It was Kitty who took Gay under her patronage, who resented the prohibition of the 'Beggar's Opera,' remonstrated with the king and queen, and was thereupon forbidden the court. She carried the poet to her house. She may have been ridiculous, but she had a warm, generous heart. 'I am now,' Gay wrote to Swift in 1729, 'in the Duke of Queensberry's house, and have been so ever since I left Hampstead; where I was carried at a time that it was thought I could not live a day. I must acquaint you (because I know it will please you) that during my sickness I had many of the kindest proofs of friendship, particularly from the Duke and Duchess of Queensberry; who, if I had been their nearest relation and dearest friend, could not have treated me with more constant attendance then, and they continue the same to me now.'

The duchess appears to have been one of those wilful, eccentric, spoiled children, whom the world at once worships and ridicules: next to the Countess of Pomfret, she was Horace Walpole's pet aversion. She was well described as being 'very clever, very whimsical, and just not mad.' Some of Walpole's touches are strongly confirmatory of this description. For instance, her grace gives a ball, orders every one to come at six, to sup at twelve, and go away directly after: opens the ball herself with a minuet. To this ball she sends strange invitations; 'yet,' says Horace, 'except these flights, the only extraordinary thing the duchess did was to do nothing extraordinary, for I do not call it very mad that some pique happening between her and the Duchess of Bedford, the latter had this distich sent to her;—

'I do not know whether what I am going to tell you did not border a little upon Moorfields. The gallery where they danced was very cold. Lord Lorn, George Selwyn, and I retired into a little room, and sat comfortably by the fire. The duchess looked in, said nothing, and sent a smith to take the hinges of the door oft. We understood the hint—left the room—and so did the smith the door.'

'I must tell you,' he adds in another letter, 'of an admirable reply of your acquaintance, the Duchess of Queensberry: old Lady Granville, Lord Carteret's mother, whom they call the queen-mother, from taking upon her to do the honours of her son's power, was pressing the duchess to ask her for some place for herself or friends, and assured her that she would procure it, be it what it would. Could she have picked out a fitter person to be gracious to? The duchess made her a most grave curtsey, and said, "Indeed, there was one thing she had set her heart on."—"Dear child, how you oblige me by asking anything! What is it? Tell me."—"Only that you would speak to my Lord Carteret to get me made lady of the bedchamber to the Queen of Hungary."'

The duchess was, therefore, one of the dowagers, 'thick as flounders,' whose proximity was irritating to the fastidious bachelor. There was, however, another Kitty between whom and Horace a tender friendship subsisted: this was Kitty Clive, the famous actress; formerly Kitty Ruftar. Horace had given her a house on his estate, which he called sometimes 'Little Strawberry Hill,' and sometimes 'Cliveden;' and here Mrs. Clive lived with her brother, Mr. Ruftar, until 1785. She formed, for her friend, a sort of outer-home, in which he passed his evenings. Long had he admired her talents. Those were the days of the drama in all its glory: the opera was unfashionable. There were, Horace writes in 1742, on the 26th of May, only two-and-forty people in the Opera House, in the pit and boxes: people were running to see 'Miss Lucy in Town,' at Drury Lane, and to admire Mrs. Clive, in her imitation of the Muscovites; but the greatest crowds assembled to wonder at Garrick, in 'Wine Merchant turned Player;' and great and small alike rushed to Goodman's Fields to see him act all parts, and to laugh at his admirable mimicry. It was perhaps, somewhat in jealousy of the counter attraction, that Horace declared he saw nothing wonderful in the acting of Garrick, though it was then heresy to say so. 'Now I talk of players,' he adds in the same letter, 'tell Mr. Chute that his friend Bracegirdle breakfasted with me this morning.' Horace delighted in such intimacies, and in recalling old times.

