144. To The Hon. H. S. Conway. Strawberry Hill, August 21, 1778. (page 195)
I think it so very uncertain whether this letter will find you, that I write merely to tell you I received yours to-day. I recollect nothing particularly worth seeing in Sussex that you have not seen (for I think you have seen Coudray and Stansted, and I know you have Petworth), but Hurst Monceaux, near Battle; and I don't know whether it is not pulled down. The site of Arundel Castle is fine, and there are some good tombs of the Fitzalans at the church, but little remains of the castle; in the room of which is a modern brick house; and in the late Duke's time the ghost of a giant walked there, his grace said--but I suppose the present Duke has laid it in the Red Sea of claret.
Besides Knowle and Penshurst, I should think there were several seats of old families in Kent worth seeing; but I do not know them. I poked out Summer-hill(318) for the sake of the Babylonienne in Grammont; but it is now a mere farmhouse. Don't let them Persuade you to visit Leeds Castle, which is not worth seeing.
You have been near losing me and half a dozen fair cousins today. The Goldsmiths, Company dined in Mr. Shirley's field, next to Pope's. I went to Ham with my three Waldegrave nieces and Miss Keppel, and saw them land, and dine in tents erected for them, from the opposite shore. You may imagine how beautiful the sight was in such a spot and in such a day! I stayed and dined at Ham, and after dinner Lady Dysart, with Lady Bridget Tollemache took our four nieces on the water to see the return of the barges but were to set me down at Lady Browne's. We were, with a footman and the two watermen, ten in a little boat. As we were in the middle of the river, a larger boat full of people drove directly upon us on purpose. I believe they were drunk. We called to them, to no purpose; they beat directly against the middle of our little skiff--but, thank you, did not do us the least harm--no thanks to them. Lady Malpas was in Lord Strafford's garden, and gave us for gone. In short, Neptune never would have had so beautiful a prize as the four girls.
I hear an express has been sent to * * * * to offer him the mastership of the horse. I had a mind to make you guess, but you never can--to Lord Exeter! Pray let me know the moment you return to Park-place.
(318) Formerly a country-seat of Queen Elizabeth, and the residence of Charles the Second when the court was at Tunbridge.- E.
145. To The Rev. Mr. Cole. Strawberry Hill, August 22, 1778. (page 196)
I beg YOU Will feel no uneasiness, dear Sir, at having shown my name to Dr. Glynn. I Can never suspect you, who are giving me fresh proofs of your friendship, and solicitude for my reputation, of doing any thing unkind. It is true I do not think I shall publish any thing about Chatterton. IS not it an affront to innocence, not to be perfectly satisfied in her? My pamphlet, for such it would be, is four times as large as the narrative in your hands, and I think Would not discredit me--but, in truth, I am grown much fonder of truth than fame; and scribblers or their patrons shall not provoke me to sacrifice the one to the other. Lord Hardwicke, I know, has long been my enemy,--latterly, to get a sight of the Conway Papers, he has paid great court to me, which, to show how little I regarded his enmity, I let him see, at least the most curious. But as I set as little value on his friendship, I did not grant another of his requests. Indeed, I have made more than one foe by not indulging the vanity of those who have made application to me; and I am obliged to them, when they augment my contempt by quarrelling with me for that refusal. It was the case of Mr. Masters, and is now of Lord Hardwicke. He solicited me to reprint his Boeotian volume of Sir Dudley Carleton's Papers, for which he had two motives. The first he inherited from his father, the desire of saving money; for though his fortune is so much larger than mine, he knew I would not let out my press for hire, but should treat him with the expense, as I have done for those I have obliged. The second was, that the rarity of my editions makes them valuable, and though I cannot make men read dull books, I can make them purchase them. His lordship, therefore, has bad grace in affecting to overlook one, whom he had in vain courted, yet he again is grown my enemy, because I would not be my own. For my Writings, they do not depend on him or the venal authors he patronizes (I doubt very frugally), but On their own merits or demerits. It is from men of sense they must expect their sentence, not from boobies and hireling authors, whom I have always shunned, with the whole fry of minor wits, critics, and monthly censors. I have not seen the Review you mention, nor ever do, but when something particular is pointed out to me. Literary squabbles I know preserve one's name, when one's work will not; but I despise the fame that depends on scolding till one is remembered, and remembered by whom? The scavengers of literature! Reviewers are like sextons, who in a charnel-house can tell you to what John Thompson or to what Tom-Matthews such a skull or such belonged--but who wishes to know? The fame that is only to be found in such vaults, is like the fires that burn unknown in tombs, and go out as fast as they are discovered. Lord Hardwicke is welcome to live among the dead if he likes',,it, and can contrive to live nowhere else.
Chatterton did abuse me under the title of Baron of Otranto,(319) but unluckily the picture is more like Dr. Milles and Chatterton's own devotees' than to me, who am but a recreant antiquary, and, as the poor lad found by experience, did not swallow every fragment that 'Was offered to me as an antique; though that is a feature he has bestowed Upon me.
I have seen, too, the criticism you mention on the Castle of Otranto, in the preface to the Old English Baron.(320) It is not at all oblique, but, though mixed with high compliments, directly attacks the visionary part, which, says the author or authoress, makes one laugh. I do assure you, I have not had the smallest inclination to return that attack. It would even be ungrateful, for the work is a professed imitation of mine, only stripped of the marvellous; and so entirely stripped, except in one awkward attempt at a ghost or two, that it is the most insipid dull nothing you ever saw. It certainly does not make me laugh; but what makes one doze, seldom makes one merry.
I am very sorry to have talked for near three pages on what relates to myself, who should be of no consequence, if people did not make me so, whether I will or not.- My not replying to them, I hope, is a proof I do not seek to make myself the topic of conversation. How very foolish are the squabbles of authors! They buzz and are troublesome, to-day, and then repose for ever on some shelf in a college' library, close by their antagonists, like Henry VI. and Edward IV. at Windsor.
I shall be in town in a few days, and will send You the heads of painters, which I left there; and along with them for yourself a translation of a French play,(321) that I have just printed there. It is not for your reading, but as one of the Strawberry editions, and one of the rarest; for I have printed but seventy-five copies. It was to oblige Lady Craven, - the translatress; and will be an aggravation of my offence to Sir Dudley's State Papers.
I hope this Elysian summer, for it has been above Indian, has dispersed all your complaints. Yet it does not agree with fruit; the peaches and nectarines are shrivelled to the size of damsons, and half of them drop. Yet you remember what portly bellies the peaches had at Paris, where it is generally as hot. I suppose our fruit-trees are so accustomed to rain, that they don't know how to behave without it. Adieu!
P. S. I can divert you with a new adventure that has happened to me in the literary way. About a month ago, I received a letter from Mr. Jonathan Scott, at Shrewsbury, to tell me he was possessed of MS. of Lord Herbert's Account of the Court of France,(322) which he designed to publish by subscription, and which he desired me to subscribe to, and to assist in the publication. I replied, that having been obliged to the late Lord Powis and his widow, I could not meddle with any such thing, without knowing that it had the consent of the present Earl and his mother.
Another letter, commending my reserve, told me Mr. Scott had applied for it formerly, and would again now. This showed me they did not consent. I have just received a third letter, owning the approbation has not yet arrived; but to keep me employed in the mean time, the modest Mr. Scott, whom I never saw, nor know more of than I did of Chatterton, proposes to me to get his fourth son a place in the civil department in India: the father not choosing it should be in the military, his three eldest sons being engaged in that branch already. If this fourth son breaks his neck, I suppose it will be laid to my charge! Yours ever.
(319) Chatterton exhibited a ridiculous portrait of Walpole: in the "Memoirs of a Sad Dog," under the character of "the redoubted Baron Otranto, who has spent his whole life in conjectures."-E.
(320) The Old English Baron, a romance of considerable repute which has been frequently reprinted, was the production of Clara Reeve. This Ingenious lady had published, in 1772, a translation of Barclay's Latin romance of Argenis, under the title of "The Phoenix, or the History of Polyarchus and Argenis." She was born at Ipswich, in 1738, died there in 1808.-E.
(321) "the Sleep Walker;" Strawberry Hill, 1778. It was translated from the French of M. Pont de Veyle, by Lady Craven, afterwards Margravine of Anspach.-E.
(322) By Lord Herbert's Account of the Court of France, Mr. Scott most probably referred to his "Letters written during his residence at the French Court" and which were first published from the originals, in the edition of his Life which appeared in 1826.-E.
146. To The Rev. Mr. Cole. September 1, 1778. (page 198)
I have now seen the Critical Review, with Lord Hardwicke's note, in which I perceive the sensibility of your friendship for me, dear Sir, but no rudeness on his part. Contemptuous it was to reprint Jane Shore's letter without any notice of my having given it before: the apology, too, is not made to me-but I am not affected by such incivilities, that imply more ill-will than boldness. As I expected more from your representation, I believe I expressed myself with more warmth than the occasion deserved; and, as I love to be just, I will, now I am perfectly cool, be so to Lord Hardwicke. His dislike of me was meritorious in him, as I conclude it was founded on my animosity to his father, as mine had been, from attachment to my own who was basely betrayed by the late Earl. The present has given me formerly many peevish marks of enmity; and I suspect, I don't know if justly, that he was the mover of the cabal in the Antiquarian Society against me- -but all their Misunderstandings were of a size that made me smile rather than provoked me. The Earl, as I told you, has since been rather wearisome in applications to me; which I received rather civilly, but encouraged no farther. When he wanted me to be his printer, I own I was not good Christian enough, not to be pleased with refusing, and yet in as well-bred excuses as I could form, pleading what was true at the time, as you know, that I had laid down my press-but so much for this idle story. I shall think no more of it, but adhere to my specific system. The antiquarians will be as ridiculous as they used to be; and, since it is impossible to infuse taste into them, they will be as dry and dull as their predecessors. One may revive what perished, but it will perish again, if more life is not breathed into it than it enjoyed originally. Facts, dates, and names will never please the multitude, unless there is some style and manner to recommend them, and unless some novelty is struck out from their appearance. The best merit of the society lies in their prints; for their volumes, no mortal will ever touch them but an antiquary. Their Saxon and Danish discoveries are not worth more than monuments of the Hottentots; and for Roman remains in Britain, they are upon a foot with what ideas we should get of Inigo Jones, if somebody was to publish views of huts and houses, that our officers run up at Senegal and Goree. Bishop Lyttelton used to torment me with barrows and Roman camps, and I would as soon have attended to the turf graves in our churchyards. I have no curiosity to know how awkward and clumsy men have been in the dawn of arts, or in their decay.
I exempt you entirely from my general censure on antiquaries, both for your singular modesty in publishing nothing yourself, and for collecting stone and bricks for others to build with. I wish your materials may ever fall into good hands--perhaps they will! our empire is falling to pieces! we are relapsing to a little island. n that state men are apt to inquire how great their ancestors have been; and, when a kingdom is past doing any thing, the few that are studious look into the memorials of past time; nations, like private persons, seek lustre from their progenitors, when they have none in themselves, and the farther they are from the dignity of their source. When half its colleges are tumbled down, the ancient university of Cambridge will revive from your Collections,(323) and you will be a living witness that saw its splendour.
Since I began this letter, I have had another curious adventure. I was in the Holbein chamber, when a chariot stopped at my door. A letter was brought up--and who should be below but--Dr. Kippis. The letter was to announce himself and his business, flattered me on My Writings, desired my assistance, and particularly my direction and aid for his writing the life of my father. I desired he would walk up, and received him very civilly, taking not the smallest notice of what you had told me of his flirts at me in the new Biographia. I told him if I had been applied to, I could have pointed out many errors in the old edition, but as they were chiefly in the printing, I supposed they would be corrected. With regard to my father's life, I said, it might be partiality, but I had such confidence in my father's virtues, that I was satisfied the more his life was examined, the clearer they would appear. That I also thought that the life of any man written under the direction of his family, did nobody honour; and that, as I was persuaded my father's would stand the test, I wished that none of his relations should interfere in it. That I did not doubt but the Doctor would speak impartially, and that was all I desired. He replied, that he did suppose I thought in that manner, and that all he asked was to be assisted in facts and dates. I said, if he would please to write the life first, and then communicate it to me, I would point out any errors in facts that I should perceive. He seemed mightily well satisfied-and so we parted-but is it not odd. that people are continually attacking me, and then come to me for' assistance?-- but when men write for profit, they are not very delicate.
I have resumed Mr. Baker's life, and pretty well arranged my plan; but I shall have little time to make any progress till October, as I am going soon to make some visits. Yours ever.
(323) His valuable Collections, in about a hundred volumes, in folio fairly written in his own band, Mr. Cole, on his death in 1782, left to the British Museum, to be locked up for twenty years. His Diary, as will be seen by a specimen or two, is truly ludicrous:--Jan. 25, 1766. Foggy. My beautiful Parrot died at ten at night, without knowing the Cause of his illness, he being very well last night.--Feb. 1. Fine day, and cold. Will. Wood carried three or four loads of dung Baptized William, the son of William Grace, blacksmith, whom I married about six months before. March 3. I baptized Sarah, the bastard daughter of the Widow Smallwood, of Eton, aged near fifty, whose husband died about a year ago.--March 6, Very fine weather. My man was blooded. I sent a loin Of pork and a spare-rib to Mr. Cartwright, in London.--27. I sent my two French wigs to my London barber to alter, they being made so miserably I could not wear them.--June 17. I went to our new Archdeacon's visitation at Newport-Pagnel. took young H. Travel with me on my dun horse, in order that he might hear the organ, he being a great psalm-singer. The most numerous appearance of clergy that I remember: forty-four dined with the Archdeacon; and what is extraordinary, not one smoked tobacco. My new coach-horse ungain.--Aug. 16. Cool day. Tom reaped for Joe Holdom. I cudgelled Jem for staying so long on an errand," etc.-E.
147. To The Rev. Mr. Cole. Strawberry Hill, Sept. 18, 1778. (page 200)
I have run through the new articles in the Biographia, and think them performed but by a heavy hand. Some persons have not trusted the characters of their ancestors, as I did my father's, to their own merits. On the contrary, I have met with one whose corruption is attempted to be palliated by imputing its punishment to the revenge of my father-which, by the way, is confessing the guilt of the convict. This was the late Lord Barrington,(324) who, i believe, was a very dirty fellow; for, besides being expelled the House of Commons on the affair of the Harburgh lottery, he was reckoned to have twice sold the Dissenters to the court; but in short, what credit can a Biographia Britannica, which ought to be a standard work, deserve, when the editor is a mercenary writer, who runs about to relations for direction, and adopts any tale they deliver to him? This very instance is proof that it is not a jot more creditable than a peerage. The authority is said to be a nephew of Judge Foster, (consequently, I suppose, a friend of Judge Barrington), and he pretends to have found a scrap of paper, nobody knows on what occasion written, that seems to be connected with nothing, and is called a palliative, if not an excuse of Lord Barrington's crime. A man is expelled from Parliament for a scandalous job, and it is called a sufficient excuse to say the minister was his enemy; and this nearly forty years after the death of both! and without any impeachment of the justice of the sentence: instead of which we are told that Lord Barrington was suspected of having offended Sir Robert Walpole, who took that opportunity of being revenged. Supposing he did--which at most you see is a suspicion--grounded on a suspicion--it would at least Imply, that he had found a good opportunity. A most admirable acquittal! Sir Robert Walpole was expelled for having endorsed a note that was not for his own benefit, nor ever supposed to be, and it Was the act of a whole outrageous party; yet, abandoned as parliaments sometimes are, a minister would not find them very complaisant In gratifying his private revenge against a member without some crime. Not a syllable is said of any defence the culprit made:; and,' had my father been guilty of such violence and injustice, it is totally incredible that he, whose minutest acts and his most innocent were so rigorously scrutinized, tortured, and blackened, should never have heard that act of power complained of. The present Lord Barrington who opposed him, saw his fall, and the secret committee appointed' to canvass his life, when a retrospect of twenty years was desired and only ten allowed, would certainly have pleaded for the longer term, had he had any thing to say, in behalf of his father's sentence. Would so warm a patriot then, though so obedient a courtier now, have suppressed the charge to this hour? This Lord Barrington, when I was going to publish the second edition of my Noble Authors, begged it as a favour of me suppress all mention of his father--a strong presumption that he was ashamed of him. I am well repaid! but I am certainly 11 record that good man. I shall-and s ow at liberty to hall take notice of the satisfactory manner in which his sons have whitewashed their patriarch. I recollect a saying of the present peer that will divert you when contrasted with forty years of servility which even in this age makes him a proverb. It was in his days of virtue. He said, "If I should ever be so unhappy as to have a place that would make it necessary for me to have a fine coat on a birthday, I would pin a bank-bill on my sleeve." He had a place in less than two years, I think--and has had almost every place that every administration could bestow.(325) Such were the patriots that opposed that excellent man, my father; allowed by all parties as incapable of revenge as ever minister was--but whose experience of mankind drew from him that memorable saying, "that very few men ought to be prime ministers, for it is not fit many should know how bad men are;"--one can see a little of it without being a prime minister. "one shuns mankind and flies to books, one meets with their meanness and falsehood there, too! one has reason to say, there is but one good, that is God. Adieu! Yours ever.
(324) John Shute, first Viscount Barrington in the peerage of Ireland, expelled the House of Commons in February 1723, for having promoted, abetted, and carried on that fraudulent undertaking, the Harburgh lottery. This lottery took its name from the place where it Was to be drawn, the town and port of Harburgh, on the river Elbe, where the projector was to settle a trade for the woollen manufacture between England and Germany. Lord Barrington was distinguished for theological learning, and published "Miscellanea Critica" and an "Essay on the several Dispensations of God to Mankind." He died in 1734, leaving five sons, who had the rare fortune of each rising to high stations in the church, the state, the law, the army, and the navy.-E.
(325) See vol. i. p. 258, letter 69. Among the Mitchell MSS. is a letter from Lord Barrington, in which he says, "No man knows what is good for him: my invariable rule, therefore, is to ask nothing, to refuse nothing; to let Others place me, and to do my best wherever I am placed. The same strange fortune which made me secretary of war five years ago has made me chancellor of the exchequer; it may perhaps at last make me pope. I think i am equally fit to be at the head of the church as the exchequer."-E.
148. To The Rev. Mr. Cole. Oct, 14, 1778. (page 202)
I think you take in no newspapers, nor do I believe condescend to read any more modern than the Paris `a la Main at the time of the Ligue; consequently you have not seen a new scandal on my father, which you will not wonder offends me. You cannot be interested in his defence; but, as it comprehends some very curious anecdotes, you will not grudge my indulging myself to a friend in vindicating a name so dear to me. In the accounts of Lady Chesterfield's(326) death and fortune, it is said that the late King, at the instigation of Sir Robert Walpole, burnt his father's will which contained a large legacy to that, his supposed, daughter, and I believe his real one; for she was very like him, as her brother General Schulembourg, is, in black, to the late King. The fact of suppressing the will is indubitably true; the instigator most false, as I can demonstrate thus:-- When the news arrived of the death of George the First, my father carried the account from Lord Townshend to the then Prince of Wales. One of the first acts of royalty is for the new monarch to make a speech to the privy council. Sir Robert asked the King who he would please to have draw the Speech, which was, in fact, asking who was to be prime minister; to which his Majesty replied, Sir Spencer Compton. It is a wonderful anecdote, and but little known, that the new premier, a very dull man, could not draw the Speech, and the person to whom he applied was the deposed premier. The Queen, who favoured my father, observed how unfit a man was for successor, who was reduced to beg assistance of his predecessor. The council met as soon as possible, the next morning at latest. There Archbishop Wake, with whom one copy of the will had been deposited, (as another was, I think, with the Duke of Wolfenbuttle, who had a pension for sacrificing it, which, I know, the late Duke of Newcastle transacted,) advanced and delivered the will to the King, who put it into his pocket, and went out of council without opening it, the Archbishop- not having courage or presence of mind to desire it to b' read,. as he ought to have done.
