do believe
+this, and all this, you are not very near turning Protestants. It is
+scarce talked of here, and to save trouble, we admit just what the
+Portuguese Minister is ordered to publish. The King of Portugal
+murdered, throws us two hundred years back--the King of Prussia _not_
+murdered, carries us two hundred years forward again.
+
+[Footnote 1: The Duke of Aveiro was offended with the King of Portugal
+for interfering to prevent his son's marriage, and, in revenge, he
+plotted his assassination. He procured the co-operation of some other
+nobles, especially the Marquis and Marchioness of Tavora, and also of
+some of the chief Jesuits in the country, who promised absolution to any
+assassin. The attempt was made on September 3rd, when the King was fired
+at and severely wounded. The conspirators were all convicted and
+executed, and the Jesuits were expelled from the country.]
+
+Another King, I know, has had a little blow: the Prince de Soubise has
+beat some Isenbourgs and Obergs, and is going to be Elector of Hanover
+this winter. There has been a great sickness among our troops in the
+other German army; the Duke of Marlborough has been in great danger, and
+some officers are dead. Lord Frederick Cavendish is returned from
+France. He confirms and adds to the amiable accounts we had received of
+the Duc d'Aiguillon's[1] behaviour to our prisoners. You yourself, the
+pattern of attentions and tenderness, could not refine on what he has
+done both in good-nature and good-breeding: he even forbad any ringing
+of bells or rejoicings wherever they passed--but how your representative
+blood will curdle when you hear of the absurdity of one of your
+countrymen: the night after the massacre at St. Cas, the Duc d'Aiguillon
+gave a magnificent supper of eighty covers to our prisoners--a Colonel
+Lambert got up at the bottom of the table, and asking for a bumper,
+called out to the Duc, "My Lord Duke, here's the Roy de Franse!" You
+must put all the English you can crowd into the accent. _My Lord Duke_
+was so confounded at this preposterous compliment, which it was
+impossible for him to return, that he absolutely sank back into his
+chair and could not utter a syllable: our own people did not seem to
+feel more.
+
+[Footnote 1: The Duc d'Aiguillon was governor of Brittany when the
+disastrous attempt of the Duke of Marlborough on St. Cast was repulsed.
+But he did not get much credit for the defeat. Lacretelle mentions that:
+"Les Bretons qui le considerent comme leur tyran pretendent qu'il
+l'etait tenu cache pendant le combat" (iii. 345). He was subsequently
+prosecuted on charges of peculation and subornation, which the
+Parliament declared to be fully established, but Mme. de Barri persuaded
+Louis to cancel their resolution.]
+
+You will read and hear that we have another expedition sailing,
+somewhither in the West Indies. Hobson, the commander, has in his whole
+life had but one stroke of a palsy, so possibly may retain half of his
+understanding at least. There is a great tranquillity at home, but I
+should think not promising duration. The disgust in the army on the late
+frantic measures will furnish some warmth probably to Parliament--and if
+the French should think of returning our visits, should you wonder?
+There are even rumours of some stirring among your little neighbours at
+Albano--keep your eye on them--if you could discover anything in time,
+it would do you great credit. _Apropos_ to _them_, I will send you an
+epigram that I made the other day on Mr. Chute's asking why Taylor the
+oculist called himself Chevalier?[1]
+
+[Footnote 1: Walpole was proud of the epigram, for the week before he
+had sent it to Lady Hervey. It was--
+
+    Why Taylor the quack calls himself Chevalier
+     'Tis not easy a reason to render,
+    Unless blinding eyes that he thinks to make clear
+      Demonstrates he's but a _Pretender_.
+
+Le Chevalier was the name commonly given in courtesy by both parties to
+Prince Charles Edward in 1745. Colonel Talbot says: "'Well, I never
+thought to have been so much indebted to the Pretend--' 'To the Prince,'
+said Waverley, smiling. 'To the Chevalier,' said the Colonel; 'it is a
+good travelling name which we may both freely use'" ("Waverley," c.
+55).]
+
+
+_A NEW EDITION OF LUCAN--COMPARISON OF "PHARSALEA"--CRITICISM ON THE
+POET, WITH THE AENEID--HELVETIUS'S WORK, "DE L'ESPRIT."_
+
+TO THE REV. HENRY ZOUCH.
+
+ARLINGTON STREET, _Dec._ 9, 1758.
+
+Sir,--I have desired Mr. Whiston to convey to you the second edition of
+my Catalogue, not so complete as it might have been, if great part had
+not been printed before I received your remarks, but yet more correct
+than the first sketch with which I troubled you. Indeed, a thing of this
+slight and idle nature does not deserve to have much more pains employed
+upon it.
+
+I am just undertaking an edition of Lucan, my friend Mr. Bentley having
+in his possession his father's notes and emendations on the first seven
+books. Perhaps a partiality for the original author concurs a little
+with this circumstance of the notes, to make me fond of printing, at
+Strawberry Hill, the works of a man who, alone of all the classics, was
+thought to breathe too brave and honest a spirit for the perusal of the
+Dauphin and the French. I don't think that a good or bad taste in poetry
+is of so serious a nature, that I should be afraid of owning too, that,
+with that great judge Corneille, and with that, perhaps, _no_ judge
+Heinsius, I prefer Lucan to Virgil. To speak fairly, I prefer great
+sense, to poetry with little sense. There are hemistichs in Lucan that
+go to one's soul and one's heart;--for a mere epic poem, a fabulous
+tissue of uninteresting battles that don't teach one even to fight, I
+know nothing more tedious. The poetic images, the versification and
+language of the Aeneid are delightful; but take the story by itself, and
+can anything be more silly and unaffecting? There are a few gods without
+power, heroes without character, heaven-directed wars without justice,
+inventions without probability, and a hero who betrays one woman with a
+kingdom that he might have had, to force himself upon another woman and
+another kingdom to which he had no pretensions, and all this to show his
+obedience to the gods! In short, I have always admired his numbers so
+much, and his meaning so little, that I think I should like Virgil
+better if I understood him less.
+
+Have you seen, Sir, a book which has made some noise--"Helvetius de
+l'Esprit"[1]? The author is so good and moral a man, that I grieve he
+should have published a system of as relaxed morality as can well be
+imagined: 'tis a large quarto, and in general a very superficial one.
+His philosophy may be new in France, but it greatly exhausted here. He
+tries to imitate Montesquieu,[2] and has heaped common-places upon
+common-places, which supply or overwhelm his reasoning; yet he has
+often wit, happy allusions, and sometimes writes finely: there is merit
+enough to give an obscure man fame; flimsiness enough to depreciate a
+great man. After his book was licensed, they forced him to retract it by
+a most abject recantation. Then why print this work? If zeal for his
+system pushed him to propagate it, did not he consider that a
+recantation would hurt his cause more than his arguments could support
+it?
+
+[Footnote 1: Helvetius was the son of the French king's physician. His
+book was condemned by the Parliament of Paris as derogatory to the
+nature of man.]
+
+[Footnote 2: Montesquieu was President of the Parliament of Bordeaux. He
+was a voluminous writer, his most celebrated work being his "L'Esprit
+des Lois." Burke described him as "A genius not born in every country,
+or every time: with a Herculean robustness of mind; and nerves not to be
+broken by labour."]
+
+We are promised Lord Clarendon in February from Oxford, but I hear shall
+have the surreptitious edition from Holland much sooner.
+
+You see, Sir, I am a sceptic as well as Helvetius, but of a more
+moderate complexion. There is no harm in telling mankind that there is
+not so much divinity in the Aeneid as they imagine; but, even if I
+thought so, I would not preach that virtue and friendship are mere
+names, and resolvable into self-interest; because there are numbers that
+would remember the grounds of the principle, and forget what was to be
+engrafted on it. Adieu!
+
+
+_STATE OF THE HOUSE OF COMMONS._
+
+TO THE HON. H.S. CONWAY.
+
+ARLINGTON STREET, _Jan._ 19, 1759.
+
+I hope the treaty of Sluys[1] advances rapidly. Considering that your
+own court is as new to you as Monsieur de Bareil and his, you cannot be
+very well entertained: the joys of a Dutch fishing town and the
+incidents of a cartel will not compose a very agreeable history. In the
+mean time you do not lose much; though the Parliament is met, no
+politics are come to town; one may describe the House of Commons like
+the price of stocks--Debates, nothing done. Votes, under par. Patriots,
+no price. Oratory, books shut. Love and war are as much at a stand;
+neither the Duchess of Hamilton, nor the expeditions are gone off yet.
+Prince Edward has asked to go to Quebec, and has been refused. If I was
+sure they would refuse me, I would ask to go thither too. I should not
+dislike about as much laurel as I could stick in my window at Christmas.
+
+[Footnote 1: Treaty of Sluys. Conway was engaged at Sluys negotiating
+with the French envoy, M. de Bareil, for an exchange of prisoners.]
+
+We are next week to have a serenata at the Opera-house for the King of
+Prussia's birthday; it is to begin, "Viva Georgio, e Frederigo viva!" It
+will, I own, divert me to see my Lord Temple whispering _for_ this
+alliance, on the same bench on which I have so often seen him whisper
+_against_ all Germany. The new opera pleases universally, and I hope
+will yet hold up its head. Since Vanneschi is cunning enough to make us
+sing _the roast beef of old Germany_, I am persuaded it will revive;
+politics are the only hot-bed for keeping such a tender plant as Italian
+music alive in England.
+
+You are so thoughtless about your dress, that I cannot help giving you a
+little warning against your return. Remember, everybody that comes from
+abroad is _cense_ to come from France, and whatever they wear at their
+first reappearance immediately grows the fashion. Now if, as is very
+likely, you should through inadvertence change hats with a master of a
+Dutch smack, Offley will be upon the watch, will conclude you took your
+pattern from M. de Bareil, and in a week's time we shall all be equipped
+like Dutch skippers. You see I speak very disinterestedly; for, as I
+never wear a hat myself, it is indifferent to me what sort of hat I
+don't wear. Adieu! I hope nothing in this letter, if it is opened, will
+affect _the conferences_, nor hasten our rupture with Holland. Lest it
+should, I send it to Lord Holdernesse's office; concluding, like Lady
+Betty Waldegrave, that the Government never suspect what they send under
+their own covers.
+
+
+_ROBERTSON'S "HISTORY OF SCOTLAND"--COMPARISON OF RAMSAY AND REYNOLDS AS
+PORTRAIT-PAINTERS--SIR DAVID'S "HISTORY OF THE GOWRIE CONSPIRACY."_
+
+TO SIR DAVID DALRYMPLE.
+
+STRAWBERRY HILL, _Feb._ 25, 1759.
+
+I think, Sir, I have perceived enough of the amiable benignity of your
+mind, to be sure that you will like to hear the praises of your
+friend.[1] Indeed, there is but one opinion about Mr. Robertson's
+"History [of Scotland]." I don't remember any other work that ever met
+universal approbation. Since the Romans and the Greeks, who have _now_
+an exclusive charter for being the best writers in every kind, he is the
+historian that pleases me best; and though what he has been so indulgent
+as to say of me ought to shut my mouth, I own I have been unmeasured in
+my commendations. I have forfeited my own modesty rather than not do
+justice to him. I did send him my opinion some time ago, and hope he
+received it. I can add, with the strictest truth, that he is regarded
+here as one of the greatest men that this island has produced. I say
+_island_, but you know, Sir, that I am disposed to say _Scotland_. I
+have discovered another very agreeable writer among your countrymen, and
+in a profession where I did not look for an author; it is Mr. Ramsay,
+the painter, whose pieces being anonymous, have been overlooked. He has
+a great deal of genuine wit, and a very just manner of reasoning. In his
+own walk, he has great merit. He and Mr. Reynolds are our favourite
+painters, and two of the very best we ever had. Indeed, the number of
+good has been very small, considering the numbers there are. A very few
+years ago there were computed two thousand portrait-painters in London;
+I do not exaggerate the computation, but diminish it; though I think it
+must have been exaggerated. Mr. Reynolds and Mr. Ramsay can scarce be
+rivals; their manners are so different. The former is bold, and has a
+kind of tempestuous colouring, yet with dignity and grace; the latter is
+all delicacy. Mr. Reynolds seldom succeeds in women; Mr. Ramsay is
+formed to paint them.
+
+[Footnote 1: Sir David was himself a historical writer of some
+importance. Macaulay was greatly indebted to his "Memoirs of Great
+Britain and Ireland from the Restoration to the Battle of La Hogue." The
+secret history and object of the strange attempt on James VI.
+(afterwards James I. of England) have been discussed by many writers,
+but without any of them succeeding in any very clear or certain
+elucidation of the transaction.]
+
+I fear I neglected, Sir, to thank you for your present of the history of
+the "Conspiracy of the Gowries"; but I shall never forget all the
+obligations I have to you. I don't doubt but in Scotland you approve
+what is liked here almost as much as Mr. Robertson's History; I mean the
+marriage of Colonel Campbell and the Duchess of Hamilton. If her fortune
+is singular, so is her merit. Such uncommon noise as her beauty made has
+not at all impaired the modesty of her behaviour. Adieu!
+
+
+_WRITERS OF HISTORY: GOODALL, HUME, ROBERTSON--QUEEN CHRISTINA._
+
+TO SIR DAVID DALRYMPLE.
+
+STRAWBERRY HILL, _July_ 11, 1759.
+
+You will repent, Sir, I fear, having drawn such a correspondent upon
+yourself. An author flattered and encouraged is not easily shaken off
+again; but if the interests of my book did not engage me to trouble you,
+while you are so good as to write me the most entertaining letters in
+the world, it is very natural for me to lay snares to inveigle more of
+them. However, Sir, excuse me this once, and I will be more modest for
+the future in trespassing on your kindness. Yet, before I break out on
+my new wants, it will be but decent, Sir, to answer some particulars of
+your letter.
+
+I have lately read Mr. Goodall's[1] book. There is certainly ingenuity
+in parts of his defence; but I believe one seldom thinks a defence
+_ingenious_ without meaning that it is unsatisfactory. His work left me
+fully convinced of what he endeavoured to disprove; and showed me, that
+the piece you mention is not the only one that he has written against
+moderation.
+
+[Footnote 1: Mr. Goodall had published an Essay on the letters put
+forward as written by Queen Mary to Bothwell, branding them as
+forgeries. The question of their genuineness has been examined with
+great acuteness by more than one subsequent writer, and the arguments
+against their genuineness are certainly very strong.]
+
+I have lately got Lord Cromerty's "Vindication of the legitimacy of King
+Robert [the Third]," and his "Synopsis Apocalyptica," and thank you
+much, Sir, for the notice of any of his pieces. But if you expect that
+his works should lessen my esteem for the writers of Scotland, you will
+please to recollect, that the letter which paints Lord Cromerty's pieces
+in so ridiculous a light, is more than a counterbalance in favour of the
+writers of your country; and of all men living, Sir, you are the last
+who will destroy my partiality for Scotland.
+
+There is another point, Sir, on which, with all your address, you will
+persuade me as little. Can I think that we want writers of history while
+Mr. Hume and Mr. Robertson are living? It is a truth, and not a
+compliment, that I never heard objections made to Mr. Hume's History
+without endeavouring to convince the persons who found fault with it,
+of its great merit and beauty; and for what I saw of Mr. Robertson's
+work, it is one of the purest styles, and of the greatest impartiality,
+that I ever read. It is impossible for me to recommend a subject to him;
+because I cannot judge of what materials he can obtain. His present
+performance will undoubtedly make him so well known and esteemed, that
+he will have credit to obtain many new lights for a future history; but
+surely those relating to his own country will always lie most open to
+him. This is much my way of thinking with regard to myself. Though the
+Life of Christina[1] is a pleasing and a most uncommon subject, yet,
+totally unacquainted as I am with Sweden and its language, how could I
+flatter myself with saying anything new of her? And when original
+letters and authentic papers shall hereafter appear, may not they
+contradict half one should relate on the authority of what is already
+published? for though Memoirs _written_ nearest to the time are likely
+to be the truest, those _published_ nearest to it are generally the
+falsest.
+
+[Footnote 1: Queen Christina of Sweden was the daughter and heiress of
+the great Gustavus Adolphus. After a time she abdicated the throne and
+lived for some time in Paris, where she acted in one respect as if still
+possessed of royal authority, actually causing her equerry, Monaldeschi,
+to be hung in one of her sitting-rooms.]
+
+But, indeed, Sir, I am now making you only civil excuses; the real one
+is, I have no kind of intention of continuing to write. I could not
+expect to succeed again with so much luck,--indeed, I think it so,--as I
+have done; it would mortify me more now, after a little success, to be
+despised, than it would have done before; and if I could please as much
+as I should wish to do, I think one should dread being a voluminous
+author. My own idleness, too, bids me desist. If I continued, I should
+certainly take more pains than I did in my Catalogue; the trouble would
+not only be more than I care to encounter, but would probably destroy
+what I believe the only merit of my last work, the ease. If I could
+incite you to tread in steps which I perceive you don't condemn, and for
+which it is evident you are so well qualified, from your knowledge, the
+grace, facility, and humour of your expression and manner, I shall have
+done a real service, where I expected at best to amuse.
+
+
+_THE BATTLE OF MINDEN--LORD G. SACKVILLE._
+
+TO THE HON. H.S. CONWAY.
+
+ARLINGTON STREET, _Aug._ 14, 1759.
+
+I am here in the most unpleasant way in the world, attending poor Mrs.
+Leneve's death-bed, a spectator of all the horrors of tedious suffering
+and clear sense, and with no one soul to speak to--but I will not tire
+you with a description of what has quite worn me out.
+
+Probably by this time you have seen the Duke of Richmond or Fitzroy--but
+lest you should not, I will tell you all I can learn, and a wonderful
+history it is. Admiral Byng was not more unpopular than Lord George
+Sackville.[1] I should scruple repeating his story if Betty and the
+waiters at Arthur's did not talk of it publicly, and thrust Prince
+Ferdinand's orders into one's hand.
+
+[Footnote 1: Lord George was brought to court-martial for disobedience
+of orders, and most deservedly cashiered--a sentence which was, not very
+becomingly, oveilooked some years afterwards, when, having changed his
+name to Germaine on succeeding to a large fortune, and having become a
+member of the House of Commons, he was made a Secretary of State by Lord
+North.]
+
+You have heard, I suppose, of the violent animosities that have reigned
+for the whole campaign between him and Lord Granby--in which some other
+warm persons have been very warm too. In the heat of the battle, the
+Prince, finding thirty-six squadrons of French coming down upon our
+army, sent Ligonier to order our thirty-two squadrons, under Lord
+George, to advance. During that transaction, the French appeared to
+waver; and Prince Ferdinand, willing, as it is supposed, to give the
+honour to the British horse of terminating the day, sent Fitzroy to bid
+Lord George bring up only the British cavalry. Ligonier had but just
+delivered his message, when Fitzroy came with his.--Lord George said,
+"This can't be so--would he have me break the line? here is some
+mistake." Fitzroy replied, he had not argued upon the orders, but those
+were the orders. "Well!" said Lord George, "but I want a guide." Fitzroy
+said, he would be his guide. Lord George, "Where is the Prince?"
+Fitzroy, "I left him at the head of the left wing, I don't know where he
+is now." Lord George said he would go seek him, and have this explained.
+Smith then asked Fitzroy to repeat the orders to him; which being done,
+Smith went and whispered Lord George, who says he then bid Smith carry
+up the cavalry. Smith is come, and says he is ready to answer anybody
+any question. Lord George says, Prince Ferdinand's behaviour to him has
+been most infamous, has asked leave to resign his command, and to come
+over, which is granted. Prince Ferdinand's behaviour is summed up in the
+enclosed extraordinary paper: which you will doubt as I did, but which
+is certainly genuine. I doubted, because, in the military, I thought
+direct disobedience of orders was punished with an immediate arrest, and
+because the last paragraph seemed to me very foolish. The going out of
+the way to compliment Lord Granby with what he would have done, seems to
+take off a little from the compliments paid to those that have done
+something; but, in short, Prince Ferdinand or Lord George, one of them,
+is most outrageously in the wrong, and the latter has much the least
+chance of being thought in the right.
+
+The particulars I tell you, I collected from the most _accurate_
+authorities.--I make no comments on Lord George, it would look like a
+little dirty court to you; and the best compliment I can make you, is to
+think, as I do, that you will be the last man to enjoy this revenge.
+
+You will be sorry for poor M'Kinsey and Lady Betty, who have lost their
+only child at Turin. Adieu!
+
+
+_ADMIRAL BOSCAWEN'S VICTORY--DEFEAT OF THE KING OF PRUSSIA--LORD G.
+SACKVILLE._
+
+TO SIR HORACE MANN.
+
+ARLINGTON STREET, _Sept._ 13, 1759.
+
+With your unathletic constitution I think you will have a greater weight
+of glory to represent than you can bear. You will be as _epuise_ as
+Princess Craon with all the triumphs over Niagara, Ticonderoga,
+Crown-point, and such a parcel of long names. You will ruin yourself in
+French horns, to exceed those of Marshal Botta, who has certainly found
+out a pleasant way of announcing victories. Besides, _all_ the West
+Indies, which we have taken by a panic, there is Admiral Boscawen has
+demolished the Toulon squadron, and has made _you_ Viceroy of the
+Mediterranean. I really believe the French will come hither now, for
+they can be safe nowhere else. If the King of Prussia should be totally
+undone in Germany,[1] we can afford to give him an appanage, as a
+younger son of England, of some hundred thousand miles on the Ohio. Sure
+universal monarchy was never so put to shame as that of France! What a
+figure do they make! They seem to have no ministers, no generals, no
+soldiers! If anything could be more ridiculous than their behaviour in
+the field, it would be in the cabinet! Their invasion appears not to
+have been designed against us, but against their own people, who, they
+fear, will mutiny, and to quiet whom they disperse expresses, with
+accounts of the progress of their arms in England. They actually have
+established posts, to whom people are directed to send their letters for
+their friends _in England_. If, therefore, you hear that the French have
+established themselves at Exeter or at Norwich, don't be alarmed, nor
+undeceive the poor women who are writing to their husbands for English
+baubles.
+
+[Footnote 1: Frederic the Great had sustained a severe defeat at
+Hochkirch in October, 1758, and a still more terrible one in August of
+this year from Marshals Laudon and Soltikof at Kunersdorf. It seemed so
+irreparable that for a moment he even contemplated putting an end to his
+life; but he was saved from the worst consequences of the blow by
+jealousies which sprang up between the Austrian and Russian commanders,
+and preventing them from profiting by their victory as they might have
+done.]
+
+We have lost another Princess, Lady Elizabeth.[1] She died of an
+inflammation in her bowels in two days. Her figure was so very
+unfortunate, that it would have been difficult for her to be happy, but
+her parts and application were extraordinary. I saw her act in "Cato" at
+eight years old, (when she could not stand alone, but was forced to lean
+against the side-scene,) better than any of her brothers and sisters.
+She had been so unhealthy, that at that age she had not been taught to
+read, but had learned the part of Lucia by hearing the others study
+their parts. She went to her father and mother, and begged she might
+act. They put her off as gently as they could--she desired leave to
+repeat her part, and when she did, it was with so much sense, that there
+was no denying her.
+
+[Footnote 1: Second daughter of Frederick, Prince of Wales.--WALPOLE.]
+
+I receive yours of August 25. To all your alarms for the King of
+Prussia I subscribe. With little Brandenburgh he could not exhaust all
+the forces of Bohemia, Hungary, Austria, Muscovy, Siberia, Tartary,
+Sweden, &c., &c., &c.--but not to politicize too much, I believe the
+world will come to be fought for somewhere between the North of Germany
+and the back of Canada, between Count Daun and Sir William Johnson.[1]
+
+[Footnote 1: Our General in America--WALPOLE.]