Mrs. Abingdon, another charming and clever actress, was also a denizen of Twickenham, which became the most fashionable village near the metropolis. Mrs. Pritchard, likewise, was attracted there; but the proximity of the Countess of Suffolk, who lived at Marble Hill was the delight of a great portion of Horace Walpole's life. Her reminiscences, her anecdotes, her experience, were valuable as well as entertaining to one who was for ever gathering up materials for history, or for biography, or for letters to absent friends.

In his own family he found little to cheer him: but if he hated one or two more especially—and no one could hate more intensely than Horace Walpole—it was his uncle, Lord Wapole, and his cousin, that nobleman's son, whom he christened Pigwiggin; 'my monstrous uncle;' 'that old buffoon, my uncle;' are terms which occur in his letters, and he speaks of the bloody civil wars between 'Horatio Walpole' and 'Horace Walpole.'

Horatio Walpole, the brother of Sir Robert, was created in June, 1756, Baron Walpole of Wolterton, as a recompense for fifty years passed in the public service—an honour which he only survived nine months. He expired in February, 1757. His death removed one subject of bitter dislike from the mind of Horace; but enough remained in the family to excite grief and resentment.

Towards his own two brothers, Robert, Earl of Orford, and Edward Walpole, Horace the younger, as he was styled in contradistinction to his uncle, bore very little affection. His feelings, however, for his nephew George, who succeeded his father as Earl of Orford in 1751, were more creditable to his heart; yet he gives a description of this ill-fated young man in his letters, which shows at once pride and disapprobation. One lingers with regret over the character and the destiny of this fine young nobleman, whose existence was rendered miserable by frequent attacks, at intervals, of insanity.

Never was there a handsomer, a more popular, a more engaging being than George, third Earl of Orford. When he appeared at the head of the Norfolk regiment of militia, of which he was colonel, even the great Lord Chatham broke out into enthusiasm:—'Nothing,' he wrote, 'could make a better appearance than the two Norfolk battalions; Lord Orford, with the front of Mars himself, and really the greatest figure under arms I ever saw, as the theme of every tongue.' His person and air, Horace Walpole declared, had a noble wildness in them: crowds followed the battalions when the king reviewed them in Hyde Park; and among the gay young officers in their scarlet uniforms, faced with black, in their buff waistcoats and gold buttons, none was so conspicuous for martial bearing as Lord Onord, although classed by his uncle 'among the knights of shire who had never in their lives shot anything but woodcocks.'

But there was a peculiarity of character in the young peer which shocked Horace. 'No man,' he says in one of his letters, 'ever felt such a disposition to love another as I did to love him. I flattered myself that he would restore some lustre to our house—at least not let it totally sink; but I am forced to give him up, and all my Walpole views.... He has a good breeding, and attention when he is with you that is even flattering;... he promises, offers everything one can wish; but this is all: the instant he leaves you, all the world are nothing to him; he would not give himself the least trouble in the world to give any one satisfaction; yet this is mere indolence of mind, not of body: his whole pleasure is outrageous exercise.'

'He is,' in another place Horace adds, 'the most selfish man in the world: without being in the least interested, he loves nobody but himself, yet neglects every view of fortune and ambition. Yet,' he concludes, 'it is impossible not to love him when one sees him: impossible to esteem him when one thinks on him.'

The young lord, succeeding to an estate deeply encumbered, both by his father and grandfather, rushed on the turf, and involved himself still more. In vain did Horace the younger endeavour to secure for him the hand of Miss Nicholls, an heiress with £50,000, and, to that end, placed the young lady with Horace the elder (Lord Walpole), at Wolterton. The scheme failed: the crafty old politician thought he might as well benefit his own sons as his nephew, for he had himself claims on the Houghton estate which he expected Miss Nicholl's fortune might help to liquidate.