These circumstances, which I solemnly assure you are strictly true, prove that my father neither advised, nor was consulted; nor is it credible that the King in one night's time should have passed from the intention of disgracing him, to make him his bosom Confidant on so delicate an affair.
I was once talking to the late Lady Suffolk, the former mistress, on that extraordinary event. She said, "I cannot justify the deed to the legatees; but towards his father, the late King was justifiable, for George the First had burnt two wills made in favour of George the Second." I suppose these were the testaments of the Duke and Duchess of Zell, parents of George the First's wife, whose treatment of her they always resented.
I said, I know the transactions of the Duke of Newcastle. The late Lord Waldegrave showed me a letter from that Duke to The first Earl of Waldegrave, then ambassador at Paris, with directions about that transaction, or, at least, about payment of the pension, I forget which.(327) I have somewhere, but cannot turn to it now, a memorandum of that affair, and who the Prince was, whom I may mistake in calling Duke of Wolfenbuttle. There was a third COPY of the will, I likewise forget with whom deposited. The newspaper says, which is true, that Lord Chesterfield filed a bill in chancery against the late King to oblige him to produce the will, and was silenced, I think, by payment of twenty thousand Pounds. There was another legacy to his own daughter, the Queen of Prussia, which has at times been, and, I believe, is still claimed by the King of Prussia.
Do not mention any part of this story, but it is worth preserving, I am sure you are satisfied with my scrupulous veracity. It may Perhaps be authenticated hereafter by collateral evidence that may come out. If ever true history does come to light my father's character will have just honour paid to it. Lord Chesterfield, one of his sharpest enemies, has not, with all his prejudices, left a very unfavourable account of him, and it would alone be raised by a comparison of their two characters. Think of one who calls Sir Robert the corrupter of youth, leaving a system of education to poison them from their nursery! Chesterfield, Pulteney, and Bolingbroke were the saints that reviled my father! I beg your pardon, but you will allow Me to open my heart to you when it is full. Yours ever.
(326) Malosine de Schulenbourg, a natural daughter of George I. by Miss Schulenbourg, afterwards created Duchess of Kendal. She was created, in 1722, Countess of Walsingham and Baroness of Aldborough, and was the widow of Philip Dormer Stanhope, the celebrated Earl of Chesterfield, who died in 1773-E.
(327) See Walpole's Memoires of George the second, vol. ii., p. 458-E.
149. To The Hon. H. S. Conway. Oct. 23, 1778. (page 204)
* * * * * Having thus told you all I know, I shall add a few words, to say I conclude you have known as much, by my not having heard from you. Should the post-office or secretary's o(fice set their wits at work to bring to light all the intelligence contained under the above hiatus, I am confident they will discover nothing, though it gives an exact description of all they have been about themselves.
My personal history is very short. I have had an assembly and the rheumatism-and am buying a house-and it rains-and I shall plant the roses against my treillage to-morrow. Thus you know -what I have done, suffered, am doing, and shall do. Let me know as much of you, in quantity, not in quality. Introductions to, and conclusions of, letters are as much out of fashion, as to at, etc. on letters. This sublime age reduces every thing to its quintessence: all periphrases and expletives are so much in disuse, that I suppose soon the only way of making love will be to say "Lie down." Luckily, the lawyers will not part with any synonymous words, and will, consequently preserve the redundancies of our language--Dixi.
150. To The Rev. Mr. Cole. October 26, 1778. (page 204)
I have finished the life of Mr. Baker, will have it transcribed, and send it to you. I have omitted several little particulars that are in your notes, for two reasons; one, because so much is said in the Biographia; and the other, because I have rather drawn a character of him, than meant a circumstantial life. In the justice I have done to him, I trust I shall have pleased you. I have much greater doubt of that effect in what I have said of his principles and party. It is odd, perhaps, to have made use of the life of a high churchman for expatiating on my own very opposite principles; but it gave me SO fair an opportunity of discussing those points, that I very naturally embraced it. I have done due honour to his immaculate conscience, but have not spared the cause in which he fell,-or rather rose,-for the ruin of his fortune was the triumph of his virtue.
As you know I do not love the press, you may be sure I have no thoughts of printing this life at present; nay, I beg you will not only not communicate it, but take care it never should be printed without my consent. I have written what presented itself; I should perhaps choose to soften several passages; and I trust to you for Your own satisfaction, not as a finished thing, or as I am determined it should remain.
Another favour I beg of you is to criticise it as largely and severely As you please: you have A right so to do, as it is built with your own materials, nay, you have a right to scold if I have, nay, since I have, employed them so differently from your intention. All my excuse is, that you communicated them to one who did not deceive you, and you was pretty sure would make nearly the use of them that he has made. Was not you? did you not suspect a little that I could not write even a Life of Mr. Baker without talking Whiggism!--Well, if I have ill-treated the cause, I am sure I have exalted the martyr. I have thrown new light on his virtue from his notes on the Gazettes, and you will admire him more, though you may love me less, for my chymistry. I should be truly sorry if I did lose a scruple of your friendship. You have ever been as candid to me, as Mr. Baker was to his antagonists, and our friendship is another proof that men of the most opposite principles can agree in every thing else, and not quarrel about them.
As my manuscript contains above twenty pages of my writing on larger paper than this, you cannot receive it speedily--however, I have Performed my promise, and I hope you will not be totally discontent, though I am not satisfied with myself. I have executed it by snatches and by long interruptions; and not having been eager about it, I find I wanted that ardour to inspire me; another proof of what I told you, that my small talent is waning, and wants provocatives. It shall be a warning to me. Adieu!
151. To The Rev. Mr. Cole. Arlington Street, Nov. 4, 1778. (page 205)
You will see by my secretary's hand, that I am not able to write myself; indeed, I am in bed with the gout in six places, like Daniel in the den; but, as the lions are slumbering round me, and leave me a moment of respite, I employ it to give you one. You have misunderstood me, dear Sir: I have not said a word that will lower Mr. Baker's character; on the contrary, I think he will come out brighter from my ordeal. In truth, as I have drawn out his life from your papers, it is a kind of Political epic, in which his conscience is the hero that always triumphs over his interest upon the most opposite occasions. Shall you dislike your saint in this light! I had transcribed about half when I fell ill last week. If the gout does not seize my right hand, I shall Probably have recovery full leisure to finish it during my recovery, but shall certainly not be able to send it to you by Mr. Lort.
Your promise fully satisfies me. My life can never extend to twenty years.(328) Anyone that saw me this moment would not take me for a Methusalem. I have not strength to dictate more now, except to add, that if Mr. Nicholls has seen my narrative about Chatterton, it can only be my letter to Mr. Barrett, of which you have a copy; the larger one has not yet been out of my own house. Yours most sincerely.
(328) Mr. Cole had informed Walpole that his collections were not to be opened until twenty years after his death. See ant`e, P. 199, letter 146, note 323.
152. To Lady Browne.(329) Arlington Street, Nov, 5, 1778. (page 206)
Your ladyship is exceedingly kind and charitable, and the least I can do in return is to do all I can--dictate a letter to you. I have not been out of bed longer than it was necessary to have it made, once a day, since last Thursday. The gout is in both my feet, both my knees, and in my left hand and elbow. Had I a mind to brag, I could boast of a little rheumatism too, but I scorn to set value on such a trifle; nay, I will own that I have felt but little acute pain. My chief propensity to exaggeration would be on the miserable nights I have passed; and yet whatever I should say would not be beyond what I thought I suffered. I have been constantly as broad awake as Mrs. Candour that is always gaping for Scandal,(330) except when I have taken opiates, and then my dreams have been as extravagant as Mrs. Candour adds to what she hears. In short, Madam, not to tire you with more details, though you have ordered them, I am so weak that I am able to see nobody at all, and when I shall be recovered enough to take possession of this new lease, as it is called, the mansion, I believe, will be so shattered that it won't be worth repairs. Is it not very foolish, then, to be literally buying a new house? Is it not verifying Pope's line, when I choose a Pretty situation,
"But just to look about us and to die?"
I am sorry Lady Jane's lot is fallen in Westphalia, where so great a hog is lord of the manor. He is like the dragon of Wantley,
"And houses and churches To him are geese and turkeys;"
so I don't wonder that he has gobbled her two cows.
Lady Blandford is delightful in congratulating me upon having the gout in town, and staying in the country herself. Nay, she is very insolent in presuming to be the only person invulnerable. If I could wish her any, harm, it should be that she might feel for one quarter of an hour a taste of the mortifications that I suffered from eleven last night till four this morning, and I am sure she would never dare to have a spark of courage again. I can only wish her in Grosvenor-square, where she would run no risks. Her reputation for obstinacy is so well established, that she might take advice from her true friends for a twelvemonth, before we should believe our own ears. However, as every body has some weak part, I know she will do for others more than for herself; and, therefore, pray Madam, tell her, that I am sure it is bad for Your ladyship to stay in the country at this time of year, and that reason, I am sure will bring you both. I really must rest.
(329) Now first printed. See vol. iii., letter to George Montagu, Esq., Nov. 1, 1767, letter 332.
(330) Sheridan's popular comedy of the "School for Scandal" which came out at Drury-lane theatre in May 1777, was at this time as much the favourite of the town as ever.-E.
153. To Lady Browne.(331) Arlington Street, Dec. 18, 1778. (page 207)
My not writing with my own hand, to thank Your ladyship for your very obliging letter, is the worst symptom that remains with me, Madam: all pain and swelling are gone; and I hope in a day or two to get a glove even on my right hand, and to walk with help into the room by the end of next week. I did I confess, see a great deal too much company too early; and was such an old child as to prattle abundantly, till I was forced to shut myself up for a week and see nobody; but I am quite recovered, and the emptiness of the town will soon preserve me from any excesses.
I am exceedingly glad to hear your ladyship finds so much benefit from the air: I own I thought you looked ill the last time I had the honour of seeing you; and though I am sorry to hear you talk with so much satisfaction of a country life, I am not selfish enough to wish you to leave Tusmore(332) a day before your health is quite re-established, nor to envy Mr. Fermor so agreeable an addition to his society and charming seat.
Poor Lady Albemarle is indeed very miserable and full of apprehensions; though the incredible zeal. of the navy for Admiral Keppel crowns him with glory, and the indignation of and the indignation of mankind, and the execration of Sir Hugh, add to the triumph. Indeed, I still think Lady A.'s fears may be well founded: some slur may be Procured on her son; and his own bad nerves, and worse constitution, may not be able to stand agitation and suspense.(333)
Lady Blandford has had a cold, but I hear is well again, and has generally two tables. She will be a loss indeed to all her friends, and to hundreds more; but she cannot be immortal, nor would be, if she could.
The writings are not yet signed, Madam, for my house, but I am in no doubt of having it; yet I shall not think of going into it till the spring, as I cannot enjoy this year's gout in it, and will not venture catching a codicil, by going backwards and forwards to it before it is aired.
I know no particular news, but that Lord Bute was thought in great danger yesterday; I have heard nothing of him to-day. I do not know even a match, but of some that are going to be divorced; the fate of one of the latter is to be turned into an exaltation, and is treated by her family and friends in quite a new style, to the discomfit of all prudery. It puts me in mind of Lord Lansdowne's lines in the room in the Tower where my father had been confined,
"Some fall so hard, they bound and rise again."
Methinks, however, it is a little hard on Lord George Germaine, that in four months after seeing a Duchess of Dorset, he may see a Lord Middlesex too; for so old the egg is said to be, that is already prepared. If this trade goes on, half the peeresses will have two eldest sons with both fathers alive at the same time. Lady Holderness expresses nothing but grief and willingness to receive her daughter(334) again on any terms, which probably will happen; for the daughter has already opened her eyes, is sensible of her utter ruin, and has written to Lord Carmarthen and Madam Cordon, acknowledging her guilt, and begging to be remembered only with pity, which is sufficient to make one pity her.
I would beg pardon for so long a letter, but your ladyship desired THE intelligence, and I know a long letter from London is not uncomfortable at Christmas, even. in the most comfortable house in the country. Perhaps my own forced idleness has a little contributed to lengthen it; still I hope it implies great readiness to obey your ladyship's commands, in your most obedient humble servant.
(331) Now first printed.
(332) Lady Browne's first husband was Henry Fermor Esq., grandfather of Mr. Fermor of Tusmore House. She was Miss Sheldon.-E.
(333) Some charges having been brought against Admiral Keppel for his conduct at the battle of Ushant, by Sir Hugh Palliser, his vice-admiral, he was tried for the same, and not only unanimously acquitted, but the prosecution declared malicious. This verdict gave such general satisfaction, that London was illuminated for two nights; upon one, of which a mob, consisting in great part of sailors who had served under Keppel, broke all the windows in the house of his accuser. The city of London voted the Admiral the freedom of the corporation. In 1782, he was Created Viscount Keppel, and appointed first lord of the admiralty. He died unmarried, in October 1786. The following is a part of Mr. Burke's beautiful panegyric on him, at the conclusion of his letter to a noble Lord:--"I ever looked on Lord Keppel as one of the greatest and best men of his age, and I loved and cultivated him accordingly. It was at his trial that he gave me this picture. With what zeal and anxious affection I attended him through that his agony of glory; what part my son took in the early flush and enthusiasm of his virtue, and the pious passion with which he attached himself to all my connexions; with what prodigality we both squandered ourselves in courting almost every sort of enmity for his sake, I believe he felt, just as I should have felt such friendship on such an occasion. I partook, indeed, of this honour with several of the first, and best, and ablest in the kingdom; but I was behind with none of them - and I am sure that if, to the eternal disgrace of this nation, and to the total annihilation of every trace of honour and virtue in it, things had taken a different turn from what they did, I should have attended him to the quarterdeck with no less good-will and more pride, though with far other feelings, than I partook of the general flow of national joy that attended the justice that was done to his virtue."-E.
(335) Amelia D'Arcy, Baroness Conyers, daughter of Robert, fourth Earl of Holderness, Married to Lord Carmarthen; who had eloped with Captain John Byron, father of the great poet.-E.
154. To The Earl Of Buchan.(336) Arlington Street, Dec. 24, 1778. (page 209)
It was an additional mortification to my illness, my lord, that I was nut able to thank your lordship with my own hand for the honour of your letter, and for your goodness in remembering an old man, who must with reason consider himself as forgotten, when he never was of importance, and is now almost useless to himself. Frequent severe fits of the gout have a good deal disabled me from pursuing the trifling studies in which I could pretend to know any thing; or at least has given me an indifference, that makes me less ready in answering questions than I may have been formerly; and as my papers are in the country, whither at present I am not able to go, I fear I can give but unsatisfactory replies to your lordship's queries.
The two very curious pictures of King James and his Queen (I cannot recollect whether the third or fourth of the name, but I know that she was a princess of Sweden or Denmark,(337) and that her arms are on her portrait,) were at the palace at Kensington, and I imagine are there still. I had obtained leave from the Lord Chamberlain to have drawings made of them, and Mr. Wale actually began them for me, but made such slow progress, and I was so called off from the thought of them by indispositions and other avocations, that they were never finished; and Mr.. Wale may, perhaps, still have the beginnings he made.
At the Duke of Devonshire's at Hardwicke, there is a valuable though poorly painted picture of James V. and Mary of Guise, his second queen: it is remarkable from the great resemblance of Mary Queen of Scots to her father; I mean in Lord Morton's picture of her, and in the image of her on her tomb at Westminster, which agree together, and which I take to be the genuine likeness. I have doubts on Lord Burlington's picture, and on Dr. Mead's. The nose in both is thicker, and also fuller at bottom than on the tomb; though it is a little supported by her coins.
There is a much finer portrait,--indeed, an excellent head,--of the Lady Margaret Douglas at Mr. Carteret's at Hawnes in Bedfordshire, the late Lord Granville's. It is a shrewd countenance, and at the same time with great goodness of character. Lord Scarborough has a good picture, in the style of Holbein at least, of Queen Margaret Tudor, daughter of Henry VII., and of her second or third husband (for, if I don't mistake, she had three); but indeed, my lord, these things are so much out of my memory at present, that I speak with great diffidence. I cannot even recollect any thing else to your lordship's purpose; but I flatter myself, that these imperfect notices will at least be a testimony of my readiness to obey your lordship's commands, as that I am, with great respect, my lord, your lordship's obedient humble servant.
(336) Now first printed. David Stewart Erskine, eleventh Earl of Buchan. He was intended for public life, but shortly after succeeding to the family honours, in 1767, he retired to Scotland, and devoted himself to literature. His principal works were, an Essay on the lives of Fletcher of Saltoun and the Poet Thomson, and a Life of Napier of Merchiston. He died at Dryburgh Abbey in 1829 at the age of eighty-seven.-E.
(337) James the First married, in 1590, Anne, daughter of Frederick King of Denmark.-E.
155. To Edward Gibbon, Esq.(338) [1778.] (page 210)
Dear Sir, I have gone through your Inquisitor's attack(339) and am far from being clear that it deserves your giving yourself the trouble of an answer, as neither the detail nor the result affects your argument. So far from it, many of his reproofs are levelled at your having quoted a wrong page; he confessing often that what you have cited is in the author, referred to, but not precisely in the individual spot. If St. Peter is attended by a corrector of the press, you will certainly never be admitted where he is a porter. I send you my copy, because I scribbled my remarks. I do not send them with the impertinent presumption of suggesting a hint to you, but to prove I did not grudge the trouble of going through such a book when you desired it, and to show how little struck me as of any weight.
I have set down nothing on your imputed plagiarisms; for, if they are so, no argument that has ever been employed must be used again, even where the passage necessary is applied to a different purpose. An author is not allowed to be master of his own works; but, by Davis's new law, the first person that cites him would be so. You probably looked into Middleton, Dodwell, etc.; had the same reflections on the same circumstances, or conceived them so as to recollect them, without remembering what suggested them. Is this plagiarism? If it is, Davis and such cavillers might go a short step further, and insist that an author should peruse every work antecedently written on every subject at all collateral to his own.-not to assist him, but to be sure to avoid every material touched by his predecessors. I will make but one remark on such divine champions. Davis and his prototypes tell you Middleton, etc. have used the same objections, and they have been confuted: answering, in the theologic dictionary, signifying confuting; no matter whether there is sense, argument, truth, in the answer or not.
Upon the whole I think ridicule is the only answer such a work is entitled to.' The ablest, answer which you can make (which would be the ablest answer that could be made) would never have any authority with the cabal, yet would allow a sort of dignity to the author. His patrons will always maintain that he vanquished you, unless u made him too ridiculous for them to dare to revive his name. You might divert yourself, too, with Alma Mater, the church, employing a goviat to defend the citadel, while the generals repose in their tents. If irenaeus, St. Augustine, etc. did not set apprentices and proselytes to combat Celsus and the adversaries of the new religion---but early bishops had not five or six thousand pounds a-year.
In short, dear Sir, I wish you not to lose your time; that is, either ,not reply, or set your mark on your answer, that it may always be read with the rest of your works.
(338) Now first collected.
(339) "An Examination of the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Chapters of Mr. Gibbon's History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. By Henry Edward Davis, B.A. of Baliol College, Oxford." He was born in 1756 and died in 1784, at the early age of twenty-seven. He was a native of Windsor, and is believed to have received a present from George the Third for this production.-E.
156. To The Rev. Mr. Cole. Strawberry Hill, Jan. 3, 1779. (page 211)
At last, after ten weeks I have been able to remove hither, in hopes change of air and the frost will assist my recovery; though I am not one of those ancients that forget the register, and think they are to be as well as ever after every fit of illness. As yet I can barely creep about the room in the middle of the day.
