Books: Letters of Horace Walpole, V4

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My brass plate for Bishop Walpole was copied exactly from the
print in Dart's Westminster, of the tomb of Robert Dalby, Bishop
of Durham, with the sole alteration Of the name. I shall return,
as soon as I have time, to Mr. Baker's Life; but I shall want to
Consult you, or, at least, the account of him in the new
Biographia, as your notes want some dates. I am not satisfied
yet with what I have sketched; but I shall correct it. My small
talent was grown very dull. This attack about Chatterton has a
little revived it; but it warns me to have done , for, if*one
comes to want provocatives,-the produce will soon be feeble.
Adieu! Yours most sincerely.

(317) John Bale, Bishop of Ossory. The work to which Walpole
alludes is his "Catalog's Scriptorum illustrium Majoris
Brytannie." Basle, 1557-E.--John Pitts wrote, in opposition to
Bale, "De illustribus Angliae Scriptoribus." Paris, 1619.-E.

Letter 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.

Letter 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.

Letter 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.

Letter 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.

Letter 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.