Constant - "Private Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, V3"

Meriwether Lewis et al - "The Journals of Lewis and Clark"

Emile Zola - "The Three Cities Trilogy: Paris, Vol. 4"

John McElroy - "The Red Acorn"

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Books: Letters of Horace Walpole, V4

H >> Horace Walpole >> Letters of Horace Walpole, V4




I went with General Conway, on Wednesday morning, from Park-place
to visit one of my antediluvian passions,--not a Statira or
Roxana, but one pre-existent to myself,--one Windsor Castle; and
I was so delightful and so juvenile, that, without attending to
any thing but my eyes, I stood full two hours and a half, and
found that half my lameness consists in my indolence. Two
Berrys, a Gothic chapel, and an historic castle, are anodynes to
a torpid mind. I now fancy that old age was invented by the
lazy. St. George's Chapel, that I always worshipped, though so
dark and black that I could see nothing distinctly, is now being
cleaned and decorated, a scene of' lightness and graces. Mr.
Conway was so struck with its Gothic beauties and taste, that he
owned the Grecian style would not admit half the variety of its
imagination. There is a new screen prefixed to the choir, so
airy and harmonious, that I concluded it Wyat's; but it is by a
Windsor architect, whose name I forget. Jarvis's window, over
the altar, after West, is rather too sombre for the Resurrection,
though it accords with the tone of the choirs; but the Christ is
a poor figure, scrambling to heaven in a fright, as if in dread
of being again buried alive. and not ascending calmly in secure
dignity: and there is a Judass below, T so gigantic, that he
seems more likely to burst by his bulk, than through guilt. In
the midst of all this solemnity, in a small angle over the lower
stalls, is crammed a small bas-relief, in oak, with the story of
Margaret Nicholson, the King, and the Coachman, as ridiculously
added and as clumsily executed as if it were a monkish miracle.
Some loyal zealot has broken away the blade of the knife, as if
the sacred wooden personage would have been in danger still. The
Castle itself is smugged up, is better glazed, has got some new
Stools, clocks, and looking-glasses, much embroidery in silk, and
a gaudy, clumsy throne, with a medallion at top of the King's and
Queen's heads, over their own--an odd kind of tautology, whenever
they sit there! There are several tawdry pictures, by West, of
the history of the Garter; but the figures are too small for that
majestic place. However, upon the whole, I was glad to see
Windsor a little revived.

I had written thus far, waiting for a letter, and happily receive
Your two from Bologna together; for which I give you a million of
thanks, and for the repairs of your coach, which I trust will
contribute to your safety: but I will swallow my apprehensions,
for I doubt I have tormented you with them. Yet do not wonder,
that after a year's absence, my affection, instead of waning, is
increased. Can I help feeling the infinite obligation I have to
you both, for quitting Italy that you love, to humour
Methusalem?--a Methusalem that is neither king nor priest, to
reward and bless you; and whom you condescend to please, because
he wishes to see you once more; though he ought to have
sacrificed a momentary glimpse to your far more durable
satisfaction. Instead of generosity, I have teased, and I fear,
wearied you, with lamentations and disquiets; and how can I make
you amends? What pleasure, what benefit, can I procure for you
in return? The most disinterested generosity, such as yours is,
gratifies noble minds; but how paltry am I to hope that the
reflections of your own minds will compensate for all the
amusements you give up to

"Make languor smile, and smooth the bed of death!"

I may boast of having no foolish weakness for your persons, as I
certainly have not; but

"The soul's dark cottage, batter'd and decay'd,
Lets in new selfishness through chinks that time has made."

And I have been as avaricious of hoarding a few moments of
agreeable society, as if I had coveted a few more trumpery
guineas in my strong-box! and then I have the assurance to tell
you I am not superannuated! Oh! but I am!

The Bolognese school is my favourite, though I do not like
Guercino, whom I call the German Guido, he is so heavy and dark.
I do not, like your friend, venerate Constantinopolitan
paintings, which are scarce preferable to Indian. The characters
of the Italian comedy were certainly adopted even from the
persons of its several districts and dialects. Pantaloon is a
Venetian, even in his countenance; and I once saw a gentleman of
Bergamo, whose face was an exact Harlequin's mask.