I have made my printer (now my secretary) copy out the rest of Mr. Baker's Life; for my own hand will barely serve to write necessary letters, and complains even of them. If you know of any very trusty person passing between London and Cambridge, I would send it to you, but should not care to trust it by the coach, nor to any giddy undergraduate that comes to town to see a play; and, besides, I mean to return you your own notes. I Will Say no more than I have said in my apology to you for the manner in which I have written this life. With regard to Mr. Baker himself, I am confident you will find that I have done full justice to his work and character. i do not expect You to approve the inferences I draw against some other persons; and yet, if his conduct was meritorious, it would not be easy to excuse those who -were active after doing what he would not do. You will not understand this sentence till you have seen the Life.
I hope you have not been untiled or unpaled by the tempest on New-year's morning.(340) I have lost two beautiful elms in a row before my windows here, and had the skylight demolished in town. Lady Pomfret's Gothic house in my street lost one of the stone towers, like those at King's Chapel, and it was beaten through the roof The top of our cross, too, at Ampthill was thrown down, as I hear from Lady Ossory this morning. I remember to have been told that Bishop Kidder and his wife were killed in their bed in the palace of Gloucester in 1709,(341) and yet his heirs were sued for dilapidations. Lord de Ferrers,(342) who deserves his ancient honours, is going to repair the castle at Tamworth, and has flattered me that he will Consult me. He has a violent passion for ancestry--and, consequently, I trust will not stake the patrimony of the Ferrars, Townshends, and Comptons, at the hazard-table. A little pride would not hurt our nobility, cock and hen. Adieu, dear Sir; send me a good account of yourself Yours ever.
(340) On the 1st of January, 1779, London was visited by one of the most violent tempests ever known. Scarcely a public building in the metropolis escaped without damage.-E.
(341) The memorable storm here alluded to took place in November, 1703, and Bishop Kidder and his lady perished in their bed at the episcopal palace at Wells by the fall of a stack of chimneys. They were privately interred in the cathedral; and one of his daughters, dying single, directed by her will a monument to be erected for her parents.-E.
(342) Robert, sixth Earl Ferrers. He had just succeeded to the title, by the death of his brother Washington, vice-admiral of the blue,; who had begun to rebuild the mansion of Stanton Harold, in Leicestershire, according to a plan of his own, and lived to see it nearly finished.-E.
157. To The Hon. H. S. Conway. Arlington Street; Jan. 9, 1779. (page 212)
Your flight to Bath would have much surprised me, if Mr. Churchill, who, I think, heard it from Stanley, had not prepared me for it. Since you was amused, I am glad you went, especially as you escaped being initiated in Mrs. Miller's follies at Batheaston,(343) which you would have mentioned. She would certainly have sent some trapes of a Muse to press you, had she known what good epigrams you write.
I went to Strawberry partly out of prudence, partly from ennui. I thought it best to air myself before I go in and out of hot rooms here, and had my house thoroughly warmed for a week previously, and then only stirred from the red room to the blue on the same floor. I stayed five days, and was neither the better nor the worse for it. I was quite tired with having neither company, books, nor amusement of any kind. Either from the emptiness of the town, or that ten weeks of gout have worn out the patience of all my acquaintance, but I do not see three persons in three days. This gives me but an uncomfortable prospect for my latter days: it is but probable that I may be a cripple in a fit or two more, if I have strength to go through them; and, as that will be long life, one outlives one's acquaintance. I cannot make new acquaintance, nor interest myself at all about the young, except those that belong to me; nor does that go beyond contributing to their pleasures, without having much satisfaction in their conversation-But-one must take every thing as it comes, and make the best of it., I have had a much happier life than I deserve, and than millions that deserve better. I should be very weak if I could not bear the uncomfortableness of old age, when I can afford what comforts it is capable of. How many poor old people have none of them! I am ashamed whenever I am peevish, and recollect that I have fire and servants to help me.
I hear Admiral Keppel is in high spirits with the great respect and zeal expressed for him. In my own opinion, his constitution will not stand the struggle. I am very uneasy too for the Duke of Richmond, who is at Portsmouth, and will be at least as much agitated.
Sir William Meredith has written a large pamphlet, and a very good one. It is to show, that whenever the Grecian republics taxed their dependents, the latter resisted, and shook off the yoke. He has printed but twelve copies: the Duke of Gloucester sent me one of them. There is an anecdote of my father, on the authority of old Jack White, which I doubt. It says, he would not go on with the excise scheme, though his friends advised it, I cannot speak to the particular event, as I was, then at school; but it was more like him to have yielded, against his sentiments, to Mr. Pelham and his candid--or say, plausible--and timid friends. I have heard him say, that he never did give up his opinion to such men but he always repented it. However, the anecdote in the, book would be more to his honour. But what a strange man is Sir William! I suppose, now he has written this book, he will change his opinion, and again be for carrying on the war--or, if he does not know his own mind for two years together, why will he take places, to make every body doubt his honesty?
(343) See ant`e, P. 125, letter 86.-E.
158. To The Rev. Mr. Cole. January 15, 1779. (page 213)
I sent you by Dr. Jacob, as you desired, my Life of Mr. Baker, and with it your own materials. I beg you will communicate my Manuscript to nobody, but if you think it worth your trouble I will consent to your transcribing it; but on one condition, and a silly one for Me to exact, who am as old as You, and broken to pieces, and very unlikely to survive you; but, should so improbable a thing happen, I must exact that you will keep your transcript sealed up, with orders written on the cover to be restored to me in case of an accident, for I should Certainly dislike very much to see it printed without my consent. I should not think of your copying it, if you did not love to transcribe, and sometimes things of as little value as my manuscript. I shall beg to have it returned to me by a safe hand as soon as you can, for I have nothing but the foul copy, which nobody can read, I believe, but I and my secretary.
I am actually printing my Justification about Chatterton, but only two hundred copies to give away; for I hate calling in the whole town to a fray, of which otherwise probably not one thousand persons would ever hear. You shall have a copy as soon as ever it is finished, which my printer says will be in three weeks.
You know my printer is my secretary too: do not imagine I am giving myself airs of a numerous household of officers. I shall be glad to see the letter of Mr. Baker you mentioned. You will perceive two or three notes in my manuscript in a different hand from mine, or that of my amanuensis (still the same officer;) they were added by a person I lent it to, and I have effaced part of the last.
I must finish, lest Dr. Jacob should call, and my parcel not be ready. I hope your sore throat is gone; my gout has returned again a little with taking the air only, but did not stay-- however, I am still confined, and almost ready to remain so, to prevent disappointment. Yours most sincerely.
159. To The Rev. Mr. Cole. Arlington Street, Jan. 28, 1779. (page 214)
I write in as much hurry as you did, dear Sir, and thank you for the motive of yours mine is to prevent your fatiguing yourself in copying my manuscript, for which I am not in the least haste: pray keep it till another safe conveyance presents itself. You may bring the gout, that is, I am sorry to hear, flying about you, into your hand by wearying it.
How can you tell me I may well be cautious about my manuscript and yet advise me to print it?--No-I shall not provoke nests of hornets, till I am dust, as they will be too.
If I dictated tales when ill in my bed, I must have been worse than I thought; for, as I know nothing of it, I must have been light-headed. Mr. Lort was certainly misinformed, though he seems to have told you the story kindly to the honour of my philosophy or spirits-but I had rather have no fame than what I do not deserve.
I am fretful or low-spirited at times in the gout, like other weak old men, and have less to boast than most men. I have some strange things in my drawer, even wilder than the Castle of Otranto, and called Hieroglyphic Tales; but they were not written lately, nor in the gout, nor, whatever they may seem, written when I was out of my senses. I showed one or two of them to a person since my recovery, who may have mentioned them, and occasioned Mr. Lort's misintelligence. I did not at all perceive that the latter looked ill; and hope he is quite recovered. You shall see Chatterton soon. Adieu!
Letter 160To The Rev. Mr. Cole. February 4, 1779. (page 215)
I have received the manuscript, and though you forbid my naming the subject more, I love truth, and truth in a friend so much, that I must tell you, that so far from taking your sincerity ill, I had much rather you should act with your native honest sincerity than say you was pleased with my manuscript. I have always tried as much as is in human nature to divest myself of the self-love of an author; in the present case I had less difficulty than ever, for I never thought my Life of Mr. Baker one of my least indifferent works. You might, believe me, have sent me your long letter; whatever it contained, it would not have made a momentary cloud between us. I have not only friendship, but great gratitude for you, for a thousand instances of kindness; and should detest any writing of mine that made a breach with a friend, and still more, if it could make me forget obligations.
161. To The Rev. Mr. Cole. February 18, 1779. (page 215)
I sent you my Chattertoniad(344) last week,,in hopes it would sweeten your pouting; but I find it has not, or has miscarried; for You have not 'acknowledged the receipt with your usual punctuality.
Have you seen Hasted's new History of Kent?(345) I am sailing through it, but am stopped every minute by careless mistakes. They tell me the author has good materials, but is very negligent, and so I perceive, He has not even given a list of monuments in the churches, which I do not remember in any history of a county; but he is rich in pedigrees; though I suppose they have many errors too, as I have found some in those I am acquainted with- It is unpardonable to be inaccurate in a work in which one nor expects nor demands any thing but fidelity.(346)
We have a great herald arising in a very noble race, Lord de Ferrers. I hope to make him a Gothic architect too, for he is going to repair Tamworth Castle and flatters me that I shall give him sweet counseil! I enjoin him to kernellare. Adieu! Yours ever.
(344) "A Letter to the Editor of the Miscellanies of Thomas Chatterton." Strawberry Hill, 1779, 8vo.-E.
(345) "The History and Topographical Survey of the County of Kent; by Edward Hasted," four volumes, folio, 1778-1799. A second and improved edition, in twelve volumes, octavo, appeared in 1797-1801. Mr. Hasted died in 1812 at the age of eighty.-E.
(346) in a memoir of himself, which, he drew up for the Gentleman's Magazein, to be published after his death, he says, "his laborious History of Kent took him more than forty years; during the whole series of which he spared neither pains nor expense to bring it to maturity."-E.
162. To Sir David Dalrymple.(347) Arlington Street, March 12, 1779. (page 216)
I have received this moment from your bookseller, Sir, the valuable present of the second volume of your "Annals," and beg leave to return you my grateful thanks for so agreeable a gift, of which I can only have taken a look enough to lament that you do not intend to continue the work. Repeated and severe attacks of the gout forbid my entertaining- visions of pleasures to come; but though I might not have the advantage of your labours, Sir, I wish too well to posterity not to be sorry that you check your hand.
Lord Buchan did me the honour lately of consulting me on portraits of illustrious Scots. I recollect that there is at Windsor a very good portrait of your countryman Duns Scotus,(348) whose name struck me on just turning over your volume. A good print was made from that picture some years ago, but I believe it is not very scarce: as it is not worth while to trouble his lordship with another letter for that purpose only, may I take the liberty, Sir, of begging you to mention it to his lordship?
(347) Now first collected.
(348) Granger considers the portrait of Windsor not to be genuine. Of Duns Scotus, he says, "It requires one half of a man's life to read the works of this profound doctor, and the , other to understand his subtleties. His printed works are in twelve volumes in folio! His manuscripts are sleeping in Merton College, Oxford. Voluminous works frequently arise from the ignorance and confused ideas of the authors: if angels, says Mr. Norris, were writers, we should have few folios. He was the head of the sect of schoolmen called scotists. He died in 1308."-E.
163. To The Rev. Mr. Cole. Strawberry Hill, March 28, 1779. (page 216)
Your last called for no answer; and I have so little to tell you, that I only write to-day to avoid the air of remissness. I came hither on Friday, for this last week has been too hot to stay in London; but March is arrived this morning with his northeasterly malice, and I suppose will assert his old-style claim to the third of April. The poor infant apricots will be the victims to that Herod of the almanack. I have been much amused with new travels through Spain by a Mr. Swinburne(349)--at least with the Alhambra, of the inner parts of which there are two beautiful prints. The Moors were the most polished, and had the most taste of any people in the Gothic ages; and I hate the knave Ferdinand and his bigoted Queen for destroying them. These new travels are simple, and do tell you a little more than late voyagers, by whose accounts one would think there was nothing in Spain but muleteers and fandangos. In truth, there does not seem to be much worth seeing but prospects; and those, unless I were a bird, I would never visit, when the accommodations are so wretched.
Mr. Cumberland has given the town a masque, called Calypso,(350) which is a prodigy of dulness. Would you believe, that such a sentimental Writer would be so gross as to make cantharides one of the ingredients of a love-potion, for enamouring Telemachus? If you think I exaggerate, here are the lines:
"To these, the hot Hispanian fly Shall bid his languid pulse beat high."
Proteus and Antiope are Minerva's missioners for securing the prince's virtue, and in recompense they are married and crowned king and queen!
I have bought at Hudson's sale a fine design of a chimney-piece, by Holbein, for Henry VIII. If I had a room left I would erect. It is certainly not so Gothic as that in my Holbein room; but there is a great deal of taste for that bastard style; perhaps it was executed at Nonsuch. I do intend, under Mr. Essex's inspection, to begin my offices next spring. It is late in my day, I confess, to return to brick and mortar but I shall be glad to perfect my plan, or the' next possessor will marry my castle to a Doric stable. There is a perspective through two or three rooms in the Alhambra, that might easily be improved into Gothic, though there seems but small affinity between them; and they might be finished within with Dutch tiles, and painting, or bits of ordinary marble, as there must be gilding. Mosaic seems to be their chief ornaments, for walls, ceilings, and floors. Fancy must sport in the furniture, and mottos might be gallant, and would be very Arabesque. I would have a mixture of colours, but with a strict attention to harmony and taste; and some one should predominate, as supposing it the favourite colour of the lady who was sovereign of the knight's affections who built the house. Carpets are classically Mahometans, and fountains--but, alas! our climate till last summer was never romantic! Were I not so old, I would at least build a Moorish novel-for you see my head Turns on Granada-and by taking the most picturesque parts of the Mahometan and Catholic religions, and with the mixture of African and Spanish names, one might make something very agreeable--at least I will not give the hint to Mr. Cumberland. Adieu! Yours ever.
(349) "Travels through Spain in the Years 1775 and 1776; in which several Monuments of Roman and Moorish Architecture are illustrated by accurate Drawings taken on the spot. By Henry Swinburne." London, 1779, 4to. Mr. Swinburne also published, in 1783-5 his "Travels in the Two Sicilies during the Years 1777-8-9, and 1780." This celebrated traveller was the youngest son of Sir John Swinburne, of Capheaton, Northumberland; the long-established seat of that ancient Roman Catholic family. Pecuniary embarrassments, arising from the marriage of his daughter to Paul Benfield, Esq. and consequent involvement in the misfortunes of that adventurer, induced him to obtain a Place in the newly-ceded settlement of Trinidad, where he died in 1803.-E.
(350) "Calypso" was brought out at Covent-Garden theatre, but was performed only a few nights. \ It was imprudently ushered in by a prelude, in which the author treated the newspaper editors as a set of unprincipled fellows.-E.
164. To Edward Gibbon, Esq.(351) (1779.] (page 218)
The penetration, solidity, and taste, that made you the first of historians, dear Sir, prevent my being surprised at your being the best writer of controversial pamphlets too.(352) I have read you with more precipitation than such a work deserved, but I could not disobey you and detain it. Yet even in that hurry I could discern, besides a thousand beauties and strokes of wit, the inimitable eighty-third page, and the conscious dignity that you maintain throughout, over your monkish antagonists. When you are so superior in argument, it would look like insensibility to the power of your reasoning, to select transient passages for commendation; and yet I must mention one that pleased me particularly, from the delicacy of the severity, and from its novelty too; it is, bold is not the word. This is the feathered arrow of Cupid, that is more formidable than the club of Hercules. I need not specify thanks, when I prove how much I have been pleased. Your most obliged.
(351) Now first collected.
(352) Gibbon's celebrated "Vindication" of the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Chapters of his History appeared early in the year 1779. "I adhered," he says in his Memoirs, "to the wise resolution of trusting myself and my writing to the candour of the public, till Mr. Davis of Oxford presumed to attack, not the faith but the fidelity of the historian. My Vindication, expressive of less anger than contempt, amused for a moment the busy and idle metropolis; and the most rational Part of the laity, and even of the clergy, appear to have been satisfied of my innocence and accuracy I would not print it in quarto, lest it should be bound and preserved with the history itself At the distance of twelve years, I calmly affirm my judgment of Davis, Chelsum, etc. A victory over such antagonists was a sufficient humiliation. They, however were rewarded in this world, Poor Chelsum was, indeed, neglected; and I dare not boast the making Dr. Watson a bishop: he is a prelate of a large mind and a liberal spirit: but I enjoyed the pleasure of giving a royal pension to Mr. Davis, and of collating Dr. Althorpe to an archiepiscopal living."-E.
165. To The Rev. Mr. Cole. Arlington Street, April 12, 1779. (page 218)
As your gout was so concise, I will not condole on it, but I am sorry you are liable to it if you do but take the air. Thank you for telling me of the vendible curiosities at the Alderman's. For St. Peter's portrait to hang to a fairie's watch, I shall not think of it, both as I do not believe it very like, and as it is composed of invisible Writing, for which my eyes are not young enough. In truth, I have almost left off making purchases: I have neither room for any thing more, nor inclination for them, as I reckon every thing very dear when One has so little time to enjoy it. However, I cannot say but the plates by Rubens do tempt me a little--yet, as I do not care to, buy even Rubens in a poke, I should wish to know if the Alderman would let me see. if it were but one. Would he be persuaded? I would pay for the carriage, though I should not buy them.
Lord de Ferrers will be infinitely happy with the sight of the pedigree, and I will certainly tell him of it, and how kind you are.
Strype's account, or rather Stow's, of Richard's person is very remarkable--but I have done with endeavouring at truth. Weeds grow more naturally than what one plants. I hear your Cantabrigians are still unshaken Chattertonians. Many men are about falsehood like girls about the first man that makes love to them: a handsomer, a richer, or even a sincerer lover cannot eradicate the first impression--but a sillier swain, or a sillier legend, sometimes gets into the head of a miss or the learned man, and displaces the antecedent folly. Truth's kingdom is not of this world.
I do not know whether our clergy are growing Mahometans or not: they certainly are not what they profess themselves--but as you and I should not agree perhaps in assigning the same defects to them, I will not enter on a subject which I have promised you to drop. All I allude to now is, the shocking murder of Miss Ray(353) by a divine. In my own opinion we are growing more fit for Bedlam, than for Mahomet's paradise. The poor criminal in question, I am persuaded, is mad--and the misfortune is, the law does not know how to define the shades of madness; and thus there -are twenty outpensioners of Bedlam, for the one that is confined. You, dear Sir, have chosen a wiser path to happiness by depending on yourself for amusement. Books and past ages draw one into no scrapes, and perhaps it is best not to know much of men till they are dead. I wish you health -,You want nothing else. I am, dear Sir, yours most truly.
(353) On the 7th of April, Miss Reay, who had been the mistress of Lord Sandwich for twenty years, by whom she was the mother of many children, was shot, on her leaving Covent-Garden theatre, by the Rev. James Hackman, who had the living of Wiverton, in Norfolk, a young man not half her age, who had imbibed a violent passion for her, whom he first met at Lord Sandwich's seat at Hinchinbroke, where he had been frequently invited to dine while commanding a recruiting party at Huntingdon; he being, previously to his entering the church, a lieutenant in the 68th regiment of foot. Having shot Miss Reay, he fired a pistol at himself; but, being only wounded by it, he was tried at the Old Bailey, convicted, and executed.-E.
