The Letters of Horace Walpole, Earl of Orford Volume IV Part 76

I by no means would be understood to decline your obliging offer, Sir: on the contrary, I accept it joyfully, if you can trust me with your ma.n.u.script for a little time, should I have leisure to read it but by small s.n.a.t.c.hes, which would be wronging you, and would break all connexion in my head. Criticism you are too great a writer to want; and to read critically is far beyond my present power. Can a scrivener, or a scrivener's hearer, be a judge of composition, style, profound reasoning, and new lights and discoveries, etc.? But my weary hand and breast must finish.

May I ask the favour of you calling on me any morning, when you shall happen to come to town? You will find the new-old lord exactly the same admirer of yours.

(834) Now first collected.

(835) Mr. Walpole had succeeded to the t.i.tle of Earl of Orford on the 5th of December, upon the death of his nephew George, the third Earl.-E.

Letter 396 To Miss Hannah More.

Berkeley Square, Jan. 1, 1792. (PAGE 529)

My much-esteemed friend, I have not so long delayed answering your letter from the pitiful revenge of recollecting how long your pen is fetching breath before it replies to mine. Oh! no; you know I love to heap coals of kindness on your head, and to draw you into little sins, that you may forgive yourself, by knowing your time was employed on big virtues. On the contrary, you would be revenged; for here have you, according to your notions, inveigled me into the fracture of a commandment; for I am writing to you on a Sunday, being the first moment of leisure that I have had since I received your letter. It does not indeed clash with my religious ideas, as I hold paying one's debts as good a deed, as praying and reading sermons for a whole day in every week, when it is impossible to fix the attention to one course of thinking for so many hours for fifty-two days in every year. Thus you see I can preach too. But seriously, and indeed I am little disposed to cheerfulness now, I am overwhelmed with troubles, and with business--and business that I do not understand; law, and the management of a ruined estate, are subjects ill-suited to a head that never studied any thing that in worldly language is called useful. The tranquillity of my remnant of life will be lost, or so perpetually interrupted, that I expect little comfort; not that I am already intending to grow rich, but, the moment one is supposed so, there are so many alert to turn one to their own account, that I have more letters to Write, to satisfy, or rather to dissatisfy them, than about my own affairs, though the latter are all confusion. I have such missives on agriculture, pretensions to livings, offers of taking care of my game as I am incapable of it, self-recommendations of making my robes, and round hints of taking out my writ, that at least I may name a proxy, and give my dormant conscience to somebody or other! I trust you think better of my heart and understanding than to suppose that I have listened to any one of these new friends.

Yet, though I have negatived all, I have been forced to answer some of them before you; and that will convince you how cruelly ill I have pa.s.sed my time lately, besides having been made ill with vexation and fatigue. But I am tolerably well again.

For the other empty metamorphosis that has happened to the outward man, you do me justice in concluding that it can do nothing but tease me; it is being called names in one's old age.

I had rather be my lord mayor, for then I should keep the nickname but a year; and mine I may retain a little longer, not that at seventy-five I reckon on becoming my Lord Methusalem.

Vainer, however, I believe I am already become; for I have wasted almost two pages about myself, and said not a t.i.ttle about your health, which I most cordially rejoice to hear you are recovering, and as fervently hope you will entirely recover. I have the highest opinion of the element of water as a constant beverage; having so deep a conviction of the goodness and wisdom of Providence, that I am persuaded that when it indulged us in such a luxurious variety of eatables, and gave us but one drinkable, it intended that our sole liquid should be both wholesome and corrective. Your system I know is different; you hold that mutton and water were the Only c.o.c.k and hen that were designed for our nourishment; but I am apt to doubt whether draughts of water for six weeks are capable of restoring health, though some are strongly impregnated with mineral and other particles. Yet you have staggered me: the Bath water by your account is, like electricity, compounded of contradictory qualities; the one attracts and repels; the other turns a shilling yellow, and whitens your jaundice. I shall hope to see you (when is that to be?) without alloy.

I must finish, wishing you three hundred and thirteen days of happiness for the new year that is arrived this morning: the fifty-two that you hold in commendam, I have no doubt will be rewarded as such good intentions deserve. Adieu, my too good friend! My direction shall talk superciliously to the postman;(836) but do let me continue unchangeably your faithful and sincere HORACE WALPOLE.(837)

(836) He means franking his letter by his newly-acquired t.i.tle of Earl of Orford.

