The Letters of Horace Walpole, Earl of Orford Volume IV Part 58

(619) Now first collected.

Letter 321 To Miss Hannah More.(620) Strawberry Hill, August 17, 1788. (page 406)

Dear Madam, In this great discovery of a new mine of Madame de S'evign'e's letters, my faith, I confess, is not quite firm. Do people sell houses wholesale, without opening their cupboards? This age, too, deals so much in false coinage, that booksellers and Birmingham give equal vent to what is not sterling; with the only difference, that the shillings of the latter pretend that the names are effaced, while the wares Of the former pa.s.s under borrowed names. Have we not seen, besides all the Testamens Politiques, the spurious letters of Ninon de l'Enclos, of Pope Ganganelli, and the Memoirs of the Princess Palatine? This is a little mortifying, while we know that there actually exists at Naples a whole library of genuine Greek and Latin authors; most of whom probably, have never been in print: and where it is not unnatural to suppose the work of some cla.s.sics, yet lost, may be in being, and the remainder of some of the best. Yet, at the 'rate in which they proceed to unroll, it would take as many centuries to bring them to light, as have elapsed since they were overwhelmed. Nay, another eruption of Vesuvius may return all the volumes to chaos! Omar is stigmatized for burning the library of Alexandria. Is the King of Naples less a Turk? IS not it almost as unconscientious to keep a seraglio of virgin authors under the custody of nurses, as of blooming Circa.s.sians?

Consider, my dear Madam, I am past seventy; or I should not be SO Ungallant as to make the smallest comparison between the contents of the two harems. Your picture, which hangs near my elbow, would frown, I am sure, if I had any light meaning.

(620) Now first collected.

Letter 322 To The Earl Of Strafford.

Strawberry Hill, Sept. 12, 1788. (page 407)

My late fit of gout, though very short, was a very authentic one, my dear lord, and the third I have had since Christmas. Still, of late years, I have suffered so little pain, that I can justly complain of nothing but the confinement, and the debility of my hands and feet, which, however, I can still use to a certain degree; and as I enjoy such good spirits and health in the intervals, I look upon the gout as no enemy; yet I know it is like the compacts said to be made with the devil, (no kind comparison to a friend!) who showers his favours on the Contractors, but is sure to seize and carry them off at last.

I would not say so much of myself, but in return to your lordship's obliging concern for me: Yet, insignificant as the subject, I have no better in bank; and if I plume myself on the tolerable state of my out-ward man, I doubt your lordship finds that age does not treat my interior so mildly as the gout does the other. If my letters, as you are pleased to say, used to amuse you, you must perceive how insipid they are grown, both from my decays and the little intercourse I have with the world.

Nay, I take care not to aim at false vivacity: what do the attempts of age at liveliness prove but its weakness? What the Spectator said wittily, ought to be practised in sober sadness by old folks: when he was dull, he declared it was by design. So far, to be sure, we ought to observe it, as not to affect more spirits than we possess. To be purposely stupid, would be forbidding our correspondents to continue the intercourse; and I am so happy in enjoying the honour of your lordship's friendship, that I will be content (if you can be so) with my natural inanity, without studying to increment it.

I have been at Park-place, and a.s.sure your lordship that the Druidic temple vastly more than answers my expectation. Small it is, no doubt, when you are within the enclosure, and but a chapel of ease to Stonehenge; but Mr. Conway has placed it with so much judgment, that it has a lofty effect, and infinitely more than it could have had if he had yielded to Mrs. Damer's and my opinion, who earnestly begged to have it placed within the enclosure of the home grounds. It now stands on the ridge of the high hill without, backed by the horizon, and with a grove on each side at a little distance; and, being exalted beyond and above the range of firs that climb up the sides of the hill from the valley, wears all the appearance of an ancient castle, whose towers are only shattered, not destroyed; and devout as I am to old castles, and small taste as I have for the ruins of ages absolutely barbarous, it is impossible not to be pleased with so very rare an antiquity so absolutely perfect, and it is difficult to prevent visionary ideas from improving a prospect.