166. To The Rev. Mr. Cole. Arlington Street, April 20, 1779. (page 219)
Dear Sir, I have received the plates very safely, but hope You nor the Alderman,(354) will take it ill that I return them. They are extremely pretty, and uncommonly well preserved; but I am sure they are not by Rubens, nor I believe after his designs, for I am persuaded they are older than his time. In truth, I have a great many Of the same sort, and do not wish for more. I shall send them back on Thursday by the Fly, and will beg you to inquire after them; and I trust they will arrive as safely as they did to Yours ever.
(354) Alderman John Boydell, an English engraver; distinguished as an encourager of the fine arts. In 1790 he held the office of Lord Mayor of London, and died in 1804.-E.
167. To The Rev. Mr. Cole. April 23, 1779. (page 220)
I ought not to trouble you so often when you are not well; but that is the very cause of my writing now. You left off abruptly from disorder, and therefore I wish to know it is gone. The plates I hope got home safe. They are pretty, especially the reverses; but the drawing in general is bad.
Pray tell me what you mean by a priced catalogue of the pictures at Houghton. Is it a printed one? if it is, where is it to be had?--odd questions from me, and which I should not wish to have mentioned as coming from me. I have been told to-day that they are actually sold to the Czarina--sic transit! mortifying enough, were not every thing transitory! we must recollect that our griefs and pains are so, as well as our joys and glories; and, by balancing the account, a grain of comfort is to be extracted! Adieu! I shall be heartily glad to receive a better account of you.
168. To Mrs. Abington.(355) (1779.] (page 220)
Mr. Walpole cannot express how much he is mortified that he cannot accept of Mrs. Abington's obliging invitation, as he had engaged company to dine with him on Sunday at Strawberry-hill; whom he would put off, if not foreigners who are leaving England. Mr. Walpole hopes, however, that this accident will not prevent an acquaintance, which his admiration of Mrs. Abington'S genius has made him long desire; and which he hopes to cultivate at Strawberry Bill, when her leisure will give him leave to trouble her with an invitation.
(355) Now first collected.
169. To The Rev. Mr. Cole. Arlington Street, May 21, 1779. (page 221)
As Mr. Essex has told me that you still continue out of order, I am impatient to hear from yourself how you are. Do send me a line: I hope it will be a satisfactory one. you know that Dr. Ducarel has published a translation of a History of the Abbey of Bec! There is a pretty print to it: and one very curious circumstance, at least valuable to us disciples of Alma Mater Etonensis. The ram-hunting was derived from the manor of Wrotham in Norfolk, which formerly belonged to Bec, and being forfeited, together with other alien priories, was bestowed by Henry VI. on our college. I do not repine at reading any book from which I can learn a single fact that I wish to know. For the lives of the abbots, they were, according to the author, all pinks of piety and holiness but there are few other facts amusing, especially with regard to the customs of those savage times-excepting that the Empress Matilda was buried in a bull's hide, and afterwards had a tomb covered with silver. There is another new book called "Sketches from Nature," in two volumes, by Mr. G. Keate, in which I found one fact too, that, if authentic, is worth knowing. The work is an imitation of Sterne, and has a sort of merit, though nothing that arrives at originality.
For the foundation of the church of Reculver, he quotes a manuscript said to be written by a Dominican friar of Canterbury, and preserved at Louvain. The story is evidently metamorphosed into a novel. and has very little of an antique air; but it affirms that the monkish author attests the beauty of Richard III. This is very absurd, if invention has nothing to do with the story; and therefore one should suppose it genuine. I have desired Dodsley to ask Mr. Keate, if there truly exists such, a manuscript: if there does, I own I wish he had printed it rather than his own production; for I am with Mr. Gray, "that any man living may make a book worth reading, if he will but set down with truth what he has seen or heard, no matter whether the book is well written or not." Let those who can write, glean.
170. To The Hon. H. S. Conway. Arlington Street, May 22, 1779. (page 221)
If you hear of us no oftener than we of you, you will be as much behindhand in news as my Lady Lyttelton. We have seen a traveller that saw you in your island,(356) but it sounds like hearing of Ulysses. Well! we must be content. YOU are not only not dethroned, but owe the safety of your dominions to your own skill in fortification. if we do not hear of your extending your conquests, why, is it not less than all our modern heroes have done, whom prophets have foretold and gazettes celebrated--or who have foretold and celebrated themselves. Pray be content to be cooped up in an island that has no neighbours, when the Howes and Clintons and Dunmores and Burgoynes and Campbells are not yet got beyond the great river-- Inquiry!(357) To-day's papers say, that the little Prince of Orange(358) is to invade you again; but we trust Sir James Wallace has clipped his wings so close, that they will not grow again this season, though he is so ready to fly.
Nothing material has happened since I wrote last-so, as every moment of a civil war is precious, every one has been turned to the interest of diversion. There have been three masquerades, an Installation, and the ball of the knights at the Haymarket this week; not to mention Almack's festino, Lady Spencer's, Ranelagh and Vauxhall, operas and plays. The Duchess of Bolton too saw masks--so many, that the floor gave way, and the company in the dining-room were near falling on the heads of those in the parlour, and exhibiting all that has not yet appeared in Doctors' Commons. At the knights' ball was such a profusion of strawberries, that people could hardly get into the supper-room. I could tell you more, but I do not love to exaggerate. Lady Ailesbury told me this morning that Lord Bristol has got a calf with two feet to each leg--I am convinced it is by the Duchess of Kingston, who has got two of every thing where others have but one.(359) Adieu! I am going to sup with Mrs. Abington--and hope Mrs. Clive will not hear of it.
(356) Mr. Conway was now at his government of Jersey.
(357) The parliamentary inquiry which took place in the House of Commons on the conduct of the American war.
(358) The Prince of Nassau, who had commanded the attack upon Jersey, claiming relationship to the great house of Nassau Mr. Walpole calls him the "little Prince of Orange." Gibbon, in a letter to Mr. Holroyd, of the 7th, says, "You have heard of the Jersey invasion; every body praises Arbuthnot's decided spirit. Conway went last night to throw himself into the island."-E.
(359) "Do you know, my lord," said the Duchess, then Miss Chudleigh, to Lord Chesterfield, "the world says I have had twins!" "Does it?" said his lordship; "I make a point of believing only one-half of what it says."-E.
171. To The Rev. Mr. Cole. Strawberry Hill, June 2, 1779. (page 222)
I am most sincerely rejoiced, dear Sir, that you find yourself at all better, and trust it is an omen of farther amendment. Mr. Essex surprised me by telling me, that you, who keep yourself so warm and so numerously clothed, do yet sometimes, if the sun shines, sit and write in your garden for hours at a time. It is more than I should readily do, whose habitudes are so very different from yours. Your complaints seem to demand perspiration--but I do not venture to advise. I understand no constitution but my own, and should kill Milo, if I managed him as I treat myself. I sat in a window on Saturday, with the east wind blowing on my neck till near two in the morning-and it seems to have done me good, for I am better within these two days than I have been these six months. My spirits have been depressed, and my nerves so aspen, that the smallest noise disturbed me. To-day I do not feel a complaint; which is something at near sixty-two.
I don't know whether I have not misinformed you, nor am sure it was Dr. Ducarel who translated the account of the Abbey of Bec-- he gave it to Mr. Lort; but I am not certain he ever published it. You was the first that notified to me the fifth volume of the Archaeologia--I am not much more edified than usual; but there are three pretty prints of Reginal Seats. Mr. Pegge's tedious dissertation, which he calls a brief one, about the foolish legend of St. George, is despicable: all his arguments are equally good for proving the existence of the dragon. What diversion might laughers make of the society! Dolly Pentraeth, the old woman of Mousehole, and Mr. Penneck's nurse. p. 81, would have furnished Foote with two personages for a farce. The same grave dissertation on patriarchal customs seems to have as much to do with British antiquities, as the Lapland: witches that sell wind--and pray what business has the Society With Roman inscriptions in Dalmatia! I am most pleased With the account of Nonsuch, imperfect as it is: it appears to have been but a villa, and not considerable for a royal one. You see lilacs were then a novelty. Well, I am glad they publish away. The vanity of figuring in these repositories will make many persons contribute their manuscripts, and every now and then something valuable Will come to light, which its own intrinsic merit might not have saved. \ I know nothing more of Houghton. I should certainly be glad to have the priced catalogue; and if you will lend me yours, my printer shall transcribe it-but I am in no hurry. I Conceive faint hopes, as the sale is not concluded: however, I take care not to flatter myself.
I think I told you I had purchased, at Mr. Ives's sale, a handsome coat in painted glass, of Hobart impaling Boleyn--but I can find no such match in my pedigree--yet I have heard that Blickling belonged to Ann Boleyn's father. Pray reconcile all this to me. '
Lord de Ferrers is to dine here on Saturday; and I have got to treat him with an account of ancient painting, formerly in the hall of Tammworth Castle; they are mentioned in Warton's Observations on the Fairy Queen, Vol i. p. 43.
Do not put yourself' to pain to answer this--only be assured I shall be happy to know when you are able to write with ease. You must leave Your cloister, if Your transcribing leaves you. Believe me, dear Sir, Ever most truly.
172. To The Rev. Dr. Lort. Strawberry Hill, June 4, 1779. (page 224)
I am sorry, dear Sir, you could not let me have the pleasure of your company; but, I own, you have partly, not entirely, made me amends by the sight of your curious manuscript, which I return you, with your other book of inaugurations.
The sight of the manuscript was particularly welcome to me, because the long visit of Henry VI. and his uncle Gloucester, to St. Edmund's Bury, accounts for those rare altar tablets that I bought at Mr. Ives's sale, on which are incontestably the portraits of Duke Humphrey, Cardinal Beaufort, and the same archbishop that is in my Marriage of Henry VI. I know the house of Lancaster were patrons of St. Edmund's Bury; but so long a visit is demonstration.
The fourth person on my panels is unknown. Over his head is a coat of arms. but may be that of W. Curteys the abbot, or the alderman, as he is in scarlet. His figure and the Duke's are far superior to the other two, and worthy of a good Italian master. The Cardinal and the Archbishop are in the dry hard manner of the age. I wish you would call and look at them; they are at Mr. Bonus's in Oxford-road; the two prelates are much damaged. I peremptorily enjoined Bonus to repair only, and not to repaint them; and thus, by putting him out of his way, I have put him so much out of humour too, that he has kept them these two years, and not finished them yet. I design them for the four void spaces in my chapel, on the sides of the shrine. The Duke of Gloucester's face is so like, though younger, that it proves I guessed right at his figure in my Marriage. The tablets came out of the abbey of Bury; were procured by old Peter Le Neve, Norroy; and came by his widow's marriage to Tom Martin, at whose sale Mr. Ives bought them. We have very few princely portraits so ancient, so authentic, and none so well painted as the Duke and fourth person. These were the insides of the doors, which I had split into two, and value them extremely. This account I think will be more satisfactory to you than notes.
Pray tell me how you like the pictures when you have examined them. I shall search in Edmondson's new Vocabulary of Arms for the coat which contains three bulls' heads on six pieces; but the colours are either white and black. or the latter is become so by time. I hope you are not going out of town yet; I shall probably be there some day in next week.
I see advertised a book something in the way of your inaugurations, called Le Costume; do you know any thing of it? Can YOU tell me who is the author of the Second Anticipation on the Exhibition? Is not it Barry the painter?
173. To The Hon. H. S. Conway. Strawberry Hill, Saturday, June 5, 1779. (page 225)
I write to you more seldom than I am disposed to do, from having nothing positive to tell you, and from being unwilling to say and unsay every minute something that is reported positively. The confident assertions of the victory over D'Estaing are totally vanished-and they who invented them, now declaim as bitterly against Byron, as if he had deceived them-and as they did against Keppel. This day se'nnight there was a great alarm about Ireland-which was far from being all invention, though not an absolute insurrection, as it was said." The case, I believe, was this:-The court, in order to break the volunteer army established by the Irish themselves, endeavoured to persuade a body in Lady Blayney's county of Monaghan to enlist in the militia--which they took indignantly. They said, they had great regard for Lady Blayney and Lord Clermont; but to act under them, would be acting under the King, and that was by no means their intention. There have since been motions for inquiries what steps the ministers have taken to satisfy the Irish-and these they have imprudently rejected-which will not tend to pacification. The ministers have been pushed too on the article of Spain, and could not deny that all negotiation is at an end--though they will not own farther. However, the Spanish ambassador is much out of humour. From Paris they write confidently of the approaching declaration;(360) and Lord Sandwich, I hear, has said in a very mixed company, that it was folly not to expect it. There is another million asked, and given on a vote of credit; and Lord North has boasted of such mines for next year,,that one would think he believed next year would never Come.
The Inquiry(361) goes on, and Lord Harrington did honour himself and Burgoyne. Barr`e and Governor Johnstone have had warm words,(362) and Burke has been as frantic for the Roman Catholics as Lord George Gordon against them. The Parliament, it is said, is to rise on the 21st.
YOU Will not collect from all this that our prospect clears up. I fear there is not more discretion in the treatment of Ireland than of America. The court seems to-be infatuated and to think that nothing is of any consequence but a majority in Parliament-though they have totally lost all power but that of provoking. Fortunate it had been for the- King and kingdom, had the court had no majority for these six years! America had still been ours -and all the lives and all the millions we have squandered! A majority that has lost thirteen provinces by bullying and vapouring, and the most childish menaces, will be a brave countermatch for France and Spain, and a rebellion in Ireland! In short, it is plain that there is nothing a majority in Parliament can do, but outvote a minority; and by their own accounts one would think they could not even do that. I saw a paper t'other day that began with this Iriscism, "As the minority have lost us thirteen provinces," etc. I know nothing the minority have done, or been suffered to do, but restore the Roman Catholic religion-and that too was by the desire of the court.
This is however the present style. They announced with infinite applause a new production of Tickell:--it has appeared, and is a most paltry performance. It is called the Cassette Verte of M. de Sartine, and pretends to be his correspondence with the opposition. Nay, they are so pitifully mean as to laugh at Dr. Franklin, who has such thorough reason to sit and laugh at them. What triumph it must be to him to see a miserable pamphlet all the revenge they can take! There is another, still duller, called Opposition Mornings, in which you are lugged in. In truth, it is a compliment to any man to except him out of the number of those that have contributed to the shocking disgraces inflicted on this undone country. When Lord Chatham was minister, he never replied to abuse but by a victory.
I know no private news: I have been here ever since Tuesday, enjoying my tranquillity, as much as an honest man can do who sees his country ruined. It is just such a period as makes philosophy wisdom. There are great moments when every man is called on to exert himself-but when folly, infatuation, delusion, incapacity, and profligacy fling a nation away, and it concurs itself, and applauds its destroyers, a man who has lent no hand to the mischief, and can neither prevent nor remedy the mass of evils, is fully justified in sitting aloof and beholding the tempest rage, with silent scorn and indignant compassion. Nay, I have, I own, some comfortable reflections. I rejoice that there is still a great continent of Englishmen who will remain free and independent, and who laugh at the impotent majorities of a prostitute Parliament. I care not whether General Burgoyne and Governor Johnstone cross over and figure in, and support or oppose; nor whether Mr. Burke, or the superior of the Jesuits, is high commissioner to the kirk of Scotland. My ideas are such as I have always had, and are too plain and simple to comprehend modern confusions; and, therefore, they suit with those of few men. What will be the issue of this chaos, I know not, and, probably, shall not see. I do see with satisfaction, that what was meditated has failed by the grossest folly; and when one has escaped the worst, lesser evils must be endured with patience.
After this dull effusion, I will divert you with a story that made me laugh this morning till I cried. You know my Swiss David, and his incomprehensible pronunciation. He came to me, and said, "Auh! dar is Meses Ellis wants some of your large flags to put in her great O." With much ado, I found out that Mrs. Ellis had sent for leave to take up some flags out of my meadow for her grotto.
I hope in a few days to see Lady Ailesbury and Miss Jennings here; I have writ to propose it. What are your intentions? Do you stay till you have made your island impregnable? I doubt it will be our only one that will be so.
(360) On the breaking out of the war between this country and America, Spain had offered to mediate between them; but, receiving a refusal, she at once declared herself a principal in the war and ready to fulfil the terms of the family compact.-E.
(361) The Inquiry into the Conduct of the American war.
(362) In the course of a debate in the House of Commons, on the 3d of June, Governor Johnstone told Colonel Barr`e, that he was making a scaramouch of himself. The Colonel got up to demand an explanation, but the Speaker put an end to the altercation.-E.
174. To The Hon. H. S. Conway. Strawberry Hill, June 16, 1779. (page 227)
Your Countess was here last Thursday, and received a letter from you, that told us how slowly you receive ours. When you will receive this I cannot guess; but it dates a new era, which you with reason did not care to look at as possible. In a word, behold a Spanish war! I must detail a little to increase your wonder. I heard here the day before yesterday that it was likely; and that night received a letter from Paris, telling me (it was of the 6th) that Monsieur de Beauveau was going, they knew not whither, at the head of twenty-five thousand men, with three lieutenant-generals and six or eight mar`echaux de camp under him. Yesterday I went to town, and Thomas Walpole happened to call on me. He, who used to be informed early, did not believe a word either of a Spanish war or a French expedition. I saw some other persons in the evening as ignorant. At night I went to sup at Richmond-house. The Duke said the Brest fleet was certainly sailed, and had got the start of ours by twelve days: that Monsieur de Beauveau was on board with a large sum of money, and with white and red cockades; and that there would certainly be a Spanish war. He added, that the Opposition were then pressing in the House of Commons to have the Parliament continue sitting, and urging to know if we were not at the eve of a Spanish war; but the ministers persisted in the prorogation ,for to-morrow or Friday, and would not answer on Spain.
I said I would make you wonder-But no-Why should the Parliament continue to sit? Are not the ministers and the Parliament the same thing? And how has either House shown that it has any talent for war?
The Duke of Richmond does not guess whither the Brest fleet is gone. He thinks, if to Ireland, we should have known it by this time. He has heard that the Prince of Beauveau has said he was going on an expedition that would be glorious in the eyes of posterity. asked, if that might not mean Gibraltar? The Duke doubts, but hopes it, as he thinks it no wise measure on their side: yet he was very melancholy, as you will be, on this heavy accession to our distresses.
Well! here we are, aris et focis and all at stake! What can we be meaning? Unable to conquer America before she was assisted--scarce able to keep France at bay--are we a match for both, and Spain too? What can be our view? nay, what can be Our expectation? I sometimes think we reckon it will be more creditable to be forced by France and Spain to give up America, than to have the merit with the latter of doing it with grace.-But, as Cato says,
"I'm weary of conjectures--this must end them;"
that is, the sword:--and never, I believe, did a Country Plunge itself into such difficulties step by step, and for six years, together, without once recollecting that each foreign war rendered the object of the civil war more unattainable; and that in both the foreign wars we have not an object in prospect. Unable to recruit our remnant of an army in America, are we to make conquests on France and Spain? They may choose their attacks: we can scarce choose what we will defend.
Ireland, they say, is more temperate than was expected. That is some consolation-yet many fear the Irish will be tempted to unite with America, which would throw all that trade into their convenient harbours; and I own I have apprehensions that the Parliament's rising without taking a step in their favour may offend them. Surely at least we have courageous ministers. I thought my father a stout man:--he had not a tithe of their spirit.