+
+You guessed right about the King of Spain; he is dead, and the Queen
+Dowager may once more have an opportunity of embroiling the little of
+Europe that remains unembroiled.
+
+Thank you, my dear Sir, for the Herculaneum and Caserta that you are
+sending me. I wish the watch may arrive safe, to show you that I am not
+insensible to all your attentions for me, but endeavour, at a great
+distance, to imitate you in the execution of commissions.
+
+I would keep this letter back for a post, that I might have but one
+trouble of sending you Quebec too; but when one has taken so many
+places, it is not worth while to wait for one more.
+
+Lord George Sackville, the hero of all conversation, if one can be so
+for not being a hero, is arrived. He immediately applied for a
+Court-Martial, but was told it was impossible now, as the officers
+necessary are in Germany. This was in writing from Lord Holdernesse--but
+Lord Ligonier in words was more squab--"If he wanted a Court-Martial, he
+might go seek it in Germany." All that could be taken from him, is, his
+regiment, above two thousand pounds a year: commander in Germany at ten
+pounds a day, between three and four thousand pounds: lieutenant-general
+of the ordnance, one thousand five hundred pounds: a fort, three hundred
+pounds. He remains with a patent place in Ireland of one thousand two
+hundred pounds, and about two thousand pounds a year of his own and
+wife's. With his parts and ambition it cannot end here; he calls himself
+ruined, but when the Parliament meets, he will probably attempt some
+sort of revenge.
+
+They attribute, I don't know with what grounds, a sensible kind of plan
+to the French; that De la Clue was to have pushed for Ireland, Thurot
+for Scotland, and the Brest fleet for England--but before they lay such
+great plans, they should take care of proper persons to execute them.[1]
+
+[Footnote 1: De la Clue and the French were this year making unusual
+efforts to establish a naval superiority over us, which they never had
+done, and never will do. As is mentioned in this letter, one powerful
+fleet was placed under De la Clue, another under Conflans, and a strong
+squadron under Commodore Thurot. De la Clue, however, for many weeks
+kept close in Toulon, resisting every endeavour of Boscawen to tempt him
+out, till the English admiral was compelled to retire to Gibraltar for
+the repair of some of his ships. De la Clue, not knowing which way he
+had gone, thought he could steal through the Straits to join Conflans,
+according to his original orders. But Boscawen caught him off Cape
+Lagos, and gave him a decisive defeat, capturing five sail of the line,
+and among them the flagship _L'Ocean_ (80). Before the end of the year
+Hawke almost destroyed the fleet of Conflans, capturing five and driving
+the rest on shore; while Thurot, who at first had a gleam of success,
+making one or two descents on the northern coast of Ireland, and even
+capturing Carrickfergus, had, in the end, worse fortune than either of
+his superior officers, being overtaken at the mouth of Belfast Lough by
+Captain Elliott with a squadron of nearly equal force, when the whole of
+the French squadron was taken and he himself was killed (the Editor's
+"History of the British Navy," c. 12).]
+
+I cannot help smiling at the great objects of our letters. We never
+converse on a less topic than a kingdom. We are a kind of citizens of
+the world, and battles and revolutions are the common incidents of our
+neighbourhood. But that is and must be the case of distant
+correspondences: Kings and Empresses that we never saw, are the only
+persons we can be acquainted with in common. We can have no more
+familiarity than the _Daily Advertiser_ would have if it wrote to the
+_Florentine Gazette_. Adieu! My compliments to any monarch that lives
+within five hundred miles of you.
+
+
+_A YEAR OF TRIUMPHS._
+
+TO GEORGE MONTAGU, ESQ.
+
+STRAWBERRY HILL, _Oct._ 21, 1759.
+
+Your pictures shall be sent as soon as any of us go to London, but I
+think that will not be till the Parliament meets. Can we easily leave
+the remains of such a year as this? It is still all gold.[1] I have not
+dined or gone to bed by a fire till the day before yesterday. Instead of
+the glorious and ever-memorable year 1759, as the newspapers call it, I
+call it this ever-warm and victorious year. We have not had more
+conquest than fine weather: one would think we had plundered East and
+West Indies of sunshine. Our bells are worn threadbare with ringing for
+victories. I believe it will require ten votes of the House of Commons
+before people will believe it is the Duke of Newcastle that has done
+this, and not Mr. Pitt. One thing is very fatiguing--all the world is
+made knights or generals. Adieu! I don't know a word of news less than
+the conquest of America. Adieu! yours ever.
+
+[Footnote 1: The immediate cause of this exultation was the battle
+(September 14th) and subsequent capture of Quebec. On the other side of
+the world Colonel Forde had inflicted severe defeats on the French and
+Dutch, and had taken Masulipatam; and besides these triumphs there were
+our naval successes mentioned in the last letter, and the battle of
+Minden.]
+
+P.S.--You shall hear from me again if we take Mexico or China before
+Christmas.
+
+2nd P.S.--I had sealed my letter, but break it open again, having forgot
+to tell you that Mr. Cowslade has the pictures of Lord and Lady Cutts,
+and is willing to sell them.
+
+
+_FRENCH BANKRUPTCY--FRENCH EPIGRAM._
+
+TO GEORGE MONTAGU, ESQ.
+
+ARLINGTON STREET, _Nov._ 8, 1759.
+
+Your pictures will set out on Saturday; I give you notice, that you may
+inquire for them. I did not intend to be here these three days, but my
+Lord Bath taking the trouble to send a man and horse to ask me to dinner
+yesterday, I did not know how to refuse; and besides, as Mr. Bentley
+said to me, "you know he was an old friend of your father."
+
+The town is empty, but is coming to dress itself for Saturday. My Lady
+Coventry showed George Selwyn her clothes; they are blue, with spots of
+silver, of the size of a shilling, and a silver trimming, and cost--my
+lord will know what. She asked George how he liked them; he replied,
+"Why, you will be change for a guinea."
+
+I find nothing talked of but the French bankruptcy;[1] Sir Robert Brown,
+I hear--and am glad to hear--will be a great sufferer. They put gravely
+into the article of bankrupts in the newspaper, "Louis le Petit, of the
+city of Paris, peace-breaker, dealer, and chapman;" it would have been
+still better if they had said, "Louis Bourbon of petty France." We don't
+know what is become of their Monsieur Thurot, of whom we had still a
+little mind to be afraid. I should think he would do like Sir Thomas
+Hanmer, make a faint effort, beg pardon of the Scotch for their
+disappointment, and retire. Here are some pretty verses just arrived.
+
+    Pourquoi le baton a Soubise,
+    Puisque Chevert est le vainqueur?[2]
+    C'est de la cour une meprise,
+    Ou bien le but de la faveur.
+    Je ne vois rien la qui m'etonne,
+    Repond aussitot un railleur;
+    C'est a l'aveugle qu'on le donne,
+    Et non pas au conducteur.
+
+[Footnote 1: In 1759 M. Bertin was Finance Minister--the fourth who had
+held that office in four years; and among his expedients for raising
+money he had been compelled to have recourse to the measure of stopping
+the payment of the interest on a large portion of the National Debt.]
+
+[Footnote 2: "_Chevert est le vainqueur._" He was one of the most
+brilliant officers in the French army. It was he who, under the orders
+of Saxe, surprised Prague in 1744, and it was to him that Marechal
+d'Estrees was principally indebted for his victory of Hastenbeck.]
+
+Lady Meadows has left nine thousand pounds in reversion after her
+husband to Lord Sandwich's daughter. _Apropos_ to my Lady Meadows's
+maiden name, a name I believe you have sometimes heard; I was diverted
+t'other day with a story of a lady of that name,[1] and a lord, whose
+initial is no farther from hers than he himself is sometimes supposed to
+be. Her postillion, a lad of sixteen, said, "I am not such a child but I
+can guess something: whenever my Lord Lyttelton comes to my lady, she
+orders the porter to let in nobody else, and then they call for a pen
+and ink, and say they are going to write history." Is not this _finesse_
+so like him? Do you know that I am persuaded, now he is parted, that he
+will forget he is married, and propose himself in form to some woman or
+other.
+
+[Footnote 1: Mrs. Montagu was the foundress of "The Blue-stocking Club."
+She was the authoress of three "Dialogues of the Dead," to which Walpole
+is alluding here, and which she published with some others by Lord
+Lyttelton.]
+
+When do you come? if it is not soon, you will find a new town. I stared
+to-day at Piccadilly like a country squire; there are twenty new stone
+houses: at first I concluded that all the grooms, that used to live
+there, had got estates, and built palaces. One young gentleman, who was
+getting an estate, but was so indiscreet as to step out of his way to
+rob a comrade, is convicted, and to be transported; in short, one of the
+waiters at Arthur's. George Selwyn says, "What a horrid idea he will
+give of us to the people in Newgate!"
+
+I was still more surprised t'other day, than at seeing Piccadilly, by
+receiving a letter from the north of Ireland from a clergyman, with
+violent encomiums on my "Catalogue of Noble Authors"--and this when I
+thought it quite forgot. It puts me in mind of the queen[1] that sunk at
+Charing Cross and rose at Queenhithe.
+
+[Footnote 1: Queen Eleanor, wife of Edward I., who erected the cross at
+Charing, and others at the different places where her body had stopped
+on the way from the North to Westminster.]
+
+Mr. Chute has got his commission to inquire about your Cutts, but he
+thinks the lady is not your grandmother. You are very ungenerous to
+hoard tales from me of your ancestry: what relation have I spared? If
+your grandfathers were knaves, will your bottling up their bad blood
+mend it? Do you only take a cup of it now and then by yourself, and then
+come down to your parson, and boast of it, as if it was pure old
+metheglin? I sat last night with the Mater Gracchorum--oh! 'tis a Mater
+Jagorum; if her descendants taste any of her black blood, they surely
+will make as wry faces at it as the servant in Don John does when the
+ghost decants a corpse. Good night! I am just returning to Strawberry,
+to husband my two last days and to avoid all the pomp of the birthday.
+Oh! I had forgot, there is a Miss Wynne coming forth, that is to be
+handsomer than my Lady Coventry; but I have known one threatened with
+such every summer for these seven years, and they are always addled by
+winter!
+
+
+_HE LIVES AMONGST ROYALTY--COMMOTIONS IN IRELAND._
+
+TO GEORGE MONTAGU, ESQ.
+
+ARLINGTON STREET, _Jan._ 7, 1760.
+
+You must not wonder I have not written to you a long time; a person of
+my consequence! I am now almost ready to say, _We_, instead of _I_. In
+short, I live amongst royalty--considering the plenty, that is no great
+wonder. All the world lives with them, and they with all the world.
+Princes and Princesses open shops, in every corner of the town, and the
+whole town deals with them. As I have gone to one, I chose to frequent
+all, that I might not be particular, and seem to have views; and yet it
+went so much against me, that I came to town on purpose a month ago for
+the Duke's levee, and had engaged Brand to go with me--and then could
+not bring myself to it. At last, I went to him and Princess Emily
+yesterday. It was well I had not flattered myself with being still in my
+bloom; I am grown so old since they saw me, that neither of them knew
+me. When they were told, he just spoke to me (I forgive him; he is not
+out of my debt, even with that): she was exceedingly gracious, and
+commended Strawberry to the skies. To-night, I was asked to their party
+at Norfolk House. These parties are wonderfully select and dignified:
+one might sooner be a knight of Malta than qualified for them; I don't
+know how the Duchess of Devonshire, Mr. Fox, and I, were forgiven some
+of our ancestors. There were two tables at loo, two at whist, and a
+quadrille. I was commanded to the Duke's loo; he was sat down: not to
+make him wait, I threw my hat upon the marble table, and broke four
+pieces off a great crystal chandelier. I stick to my etiquette, and
+treat them with great respect; not as I do my friend, the Duke of York.
+But don't let us talk any more of Princes. My Lucan appears to-morrow; I
+must say it is a noble volume. Shall I send it to you--or won't you come
+and fetch it?
+
+There is nothing new of public, but the violent commotions in
+Ireland,[1] whither the Duke of Bedford still persists in going. Aeolus
+to quell a storm!
+
+[Footnote 1: "In 1759 reports that a Legislative Union was contemplated
+led to some furious Protestant riots in Dublin. The Chancellor and some
+of the Bishops were violently attacked. A judge in a law case warned the
+Roman Catholics that 'the laws did not presume a Papist to exist in the
+kingdom'; nor could they breathe without the connivance of the
+Government" (Lecky, "History of England," ii. 436). Gray, in a letter to
+Dr. Wharton, mentions that they forced their way into the House of
+Lords, and "placed an old woman on the throne, and called for pipes and
+tobacco." He especially mentions the Bishops of Killaloe and Waterford
+as exposed to ardent ill-treatment, and concludes: "The notion that had
+possessed the crowd was that an union was to be voted between the two
+nations, and they should have no more Parliaments in Dublin."]
+
+I am in great concern for my old friend, poor Lady Harry Beauclerc; her
+lord dropped down dead two nights ago, as he was sitting with her and
+all their children. Admiral Boscawen is dead by this time. Mrs.
+Osborn[1] and I are not much afflicted: Lady Jane Coke too is dead,
+exceedingly rich; I have not heard her will yet.
+
+[Footnote 1: Boscawen had been a member of the court martial which had
+found Admiral Byng guilty. Mrs. Osborn was Byng's sister.]
+
+If you don't come to town soon, I give you warning, I will be a lord of
+the bedchamber, or a gentleman usher. If you will, I will be nothing but
+what I have been so many years--my own and yours ever.
+
+
+_SEVERITY OF THE WEATHER--SCARCITY IN GERMANY--A PARTY AT PRINCE
+EDWARD'S--CHARLES TOWNSEND'S COMMENTS ON LA FONTAINE._
+
+TO GEORGE MONTAGU, ESQ.
+
+ARLINGTON STREET, _Jan._ 14, 1760.
+
+How do you contrive to exist on your mountain in this rude season? Sure
+you must be become a snowball! As I was not in England in forty-one, I
+had no notion of such cold. The streets are abandoned; nothing appears
+in them: the Thames is almost as solid. Then think what a campaign must
+be in such a season! Our army was under arms for fourteen hours on the
+twenty-third, expecting the French; and several of the men were frozen
+when they should have dismounted. What milksops the Marlboroughs and
+Turennes, the Blakes and the Van Tromps appear now, who whipped into
+winter quarters and into port, the moment their noses looked blue. Sir
+Cloudesley Shovel said that an admiral would deserve to be broke, who
+kept great ships out after the end of September, and to be shot if after
+October. There is Hawke in the bay weathering _this_ winter, after
+conquering in a storm. For my part, I scarce venture to make a campaign
+in the Opera-house; for if I once begin to freeze, I shall be frozen
+through in a moment. I am amazed, with such weather, such ravages, and
+distress, that there is anything left in Germany, but money; for
+thither, half the treasure of Europe goes: England, France, Russia, and
+all the Empress can squeeze from Italy and Hungary, all is sent thither,
+and yet the wretched people have not subsistence. A pound of bread sells
+at Dresden for eleven-pence. We are going to send many more troops
+thither; and it is so much the fashion to raise regiments, that I wish
+there were such a neutral kind of beings in England as abbes,[1] that
+one might have an excuse for not growing military mad, when one has
+turned the heroic corner of one's age. I am ashamed of being a young
+rake, when my seniors are covering their grey toupees with helmets and
+feathers, and accoutering their pot-bellies with cuirasses and martial
+masquerade habits. Yet rake I am, and abominably so, for a person that
+begins to wrinkle reverendly. I have sat up twice this week till between
+two and three with the Duchess of Grafton, at loo, who, by the way, has
+got a pam-child this morning, and on Saturday night I supped with Prince
+Edward at my Lady Rochford's, and we stayed till half an hour past
+three. My favour with that Highness continues, or rather increases. He
+makes everybody make suppers for him to meet me, for I still hold out
+against going to court. In short, if he were twenty years older, or I
+could make myself twenty years younger, I might carry him to Campden
+House, and be as impertinent as ever my Lady Churchill was; but, as I
+dread being ridiculous, I shall give my Lord Bute no uneasiness. My Lady
+Maynard, who divides the favour of this tiny court with me, supped with
+us. Did you know she sings French ballads very prettily? Lord Rochford
+played on the guitar, and the Prince sung; there were my two nieces, and
+Lord Waldegrave, Lord Huntingdon, and Mr. Morrison the groom, and the
+evening was pleasant; but I had a much more agreeable supper last night
+at Mrs. Clive's, with Miss West, my niece Cholmondeley, and Murphy, the
+writing actor, who is very good company, and two or three more. Mrs.
+Cholmondeley is very lively; you know how entertaining the Clive is, and
+Miss West is an absolute original.
+
+[Footnote 1: French chroniclers remark that the title Abbe had long
+since ceased in France to denote the possession of any ecclesiastical
+preferment, but had become a courteous denomination of unemployed
+ecclesiastics; and they compare it to the use of the term "Esquire" in
+England.]
+
+There is nothing new, but a very dull pamphlet written by Lord Bath, and
+his chaplain Douglas, called a "Letter to Two Great Men." It is a plan
+for the peace, and much adopted by the City, and much admired by all who
+are too humble to judge for themselves.
+
+I was much diverted the other morning with another volume on birds by
+Edwards, who has published four or five. The poor man, who is grown very
+old and devout, begs God to take from him the love of natural
+philosophy; and having observed some heterodox proceedings among bantam
+cocks, he proposes that all schools of girls and boys should be
+promiscuous, lest, if separated, they should learn wayward passions. But
+what struck me most were his dedications, the last was to God; this is
+to Lord Bute, as if he was determined to make his fortune in one world
+or the other.
+
+Pray read Fontaine's fable of the lion grown old; don't it put you in
+mind of anything? No! not when his shaggy majesty has borne the insults
+of the tiger and the horse, &c., and the ass comes last, kicks out his
+only remaining fang, and asks for a blue bridle? _Apropos_, I will tell
+you the turn Charles Townshend gave to this fable. "My lord," said he,
+"has quite mistaken the thing; he soars too high at first: people often
+miscarry by not preceding by degrees; he went and at once asked for my
+_Lord_ Carlisle's garter--if he would have been contented to ask first
+for my _Lady_ Carlisle's garter, I don't know but he would have obtained
+it!" Adieu!
+
+
+_CAPTURE OF CARRICKFERGUS._
+
+TO SIR HORACE MANN.
+
+ARLINGTON STREET, _Feb._ 28, 1760.
+
+The next time you see Marshal Botta, and are to act King of Great
+Britain, France, and Ireland, you must abate about a hundredth
+thousandth part of the dignity of your crown. You are no more monarch
+of _all_ Ireland, than King O'Neil, or King Macdermoch is. Louis XV. is
+sovereign of France, Navarre, and Carrickfergus. You will be mistaken if
+you think the peace is made, and that we cede this Hibernian town, in
+order to recover Minorca, or to keep Quebec and Louisbourg. To be sure,
+it is natural you should think so: how should so victorious and heroic a
+nation cease to enjoy any of its possessions, but to save Christian
+blood? Oh! I know you will suppose there has been another insurrection,
+and that it is King John of Bedford, and not King George of Brunswick,
+that has lost this town. Why, I own you are a great politician, and see
+things in a moment--and no wonder, considering how long you have been
+employed in negotiations; but for once all your sagacity is mistaken.
+Indeed, considering the total destruction of the maritime force of
+France, and that the great mechanics and mathematicians of this age have
+not invented a flying bridge to fling over the sea and land from the
+coast of France to the north of Ireland, it was not easy to conceive how
+the French should conquer Carrickfergus--and yet they have. But how I
+run on! not reflecting that by this time the old Pretender must have
+hobbled through Florence on his way to Ireland, to take possession of
+this scrap of his recovered domains; but I may as well tell you at once,
+for to be sure you and the loyal body of English in Tuscany will slip
+over all this exordium to come to the account of so extraordinary a
+revolution. Well, here it is. Last week Monsieur Thurot--oh! now you
+are _au fait_!--Monsieur Thurot, as I was saying, landed last week in
+the isle of Islay, the capital province belonging to a great Scotch
+King, who is so good as generally to pass the winter with his friends
+here in London. Monsieur Thurot had three ships, the crews of which
+burnt two ships belonging to King George, and a house belonging to his
+friend the King of Argyll--pray don't mistake; by _his friend_, I mean
+King George's, not Thurot's friend. When they had finished this
+campaign, they sailed to Carrickfergus, a poorish town, situate in the
+heart of the Protestant cantons. They immediately made a moderate demand
+of about twenty articles of provisions, promising to pay for them; for
+you know it is the way of modern invasions to make them cost as much as
+possible to oneself, and as little to those one invades. If this was not
+complied with, they threatened to burn the town, and then march to
+Belfast, which is much richer. We were sensible of this civil
+proceeding, and not to be behindhand, agreed to it; but somehow or other
+this capitulation was broken; on which a detachment (the whole invasion
+consists of one thousand men) attack the place. We shut the gates, but
+after the battle of Quebec, it is impossible that so great a people
+should attend to such trifles as locks and bolts, accordingly there were
+none--and as if there were no gates neither, the two armies fired
+through them--if this is a blunder, remember I am describing an _Irish_
+war. I forgot to give you the numbers of the Irish army. It consisted of
+four companies--indeed they consisted but of seventy-two men, under
+Lieut.-colonel Jennings, a wonderful brave man--too brave, in short, to
+be very judicious. Unluckily our ammunition was soon spent, for it is
+not above a year that there have been any apprehensions for Ireland, and
+as all that part of the country are most protestantly loyal, it was not
+thought necessary to arm people who would fight till they die for their
+religion. When the artillery was silenced, the garrison thought the best
+way of saving the town was by flinging it at the heads of the besiegers;
+according they poured volleys of brickbats at the French, whose
+commander, Monsieur Flobert, was mortally knocked down, and his troops
+began to give way. However, General Jennings thought it most prudent to
+retreat to the castle, and the French again advanced. Four or five raw
+recruits still bravely kept the gates, when the garrison, finding no
+more gunpowder in the castle than they had had in the town, and not near
+so good a brick-kiln, sent to desire to surrender. General Thurot
+accordingly made them prisoners of war, and plundered the town.
+
+
+_THE BALLAD OF "HARDYKNUTE"--MR. HOME'S "SIEGE OF AQUILEIA"--"TRISTRAM
+SHANDY"--BISHOP WARBURTON'S PRAISE OF IT._
+
+TO SIR DAVID DALRYMPLE.
+
+STRAWBERRY HILL, _April_ 4, 1760.
+
+Sir,--As I have very little at present to trouble you with myself, I
+should have deferred writing till a better opportunity, if it were not
+to satisfy the curiosity of a friend; a friend whom you, Sir, will be
+glad to have made curious, as you originally pointed him out as a likely
+person to be charmed with the old Irish poetry you sent me. It is Mr.
+Gray, who is an enthusiast about those poems, and begs me to put the
+following queries to you; which I will do in his own words, and I may
+say truly, _Poeta loquitur_.
+
+"I am so charmed with the two specimens of Erse poetry, that I cannot
+help giving you the trouble to inquire a little farther about them, and
+should wish to see a few lines of the original, that I may form some
+slight idea of the language, the measure, and the rhythm.
+
+"Is there anything known of the author or authors, and of what antiquity
+are they supposed to be?
+
+"Is there any more to be had of equal beauty, or at all approaching to
+it?
+
+"I have been often told, that the poem called Hardykanute[1] (which I
+always admired and still admire) was the work of somebody that lived a
+few years ago. This I do not at all believe, though it has evidently
+been retouched in places by some modern hand; but, however, I am
+authorised by this report to ask, whether the two poems in question are
+certainly antique and genuine. I make this inquiry in quality of an
+antiquary, and am not otherwise concerned about it; for if I were sure
+that any one now living in Scotland had written them, to divert himself
+and laugh at the credulity of the world, I would undertake a journey
+into the Highlands only for the pleasure of seeing him."