If, as Lady Anne Conolly told your lordship, I have had a great deal of company, you must understand it of my house, not of me; for I have very little. Indeed, last Monday both my house and I were included. The Duke of York sent me word the night before, that he would come and see it, and of course I had the honour of showing it myself. He said, and indeed it seemed so, that he was much pleased; at least, I had every reason to be satisfied; for I never saw any prince more gracious and obliging, nor heard one utter more personally kind speeches.

I do not find that her grace the Countess of Bristol's(621) will is really known yet. They talk of two wills--to be sure, in her double capacity; and they say she has made three coheiresses to her jewels, the Empress of Russia, Lady Salisbury, and the wh.o.r.e of Babylon.(622) The first of those legatees, I am not sorry, is in a piteous sc.r.a.pe: I like the King of Sweden no better than I do her and the Emperor; but it is good that two destroyers should be punished by a third, and that two crocodiles should be gnawed by an insect. Thank G.o.d! we are not only at peace, but in full plenty--nay, and in full beauty too. Still better; though we have had rivers of rain, it has not, contrary to all precedent, washed away our warm weather. September, a month I generally dislike for its irresolute mixture of warm and cold, has. .h.i.therto been peremptorily fine. The apple and walnut-trees bend down with fruit, as in a poetic description of Paradise.

(621) The d.u.c.h.ess of Kingston, who died at Paris in August.-E.

(622) The newspapers had circulated a report that the d.u.c.h.ess had bequeathed her diamonds to the Empress of Russia and his Holiness the Pope.-E.

Letter 323 To Miss Hannah More.

Strawberry Hill, Sept. 22, 1788. (page 408)

I don't like to defraud you of your compa.s.sion, my good friend, profuse as you are of it. I really suffered scarce any pain at all from my last fit of gout. I have known several persons who think there is a dignity in complaining; and, if you ask how they do, reply, "Why, I am pretty well to-day; but if you knew what I suffered yesterday!" Now methinks n.o.body has a right to tax another for pity on what is past; and besides, complaint of what is over can only make the hearer glad you are in pain no longer.

Yes, yes, my dear Madam, you generally place your pity so profitably, that YOU shall not waste a drop upon me, who ought rather to be congratulated on being so well at my age.

Much less shall I allow you to make apologies for your admirable and proper conduct towards your Poor prot'eg'ee(623) And now you have told me the behaviour of a certain great dame, I will confess to you that I have known it some months by accident-nay, and tried to repair it. I prevailed on Lady * * * * *, who as readily undertook the commission, and told the Countess of her treatment of you. Alas! the answer was, "It is too late; I have no money." No! but she has, if she has a diamond left. I am indignant; yet, do you know, not at this d.u.c.h.ess, or that countess, but at the invention of ranks, and t.i.tles, and pre-eminence. I used to hate that king and t'other prince; but, alas! on reflection I find the censure ought to fall on human nature in general. They are made of the same stuff as we, and dare we say what we should be in their situation? Poor creatures!

think how they are educated, or rather corrupted, early, how flattered! To be educated properly, they should be led through hovels, and hospitals, and prisons. Instead of being reprimanded (and perhaps immediately after sugar-plum'd) for not learning their Latin or French grammar, they now and then should be kept fasting; and, if they cut their finger, should have no plaister till it festered. No part of a royal brat's memory, which is good enough, should be burthened but with the remembrance of human sufferings. In short, I fear our nature is so liable to be corrupted and perverted by greatness, rank, power, and wealth, that I am inclined to think that virtue is the compensation to the poor for the want of riches: nay, I am disposed to believe that the first footpad or highwayman has been a man of quality, or a prince, who could not bear having wasted his fortune, and was too lazy to work; for a beggar-born would think labour a more natural way of getting a livelihood than venturing his life. I have something a similar opinion about common women. No modest girl thinks of many men, till she has been in love with one, been ruined by him, and abandoned. But to return to my theme, and it will fall heavy on yourself. Could the milkwoman have been so bad, if you had merely kept her from starving, instead of giving her opulence? The soil, I doubt, was bad; but it could not have produced the rank weed of ingrat.i.tude, if you had not dunged it with gold, which rises from rock, and seems to meet with a congenial bed when it falls on the human heart.