I have scarce a penfull of news for you; the world is at Weymouth
or Newmarket. En attendent, voici, the Gunnings again! The old
gouty General has carried off his tailor's wife; or rather, she
him, whither, I know not. Probably, not far; for the next day
the General was arrested for three thousand pounds, and carried
to a spunginghouse, whence he sent cupid with a link to a friend,
to beg help and a crutch. This amazing folly is generally
believed; perhaps because the folly of that race is amazing--so
is their whole story. The two beautiful sisters Were going on
the stage, when they are at once exalted almost as high as they
could be, were countessed and double-duchessed; and now the rest
of the family have dragged themselves through all the kennels of
the newspapers! Adieu! forgive all my pouts. I will be perfectly
good-humoured when I have nothing to vex me!



Letter 395 To John Pinkerton, Esq.(834)
Berkeley Square, Dec. 26, 1791. (page 528)

As I am sure of the sincerity of your congratulations,(835 I feel
much obliged by them, though what has happened destroys my
tranquillity; and, if what the world reckons advantages could
compensate the loss of peace and ease, would ill indemnify me,
even by them. A small estate, loaded with debt, and of which I
do not understand the management, and am too old to learn; a
source of lawsuits among my near relations, though not affecting
me; endless conversations with lawyers, and packets of letters to
read every day and answer,--all this weight of new business is
too much for the rag of life that yet hangs about me, and was
preceded by three weeks of anxiety about my unfortunate nephew,
and daily correspondence with physicians and mad-doctors, falling
upon me when I had been out of order ever since July. Such a
mass of troubles made me very seriously ill for some days, and
has left me and still keeps me so weak and dispirited, that, if I
shall not soon be able to get some repose, my poor head or body
will not be able to resist. For the empty title, I trust you do
not suppose it is any thing but an incumbrance, by larding my
busy mornings with idle visits of interruption, and which, when I
am able to go out, I shall be forced to return. Surely no man of
seventy-four, unless superannuated, can have the smallest
pleasure in sitting at home in his own room, as I almost always
do, and being called by a new name! It will seem personal, and
ungrateful too, to have said so much about my own triste
situation, and not to have yet thanked you, Sir. for your kind
and flattering offer of letting me read what you have finished of
your history; but it was necessary to expose my position to you,
before I could venture to accept your proposal, when I am so
utterly incapable of giving a quarter of an hour at a time to
what I know, by my acquaintance with your works, will demand all
my attention, if I wish to reap the pleasure they are formed to
give me. It is most true that for these seven weeks I have not
read seven pages, but letters, states of account, cases to be
laid before lawyers, accounts of farms, etc. etc., and those
subject to mortgages. Thus are my mornings occupied: in an
evening my relations and a very few friends come to me; and, when
they are gone, I have about an hour to midnight to write answers
to letters for the next day's post, which I had not time to do in
the morning. This is actually my case now. I happened to be
quitted at ten o'clock, and would not lose the opportunity of
thanking you, not knowing when I could command another hour.

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 manuscript for a little time, should I have leisure to
read it but by small snatches, 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 title 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 passed 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 tittle 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 cock 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 title 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
passage 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 Parnassus. 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 massacre of Paris
has exhibited horrors that even surpass 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, surpass 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 hellish 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 space of eight hours. Think on premiums voted
for the assassination of several princes, and do not think that
such execrable proceedings have been confined to Paris; no,
Avignon, Marseilles, 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 assured it contains neither
metaphysics nor politics; but as she entered the lists on the
latter, and borrowed her title 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 gratitude 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.
Nobody 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 assassins, 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 gratitude, and the municipality 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 Marseillais,"
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 massacre; 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 appetite 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
Duchesse 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 assassination of Kings and generals, and
cannot rest without incensing all Europe against them.

The Duchess 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 Duchess, "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
trespass 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.