Books: The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2

H >> Horace Walpole >> The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | 32 | 33 | 34 | 35 | 36 | 37 | 38 | 39 | 40 | 41 | 42 | 43 | 44 | 45 | 46 | 47 | 48 | 49 | 50 | 51 | 52 | 53 | 54 | 55 | 56 | 57 | 58 | 59 | 60 | 61

You have heard, I suppose, that Nugent must answer a little
more seriously for Lady Lymington's child. Why, she was as
ugly as Mrs. Nugent, had had more children, and was not so
young. The pleasure of wronging a woman, who had bought him so
dear, could be the only temptation.

Adieu! I have told you all I know, and as much is scandal, very
possibly more than is true. I go to Strawberry on Saturday,
and so shall not know even scandal.

66 Letter 24
To Sir Horace Mann.
Arlington Street, May 19, 1750.

I did not doubt but you would be diverted with the detail of
absurdities that were committed after the earthquake: I could
have filled more paper with such relations, If I had not feared
tiring you. We have swarmed with sermons, essays, relations,
poems, and exhortations On that subject. One Stukely, a
parson, has accounted for it, and I think prettily, by
electricity--but that is the fashionable cause, and every thing
is resolved into electrical appearances, as formerly every
thing was accounted for by Descartes's vortices, and Sir
Isaac's gravitation. But they all take care, after accounting
for the earthquake systematically, to assure you that still it
was nothing less than a judgment. Dr. Barton, the rector of
St. Andrews, was the only sensible, or at least honest divine,
upon the occasion. When some women would have had him to pray
to them in his parish church against the intended shock, he
excused himself on having a great cold. "And besides," said
he, "you may go to St. James's church; the Bishop of Oxford is
to preach there all night about earthquakes." Turner, a great
china-man, at the corner of Dext street, had a jar cracked by
the shock: he originally asked ten guineas for the pair; he now
asks twenty, "because it is the only jar in Europe that has
been cracked by an earthquake." But I have quite done with this
topic. The Princess of Wales is lowering the price of princes,
as the earthquake has raised old china; she has produced a
fifth boy. In a few years we shall have Dukes of York and
Lancaster popping out of bagnios and taverns as frequently as
Duke Hamilton.(140) George Selwyn said a good thing the other
day on another cheap dignity: he was asked who was playing at
tennis, He replied, "Nobody but three markers and a Regent."
your friend Lord Sandwich. While we are undervaluing all
principalities and powers, you are making a rout with them, for
which I shall scold you. We had been diverted with the pompous
accounts of the reception of the Margrave of Baden Dourlach at
Rome; and now you tell me he has been put upon the same foot at
Florence! I never heard his name when he was here, but on his
being mob'd as he was going to Wanstead, and the people's
calling him the Prince of Bad-door-lock. He was still less
noticed than he of Modena.

Lord Bath is as well received at Paris as a German Margrave in
Italy. Every body goes to Paris: Lord Mountford was introduced
to the King, who only said brutally enough, "Ma foi! il est
bien nourri!" Lord Albemarle keeps an immense table there, with
sixteen people in his kitchen; his aide-de-camps invite every
body, but he seldom graces the banquet himself, living retired
out of the town with his old Columbine.(141) What an
extraordinary man! with no fortune at all, and with slight parts,
he has seventeen thousand a year from the government, which he
squanders away, though he has great debts, and four or five
numerous broods of children of one sort or other!

The famous Westminster election is at last determined, and Lord
Trentham returned: the mob were outrageous, and pelted Colonel
Waldegrave, whom they took for Mr. Leveson, from Covent-garden
to the Park, and knocked down Mr. Offley, who was with him.
Lord Harrington(142) was scarce better treated when he went on
board a ship from Dublin. There are great commotions there
about one Lucas, an apothecary, and favourite of the mob. The
Lord Lieutenant bought off a Sir Richard Cox, a patriot, by a
place in the revenue, though with great opposition from that
silly mock-virtuoso, Billy
Bristow, and that sillier Frederick Frankland, two oafs, whom
you have seen in Italy, and who are commissioners there. Here
are great disputes in the Regency, where Lord Harrington finds
there is not spirit enough to discard these puppet-show heroes!

We have got a second volume of Bower'S(143) History of the
Popes, but it is tiresome and pert, and running into a warmth
and partiality that he had much avoided in his first volume.
He has taken such pains to disprove the Pope's supremacy being
acknowledged pretty early, that he has convinced me it was
acknowledged. Not that you and I care whether it were or not.
He is much admired here; but I am not good Christian enough to
rejoice over him, because turned Protestant; nor honour his
confessorship, when he ran away with the materials that were
trusted to him to write for the papacy, and makes use of them
to write against it. You know how impartial I am; I can love
him for being shocked at a system of cruelty supporting
nonsense; I can be pleased with the truths he tells; I can and
do admire his style, and his genius in recovering a language
that he forgot by six years old, so well as to excel in writing
it, and yet I wish that all this had happened without any
breach of trust!