+
+[Footnote 1: "Hardyknute" was an especial favourite of Sir W. Scott. In
+his "Life of Mr. Lockhart" he mentions having found in one of his books
+a mention that "he was taught 'Hardyknute' by heart before he could read
+the ballad itself; it was the first poem he ever learnt, the last he
+should ever forget" (c. 2). And in the very last year of his life, while
+at Malta, in a discussion on ballads in general, "he greatly lamented
+his friend Mr. Frere's heresy in not esteeming highly enough that of
+'Hardyknute.' He admitted that it was not a veritable old ballad, but
+'just old enough,' and a noble imitation of the best style." In fact, it
+was the composition of a lady, Mrs. Hachet, of Wardlaw.]
+
+You see, Sir, how easily you may make our greatest southern bard travel
+northward to visit a brother. The young translator has nothing to do but
+to own a forgery, and Mr. Gray is ready to pack up his lyre, saddle
+Pegasus, and set out directly. But seriously, he, Mr. Mason, my Lord
+Lyttelton, and one or two more, whose taste the world allows, are in
+love with your Erse elegies: I cannot say in general they are so much
+admired--but Mr. Gray alone is worth satisfying.
+
+The "Siege of Aquileia," of which you ask, pleased less than Mr. Home's
+other plays.[1] In my own opinion, "Douglas" far exceeds both the
+other. Mr. Home seems to have a beautiful talent for painting genuine
+nature and the manners of his country. There was so little of nature in
+the manners of both Greeks and Romans, that I do not wonder at his
+success being less brilliant when he tried those subjects; and, to say
+the truth, one is a little weary of them. At present, nothing is talked
+of, nothing admired, but what I cannot help calling a very insipid and
+tedious performance: it is a kind of novel, called "The Life and
+Opinions of Tristram Shandy;"[2] the great humour of which consists in
+the whole narration always going backwards. I can conceive a man saying
+that it would be droll to write a book in that manner, but have no
+notion of his persevering in executing it. It makes one smile two or
+three times at the beginning, but in recompense makes one yawn for two
+hours. The characters are tolerably kept up, but the humour is for ever
+attempted and missed. The best thing in it is a Sermon, oddly coupled
+with a good deal of coarseness, and both the composition of a clergyman.
+The man's head, indeed, was a little turned before, now topsy-turvy with
+his success and fame. Dodsley has given him six hundred and fifty pounds
+for the second edition and two more volumes (which I suppose will reach
+backwards to his great-great-grandfather); Lord Fauconberg, a donative
+of one hundred and sixty pounds a-year; and Bishop Warburton[3] gave him
+a purse of gold and this compliment (which happened to be a
+contradiction), "that it was quite an original composition, and in the
+true Cervantic vein:" the only copy that ever was an original, except in
+painting, where they all pretend to be so. Warburton, however, not
+content with this, recommended the book to the bench of bishops, and
+told them Mr. Sterne, the author, was the English Rabelais. They had
+never heard of such a writer. Adieu!
+
+[Footnote 1: "_Mr. Home's other plays._" Mr. Home was a Presbyterian
+minister. His first play was "The Tragedy of Douglas," which D'Israeli
+describes as a drama which, "by awakening the piety of domestic
+affections with the nobler passions, would elevate and purify the mind;"
+and proceeds, with no little indignation, to relate how nearly it cost
+the author dear. The "Glasgow divines, with the monastic spirit of the
+darkest ages, published a paper, which I abridge for the contemplation
+of the reader, who may wonder to see such a composition written in the
+eighteenth century: 'On Wednesday, February 2, 1757, the Presbytery of
+Glasgow came to the following resolution: They, having seen a printed
+paper intituled an admonition and exhortation of the reverend Presbytery
+of Edinburgh, which, among other evils prevailing, observed the
+following _melancholy_ but _notorious_ facts, that one who is a minister
+of the Church of Scotland did _himself_ write and compose _a stage
+play_, intituled 'The Tragedy of Douglas,' and got it to be acted at the
+theatre of Edinburgh; and that he, with several other ministers of the
+Church, were present, and _some_ of them _oftener than once_, at the
+acting of the said play before a numerous audience. The presbytery being
+_deeply affected_ with this new and strange appearance, do publish these
+sentiments,'" &c., &c.--sentiments with which I will not disgust the
+reader.]
+
+[Footnote 2: Walpole's criticism is worth preserving as a singular proof
+how far prejudice can obscure the judgement of a generally shrewd
+observer, and it is the more remarkable since he selects as its especial
+fault the failure of the author's attempts at humour; while all other
+critics, from Macaulay to Thackeray, agree in placing it among those
+works in which the humour is most conspicuous and most attractive. Even
+Johnson, when Boswell once, thinking perhaps that his "illustrious
+friend" might be offended with its occasional coarseness, pronounced
+Sterne to be "a dull fellow," was at once met with, "Why no, Sir."]
+
+[Footnote 3: Bishop Warburton was Bishop of Gloucester, a prelate whose
+vast learning was in some degree tarnished by unepiscopal violence of
+temper. He was a voluminous author; his most important work being an
+essay on "The Divine Legation of Moses." In one of his letters to
+Garrick he praises "Tristram Shandy" highly, priding himself on having
+recommended it to all the best company in town.]
+
+
+_ERSE POETRY--"THE DIALOGUES OF THE DEAD"--"THE COMPLETE ANGLER."_
+
+TO SIR DAVID DALRYMPLE.
+
+_June_ 20, 1760.
+
+I am obliged to you, Sir, for the volume of Erse poetry: all of it has
+merit; but I am sorry not to see in it the six descriptions of night
+with which you favoured me before, and which I like as much as any of
+the pieces. I can, however, by no means agree with the publisher, that
+they seem to be parts of an heroic poem; nothing to me can be more
+unlike. I should as soon take all the epitaphs in Westminster Abbey, and
+say it was an epic poem on the History of England. The greatest part are
+evidently elegies; and though I should not expect a bard to write by the
+rules of Aristotle, I would not, on the other hand, give to any work a
+title that must convey so different an idea to every common reader. I
+could wish, too, that the authenticity had been more largely stated. A
+man who knows Dr. Blair's character will undoubtedly take his word; but
+the gross of mankind, considering how much it is the fashion to be
+sceptical in reading, will demand proofs, not assertions.
+
+I am glad to find, Sir, that we agree so much on "The Dialogues of the
+Dead;"[1] indeed, there are very few that differ from us. It is well for
+the author, that none of his critics have undertaken to ruin his book
+by improving it, as you have done in the lively little specimen you sent
+me. Dr. Brown has writ a dull dialogue, called "Pericles and Aristides,"
+which will have a different effect from what yours would have. One of
+the most objectionable passages in Lord Lyttelton's book is, in my
+opinion, his apologising for the _moderate_ government of Augustus. A
+man who had exhausted tyranny in the most lawless and unjustifiable
+excesses is to be excused, because, out of weariness or policy, he grows
+less sanguinary at last!
+
+[Footnote 1: "The Dialogues of the Dead" were by Lord Lyttelton. In an
+earlier letter Walpole pronounces them "not very lively or striking."]
+
+There is a little book coming out, that will amuse you. It is a new
+edition of Isaac Walton's "Complete Angler,"[1] full of anecdotes and
+historic notes. It is published by Mr. Hawkins,[2] a very worthy
+gentleman in my neighbourhood, but who, I could wish, did not think
+angling so very _innocent_ an amusement. We cannot live without
+destroying animals, but shall we torture them for our sport--sport in
+their destruction? I met a rough officer at his house t'other day, who
+said he knew such a person was turning Methodist; for, in the middle of
+conversation, he rose, and opened the window to let out a moth. I told
+him I did not know that the Methodists had any principle so good, and
+that I, who am certainly not on the point of becoming one, always did so
+too. One of the bravest and best men I ever knew, Sir Charles Wager, I
+have often heard declare he never killed a fly willingly. It is a
+comfortable reflection to me, that all the victories of last year have
+been gained since the suppression of the Bear Garden and prize-fighting;
+as it is plain, and nothing else would have made it so, that our valour
+did not singly and solely depend upon these two Universities. Adieu!
+
+[Footnote 1: "The Complete Angler" is one of those rare books which
+retain its popularity 250 years after its publication--not for the value
+of its practical instructions to fishermen, for in this point of view it
+is valueless (Walton himself being only a worm or livebait fisherman,
+and the chapters on fly-fishing being by Cotton), but for its healthy
+tone and love of country scenery and simple country amusements which are
+seldom more attractively displayed.]
+
+[Footnote 2: Afterwards Sir John Hawkins, the executor and biographer of
+Dr. Johnson.]
+
+
+_VISITS IN THE MIDLAND COUNTIES--WHICHNOVRE--SHEFFIELD--THE NEW ART OF
+PLATING--CHATSWORTH--HADDON HALL--HARDWICKE--APARTMENTS OF MARY QUEEN OF
+SCOTS--NEWSTEAD--ALTHORP._
+
+TO GEORGE MONTAGU, ESQ.
+
+ARLINGTON STREET, _Sept._ 1, 1760.
+
+I was disappointed at your not being at home as I returned from my
+expedition.
+
+My tour has been extremely agreeable. I set out with winning a good deal
+at Loo at Ragley; the Duke of Grafton was not so successful, and had
+some high words with Pam. I went from thence to Offley's at
+Whichnovre[1], the individual manor of the flitch of bacon, which has
+been growing rusty for these thirty years in his hall. I don't wonder; I
+have no notion that one could keep in good humour with one's wife for a
+year and a day, unless one was to live on the very spot, which is one of
+the sweetest scenes I ever saw. It is the brink of a high hill; the
+Trent wriggles through at the foot; Lichfield and twenty other churches
+and mansions decorate the view. Mr. Anson has bought an estate
+[Shugborough] close by, whence my Lord used to cast many a wishful eye,
+though without the least pretensions even to a bit of lard.
+
+[Footnote 1: The manor of Whichnovre, near Lichfield, is held (like the
+better-known Dunmow, in Essex) on the singular custom of the Lord of the
+Manor "keeping ready, all times of the year but Lent, one bacon-flyke
+hanging in his hall, to be given to every man or woman who demanded it a
+year and a day after marriage, upon their swearing that they would not
+have changed for none other, fairer nor fouler, richer nor poorer, nor
+for no other descended of great lineage sleeping nor waking at no
+time."]
+
+I saw Lichfield Cathedral, which has been rich, but my friend Lord
+Brooke and his soldiery treated poor St. Chad[1] with so little
+ceremony, that it is in a most naked condition. In a niche at the very
+summit they have crowded a statue of Charles the Second, with a special
+pair of shoe-strings, big enough for a weathercock. As I went to Lord
+Strafford's I passed through Sheffield, which is one of the foulest
+towns in England in the most charming situation; there are
+two-and-twenty thousand inhabitants making knives and scissors: they
+remit eleven thousand pounds a week to London. One man there has
+discovered the art of plating copper with silver; I bought a pair of
+candlesticks for two guineas that are quite pretty. Lord Strafford has
+erected the little Gothic building, which I got Mr. Bentley to draw; I
+took the idea from Chichester Cross. It stands on a high bank in the
+menagerie, between a pond and a vale, totally bowered over with oaks. I
+went with the Straffords to Chatsworth and stayed there four days; there
+were Lady Mary Coke, Lord Besborough and his daughters, Lord Thomond,
+Mr. Boufoy, the Duke, the old Duchess, and two of his brothers. Would
+you believe that nothing was ever better humoured than the ancient
+Grace? She stayed every evening till it was dark in the skittle-ground,
+keeping the score; and one night, that the servants had a ball for Lady
+Dorothy's birthday, we fetched the fiddler into the drawing-room, and
+the dowager herself danced with us! I never was more disappointed than
+at Chatsworth,[2] which, ever since I was born, I have condemned. It is
+a glorious situation; the vale rich in corn and verdure, vast woods hang
+down the hills, which are green to the top, and the immense rocks only
+serve to dignify the prospect. The river runs before the door, and
+serpentises more than you can conceive in the vale. The Duke is widening
+it, and will make it the middle of his park; but I don't approve an idea
+they are going to execute, of a fine bridge with statues under a noble
+cliff. If they will have a bridge (which by the way will crowd the
+scene), it should be composed of rude fragments, such as the giant of
+the Peak would step upon, that he might not be wetshod. The expense of
+the works now carrying on will amount to forty thousand pounds. A heavy
+quadrangle of stables is part of the plan, is very cumbrous, and
+standing higher than the house, is ready to overwhelm it. The principal
+front of the house is beautiful, and executed with the neatness of
+wrought plate; the inside is most sumptuous, but did not please me; the
+heathen gods, goddesses, Christian virtues, and allegoric gentlefolks,
+are crowded into every room, as if Mrs. Holman had been in heaven and
+invited everybody she saw. The great apartment is first; painted
+ceilings, inlaid floors, and unpainted wainscots make every room
+_sombre_. The tapestries are fine, but not fine enough, and there are
+few portraits. The chapel is charming. The great _jet d'eau_ I like, nor
+would I remove it; whatever is magnificent of the kind in the time it
+was done, I would retain, else all gardens and houses wear a tiresome
+resemblance. I except that absurdity of a cascade tumbling down marble
+steps, which reduces the steps to be of no use at all. I saw Haddon, an
+abandoned old castle of the Rutlands, in a romantic situation, but which
+never could have composed a tolerable dwelling. The Duke sent Lord John
+[Cavendish] with me to Hardwicke, where I was again disappointed; but I
+will not take relations from others; they either don't see for
+themselves, or can't see for me. How I had been promised that I should
+be charmed with Hardwicke,[3] and told that the Devonshires ought to
+have established there! never was I less charmed in my life. The house
+is not Gothic, but of that betweenity, that intervened when Gothic
+declined and Paladian was creeping in--rather, this is totally naked of
+either. It has vast chambers--aye, vast, such as the nobility of that
+time delighted in, and did not know how to furnish. The great apartment
+is exactly what it was when the Queen of Scots was kept there. Her
+council-chamber, the council-chamber of a poor woman, who had only two
+secretaries, a gentleman-usher, an apothecary, a confessor, and three
+maids, is so outrageously spacious, that you would take it for King
+David's, who thought, contrary to all modern experience, that in the
+multitude of counsellors there is wisdom. At the upper end is the state,
+with a long table, covered with a sumptuous cloth, embroidered and
+embossed with gold,--at least what was gold; so are all the tables.
+Round the top of the chamber runs a monstrous frieze, ten or twelve feet
+deep, representing stag-hunting in miserable plastered relief. The next
+is her dressing-room, hung with patch-work on black velvet; then her
+state bedchamber. The bed has been rich beyond description, and now
+hangs in costly golden tatters. The hangings, part of which they say her
+Majesty worked, are composed of figures as large as life, sewed and
+embroidered on black velvet, white satin, &c., and represent the virtues
+that were necessary for her, or that she was forced to have, as Patience
+and Temperance, &c. The fire-screens are particular; pieces of yellow
+velvet, fringed with gold, hang on a cross-bar of wood, which is fixed
+on the top of a single stick, that rises from the foot. The only
+furniture which has any appearance of taste are the table and cabinets,
+which are all of oak, richly carved. There is a private chamber within,
+where she lay, her arms and style over the door; the arras hangs over
+all the doors; the gallery is sixty yards long, covered with bad
+tapestry, and wretched pictures of Mary herself, Elizabeth in a gown of
+sea-monsters, Lord Darnley, James the Fifth and his Queen, curious, and
+a whole history of Kings of England, not worth sixpence a-piece. There
+is an original of old Bess of Hardwicke herself, who built the house.
+Her estates were then reckoned at sixty thousand pounds a-year, and now
+let for two hundred thousand pounds. Lord John Cavendish told me, that
+the tradition in the family is, that it had been prophesied to her that
+she should never die as long as she was building; and that at last she
+died in a hard frost, when the labourers could not work. There is a fine
+bank of old oaks in the park over a lake; nothing else pleased me there.
+However, I was so diverted with this old beldam and her magnificence,
+that I made this epitaph for her:--
+
+    Four times the nuptial bed she warm'd,
+    And every time so well perform'd,
+    That when death spoil'd each husband's billing,
+    He left the widow every shilling.
+    Fond was the dame, but not dejected;
+    Five stately mansions she erected
+    With more than royal pomp, to vary
+    The prison of her captive Mary.
+    When Hardwicke's towers shall bow their head,
+    Nor mass be more in Worksop said;
+    When Bolsover's fair fame shall tend
+    Like Olcotes, to its mouldering end;
+    When Chatsworth tastes no Ca'ndish bounties,
+    Let fame forget this costly countess.
+
+[Footnote 1: Scott alludes to Lord Brooke's violation of St. Chad's
+Cathedral in "Marmion," whose tomb
+
+    Was levelled when fanatic Brooke
+    The fair cathedral stormed and took,
+    But thanks to Heaven and good St. Chad
+    A guerdon meet the spoiler had (c. vi. 36).
+
+And the poet adds in a note that Lord Brooke himself, "who commanded the
+assailants, was shot with a musket-ball through the visor of his helmet;
+and the royalists remarked that he was killed by a shot fired from St.
+Chad's Cathedral on St. Chad's Day, and received his wound in the very
+eye with which, he had said, he hoped to see the ruin of all the
+cathedrals in England."]
+
+[Footnote 2: "_Disappointed with Chatsworth._" In a letter, however, to
+Lord Strafford three days afterwards he says: "Chatsworth surpassed his
+expectations; there is such richness and variety of prospect."]
+
+[Footnote 3: Hardwicke was one of what Home calls "the gentleman's
+houses," to which the unfortunate Queen was removed between the times of
+her detention at Tutbury and Fotheringay. It is not mentioned by
+Burton.]
+
+As I returned, I saw Newstead[1] and Althorpe: I like both. The former
+is the very abbey. The great east window of the church remains, and
+connects with the house; the hall entire, the refectory entire, the
+cloister untouched, with the ancient cistern of the convent, and their
+arms on it; a private chapel quite perfect. The park, which is still
+charming, has not been so much unprofaned; the present Lord has lost
+large sums, and paid part in old oaks, five thousand pounds of which
+have been cut near the house. In recompense he has built two baby forts,
+to pay his country in castles for the damage done to the navy, and
+planted a handful of Scotch firs, that look like ploughboys dressed in
+old family liveries for a public day. In the hall is a very good
+collection of pictures, all animals; the refectory, now the great
+drawing-room, is full of Byrons; the vaulted roof remaining, but the
+windows have new dresses making for them by a Venetian tailor. Althorpe
+has several very fine pictures by the best Italian hands, and a gallery
+of all one's acquaintance by Vandyke and Lely. I wonder you never saw
+it; it is but six miles from Northampton. Well, good night; I have writ
+you such a volume, that you see I am forced to page it. The Duke [of
+Cumberland] has had a stroke of the palsy, but is quite recovered,
+except in some letters, which he cannot pronounce; and it is still
+visible in the contraction of one side of his mouth. My compliments to
+your family.
+
+[Footnote 1: Newstead, since Walpole's time immortalised as the seat of
+the illustrious Byron. Evelyn had compared it, for its situation, to
+Fontainebleau, and particularly extolled "the front of a glorious Abbey
+Church" and its "brave woods and streams;" and Byron himself has given
+an elaborate description of it under the name of "Norman Abbey," not
+overlooking its woods:
+
+      It stood embosomed in a happy valley
+    Crowned by high woodlands, where the Druid-oak
+      Stood like Caractacus in act to rally
+    His host, with broad arms, 'gainst the thunderstroke--
+
+nor the streams:
+
+      Before the mansion lay a lucid lake
+    Broad as transparent, deep, and freshly fed
+      By a river, which its softened way did take
+    In currents through the calmer waters spread
+      Around--
+
+nor the abbey front:
+
+      A glorious remnant of the Gothic pile
+    While yet the church was Rome's, stood half apart
+      In a grand arch, which once screened many an angle.
+
+("Don Juan," xiii. 56-59.)]
+
+
+_GENTLEMAN'S DRESS--INFLUENCE OF LORD BUTE--ODE BY LORD MIDDLESEX--G.
+SELWYN'S QUOTATION._
+
+
+TO GEORGE MONTAGU, ESQ.
+
+ARLINGTON STREET, _April_ 16, 1761.
+
+You are a very mule; one offers you a handsome stall and manger in
+Berkeley Square, and you will not accept it. I have chosen your coat, a
+claret colour, to suit the complexion of the country you are going to
+visit; but I have fixed nothing about the lace. Barrett had none of
+gauze, but what were as broad as the Irish Channel. Your tailor found a
+very reputable one at another place, but I would not determine rashly;
+it will be two or three-and-twenty shillings the yard; you might have a
+very substantial real lace, which would wear like your buffet, for
+twenty. The second order of gauzes are frippery, none above twelve
+shillings, and those tarnished, for the species is out of fashion. You
+will have time to sit in judgment upon these important points; for
+Hamilton your secretary told me at the Opera two nights ago, that he had
+taken a house near Bushy, and hoped to be in my neighbourhood for four
+months.
+
+I was last night at your plump Countess's, who is so shrunk, that she
+does not seem to be composed of above a dozen hassocs. Lord Guildford
+rejoiced mightily over your preferment. The Duchess of Argyle was
+playing there, not knowing that the great Pam was just dead, to wit,
+her brother-in-law. He was abroad in the morning, was seized with a
+palpitation after dinner and was dead before the surgeon could arrive.
+There's the crown of Scotland too fallen upon my Lord Bute's head![1]
+Poor Lord Edgecumbe is still alive, and may be so for some days; the
+physicians, who no longer ago than Friday se'nnight persisted that he
+had no dropsy, in order to prevent his having Ward, on Monday last
+proposed that Ward should be called in, and at length they owned they
+thought the mortification begun. It is not clear it is yet; at times he
+is in his senses, and entirely so, composed, clear, and rational; talks
+of his death, and but yesterday, after such a conversation with his
+brother, asked for a pencil to amuse himself with drawing. What parts,
+genius, and agreeableness thrown away at a hazard table, and not
+permitted the chance of being saved by the villainy of physicians!
+
+[Footnote 1: Lord Bute used his influence in favour of Scotchmen with so
+little moderation that he raised a prejudice against the whole nation,
+which found a vent in Wilkes's _North Briton_ and Churchill's bitter and
+powerful satire, "The Prophecy of Famine."]
+
+You will be pleased with the Anacreontic, written by Lord Middlesex upon
+Sir Harry Bellendine: I have not seen anything so antique for ages; it
+has all the fire, poetry, and simplicity of Horace.
+
+    Ye sons of Bacchus, come and join
+    In solemn dirge, while tapers shine
+    Around the grape-embossed shrine
+    Of honest Harry Bellendine.
+
+    Pour the rich juice of Bourdeaux's wine,
+    Mix'd with your falling tears of brine,
+    In full libation o'er the shrine
+    Of honest Harry Bellendine.
+
+    Your brows let ivy chaplets twine,
+    While you push round the sparkling wine,
+    And let your table be the shrine
+    Of honest Harry Bellendine.
+
+He died in his vocation, of a high fever, after the celebration of some
+orgies. Though but six hours in his senses, he gave a proof of his usual
+good humour, making it his last request to the sister Tuftons to be
+reconciled; which they are. His pretty villa, in my neighbourhood, I
+fancy he has left to the new Lord Lorn. I must tell you an admirable
+_bon mot_ of George Selwyn, though not a new one; when there was a
+malicious report that the eldest Tufton was to marry Dr. Duncan, Selwyn
+said, "How often will she repeat that line of Shakspeare,
+
+    Wake Duncan with this knocking--would thou couldst!"