(837) This is the last letter signed Horace Walpole.-E.

Letter 397 To Thomas Barrett, Esq.

Berkeley Square, May 14, 1792. (PAGE 530)

Dear Sir, Though my poor fingers do not yet write easily, I cannot help inquiring if Mabeuse(838) is arrived safely at Lee, and fits his destined stall in the library. My amendment is far slower, comme de raison, than ever; and my weakness much greater. Another fit, I doubt, will confine me to my chair, if it does not do more; it is not worth haggling about that.

Dr. Darwin has appeared, superior in some respects to the former part. The Triumph of Flora, beginning at the fifty-ninth line, is most beautifully and enchantingly imagined; and the twelve verses that by miracle describe and comprehend the creation of the universe out of chaos, are in my opinion the most sublime pa.s.sage in any author, or in any of the few languages with which I am acquainted. There are a thousand other verses most charming, or indeed are all so, crowded with most poetic imagery, gorgeous epithets and style: and yet these four cantos do not please me equally with the Loves of the Plants. This seems to me almost as much a rhapsody of unconnected parts; and is so deep, that I cannot read six lines together, and know what they are about, till I have studied them in the long notes, and then perhaps do not comprehend them; but all this is my fault, not Dr.

Darwin's. Is he to blame, that I am no natural philosopher, no chemist, no metaphysician? One misfortune will attend this glorious work; it will be little read but by those who have no taste for poetry and who will be weighing, and criticising his positions, without feeling the imagination, harmony, and expression of the versification. Is not it extraordinary, dear Sir, that two of our very best poets, Garth and Darwin, should have been physicians? I believe they have left all the lawyers wrangling at the turnpike of Parna.s.sus. Adieu, dear Sir! Yours most cordially.

(838) A capital picture by that master, then lately purchased by Mr. Barrett.-E.

Letter 398 To Miss Hannah More.(839) Strawberry Hill, Aug. 21, 1792. (PAGE 531)

My dear Saint Hannah, I have frequently been going to write to you, but checked myself.

You are so good and so bad, that I feared I should interrupt some act of benevolence on one side; and on the other that you would not answer my letter in three months. I am glad to find, as an Irishman would say, that the way to make you answer is not to speak first. But, ah! i am a brute to upbraid any moment of your silence, though I regretted it when I hear that your kind intentions have been prevented by frequent cruel pain! and that even your rigid abstemiousness does not remove your complaints.

Your heart is always aching for others, and your head for yourself. Yet the latter never hinders the activity of the former. What must your tenderness not feel now, when a whole nation of monsters is burst forth? The second ma.s.sacre of Paris has exhibited horrors that even surpa.s.s the former.(840) Even the Queen's women were butchered in the Thuilleries, and the tigers chopped of the heads from the dead bodies, and tossed them into the flames of the palace. The tortures of the poor King and Queen, from the length of"their duration, surpa.s.s all example; and the brutal insolence with which they were treated on the 10th, all invention. They were dragged through the Place Vendome to see the statue of Louis the Fourteenth in fragments, and told it was to be the King's fate; and he, the most harmless of men, was told he is a monster; and this, after three years of sufferings. King and Queen, and children were shut up in a room, without nourishment, for twelve hours. One who was a witness has come over, and says he found the Queen sitting on the floor, trembling like an aspen in every limb, and her sweet boy the Dauphin asleep against her knee! She has not one woman to attend her that ever she saw, but a companion of her misery, the King's sister, an heroic virgin saint, who, on the former irruption into the palace, flew to and clung to her brother, and being mistaken for the Queen, and the h.e.l.lish fiends wishing to murder her, and somebody aiming to undeceive them, she said, "Ah! ne les d'etrompez pas!"(841) Was not that sentence the sublime of innocence? But why do I wound your thrilling nerves with the relation of such horrible scenes? Your blackmanity(842) must allow some of its tears to these poor victims. For my part, I have an abhorrence of politics, if one can so term these tragedies, which make one harbour sentiments one naturally abhors; but can one refrain without difficulty from exclaiming such wretches should be exterminated? They have butchered hecatombs of Swiss, even to porters in private houses, because they often are, and always are called, Le Suisse. Think on fifteen hundred persons, probably more, butchered on the 10th,(843) in the s.p.a.ce of eight hours. Think on premiums voted for the a.s.sa.s.sination of several princes, and do not think that such execrable proceedings have been confined to Paris; no, Avignon, Ma.r.s.eilles, etc. are still smoking with blood! Scarce the Alecto of the North, the legislatress and the usurper of Poland, has occasioned the spilling of larger torrents!