Stosch has grievously offended me; but that he will little
regard, as I can be of no use to him: he has sold or given his
charming intaglio of the Gladiator to Lord Duncannon. I must
reprove you a little who sent it; you know how much I pressed
you to buy it for me, and how much I offered. I still think it
one of the finest rings(144) I ever saw, and am mortified at not
having it.

Apropos to Bower; Miss Pelham had heard that he had foretold
the return of the earthquake-fit: her father sent for him, to
COnVince her that Bower was too sensible; but had the
precaution to talk to him first: he replied gravely, that a
fire was kindled under the earth, and he could not tell when it
would blaze out. You may be sure he was not carried to the
girl! Adieu!

(140) Jonas, sixth Duke of Hamilton, the Husband of the
beautiful Miss Gunning. he died in 1758.-D.

(141) Mademoiselle Gauchet.

(142) William Stanhope, Earl of Harrington, Lord Lieutenant.

(143) Archibald Bow(@r, a man of disreputable character, who
was born in Scotland, of a Roman Catholic family, was educated
at Douay and Rome, and became a Jesuit. Having been detected,
as it is said, in an intrigue with a nun, he was forced to fly
from Perugia, where he resided: and after a series of strange
and not very creditable adventures, he arrived in England.
Here he declared himself a Protestant; but, after some years,
wishing to swindle the English Jesuits out of an annuity, be
again returned to their order. Having got all he could from
them, he again returned to Protestantism, and wrote his
"History of the Popes," which was his principal literary
work.-D. (Gibbon, speaking of Bower, in his Extraits (le mon
Journal for 1764, says, " He is a rogue unmasked, who enjoyed,
for twenty years, the favour of the public, because he had
quitted a sect to which he still secretly adhered; and because
he had been a counsellor of the inquisition in the town of
Macerata, where an inquisition never existed." Bower died in
Bond Street, in September, 1766, in his eighty-first year, and
was buried in Mary-le-bone churchyard, where there is a
monument to his memory.]

(144) It is engraved in Stosch's book: it is a Gladiator
standing, with a vase by him on a table, on an exceedingly fine
garnet.

68 Letter 25
To George Montagu, Esq.
Arlington Street, June 23, 1750.

Dear George,
As I am not Vanneck'd(145) I have been in no hurry to thank you
for your congratulation, and to assure you that I never knew
what solid happiness was till I was married. Your Trevors and
Rices dined with me last week at Strawberry Hill, and would
have had me answer you upon the matrimonial tone, but I thought
I should imitate cheerfulness in that style as ill as if I were
really married. I have had another of your friends with me
here some time, whom I adore, Mr. Bentley; he has more sense,
judgment, and wit, more taste, and more misfortunes, than sure
ever met in any man. I have heard that Dr. Bentley, regretting
his want of taste for all such learning as his, which is the
very want of taste, used to sigh and say, "Tully had his
Marcus." If the sons resembled as much as the fathers did, at
least in vanity, I would be the modest agreeable Marquis. Mr.
Bentley tells me that you press him much to visit you at
Hawkhurst. I advise him, and assure him he will make his
fortune under you there; that you are an agent from the board
of trade to the smugglers, and wallow in contraband wine, tea,
and silk handkerchiefs. I found an old newspaper t'other day,
with a list of outlawed smugglers; there were John Price, alias
Miss Marjoram, Bob Plunder, Bricklayer Tom, and Robin
Cursemother, all of Hawkhurst, in Kent. When Miss Harriet is
thoroughly hardened at Buxton, as I hear she is being,, in a
public room with the whole Wells, from drinking waters, I
conclude she will come to sip nothing but new brandy.