+
+I enclose the receipt from your lawyer. Adieu!
+
+
+_CAPTURE OF BELLEISLE--GRAY'S POEMS--HOGARTH'S VANITY._
+
+TO GEORGE MONTAGU, ESQ.
+
+ARLINGTON STREET, _May_ 5, 1761.
+
+We have lost a young genius, Sir William Williams; an express from
+Belleisle, arrived this morning, brings nothing but his death. He was
+shot very unnecessarily, riding too near a battery; in sum, he is a
+sacrifice to his own rashness, and to ours. For what are we taking
+Belleisle?[1] I rejoiced at the little loss we had on landing; for the
+glory, I leave it the common council. I am very willing to leave London
+to them too, and do pass half the week at Strawberry, where my two
+passions, lilacs and nightingales, are in full bloom. I spent Sunday as
+if it were Apollo's birthday; Gray and Mason were with me, and we
+listened to the nightingales till one o'clock in the morning. Gray has
+translated two noble incantations from the Lord knows who, a Danish
+Gray, who lived the Lord knows when. They are to be enchased in a
+history of English bards, which Mason and he are writing; but of which
+the former has not written a word yet, and of which the latter, if he
+rides Pegasus at his usual footpace, will finish the first page two
+years hence.
+
+[Footnote 1: Belleisle was of no value to us to keep; but Pitt sent an
+expedition against it, that in any future treaty of peace he might be
+able to exchange it for Minorca.]
+
+But the true frantic Oestus resides at present with Mr. Hogarth; I went
+t'other morning to see a portrait he is painting of Mr. Fox. Hogarth
+told me he had promised, if Mr. Fox would sit as he liked, to make as
+good a picture as Vandyke or Rubens could. I was silent--"Why now," said
+he, "you think this very vain, but why should not one speak truth?" This
+_truth_ was uttered in the face of his own Sigismonda, which is exactly
+a maudlin street-walker, tearing off the trinkets that her keeper had
+given her, to fling at his head. She has her father's picture in a
+bracelet on her arm, and her fingers are bloody with the heart, as if
+she had just bought a sheep's pluck in St. James's Market. As I was
+going, Hogarth put on a very grave face, and said, "Mr. Walpole, I want
+to speak to you." I sat down, and said, I was ready to receive his
+commands. For shortness, I will mark this wonderful dialogue by initial
+letters.
+
+H. I am told you are going to entertain the town with something in our
+way. W. Not very soon, Mr. Hogarth. H. I wish you would let me have it,
+to correct; I should be very sorry to have you expose yourself to
+censure; we painters must know more of those things than other people.
+W. Do you think nobody understands painting but painters? H. Oh! so far
+from it, there's Reynolds, who certainly has genius; why, but t'other
+day he offered a hundred pounds for a picture, that I would not hang in
+my cellar; and indeed, to say truth, I have generally found, that
+persons who had studied painting least were the best judges of it; but
+what I particularly wished to say to you was about Sir James Thornhill
+(you know he married Sir James's daughter): I would not have you say
+anything against him; there was a book published some time ago, abusing
+him, and it gave great offence. He was the first that attempted
+_history_ in England, and, I assure you, some Germans have said that he
+was a very great painter. W. My work will go no lower than the year one
+thousand seven hundred, and I really have not considered whether Sir J.
+Thornhill will come within my plan or not; if he does, I fear you and I
+shall not agree upon his merits. H. I wish you would let me correct it;
+besides, I am writing something of the same kind myself; I should be
+sorry we should clash. W. I believe it is not much known what my work
+is, very few persons have seen it. H. Why, it is a critical history of
+painting, is not it? W. No, it is an antiquarian history of it in
+England; I bought Mr. Vertue's MSS., and, I believe, the work will not
+give much offence; besides, if it does, I cannot help it; when I publish
+anything, I give it to the world to think of it as they please. H. Oh!
+if it is an antiquarian work, we shall not clash; mine is a critical
+work; I don't know whether I shall ever publish it. It is rather an
+apology for painters. I think it is owing to the good sense of the
+English that they have not painted better. W. My dear Mr. Hogarth, I
+must take my leave of you, you now grow too wild--and I left him. If I
+had stayed, there remained nothing but for him to bite me. I give you my
+honour this conversation is literal, and, perhaps, as long as you have
+known Englishmen and painters, you never met with anything so
+distracted. I had consecrated a line to his genius (I mean, for wit) in
+my Preface; I shall not erase it; but I hope nobody will ask me if he is
+not mad. Adieu!
+
+
+_INTENDED MARRIAGE OF THE KING--BATTLES IN GERMANY--CAPTURE OF
+PONDICHERRY--BURKE._
+
+TO GEORGE MONTAGU, ESQ.
+
+STRAWBERRY HILL, _July_ 22, 1761.
+
+For my part, I believe Mademoiselle Scuderi[1] drew the plan of this
+year. It is all royal marriages, coronations, and victories; they come
+tumbling so over one another from distant parts of the globe, that it
+looks just like the handywork of a lady romance writer, whom it costs
+nothing but a little false geography to make the Great Mogul in love
+with a Princess of Mecklenburgh, and defeat two marshals of France[2] as
+he rides post on an elephant to his nuptials. I don't know where I am. I
+had scarce found Mecklenburg Strelitz with a magnifying-glass before I
+am whisked to Pondicherry--well, I take it, and raze it. I begin to grow
+acquainted with Colonel Coote,[3] and figure him packing up chests of
+diamonds, and sending them to his wife against the King's
+wedding--thunder go to the Tower guns, and behold, Broglie and Soubise
+are totally defeated; if the mob have not much stronger heads and
+quicker conceptions than I have, they will conclude my Lord Granby is
+become nabob. How the deuce in two days can one digest all this? Why is
+not Pondicherry in Westphalia? I don't know how the Romans did, but I
+cannot support two victories every week. Well, but you will want to know
+the particulars. Broglie and Soubise united, attacked our army on the
+15th, but were repulsed; the next day, the Prince Mahomet Alli Cawn--no,
+no, I mean Prince Ferdinand, returned the attack, and the French threw
+down their arms and fled, run over my Lord Harcourt, who was going to
+fetch the new Queen; in short, I don't know how it was, but Mr. Conway
+is safe, and I am as happy as Mr. Pitt himself. We have only lost a
+Lieutenant-colonel Keith; Colonel Marlay and Harry Townshend are
+wounded.
+
+[Footnote 1: Mdlle. Scuderi and her brother were writers of romances of
+enormous length, and, in their time, of great popularity (see
+D'Israeli's account of them, "Curiosities of Literature," i. 105).]
+
+[Footnote 2: "_Defeat two French marshals_"--they were Marechal de
+Broglie and the Prince de Soubise. The action, which, however, was of
+but little importance, is called by Lacretelle "Le Combat de
+Fillingshausen."]
+
+[Footnote 3: Colonel Eyre Coote, the best soldier next to Clive himself
+that India had yet seen, had defeated the French Governor, Count Lally,
+at Wandewash in January, 1760; and the capture of Pondicherry was one
+important fruit of the victory.]
+
+I could beat myself for not having a flag ready to display on my round
+tower, and guns mounted on all my battlements. Instead of that, I have
+been foolishly trying on my new pictures upon my gallery. However, the
+oratory of our Lady of Strawberry shall be dedicated next year on the
+anniversary of Mr. Conway's safety. Think with his intrepidity, and
+delicacy of honour wounded, what I had to apprehend; you shall
+absolutely be here on the sixteenth of next July. Mr. Hamilton tells me
+your King does not set out for his new dominions till the day after the
+Coronation; if you will come to it, I can give you a very good place for
+the procession; where, is a profound secret, because, if known, I should
+be teased to death, and none but my first friends shall be admitted. I
+dined with your secretary [Single-speech Hamilton] yesterday; there were
+Garrick and a young Mr. Burke[1]--who wrote a book in the style of Lord
+Bolingbroke, that was much admired. He is a sensible man, but has not
+worn off his authorism yet, and thinks there is nothing so charming as
+writers, and to be one. He will know better one of these days. I like
+Hamilton's little Marly; we walked in the great _allee_, and drank tea
+in the arbour of treillage; they talked of Shakspeare and Booth, of
+Swift and my Lord Bath, and I was thinking of Madame Sevigne. Good
+night--I have a dozen other letters to write; I must tell my friends how
+happy I am--not as an Englishman, but as a cousin.
+
+[Footnote 1: Mr. Burke's book was "A Vindication of Natural Society,"
+and was regarded as a very successful imitation of the style of Lord
+Bolingbroke.]
+
+
+_ARRIVAL OF THE PRINCESS OF MECKLENBURGH--THE ROYAL WEDDING--THE QUEEN'S
+APPEARANCE AND BEHAVIOUR._
+
+TO SIR HORACE MANN.
+
+ARLINGTON STREET, _Sept._ 10, 1761.
+
+When we least expected the Queen, she came, after being ten days at sea,
+but without sickness for above half-an-hour. She was gay the whole
+voyage, sung to her harpsichord, and left the door of her cabin open.
+They made the coast of Suffolk last Saturday, and on Monday morning she
+landed at Harwich; so prosperously has his Majesty's chief eunuch, as
+they have made the Tripoline ambassador call Lord Anson, executed his
+commission. She lay that night at your old friend Lord Abercorn's, at
+Witham [in Essex]; and, if she judged by her host, must have thought she
+was coming to reign in the realm of taciturnity. She arrived at St.
+James's a quarter after three on Tuesday the 8th. When she first saw the
+Palace she turned pale: the Duchess of Hamilton smiled. "My dear
+Duchess," said the Princess, "_you_ may laugh; you have been married
+twice; but it is no joke to me." Is this a bad proof of her sense? On
+the journey they wanted her to curl her toupet. "No, indeed," said she,
+"I think it looks as well as those of the ladies who have been sent for
+me: if the King would have me wear a periwig, I will; otherwise I shall
+let myself alone." The Duke of York gave her his hand at the
+garden-gate: her lips trembled, but she jumped out with spirit. In the
+garden the King met her; she would have fallen at his feet; he prevented
+and embraced her, and led her into the apartments, where she was
+received by the Princess of Wales and Lady Augusta: these three
+princesses only dined with the King. At ten the procession went to
+chapel, preceded by unmarried daughters of peers, and peeresses in
+plenty. The new Princess was led by the Duke of York and Prince William;
+the Archbishop married them; the King talked to her the whole time with
+great good humour, and the Duke of Cumberland gave her away. She is not
+tall, nor a beauty; pale, and very thin; but looks sensible; and is
+genteel. Her hair is darkish and fine; her forehead low, her nose very
+well, except the nostrils spreading too wide; her mouth has the same
+fault, but her teeth are good. She talks a good deal, and French
+tolerably; possesses herself, is frank, but with great respect to the
+King. After the ceremony, the whole company came into the drawing-room
+for about ten minutes, but nobody was presented that night. The Queen
+was in white and silver; an endless mantle of violet-coloured velvet,
+lined with ermine, and attempted to be fastened on her shoulder by a
+bunch of large pearls, dragged itself and almost the rest of her clothes
+halfway down her waist. On her head was a beautiful little tiara of
+diamonds; a diamond necklace, and a stomacher of diamonds, worth three
+score thousand pounds, which she is to wear at the Coronation too. Her
+train was borne by the ten bridesmaids, Lady Sarah Lenox,[1] Lady
+Caroline Russell, Lady Caroline Montagu, Lady Harriot Bentinck, Lady
+Anne Hamilton, Lady Essex Kerr (daughters of Dukes of Richmond, Bedford,
+Manchester, Portland, Hamilton, and Roxburgh); and four daughters of the
+Earls of Albemarle, Brook, Harcourt, and Ilchester--Lady Elizabeth
+Keppel, Louisa Greville, Elizabeth Harcourt, and Susan Fox Strangways:
+their heads crowned with diamonds, and in robes of white and silver.
+Lady Caroline Russell is extremely handsome; Lady Elizabeth Keppel very
+pretty; but with neither features nor air, nothing ever looked so
+charming as Lady Sarah Lenox; she has all the glow of beauty peculiar to
+her family. As supper was not ready, the Queen sat down, sung, and
+played on the harpsichord to the Royal Family, who all supped with her
+in private. They talked of the different German dialects; the King asked
+if the Hanoverian was not pure--"Oh, no, Sir," said the Queen; "it is
+the worst of all."--She will not be unpopular.
+
+[Footnote 1: Lady Sarah Lennox, in an account of a theatrical
+performance at Holland House in a previous letter, is described by
+Walpole as "more beautiful than you can conceive." The King himself
+admired her so greatly that he is believed to have had serious thoughts
+of choosing her to be his queen. She afterwards married Major G. Napier,
+and became the mother of Sir William and Sir Charles Napier.]
+
+The Duke of Cumberland told the King that himself and Lady Augusta were
+sleepy. The Queen was very averse to leave the company, and at last
+articled that nobody should accompany her but the Princess of Wales and
+her own two German women, and that nobody should be admitted afterwards
+but the King--they did not retire till between two and three.
+
+The next morning the King had a levee. He said to Lord Hardwicke, "It is
+a very fine day:" that old gossip replied, "Yes, Sir, and it was a very
+fine night." Lord Bute had told the King that Lord Orford had betted his
+having a child before Sir James Lowther, who had been married the night
+before to Lord Bute's eldest daughter; the King told Lord Orford he
+should be glad to go his halves. The bet was made with Mr. Rigby.
+Somebody asked the latter how he could be so bad a courtier as to bet
+against the King? He replied, "Not at all a bad courtier; I betted Lord
+Bute's daughter against him."
+
+After the King's Levee there was a Drawing-room; the Queen stood under
+the throne: the women were presented to her by the Duchess of Hamilton,
+and then the men by the Duke of Manchester; but as she knew nobody, she
+was not to speak. At night there was a ball, drawing-rooms yesterday and
+to-day, and then a cessation of ceremony till the Coronation, except
+next Monday, when she is to receive the address of the Lord Mayor and
+Aldermen, sitting on the throne attended by the bridesmaids. A
+ridiculous circumstance happened yesterday; Lord Westmoreland, not very
+young nor clear-sighted, mistook Lady Sarah Lenox for the Queen, kneeled
+to her, and would have kissed her hand if she had not prevented him.
+People think that a Chancellor of Oxford was naturally attracted by the
+blood of Stuart. It is as comical to see Kitty Dashwood, the famous old
+beauty of the Oxfordshire Jacobites, living in the palace as Duenna to
+the Queen. She and Mrs. Boughton, Lord Lyttelton's ancient Delia, are
+revived again in a young court that never heard of them. There, I think,
+you could not have had a more circumstantial account of a royal wedding
+from the Heralds' Office. Adieu!
+
+Yours to serve you,
+
+HORACE SANDFORD.
+
+Mecklenburgh King-at-Arms.
+
+
+_THE CORONATION AND SUBSEQUENT GAIETIES._
+
+TO THE COUNTESS OF AILESBURY.
+
+STRAWBERRY HILL, _Sept._ 27, 1761.
+
+You are a mean, mercenary woman. If you did not want histories of
+weddings and coronations, and had not jobs to be executed about muslins,
+and a bit of china, and counterband goods, one should never hear of you.
+When you don't want a body, you can frisk about with greffiers and
+burgomasters, and be as merry in a dyke as my lady frog herself. The
+moment your curiosity is agog, or your cambric seized, you recollect a
+good cousin in England, and, as folks said two hundred years ago, begin
+to write "upon the knees of your heart." Well! I am a sweet-tempered
+creature, I forgive you.
+
+[Illustration: THE LIBRARY, STRAWBERRY HILL]
+
+My heraldry was much more offended at the Coronation with the ladies
+that did walk, than with those that walked out of their place; yet I was
+not so _perilously_ angry as my Lady Cowper, who refused to set a foot
+with my Lady Macclesfield; and when she was at last obliged to associate
+with her, set out on a round trot, as if she designed to prove the
+antiquity of her family by marching as lustily as a maid of honour of
+Queen Gwiniver. It was in truth a brave sight. The sea of heads in
+Palace-yard, the guards, horse and foot, the scaffolds, balconies, and
+procession exceeded imagination. The Hall, when once illuminated, was
+noble; but they suffered the whole parade to return into it in the
+dark, that his Majesty might be surprised with the quickness with which
+the sconces catched fire. The Champion acted well; the other Paladins
+had neither the grace nor alertness of Rinaldo. Lord Effingham and the
+Duke of Bedford were but untoward knights errant; and Lord Talbot had
+not much more dignity than the figure of General Monk in the Abbey. The
+habit of the peers is unbecoming to the last degree; but the peeresses
+made amends for all defects. Your daughter Richmond, Lady Kildare, and
+Lady Pembroke were as handsome as the Graces. Lady Rochford, Lady
+Holdernesse, and Lady Lyttelton looked exceedingly well in that their
+day; and for those of the day before, the Duchess of Queensbury, Lady
+Westmoreland and Lady Albemarle were surprising. Lady Harrington was
+noble at a distance, and so covered with diamonds, that you would have
+thought she had bid somebody or other, like Falstaff, _rob me the
+Exchequer_. Lady Northampton was very magnificent too, and looked
+prettier than I have seen her of late. Lady Spencer and Lady Bolingbroke
+were not the worst figures there. The Duchess of Ancaster [Mistress of
+the Robes] marched alone after the Queen with much majesty; and there
+were two new Scotch peeresses that pleased everybody, Lady Sutherland
+and Lady Dunmore. _Per contra_, were Lady P----, who had put a wig on,
+and old E----, who had scratched hers off; Lady S----, the Dowager
+E----, and a Lady Say and Sele, with her tresses coal-black, and her
+hair coal-white. Well! it was all delightful, but not half so charming
+as its being over. The gabble one heard about it for six weeks before,
+and the fatigue of the day, could not well be compensated by a mere
+puppet-show; for puppet-show it was, though it cost a million. The Queen
+is so gay that we shall not want sights; she has been at the Opera, the
+Beggar's Opera and the Rehearsal, and two nights ago carried the King to
+Ranelagh.
+
+Some of the peeresses were so fond of their robes, that they graciously
+exhibited themselves for a whole day before to all the company their
+servants could invite to see them. A maid from Richmond begged leave to
+stay in town because the Duchess of Montrose was only to be seen from
+two to four. The Heralds were so ignorant of their business, that,
+though pensioned for nothing but to register lords and ladies, and what
+belongs to them, they advertised in the newspaper for the Christian
+names and places of abode of the peeresses. The King complained of such
+omissions and of the want of precedent; Lord Effingham, the Earl
+Marshal, told him, it was true there had been great neglect in that
+office, but he had now taken such care of registering directions, that
+_next coronation_ would be conducted with the greatest order imaginable.
+The King was so diverted with this _flattering_ speech that he made the
+earl repeat it several times.
+
+On this occasion one saw to how high-water-mark extravagance is risen in
+England. At the Coronation of George II. my mother gave forty guineas
+for a dining-room, scaffold, and bedchamber. An exactly parallel
+apartment, only with rather a worse view, was this time set at three
+hundred and fifty guineas--a tolerable rise in thirty-three years! The
+platform from St. Margaret's Roundhouse to the church-door, which
+formerly let for forty pounds, went this time for two thousand four
+hundred pounds. Still more was given for the inside of the Abbey. The
+prebends would like a Coronation every year. The King paid nine thousand
+pounds for the hire of jewels; indeed, last time, it cost my father
+fourteen hundred to bejewel my Lady Orford.
+
+
+_A COURT BALL--PAMPHLETS ON MR. PITT--A SONG BY GRAY._
+
+TO THE COUNTESS OF AILESBURY.
+
+ARLINGTON STREET, _Nov._ 28, 1761.
+
+Dear Madam,--You are so bad and so good, that I don't know how to treat
+you. You give me every mark of kindness but letting me hear from you.
+You send me charming drawings the moment I trouble you with a
+commission, and you give Lady Cecilia [Johnston] commissions for trifles
+of my writing, in the most obliging manner. I have taken the latter off
+her hands. The Fugitive Pieces, and the "Catalogue of Royal and Noble
+Authors" shall be conveyed to you directly. Lady Cecilia and I agree how
+we lament the charming suppers there, every time we pass the corner of
+Warwick Street! We have a little comfort for your sake and our own, in
+believing that the campaign is at an end, at least for this year--but
+they tell us, it is to recommence here or in Ireland. You have nothing
+to do with that. Our politics, I think, will soon be as warm as our war.
+Charles Townshend is to be lieutenant-general to Mr. Pitt. The Duke of
+Bedford is privy seal; Lord Thomond, cofferer; Lord George Cavendish,
+comptroller.
+
+Diversions, you know, Madam, are never at high-water mark before
+Christmas; yet operas flourish pretty well: those on Tuesdays are
+removed to Mondays, because the Queen likes the burlettas, and the King
+cannot go on Tuesdays, his post-days. On those nights we have the middle
+front box, railed in, where Lady Mary [Coke] and I sit in triste state
+like a Lord Mayor and Lady Mayoress. The night before last there was a
+private ball at court, which began at half an hour after six, lasted
+till one, and finished without a supper. The King danced the whole time
+with the Queen,--Lady Augusta with her four younger brothers. The other
+performers were: the two Duchesses of Ancaster and Hamilton, who danced
+little; Lady Effingham and Lady Egremont, who danced much; the six maids
+of honour; Lady Susan Stewart, as attending Lady Augusta; and Lady
+Caroline Russel, and Lady Jane Stuart, the only women not of the family.
+Lady Northumberland is at Bath; Lady Weymouth lies in; Lady Bolingbroke
+was there in waiting, but in black gloves, so did not dance. The men,
+besides the royals, were Lords March and Eglintoun, of the bedchamber;
+Lord Cantelupe, vice-chamberlain; Lord Huntingdon; and four strangers,
+Lord Mandeville, Lord Northampton, Lord Suffolk, and Lord Grey. No
+sitters-by, but the Princess, the Duchess of Bedford, and Lady Bute.
+
+If it had not been for this ball, I don't know how I should have
+furnished a decent letter. Pamphlets on Mr. Pitt[1] are the whole
+conversation, and none of them worth sending cross the water: at least
+I, who am said to write some of them, think so; by which you may
+perceive I am not much flattered with the imputation. There must be new
+personages, at least, before I write on any side.--Mr. Pitt and the Duke
+of Newcastle! I should as soon think of informing the world that Miss
+Chudleigh is no vestal. You will like better to see some words which Mr.
+Gray has writ, at Miss Speed's request, to an old air of Geminiani; the
+thought is from the French.
+
+    I.
+
+    Thyrsis, when we parted, swore
+      Ere the spring he would return.
+    Ah! what means yon violet flower,
+      And the bud that decks the thorn!
+    'Twas the lark that upward sprung,
+    'Twas the nightingale that sung.
+
+    II.
+
+    Idle notes! untimely green!
+      Why this unavailing haste!
+    Western gales and skies serene
+      Speak not always winter past.
+    Cease my doubts, my fears to move;
+    Spare the honour of my love.
+
+Adieu, Madam, your most faithful servant.
+
+[Footnote 1: Mr. Pitt had lately resigned the office of Secretary of
+State, on being outvoted in the Cabinet, which rejected his proposal to
+declare war against Spain; and he had accepted a pension of L3,000 a
+year and a peerage for his wife--acts which Walpole condemns in more
+than one letter, and which provoked comments in many quarters.]
+
+
+_DEATH OF THE CZARINA ELIZABETH--THE COCK-LANE GHOST--RETURN TO ENGLAND
+OF LADY MARY WORTLEY._
+
+TO SIR HORACE MANN.
+
+ARLINGTON STREET, _Jan._ 29, 1762.