At length the insanity and recklessness displayed by his nephew—the handsome martial George—induced poor Horace to take affairs in his own hands. His reflections, on his paying a visit to Houghton to look after the property there, are pathetically expressed:—

'Here I am again at Houghton,' he writes in March, 1761, 'and alone; in this spot where (except two hours last month) I have not been in sixteen years. Think what a crowd of reflections!... Here I am probably for the last time of my life: every clock that strikes, tells me I am an hour nearer to yonder church—that church into which I have not yet had courage to enter; where lies that mother on whom I doated, and who doated on me! There are the two rival mistresses of Houghton, neither of whom ever wished to enjoy it. There, too, is he who founded its greatness—to contribute to whose fall Europe was embroiled; there he sleeps in quiet and dignity, while his friend and his foe—rather his false ally and real enemy—Newcastle and Bath, are exhausting the dregs of their pitiful lives in squabbles and pamphlets.

When he looked at the pictures—that famous Houghton collection—the surprise of Horace was excessive. Accustomed to see nothing elsewhere but daubs, he gazed with ecstasy on them. 'The majesty of Italian ideas,' he says, 'almost sinks before the warm nature of Italian colouring! Alas! don't I grow old?'

As he lingered in the gallery, with mingled pride and sadness, a party arrived to see the house—a man and three women in riding-dresses—who 'rode post' through the apartments. 'I could not,' he adds, 'hurry before them fast enough; they were not so long in seeing the whole gallery as I could have been in one room, to examine what I knew by heart. I remember formerly being often diverted with this kind of seers; they come, ask what such a room is called in which Sir Robert lay, write it down, admire a lobster or a cabbage in a Market Piece, dispute whether the last room was green or purple, and then hurry to the inn, for fear the fish should be over-dressed. How different my sensations! not a picture here but recalls a history; not one but I remembered in Downing Street, or Chelsea, where queens and crowds admired them, though seeing them as little as these travellers!⁵

After tea he strolled into the garden. They told him it was now called a pleasure-ground. To Horace it was a scene of desolation—a floral Nineveh. 'What a dissonant idea of pleasure!—those groves, those allées, where I have passed so many charming moments, were now stripped up or overgrown—many fond paths I could not unravel, though with an exact clue in my memory. I met two gamekeepers, and a thousand hares! In the days when all my soul was tuned to pleasure and vivacity (and you will think perhaps it is far from being out of tune yet), I hated Houghton and its solitude; yet I loved this garden, as now, with many regrets, I love Houghton—Houghton, I know not what to call it—a monument of grandeur or ruin!'

Although he did not go with the expectation of finding a land flowing with milk and honey, the sight of all this ruin long saddened his thoughts. All was confusion, disorder, debts, mortgages, sales, pillage, villainy, waste, folly, and madness. The nettles and brambles in the park were up to his shoulders; horses had been turned into the garden, and banditti lodged in every cottage.

The perpetuity of livings that came up to the very park-palings had been sold, and the farms let at half their value. Certainly, if Houghton were bought by Sir Robert Walpole with public money, that public was now avenged.

The owner of this ruined property had just stemmed the torrent; but the worst was to come. The pictures were sold, and to Russia they went.

Whilst thus harassed by family misfortunes, other annoyances came. The mournful story of Chatterton's fate was painfully mixed up with the tenour of Horace Walpole's life.

The gifted and unfortunate Thomas Chatterton was born at Bristol in 1752. Even from his birth fate seemed to pursue him, for he was a posthumous son: and if the loss of a father in the highest ranks of life be severely felt, how much more so is it to be deplored in those which are termed the working classes!

The friendless enthusiast was slow in learning to read; but when the illuminated capitals of an old book were presented to him, he quickly learned his letters. This fact, and his being taught to read out of a black-letter Bible, are said to have accounted for his facility in the imitation of antiquities. Pensive and taciturn, he picked up education at a charity-school, until apprenticed to a scrivener, when he began that battle of life which ended to him so fatally.