As jolly and as abominable a life as she may have been leading,
I defy all her enormities to equal a party of pleasure that I
had t'other night. I shall relate it to you to show you the
manners of the age, which are always as entertaining to a
person fifty miles off, as to one born an hundred and fifty
years after the time. I had a card from Lady Caroline
Petersham to go with her to Vauxhall. I went accordingly to her
house, and found her and the little Ashe,(146) or the Pollard
Ashe, as they call her; they had just finished their last layer
of red, and looked as handsome as crimson could make them. On
the cabinet-door stood a pair of Dresden candlesticks, a present
from the virgin hands of Sir John Bland: the branches of each
formed a little bower over a cock and hen * * * * We issued
into the mall to assemble our company, which was all the town, if
we could get it; for just so many had been summoned, except Harry
Vane(147) whom we met by chance. We mustered the Duke of
Kingston, whom Lady Caroline says she has been trying for these
seven years; but alas! his beauty is at the fall of the leaf;
Lord March,(148) Mr. Whitehead, a pretty Miss Beauclerc, and a
very foolish Miss Sparre. These two damsels were trusted by
their mothers for the first time of their lives to the matronly
care of Lady Caroline. As we sailed up the mall with all our
colours flying, Lord Petersham,(149) with his hose and legs
twisted to every point of crossness, strode by us on the outside,
and repassed again on the return. At the end of' the mall she
called to him; he would not answer: she gave a familiar spring
and, between laugh and confusion, ran up to him, "My lord! my
lord! why, you don't see us!" We advanced at a little
distance, not a little awkward in expectation how all this
would end, for my lord never stirred his hat, or took the least
notice of any body; she said, "Do you go with us, or are you
going any where else?"--"I don't go with you, I am going
somewhere else;" and away he stalked. as sulky as a ghost that
nobody will speak to first. We got into the best order we
could, and marched to our barge, with a boat of French horns
attending, and little Ashe singing. We paraded some time up
the river, and at last debarked at Vauxhall - there, if we had
so pleased, we might have had the vivacity of our party
increased by a quarrel; for a Mrs. Loyd,(150)Who is supposed
to be married to Lord Haddington, seeing the two girls
following Lady Petersham and Miss Ashe, said aloud, "Poor
girls, I am sorry to see them in such bad company!" Miss
Sparre, who desired nothing so much as the fun of seeing a
duel,--a thing which, though she is fifteen, she has never been
so lucky to see,--took due pains to make Lord March resent
this; but he, who is very lively and agreeable, laughed her out
of this charming frolic with a great deal of humour. Here we
picked up Lord Granby, arrived very drunk from Jenny's
Whim;(151) where, instead of going to old Strafford's(152)
catacombs to make honourable love, he had dined with Lady
Fanny,(153) and left her and eight other women and
four other men playing at brag. He would fain have made over
his honourable love upon any terms to poor Miss Beauclerc, who
is very modest, and did not know at all what to do with his
whispers or his hands. He then addressed himself to the
Sparre, who was very well disposed to receive both; but the
tide of champagne turned, he hiccupped at the reflection of his
marriage (of which he is wondrous sick), and only proposed to
the girl to shut themselves up and rail at the world for three
weeks. If all the adventures don't conclude as you expect in
the beginning of a paragraph, you must not wonder, for I am not
making a history, but relating one strictly as it happened, and
I think with full entertainment enough to content you. At
last, we assembled in our booth, Lady Caroline in the front,
with the vizor of her hat erect, and looking gloriously jolly
and handsome. She had fetched my brother Orford from the next
box, where he was enjoying himself with his petite partie, to
help us to mince chickens. We minced seven chickens into a
china dish, which Lady Caroline stewed over a lamp with three
pats of butter and a flagon of water, stirring and rattling,
and laughing, and we every minute expecting to have the dish
fly about our ears. She had brought Betty, the fruit-girl,
with hampers of strawberries and cherries from Rogers's, and
made her wait upon us, and then made her sup by us at a little
table. The conversation was no less lively than the whole
transaction. There was a Mr. O'Brien arrived from Ireland, who
would get the Duchess of Manchester from Mr. Hussey, if she
were still at liberty. I took up the biggest hautboy in the
dish, and said to Lady Caroline, "Madam, Miss Ashe desires you
would eat this O'Brien strawberry:" she replied immediately, "I
won't, you hussey." You may imagine the laugh this reply
occasioned. After the tempest was a little calmed, the Pollard
said, "Now, how any body would spoil this story that was to
repeat it, and say, "I won't, you jade!" In short, the whole
air of our party was sufficient, as you will easily imagine, to
take up the whole attention of the garden; so much so, that
from eleven o'clock till half an hour after one we had the
whole concourse round our booth: at last, they came into the
little gardens of each booth on the sides of ours, till Harry
Vane took up a bumper, and drank their healths, and was
proceeding to treat them with still greater freedom. It was
three o'clock before we got home. I think I have told you the
chief passages. Lord Granby's temper had been a little ruffled
the night before; the Prince had invited him and Dick Lyttelton
to Kew, where he won eleven hundred pounds of the latter, and
eight of the former, then cut and told them @e would play with
them no longer, for he saw they played so idly, that they were
capable of "losing more than they would like." Adieu! I expect
in return for this long tale that you will tell me some of your
frolics with Robin Cursemother, and some of Miss
Marjoram's bon-mots.