+
+I wish you joy, sir minister; the Czarina [Elizabeth] is dead. As _we
+conquered America in Germany_,[1] I hope we shall overrun Spain by this
+burial at Petersburg. Yet, don't let us plume ourselves too fast;
+nothing is so like a Queen as a King, nothing so like a predecessor as a
+successor. The favourites of the Prince Royal of Prussia, who had
+suffered so much for him, were wofully disappointed, when he became the
+present glorious Monarch; they found the English maxim true, that the
+King never dies; that is, the dignity and passions of the Crown never
+die. We were not much less defeated of our hopes on the decease of
+Philip V. The Grand Duke[2] [Peter III.] has been proclaimed Czar at the
+army in Pomerania; he may love conquest like that army, or not know it
+is conquering, like his aunt. However, we cannot suffer more by this
+event. I would part with the Empress Queen, on no better a prospect.
+
+[Footnote 1: "_We conquered America in Germany._" This is a quotation
+from a boastful speech of Mr. Pitt's on the conquest of Canada.]
+
+[Footnote 2: The Grand Duke (Peter III.) was married, for his
+misfortune, to Catharine, a princess of Anhalt-Zerbzt, whose lover,
+Count Orloff, murdered him before the end of the summer, at his wife's
+command; and in August she assumed the government, and was crowned with
+all due solemnity as Czarina or Empress. Walpole had some reason for
+saying that "nothing was so like a predecessor as a successor," since in
+character Elizabeth closely resembled Catharine.]
+
+We have not yet taken the galleons, nor destroyed the Spanish fleet. Nor
+have they enslaved Portugal, nor you made a triumphant entry into
+Naples. My dear sir, you see how lucky you were not to go thither; you
+don't envy Sir James Grey, do you? Pray don't make any categorical
+demands to Marshal Botta,[1] and be obliged to retire to Leghorn,
+because they are not answered. We want allies; preserve us our friend
+the Great Duke of Tuscany. I like your answer to Botta exceedingly, but
+I fear the Court of Vienna is shame-proof. The Apostolic and Religious
+Empress is not a whit a better Christian, not a jot less a woman, than
+the late Russian Empress, who gave such proofs of her being a _woman_.
+
+[Footnote 1: Marshal Botta was the Commander-in-chief in Tuscany.]
+
+We have a mighty expedition on the point of sailing; the destination not
+disclosed. The German War loses ground daily; however, all is still in
+embryo. My subsequent letters are not likely to be so barren, and
+indecisive. I write more to prove there is nothing, than to tell you
+anything.
+
+You were mistaken, I believe, about the Graftons; they do not remove
+from Turin, till George Pitt arrives to occupy their house there. I am
+really anxious about the fate of my letter to the Duchess [of Grafton];
+I should be hurt if it had miscarried; she would have reason to think me
+very ungrateful.
+
+I have given your letter to Mr. T[homas] Pitt; he has been very
+unfortunate since his arrival--has lost his favourite sister in
+child-bed. Lord Tavistock, I hear, has written accounts of you that give
+me much pleasure.
+
+I am ashamed to tell you that we are again dipped into an egregious
+scene of folly. The reigning fashion is a ghost[1]--a ghost, that would
+not pass muster in the paltriest convent in the Apennine. It only knocks
+and scratches; does not pretend to appear or to speak. The clergy give
+it their benediction; and all the world, whether believers or infidels,
+go to hear it. I, in which number you may guess, go to-morrow; for it is
+as much the mode to visit the ghost as the Prince of Mecklenburgh, who
+is just arrived. I have not seen him yet, though I have left my name for
+him. But I will tell you who is come too--Lady Mary Wortley.[2] I went
+last night to visit her; I give you my honour, and you who know her,
+would credit me without it, the following is a faithful description. I
+found her in a little miserable bedchamber of a ready-furnished house,
+with two tallow candles, and a bureau covered with pots and pans. On her
+head, in full of all accounts, she had an old black-laced hood, wrapped
+entirely round, so as to conceal all hair or want of hair. No
+handkerchief, but up to her chin a kind of horseman's riding-coat,
+calling itself a pet-en-l'air, made of a dark green (green I think it
+had been) brocade, with coloured and silver flowers, and lined with
+furs; boddice laced, a foul dimity petticoat sprig'd, velvet muffeteens
+on her arms, grey stockings and slippers. Her face less changed in
+twenty years than I could have imagined; I told her so, and she was not
+so tolerable twenty years ago that she needed have taken it for
+flattery, but she did, and literally gave me a box on the ear. She is
+very lively, all her senses perfect, her languages as imperfect as ever,
+her avarice greater. She entertained me at first with nothing but the
+dearness of provisions at Helvoet. With nothing but an Italian, a
+French, and a Prussian, all men servants, and something she calls an
+_old_ secretary, but whose age till he appears will be doubtful; she
+receives all the world, who go to homage her as Queen Mother,[3] and
+crams them into this kennel. The Duchess of Hamilton, who came in just
+after me, was so astonished and diverted, that she could not speak to
+her for laughing. She says that she has left all her clothes at Venice.
+I really pity Lady Bute; what will the progress be of such a
+commencement!
+
+[Footnote 1: It was known as the Cock-lane Ghost. A girl in that lane
+asserted that she was nightly visited by a ghost, who could reveal a
+murder, and who gave her tokens of his (or its) presence by knocks and
+scratches, which were audible to others in the room besides herself; and
+at last she went so far as to declare that the ghost had promised to
+attend a witness, who might be selected, into the vault under the Church
+of St. John's, Clerkenwell, where the body of the supposed victim was
+buried. Her story caused such excitement, that at last Dr. Johnson, Dr.
+Douglas (afterwards Bishop of Salisbury), and one or two other
+gentlemen, undertook an investigation of the affair, which proved beyond
+all doubt that it was a trick, though they could not discover how it was
+performed, nor could they make the girl confess; and Johnson wrote an
+account of their investigations and verdict, which was published in _The
+Gentleman's Magazine_ and the newspapers of the day (Boswell's "Life of
+Johnson," ann. 1763).]
+
+[Footnote 2: Lady Mary Wortley was a daughter of the Duke of Kingston
+and wife of Mr. Wortley, our ambassador at Constantinople. She was the
+most accomplished lady of the eighteenth century. Christian Europe is
+indebted to her for the introduction of the practice of inoculation for
+the smallpox, of which she heard during her residence in Turkey, and of
+the efficacy of which she was so convinced that she caused her own
+children to be inoculated; and, by publishing its success in their case,
+she led to its general adoption. It saved innumerable lives in the
+eighteenth century, and was, in fact, the parent of the vaccination
+which has superseded it, and which is merely inoculation with matter
+derived from another source, the cow. She was also an authoress of
+considerable repute for lyric odes and _vers de societe_, &c., and,
+above all, for her letters, most of which are to her daughter, Lady Bute
+(as Mme. de Sevigne's are to her daughter, Mme. de Grignan), and which
+are in no respect inferior to those of the French lady in sprightly wit,
+while in the variety of their subjects they are far superior, as giving
+the account of Turkish scenery and manners, and also of those of other
+countries which her husband visited on various diplomatic missions,
+while Mme. de Sevigne's are for the greater part confined to the gossip
+of the coteries of Paris. Her works occupy five volumes; but what we
+have is but a small part of what we might have had. D'Israeli points out
+that "we have lost much valuable literature by the illiberal or
+malignant descendants of learned and ingenious persons. Many of Lady
+Mary Wortley Montague's letters have been destroyed, I am informed, by
+her daughters, who imagined that the family honours were lowered by the
+addition of those of literature. Some of her best letters, recently
+published, were found buried in an old trunk. It would have mortified
+her ladyship's daughter to have heard that her mother was the Sevigne of
+Britain" ("Curiosities of Literature," i. 54); and, as will be seen in a
+subsequent letter (No. 67), Walpole corroborates D'Israeli. Lady Mary
+was at one time a friend and correspondent of Pope, who afterwards, for
+some unknown reason, quarrelled with her, and made her the subject of
+some of the most disgraceful libels that ever proceeded from even his
+pen.]
+
+[Footnote 3: She was mother of Lady Bute, wife of the Prime
+Minister.--WALPOLE.]
+
+The King of France has avowed a natural son,[1] and given him the estate
+which came from Marshal Belleisle, with the title of Comte de Gisors.
+The mother I think is called Matignon or Maquignon. Madame Pompadour
+was the Bathsheba that introduced this Abishag. Adieu, my dear sir!
+
+[Footnote 1: This was a false report.--WALPOLE.]
+
+
+_HIS OWN "ANECDOTES OF PAINTING"--HIS PICTURE OF THE WEDDING OF HENRY
+VII.--BURNET'S COMPARISON OF TIBERIUS AND CHARLES II.--ADDISON'S
+"TRAVELS."_
+
+TO THE REV. HENRY ZOUCH.
+
+ARLINGTON STREET, _March_ 20, 1762.
+
+I am glad you are pleased, Sir, with my "Anecdotes of Painting;" but I
+doubt you praise me too much: it was an easy task when I had the
+materials collected, and I would not have the labours of forty years,
+which was Vertue's case, depreciated in compliment to the work of four
+months, which is almost my whole merit. Style is become, in a manner, a
+mechanical affair, and if to much ancient lore our antiquaries would add
+a little modern reading, to polish their language and correct their
+prejudices, I do not see why books of antiquities should not be made as
+amusing as writings on any other subject. If Tom Hearne had lived in the
+world, he might have writ an agreeable history of dancing; at least, I
+am sure that many modern volumes are read for no reason but for their
+being penned in the dialect of the age.
+
+I am much beholden to you, dear Sir, for your remarks; they shall have
+their due place whenever the work proceeds to a second edition, for that
+the nature of it as a record will ensure to it. A few of your notes
+demand a present answer: the Bishop of Imola pronounced the nuptial
+benediction at the marriage of Henry VII., which made me suppose him the
+person represented.[1]
+
+[Footnote 1: In a previous letter Walpole mentions that Vertue (the
+engraver) had disputed the subject of this picture, because the face of
+the King did not resemble other pictures of him; but Walpole was
+convinced of the correctness of his description of it, because it does
+resemble the face on Henry's shillings, "which are more authentic than
+pictures."]
+
+Burnet, who was more a judge of characters than statues, mentions the
+resemblance between Tiberius and Charles II.; but, as far as
+countenances went, there could not be a more ridiculous prepossession;
+Charles had a long face, with very strong lines, and a narrowish brow;
+Tiberius a very square face, and flat forehead, with features rather
+delicate in proportion. I have examined this imaginary likeness, and see
+no kind of foundation for it. It is like Mr. Addison's Travels,[1] of
+which it was so truly said, he might have composed them without stirring
+out of England. There are a kind of naturalists who have sorted out the
+qualities of the mind, and allotted particular turns of features and
+complexions to them. It would be much easier to prove that every form
+has been endowed with every vice. One has heard much of the vigour of
+Burnet himself; yet I dare to say, he did not think himself like Charles
+II.
+
+[Footnote 1: It is Fielding who, in his "Voyage to Lisbon," gave this
+character to Addison's "Travels."]
+
+I am grieved, Sir, to hear that your eyes suffer; take care of them;
+nothing can replace the satisfaction they afford: one should hoard them,
+as the only friend that will not be tired of one when one grows old,
+and when one should least choose to depend on others for entertainment.
+I most sincerely wish you happiness and health in that and every other
+instance.
+
+
+_BIRTH OF THE PRINCE OF WALES--THE CZARINA--VOLTAIRE'S HISTORICAL
+CRITICISMS--IMMENSE VALUE OF THE TREASURES BROUGHT OVER IN THE
+"HERMIONE."_
+
+TO SIR HORACE MANN.
+
+ARLINGTON STREET, _Aug._ 12, 1762.
+
+A Prince of Wales [George IV.] was born this morning; the prospect of
+your old neighbour [the Pretender] at Rome does not improve; the House
+of Hanover will have numbers in its own family sufficient to defend
+their crown--unless they marry a Princess of Anhalt Zerbst. What a
+shocking tragedy that has proved already! There is a manifesto arrived
+to-day that makes one shudder! This northern Athaliah, who has the
+modesty not to name her murdered _husband_ in that light, calls him _her
+neighbour_; and, as if all the world were savages, like Russians,
+pretends that he died suddenly of a distemper that never was
+expeditious; mocks Heaven with pretensions to charity and piety; and
+heaps the additional inhumanity on the man she has dethroned and
+assassinated, of imputing his death to a judgment from Providence. In
+short, it is the language of usurpation and blood, counselled and
+apologised for by clergymen! It is Brunehault[1] and an archbishop!
+
+[Footnote 1: Brunehault (in modern English histories called Brunhild)
+was the wife of Sigebert, King of Austrasia (that district of France
+which lies between the Meuse and the Rhine) and son of Clotaire I. The
+"Biographie Universelle" says of her: "This Princess, attractive by her
+beauty, her wit, and her carriage, had the misfortune to possess a great
+ascendency over her husband, and to have lost sight of the fact that
+even sovereigns cannot always avenge themselves with impunity." Her
+sister, Galswith, the wife of Chilperic, King of Neustria, between the
+Loire and the Meuse, had been assassinated by Fredegonde, and
+Brunehault, determined to avenge her, induced Sigebert to make war on
+Chilperic, who had married Fredegonde. He gained a victory; but
+Fredegonde contrived to have him also assassinated, and Brunehault
+became Fredegonde's prisoner. But Murovee, son of Chilperic, fell in
+love with her, and married her, and escaping from Rouen, fled into
+Austrasia. At last, in 595, Fredegonde died, and Brunehault subdued the
+greater part of Neustria, and ruled with great but unscrupulous energy.
+She encouraged St. Augustine in his mission to England; she built
+hospitals and churches, earning by her zeal in such works a letter of
+panegyric from Pope Gregory the Great. But, old as she was, she at the
+same time gave herself up to a life of outrageous license. It was not,
+however, her dissolute life which proved fatal to her, but the design
+which she showed to erect a firm monarchy in Austrasia and Neustria, by
+putting down the overgrown power of the nobles. They raised an army to
+attack her; she was defeated, and with four of her great-grandchildren,
+the sons of her grandson, King Theodoric, who had been left to her
+guardianship, fell into the hands of the nobles, who put her to death
+with every circumstance of cruelty and indignity. (See Kitchin's
+"History of France," i. 91.)]
+
+I have seen Mr. Keith's first despatch; in general, my account was
+tolerably correct; but he does not mention Ivan. The conspiracy advanced
+by one of the gang being seized, though for another crime; they thought
+themselves discovered. Orloff, one of them, hurried to the Czarina, and
+told her she had no time to lose. She was ready for anything; nay,
+marched herself at the head of fourteen thousand men and a train of
+artillery against her husband, but not being the only Alecto in Muscovy,
+she had been aided by a Princess Daschkaw, a nymph under twenty, and
+sister to the Czar's mistress. It was not the latter, as I told you, but
+the Chancellor's wife, who offered up the order of St. Catherine. I do
+not know how my Lord Buckingham [the English Minister at St. Petersburg]
+feels, but unless to conjure up a tempest against this fury of the
+north, nothing could bribe me to set my foot in her dominions. Had she
+been priestess of the Scythian Diana, she would have sacrificed her
+brother by choice. It seems she does not degenerate; her mother was
+ambitious and passionate for intrigues; she went to Paris, and dabbled
+in politics with all her might.
+
+The world had been civilising itself till one began to doubt whether
+ancient histories were not ancient legends. Voltaire had unpoisoned half
+the victims to the Church and to ambition. Oh! there never was such a
+man as Borgia[1]; the league seemed a romance. For the honour of poor
+historians, the assassinations of the Kings of France and Portugal,
+majesties still living in spite of Damien and the Jesuits, and the
+dethronement and murder of the Czar, have restored some credibility to
+the annals of former ages. Tacitus recovers his character by the edition
+of Petersburg.
+
+[Footnote 1: Borgia, the father, was Pope Sextus VI.; Caesar Borgia was
+the son--both equally infamous for their crimes, and especially their
+murders by poison.]
+
+We expect the definitive courier from Paris every day. Now it is said
+that they ask time to send to Spain. What? to ask leave to desert them!
+The Spaniards, not so expeditious in usurpation as the Muscovites, have
+made no progress in Portugal. Their absurd manifestoes appeared too
+soon. The Czarina and Princess Daschkaw stay till the stroke is struck.
+Really, my dear Sir, your Italy is growing unfashionably innocent,--if
+you don't take care, the Archbishop of Novgorod will deserve, by his
+crimes, to be at the head of the _Christian_ Church.[1] I fear my
+friend, good Benedict, infected you all with his virtues.
+
+[Footnote 1: That is, Pope Benedict XIV.]
+
+You see how this Russian revolution has seized every cell in my head--a
+Prince of Wales is passed over in a line, the peace in another line. I
+have not even told you that the treasure of the _Hermione_,[1] reckoned
+eight hundred thousand pounds, passed the end of my street this morning
+in one-and-twenty waggons. Of the Havannah I could tell you nothing if I
+would; people grow impatient at not hearing from thence. Adieu!
+
+[Footnote 1: In August, 1761, Sir G. Pocock took Havannah, the capital
+of Cuba. In September Commodore Cornish and Colonel Draper took Manilla,
+the principal of the Philippine Islands; and the treasures found in
+Manilla alone exceeded the sum here mentioned by Walpole, and yet did
+not equal those brought home from the Havannah, as Walpole mentions in a
+subsequent letter.]
+
+You see I am a punctual correspondent when Empresses commit murders.
+
+
+_NEGOTIATIONS FOR PEACE--CHRISTENING OF THE PRINCE OF WALES._
+
+TO THE HON. H.S. CONWAY.
+
+STRAWBERRY HILL, _Sept._ 9, 1762.
+
+    Nondum laurus erat, longoque decentia crine
+    Tempora cingebat de qualibet arbore Phoebus.[1]
+
+[Footnote 1: The quotation is from Ovid, Met. i. 450.]
+
+This is a hint to you, that as Phoebus, who was certainly your superior,
+could take up with a chestnut garland, or any crown he found, you must
+have the humility to be content without laurels, when none are to be
+had: you have hunted far and near for them, and taken true pains to the
+last in that old nursery-garden Germany, and by the way have made me
+shudder with your last journal: but you must be easy with _qualibet_
+other _arbore_; you must come home to your own plantations. The Duke of
+Bedford is gone in a fury to make peace,[1] for he cannot be even
+pacific with temper; and by this time I suppose the Duke de Nivernois is
+unpacking his portion of olive _dans la rue de Suffolk Street_. I say, I
+suppose--for I do not, like my friends at Arthur's, whip into my
+post-chaise to see every novelty. My two sovereigns, the Duchess of
+Grafton and Lady Mary Coke, are arrived, and yet I have seen neither
+Polly nor Lucy. The former, I hear, is entirely French; the latter as
+absolutely English.
+
+[Footnote 1: "On the 6th of September the Duke of Bedford embarked as
+ambassador from England; on the 12th the Duc de Nivernois landed as
+ambassador from France. Of these two noblemen, Bedford, though well
+versed in affairs, was perhaps by his hasty temper in some degree
+disqualified for the profession of a Temple or a Gondomar; and Nivernois
+was only celebrated for his graceful manners and his pretty songs" (Lord
+Stanhope, "History of England," c. 38).]
+
+Well! but if you insist on not doffing your cuirass, you may find an
+opportunity of wearing it. The storm thickens. The City of London are
+ready to hoist their standard; treason is the bon-ton at that end of the
+town; seditious papers pasted up at every corner: nay, my neighbourhood
+is not unfashionable; we have had them at Brentford and Kingston. The
+Peace is the cry;[1] but to make weight, they throw in all the abusive
+ingredients they can collect. They talk of your friend the Duke of
+Devonshire's resigning; and, for the Duke of Newcastle, it puts him so
+much in mind of the end of Queen Anne's time, that I believe he hopes to
+be Minister again for another forty years.
+
+[Footnote 1: "_The Peace is the cry._" This was the peace of Paris, not
+absolutely concluded till February of the next year. The conditions in
+our favour were so inadequate to our successes in the war, that the
+treaty caused general indignation; so great, indeed, that Lord Bute, the
+Prime Minister, was afraid to face the meeting of Parliament, and
+resigned his office, in which he was succeeded by Mr. George Grenville.
+It was the subject of severe, but not undeserved comment in the
+celebrated _North Briton_, No. 45, by Wilkes.]
+
+In the mean time, there are but dark news from the Havannah; the
+_Gazette_, who would not fib for the world, says, we have lost but four
+officers; the World, who is not quite so scrupulous, says, our loss is
+heavy.--But what shocking notice to those who have _Harry Conways_
+there! The _Gazette_ breaks off with saying, that they were to storm the
+next day! Upon the whole, it is regarded as a preparative to worse news.
+
+Our next monarch [George IV.] was christened last night, George Augustus
+Frederick; the Princess, the Duke of Cumberland, and Duke of
+Mecklenburgh, sponsors; the ceremony performed by the Bishop of London.
+The Queen's bed, magnificent, and they say in taste, was placed in the
+great drawing-room: though she is not to see company in form, yet it
+looks as if they had intended people should have been there, as all who
+presented themselves were admitted, which were very few, for it had not
+been notified; I suppose to prevent too great a crowd: all I have heard
+named, besides those in waiting, were the Duchess of Queensberry, Lady
+Dalkeith, Mrs. Grenville, and about four more ladies.
+
+
+_TREASURES FROM THE HAVANNAH--THE ROYAL VISIT TO ETON--DEATH OF LADY
+MARY--CONCEALMENT OF HER WORKS--VOLTAIRE'S "UNIVERSAL HISTORY."_
+
+TO SIR HORACE MANN.
+
+STRAWBERRY HILL, _Oct._ 3, 1762.
+
+I am now only the peace in your debt, for here is the Havannah. Here it
+is, following despair and accompanied by glory, riches, and twelve
+ships-of-the-line; not all in person, for four are destroyed. The
+booty--that is an undignified term--I should say, the plunder, or the
+spoils, which is a more classic word for such heroes as we are, amounts
+to at least a million and a half. Lord Albemarle's share will be about
+L140,000. I wish I knew how much that makes in _talents_ or _great
+sesterces_. What to me is better than all, we have lost but sixteen
+hundred men; _but_, alas! Most of the sick recovered! What an affecting
+object my Lady Albemarle would make in a triumph, surrounded by her
+three victorious sons; for she had three at stake! My friend Lady
+Hervey,[1] too, is greatly happy; her son Augustus distinguished himself
+particularly, brought home the news, and on his way took a rich French
+ship going to Newfoundland with military stores. I do not surely mean to
+detract from him, who set all this spirit on float, but you see we can
+conquer, though Mr. Pitt is at his plough.
+
+[Footnote 1: Lady Hervey, the widow of Pope's Lord Fanny and Sporus, had
+been the beautiful "Molly Lepel," celebrated by Lord Chesterfield.
+
+    Had I Hanover, Bremen, and Verden
+      And likewise the Duchy of Zell,
+    I would part with them all for a farden,
+      Compared with sweet Molly Lepel.
+
+Three of her sons succeeded to the Earldom of Bristol.]
+
+The express arrived while the Duke de Nivernois was at dinner with Lord
+Bute. The world says, that the joy of the company showed itself with too
+little politeness--I hope not; I would not exult to a single man, and a
+minister of peace; it should be in the face of Europe, if I assumed that
+dominion which the French used to arrogate; nor do I believe it
+happened; all the company are not so charmed with the event. They are
+not quite convinced that it will facilitate the pacification, nor am I
+clear it will. The City of London will not lower their hopes, and views,
+and expectations, on this acquisition. Well, if we can steer wisely
+between insolence from success and impatience for peace, we may secure
+our safety and tranquillity for many years. But they are _not_ yet
+arrived, nor hear I anything that tells me the peace will certainly be
+made. France _wants_ peace; I question if she _wishes_ it. How his
+Catholic royalty will take this, one cannot guess. My good friend, we
+are not at table with Monsieur de Nivernois, so we may smile at this
+consequence of the family-compact. Twelve ships-of-the-line and the
+Havannah!--it becomes people who cannot keep their own, to divide the
+world between them!