And so Dr. Warton imagines I m writing "Walpoliana!" No, in truth, nor any thing else; nor shall-nor will I go out in a jest-book. Age has not only made me prudent, but, luckily, lazy; and, without the latter extinguisher, I do not know but that farthing candle my discretion would let my snuff of life flit to the last sparkle of folly, like what children call. the parson and clerk in a bit of burnt paper. You see by my writability in pressing my letters on you, that my pen has still a colt's tooth left, but I never indulge the poor old child with more paper than this small-sized sheet, I do not give it enough to make a paper kite and fly abroad on wings of booksellers. You ought to continue writing, for you do good your writings, or at least mean it; and if a virtuous intention fails, it is a sort of coin, which, though thrown away, still makes the donor worth more than he was before he gave it away. I delight too in the temperature of your piety, and that you would not see the enthusiastic exorcist. How shocking to suppose that the Omnipotent Creator of worlds delegates his power to a momentary insect to eject supernatural spirits that he had permitted to infest another insect, and had permitted to vomit blasphemies against himself!

Pray do not call that enthusiasm, but delirium. I pity real enthusiasts, but I would shave their heads and take away some blood. The exorcist's a.s.sociates are in a worse predicament, I doubt, and hope to make enthusiasts. If such abominable impostors were not rather a subject of indignation, I could smile at the rivalship between them and the animal magnetists, who are inveigling fools into their different pales. And alas! while folly has a shilling left, there will be enthusiasts and quack doctors; and there will be slaves while there are kings or sugar-planters.(624) I have remarked, that though Jesuits, etc.

travel to distant East and West to propagate their religion and traffic, I never heard of one that made a journey into Asia or Africa to preach the doctrines of liberty, though those regions are so deplorably oppressed. Nay, I much doubt whether ever any chaplain of the regiments we have sent to India has once whispered to a native of Bengal, that there are milder forms of government than those of his country. No; security of property is not a wholesome doctrine to be inculcated in a land where the soil produces diamonds and gold! In short, if your Bristol exorcist believes he can cast out devils, why does he not go to Leadenhallstreet? There is a company whose name is legion.

By your gambols, as you call them, after the most ungambolling peeress in Christendom, and by your jaunts, I conclude, to my great satisfaction, that you are quite well. Change of scene and air are good for your spirits; and September, like all our old ladies, has given itself May airs, and must have made your journey very pleasant. Yet you will be glad to get back to your Cowslip-green, though it may offer you nothing but Michaelmas daisies. When you do leave it, I wish you could persuade Mrs.

Garrick to settle sooner in London. There is full as good hay to be made in town at Christmas at Hampton, and some hay-makers that will wish for you particularly. Your most sincere friend.

(623) Ann Yearsley. See ant'e, p. 395, letter 313.-E.

(624) In the letter to which this is a reply, Miss More had said-- "in vain do we boast of the enlightened eighteenth century, and conceitedly talk as if human reason had not a manacle left about her, but that philosophy had broken down all the strongholds of prejudice, ignorance, and superst.i.tion: and yet at this very time Mesmer has got an hundred thousand pounds by animal magnetism in Paris, and Mainanduc is getting as much in London. There is a fortune-teller in Westminster who is making little less. Lavater's Physiognomy-books sell at fifteen guineas a set. The divining-rod is still considered as oracular in many places. Devils are cast out by seven ministers; and, to complete the disgraceful catalogue, slavery is vindicated in print, and defended in the House of Peers." Memoirs, vol. ii. P. 120.-E.

Letter 324 To The Right Hon. Lady Craven.