P. S. Dr. Middleton called on me yesterday: he is come to town
to consult his physician for a jaundice and swelled legs,
symptoms which, the doctor tells him, and which he believes,
can be easily cured: I think him visibly broke, and near his
end.(154) He lately advised me to marry, on the sense of his
own happiness; but if any body had advised him to the contrary,
at his time of life,(155) I believe he would not have broke so
soon.

(145) Alluding to the projected marriages, which soon after
took place, between two of the sons of his uncle Lord Walpole:
who each of them married a daughter of Sir Joshua Vanneck.-E.

(146 Miss Ashe was said to have been of very high parentage.
She married Mr. Falconer; an officer in the navy.-E.

(147) Eldest son of Lord Barnard, created Earl of Darlington in
1754.-E.

(148) Upon the death of Charles, Duke of Queensbury and Dover,
he succeeded, in 1778, to the title of Queensbury, and died
unmarried in 1810.-E.

(149) Afterwards Earl of Harrington. His gait was so singular,
that he was generally known by the nickname of Peter
Shamble.-E.

(150) She was afterwards married to Lord Haddington.-E.

(151) A tavern at the end of the wooden bridge at Chelsea, at
that period much frequented by his lordship and other men of
rank.-E.

(152) Anne, daughter and Heiress of Sir Henry Johnson, widow of
Thomas Lord Raby, created Earl of Strafford in 1711.

(153) Lady Frances Seymour, eldest daughter of Charles, Duke of
Somerset (known by the name of the Proud Duke), by his second
Duchess, Lady Charlotte Finch. She was married in the
following September to the Marquis of Granby.-E.

(154) Warburton, in a letter to Hurd, of the 11th of July,
says, "I hear Dr. Middleton has been lately in London, (I
suppose, to consult Dr. Heberden about his health,) and is
returned in an extreme bad condition. The scribblers against
him will say they have killed him; but by what Mr. Yorke told
me, his bricklayer will dispute the honour of his death with
them.',-E.

(155) The Doctor had recently taken a third wife, the relict of
a Bristol merchant. On making her a matrimonial visit, Bishop
Gooch told Mrs. Middleton that ,he was glad she did not dislike
the Ancients so much as her husband did." She replied, "that
she hoped his lordship did not reckon her husband among the
Ancients yet." The Bishop answered, "You, Madam, are the best
judge of that" Nichols's literary Anecdotes, Vol. v. p. 422.-E.

71 Letter 26
To Sir Horace Mann.
Arlington Street, July 25, 1750.

I told YOU my idle season was coming on, and that I should have
great intervals between my letters; have not I kept my word?
For any thing I have to tell you, I might have kept it a month
longer. I came out of Essex last night, and find the town
quite depopulated: I leave it to-morrow, and go to Mr.
Conway's(156) in Buckinghamshire, with only giving a transient
glance on Strawberry Hill. Don't imagine I am grown fickle; I
thrust all my visits into a heap, and then am quiet for the
rest of the season. It is so much the way in England to jaunt
about, that one can't avoid it; but it convinces me that people
are more tired of themselves and the country than they care to
own.

Has your brother told you that my Lord Chesterfield has bought
the Houghton lantern? the famous lantern, that produced so much
patriot Wit;(157) and very likely some of his lordship's? My
brother had bought a much handsomer at Lord Cholmondeley's
sale; for, with all the immensity of the celebrated one, it was
ugly, and too little for the hall. He would have given it to
Lord Chesterfield rather than he should not have had it.

You tell us nothing of your big events, of the quarrel of the
Pope and the Venetians, on the Patriarchate of Aquileia. We
look upon it as so decisive that I should not wonder if Mr.
Lyttelton, or Whitfield the Methodist, were to set out for
Venice, to make them a tender of some of our religions.

Is it true too what we hear, that the Emperor has turned the
tables on her Caesarean jealousy,(158) and discarded Metastasio
the poet, and that the latter is gone mad upon it, instead of
hugging himself on coming off so much better than his
predecessor in royal love and music, David Rizzio? I believe I
told you that one of your sovereigns, and an intimate friend of
yours, King Theodore, is in the King's Bench prison. I have so
little to say, that I don't care if I do tell you the same
thing twice. He lived in a privileged place; his creditors
seized him by making him believe lord Granville wanted him on
business of importance; he bit at it, and concluded they were
both to be reinstated at once. I have desired Hogarth to go
and steal his picture for me; though I suppose one might easily
buy a sitting of him. The King of Portugal (and when I have
told you this, I have done with kings) has bought a handsome
house here,(159) for the residence of his ministers.