+
+Your nephew Foote has made a charming figure; the King and Queen went
+from Windsor to see Eton; he is captain of the Oppidans, and made a
+speech to them with great applause. It was in English, which was right;
+why should we talk Latin to our Kings rather than Russ or Iroquois? Is
+this a season for being ashamed of our country? Dr. Barnard, the master,
+is the Pitt of masters, and has raised the school to the most
+flourishing state it ever knew.
+
+Lady Mary Wortley[1] has left twenty-one large volumes in prose and
+verse, in manuscript; nineteen are fallen to Lady Bute, and will not see
+the light in haste. The other two Lady Mary in her passage gave to
+somebody in Holland, and at her death expressed great anxiety to have
+them published. Her family are in terrors lest they should be, and have
+tried to get them: hitherto the man is inflexible. Though I do not doubt
+but they are an olio of lies and scandal, I should like to see them. She
+had parts, and had seen much. Truth is often at bottom of such
+compositions, and places itself here and there without the intention of
+the mother. I dare say in general, these works are like Madame del
+Pozzo's _Memoires_. Lady Mary had more wit, and something more delicacy;
+their manners and morals were a good deal more alike.
+
+[Footnote 1: In a note to this letter, subsequently added by Walpole, he
+reduces this statement to seventeen, saying: "It was true that Lady Mary
+did leave seventeen volumes of her works and memories. She gave her
+letters from Constantinople to Mr. Sowden, minister of the English
+Church at Rotterdam, who published them; and, the day before she died,
+she gave him those seventeen volumes, with injunctions to publish them
+too; but in two days the man had a crown living from Lord Bute, and Lady
+Bute had the seventeen volumes."]
+
+There is a lad, a waiter at St. James's coffee-house, of thirteen years
+old, who says he does not wonder we beat the French, for he himself
+could thrash Monsieur de Nivernois. This duke is so thin and small, that
+when minister at Berlin, at a time that France was not in favour there,
+the King of Prussia said, if his eyes were a little older, he should
+want a glass to see the embassador. I do not admire this bon-mot.
+Voltaire is continuing his "Universal History"; he showed the Duke of
+Grafton a chapter, to which the title is, _Les Anglois vainqueurs dans
+les Quatres Parties du Monde_. There have been minutes in the course of
+our correspondence when you and I did not expect to see this chapter. It
+is bigger by a quarter than our predecessors the Romans had any
+pretensions to, and larger than I hope our descendants will see written
+of them, for conquest, unless by necessity, as ours has been, is an
+odious glory; witness my hand
+
+H. WALPOLE.
+
+P.S.--I recollect that my last letter was a little melancholy; this, to
+be sure, has a grain or two of national vanity; why, I must own I am a
+miserable philosopher; the weather of the hour does affect me. I cannot
+here, at a distance from the world and unconcerned in it, help feeling a
+little satisfaction when my country is successful; yet, tasting its
+honours and elated with them, I heartily, seriously wish they had their
+_quietus_. What is the fame of men compared to their happiness? Who
+gives a nation peace, gives tranquillity to all. How many must be
+wretched, before one can be renowned! A hero bets the lives and fortunes
+of thousands, whom he has no right to game with: but alas! Caesars have
+little regard to their fish and counters!
+
+
+_RESIGNATION OF LORD BUTE--FRENCH VISITORS--WALPOLE AND NO. 45._
+
+TO SIR HORACE MANN.
+
+STRAWBERRY HILL, _April_ 30, 1763.
+
+The papers have told you all the formal changes; the real one consists
+solely in Lord Bute being out of office, for, having recovered his
+fright, he is still as much Minister as ever, and consequently does not
+find his unpopularity decrease. On the contrary, I think his situation
+more dangerous than ever: he has done enough to terrify his friends,
+and encourage his enemies, and has acquired no new strength; rather has
+lost strength, by the disappearance of Mr. Fox from the scene. His
+deputies, too, will not long care to stand all the risk for him, when
+they perceive, as they must already, that they have neither credit nor
+confidence. Indeed the new administration is a general joke, and will
+scarce want a violent death to put an end to it. Lord Bute is very
+blamable for embarking the King so deep in measures that may have so
+serious a termination. The longer the Court can stand its ground, the
+more firmly will the opposition be united, and the more inflamed. I have
+ever thought this would be a turbulent reign, and nothing has happened
+to make me alter my opinion.
+
+Mr. Fox's exit has been very unpleasant. He would not venture to accept
+the Treasury, which Lord Bute would have bequeathed to him; and could
+not obtain an earldom, for which he thought he had stipulated; but some
+of the negotiators asserting that he had engaged to resign the
+Paymaster's place, which he vehemently denies, he has been forced to
+take up with a barony, and has broken with his associates--I do not say
+friends, for with the chief of _them_[1] he had quarrelled when he
+embarked in the new system. He meets with little pity, and yet has found
+as much ingratitude as he had had power of doing service.
+
+[Footnote 1: "_The chief of them._" Walpole himself explains in a note
+that he means the Dukes of Cumberland and Devonshire.]
+
+I am glad you are going to have a great duke; it will amuse you, and a
+new Court will make Florence lively, the only beauty it wants. You
+divert me with my friend the Duke of Modena's conscientious match: if
+the Duchess had outlived him, she would not have been so scrupulous.
+But, for Hymen's sake, who is that Madame Simonetti? I trust, not that
+old painted, gaming, debauched Countess from Milan, whom I saw at the
+fair of Reggio!
+
+I surprise myself with being able to write two pages of pure English; I
+do nothing but deal in broken French. The two nations are crossing over
+and figuring-in. We have had a Count d'Usson and his wife these six
+weeks; and last Saturday arrived a Madame de Boufflers, _scavante,
+galante_, a great friend of the Prince of Conti, and a passionate
+admirer _de nous autres Anglois_. I am forced to live much with _tout
+ca_, as they are perpetually at my Lady Hervey's; and as my Lord
+Hertford goes ambassador to Paris, where I shall certainly make him a
+visit next year--don't you think I shall be computing how far it is to
+Florence? There is coming, too, a Marquis de Fleury,[1] who is to be
+consigned to me, as a political relation, _vu l'amitie entre le Cardinal
+son oncle et feu monsieur mon pere_. However, as my cousin Fleury is not
+above six-and-twenty, I had much rather be excused from such a
+commission as showing the Tombs and the Lions, and the King and Queen,
+and my Lord Bute, and the Waxwork, to a boy. All this breaks in upon my
+plan of withdrawing by little and little from the world, for I hate to
+tire it with an old lean face, and which promises to be an old lean face
+for thirty years longer, for I am as well again as ever. The Duc de
+Nivernois called here the other day in his way from Hampton Court; but,
+as the most sensible French never have eyes to see anything, unless they
+see it every day and see it in fashion, I cannot say he flattered me
+much, or was much struck with Strawberry. When I carried him into the
+Cabinet, which I have told you is formed upon the idea of a Catholic
+chapel, he pulled off his hat, but perceiving his error, he said, "_Ce
+n'est pas une chapelle pourtant_," and seemed a little displeased.
+
+[Footnote 1: Cardinal Fleury, Prime Minister of France from 1727 to
+1742. Pope celebrated his love of peace--
+
+    Peace is my dear delight, not Fleury's more;
+
+and by his resolute maintenance of peace during the first seven years of
+his administration he had so revived the resources and restored the
+power of his country, that when the question of going to war with France
+was discussed in the Council of Vienna the veteran Prince Eugene warned
+the Ministers that his wise and prudent administration had been so
+beneficial to his country that the Empire was no longer a match for it.]
+
+My poor niece [Lady Waldegrave] does not forget her Lord, though by this
+time I suppose the world has. She has taken a house here, at Twickenham,
+to be near me. Madame de Boufflers has heard so much of her beauty, that
+she told me she should be glad to peep through a grate anywhere to get a
+glimpse of her,--but at present it would not answer. I never saw so
+great an alteration in so short a period; but she is too young not to
+recover her beauty, only dimmed by grief that must be temporary. Adieu!
+my dear Sir.
+
+
+_Monday, May 2nd_, ARLINGTON STREET.
+
+The plot thickens: Mr. Wilkes is sent to the Tower for the last _North
+Briton_;[1] a paper whose fame must have reached you. It said Lord Bute
+had made the King utter a gross falsehood in his last speech. This hero
+is as bad a fellow as ever hero was, abominable in private life, dull in
+Parliament, but, they say, very entertaining in a room, and certainly no
+bad writer, besides having had the honour of contributing a great deal
+to Lord Bute's fall. Wilkes fought Lord Talbot in the autumn, whom he
+had abused; and lately in Calais, when the Prince de Croy, the Governor,
+asked how far the liberty of the press extended in England, replied, I
+cannot tell, but I am trying to know. I don't believe this will be the
+only paragraph I shall send you on this affair.
+
+[Footnote 1: The celebrated No. 45 which attacked the speech with which
+the King had opened Parliament; asserting that it was the speech not of
+the King, but of the Ministers; and that as such he had a right to
+criticise it, and to denounce its panegyric of the late speech as
+founded on falsehood.]
+
+
+_A PARTY AT "STRABERRI"--WORK OF HIS PRINTING PRESS--EPIGRAMS--A GARDEN
+PARTY AT ESHER._
+
+TO GEORGE MONTAGU, ESQ.
+
+STRAWBERRY HILL, _May_ 17, 1763.
+
+"On vient de nous donner une tres jolie fete au chateau de Straberri:
+tout etoit tapisse de narcisses, de tulipes, et de lilacs; des cors de
+chasse, des clarionettes; des petits vers galants faits par des fees, et
+qui se trouvoient sous la presse; des fruits a la glace, du the, du
+caffe, des biscuits, et force hot-rolls."--This is not the beginning of
+a letter to you, but of one that I might suppose sets out to-night for
+Paris, or rather, which I do not suppose will set out thither; for
+though the narrative is circumstantially true, I don't believe the
+actors were pleased enough with the scene, to give so favourable an
+account of it.
+
+The French do not come hither to see. _A l'Anglaise_ happened to be the
+word in fashion; and half a dozen of the most fashionable people have
+been the dupes of it. I take for granted that their next mode will be _a
+l'Iroquaise_, that they may be under no obligation of realising their
+pretensions. Madame de Boufflers[1] I think will die a martyr to a
+taste, which she fancied she had, and finds she has not. Never having
+stirred ten miles from Paris, and having only rolled in an easy coach
+from one hotel to another on a gliding pavement, she is already worn out
+with being hurried from morning till night from one sight to another.
+She rises every morning so fatigued with the toils of the preceding
+day, that she has not strength, if she had inclination, to observe the
+least, or the finest thing she sees! She came hither to-day to a great
+breakfast I made for her, with her eyes a foot deep in her head, her
+hands dangling, and scarce able to support her knitting-bag. She had
+been yesterday to see a ship launched, and went from Greenwich by water
+to Ranelagh. Madame Dusson, who is Dutch-built, and whose muscles are
+pleasure-proof, came with her; there were besides, Lady Mary Coke, Lord
+and Lady Holdernesse, the Duke and Duchess of Grafton, Lord Hertford,
+Lord Villiers, Offley, Messieurs de Fleury, D'Eon,[2] et Duclos.[3] The
+latter is author of the Life of Louis Onze; dresses like a dissenting
+minister, which I suppose is the livery of a _bel esprit_, and is much
+more impetuous than agreeable. We breakfasted in the great parlour, and
+I had filled the hall and large cloister by turns with French horns and
+clarionettes. As the French ladies had never seen a printing-house, I
+carried them into mine; they found something ready set, and desiring to
+see what it was, it proved as follows:--
+
+The Press speaks--
+
+FOR MADAME DE BOUFFLERS.
+
+    The graceful fair, who loves to know,
+    Nor dreads the north's inclement snow;
+    Who bids her polish'd accent wear
+    The British diction's harsher air;
+    Shall read her praise in every clime
+    Where types can speak or poets rhyme.
+
+FOR MADAME DUSSON.
+
+    Feign not an ignorance of what I speak;
+    You could not miss my meaning were it Greek:
+    'Tis the same language Belgium utter'd first,
+    The same which from admiring Gallia burst.
+    True sentiment a like expression pours;
+    Each country says the same to eyes like yours.
+
+[Footnote 1: Boswell records Mr. Beauclerk's account of his introduction
+of this lady to Johnson: "When Mme. de Boufflers was first in England
+she was desirous to see Johnson. I accordingly went with her to his
+chambers in the Temple, where she was entertained with his conversation
+for some time. When our visit was over, she and I left him, and were got
+into Inner Temple Lane, when, all at once, I heard a noise like thunder.
+This was occasioned by Johnson, who, it seems, upon a little
+recollection, had taken it into his head that he ought to have done the
+honours of his literary residence to a foreign lady of quality, and,
+eager to show himself a man of gallantry, was hurrying down the
+staircase in evident agitation. He overtook us before we reached the
+Temple Gate, and brushing in between me and Mme. de Boufflers, seized
+her hand and conducted her to her coach. His dress was a rusty brown
+morning suit, a pair of old shoes by way of slippers, a little
+shrivelled wig sticking on the top of his head, and the sleeves of his
+shirt and the knees of his breeches hanging loose. A considerable crowd
+of people gathered round, and were not a little struck by this singular
+appearance" (vol. ii., ann. 1775.)]
+
+[Footnote 2: This gentleman was at this time secretary to the Duc de
+Nivernois. For many years he dressed in woman's clothes, and the
+question of his sex was made the subject of many wagers and trials both
+in England and France.]
+
+[Footnote 3: M. Duclos was an author of good repute as a novelist, and
+one of the contributors to the "Dictionnaire de l'Academie."]
+
+You will comprehend that the first speaks English, and that the second
+does not; that the second is handsome, and the first not; and that the
+second was born in Holland. This little gentilesse pleased, and atoned
+for the popery of my house, which was not serious enough for Madame de
+Boufflers, who is Montmorency, _et du sang du premier Chretien_; and too
+serious for Madame Dusson, who is a Dutch Calvinist. The latter's
+husband was not here, nor Drumgold, who have both got fevers, nor the
+Duc de Nivernois, who dined at Claremont. The Gallery is not advanced
+enough to give them any idea at all, as they are not apt to go out of
+their way for one; but the Cabinet, and the glory of yellow glass at
+top, which had a charming sun for a foil, did surmount their
+indifference, especially as they were animated by the Duchess of
+Grafton, who had never happened to be here before, and who perfectly
+entered into the air of enchantment and fairyism, which is the tone of
+the place, and was peculiarly so to-day--_apropos_, when do you design
+to come hither? Let me know, that I may have no measures to interfere
+with receiving you and your grandsons.
+
+Before Lord Bute ran away, he made Mr. Bentley[1] a Commissioner of the
+Lottery; I don't know whether a single or a double one: the latter,
+which I hope it is, is two hundred a-year.
+
+[Footnote 1: Mr. Bentley, who was an occasional correspondent of
+Walpole, was a son of the great Master of Trinity College, Cambridge.]
+
+
+_Thursday 19th_.
+
+I am ashamed of myself to have nothing but a journal of pleasures to
+send you; I never passed a more agreeable day than yesterday. Miss
+Pelham gave the French an entertainment at Esher;[1] but they have been
+so feasted and amused, that none of them were well enough, or reposed
+enough, to come, but Nivernois and Madame Dusson. The rest of the
+company were, the Graftons, Lady Rockingham, Lord and Lady Pembroke,
+Lord and Lady Holdernesse, Lord Villiers, Count Woronzow the Russian
+minister, Lady Sondes, Mr. and Miss Mary Pelham, Lady Mary Coke, Mrs.
+Anne Pitt, and Mr. Shelley. The day was delightful, the scene
+transporting; the trees, lawns, concaves, all in the perfection in which
+the ghost of Kent[2] would joy to see them. At twelve we made the tour
+of the farm in eight chaises and calashes, horsemen, and footmen,
+setting out like a picture of Wouverman's. My lot fell in the lap of
+Mrs. Anne Pitt, which I could have excused, as she was not at all in
+the style of the day, romantic, but political. We had a magnificent
+dinner, cloaked in the modesty of earthenware; French horns and hautboys
+on the lawn. We walked to the Belvidere on the summit of the hill, where
+a theatrical storm only served to heighten the beauty of the landscape,
+a rainbow on a dark cloud falling precisely behind the tower of a
+neighbouring church, between another tower and the building at
+Claremont. Monsieur de Nivernois, who had been absorbed all day, and
+lagging behind, translating my verses, was delivered of his version, and
+of some more lines which he wrote on Miss Pelham in the Belvidere, while
+we drank tea and coffee. From thence we passed into the wood, and the
+ladies formed a circle on chairs before the mouth of the cave, which was
+overhung to a vast height with woodbines, lilacs, and laburnums, and
+dignified by the tall shapely cypresses. On the descent of the hill were
+placed the French horns; the abigails, servants, and neighbours
+wandering below by the river; in short, it was Parnassus, as Watteau
+would have painted it. Here we had a rural syllabub, and part of the
+company returned to town; but were replaced by Giardini and Onofrio, who
+with Nivernois on the violin, and Lord Pembroke on the bass, accompanied
+Miss Pelham, Lady Rockingham, and the Duchess of Grafton, who sang. This
+little concert lasted till past ten; then there were minuets, and as we
+had seven couple left, it concluded with a country dance. I blush again,
+for I danced, but was kept in countenance by Nivernois, who has one
+wrinkle more than I have. A quarter after twelve they sat down to
+supper, and I came home by a charming moonlight. I am going to dine in
+town, and to a great ball with fireworks at Miss Chudleigh's, but I
+return hither on Sunday, to bid adieu to this abominable Arcadian life;
+for really when one is not young, one ought to do nothing but
+_s'ennuyer_; I will try, but I always go about it awkwardly. Adieu!
+
+[Footnote 1: "_Esher._" Claremont, at Esher, now the property of the
+Queen, and residence of the Duchess of Albany, at this time belonged to
+the Duke of Newcastle, Miss Pelham's uncle.]
+
+[Footnote 2: Kent was the great landscape gardener of the last
+generation.]
+
+P.S.--I enclose a copy of both the English and French verses.
+
+    A MADAME DE BOUFFLERS.
+
+    Boufflers, qu'embellissent les graces,
+    Et qui plairoit sans le vouloir,
+    Elle a qui l'amour du scavoir
+    Fit braver le Nord et les glaces;
+    Boufflers se plait en nos vergers,
+    Et veut a nos sons etrangers
+    Plier sa voix enchanteresse.
+    Repetons son nom mille fois,
+    Sur tous les coeurs Boufflers aura des droits,
+    Par tout ou la rime et la Presse
+    A l'amour preteront leur voix.
+
+    A MADAME D'USSON.
+
+    Ne feignez point, Iris, de ne pas nous entendre;
+    Ce que vous inspirez, en Grec doit se comprendre.
+      On vous l'a dit d'abord en Hollandois,
+      Et dans un langage plus tendre
+      Paris vous l'a repete mille fois.
+      C'est de nos coeurs l'expression sincere;
+    En tout climat, Iris, a toute heure, en tous lieux,
+      Par tout ou brilleront vos yeux,
+    Vous apprendrez combien ils scavent plaire.
+
+
+_GENERAL CHARACTER OF THE FRENCH--FESTIVITIES ON THE QUEEN'S BIRTHDAY._
+
+TO THE HON. H.S. CONWAY.
+
+ARLINGTON STREET, _May_ 21, 1763.
+
+You have now seen the celebrated Madame de Boufflers. I dare say you
+could in that short time perceive that she is agreeable, but I dare say
+too that you will agree with me that vivacity[1] is by no means the
+_partage_ of the French--bating the _etourderie_ of the _mousquetaires_
+and of a high-dried _petit-maitre_ or two, they appear to me more
+lifeless than Germans. I cannot comprehend how they came by the
+character of a lively people. Charles Townshend has more _sal volatile_
+in him than the whole nation. Their King is taciturnity itself, Mirepoix
+was a walking mummy, Nivernois has about as much life as a sick
+favourite child, and M. Dusson is a good-humoured country gentleman, who
+has been drunk the day before, and is upon his good behaviour. If I have
+the gout next year, and am thoroughly humbled by it again, I will go to
+Paris, that I may be upon a level with them: at present, I am _trop fou_
+to keep them company. Mind, I do not insist that, to have spirits, a
+nation should be as frantic as poor Fanny Pelham, as absurd as the
+Duchess of Queensberry, or as dashing as the Virgin Chudleigh.[2] Oh,
+that you had been at her ball t'other night! History could never
+describe it and keep its countenance. The Queen's real birthday, you
+know, is not kept: this Maid of Honour kept it--nay, while the Court is
+in mourning, expected people to be out of mourning; the Queen's family
+really was so, Lady Northumberland having desired leave for them. A
+scaffold was erected in Hyde-park for fireworks. To show the
+illuminations without to more advantage, the company were received in an
+apartment totally dark, where they remained for two hours.--If they gave
+rise to any more birthdays, who could help it? The fireworks were fine,
+and succeeded well. On each side of the court were two large scaffolds
+for the Virgin's tradespeople. When the fireworks ceased, a large scene
+was lighted in the court, representing their Majesties; on each side of
+which were six obelisks, painted with emblems, and illuminated; mottoes
+beneath in Latin and English: 1. For the Prince of Wales, a ship,
+_Multorum spes_. 2. For the Princess Dowager, a bird of paradise, and
+_two_ little ones, _Meos ad sidera tollo_. People smiled. 3. Duke of
+York, a temple, _Virtuti et honori_. 4. Princess Augusta, a bird of
+paradise, _Non habet parem_--unluckily this was translated, _I have no
+peer_. People laughed out, considering where this was exhibited. 5. The
+three younger princes, an orange tree, _Promittit et dat_. 6. The two
+younger princesses, the flower crown-imperial. I forget the Latin: the
+translation was silly enough, _Bashful in youth, graceful in age_. The
+lady of the house made many apologies for the poorness of the
+performance, which she said was only oil-paper, painted by one of her
+servants; but it really was fine and pretty. The Duke of Kingston was in
+a frock, _comme chez lui_. Behind the house was a cenotaph for the
+Princess Elizabeth, a kind of illuminated cradle; the motto, _All the
+honours the dead can receive_. This burying-ground was a strange codicil
+to a festival; and, what was more strange, about one in the morning,
+this sarcophagus burst out into crackers and guns. The Margrave of
+Anspach began the ball with the Virgin. The supper was most sumptuous.
+
+[Footnote 1: In a subsequent letter he represents Mme. de Boufflers as
+giving them the same character, saying, "Dans ce pays-ci c'est un effort
+perpetuel pour sedivertir."]
+
+[Footnote 2: Miss Chudleigh, who had been one of the Princess Dowager's
+maids of honour, married Mr. Hervey, afterwards Earl of Bristol, but,
+having taken a dislike to him, she procured a divorce, and afterwards
+married the Duke of Kingston; but, after his death, his heirs, on the
+ground of some informality in the divorce, prosecuted her for bigamy,
+and she was convicted.]
+
+You ask, when do I propose to be at Park-place. I ask, shall not you
+come to the Duke of Richmond's masquerade, which is the 6th of June? I
+cannot well be with you till towards the end of that month.
+
+The enclosed is a letter which I wish you to read attentively, to give
+me your opinion upon it, and return it. It is from a sensible friend of
+mine in Scotland [Sir David Dalrymple], who has lately corresponded with
+me on the enclosed subjects, which I little understand; but I promised
+to communicate his ideas to George Grenville, if he would state
+them--are they practicable? I wish much that something could be done for
+those brave soldiers and sailors, who will all come to the gallows,
+unless some timely provision can be made for them.--The former part of
+his letter relates to a grievance he complains of, that men who have
+_not_ served are admitted into garrisons, and then into our hospitals,
+which were designed for meritorious sufferers. Adieu!