Upon very slight accidents did his destiny hinge. In those days women worked with thread, and used thread-papers. Now paper was, at that time, dear: dainty matrons liked tasty thread-papers. A pretty set of thread-papers, with birds or flowers painted on each, was no mean present for a friend. Chatterton, a quiet child, one day noticed that his mother's thread-papers were of no ordinary materials. They were made of parchment, and on this parchment was some of the black-letter characters by which his childish attention had been fixed to his book. The fact was, that his uncle was sexton to the ancient church of St. Mary Redcliffe, at Bristol; and the parchment was the fruit of theft. Chatterton's father had carried off, from a room in the church, certain ancient manuscripts, which had been left about; being originally abstracted from what was called Mr. Canynge's coffin. Mr. Canynge, an eminent merchant, had rebuilt St. Mary Redcliffe in the reign of Edward IV.: and the parchments, therefore, were of some antiquity. The antiquary groans over their loss in vain: Chatterton's father had covered his books with them; his mother had used up the strips for thread-papers; and Thomas Chatterton himself contrived to abstract a considerable portion also, for his own purposes.

He was ingenious, industrious, a poet by nature, and, wonderful to say, withal a herald by taste. Upon his nefarious possessions, he founded a scheme of literary forgeries; purporting to be ancient pieces of poetry found in Canynge's chest; and described as being the production of Thomas Canynge and of his friend, one Thomas Rowley, a priest. Money and books were sent to Chatterton in return for little strips of vellum, which he passed off as the original itself; and the successful forger might now be seen in deep thought, walking in the meadows near Redcliffe; a marked, admired, poetic youth.

In 1769, Chatterton wrote to Horace Walpole, offering to send him some accounts of eminent painters who had flourished at Bristol, and at the same time mentioning the discovery of the poems, and enclosing some specimens. In a subsequent letter he begged Walpole to aid him in his wish to be freed from his then servile condition, and to be placed in one more congenial to his pursuits.

In his choice of a patron poor Chatterton made a fatal mistake. The benevolence of Horace was of a general kind, and never descended to anything obscure or unappreciated. There was a certain hardness in that nature of his which had so pleasant an aspect. 'An artist,' he once said, 'has his pencils—an author his pens—and the public must reward them as it pleases.' Alas! he forgot how long it is before penury, even ennobled by genius, can make itself seen, heard, approved, repaid: how vast is the influence of prestige! how generous the hand which is extended to those in want, even if in error! All that Horace did, however, was strictly correct: he showed the poems to Gray and Mason, who pronounced them forgeries; and he wrote a cold and reproving letter to the starving author: and no one could blame him: Chatterton demanded back his poems; Walpole was going to Paris, and forgot to return them. Another letter came: the wounded poet again demanded them, adding that Walpole would not have dared to use him so had he not been poor. The poems were returned in a blank cover: and here all Walpole's concern with Thomas Chatterton ends. All this happened in 1769. In August, 1770, the remains of the unhappy youth were carried to the burial-ground of Shoe Lane workhouse, near Holborn. He had swallowed arsenic; had lingered a day in agonies; and then, at the age of eighteen expired. Starvation had prompted the act: yet on the day before he had committed it, he had refused a dinner, of which he was invited by his hostess to partake, assuring her that he was not hungry. Just or unjust, the world has never forgiven Horace Walpole for Chatterton's misery. His indifference has been contrasted with the generosity of Edmund Burke to Crabbe: a generosity to which we owe 'The Village,' 'The Borough,' and to which Crabbe owed his peaceful old age, and almost his existence. The cases were different; but Crabbe had his faults—and Chatterton was worth saving. It is well for genius that there are souls in the world more sympathizing, less worldly, and more indulgent, than those of such men as Horace Walpole. Even the editor of 'Walpoliana' lets judgment go by default. 'As to artists,' he says, 'he paid them what they earned, and he commonly employed mean ones, that the reward might be smaller.'

Let us change the strain: stilled be the mournful note on which we have rested too long. What have wits and beaux and men of society to do with poets and beggars? Behold, Horace, when he has written his monitory letter, packs up for Paris. Let us follow him there, and see him in the very centre of his pleasures—in the salon of La Marquise du Deffand.