Berkeley Square, Dec. 11, 1788. (page 411)

It is agreeable to your ladyship's usual goodness to honour me with another letter; and I may say, to your equity too, after I had proved to Monsieur Mercier, by the list of dates of my letters, that it was not mine, but the post's fault, that you did not receive one that I had the honour of writing to you above a year ago. Not, Madam, that I could wonder if you had the prudence to drop a correspondence with an old superannuated man; who, conscious of his decay, has had the decency of not troubling, with his dotages persons of not near your ladyship's youth and vivacity. I have been of opinion that few persons know when to die; I am not so English as to mean when to despatch themselves--no, but when to go out of the world. I have usually applied this opinion to those who have made a considerable figure; and, consequently, it was not adapted to myself. Yet even we ciphers ought not to fatigue the public scene when we are become lumber. Thus, being quite out of the question, I will explain my maxim, which is the more wholesome, the higher it is addressed. My opinion, then, is, that when any personage has shone as much as is possible in his or her best walk, (and, not to repeat both genders every minute, I will use the male as the common of the two,) he should take up his Strulbrugism, and be heard of no more. Instances will be still more explanatory. Voltaire ought to have pretended to die after Alzire, Mahomet, and Semiramis, and not have produced his wretched last pieces: Lord Chatham should have closed his political career with his immortal war: and how weak was Garrick, when he had quitted the stage, to limp after the tatters of fame by writing and reading pitiful poems; and even by sitting to read plays which he had acted with such fire and energy! We have another example in Mr. Anstey; who, if he had a friend upon earth, would have been obliged to him for being knocked on the head, the moment he had published the first edition of the Bath Guide; for, even in the second, he had exhausted his whole stock of inspiration, and has never written any thing tolerable since. When Such unequal authors print their works together, one man may apply in a new light the old hacked simile of Mezentius, who tied together the living and the dead.

We have just received the works of an author, from whom I find I am to receive much less entertainment than I expected, because I shall have much less to read than I intended. His Memoirs, I am told, are almost wholly military; which, therefore, I shall not read: and his poetry, I am sure, I shall not look at, because I should not understand it. What I saw of it formerly, convinced me that he would not have been a poet, even if he had written in his own language: and, though I do not understand German, I am told it is a fine language - and I can easily believe that any tongue (not excepting our old barbarous Saxon, which, a bit of an antiquary as I am, I abhor,) is more harmonious than French. It was curious absurdity, therefore, to pitch on the most unpoetic language in Europe, the most barren, and the most clogged with difficulties. I have heard Russian and Polish sung, and both sounded musical; but, to abandon one's own tongue, and not adopt Italian, that is even sweeter, and softer, and more copious, than the Latin, was a want of taste that I should think could not be applauded even by a Frenchman born in Provence. But what a language is the French, which measures verses by feet that never are to be p.r.o.nounced; which is the case wherever the mute e is found! What poverty of various sounds for rhyme, when, lest similar cadences should too often occur, their mechanic bards are obliged to marry masculine and feminine terminations as alternately as the black and white squares of a chessboard? Nay, will you believe me, Madam,--yes, you will, for you may convince your own eyes,-that a scene of Zaire begins with three of the most nasal adverbs that ever snorted together in a breath?

Enfin, donc, desormais, are the culprits in question. Enfin donc, need I tell your ladyship, that the author I alluded to at the beginning of' this long tirade is the late King of Prussia?

I am conscious that I have taken a little liberty when I excommunicate a tongue in which your ladyship has condescended to write;(625) but I only condemn it for verse and pieces of eloquence, of which I thought it alike incapable, till I read Rousseau of Geneva. It is a most sociable language, and charming for narrative and epistles. Yet, write as well as you will in it, you must be liable to express yourself better in the speech natural to you and your own country has a right to understand all your works, and is jealous of their not being as perfect as you could make them. Is it not more creditable to be translated into a foreign language than into your own? and will it not vex you to hear the translation taken for the original, and to find vulgarisms that you could not have committed yourself? But I have done, and will release you, Madam; only observing, that you flatter me with a vain hope, when you tell me you shall return to England, some time or other. Where will that time be for me! and when it arrives, shall I not be somewhere else?