+
+
+_THE ORDINARY WAY OF LIFE IN ENGLAND--WILKES--C. TOWNSHEND--COUNT
+LALLY--LORD CLIVE--LORD NORTHINGTON--LOUIS LE BIEN AIME--THE DRAMA IN
+FRANCE._
+
+TO THE EARL OF HERTFORD.
+
+ARLINGTON STREET, _Dec._ 29, 1763
+
+You are sensible, my dear lord, that any amusement from my letters must
+depend upon times and seasons. We are a very absurd nation (though the
+French are so good at present as to think us a very wise one, only
+because they, themselves, are now a very weak one); but then that
+absurdity depends upon the almanac. Posterity, who will know nothing of
+our intervals, will conclude that this age was a succession of events. I
+could tell them that we know as well when an event, as when Easter, will
+happen. Do but recollect these last ten years. The beginning of October,
+one is certain that everybody will be at Newmarket, and the Duke of
+Cumberland will lose, and Shafto win, two or three thousand pounds.
+After that, while people are preparing to come to town for the winter,
+the Ministry is suddenly changed, and all the world comes to learn how
+it happened, a fortnight sooner than they intended; and fully persuaded
+that the new arrangement cannot last a month. The Parliament opens;
+everybody is bribed; and the new establishment is perceived to be
+composed of adamant. November passes, with two or three self-murders,
+and a new play. Christmas arrives; everybody goes out of town; and a
+riot happens in one of the theatres. The Parliament meets again; taxes
+are warmly opposed; and some citizen makes his fortune by a
+subscription. The opposition languishes; balls and assemblies begin;
+some master and miss begin to get together, are talked of, and give
+occasion to forty more matches being invented; an unexpected debate
+starts up at the end of the session, that makes more noise than anything
+that was designed to make a noise, and subsides again in a new peerage
+or two. Ranelagh opens and Vauxhall; one produces scandal, and t'other a
+drunken quarrel. People separate, some to Tunbridge, and some to all the
+horse-races in England; and so the year comes again to October. I dare
+to prophesy, that if you keep this letter, you will find that my future
+correspondence will be but an illustration of this text; at least, it is
+an excuse for my having very little to tell you at present, and was the
+reason of my not writing to you last week.
+
+[Illustration: HORACE WALPOLE.
+
+_From a picture in the National Portrait Gallery, by Nathaniel Hone,
+R.A._]
+
+Before the Parliament adjourned, there was nothing but a trifling debate
+in an empty House, occasioned by a motion from the Ministry, to order
+another physician and surgeon to attend Wilkes:[1] it was carried by
+about seventy to thirty, and was only memorable by producing Mr. Charles
+Townshend, who, having sat silent through the question of privilege,
+found himself interested in the defence of Dr. Brocklesby![2] Charles
+ridiculed Lord North extremely, and had warm words with George
+Grenville. I do not look upon this as productive of consequential
+speaking for the opposition; on the contrary, I should expect him sooner
+in place, if the Ministry could be fools enough to restore weight to
+him, and could be ignorant that he can never hurt them so much as by
+being with them. Wilkes refused to see Heberden and Hawkins, whom the
+House commissioned to visit him; and to laugh at us more, sent for two
+Scotchmen, Duncan and Middleton. Well! but since that, he is gone off
+himself: however, as I did in D'Eon's case, I can now only ask news of
+him from you, not tell you any; for you have got him. I do not believe
+you will invite him, and make so much of him, as the Duke of Bedford
+did. Both sides pretend joy at his being gone; and for once I can
+believe both. You will be diverted, as I was, at the cordial esteem the
+ministers have for one another; Lord Waldegrave told my niece [Lady
+Waldegrave], this morning, that he had offered a shilling, to receive a
+hundred pounds when Sandwich shall lose his head! what a good opinion
+they have of one another! _apropos_ to losing heads, is Lally[3]
+beheaded?
+
+[Footnote 1: Wilkes had been wounded in a duel, and alleged his wound as
+a sufficient reason for not attending in his place in the House of
+Commons when summoned. Dr. Brocklesby, a physician of considerable
+eminence, reported that he was unable to attend; but the House of
+Commons, as if they distrusted his report, appointed two other
+physicians to examine the patient, Drs. Heberden and Hawkins.]
+
+[Footnote 2: Dr. Brocklesby is mentioned by Boswell as an especial
+friend of Johnson; having even offered him an annuity of L100 to relieve
+him from the necessity of writing to increase his income.]
+
+[Footnote 3: Count Lally, of an Irish family, his father or grandfather
+having been among those who, after the capitulation of Limerick,
+accompanied the gallant Sarsfield to France, had been the French
+governor in India; but, having failed in an attempt on Madras, and
+having been afterwards defeated at Wandewash by Colonel Coote, was
+recalled in disgrace, and brought to trial on a number of ridiculously
+false charges, convicted, and executed; his real offence being that by a
+somewhat intemperate zeal for the reformation of abuses, and the
+punishment of corruption which he detested, he had made a great number
+of personal enemies. He was the father of Count Lally Tollendal, who was
+a prominent character in the French Revolution.]
+
+The East India Company have come to an unanimous resolution of not
+paying Lord Clive the three hundred thousand pounds, which the Ministry
+had promised him in lieu of his Nabobical annuity. Just after the
+bargain was made, his old rustic of a father was at the King's levee;
+the King asked where his son was; he replied, "Sire, he is coming to
+town, and then your Majesty will have another vote." If you like these
+franknesses, I can tell you another. The Chancellor [Northington] is a
+chosen governor of St. Bartholomew's Hospital: a smart gentleman, who
+was sent with the staff, carried it in the evening, when the Chancellor
+happened to be drunk. "Well, Mr. Bartlemy," said his lordship, snuffing,
+"what have you to say?" The man, who had prepared a formal harangue, was
+transported to have so fair opportunity given him of uttering it, and
+with much dapper gesticulation congratulated his lordship on his health,
+and the nation on enjoying such great abilities. The Chancellor stopped
+him short, crying, "By God, it is a lie! I have neither health nor
+abilities; my bad health has destroyed my abilities."[1] The late
+Chancellor [Hardwicke] is much better.
+
+[Footnote 1: Lord Northington had been a very hard liver. He was a
+martyr to the gout; and one afternoon, as he was going downstairs out of
+his Court, he was heard to say to himself, "D--- these legs! If I had
+known they were to carry a Lord Chancellor, I would have taken better
+care of them;" and it was to relieve himself of the labours of the Court
+of Chancery that he co-operated with Mr. Pitt in the discreditable
+intrigue which in the summer of 1766 compelled the resignation of Lord
+Rockingham, Mr. Pitt having promised him the office of President of the
+Council in the new Ministry which he intended to form.]
+
+The last time the King was at Drury-lane, the play given out for the
+next night was "All in the Wrong:" the galleries clapped, and then cried
+out, "Let _us_ be all in the right! Wilkes and Liberty!" When the King
+comes to a theatre, or goes out, or goes to the House, there is not a
+single applause; to the Queen there is a little: in short, _Louis le
+bien aime_[1] is not French at present for King George.
+
+[Footnote 1: "Le Bien aime" was a designation conferred on Louis XV. by
+the people in their joy at his recovery from an illness which had
+threatened his life at Metz in 1744. Louis himself was surprised, and
+asked what he had done to deserve such a title; and, in truth, it was a
+question hard to answer; but it was an expression of praise for his
+leaving the capital to accompany his army in the campaign.]
+
+I read, last night, your new French play, "Le Comte de Warwic,"[1] which
+we hear has succeeded much. I must say, it does but confirm the cheap
+idea I have of you French: not to mention the preposterous perversion
+of history in so known a story, the Queen's ridiculous preference of old
+Warwick to a young King; the omission of the only thing she ever said or
+did in her whole life worth recording, which was thinking herself too
+low for his wife, and too high for his mistress; the romantic honour
+bestowed on two such savages as Edward and Warwick: besides these, and
+forty such glaring absurdities, there is but one scene that has any
+merit, that between Edward and Warwick in the third act. Indeed, indeed,
+I don't honour the modern French: it is making your son but a slender
+compliment, with his knowledge, for them to say it is extraordinary. The
+best proof I think they give of their taste, is liking you all three. I
+rejoice that your little boy is recovered. Your brother has been at
+Park-place this week, and stays a week longer: his hill is too high to
+be drowned.
+
+[Footnote 1: "Le Comte de Warwic" was by La Harpe, who was only
+twenty-three years of age. The answer here attributed to Elizabeth
+Woodville has been attributed to others also; and especially to Mdlle.
+de Montmorency, afterwards Princesse de Conde, when pursued by the
+solicitations of Henry IV.]
+
+Thank you for your kindness to Mr. Selwyn: if he had too much
+impatience, I am sure it proceeded only from his great esteem for you.
+
+I will endeavour to learn what you desire; and will answer, in another
+letter, that and some other passages in your last. Dr. Hunter is very
+good, and calls on me sometimes. You may guess whether we talk you over
+or not. Adieu!
+
+
+_A NEW YEAR'S PARTY AT LADY SUFFOLK'S--LADY TEMPLE POETESS LAUREATE TO
+THE MUSES_
+
+TO GEORGE MONTAGU, ESQ.
+
+ARLINGTON STREET, _Jan._ 11, 1764.
+
+It is an age, I own, since I wrote to you: but except politics, what was
+there to send you? and for politics, the present are too contemptible to
+be recorded by anybody but journalists, gazetteers, and such historians!
+The ordinary of Newgate, or Mr. ----, who write for their monthly
+half-crown, and who are indifferent whether Lord Bute, Lord Melcombe, or
+Maclean [the highwayman], is their hero, may swear they find diamonds on
+dunghills; but you will excuse _me_, if I let our correspondence lie
+dormant rather than deal in such trash. I am forced to send Lord
+Hertford and Sir Horace Mann such garbage, because they are out of
+England, and the sea softens and makes palatable any potion, as it does
+claret; but unless I can divert _you_, I had rather wait till we can
+laugh together; the best employment for friends, who do not mean to pick
+one another's pocket, nor make a property of either's frankness. Instead
+of politics, therefore, I shall amuse you to-day with a fairy tale.
+
+I was desired to be at my Lady Suffolk's on New-year's morn, where I
+found Lady Temple and others. On the toilet Miss Hotham spied a small
+round box. She seized it with all the eagerness and curiosity of eleven
+years. In it was wrapped up a heart-diamond ring, and a paper in which,
+in a hand as small as Buckinger's[1] who used to write the Lord's
+Prayer in the compass of a silver penny, were the following lines:--
+
+    Sent by a sylph, unheard, unseen,
+    A new-year's gift from Mab our queen:
+    But tell it not, for if you do,
+    You will be pinch'd all black and blue.
+    Consider well, what a disgrace,
+    To show abroad your mottled face:
+    Then seal your lips, put on the ring,
+    And sometimes think of Ob. the king.
+
+[Footnote 1: Buckinger was a dwarf born without hands or feet.]
+
+You will eagerly guess that Lady Temple was the poetess, and that we
+were delighted with the gentleness of the thought and execution. The
+child, you may imagine, was less transported with the poetry than the
+present. Her attention, however, was hurried backwards and forwards from
+the ring to a new coat, that she had been trying on when sent for down;
+impatient to revisit her coat, and to show the ring to her maid, she
+whisked upstairs; when she came down again, she found a letter sealed,
+and lying on the floor--new exclamations! Lady Suffolk bade her open it:
+here it is:--
+
+    Your tongue, too nimble for your sense,
+    Is guilty of a high offence;
+    Hath introduced unkind debate,
+    And topsy-turvy turn'd our state.
+    In gallantry I sent the ring,
+    The token of a love-sick king:
+    Under fair Mab's auspicious name
+    From me the trifling present came.
+    You blabb'd the news in Suffolk's ear;
+    The tattling zephyrs brought it here;
+    As Mab was indolently laid
+    Under a poppy's spreading shade.
+    The jealous queen started in rage;
+    She kick'd her crown, and beat her page:
+    "Bring me my magic wand," she cries;
+    "Under that primrose, there it lies;
+    I'll change the silly, saucy chit,
+    Into a flea, a louse, a nit,
+    A worm, a grasshopper, a rat,
+    An owl, a monkey, hedgehog, bat.
+    But hold, why not by fairy art
+    Transform the wretch into--
+    Ixion once a cloud embraced,
+    By Jove and jealousy well placed;
+    What sport to see proud Oberon stare,
+    And flirt it with a _pet en l'air_!"
+    Then thrice she stamp'd the trembling ground,
+    And thrice she waved her wand around;
+    When I, endow'd with greater skill,
+    And less inclined to do you ill,
+    Mutter'd some words, withheld her arm,
+    And kindly stopp'd the unfinish'd charm.
+    But though not changed to owl or bat,
+    Or something more indelicate;
+    Yet, as your tongue has run too fast,
+    Your boasted beauty must not last.
+    No more shall frolic Cupid lie
+    In ambuscade in either eye,
+    From thence to aim his keenest dart
+    To captivate each youthful heart:
+    No more shall envious misses pine
+    At charms now flown, that once were thine
+    No more, since you so ill behave,
+    Shall injured Oberon be your slave.
+
+There is one word which I could wish had not been there though it is
+prettily excused afterwards. The next day my Lady Suffolk desired I
+would write her a patent for appointing Lady Temple poet laureate to the
+fairies. I was excessively out of order with a pain in my stomach, which
+I had had for ten days, and was fitter to write verses like a Poet
+Laureate, than for making one; however, I was going home to dinner
+alone, and at six I sent her some lines, which you ought to have seen
+how sick I was, to excuse; but first I must tell you my tale
+methodically. The next morning by nine o'clock Miss Hotham (she must
+forgive me twenty years hence for saying she was eleven, for I recollect
+she is but ten), arrived at Lady Temple's, her face and neck all spotted
+with saffron, and limping. "Oh, Madam!" said she, "I am undone for ever
+if you do not assist me!" "Lord, child," cried my Lady Temple, "what is
+the matter?" thinking she had hurt herself, or lost the ring, and that
+she was stolen out before her aunt was up. "Oh, Madam," said the girl,
+"nobody but you can assist me!" My Lady Temple protests the child acted
+her part so well as to deceive her. "What can I do for you?" "Dear
+Madam, take this load from my back; nobody but you can." Lady Temple
+turned her round, and upon her back was tied a child's waggon. In it
+were three tiny purses of blue velvet; in one of them a silver cup, in
+another a crown of laurel, and in the third four new silver pennies,
+with the patent, signed at top, "Oberon Imperator;" and two sheets of
+warrants strung together with blue silk according to form; and at top an
+office seal of wax and a chaplet of cut paper on it. The Warrants were
+these:--
+
+     From the Royal Mews:
+
+     A waggon with the draught horses, delivered by command without fee.
+
+
+     From the Lord Chamberlain's Office:
+
+     A warrant with the royal sign manual, delivered by command without
+     fee, being first entered in the office books.
+
+     From the Lord Steward's Office:
+
+     A butt of sack, delivered without fee or gratuity, with an order
+     for returning the cask for the use of the office, by command.
+
+     From the Great Wardrobe:
+
+     Three velvet bags, delivered without fee, by command.
+
+     From the Treasurer of the Household's Office:
+
+     A year's salary paid free from land-tax, poundage, or any other
+     deduction whatever by command.
+
+     From the Jewel Office:
+
+     A silver butt, a silver cup, a wreath of bays, by command without
+     fee.
+
+Then came the Patent:
+
+    By these presents be it known,
+    To all who bend before our throne,
+    Fays and fairies, elves and sprites,
+    Beauteous dames and gallant knights,
+    That we, Oberon the grand,
+    Emperor of fairy land,
+    King of moonshine, prince of dreams,
+    Lord of Aganippe's streams,
+    Baron of the dimpled isles
+    That lie in pretty maiden's smiles,
+    Arch-treasurer of all the graces
+    Dispersed through fifty lovely faces,
+    Sovereign of the slipper's order,
+    With all the rites thereon that border,
+    Defender of the sylphic faith,
+    Declare--and thus your monarch saith:
+    Whereas there is a noble dame,
+    Whom mortals Countess Temple name,
+    To whom ourself did erst impart
+    The choicest secrets of our art,
+    Taught her to tune the harmonious line
+    To our own melody divine,
+    Taught her the graceful negligence,
+    Which, scorning art and veiling sense,
+    Achieves that conquest o'er the heart
+    Sense seldom gains, and never art:
+    This lady, 'tis our royal will
+    Our laureate's vacant seat should fill;
+    A chaplet of immortal bays
+    Shall crown her brow and guard her lays,
+    Of nectar sack an acorn cup
+    Be at her board each year filled up;
+    And as each quarter feast comes round
+    A silver penny shall be found
+    Within the compass of her shoe--
+    And so we bid you all adieu!
+
+     Given at our palace of Cowslip Castle, the shortest night of the
+     year.
+
+     OBERON.
+
+And underneath,
+
+     HOTHAMINA.
+
+How shall I tell you the greatest curiosity of the story? The whole plan
+and execution of the second act was laid and adjusted by my Lady Suffolk
+herself and Will. Chetwynd, Master of the Mint, Lord Bolingbroke's
+Oroonoko-Chetwynd;[1] he fourscore, she past seventy-six; and, what is
+more, much worse than I was, for added to her deafness, she has been
+confined these three weeks with the gout in her eyes, and was actually
+then in misery, and had been without sleep. What spirits, and
+cleverness, and imagination, at that age, and under those afflicting
+circumstances! You reconnoitre her old court knowledge, how charmingly
+she has applied it! Do you wonder I pass so many hours and evenings with
+her? Alas! I had like to have lost her this morning! They had poulticed
+her feet to draw the gout downwards, and began to succeed yesterday, but
+to-day it flew up into her head, and she was almost in convulsions with
+the agony, and screamed dreadfully; proof enough how ill she was, for
+her patience and good breeding makes her for ever sink and conceal what
+she feels. This evening the gout has been driven back to her foot, and I
+trust she is out of danger. Her loss will be irreparable to me at
+Twickenham, where she is by far the most rational and agreeable company
+I have.
+
+[Footnote 1: Oroonoko-Chetwynd, M.P. for Plymouth. He was called
+Oroonoko and sometimes "Black Will," from his dark complexion.]
+
+I don't tell you that the Hereditary Prince [of Brunswick][1] is still
+expected and not arrived. A royal wedding would be a flat episode after
+a _real_ fairy tale, though the bridegroom is a hero. I have not seen
+your brother General yet, but have called on him, When come you
+yourself? Never mind the town and its filthy politics; we can go to the
+Gallery at Strawberry--stay, I don't know whether we can or not, my hill
+is almost drowned, I don't know how your mountain is--well, we can take
+a boat, and always be gay there; I wish we may be so at seventy-six and
+eighty! I abominate politics more and more; we had glories, and would
+not keep them: well! content, that there was an end of blood; then perks
+prerogative its ass's ears up; we are always to be saving our liberties,
+and then staking them again! 'Tis wearisome! I hate the discussion, and
+yet one cannot always sit at a gaming-table and never make a bet. I wish
+for nothing, I care not a straw for the inns or the outs; I determine
+never to think of them, yet the contagion catches one; can you tell
+anything that will prevent infection? Well then, here I swear,--no, I
+won't swear, one always breaks one's oath. Oh, that I had been born to
+love a court like Sir William Breton! I should have lived and died with
+the comfort of thinking that courts there will be to all eternity, and
+the liberty of my country would never once have ruffled my smile, or
+spoiled my bow. I envy Sir William. Good night!
+
+[Footnote 1: The Duke of Brunswick, who was mortally wounded in 1806 at
+the battle of Jena. He had come, as is mentioned in the next letter, to
+marry the King's sister.]
+
+
+_MARRIAGE OF THE PRINCE OF BRUNSWICK: HIS POPULARITY._
+
+TO SIR HORACE MANN.
+
+ARLINGTON STREET, _Jan._ 18, 1764.
+
+Shall I tell you of all our crowds, and balls, and embroideries? Don't I
+grow too old to describe drawing-rooms? Surely I do, when I find myself
+too old to go into them. I forswore puppet-shows at the last
+coronation, and have kept my word to myself. However, being bound by a
+prior vow, to keep up the acquaintance between you and your own country,
+I will show you, what by the way I have not seen myself, the Prince of
+Brunswick. He arrived at Somerset House last Friday evening; at
+Chelmsford a quaker walked into the room, _did_ pull off his hat, and
+said, "Friend, my religion forbids me to fight, but I honour those that
+fight well." The Prince, though he does not speak English, understands
+it enough to be pleased with the compliment. He received another, very
+flattering. As he went next morning to St. James's, he spied in the
+crowd one of Elliot's light-horse and kissed his hand to the man.
+"What!" said the populace, "does he know you?" "Yes," replied the man;
+"he once led me into a scrape, which nothing but himself could have
+brought me out of again." You may guess how much this added to the
+Prince's popularity, which was at high-water mark before.
+
+When he had visited the King and Queen, he went to the Princess Dowager
+at Leicester House, and saw his mistress. He is very _galant_, and
+professes great satisfaction in his fortune, for he had not even seen
+her picture. He carries his good-breeding so far as to declare he would
+have returned unmarried, if she had not pleased him. He has had levees
+and dinners at Somerset House; to the latter, company was named for him.
+On Monday evening they were married by the Archbishop in the great
+drawing-room, with little ceremony; supped, and lay at Leicester House.
+Yesterday morning was a drawing-room at St. James's, and a ball at
+night; both repeated to-day, for the Queen's birthday. On Thursday they
+go to the play; on Friday the Queen gives them a ball and dinner at her
+house; on Saturday they dine with the Princess at Kew, and return for
+the Opera; and on Wednesday--why, they make their bow and curtsy, and
+sail.
+
+The Prince has pleased everybody; his manner is thought sensible and
+engaging; his person slim, genteel, and handsome enough; that is, not at
+all handsome, but martial, agreeably weather-worn. I should be able to
+swear to all this on Saturday, when I intend to see him; but, alas! the
+post departs on Friday, and, however material my testimony may be, he
+must want it.
+
+
+_GAMBLING QUARRELS--MR. CONWAY'S SPEECH._
+
+TO THE EARL OF HERTFORD.
+
+ARLINGTON STREET, _Feb._ 6, 1764.
+
+You have, I hope, long before this, my dear lord, received the immense
+letter that I sent you by old Monin. It explained much, and announced
+most part of which has already happened; for you will observe that when
+I tell you anything very positively, it is on good intelligence. I have
+another much bigger secret for you, but that will be delivered to you by
+word of mouth. I am not a little impatient for the long letter you
+promised me. In the mean time thank you for the account you give me of
+the King's extreme civility to you. It is like yourself to dwell on
+that, and to say little of M. de Chaulnes's dirtv behaviour; but
+Monsieur and Madame de Guerchy have told your brother and me all the
+particulars.
+
+I was but too good a prophet when I warned you to expect new
+extravagances from the Duc de Chaulnes's son. Some weeks ago he lost
+five hundred pounds to one Virette, an equivocal being, that you
+remember here. Paolucci, the Modenese minister, who is not in the odour
+of honesty, was of the party. The Duc de Pecquigny said to the latter,
+"Monsieur, ne jouez plus avec lui, si vous n'etes pas de moitie." So far
+was very well. On Saturday, at the Maccaroni Club (which is composed of
+all the travelled young men who wear long curls and spying glasses),
+they played again: the Duc lost, but not much. In the passage at the
+Opera, the Duc saw Mr. Stuart talking to Virette, and told the former
+that Virette was a coquin, a fripon, &c., &c. Virette retired, saying
+only, "Voila un fou." The Duc then desired Lord Tavistock to come and
+see him fight Virette, but the Marquis desired to be excused. After the
+Opera, Virette went to the Duc's lodgings, but found him gone to make
+his complaint to Monsieur de Guerchy, whither he followed him; and
+farther this deponent knoweth not. I pity the Count [de Guerchy], who is
+one of the best-natured amiable men in the world, for having this absurd
+boy upon his hands!