The town has wound up the season perfectly in character by a f`ete at the Pantheon by subscription. Le Texier managed it; but it turned out sadly. The company was first shut into the galleries to look down on the supper, then let to descend to it. Afterwards they were led into the subterraneous apartment, which was laid with mould, and planted with trees, and crammed with nosegays: but the fresh earth, and the dead leaves, and the effluvia of breaths made such a stench and moisture, that they were suffocated; and when they remounted, the legs and wings of chickens, and remnants Of ham (for the supper was not removed) poisoned them more. A druid in an arbour distributed verses to the ladies; then the Baccelli(363) and the dancers of the Opera danced; and then danced the company; and then it being morning, and the candles burnt out, the windows were opened; and then the stewed-danced assembly were such shocking figures, that they fled like ghosts as they looked.--I suppose there will be no more balls unless the French land, and then we shall show we do not mind it.
Thus I have told you all I know. You will ponder over these things in your little distant island, when we have forgotten them. There is another person, one Doctor Franklin, who, I fancy, is not sorry that we divert ourselves so well. Yours ever.
(363) After the departure of Mademoiselle Heinel, no dancing so much delighted the frequenters of the Opera as that of Mademoiselle Baccelli and M. Vestris le jeune.-E.
175. To The Hon. George Hardinge.(364) Strawberry Hill, July 4, 1779. (page 229)
I have now received the drawings of Grignan, and know not how to express my satisfaction and gratitude but by a silly witticism that is like the studied quaintness of the last age. In short, they are so much more beautiful than I expected, that I am not surprised at your having surprised me by exceeding even what I expected from your well-known kindness to me; they are charmingly executed, and with great taste. I own too that Grignan is grander, and in a much finer situation, than I had imagined; as I concluded that the witchery of Madame de S`evign`e's ideas and style had spread the same leaf-gold over places with which she gilded her friends. All that has appeared of them since the publication of her letters has lowered them. A single letter of her daughter, that to Paulina, with a description of the Duchess of Bourbon's toilette, is worthy of the mother. Paulina's own letters contain not a little worth reading: one just divines that she might have written well if she had had any thing to write about (which, however, would not have signified to her grandmother.) Coulanges was a silly good-humoured glutton, that flattered a rich widow for her dinners. His wife was sensible, but dry, and rather peevish at growing old. Unluckily nothing more has come to light of Madame de S`evign`e's son, whose short letters in the collection I am almost profane enough to prefer to his mother's; and which makes me astonished that she did not love his wit, so unaffected, and so congenial to her own, in preference to the eccentric and sophisticated reveries of her sublime and ill-humoured daughter. Grignan alone maintains its dignity, and shall be consecrated here among other monuments of that bewitching period, and amongst which one loves to lose oneself, and drink oblivion of an era so very unlike; for the awkward bigots to despotism of our time have not Madame de S`evign`e's address, nor can paint an Indian idol with an hundred hands as graceful as the Apollo of the Belvidere. When will you come and accept my thanks? will Wednesday next suit you? But do you know that I must ask you not to leave your gown behind You, which indeed I never knew you put on Willingly, but to come in it. I shall want your protection at Westminster Hall. Yours most cordially.
(364) Son of Nicholas Hardinge, Esq. one of the joint secretaries of the treasury, and member for the borough of Eye. He was educated at Eton school, and finished his studies at Trinity College, Cambridge, where Dr. Watson was his tutor, He was called to the bar in 1769, and was subsequently appointed solicitor- general to the Queen. in 1787, he was made a Welsh judge, and died in 1816. In 1818, the works of this clever and eccentric scholar were published, with an account of his life, by Mr. John Nichols.-E.
176. To The Countess Of Ailesbury. Saturday night, July 10, 1779. (page 230)
I could not thank your ladyship before the post went out to-day, as I was getting into my chaise to go and dine at Carshalton with my cousin Thomas Walpole when I received your kind inquiry about my eye. It is quite well again, and I hope the next attack of the gout will be any where rather than in that quarter.
I did not expect Mr. Conway would think of returning just now. As you have lost both Mrs. Damer and Lady William Campbell, I do not see why your ladyship should not go to Goodwood.
The Baroness's increasing peevishness does not surprise me. When people will not weed their own minds, they are apt to be overrun with nettles. She knows nothing of politics, and no wonder talks nonsense about them. It is silly to wish three nations had but one neck; but it is ten times more absurd to act as if it was so, which the government has done;--ay, and forgetting, too, that it has not a scimitar large enough to sever that neck, which they have in effect made one. It is past the time, Madam, of making Conjectures. How can one guess whither France and Spain will direct a blow that is in their option? I am rather inclined to think that they will have patience to ruin us in detail. Hitherto France and America have carried their points by that manoeuvre. Should there be an engagement at sea, and the French and Spanish fleets, by their great superiority, have the advantage, one knows not what might happen. Yet, though there are such large preparations making on the French coast, I do not much expect a serious invasion, as they are sure they can do us more damage by a variety of other attacks, where we can make little resistance. Gibraltar and Jamaica can but be the immediate objects of Spain. Ireland is much worse guarded than this island:--nay, we must be undone by our expense, should the summer pass without any attempt. My cousin thinks they will try to destroy Portsmouth and Plymouth--but I have seen nothing in the present French ministry that looks like bold enterprise. We are much more adventurous, that set every thing to the hazard: but there are such numbers of baronesses that both talk and act with passion, that one would think the nation had lost its senses. Every thing has miscarried that has been undertaken, and the worse we succeed, the more is risked;--yet the nation is not angry! How can one conjecture during such a delirium? I sometimes almost think I must be in the wrong to be of so contrary an opinion to most men--yet, when every Misfortune that has happened had been foretold by a few, why should I not think I have been in the right? Has not almost every single event that has been announced as prosperous proved a gross falsehood, and often a silly one? Are we not at this moment assured that Washington cannot possibly amass an army of above 8000 men! and yet Clinton, with 20,000 men, and with the hearts, as we are told, too, of three parts of the colonies, dares not show his teeth without the walls of New York? Can I be in the wrong in not believing what is so contradictory to my senses We could not Conquer America when it stood alone; then France supported it, and we did not mend the matter. To make it still easier, we have driven Spain into the alliance. Is this wisdom? Would it be presumption, even if one were single, to think that we must have the worst in such a contest? Shall I be like the mob, and expect to conquer France and Spain, and then thunder upon America? Nay, but the higher mob do not expect such success. They would not be so angry at the house of Bourbon, if not morally certain that those kings destroy all our passionate desire and expectation of conquering America. We bullied, and threatened, and begged, and nothing would do. Yet independence was still the word. Now we rail at the two monarchs--and when they have banged us, we shall sue to them as humbly as We did to the Congress. All this my senses, such as they are, tell me has been and will be the case. What is worse, all Europe is of the same opinion; and though forty thousand baronesses may be ever SO angry, I venture to prophesy that we shall make but a very foolish figure whenever we are so lucky as to obtain a peace; and posterity, that may have prejudices of its own, will still take the liberty to pronounce, that its ancestors were a woful set of politicians from the year 1774 to--I wish I knew when.
If I might advise, I would recommend Mr. Burrell to command the fleet in the room of Sir Charles Hardy. The fortune of the Burrells is powerful enough to baffle calculation. Good night, Madam!
P. S. I have not written to Mr. Conway since this day sevennight, not having a teaspoonful of news to send him. I will beg your ladyship to tell him so.
177. To The Rev. Mr. Cole. Strawberry Hill, July 12, 1779. (page 231)
I am concerned, dear sir, that you gave yourself the trouble of transcribing the catalogue and prices, which I received last night, and for which I am exceedingly obliged to you. Partial as I am to the pictures at Houghton, I confess I think them much overvalued. My father's whole collection, of which alone he had preserved the prices, cost but 40,000 pounds; and after his death there were three sales of pictures, among which were all the whole-lengths of Vandyke but three, which had been sent to Houghton, but not fitting any of the ,spaces left, came back to town. Few of the rest sold were very fine, but no doubt Sir Robert had paid as dear for many of them; as purchasers are not perfect connoisseurs at first. Many of the valuations are not only exorbitant, but injudicious. They who made the estimate seem to have considered the rarity of the hands more than the excellence. Three-The, Magi's Offering, by Carlo Maratti, as it is called, and two supposed Paul Veronese,-are very indifferent copies, and yet all are roundly valued, and the first ridiculously. I do not doubt of another picture in the collection but the Last Supper, by Raphael, and yet this is set down at 500 pounds. I miss three pictures, at least they are not set down, the Sir Thomas Wharton, and Laud and Gibbons. The first is most capital; yes, I recollect I have had some doubts on the Laud, though the University of Oxford once offered 400 pounds for it--and if Queen Henrietta is by Vandyke, it is a very indifferent One. The affixing a higher value to the Pietro Cortona than to the octagon Guido is most absurd--I have often gazed on the latter, and preferred it even to the Doctor's. In short, the appraisers were determined to see what the Czarina Could give, rather than what the pictures were really worth--I am glad she seems to think so, for I hear no more of the sale--it is not very wise in me still to concern myself, at my age, about what I have SO little interest in-it is still less wise to be so anxious on trifles, when one's country is sinking. I do not know which is most Mad, my nephew, or our ministers--both the one and the other increase my veneration for the founder of Houghton!
I will not rob you of the prints you mention, dear Sir; one of them at least I know Mr. Pennant gave me. I do not admire him for his punctiliousness with you. Pray tell me the name Of your glass-painter; I do not think I shall want him, but it is not impossible. Mr. Essex agreed With me, that Jarvis's windows for Oxford, after Sir Joshua Reynolds, will not succeed. Most of his colours are opake, and their great beauty depending on a spot of light for Sun or moon, is an imposition. When his paintings are exhibited at Charing-cross, all the rest of the room is darkened to relieve them. That cannot be done at New College; or if done, the chapel would be too dark. If there are other lights, the effect will be lost.
This sultry weather will, I hope, quite restore YOU; People need not go to Lisbon and Naples, if we continue to have such summers. Yours most sincerely.
178. To The Rev. Mr. Cole. Strawberry Hill, August 12, 1779. (page 232)
I write from decency, dear Sir, not from having any thing particular to say, but to thank you for your offer of letting me see the arms of painted glass; which, however, I will decline, lest it should be broken, and as at present I have no occasion to employ the painter. If I build my offices, perhaps I may have; but I have dropped that thought for this year. The disastrous times do not inspire expense. Our alarms, I conclude, do not ruffle your hermitage. We are returning to our state of islandhood, and shall have little, I believe, to boast but of what we have been.
I see a History of Alien Priories announced;(365) do you know any thing of it, or of the author? I am ever yours.
(365) This was Mr. Gough's well-known work, entitled "Some Account of the Alien Priories, and of such Lands as they are known to have possessed in England and Wales," in two volumes octavo.-E.
179. To The Countess Of Ailesbury. Strawberry Hill, Friday night, 1779. (page 233)
I am not at all surprised, my dear Madam, at the intrepidity of Mrs. Damer;(366) she always was the heroic daughter of a hero. Her sense and coolness never forsake her. I, who am not so firm, shuddered at your ladyship's account. Now that she has stood fire for four hours, I hope she will give as clear proofs of her understanding, of which I have as high opinion as of her courage, and not return in any danger.
I am to dine at Ditton to-morrow, and will certainly talk on the subject You recommend; yet I am far, till I have heard more, from thinking with your ladyship, that more troops and artillery at Jersey would be desirable. Any considerable quantity of either, especially of the former, cannot be spared at this moment, when so big a cloud 'hangs over this island, nor would any number avail if the French should be masters at sea. A large garrison would but tempt the French thither, were it but to distress this country; and, what is worse, would encourage Mr. Conway to make an impracticable defence. If he is to remain in a situation so unworthy of him, I confess I had rather he was totally incapable of making any defence. I love him enough not to murmur at his exposing himself where his country and his honour demand him; but I would not have him measure himself in a place untenable against very superior force. My present comfort is, as to him, that France at this moment has a far vaster object. I have good reason to believe the government knows that a great army is ready to embark at St. Maloes, but will not stir till after a sea-fight, which we do not know but may be engaged at this moment. Our fleet is allowed to be the finest ever set forth by this country; but it is inferior in number by seventeen ships to the united squadron of the Bourbons. France, if successful, means to pour in a vast many thousands on us, and has threatened to burn the capital itself, Jersey, my dear Madam, does not enter into a calculation of such magnitude. The moment is singularly awful; yet the vaunts of enemies are rarely executed successfully and ably. Have we trampled America under our foot?
You have too good sense, Madam, to be imposed upon by my arguments, if they are insubstantial. You do know that I have had my terrors for Mr. Conway; but at present they are out of the question, from the insignificance of his island. DO not listen to rumours, nor believe a single one till it has been canvassed over and over. Fear, folly, fifty Motives, Will coin new reports every hour at such a conjuncture. When one is totally void of credit and power, patience is the only wisdom. I have seen dangers still more imminent. They were dispersed. Nothing happens in proportion to what is meditated. Fortune, whatever fortune is, is more constant than is the common notion. I do not give this as one of my solid arguments, but I have encouraged myself in being superstitious on the favourable side. I never, like most superstitious people, believe auguries against my wishes. We have been fortunate in the escape of Mrs. Damer, and in the defeat at Jersey even before Mr. Conway arrived-, and thence I depend on the same future prosperity. From the authority of persons who do not reason on such airy hopes, I am seriously persuaded, that if the fleets engage, the enemy will not gain advantage without deep-felt loss, enough probably to dismay their invasion. Coolness may succeed, and then negotiation. Surely, if we, can weather the summer, we shall, obstinate as we are against conviction, be compelled by the want of money to relinquish our ridiculous pretensions, now proved to be utterly impracticable; for, with an inferior navy at home, can we assert sovereignty over America? It is a contradiction in, terms and in fact. It may be hard of digestion to relinquish it, but it is impossible to pursue it. Adieu, my dear Madam! I have not left room for a line more.
(366) The packet in which she was crossing from Dover to Ostend was taken by a French frigate, after a running fight of several hours.
180. To The Hon. H. S. Conway. Strawberry Hill, Sept. 13, 1779. (page 234)
I am writing to you at random; not knowing whether or when this letter will go: but your brother told me last night that an officer, whose name I have forgot, was arrived from Jersey, and would return to you soon. I am sensible how very seldom I have written to you-but you have been few moments out of my thoughts. What they have been, you who know me so minutely may well guess, and why they do not pass my lips. Sense, experience, circumstances, can teach One to command one's self. outwardly, but do not divest a most friendly heart of its feelings. I believe the state of my Mind has contributed to bring on a very weak and decaying body my present disorders. I have not been well the whole summer; but for these three weeks much otherwise. It has at last ended in the gout, which to all appearance will be a short fit.
On public affairs I cannot speak. Every thing is so exaggerated on all sides, that what grains of truth remain in the sieve would appear cold and insipid; and the great manoeuvres you learn as soon as I. In the naval battle between Byron and D'Estaing, our captains were worthy of any age in our story.
You may imagine how happy I am at Mrs. Damer's return, and at her not being at Naples, as she was likely to have been, at the dreadful explosion of Vesuvius.(367) Surely it will have glutted Sir William's rage for volcanoes! How poor Lady Hamilton's nerves stood it I do not conceive. Oh, mankind! mankind! Are there not calamities enough in store for us, but must destruction be our amusement and pursuit?
I send this to Ditton,(368) where it may wait some days; but I would not suffer a sure opportunity to slip without a line. You are more obliged to me for all I do not say, than for whatever eloquence itself could pen.
P. S. I unseal my letter to add, that undoubtedly you will come to the Meeting of Parliament, which will be in October. Nothing can or ever did make me advise you to take a step unworthy of yourself. But surely you have higher and more sacred duties than the government of a mole-hill!
(367) On the 10th of August when the eruption was so great, that several villages were destroyed; a hunting seat belonging to the King of Naples, called Caccia Bella, shared the like fate.-E.
(368) Where Lord Hertford had then a villa.
181. To The Rev. Mr. Cole. Berkeley Square, Nov. 16, 1779. (page 235)
You ought not to accuse yourself only, when I have been as silent as you. Surely we have been friends too long to admit ceremony as a go-between. I have thought of writing to you several times, but found I had nothing worth telling you. I am rejoiced to hear your health has been better: mine has been worse the whole summer and autumn than ever it was without any positive distemper, and thence I conclude it is a failure in my constitution-of which, being a thing of course, we will say no more-nobody but a physician is bound to hear what he cannot cure-and if we will pay for what we cannot expect, it is our own fault.
I have seen Doctor Lort, who seems pleased with becoming a limb of Canterbury. I heartily wish the mitre may not devolve before it has beamed substantially on him. In the meantime he will be delighted with ransacking the library at Lambeth; and, to do him justice, his ardour is literary, not interested.
I am much obliged to you, dear Sir, for taking the trouble of transcribing Mr. Tyson's Journal, which is entertaining. But I am so Ignorant as not to know where Hatfield Priory is. The three heads I remember on the gate at Whitehall; there were five more. The whole demolished structure was transported to the great Park at Windsor, by the late Duke of Cumberland, who intended to re-edify it, but never did; and now I suppose
Its ruins ruined, as its Place no more.
I did not know what was become of the heads, and am glad any are preserved. I should doubt their being the works of Torregiano. Pray who is Mr. Nichols, who has published the Alien Priories; there are half a dozen or more pretty views of French cathedrals. I cannot say that I found any thing else in the book that amused me-but as you deal more in ancient lore than I do, perhaps you might be better pleased.
I am told there is a new History of Gloucestershire, very large, but ill executed, by one Rudder(369)--still I have sent for it, for Gloucestershire is a very historic country.
It was a wrong scent on which I employed you. The arms I have impaled were certainly not Boleyn's. You lament removal of friends -alas! dear Sir, when one lives to our age, one feels that in a higher degree than from their change of place! but one must not dilate those common moralities. You see by my date I have changed place myself. I am got into an excellent, comfortable, cheerful house; and as, from necessity and inclination, I live much more at home than I used to do, it is very agreeable to be so pleasantly lodged, and to be in a warm inn as one passes through the last Vale. Adieu! Yours ever.
(369) "The History and Antiquities of Gloucestershire; comprising the Topography, Antiquities, Curiosities, Produce, Trade, and Manufactures of that County:" by Samuel Rudder, printer, Cirencester, folio.-E.
182. To The Rev. Mr. Cole. Berkeley Square, Dec. 1779. (page 236)
I have two good reasons against writing: nothing to say and a lame muffled hand; and therefore I choose to write to you, for it shows remembrance. For these six weeks almost I have been a prisoner with the gout, but begin to creep about my room. How have you borne the late deluge and the present frost? How do you like an earl-bishop?(370) Had not we one before in ancient days? I have not a book in town; but was not there Anthony Beck, or a Hubert de Burgh, that was Bishop of Durham and Earl of Kent, or have I confounded them?
Have you seen Rudder's new History of Gloucestershire? His additions to Sir Robert Atkyns make it the most sensible history of a county that we have had yet; for his descriptions of the scite, soil, products, and prospects of each parish are extremely good and picturesque; and he treats fanciful prejudices, and Saxon etymologies, when unfounded, and traditions, with due contempt.
I will not spin this note any further, but shall be glad of a line to tell me you are well. I have not seen Mr. Lort since he roosted under the metropolitan Wings of his grace of Lambeth. Yours ever.