I do not pretend to send your ladyship English news, nor to tell you of English literature. You must before this time have heard of the dismal state into which our chief personage is fallen!

That consideration absorbs all others. The two houses are going to settle some intermediate succedaneum; and the obvious one, no doubt, will be fixed on.

(625) Besides writing a comedy in French, called "Nourjahad,"

Lady Craven had translated into that language Cibber's play of "She would and She would not."-E.

Letter 325 To The Miss Berrys.(626) February 2, 17-71(627) [1789.) (page 413)

I am sorry, in the sense of that word before it meant, like a Hebrew word, glad or sorry, that I am engaged this evening; and I am at your command on Tuesday, as it is always my inclination to be. It is a misfortune that words are become so much the current coin of society, that, like King William's shillings, they have no impression left; they are so smooth, that they mark no more to whom they first belonged than to whom they do belong, and are not worth even the twelvepence into which they may be changed: but if they mean too little, they may seem to mean too much too, especially when an old man (who is often synonymous for a miser) parts with them. I am afraid of protesting how much I delight in your society, lest I should seem to affect being gallant; but if two negatives make an affirmative, why may not two ridicules compose one piece of sense? and therefore, as I am in love with you both, I trust it is a proof of the good sense of your devoted H. WALPOLE.

(626) This is the first of a series of letters addressed by Mr Walpole to Miss Mary and Miss Agnes Berry, and now first published from the original in their possession.-E.

(627) The date is thus put, alluding to his age, which, in'1789 was seventy-one.-M. B.

letter 326 To The Miss Berrys.

Berkeley Square, March 20, 1789. (page 413)

Mrs. Damer had lent her Madame de la Motte,(628) and I have but this moment recovered it; so, you see, I had not forgotten it any more than my engagements to you: nay, were it not ridiculous at my age to use a term so almost run out as never, I would add, that you may find I never can forget you. I hope you are not engaged this day sevennight, but will allow me to wait on you to Lady Ailesbury, which I will settle with her when I have your answer. I did mention it to her in general, but have no day free before Friday next, except Thursday; when, if there is another illumination, as is threatened, we should neither get thither nor thence; especially not the latter, if the former is impracticable.

"Quicquid delirant Reges, plectuntur Achivi."(629)

P. S. I have got a few hairs of Edward the Fourth's head, not beard; they are of a darkish brown, not auburn.

(628) The M'emoire Justificatif of Madame de la Motte, relative to her conduct in the far-famed affair of the necklace.-E.

(629) Alluding to the public rejoicings on the recovery of George the Third from his first illness in 1788. In a letter to her sister of the 9th of March, Miss More relates the following particulars:--"A day or two ago I dined at the Bishop of London's, with Dr. Willis. As we had n.o.body else at dinner but the Master of the Rolls, I was indulged in asking the doctor all manner of impertinent questions. He never saw, he said, so much natural sweetness and goodness of mind, united to so much piety, as in the King. During his illness, he many time shed tears for Lord North's blindness. The Bishop had been to him that morning: he told him that he wished to return his thanks to Almighty G.o.d in the most public manner, and hoped the Bishop would not refuse him a sermon. He proposed going to St. Paul's to do it. He himself has named one of the Psalms for the thanksgiving-day, and the twelfth of Isaiah for the lesson."

On the 17th, she again writes--"The Queen and Princesses came to see the illuminations, and did not get back to Kew till after one O'clock. When the coach stopped, the Queen took notice of a fine gentleman who came to the coach-door without his hat. This was the King, who came to hand her out. She scolded him for being up and out so late; but he gallantly replied, 'he could not Possibly go to bed and sleep till he knew she was safe.' There never was so joyous, so innocent, and so orderly a mob." Memoirs, vol. ii.

Pp. 144- 155-E.