I am almost sorry that your letter arrived at this crisis; I cannot help venting a little of what haunts me. But it is better to thank Providence for the tranquillity and happiness we enjoy in this country, in spite of the philosophizing serpents we have in our bosom, the Paines, the Tookes, and the Woolstoncrofts. I am glad you have not read the tract of the last-mentioned writer.

I would not look at it, though a.s.sured it contains neither metaphysics nor politics; but as she entered the lists on the latter, and borrowed her t.i.tle from the demon's book, which aimed at spreading the wrongs of men, she is excommunicated from the pale of my library. We have had enough of new systems, and the world a great deal too much, already.

Let us descend to private life. Your friend Mrs. Boscawen, I fear, is unhappy: she has lost most suddenly her son-in-law, Admiral Leveson. Mrs. Garrick I have scarcely seen this whole summer. She is a liberal Pomona to me--I will not say an Eve; for though she reaches fruit to me, she will never let Me in, as if I were a boy, and would rob her orchard.

As you interest yourself about a certain trumpery old person, I with infinite grat.i.tude will add a line on him. He is very tolerably well, weak enough certainly, yet willing to be contented; he is satisfied with knowing that he is at his best.

n.o.body grows stronger at seventy-five, nor recovers the use of limbs half lost; nor-though neither deaf nor blind, nor in the latter most material point at all impaired; nor, as far as he can find on strictly watching himself, much damaged as to common uses in his intellects--does the gentleman expect to avoid additional decays, if his life shall be further protracted. He has been too fortunate not to be most thankful for the past, and most submissive for what is to come, be it more or less. He forgot to say, that the warmth of his heart towards those he loves and esteems has not suffered the least diminution, and consequently he is as fervently as ever Saint Hannah's most sincere friend and humble servant, ORFORD.

(839) Now first collected.

(840) From the 2d to the 6th of September, these internal atrocities proceeded uninterrupted, protracted by the actors for the sake of the daily pay of a Louis to each. M. Thiers states, that Billaud Varennes appeared publicly among the a.s.sa.s.sins, and encouraged what were called the labourers. "My friends," said he, "by taking the lives of villains you have saved the country.

France owes you eternal grat.i.tude, and the munic.i.p.ality offers you twenty livres apiece, and you shall be paid immediately." All the reports of the time differ in their estimate of the number of the victims. "That estimate," says M. Thiers, varies from six to twelve thousand in the prisons of France." Vol. ii. p. 45.-E.

(841) This fact is confirmed by M. Thiers. "During the irruption of the populace into the Thuilleries, on the 20th of June, Madame Elizabeth," he says, "followed the King from window to window, to share his danger. The people, when they saw her, took her for the Queen. Shouts of 'There's the Austrian!' were raised in an alarming manner. The national grenadiers, who had surrounded the Princess, endeavoured to set the people right. 'Leave them,'

said that generous sister, 'leave them in their error, and save the Queen!' Vol. i. p. 306.-E.

(842) An allusion to the lively interest Miss More was taking in the abolition of the slave trade.-E.

(843) At the storming of the Thuilleries. "The Ma.r.s.eillais,"

says M. Thiers, "made themselves masters of the palace: the rabble, with pikes, poured in after them, and the rest of the scene was soon but one general ma.s.sacre; the unfortunate Swiss in vain begged for quarter, at the Same time throwing down their arms; they were butchered without mercy." Vol. i. P. 380.-E.

Letter 399 To The Hon. H. S. Conway.