I believe you have often heard me mention a Mr. Ashton,(160) a
clergyman, who, in one word, has great preferments, and owes
every thing upon earth to me. I have long had reason to
complain of his behaviour; in short, my father is dead, and I
can make no bishops. He has at last quite thrown off the mask,
and in the most direct manner, against my will, has written
against my friend Dr. Middleton,(161) taking for his motto
these lines,

"Nullius addictus jurare in verba Magistri,
Quid verum atque decens curo et rogo, et omnis in hoc sum".

I have forbid him my house, and wrote this paraphrase upon his
picture,

"Nullius addictus munus meminisse Patroni,
Quid vacat et qui dat, curo et rogo, et omnis in hoc sum."

I own it was pleasant to me the other day, on meeting Mr.
Tonson, his bookseller, at the Speaker's, and asking him if he
had sold many of Mr. Ashton's books, to be told, "Very few
indeed, Sir!"

I beg you will thank Dr. Cocchi much for his book; I will thank
him much more when I have received and read it. His friend,
Dr. Mead, is undone; his fine collection is going to be sold:
he owes about five-and-twenty thousand Pounds. All the world
thought himimmensely rich; but, besides the expense of his
collection, he kept a table for which alone he is said to have
allowed seventy pounds a-week.

(156) Mr. Conway had hired Latimers, in Buckinghamshire, for
three years.

(157) In one pamphlet, the noise of this lantern, was so
exaggerated, that the author said, on a journey to Houghton, he
was first carried into a glass-room, which he supposed was the
porter's lodge, but proved to be the lantern. [This lantern,
which hung from the ceiling of the hall, was for eighteen
candles, and of copper gilt. It was the Craftsman which made
so much noise about it.]

(158) The Empress Maria Theresa, who was very jealous, and with
reason, of her husband, the Emperor Francis.-D.

(159) In South Audley Street. (It continued to be the residence
of the Portuguese ambassadors till the year 1831.-D.

(160) Thomas Ashton, fellow of Eton College, and rector of St.
Botolph's, Bishopsgate.

(161) Dr. Conyers Middleton, author of the Life of Cicero. [The
Doctor died three days after the date of this letter, in his
sixty-seventh year.]

73 Letter 27
To sir Horace Mann.
Strawberry Hill, August 2, 1750.

I had just sent my letter to the '@Secretary's office the other
day, when I received yours: it would have prevented my
reproving you for not mentioning the quarrel between the Pope
and the Venetians; and I should have had time to tell you that
Dr. Mead's bankruptcy is contradicted. I don't love to send
you falsities, so I tell you this is contradicted, though it is
by no means clear that he is not undone-he is scarce worth
making an article in two letters.

I don't wonder that Marquis Acciaudi's villa did not answer to
you; by what I saw in Tuscany, and by the prints, their villas
are strangely out of taste, and laboured by their unnatural
regularity and art to destroy the romanticness of the
situations. I wish you could see the villas and seats here!
the country wears a new face; every body is improving their
places, and as they don't fortify, their plantations with
intrenchments of walls and high hedges, one has the benefit of
them even in passing by. The dispersed buildings, I mean
temples, bridges, etc. are generally Gothic or Chinese, and
give a whimsical air of novelty that is very pleasing. You
would like a drawing-room in the latter style that I fancied
and have been executing at Mr. Rigby's, in Essex. it has large
and Very fine Indian landscapes, with a black fret round them,
and round the whole entablature of the room, and all the ground
or hanging is of pink paper. While I was there, we had eight
of the hottest days that ever were felt; they say, some degrees
beyond the hottest in the East Indies, and that the Thames was
more so than the hot well at Bristol. The guards died )n their
posts at Versailles: and here a captain Halyburton,
brother-in-law of lord Moncton, went mad with the excess

Your brother Gal. will, I suppose, be soon making improvements
like the rest of the world: he has bought an estate in Kent,
called Bocton Malherbe, famous enough for having belonged to
two men who, in my opinion, have very little title to fame, Sir
Harry Wotton and my lord Chesterfield. I must have the
pleasure of being the first to tell you that your pedigree is
finished at last; a most magnificent performance, and that will
make a pompous figure in a future great hall at Bocton Malherbe
when your great nephews or great-grandchildren shall be Earls,
etc. My cousin Lord Conway is made Earl of Hertford, as a
branch of the somersets: Sir Edward Seymour gave his
approbation handsomely. He has not yet got the dukedom
himself, as there is started up a Dr. Seymour who claims it,
but will be able to make nothing out.