+
+Well! now for a little politics. The Cider Bill has not answered to the
+minority, though they ran the ministry hard; but last Friday was
+extraordinary. George Grenville was pushed upon some Navy Bills. I don't
+understand a syllable, you know, of money and accounts; but whatever
+was the matter, he was driven from entrenchment to entrenchment by Baker
+and Charles Townshend. After that affair was over, and many gone away,
+Sir W. Meredith moved for the depositions on which the warrant against
+Wilkes had been granted. The Ministers complained of the motion being
+made so late in the day; called it a surprise; and Rigby moved to
+adjourn, which was carried but by 73 to 60. Had a surprise been
+intended, you may imagine the minority would have been better provided
+with numbers; but it certainly had not been concerted: however, a
+majority, shrunk to thirteen, frightened them out of the small senses
+they possess. Heaven, Earth, and the Treasury, were moved to recover
+their ground to-day, when the question was renewed. For about two hours
+the debate hobbled on very lamely, when on a sudden your brother rose,
+and made such a speech[1]--but I wish anybody was to give you the
+account except me, whom you will think partial: but you will hear enough
+of it, to confirm anything I can say. Imagine fire, rapidity, argument,
+knowledge, wit, ridicule, grace, spirit; all pouring like a torrent, but
+without clashing. Imagine the House in a tumult of continued applause,
+imagine the Ministers thunderstruck; lawyers abashed and almost
+blushing, for it was on their quibbles and evasions he fell most
+heavily, at the same time answering a whole session of arguments on the
+side of the court. No, it was _unique_; you can neither conceive it, nor
+the exclamations it occasioned. Ellis, the Forlorn Hope, Ellis presented
+himself in the gap, till the ministers could recover themselves, when on
+a sudden Lord George Sackville _led up the Blues_; spoke with as much
+warmth as your brother had, and with great force continued the attack
+which he had begun. Did not I tell you he would take this part? I was
+made privy to it; but this is far from all you are to expect. Lord North
+in vain rumbled about his mustard-bowl, and endeavoured alone to outroar
+a whole party: him and Forrester, Charles Townshend took up, but less
+well than usual. His jealousy of your brother's success, which was very
+evident, did not help him to shine. There were several other speeches,
+and, upon the whole, it was a capital debate; but Plutus is so much more
+persuasive an orator than your brother or Lord George, that we divided
+but 122 against 217. Lord Strange, who had agreed to the question, did
+not dare to vote for it, and declared off; and George Townshend, who had
+actually voted for it on Friday, now voted against us. Well! upon the
+whole, I heartily wish this administration may last: both their
+characters and abilities are so contemptible, that I am sure we can be
+in no danger from prerogative when trusted to such hands!
+
+[Footnote 1: Walpole must have exaggerated the merits of this speech;
+for Conway was never remarkable for eloquence. Indeed, Walpole himself,
+in his "Memoirs of George II.," quotes Mr. Hutchinson, the Prime
+Serjeant in Ireland, contrasting him with Lord G. Sackville, "Lord
+George having parts, but no integrity; Conway integrity, but no parts:
+and now they were governed by one who had neither." And Walpole's
+comment on this comparison is: "There was more wit than truth in this
+description. Conway's parts, though not brilliant, were solid" (vol. ii.
+p. 246). In his "Life of Pitt" Lord Stanhope describes him as "a man
+who, in the course of a long public life, had shown little vigour or
+decision, but who was much respected for his honourable character and
+moderate counsels" (c. 5).]
+
+Before I have done with Charles Townshend, I must tell you one of his
+admirable _bon mots_. Miss Draycote, the great fortune, is grown very
+fat; he says her _tonnage_ is become equal to her _poundage_.
+
+
+_ACCOUNT OF THE DEBATE ON THE GENERAL WARRANT._
+
+TO THE EARL OF HERTFORD.
+
+ARLINGTON STREET, _Wednesday, Feb._ 15, 1764.
+
+My dear Lord,--You ought to be witness to the fatigue I am suffering,
+before you can estimate the merit I have in being writing to you at this
+moment. Cast up eleven hours in the House of Commons on Monday, and
+above seventeen hours yesterday,--ay, seventeen at length,--and then you
+may guess if I am tired! nay, you must add seventeen hours that I may
+possibly be there on Friday, and then calculate if I am weary. In short,
+yesterday was the longest day ever known in the House of Commons--why,
+on the Westminster election at the end of my father's reign, I was at
+home by six. On Alexander Murray's affair, I believe, by five--on the
+militia, twenty people, I think, sat till six, but then they were only
+among themselves, no heat, no noise, no roaring. It was half an hour
+after seven this morning before I was at home. Think of that, and then
+brag of your French parliaments!
+
+What is ten times greater, Leonidas and the Spartan _minority_ did not
+make such a stand at Thermopylae, as we did. Do you know, we had like to
+have been the _majority_? Xerxes[1] is frightened out of his senses;
+Sysigambis[1] has sent an express to Luton to forbid Phraates[1] coming
+to town to-morrow; Norton's[2] impudence has forsaken him; Bishop
+Warburton is at this moment reinstating Mr. Pitt's name in the
+dedication to his Sermons, which he had expunged for Sandwich's; and
+Sandwich himself is--at Paris, perhaps, by this time, for the first
+thing that I expect to hear to-morrow is, that he is gone off.
+
+[Footnote 1: "_Xerxes, Sysigambis, Phraates._" These names contain
+allusions to one of Mdlle. Scuderi's novels, which, as D'Israeli
+remarks, are "representations of what passed at the Court of France";
+but in this letter the scene of action is transferred to England. Xerxes
+is George III.; Sysigambis, the Princess Dowager; and Phraates is Lord
+Bute.]
+
+[Footnote 2: Sir Fletcher Norton, the Speaker.]
+
+Now are you mortally angry with me for trifling with you, and not
+telling you at once the particulars of this _almost-revolution_? You may
+be angry, but I shall take my own time, and shall give myself what airs
+I please both to you, my Lord Ambassador, and to you, my Lord Secretary
+of State, who will, I suppose, open this letter--if you have courage
+enough left. In the first place, I assume all the impertinence of a
+prophet,--aye, of that great curiosity, a prophet, who really prophesied
+before the event, and whose predictions have been accomplished. Have I,
+or have I not, announced to you the unexpected blows that would be given
+to the administration?--come, I will lay aside my dignity, and satisfy
+your impatience. There's moderation.
+
+We sat all Monday hearing evidence against Mr. Wood,[1] that dirty
+wretch Webb, and the messengers, for their illegal proceedings against
+Mr. Wilkes. At midnight, Mr. Grenville offered us to adjourn or proceed.
+Mr. Pitt humbly begged not to eat or sleep till so great a point should
+be decided. On a division, in which though many said _aye_ to
+adjourning, nobody would go out for fear of losing their seats, it was
+carried by 379 to 31, for proceeding--and then--half the House went
+away. The ministers representing the indecency of this, and Fitzherbert
+saying that many were within call, Stanley observed, that after voting
+against adjournment, a third part had adjourned themselves, when,
+instead of being within _call_, they ought to have been within
+_hearing_; this was unanswerable, and we adjourned.
+
+[Footnote 1: Mr. Wood and Mr. Webb were the Under-Secretary of State and
+the Solicitor of the Treasury; and, as such, the officers chiefly
+responsible for the _form_ of the warrant complained of.]
+
+Yesterday we fell to again. It was one in the morning before the
+evidence was closed. Carrington, the messenger, was alone examined for
+seven hours. This old man, the cleverest of all ministerial terriers,
+was pleased with recounting his achievements, yet perfectly guarded and
+betraying nothing. However, the _arcana imperii_ have been wofully laid
+open.
+
+I have heard Garrick, and other players, give themselves airs of fatigue
+after a long part--think of the Speaker, nay, think of the clerks
+taking most correct minutes for sixteen hours, and reading them over to
+every witness; and then let me hear of fatigue! Do you know, not only my
+Lord Temple,[1]--who you may swear never budged as spectator,--but old
+Will Chetwynd, now past eighty, and who had walked to the House, did not
+stir a single moment out of his place, from three in the afternoon till
+the division at seven in the morning. Nay, we had _patriotesses_, too,
+who stayed out the whole: Lady Rockingham and Lady Sondes the first day;
+both again the second day, with Miss Mary Pelham, Mrs. Fitzroy, and the
+Duchess of Richmond, as patriot as any of us. Lady Mary Coke, Mrs.
+George Pitt, and Lady Pembroke, came after the Opera, but I think did
+not stay above seven or eight hours at most.
+
+[Footnote 1: Lord Temple was Mr. Pitt's brother-in-law, a restless and
+impracticable intriguer. He had some such especial power of influencing
+Mr. Pitt--who, it is supposed, must have been under some pecuniary
+obligation to him--that he was able the next year to prevent his
+accepting the office of Prime Minister when the King pressed it on him.]
+
+At one, Sir W. Meredith moved a resolution of the illegality of the
+Warrant, and opened it well. He was seconded by old Darlington's
+brother, a convert to us. Mr. Wood, who had shone the preceding day by
+great modesty, decency, and ingenuity, forfeited these merits a good
+deal by starting up, (according to a Ministerial plan,) and very
+arrogantly, and repeatedly in the night, demanding justice and a
+previous acquittal, and telling the House he scorned to accept being
+merely _excused_; to which Mr. Pitt replied, that if he disdained to be
+_excused_, he would deserve to be _censured_. Mr. Charles Yorke (who,
+with his family, have come roundly to us for support against the Duke of
+Bedford on the Marriage Bill) proposed to adjourn. Grenville and the
+ministry would have agreed to adjourn the debate on the great question
+itself, but declared they would push this acquittal. This they announced
+haughtily enough--for as yet, they did not doubt of their strength. Lord
+Frederick Campbell was the most impetuous of all, so little he foresaw
+how much _wiser_ it would be to follow your brother. Pitt made a short
+speech, excellently argumentative, and not bombast, nor tedious, nor
+deviating from the question. He was supported by your brother, and
+Charles Townshend, and Lord George; the two last of whom are strangely
+firm, now they are got under the cannon of your brother:--Charles, who,
+as he must be extraordinary, is now so in romantic nicety of honour. His
+father, who is dying, or dead, at Bath, and from whom he hopes two
+thousand a year, has sent for him. He has refused to go--lest his
+_steadiness_ should be questioned. At a quarter after four we divided.
+_Our_ cry was so loud, that both we and the ministers thought we had
+carried it. It is not to be painted, the dismay of the latter--in good
+truth not without reason, for _we_ were 197, they but 207. Your
+experience can tell you, that a majority of _but_ ten is a defeat.
+Amidst a great defection from them, was even a white staff, Lord Charles
+Spencer--now you know still more of what I told you was preparing for
+them!
+
+Crest-fallen, the ministers then proposed simply to discharge the
+complaint; but the plumes which they had dropped, Pitt soon placed in
+his own beaver. He broke out on liberty, and, indeed, on whatever he
+pleased, uninterrupted. Rigby sat feeling the vice-treasureship slipping
+from under him. Nugent was not less pensive--Lord Strange, though not
+interested, did not like it. Everybody was too much taken up with his
+own concerns, or too much daunted, to give the least disturbance to the
+Pindaric. Grenville, however, dropped a few words, which did but
+heighten the flame. Pitt, with less modesty than ever he showed,
+pronounced a panegyric on his own administration, and from thence broke
+out on the _dismission of officers_. This increased the roar from us.
+Grenville replied, and very finely, very pathetically, very animated. He
+painted Wilkes and faction, and, with very little truth, denied the
+charge of menaces to officers. At that moment, General A'Court walked up
+the House--think what an impression such an incident must make, when
+passions, hopes, and fears, were all afloat--think, too, how your
+brother and I, had we been ungenerous, could have added to these
+sensations! There was a man not so delicate. Colonel Barre rose--and
+this attended with a striking circumstance; Sir Edward Deering, one of
+_our_ noisy fools, called out, "_Mr._ Barre."[1] The latter seized the
+thought with admirable quickness, and said to the Speaker, who, in
+pointing to him, had called him _Colonel_, "I beg your pardon, Sir, you
+have pointed to me by a title I have no right to," and then made a very
+artful and pathetic speech on his own services and dismission; with
+nothing bad but an awkward attempt towards an excuse to Mr. Pitt for his
+former behaviour. Lord North, who will not lose his _bellow_, though he
+may lose his place, endeavoured to roar up the courage of his comrades,
+but it would not do--the House grew tired, and we again divided at seven
+for adjournment; some of our people were gone, and we remained but 184,
+they 208; however, you will allow our affairs are mended, when we say,
+_but_ 184. _We_ then came away, and left the ministers to satisfy Wood,
+Webb, and themselves, as well as they could. It was eight this morning
+before I was in bed; and considering that, this is no very short letter.
+Mr. Pitt bore the fatigue with his usual spirit--and even old Onslow,
+the late Speaker, was sitting up, anxious for the event.
+
+[Footnote 1: Mr. Barre had lately been dismissed from the office of
+Adjutant-General, on account of some of his votes in Parliament. In 1784
+he was appointed Clerk of the Rolls, a place worth above L3,000 a year,
+by Mr. Pitt, who, with extraordinary disinterestedness, forbore from
+taking it himself, that he might relieve the nation from a pension of
+similar amount which had been improperly conferred on the Colonel by
+Lord Rockingham.]
+
+On Friday we are to have the great question, which would prevent my
+writing; and to-morrow I dine with Guerchy, at the Duke of Grafton's,
+besides twenty other engagements. To-day I have shut myself up; for with
+writing this, and taking notes yesterday all day, and all night, I have
+not an eye left to see out of--nay, for once in my life, I shall go to
+bed at ten o'clock....
+
+Adieu! pray tell Mr. Hume that I am ashamed to be thus writing the
+history of England, when he is with you!
+
+
+_LORD CLIVE--MR. HAMILTON, AMBASSADOR TO NAPLES--SPEECH OF LOUIS XV._
+
+TO SIR HORACE MANN.
+
+STRAWBERRY HILL, _June_ 8, 1764.
+
+Your Red Riband is certainly postponed. There was but one vacant, which
+was promised to General Draper, who, when he thought he felt the sword
+dubbing his shoulder, was told that my Lord Clive could not conquer the
+Indies a second time without being a Knight of the Bath. This, however,
+I think will be but a short parenthesis, for I expect that _heaven-born
+hero_[1] to return from whence he came, instead of bringing hither all
+the Mogul's pearls and rubies. Yet, before that happens there will
+probably be other vacancies to content both Draper and you.
+
+[Footnote 1: "That _heaven-born hero_" had been Lord Chatham's
+description of Lord Clive.]
+
+You have a new neighbour coming to you, Mr. William Hamilton,[1] one of
+the King's equerries, who succeeds Sir James Gray at Naples. Hamilton is
+a friend of mine, is son of Lady Archibald, and was aide-de-camp to Mr.
+Conway. He is picture-mad, and will ruin himself in virtu-land. His
+wife is as musical as he is connoisseur, but she is dying of an asthma.
+
+[Footnote 1: Mr. W. Hamilton, afterwards Sir William, was the husband of
+the celebrated Lady Hamilton.]
+
+I have never heard of the present[1] you mention of the box of essences.
+The secrets of that prison-house do not easily transpire, and the merit
+of any offering is generally assumed, I believe, by the officiating
+priests.
+
+[Footnote 1: A present from Sir Horace, I believe, to the
+Queen.--WALPOLE.]
+
+Lord Tavistock is to be married to-morrow to Lady Elizabeth Keppel, Lord
+Albemarle's sister.
+
+I love to tell you an anecdote of any of our old acquaintance, and I
+have now a delightful one, relating, yet indirectly, to one of them. You
+know, to be sure, that Madame de Craon's daughter, Madame de Boufflers,
+has the greatest power with King Stanislaus. Our old friend the Princess
+de Craon goes seldom to Luneville for this reason, not enduring to see
+her daughter on that throne which she so long filled with absolute
+empire. But Madame de Boufflers, who, from his Majesty's age, cannot
+occupy _all_ the places in the palace that her mother filled,
+indemnifies herself with his Majesty's Chancellor. One day the lively
+old monarch said, "Regardez, quel joli petit pied, et la belle jambe!
+Mon Chancellier vous dira le reste." You know this is the form when a
+King of France says a few words to his Parliament, and then refers them
+to his chancellor. I expect to hear a great deal soon of the princess,
+for Mr. Churchill and my sister are going to settle at Nancy for some
+time. Adieu!
+
+
+_THE KING OF POLAND--CATHERINE OF RUSSIA._
+
+TO SIR HORACE MANN.
+
+STRAWBERRY HILL, _Aug._ 13, 1764.
+
+I am afraid it is some thousands of days since I wrote to you; but woe
+is me! how could I help it? Summer will be summer, and peace peace. It
+is not the fashion to be married, or die in the former, nor to kill or
+be killed in the latter; and pray recollect if those are not the sources
+of correspondence. You may perhaps put in a caveat against my plea of
+peace, and quote Turks Island[1] upon me; why, to be sure the
+parenthesis is a little hostile, but we are like a good wife, and can
+wink at what we don't like to see; besides, the French, like a sensible
+husband, that has made a slip, have promised us a new topknot, so we
+have kissed and are very good friends.
+
+[Footnote 1: Turk's Island, called also Tortuga, is a small island near
+St. Domingo, of which a French squadron had dispossessed some British
+settlers; but the French Government disavowed the act, and compensated
+the settlers.]
+
+The Duke of York returned very abruptly. The town talks of remittances
+stopped; but as I know nothing of the matter, and you are not only a
+minister but have the honour of his good graces, I do not pretend to
+tell you what to be sure you know better than I do.
+
+Old Sir John Barnard is dead, which he had been to the world for some
+time; and Mr. Legge. The latter, who was heartily in the minority, said
+cheerfully just before he died, "that he was going to the majority."
+
+Let us talk a little of the north. Count Poniatowski, with whom I was
+acquainted when he was here, is King of Poland, and calls himself
+Stanislaus the Second. This is the sole instance, I believe, upon
+record, of a second of a name being on the throne while the first was
+living without having contributed to dethrone him.[1] Old Stanislaus
+lives to see a line of successors, like Macbeth in the cave of the
+witches. So much for Poland; don't let us go farther north; we shall
+find there Alecto herself. I have almost wept for poor Ivan! I shall
+soon begin to believe that Richard III. murdered as many folks as the
+Lancastrian historians say he did. I expect that this Fury will poison
+her son next, lest Semiramis should have the bloody honour of having
+been more unnatural. As Voltaire has unpoisoned so many persons of
+former ages, methinks he ought to do as much for the present time, and
+assure posterity that there never was such a lamb as Catherine II., and
+that, so far from assassinating her own husband and Czar Ivan,[2] she
+wept over every chicken that she had for dinner. How crimes, like
+fashions, flit from clime to clime! Murder reigns under the Pole, while
+you, who are in the very town where Catherine de' Medici was born, and
+within a stone's throw of Rome, where Borgia and his holy father sent
+cardinals to the other world by hecatombs, are surprised to hear that
+there is such an instrument as a stiletto. The papal is now a mere gouty
+chair, and the good old souls don't even waddle out of it to get a
+bastard.
+
+[Footnote 1: The first was Stanislaus Leczinski, father of the Queen of
+France. He had been driven from Poland by Peter the Great after the
+overthrow of Charles XII. of Sweden (_v. infra_, Letter 90).]
+
+[Footnote 2: Ivan, the Czar who had been deposed by the former Czarina,
+Elizabeth, had recently been murdered, while trying to escape from the
+confinement in which he had been so long detained.]
+
+Well, good night! I have no more monarchs to chat over; all the rest are
+the most Catholic or most Christian, or most something or other that is
+divine; and you know one can never talk long about folks that are only
+excellent. One can say no more about Stanislaus _the first_ than that he
+is the best of beings. I mean, unless they do not deserve it, and then
+their flatterers can hold forth upon their virtues by the hour.
+
+
+_MADAME DE BOUFFLERS' WRITINGS--KING JAMES'S JOURNAL._
+
+TO THE EARL OF HERTFORD.
+
+STRAWBERRY HILL, _Oct._ 5, 1764.
+
+My dear Lord,--Though I wrote to you but a few days ago, I must trouble
+you with another line now. Dr. Blanchard, a Cambridge divine, and who
+has a good paternal estate in Yorkshire, is on his travels, which he
+performs as a gentleman; and, therefore, wishes not to have his
+profession noticed. He is very desirous of paying his respects to you,
+and of being countenanced by you while he stays at Paris. It will much
+oblige a particular friend of mine, and consequently me, if you will
+favour him with your attention. Everybody experiences your goodness, but
+in the present case I wish to attribute it a little to my request.
+
+I asked you about two books, ascribed to Madame de Boufflers. If they
+are hers, I should be glad to know where she found, that Oliver Cromwell
+took orders and went over to Holland to fight the Dutch. As she has been
+on the spot where he reigned (which is generally very strong evidence),
+her countrymen will believe her in spite of our teeth; and Voltaire, who
+loves all anecdotes that never happened, _because_ they prove the
+manners of the times, will hurry it into the first history he publishes.
+I, therefore, enter my caveat against it; not as interested for Oliver's
+character, but to save the world from one more fable. I know Madame de
+Boufflers will attribute this scruple to my partiality to Cromwell (and,
+to be sure, if we must be ridden, there is some satisfaction when the
+man knows how to ride). I remember one night at the Duke of Grafton's, a
+bust of Cromwell was produced: Madame de Boufflers, without uttering a
+syllable, gave me the most speaking look imaginable, as much as to say,
+"Is it possible you can admire this man!" _Apropos_: I am sorry to say
+the reports do not cease about the separation, and yet I have heard
+nothing that confirms it.
+
+I once begged you to send me a book in three volumes, called "Essais sur
+les Moeurs;" forgive me if I put you in mind of it, and request you to
+send me that, or any other new book. I am wofully in want of reading,
+and sick to death of all our political stuff, which, as the Parliament
+is happily at the distance of three months, I would fain forget till I
+cannot help hearing of it. I am reduced to Guicciardin, and though the
+evenings are so long, I cannot get through one of his periods between
+dinner and supper. They tell me Mr. Hume has had sight of King James's
+journal;[1] I wish I could see all the trifling passages that he will
+not deign to admit into History. I do not love great folks till they
+have pulled off their buskins and put on their slippers, because I do
+not care sixpence for what they would be thought, but for what they are.
+
+[Footnote 1: This journal is understood to have been destroyed in the
+course of the French Revolution, but it had not only been previously
+seen by Hume, as Walpole mentions here, but Mr. Fox had also had access
+to it, and had made some notes or extracts from it, which were
+subsequently communicated to Lord Macaulay when he carried out the
+design of writing a "History of the Revolution of 1688," which Mr. Fox
+had contemplated.]
+
+Mr. Elliot brings us woful accounts of the French ladies, of the decency
+of their conversation, and the nastiness of their behaviour.
+
+Nobody is dead, married, or gone mad, since my last. Adieu!...
+
+
+END OF VOL. I.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Letters of Horace Walpole, by Horace Walpole
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+     https://www.gutenberg.org/2/4/6/8/24689
+
+An alternative method of locating eBooks:
+     https://www.gutenberg.org/GUTINDEX.ALL
+
+
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