Strawberry Hill, August 31, 1792. (PAGE 533)

Your long letter and my short one crossed one another upon the road. I knew I was in your debt; but I had nothing to say but what you know better than I; for you read all the French papers, and I read none, as they have long put me out of all patience: and besides, I hear so much of their horrific proceedings, that they quite disturb me, and have given me what I call the French disease; that is, a barbarity that I abhor, for I cannot help wishing destruction to thousands of human creatures whom I never saw. But when men have worked themselves up into tigers and hyenas, and labour to communicate their appet.i.te for blood, what signifies whether they walk on two legs or four, or whether they dwell in cities, or in forests and dens? Nay, the latter are the more harmless wild beasts; for they only cranch a poor traveller now and then, and when they are famished with hunger: the others, though they have dined, cut the throats of some hundreds of poor Swiss for an afternoon's luncheon. Oh! the execrable nation! I cannot tell you any new particulars, for Mesdames de Cambis and d'Hennin, my chief informers, are gone to Goodwood to the poor d.u.c.h.esse de Biron, of whose recovery I am impatient to hear; and so I am of the cause of her very precipitate flight and panic.

She must, I think, have had strong motives; for two years ago I feared she was much too courageous, and displayed her intrepidity too publicly. If I did not always condemn the calling bad people mad people, I should say all Paris had gone distracted: they furnish provocation to every species of retaliation, by publishing rewards for a.s.sa.s.sination of Kings and generals, and cannot rest without incensing all Europe against them.

The d.u.c.h.ess of York gave a great entertainment at Oatlands on her Duke's birthday; sent to his tradesmen in town to come to it, and allowed two guineas apiece to each for their carriage; gave them a dance, and opened the ball herself with the Prince of Wales. A company of strollers came to Weybridge to act in a barn: she was solicited to go to it, and did out of charity, and carried all her servants. Next day a Methodist teacher came to preach a charity sermon in the same theatre, and she Consented to hear it on the same motive; but her servants desired to be excused, on not understanding English. "Oh!" said the d.u.c.h.ess, "but you went to the comedy, which you understood less, and you shall go to the sermon;" to which she gave handsomely, and for them. I like this.

Tack this to my other fragment, and then, I trust, I shall not be a defaulter in correspondence. I own I am become an indolent poor creature: but is that strange? With seventy-five years over my head, or on the point of being so; with a chalk-stone in every finger; with feet so limping, that I have been but twice this whole summer round my own small garden, and so much weaker than I was, can I be very comfortable, but when sitting quiet and doing nothing? All my strength consists in my sleep, which is as vigorous as at twenty: but with regard to letter-writing, I have so many to write on business which I do not understand, since the unfortunate death of my nephew, that, though I make them as brief as possible, half-a-dozen short ones tire me as much as a long One to an old friend; and as the busy ones must be executed, I trespa.s.s on the others, and remit them to another day. Norfolk has come very mal-apropos into the end of my life, and certainly never entered into my views and plans; and I, who could never learn the multiplication table, was not intended to transact leases.. direct repairs of farm-houses, settle fines for church lands, negotiate for lowering interest on mortgages, etc. In short, as I was told formerly, though I know several things, I never understood any thing useful. Apropos, the letter of which Lady Cecilia Johnstone told you is not at all worth your seeing.

It was an angry one to a parson who oppresses my tenants, and will go to law with them about tythes. She came in as I was writing it; and as I took up the character of parson myself, and preached to him as pastor of a flock which it did not become him to lead into the paths of law, instead of those of peace, I thought it would divert and showed it to her. Adieu! I have been writing to you till midnight, and my poor fingers ache. Yours ever.

Letter 400 To Miss Hannah More.

Berkeley Square, Feb. 9, 1793. (PAGE 535)

My holy Hannah, WITH your innate and usual goodness and sense, you have done me justice by guessing exactly at the cause of my long silence. You have been apt to tell me that my letters diverted you. How then could I write, when it was impossible but to attrist you! when I could speak of nothing but unparalleled horrors! and but awaken your sensibility, if it slumbered for a moment! What mind could forget the 10th of August and the 2d of September; and that the black and b.l.o.o.d.y year 1792 has plunged its murderous dagger still deeper, and already made 1793 still more detestably memorable! though its victim(844) has at last been rewarded for four years of torture by forcing from him every kind of proof of the most perfect character that ever sat on a throne. Were these, alas! themes for letters? Nay, am I not sure that you have been still more shocked by a crime that pa.s.ses even the guilt of shedding the blood of poor Louis, to hear of atheism avowed, and the avowal tolerated by monsters calling themselves a National a.s.sembly! But I have no words that can reach the criminality of such inferno-human beings, but must compose a term that aims at conveying my idea of them.