(370) The Hon. and Rev, Frederick Hervey, bishop of Derry, had just succeeded to the earldom of Bristol, as fifth Earl, by the death of his brother. Hardy, in his memoirs of Lord Charlemont gives the following account of this singular man:--"His family was famous for talents, equally so for eccentricity; and the eccentricity of the whole race shone out and seemed to be concentrated in him. In one respect he was not unlike Villiers Duke of Buckingham, 'every thing by starts, and nothing long!' Generous, but uncertain; splendid, but fantastical; an admirer of the fine arts, without any just selection: engaging, often licentious in conversation- extremely polite, extremely violent. His distribution of church livings, chiefly, as I have been informed, among the older and respectable clergy in his own diocese, must always be mentioned with that warm approbation which it is justly entitled to. His progress from his diocese to the metropolis, and his entrance into it, were perfectly correspondent to the rest of his conduct. Through every town on the road, he seemed to court, and was received with, all warlike honours; and I remember seeing him pass by the Parliament-house in Dublin (Lords and Commons were then both sitting), escorted by a body of dragoons, full of spirits and talk, apparently enjoying the eager gaze of the surrounding multitude, and displaying altogether the self-complacency of a favourite marshal of France on his way to Versailles, rather than the grave deportment of a prelate of the Church of England." He died in 1803.-E.
183. To The Rev. Mr. Cole. Berkeley Square, Jan. 5, 1780. (page 237)
When you said that you feared that your particular account of your very providential escape would deter me from writing to you again, I am sure, dear Sir, that you spoke only from modesty, and not from thinking me capable of being so criminally indifferent to any thing, much less under such danger as you have run, that regards so old a friend, and one to whom I owe so many obligations. I am but too apt to write letters on trifling or no occasion's: and should certainly have told you the interest I take in your accident, and how happy I am that it had no consequences of any sort. It is hard that temperance itself, which you are, should be punished for a good-natured transgression of your own rules, and where the excess was only staying out beyond your usual hour. I am heartily glad you did not jump out of your chaise; it has often been a much worse precaution than any consequences from risking to remain in it; as you are lame too, might have been very fatal. Thank God! all ended so well. Mr. Masters seems to have been more frightened, with not greater reason. What an absurd man to be impatient to notify a disagreeable event to you, and in so boisterous a manner, and which he could not know was true, since it was not!
I shall take extremely kind your sending me your picture in glass. I have carefully preserved the slight outline of yourself in a gown and nightcap, which you once was' so good as to give me, because there was some likeness to your features. though it is too old even now. For a portrait of me in return you might have it by sending the painter to the anatomical school, and bidding him draw the first skeleton he sees. I should expect any limner would laugh in my face if I offered it to him to be copied.
I thought I had confounded the ancient count-bishops, as I had, and YOU have set me right. The new temporal-ecclesiastical peers estate is more than twelve thousand a Year, though I can scarce believe it is eighteen, as the last lord said.
The picture found near the altar in Westminster-Abbey, about three years ago, was of King Sebert; I saw it, and it was well preserved, with some others worse--but they have foolishly buried it again behind their new altar-piece; and so they have a very fine tomb of Ann of Cleve, close to the altar, which they did not know till I told them whose it was, though her arms are upon it, and though there is an exact plate of it in Sandford. They might at least have cut out the portraits, and removed them to a conspicuous situation; but though this age is grown so antiquarian, it has not gained a grain more of sense in that walk--witness as you instance in Mr. Grose's Legends, and in the dean and chapter reburying the crown, robes, and sceptre of Edward I.--there would surely have been as much piety in preserving them in their treasury, as in consigning them again to decay. I did not know that the salvation of robes and crowns depended on receiving Christian burial. At the same time, the chapter transgress that prince's will, like all their antecessors; for he ordered his tomb to be opened every year or two years, and receive a new cerecloth or pall; but they boast now of having enclosed him so substantially that his ashes cannot be violated again.
It was the present Bishop Dean who showed me the pictures and Ann's tomb, and consulted me on the new altar-piece. I advised him to have a light octangular canopy, like the cross at Chichester, placed over the table or altar itself, which would have given dignity to it, especially if elevated by a flight of steps; and from the side arches of the octacon, I would have had a semicircle of open arches that should have advanced quite to the seats of the prebends, which would have discovered the pictures; and through the octagon itself you would have perceived the shrine of Edward the Confessor, which is much higher than the level of the choir--but men who ask advice seldom follow it, if you do not happen to light on the same ideas with themselves.
P. S. The Houghton pictures are not lost-but to Houghton and England!(371)
(371) They had been sold to the Empress of Russia in the preceding September, and immediately transferred to that country.-E.
184. To Robert Jephson, Esq.(372) Berkeley Square, January 25, 1780. (page 238)
It was but yesterday, Sir, that I received the favour of your letter, and this morning I sent, according to your permission, to Mr. Sheridan the elder, to desire the manuscript of your tragedy;(373) for as I am but just recovering of a fit of the gout, which I had severely for above two months, I was not able to bear the fatigue of company at home; nor could I have had the pleasure of attending to the piece so much as I wished to do, if I had invited ladies to hear it, to whom I must have been doing the honours.
I have read your play once, Sir, rapidly, though alone, and therefore cannot be very particular on the details; but I can say already, with great truth, that you have made a great deal more than I thought possible out of the skeleton of a story.; and have arranged it so artfully, that unless I am deceived by being too familiar with it, it will be -very intelligible to the audience, even if they have not read the original fable; and you have had the address to make it coherent, without the marvellous, though so much depended on that part. In short, you have put my extravagant materials in an alembic, and drawn off only what was rational.
Your diction is very beautiful, often poetic, and yet what I admire, very simple and natural; and when necessary, rapid, concise, and sublime.
If I did not distrust my own self-love, I should say that I think it must be a very interesting piece: and yet I might say so without vanity, so much of the disposition of the scenes is your own. I do not yet know, Sir, what alterations you propose to make; nor do I perceive where the second and fourth acts want amendment. The first in your manuscript is imperfect. If I wished for any correction, it would be to shorten the scene in the fourth act between the Countess, Adelaide, and Austin, which rather delays the impatience of the audience for the catastrophe, and does not contribute to it, but by the mother's orders to the daughter at the end of the scene to repair to the great church. In the last scene I should wish to have Theordore fall into a transport of rage and despair immediately on the death of Adelaide, and be carried off by Austin's orders; for I doubt the interval is too long for him to faint after Narbonne's speech. The fainting, fit, I think, might be better applied to the Countess; it does not seem requisite that she should die, but the audience might be left in suspense about her.
My last observations will be very trifling indeed, Sir; but I think you use nobleness, niceness, etc. too often, which I doubt are not classic terminations for nobility, nicety, etc. though I allow that nobility will not always express nobleness. My children's timeless deaths can scarce be said for untimely; nor should I choose to employ children's as a plural genitive case, which I think the s at the end cannot imply. "Hearted preference" is very bold for preference taken to heart. Raymond, in the last scene says--
"Show me thy wound--oh, hell! 'tis through her heart!"
This line is quite unnecessary, and infers an obedience in displaying her wound which would be shocking; besides, as there is often a buffoon in an audience at a new tragedy, it might be received dangerously. The word "Jehovah" will certainly not be suffered on the stage.
In casting the parts I conclude Mrs. Yates, as women never cease to like acting young parts, would prefer that of Adelaide, though the Countess is more suitable to her age; and it is foolish to see her representing the daughter of women fifteen or twenty years younger. As my bad health seldom allows of my going to the theatre, I never saw Mr. Henderson but once. His person and style should recommend him to the parts of Raymond or Austin. Smith, I suppose, would expect to be Theodore; but Lewis is younger, handsomer, and, I think, a better actor; but you are in the right, Sir, in having no favourable idea of our stage at present.
I am sorry, Sir, that neither my talents nor health allow me to offer to supply you with Prologue and Epilogue. Poetry never was my natural turn; and what little propensity I had to it, is totally extinguished by age and pain. It is honour enough to me to have furnished the canons of your tragedy; I should disgrace it by attempting to supply adventitious ornaments. The clumsiness of the seams would betray my gouty fingers. I shall take the liberty of reading your play once more before I return it. It will be extraordinary indeed if it is not accepted, but I cannot doubt but it will be, and very successful; though it will be great pity but you should have some zealous friend to attend to it, and who is able to bustle, and see justice done to it by the managers. I lament that such a superannuated being as myself is not only totally incapable Of that office, but that I am utterly' unacquainted -with the managers, and now too retired to form new Connexions. I was still more concerned, Sir, to hear of your unhappy accident, though the bad consequences are past.
(372) now first published.
(373) Mr. Jephson's tragedy of The Count of Narbonne, founded on Walpole's Gothic story of the Castle of Otranto. It will be seen, that it was brought out, in the following year, With considerable success, at Covent Garden theatre. "On Friday evening" says Hannah More, in a letter to one of her sisters, "I went to Mr. Tighe's to hear him read Jephson's tragedy. 'Praise,' says Dr. Johnson, 'is a tribute which every man is expected to pay for the grant of perusing a manuscript;' and indeed I could praise without hurting my Conscience, for The Count of Narbonne has considerable merit; the language is very Poetical, and parts of the fable very interesting; the plot managed with art, and the characters well drawn. The love scenes I think are the worst: they are prettily written, and full of flowers, but are rather cold; they have more poetry than passion. I do not mean to detract from Mr. Jephson's merit by this remark; for it does not lessen a poet's fame to say he excels more in Painting the terrible, than the tender passions."-Memoirs, vol. i, P, 206.-E.
185. To Robert Jephson, Esq.(374) Berkeley Square, Jan. 27, 1780. (page 240)
I have returned Your tragedy, Sir, to Mr. Sheridan, after having read it again, and without wishing any more alterations than the few I hinted before. There may be some few incorrectnesses, but none of much consequence. I must -again applaud your art and judgment, Sir, in having made so rational a play out of my wild tale - and where you have changed the arrangement of the incidents, you have applied them to great advantage The Characters of the mother and daughter you have rendered more natural by giving jealousy to the mother, and more passion to the daughter. In short, you have both honoured and improved my outlines: my vanity is content, and truth enjoins me to do justice. Bishop Warburton, in his additional notes to Pope's works, which I saw in print in his bookseller's hands, though they have not yet been published, observed that the plan of The Castle of Otranto was regularly a drama(375) (an intention I am sure I do not pretend to have conceived; nor, indeed, can I venture to affirm that I had any intention at all but to amuse myself--no, not even a plan, till some pages were written). You, Sir, have realized his idea, and yet I believe the Bishop would be surprised to see how well you have succeeded. One cannot be quite ashamed of one's follies, if genius condescends to adopt, and put them to a sensible use. Miss Aikin flattered me even by stooping to tread in my eccentric steps. Her " Fragment," though but a specimen, showed her talent for imprinting terror. I cannot compliment the author of the " Old English Baron," professedly written in imitation, but as a corrective of The Castle of Otranto. It was totally void of imagination and interest, had scarce 'any incidents, and, though it condemned the marvellous, admitted a ghost. I suppose the author thought a tame ghost might come within the laws of probability. You alone, Sir, have kept within nature, and made superstition supply the place of phenomenon, yet acting as the agent of divine justice--a beautiful use of bigotry.
I was mistaken in thinking the end of the first act deficient. The leaves stuck together, and, there intervening two or three blank pages between the first and second acts, I examined no farther, but concluded the former imperfect, which on the second reading I found it was not.
I imagine, Sir, that the theatres of Dublin cannot have fewer good Performers than those of London; may I ask why you prefer ours? Your own directions and instructions would be of great advantage to your play; especially if you suspect antitragic prejudices in the managers. You, too, would be the best judge of the rehearsal of what might be improvements. Managers will take liberties, and often curtail necessary speeches, so as to produce nonsense. Methinks it is unkind to send a child, of which you have so much reason to be proud, to a Foundling Hospital.
(374) NOW first printed.
(375) Bishop Warburton's panegyric on the Castle of Otranto appears in a note to the following lines in Pope's imitation of one of Horace's epistles:--
"Then peers grew proud in horsemanship t'excel, Newmarket's glory rose as Britain's fell' The soldier breathed the gallantries of France, And ev'ry flow'ry courtier Writ Romance."
"Amidst all this nonsense," says the Bishop, "when things were at the worst, we have been lately entertained with what I will venture to call, a masterpiece in the Fable; and of a new species likewise. The piece I mean is, The Castle of Otranto. The scene is laid in Gothic chivalry; where a beautiful imagination, supported by strength of judgment, has enabled the author to go beyond his Subject, and effect the full purpose of the ancient tragedy; that is, to purge the passions by Pity and terror, in colouring as great and harmonious as in any of the best dramatic writers."-E.
186. To The Rev. Mr. Cole. Berkeley Square, Feb. 5, 1780. (PAGE 242)
I have been turning over the new second volume of the Biographia, and find the additions very poor and lean performances. The lives entirely new are partial and flattering, being contributions of the friends of those whose lives are recorded. This publication made at a time when I have lived to see several of my contemporaries deposited in this national temple of fame has made me smile, and reflect that many preceding authors, who have been installed there with much respect, may have been as trifling personages as those we have l(nown and now behold consecrated to memory. Three or four have struck me particularly, as Dr. Birch,(376) who was a worthy, good-natured soul, full of industry and activity, and running about like a young setting-dog in quest of any thing, new or old, and with no parts, taste, or judgment. Then there is Dr. Blackwell,(377) the most impertinent literary coxcomb upon earth--but the editor has been so just as to insert a very merited satire on his Court of Augustus.
The third is Dr. Brown, that mountebank, who for a little time made as much noise by his Estimate, as ever quack did by a nostrum. I do not know if I ever told you how much I was struck the only time I ever saw him. You know one object, and the anathemas of his Estimate was the Italian Opera; yet did I find him one evening, in Passion Week, accompanying some of the Italian singers, at a concert at Lady Carlisle's. A clergyman, no doubt, is not obliged to be on his knees the whole week before Easter, and music and a concert are harmless amusements; but when Cato or Calvin are out of character, reformation becomes ridiculous--but poor Dr. Brown was mad,(378) and therefore might be in earnest, whether he played the fool or the reformer.
You recollect, perhaps, the threat of Dr. Kippis to me, which is to be executed on my father, for my calling the first edition of the Biographia the Vindicatio Britannica--but observe how truth emerges at last! In his new volume he confesses that the article of Lord Arlington, which I had specified as one of the most censurable, is the one most deserving that censure, and that the character of Lord Arlington is palliated beyond all truth and reason"-words stronger than mine--yet mine deserved to draw vengeance on my father! so a Presbyterian divine inverts divine judgment, and visits the sins of the children on the parents!
Cardinal Beaton's character, softened in the first edition, gentle Dr. Kippis pronounces "extremely detestable"--yet was I to blame for hinting such defects in that work!--and yet my words are quoted to show that Lord Orrery's poetry was ridiculously bad. In like manner Mr. Cumberland, who assumes the whole honour of publishing his grandfather's Lucan, and does not deign to mention its being published at Strawberry Hill, (though by the way I believe it will be oftener purchased for having been printed there, than for wearing Mr. Cumberland's name to the dedication,) and yet he quotes me for having praised his ancestor in one of my publications. These little instances of pride and spleen divert me, and then make me reflect sadly on human weaknesses. I am very apt myself to like what flatters my opinions or passions, and to reject scornfully what thwarts them, even in the same persons. The more one lives, the more one discovers one's uglinesses in the features of others! Adieu! dear Sir; I hope you do not suffer by this severe season.
P. S. I remember two other instances, where my impartiality, or at least sincerity, have exposed me to double censure. You perhaps condemned my severity on Charles the First; yet the late Mr. Hollis wrote against me in the newspapers, for condemning the republicans for their destruction of ancient monuments. Some blamed me for undervaluing the Flemish and Dutch pictures in my preface to the Aedes Walpolianae. Barry the painter, because I laughed at his extravagances, says, in his rejection of that school, "But I leave them to be admired by the Hon. Horace Walpole, and such judges." Would not one think I had been their champion!
(376) See vol. i. p. 434, letter 177.-E.
(377) Dr. Thomas Blackwell, principal of the Marischal College in Aberdeen. Besides the above work, he wrote "An Enquiry into the Life and Writings of Homer," and "Letters concerning Mythology." He died in 1757.
(378) In September, 1766, he destroyed himself in a fit of insanity. See vol. ii. p. 232, letter 119, note 234.-E.
187. To The Rev. Mr. Cole. Berkeley Square, Feb. 27, 1780. (PAGE 243)
Unapt as you are to inquire after news, dear Sir, you wish to have Admiral Rodney's victory confirmed.(379) I can now assure you, that he has had a considerable advantage, and took at least four Spanish men-of-war, and an admiral, who they say is since dead of his wounds. We must be glad of these deplorable successes--but I heartily wish we had no longer occasion to hope for the destruction of any of our species but, alas! it looks as if devastation would still open new fields of blood! The prospect darkens even at home--but, however you and I may differ in our political principles, it would be happy. if every body would pursue others with as little rancour. How seldom does it happen in political contests, that any side can count any thing but its wounds! your habitudes seclude you from meddling in our divisions; so do my age and my illnesses me. Sixty-two is not a season for bustling among young partisans. Indeed, if the times grow perfectly serious, I shall not wish to reach sixty-three. Even a superannuated spectator is then a miserable being; for though insensibility is one of the softenings of old age, neither one's feelings nor enjoyments can be accompanied with tranquillity. We veterans must hide ourselves in inglorious security, and lament what we cannot prevent; nor shall be listened to, till misfortunes have brought the actors to their senses; and then it will be too late, or they will calm themselves faster than they could preach--but I hope the experience of the last century will have some operation and check our animosities. Surely, too, we shall recollect the ruin a civil war would bring on, when accompanied by such collaterals as French and Spanish wars. Providence alone can steer us amidst all these rocks. I shall watch the interposition of its aegis with anxiety and humility. It saved us this last summer, and nothing else I am sure did; but often the mutual follies of enemies are the instruments Of Heaven. If it pleases not to inspire wisdom, I shall be content if it extricates us by the reciprocal blunders and oversights of all parties--of which, at least, we ought never to despair. It is almost my systematic belief, that as cunning and penetration are seldom exerted for good ends, it is the absurdity of mankind that often acts as a succedaneum, and carries on and maintains the equilibrium that Heaven designed should subsist. Adieu, dear Sir! Shall we live to lay down our heads in peace? Yours ever.
28th.--A second volume of Sir George Rodney's exploits arrived to-day. I do not know the authentic circumstances, for I have not been abroad yet, but they say he has taken four more Spanish ships of the line and five frigates; of the former, one of ninety guns. Spain was sick of the war before--how fortunate if she would renounce it!
I have just got a new History of Leicester, in six small volumes. It seems to be superficial; but the author is young, and talks modestly which, if it Will not serve instead of merit, makes one at least hope he will improve, and not grow insolent on age and more knowledge. I have also received from Paris a copy of an illumination from La Cit`e des Dames of Christina of Pisa, in the French King's library. There is her own portrait with three allegoric figures. I have learnt much more about her, and of her amour with an English peer;(380) but I have not time to say more at present.
(379) Admiral Sir George Rodney, who had been despatched to the relief of Gibraltar, the garrison of which was much distressed for provisions, after taking a convoy of Spanish ships bound to the Caraccas, fell in, on the 16th of February off Cape St. Vincent, with the Spanish fleet, commanded by Don Juan Langara, which he defeated, and captured four sail of the line.-E.
(380) John Montacute, Earl of Salisbury; who arriving in Paris, as ambassador from Richard II. to demand in marriage the Princess Isabel, daughter of Charles V., soon after the death of Castel, the husband of Christine, was so struck with her beauty and accomplishments as to offer her his hand. This Christine respectfully declined; upon which the Earl bade adieu to love, renounced marriage, and, with her consent, brought her eldest son with him to England, to educate and protect.-E.
188. To The Rev. Mr. Cole
Berkeley Square, March 6, 1780. (PAGE 245)
I have this moment received your portrait in glass, dear Sir, and am impatient to thank you for it, and tell you how much I value it. It is better executed than I own I expected, and yet I am not quite satisfied with it. The drawing is a little incorrect, the eyes too small in proportion, and the mouth exaggerated. In short, it is a strong likeness of your features, but not of your countenance, which is better, and more serene. However, I am enough content to place it at Strawberry amongst all my favourite, brittle, transitory relics, which will soon vanish with their founder--and with his no great unwillingness for himself.