For the future it will be sufficient to call them the French; I hope no other nation will ever deserve to be confounded with them!

Indeed, my dear friend, I have another reason for wishing to burn my pen entirely: all my ideas are confounded and overturned; I do not know whether all I ever learned in the seventy first years of my seventy-five was not wrong and false: common sense, reasoning, calculation, conjecture from a.n.a.logy and from history of past events, all, all have been baffled; nor am I sure that what used to be thought the result of experience and wisdom was not a ma.s.s of mistakes. Have I not found, do I not find, that the invention of establishing metals as the signs of property was an useless discovery, or at least only useful till the art of making paper was found out? Nay, the latter is preferable to gold and silver.

If the ores were adulterated and cried down, n.o.body would take them in exchange. Depreciate paper as much as you will, and it will still serve all the purposes of barter.

Tradesmen still keep shops, stock them with goods, and deliver their commodities for those coined rags. Poor Reason, where art thou?

To show you that memory and argument are Of no value, at least with me, I thought a year or two that this papermint would soon blow UP, because I remembered that when Mr. Charles Fox and one or two more youths of brilliant genius first came to light, and into vast debts at play, they imparted to the world an important secret which they had discovered. It was, that n.o.body needed to want money, if they would pay enough for it. Accordingly, they borrowed of Jews at vast usury: but as they had made but an incomplete calculation, the interest so soon exceeded the princ.i.p.al, that the system did not maintain its ground for above two or three years. Faro has proved a more substantial speculation. But I miscarried in applying my remembrance to the a.s.signats, which still maintain their ground against that long-decried but as long-adored corrupter of virtue, gold.(845) Alack! I do not hear that virtue has flourished more for the destruction of its old enemy!

Shall I add another truth? I have been so disgusted and fatigued by hearing of nothing but French ma.s.sacres, etc.

and found it so impossible to shift conversation to any other topic, that before I had been a month in town, I wished Miss Gunning would revive, that people might have at least one other subject to interest the ears and tongues of the public. But no wonder universal attention is engrossed by the present portentous scene! It seems to draw to a question, whether Europe or France is to be depopulated; whether civilization can be recovered, or the republic of Chaos can be supported by a.s.sa.s.sination. We have heard of the golden, silver, and iron ages; the brazen one existed while the French were only predominantly insolent. What the present age will be denominated, I cannot guess'. Though the paper age would be characteristic, it is not emphatic enough, nor specifies the enormous sins of the fiends that are the agents. I think it may be styled the diabolical age -. the Duke of Orleans has dethroned Satan, who since his fall has never instigated such crimes as Orleans has perpetrated.(846)

Let me soften my tone a little, and harmonize your poor mind by sweeter accents. In this deluge of triumphant enormities, what trails of the sublime and beautiful may be gleaned! Did you hear of Madame Elizabeth, the King's sister? a saint like yourself. She doted on her brother, for she certainly knew his soul. In the tumult in July, hearing the populace and the poissardes had broken into the palace, she flew to the King, and by embracing him tried to shield his person. The populace took her for the Queen, cried out "Voil'a cette chienne, cette Autrichienne!" and were proceeding to violence. Somebody to save her, screamed "Ce n'est pas la Reine, c'est--"

The Princess said, "Ah! mon Dieu! ne les d'etrompez pas." If that was not the most sublime instance of perfect innocence ready prepared for death, I know not where to find one.

Sublime indeed, too, was the sentence of good Father Edgeworth, the King's confessor, who, thinking his royal penitent a little dismayed just before the fatal stroke, cried out "Montez, digne fils de St. Louis! Le ciel vous est ouvert." The holy martyr's countenance brightened up, and he submitted at once. Such victims, such confessors as those, and Monsieur do Malesherbes, repair some of the breaches in human nature made by Orleans, Condorcet, Santerre, and a legion of evil spirits.