I take it ill, that you should think I should suspect you of asking indirectly for my Noble Authors-and much more if you would not be so free as to ask for them directly-a most trifling present surely--and from you who have made me a thousand! I know I have some copies in my old house in Arlington-street, I hope of both volumes, I am sure of the second. I will soon go thither and look for them.
I have gone through the six volumes of Leicester. The author is so modest and so humble, that I am quite sorry it is so very bad a work; the arrangement detestable, the materials trifling, his reflections humane but silly. He disposes all under reigns of Roman emperors and English kings, whether they did any thing or nothing at Leicester. I am sorry I have such predilection for the histories of particular counties and towns: there certainly does not exist a worse class of reading.
Dr. E. made me a visit last week. He is not at all less vociferous for his disgrace. I wish I had any Guinea-fowls. I can easily get you some eggs from Lady Ailesbury, and will ask her for some, that you may have the pleasure of rearing your own chicks--but how can you bear their noise? they are more discordant and clamorous than peacocks. How shall I convey the eggs?
I smiled at Dr. Kippis's bestowing the victory on Dean Milles, and a sprig on Mr. Masters. I regard it as I should, if the sexton of Broad Street St. Giles's were to make a lower bow to a cheese-monger of his own parish than to me. They are all three haberdashers of small wares, and welcome to each other's civilities. When such men are summoned to a jury on one of their own trade, it is natural they should be partial. They do not reason, but recollect how much themselves have overcharged some yards of buckram. Adieu!
P. S. Mr. Pennicott has shown me a most curious and delightful picture. It is Rose, the royal gardener, presenting the first pine-apple ever raised in England to Charles II. They are In a garden, with a view of a good private house, such as there are several at Sunbury and about london. It is by far the best likeness of the King I ever saw; the countenance cheerful, good-humoured, and very sensible. He is in brown, lined with orange, and many black ribands, a large flapped hat, dark wig, not tied up, nor yet bushy, a point cravat, no waistcoat, and a tasselled handkerchief, hanging from a low pocket. The whole is of the smaller landscape size, and extremely well coloured, with perfect harmony. \It was a legacy from London, grandson of him who was partner with Wise.
189. To The Rev. Mr. Cole. Strawberry Hill, March 13, 1780.(PAGE 246)
You compliment me, my good friend, on a sagacity that is surely very common. How frequently do we see portraits that have catched the features and missed the countenance or character, which is far more difficult to hit; nor is it unfrequent to hear that remark made.
I have confessed to you that I am fond of local histories. It is the general execution of them that I condemn, and that I call "the worst kind of reading." I cannot comprehend but that they might be performed with taste. I did mention this winter the new edition of Atkyns's Gloucestershire, as having additional descriptions of situations that I thought had merit. I have just got another, a View of Northumberland, in two volumes, quarto, with cuts;(381) but I do not devour it fast; for the author's predilection is to Roman antiquities, which, such as are found in this island, are very indifferent, and inspire me with little curiosity. A barbarous country, so remote from the seat of empire, and occupied by a few legions that very rarely decided any great events, is not very interesting, though one's own country; nor do I care a straw for a stone that preserves the name of a standard-bearer of a cohort, or of a colonel's daughter. Then I have no patience to read the tiresome disputes of antiquaries to settle forgotten names of vanished towns, and to prove that such a village was called something else in Antoninus's Itinerary. I do not say the Gothic antiquities I like are of more importance; but at least they exist. The site of a Roman camp, of which nothing remains but a bank, gives me not the smallest pleasure. One knows they had square camps-has one a clearer idea from the spot, which is barely distinguishable? How often does it happen, that the lumps of earth are so imperfect, that it is never clear whether they are Roman, Druidic, Danish, or Saxon fragments: the moment it is uncertain, it is plain they furnish no specific idea of art or history, and then I neither desire to see or read them. I have been diverted, too, by another work, in which I am personally a little concerned. Yesterday was published an octavo, pretending to contain the correspondence of Hackman and Miss Ray, that he murdered.(382) I doubt whether the letters are genuine; and yet, if fictitious, they are executed well, and enter into his character: hers appears less natural, and yet the editors were certainly more likely to be in the possession of hers than his. It is not probable that Lord Sandwich should have sent what he found in her apartments to the press. No account is pretended to be given of how they came to light.
You will wonder how I should be concerned in this correspondence, who never saw either of the lovers in my days. In fact, my being dragged in is a reason for doubting the authenticity; nor can I believe that the long letter in which I am frequently mentioned could be written by the wretched lunatic. It pretends that Miss Ray desired him to give her a particular account of Chatterton. He does give a most ample one; but is there a glimpse of probability that a being so frantic should have gone to Bristol, and sifted Chatterton's sister and others with as much cool curiosity as Mr. Lort could do? and at such a moment! Besides, he murdered Miss Ray, I think, in March; my printed defence was not at all dispersed before the preceding January or February, nor do I conceive that Hackman could even see it. There are notes, indeed, by the editor, who has certainly seen it; but I rather imagine that the editor, whoever he is, composed the whole volume. I am acquitted of' being accessory to the man's death, which is gracious; but much blamed for speaking of his bad character, and for being too hard on his forgeries, though I took so much pains to Specify the innocence of them; and for his character, I only quoted the words of his own editor and panegyrist. I did not repeat what Dr. Goldsmith told me at the Royal Academy, where I first heard of his death, that he went by the appellation of the "Young Villain;" but it is not new to me, as you know, to be blamed by two opposite parties. The editor has in one place confounded me and my uncle; who, he says, as is true, checked Lord Chatham for being too forward a young man in 1740. In that year I was not even come into Parliament; and must have been absurd indeed if I had taunted Lord Chatham with youth, who was, at least, six or seven years younger than he was; and how could he reply by reproaching me with old age, who was then not twenty-three? I shall make no answer to these absurdities, nor to any part of the work. Blunder, I see, people will, and talk of what they do not understand @ and what care I? There is another trifling mistake of still less consequence. The editor supposes it was Macpherson who communicated Ossian to me. It was Sir David Dalrymple who sent me the first specimen.(383) Macpherson did once come to me, but my credulity was then a little shaken.
Lady Ailesbury has promised me Guinea-eggs for you, but they have not yet begun to lay I am well acquainted with Lady Craven's little tale, dedicated to me.(384) It is careless and incorrect, but there are very pretty things in it. I will stop, for I fear I have written to you too much lately. One you did not mention: I think it was of the 28th of last month.
(381) "A View of Northumberland; with an Excursion to the Abbey of Melrose, Scotland, in the year 1776;" by William Hutchinson, F. A. S. Two volumes 4to.; 1778-80.-E.
(382) the work here alluded to was written by Sir Herbert Croft, Bart. It was a compound of fact and fiction called "Love and Madness, a Story too true, in a Series of Letters between Parties, whose names would, perhaps, be mentioned, were they less known or less lamented. London, 1780." The work ran through several editions. In 1800, Sir Herbert published, "Chatterton and Love and Madness, in a Letter from Sir Herbert Croft to Mr. Nichols." Boswell says, that Dr. Johnson greatly disapproved of mingling real facts with fiction, and on this account censured "Love and Madness."-E.
(383) See vol. iii. p. 63, letter 25, note 64.-E.
(384) Entitled "The Miniature Picture."-E.
190. To The Rev. Mr. Cole. Berkeley Square, March 30, 1780. (page 248)
I cannot be told that you are extremely ill, and refrain from begging to hear that you are better. Let me have but one line; if it is good, 'it will satisfy me. If you was not out of order, I would scold you for again making excuses about the Noble Authors; it was not kind to be so formal about a trifle.
We do not differ so much in politics as you think, for when they grow too serious, they are so far from inflaming my zeal, they make me more moderate: and I can as easily discern the faults on my own side as on the other; nor would assist Whigs more than Tories in altering the constitution. The project of annual parliaments, or of adding a hundred members to the House of Commons would, I think, be very unwise, and will never have my approbation--but a temperate man is not likely to be listened to in turbulent times; and when one has not youth and lungs, or ambition, to make oneself attended to, one can only be silent and lament, and preserve oneself blameless of any mischief that is done or attempted.
191. To The Rev. Mr. Cole. Berkeley Square, May 11, 1780. (page 248)
Mr. Godfrey, the engraver, told me yesterday that Mr. Tyson is dead.(385) I am sorry for it, though he had left me off. A much older friend of mine died yesterday; but of whom I must say the same, George Montagu, whom you must remember at Eton and Cambridge. I should have been exceedingly concerned for him a few years ago but he had dropped me, partly from politics and partly from caprice, for we never had any quarrel; but he was grown an excessive humourist, and had shed almost all his friends as well as me. He had parts, and infinite vivacity and originality till of late years; and it grieved me much that he had changed towards me, after a friendship of between thirty and forty years.
I am told that a nephew of the provost of King's has preached and printed a most flaming sermon, which condemns the whole Opposition to the stake. Pray who is it, and on what occasion? Mr. Bryant has published an Answer to Dr. Priestley.(386) I bought it, but though I have a great value for the author, the subject is so metaphysical, and so above human decision, I soon laid it aside. I hope you can send me a good account of yourself, though the spring is so unfavourable. Yours most sincerely.
(385) Mr. Cole, in a letter of the 14th, says, "the loss of poor Mr. Tyson shocked and afflicted me more than I thought it possible I could have been afflicted: since the loss of Mr. Gray, I have lamented no one so much. God rest his soul! I hope he is happy; and, was it not for those he has left behind, I am so much of a philosopher, now the affair is over, I would prefer the exchange."-E.
(386) It was entitled "An Address to Dr. Priestley upon his Doctrine of Philosophical Necessity Illustrated."-E.
@Letter 192 To The Rev. Mr. Cole. Friday night, May 19, 1780. (page 249)
By tomorrow's coach you will receive a box of Guinea-hens' eggs, which Lady Ailesbury sent me to-day from Park-place. I hope they will arrive safe and all be hatched.
I thank you for the account of the sermon and the portrait of the uncle. They will satisfy me without buying the former. As I knew Mr. Joseph Spence,(387) I do not think I should have been so much delighted as Dr. Kippis with reading his letters. He was a good-natured, harmless little soul, but more like a silver penny than a genius. It was a neat, fiddle-faddle, bit of sterling, that had read good books and kept good company, but was too trifling for use, and only fit to please a child.
I hesitate on purchasing Mr. Gough's second edition. I do not think there was a guinea's worth of entertainment in the first; how can the additions be worth a guinea and a half? I have been aware of the royal author you tell me of, and have noted him for a future edition; but that will not appear in my own time; because, besides that, it will have the castrations in my original copy, and other editions, that I am not impatient to produce. I have been solicited to reprint the work, but do not think it fair to give a very imperfect edition when I could print it complete, which I do not choose to do, as I have an aversion to literary squabbles: one seems to think one's self too important when one engages in a controversy on one's writings; and when one does not vindicate them, the answerer passes for victor, as you see Dr. Kippis allots the palm to Dr. Milles, though you know I have so much more to say in defence of my hypothesis. I have actually some hopes of still more, of which I have heard, but till I see it, I shall not reckon upon it as on my side.
Mr. lort told me of King James's Procession to St. Paul's; but they ask such a price for it, and I care so little for James I., that I have not been to look at the picture.
Your electioneering will probably be increased immediately. Old Mr. Thomas Townshend is at the point of death.(388) The Parliament will probably be dissolved before another session. We wanted nothing but drink to inflame our madness, which I do not confine to politics; but what signifies it to throw out general censures? We old folks are apt to think nobody wise but ourselves. I wish the disgraces of these last two or three years did not justify a little severity more than flows from the peevishness of years! Yours ever.
(387) See Vol. I. p, 168, letter 29.-E.
(388) The Right Hon. Thomas Townshend, son of Charles second Viscount Townshend, many years member for the University of Cambridge. He died a few days after the date of this letter. He was a most elegant scholar, and lived in acquaintance and familiarity with most of the considerable men of his time. In early life he entered into the secretary of state's office under his father, whom he accompanied in his journeys to Germany with George the First and Second. At the time of his death he was in his seventy-ninth year.-E.
193. To The Rev. Mr. Cole. Berkeley Square, May 30, 1780. (page 250)
I hope you will bring your eggs to a fair market. At last I have got from Bonus my altar-doors which I bought at Mr. Ives's; he has repaired them admirably. I would not suffer him to repaint or varnish them. There are indubitably Duke Humphrey of Gloucester, Cardinal Beaufort, and Archbishop Kemp. The fourth I cannot make out. It is a man in a crimson garment lined with white, and not tonsured. He is in the stable with cattle, and has the air of Joseph; but over his head hangs a large shield with these arms. * * *(389) The Cornish choughs are sable on or; the other three divisions are gules, on the first of which is a gold crescent.
The second arms have three bulls' heads sable, horned or. The chevron was so changed that Bonus thought it sable; but I think it was gules, and then it would be Bullen or Boleyn. Lord de Ferrars says, that the first are the arms of Sir Bartholomew Tate, who he finds married a Sanders. Edmondson's new Dictionary of Heraldry confirms both arms for Tate and Sanders, except that Sanders bore the chevron erminc, which it may have been. But what I wish to discover IS, whether Sir Bartholomew Tate was a benefactor to St. Edmundsbury, whence these doors came, or was in any shape a retainer to the Duke of Gloucester or Cardinal Beaufort. The Duke's and Sir Bartholomew's figures were on the insides of the doors (which I have had sawed into four panels,) and are painted in a far superior style to the Cardinal and the Archbishop, which are very hard and dry. The two others are so good that they are in the style of the school of the Caracci. They at least were painted by some Italian; the draperies have large and bold folds, and One wonders how they could be executed in the reign of Henry VI. I shall be very glad if you can help me to any lights, at least about Sir Bartholomew. I intend to place them in my chapel, as they will aptly accompany the shrine. The Duke and Archbishop's agree perfectly with their portraits in my Marriage of Henry VI., and prove how rightly I guessed. The Cardinal's is rather a longer and thinner visage, but that he might have in the latter end of life; and in the Marriage he has the red bonnet on, which shortens his face. On the door he is represented in the character he ought to have possessed, a pious, contrite look, not the truer resemblance which Shakspeare drew-- "He dies, and makes no sign!"--but Annibal Caracci himself could not paint like our Raphael poet! Pray don't venture yourself in any more electioneering riots: you see the mob do not respect poets, nor, I suppose, antiquaries.
P. S. I am in no haste for an answer to my queries.
(389) Here Mr. Walpole had sketched in a rough draught of the arms.
194. To Mrs. Abington.(390) Strawberry Hill, June 11, 1780. (page 251)
Madam, You may certainly always command me and my house. My common custom is to give a ticket for only four persons at a time but it would be very insolent in me, when all laws are set at nought, to pretend to prescribe rules. At such times there is a shadow of authority in setting the laws aside by the legislature itself; and though I have no army to supply their place, I declare Mrs. Abington may march through all my dominions at the head of as large a troop as she pleases. I do not say, as she can muster and command; for then I am sure my house would not hold them. The day, too, is at her own choice; and the master is her very obedient humble servant.
(390) Now first printed.
195. To The Earl Of Strafford. Strawberry Hill, June 12, 1780. (page 251)
My dear lord, If the late events had been within the common proportion of news, I would have tried to entertain your lordship with an account of them; but they were far beyond that size, and could only create horror and indignation. Religion has often been the cloak of injustice, outrage, and villany: in our late tumults,(391) it scarce kept on its mask a moment; its persecution was downright robbery; and it was so drunk that it killed its banditti faster than they could plunder. The tumults have been carried on in so violent and scandalous a manner, that I trust they will have no copies. When prisons are levelled to the ground, when the Bank is aimed at, and reformation is attempted by conflagrations, the savages of Canada are the only fit allies of Lord George Gordon(392) and his crew. The Tower is much too dignified a prison for him-but he had left no other.
I came out of town on Friday, having seen a good deal of the shocking transactions of Wednesday night--in fact, it was difficult to be in London, and not to see or think some part of it in flames. I saw those of the King's Bench, New Prison, and those on the three sides of the Fleet-market, which turned into one blaze.(393) The town and parks are now one camp--the next disagreeable sight to the capital being in ashes. It will still not have been a fatal tragedy, if it brings the nation one and all to their senses. It will still be not quite an unhappy country, if we reflect that the old constitution, exactly as it was in the last reign, was the most desirable of any in the universe. It made us then the first people in Europe--we have a vast deal of ground to recover--but can we take a better path than that which King William pointed out to us? I mean the system he left us at the Revolution. I am averse to all changes of it--it fitted us just as it was.
For some time even individuals must be upon their guard. Our new and now imprisoned apostle has delivered so many Saint Peters from gaol, that one hears of nothing but robberies on the highway. Your lordship's sister, Lady Browne, and I have been at Twickenham-park this evening, and kept together, and had a horseman at our return. Baron d'Aguilar was shot at in that very lane on Thursday night. A troop of the fugitives had rendezvoused in Combe Wood, and were dislodged thence yesterday by the light horse.
I do not know a syllable but what relates to these disturbances. The newspapers have neglected few truths. Lies, without their natural propensity to falsehoods, they could not avoid, for every minute produces some, at least exaggerations. We were threatened with swarms of good Protestants `a br`uler from all quarters, and report sent various detachments on similar errands; but thank God they have been but reports! Oh! when shall we have peace and tranquility? I hope your lordship and Lady Strafford will at least enjoy the latter in your charming woods. I have long doubted which of our passions is the strongest--perhaps every one of them is equally strong in some person or other-but I have no doubt but ambition is the most detestable, and the most inexcusable; for its mischiefs are by far the most extensive, and its enjoyments by no means proportioned to its anxieties. The latter, I believe, is the case of most passions--but then all but ambition cost little pain to any but the possessor. An ambitious man must be divested of all feeling but for himself. The torment of others is his high-road to happiness. Were the transmigration of souls true, and accompanied by consciousness, how delighted would Alexander or Croesus be to find themselves on four legs, and divested of a wish to conquer new worlds, or to heap up all the wealth of this! Adieu, my dear lord!
(391) The riots of 1780, when Lord George Gordon raised a no-popery cry, and assembled many thousand persons in St. George's Fields, to accompany him to the House of Commons, with a petition for the repeal of the act passed for the relief of the Roman Catholics in the preceding session. The petition was, of course, rejected; which being communicated to the mob by Lord George, they dispersed for a while, but on that evening commenced their work of mischief, destroying two Catholic chapels in Duke-street and Warwick-street: Newgate and all the other prisons were likewise fired; the Bank was attempted; and the riot was not quelled until 210 persons were killed and 248 wounded, of whom seventy-five died in the hospitals. Lord George was committed to the Tower; and many of the ringleaders, after being tried by special commissioners, suffered the extreme penalty of the law.-E.
(392) Lord George Gordon was brother of Alexander Duke of Gordon. He was considered not to be at all times of sound mind. Some years after his acquittal, on the indictment preferred against him in the Court of King's Bench as instigator of the riots, he was convicted of a libel on Marie Antoinette and Count d'Ademar, one of the French ministry. To avoid punishment, he fled the country; but shortly afterwards was discovered at Birmingham in the garb of a Jew, and committed to Newgate, pursuant to his sentence, where he lived some time, professing the Jewish religion, having undergone the extreme rites of it, and where he died, in November 1793.-E.
(393) In her reply to a letter from Walpole, giving an account of these riots, Madame du Deffand says--"Rien n'est plus affreux que tout ce qui arrive chez vous. Votre libert`e ne me s`eduit point; cette libert`e tant vant`ee me paroit bien plus on`ereuse que notre esclavage; mais il ne m'appartient pas de traitor de telles mati`eres: permettez-moi de bl`amer votre indiscr`etion, de vous aller promener dans les rues pendant ce vacarme."-E.
196. To The Rev. Mr. Cole. Strawberry Hill, June 15, 1780. (page 253)
You may like to know one is alive, dear Sir, after a massacre, and the conflagration of a capital. I was in it, both on the Friday and on the Black Wednesday; the most horrible sight I ever beheld, and which, for six hours together, I expected to end in half the town being reduced to ashes. I can give you little account of the original of this shocking affair; negligence was certainly its nurse, and religion only its godmother. The ostensible author is in the Tower. Twelve or fourteen thousand men have quelled all tumults; and as no bad account is come from the country, except for a moment at Bath, and as eight days have passed,--nay, more, since the commencement, I flatter myself the whole nation is shocked at the scene; and that, if plan there was, it was laid only in and for the metropolis. The lowest and most villanous of the people, and to no great amount, were almost the sole actors.
/I hope your electioneering riotry(394) has not, nor will mix in these tumults. It would be most absurd; for Lord Rockingham, the Duke of Richmond, Sir George Saville, and Mr. Burke, the patrons of toleration, were devoted to destruction as much as the ministers. The rails torn from Sir George's house were the chief weapons and instruments of the mob. For the honour of the nation I should be glad to have it proved that the French were the engineers. You and I have lived too long for our comfort--shall we close our eyes in peace? I will not trouble you more about the arms I sent you: I should like that they were those of the family of Boleyn; and since I cannot be sure they were not, why should not I fancy them so? I revert to the prayer for peace. You and I, that can amuse ourselves with our books and papers, feel as much indignation at the turbulent as they have scorn for us. It is hard at least that they who disturb nobody can have no asylum in which to pursue their innoxious indolence Who is secure against Jack Straw and a whirlwind? How I abominate Mr. Banks and Dr. Solander, who routed the poor Otaheitans out of the centre of the ocean, and carried our abominable passions amongst them! not even that poor little specie could escape European restlessness. Well, I have seen many tempestuous scenes, and outlived them! the present prospect is too thick to see through- -it is well hope never forsakes us. Adieu!
(394) Of the "electioneering riotry" going on at this time in Cambridgeshire, Mr. Cole, in a letter of the 14th of May, gives the following account:--"Electioneering madness and faction have inflamed this country to such a degree, that the peace it has enjoyed for above half a century may take as long a time before it returns again. Yesterday, the three candidates were nominated; the Duke of Rutland's brother, the late Mr. Charles Yorke's son, and Sir Sampson Gideon, whose expenses for this month have been enormous, beyond all belief. Sending my servant on a particular message to Sir Sampson, he found him in bed, not well, and probably half asleep; for he not only wrote the direction to two covers which I sent him, but sealed them both, though they were only covers. I wonder, indeed, that he is alive, considering the immense fatigue and necessary drinking he must undergo--a miserable hard task to get into Parliament!" The contest terminated in the return of Lord Robert Manners, who died, in April 1782, of the wounds he received in the great sea-fight in the West Indies; and of Mr. Philip Yorke, who, in 1790, succeeded his uncle as Earl of Hardwicke.-E.
197. To The Rev. Mr. Cole. Strawberry Hill, July 4, 1780. (page 254)
I answer your letter the moment I receive it, to beg you will by no means take any notice, not even in directly and without My name, of the Life of Mr. Baker. I am earnest against its being known to exist. I should be teased to show it. Mr. Gough might inquire about it--I do not desire his acquaintance; and above all am determined, if I can help it, to have no controversy while I live. You know I have hitherto suppressed my answers to the critics of Richard III. for that reason; and above all things, I hate theologic or political controversy-nor need you fear my disputing with you, though we disagree very considerably indeed about Papist's and Presbyterians. I hope you have not yet sent the manuscript to Mr. Lort, and if you have not, do entreat you to deface undecipherably what you have said about my Life of Mr. Baker.
Pray satisfy me that no mention of it shall appear in print. I can by no means consent to it, and I am sure you will prevent it. Yours sincerely.
198. To The Earl Of Strafford. Strawberry Hill, Sept. 9, 1780. (page 255)
I am very happy at receiving a letter from your lordship this moment, as I thought it very long since we had corresponded, but am afraid of being troublesome, when I have not the excuse of thanking you, or something worth telling you, which in truth is not the case at present. No soul, whether interested or not, but deafens one about elections. I always detested them, even when in Parliament; and when I lived a good deal at White's, preferred hearing of Newmarket to elections; for the former, being uttered in a language I did not understand, did not engage my attention; but as they talked of elections in English, I could not help knowing what they said. It does surprise me, I own, that people can choose to stuff their heads with details and circumstances. of which in six weeks they will never hear or think more. The weather till now has been the chief topic of conversation. Of late it has been the third very hot summer; but refreshed by so little rain, that the banks of the Thames have been and are, I believe, like those of the Manzanares. The night before last we had some good showers, and to-day a thick fog has dissolved in some as thin as gauze. Still I am not quite sorry to enjoy the weather of adust climates without their tempests and insects. Lady Cowper I lately visited, and but lately: if what I hear is true, I shall be a gainer, for they talk of Lord Duncannon having her house at Richmond: like your lordship, I confess I was surprised at his choice. I know nothing to the prejudice of the young lady;(395) but I should not have selected, for so gentle and very amiable a man, a sister of the empress of fashion,(396) nor a daughter of the goddess of wisdom.(397)
They talk of great disssatisfactions in the fleet. Geary and Barrington are certainly retired. It looks, if this deplorable war should continue, as if all our commanders by sea and land were to be disgraced or disgusted.
The people here have christened Mr. Shirley's new house, Spite-hall.(398) It is dismal to think that one may live to seventy-seven, and go out of the world doing as ill-natured an act as possible! When I am reduced to detail the gazette of Twickenham, I had better release your lordship; but either way it is from the utmost attention and respect for your lordship and Lady Strafford, as I am ever most devotedly and gratefully yours.
(395) In the following November, Lord Duncannon married Henrietta-Frances, second daughter of John first Earl Spencer.-E.
(396) Georgiana, eldest daughter of John first Earl Spencer; married, in 1774, to the Duke of Devonshire.-E.
(397) Margaret-Georgiana, daughter of the Right Hon. Stephen Poyntz; married, in 1755, to John first Earl Spencer.-E.
(398) Because built, it was said, on purpose to intercept a view of the Thames from his opposite neighbour.
199. To The Rev. Mr. Cole. Strawberry Hill, Sept. 27, 1780. (page 256)
Dear Sir, I MUST inquire how you do after all your election agitations, which have growled even around your hermitage. Candidates and their emissaries are like Pope's authors,
"They pierce our thickets, through our groves they glide."
However, I have barred my doors; and when I would not go to an election for myself, I would not for any one else.
Has not a third real summer, and so very dry one, assisted your complaints? I have been remarkably well, and better than for these five years. Would I could say the same of all my friends-- but, alas! I expect every day to hear that I have lost my dear old friend Madame du Deffand.(399) She was indeed near eighty-four, but retained all her interior faculties--two days ago the letters from Paris forbade all hopes. So I reckon myself dead as to France, where I have kept up no other connexion.
I am going at last to publish my fourth volume of Painters, which, though printed so long, I have literally treated by Horace's rule, "Nonumque prematur in nonum." Tell me how I shall send it to you. Yours ever.
(399) In the last letter Madame du Deffand ever wrote to Walpole, dated the 22d of August, she thus describes her situation:--"Je vous mandai dans ma derni`ere que je ne me portais pas bien; c'cst encore pis aujourd'hui. Je suis d'une faiblesse et d'un abattement excessifs; Ma voix est `eteinte, je ne puis me soutenir sur mes jambes, je ne puis me donner aucun mouvement, j'ai le coeur envolopp`e; j'ai de la peine `a croire que cet `etat ne m'annonce une fin prochaine. Je n'ai pas la force d'en `etre effray`ee; et, ne vous devant revoir de ma vie, je n'a rien `a regretter. Divertissez-vous, mon ami, le plus que vous pourrez; ne vous affligez point de mon `etat; nous `etions presque perdus l'un pour l'autre; nous ne nous devions jamais revoir! vous me regretterez, parce qu'on est bien-aise de se savoir aim`e. Peut-`etre que par la suite Wiart vous mandera de mes nouvelles; c'est une fatigue pour moi de dicter." From this day she kept her bed. On the 8th of September Mr. Walpole had written to her, expressing his great anxiety for her. To his inquiries she was unable to dictate an answer. Her anteroom continued every day crowded with the persons who had before surrounded her supper-table. Her weakness became excessive; but she suffered no pain, and possessed her memory, understanding, and ideas till within the last eight days of her existence, when a lethargic insensibility took which terminated in death, without effort or struggle, on the 24th of September. She was buried, according to her own direction, in the plainest manner, in her parish church of St. Sulpice. To Mr. Walpole she bequeathed the whole of her manuscripts, papers, letters, and books, of every description; with a permission to the Prince of Beauvau to take a copy of any of the papers he might desire.-E.
200. To The Rev. Mr. Cole. Berkeley Square, Oct. 3, 1780. (page 256)
I did not go to Malvern, and therefore cannot certify you, my good Sir, whether Tom Hearne mistook stone for brass or not, though I dare to say your criticism is just.
My book, if I can possibly, shall go to the inn to-morrow, or next day at least. You will find a great deal of rubbish in it, with all your partiality--but I shall have done with it.
I cannot thank you enough for your goodness about your notes that you promised Mr. Grose; but I cannot possibly be less generous and less disinterested, nor can by any means be the cause of your breaking your word. In short, I insist on your sending your notes to him--and as to my Life of Mr. Baker, if it is known to exist, nobody can make me produce it sooner than I please, nor at all if I do not please; so pray send your accounts, and leave me to be stout with our antiquaries, or curious. I shall not satisfy the latter, and don't care a straw for the former.
The Master of Pembroke (who he is, I don't know(400)) is like the lover who said,
"Have I not seen thee where thou hast not been?"
I have been in Kent with Mr. Barrett, but was not at Ramsgate; the Master, going thither, perhaps saw me. It is a mistake not worth rectifying. I have no time for more, being in the midst of the delivery of my books. Yours ever.
(400) Dr. James Brown; see ante, p. 62, letter 36.-E.
201. To The Rev. Mr. Cole. Berkeley Square, Nov. 11, 1780. (page 257)
I am afraid you are not well, my good Sir; for you are so obligingly punctual, that I think you would have acknowledged the receipt of my last volume, if you were not out of order.
Lord Dacre lent me the new edition of Mr. Gough's Topography, and the ancient maps and quantity of additions tempted me to buy it. I have not gone through much above the half of the first volume, and find it more entertaining than the first edition. This is no partiality; for I think he seems rather disposed, though civilly, to find cavils with me. Indeed, in the passage in which I am most mentioned, he not only gives a very confused, but quite a wrong account: as in other places, he records some trifles in my possession not worth recording--but I know that we antiquaries are but too apt to think, that whatever has had the honour of entering our ears, is worthy of being laid before the eyes of every body else. The story I mean is P. ix. of the preface. Now the three volumes of drawings and tombs, by Mr. Lethueillier and Sir Charles Frederick, for which Mr. Gough says I refused two hundred pounds, are now Lord Bute's, are not Lord Bute's, but mine, and for which I never was offered two hundred pounds, and for which I gave sixty pounds--full enough. The circumstances were much more entertaining than Mr. G.'s perplexed account. Bishop Lyttelton told me Sir Charles Frederick complained of Mr. L.'s not bequeathing them to him, as he had been a joint labourer with him; and that Sir Charles wished I Would not bid against him for them, as they were to be sold by auction. I said this was a very reasonable request, and that I was ready to oblige Sir Charles; but as I heard others meant to bid high for the books, I should wish to know how far he would go, and that I would not oppose him; but should the books exceed the price Sir Charles was willing to give, I should like to be at liberty to bid for them against others. However, added I, as Sir Charles (who lived then in Berkelyey-square, as I did then in Arlington-street,) passes by my door every time he goes to the House of Commons, if he will call on me, We will make such agreement. You will scarce believe the sequel. The dignity of Sir Charles Frederick was hurt that I should propose his making me the first visit, though to serve himself--nothing could be more out of my imagination than the ceremonial of visits; though when he was so simple as to make a point of it, I could not see how in any light I was called on to make the first visit--and so the treaty ended; and so I bought the books. There was another work, I think in two volumes, which was their Diary of Their Tour, with a few slight views. Bishop Lyttelton proposed them to me, and engaged to get them for me from Mr. Lethueillier's sister for ten guineas. She hesitated, the Bishop died, I thought no more of them, and they may be what Lord Bute has. There is another assertion in Mr. Gough, which I can authentically Contradict. He says Sir Matthew Decker first introduced ananas, p. 134. My very curious picture of Rose, the royal gardener, presenting the first ananas to Charles II. proves the culture here earlier by several years.
At page 373, he seems to doubt my assertion of Gravelot's making drawings of tombs in Gloucestershire, because he never met with any engravings from them. I took my account from Vertue, who certainly knew what he said. I bought at Vertue's own sale some of Gravelot's drawings of our regal monuments, which Vertue engraved: but, which is stronger, Mr. Gough himself a few pages after, viz. in p. 387, mentions Gravelot's drawing of Tewkesbury church; which being in Gloucestershire, Mr. G. might have believed me that Gravelot did draw in that county. This is a little like Mr. Masters's being angry with me for taking liberties with bishops and chancellors, and then abusing grossly one who had been both bishop and chancellor. I forgot that in the note on Sir Charles Frederick, Mr. Gough calls Mr. Worseley, Wortley. In page 354, he says Rooker exhibited a drawing of Waltham-cross to the Royal Academy of Sciences--pray where is that academy? I suppose he means that of painting. I find a few omissions; one very comical; he says Penshurst was celebrated by Ben Jonson, and seems Perfectly in the dark as to how much more fame it owes to Waller. We antiquaries are a little apt to get laughed at for knowing what every body has forgotten, and for being ignorant of what every child knows. Do not tell him of these things, for I do not wish to vex him. I hope I was mistaken, and shall hear that you are well. Yours ever.
202. To The Rev. Mr. Cole. Berkeley Square, Nov. 24, 1780. (page 259)
I am sorry I was so much in the right in guessing you had been ill, but at our age there is little sagacity in such divination. In my present holidays from the gout, I have a little rheumatism, or some of those accompaniments.
I have made several more notes to the new Topography, but none of consequence enough to transcribe. It is well it is a book only for the adept, or the scorners would often laugh. Mr. Gough speaking of some cross that has been removed, says, there is now an unmeaning market-house in its place. Saving his reverence and our prejudices, I doubt there is a good deal more meaning in a market-house than in a cross. They tell me that there are numberless mistakes. Mr. Pennant, whom I saw yesterday, says so. He is not one of our plodders; rather the other extreme. His corporal spirits (for I cannot call them animal) do not allow him time to digest any thing. He gave a round jump from ornithology to antiquity; and, as if they had any relation, thought he understood every thing between them. These adventures divert me who am got on shore, and find how sweet it is to look back on those who are toiling in deep waters, whether in ships, or cock-boats, or on old rotten planks. I am sorry for the Dean of Exeter; if he dies, I conclude the leaden mace of the Antiquarian Society will be given to Judge Barrington,(401)
Et simili frondescet Virga metallo."
I endeavoured to give our antiquaries a little wrench towards taste--but it was in vain. Sandby and our engravers have lent them a great deal--but there it stops. Captain Grose's dissertations are as dull and silly as if they were written for the Ostrogoth maps of the beginning of the new Topography: and which are so square and incomprehensible, that they look as if they were ichnographics of the New Jerusalem. I am delighted with having done with the professions of author and printer, and intend to be most comfortably lazy, I was going to say idle (but that would not be new) for the rest of my days.
If there was a peace, I would build my offices--if there is not soon, we shall be bankrupt--nay, I do not know what may happen as it is. Well! Mr. Grose will have plenty of ruins to engrave! The Royal Academy will make a fine mass, with what remains of old Somerset-house.
Adieu! my good Sir. Let me know you are well. You want nothing else, for you can always amuse Yourself, and do not let the foolish world disturb you. Yours most sincerely.
(401) The Hon. Daines Barrington, fourth son of John first Viscount Barrington, second Justice of Chester, and author of "Observations on the Statutes," etc. He was eminent in natural history, and in several branches of literature; and died in 1800.-E.
203. To The Rev. Mr. Cole. Berkeley Square, Nov. 30, 1780. (page 260)
I am sorry, my dear Sir, that you should be so humble with me, your ancient friend, and to whom you have ever been so liberal, as to make an apology for desiring me to grant the request of another person. I am not less sorry that I shall not, I fear, be able to comply with it; and you must have the patience to hear my reason,,-,. The first edition of the Anecdotes was of three hundred, of the two first volumes; and of as many of the third volume, and of the volume of Engravers. Then there was an edition of three hundred of all four. Unluckily, I did not keep any number back of the two first volumes, and literally have none but those I reserved for myself. Of the other two I have two or three: and, I believe, I have a first, but without the cuts. If I can,.with some odd volumes that I kept for corrections, make out a decent set, the library of the University shall have them; but you must not promise them, lest I should not be able to perform.
Of my new fourth volume I printed six hundred; but as they can be had, I believe not a third part is sold. This is a very plain lesson to me, that my editions sell for their curiosity, and not for any merit in them: and so they would if I printed Mother Goose's Tales, and but a few. As my Anecdotes of Painting have been published at such distant periods, and in three divisions, complete sets will be seldom seen; so, If I am humbled as an author, I may be vain as a printer; and, when one has nothing else to be vain of, it is certainly very little worth while to be proud of that.
I will now trust you with a secret, but beg Mr. Gough may not know it, for he will print it directly. Though I forgot Alma Mater, I have not forgotten my Alma Nutrices, wet or dry, I mean Eton and King's. I have laid aside for them, and left them in my will, as complete a set as I could, of all I have printed. A few I did give them at first; but I have for neither a perfect set of the Anecdotes, I mean not the two first volumes. I should be much obliged to you, if, without naming me, you could inform yourself if I did send to King'S those two first volumes--I believe not. '
I will now explain what I said above of Mr. Gough. He has learnt, I suppose from my engravers, that I have had some views of Strawberry-hill engraved. Slap-dash, down it went, and he has even specified each view in his second volume. This curiosity is a little impertinent; but he has made me some amends by a new blunder, for he says they are engraved for a second edition of my Catalogue. Now I have certainly printed but one edition, for which the prints are designed. He says truly, that I printed but a few for use; consequently, I by no means wished the whole world should know it; but he is silly, and so I will say no more about him. Dr. Lort called yesterday, and asked if I had any message for you; but I had written too lately.
Mr. Pennant has been, as I think I told you, in town: by this time I conclude he is, as Lady Townley says of fifty pounds, all over the kingdom. When Dr. Lort returns, I shall be very glad to read your transcript of Wolsey's Letters; for, in your hand, I can read them. I will not have them but by some very safe conveyance, and will return them with equal care.
I can have no objection to Robin Masters being wooden-head of the Antiquarian Society; but, I suppose, he is not dignified enough for them. I should prefer the Judge too, because a coif makes him more like an old woman, and I reckon that Society the midwives of superannuated miscarriages. I am grieved for the return of your headaches--I doubt you write too much. Yours most sincerely.
P. S. It will be civil to tell Dr. Farmer that I do not know whether I can obey his commands , but that I will if I can. As to a distinguished place, I beg not to be preferred to much better authors; nay, the more conspicuous, the more likely to be stolen for the reasons I have given you, of there being few complete sets, and true collectors are mighty apt to steal.