Horace Walpole had perfected his education, as a fine gentleman, by his intimacy with Madame Geoffrin, to whom Lady Hervey had introduced him. She called him le nouveau Richelieu; and Horace was sensible of so great a compliment from a woman at once 'spirituelle and pieuse'—a combination rare in France. Nevertheless, she had the national views of matrimony. 'What have you done, Madame,' said a foreigner to her, 'with the poor man I used to see here, who never spoke a word?'

'Ah, mon Dieu! was the reply, 'that was my husband: he is dead.' She spoke in the same tone as if she had been specifying the last new opera, or referring to the latest work in vogue: things just passed away.

The Marquise du Deffaud was a very different personage to Madame Geoffrin, whose great enemy she was. When Horace Walpole first entered into the society of the Marquise, she was stone blind, and old; but retained not only her wit, and her memory, but her passions. Passions, like artificial flowers, are unbecoming to age: and those of the witty, atheistical Marquise are almost revolting. Scandal still attached her name to that of Hénault, of whom Voltaire wrote the epitaph beginning

Hénault was for many years deaf; and, during the whole of his life, disagreeable. There was something farcical in the old man's receptions on his death-bed; whilst, amongst the rest of the company came Madame du Deffand, a blind old woman of seventy, who, bawling in his ear, aroused the lethargic man, by inquiring after a former rival of hers, Madame de Castelmaron—about whom he went on babbling until death stopped his voice.

She was seventy years of age when Horace Walpole, at fifty, became her passion. She was poor and disreputable, and even the high position of having been mistress to the regent could not save her from being decried by a large portion of that society which centered round the bel esprit. 'She was,' observes the biographer of Horace Walpole (the lamented author of the 'Crescent and the Cross,') 'always gay, always charming—everything but a Christian.' The loss of her eyesight did not impair the remains of her beauty; her replies, her compliments, were brilliant; even from one whose best organs of expression were mute.

A frequent guest at her suppers, Walpole's kindness, real or pretended, soon made inroads on a heart still susceptible. The ever-green passions of this venerable sinner threw out fresh shoots; and she became enamoured of the attentive and admired Englishman. Horace was susceptible of ridicule: there his somewhat icy heart was easily touched. Partly in vanity, partly in playfulness, he encouraged the sentimental-exaggeration of his correspondent; but, becoming afraid of the world's laughter, ended by reproving her warmth, and by chilling, under the refrigerating influence of his cautions, all the romance of the octogenarian.

In later days, however, after his solicitude—partly soothed by the return of his letters to Madame du Deffand, partly by her death—had completely subsided, a happier friendship was permitted to solace his now increasing infirmities, as well as to enhance his social pleasures.

It was during the year 1788, when he was living in retirement at Strawberry, that his auspicious friendship was formed. The only grain of ambition he had left he declared was to believe himself forgotten; that was 'the thread that had run through his life;' 'so true,' he adds, 'except the folly of being an author, has been what I said last year to the Prince' (afterwards George IV.), 'when he asked me "If I was a Freemason," I replied, "No sir; I never was anything."'

Lady Charleville told him that some of her friends had been to see Strawberry. 'Lord!' cried one lady, 'who is that Mr. Walpole?' 'Lord!' cried a second; 'don't you know the great epicure, Mr. Walpole?' 'Who?' cried the first,—'great epicure! you mean the antiquarian.' 'Surely,' adds Horace, 'this anecdote may take its place in the chapter of local fame.'

But he reverts to his new acquisition—the acquaintance of the Miss Berrys, who had accidentally taken a house next to his at Strawberry Hill. Their story, he adds, was a curious one: their descent Scotch; their grandfather had an estate of £5,000 a year, but disinherited his son on account of his marrying a woman with no fortune. She died, and the grandfather, wishing for an heir-male, pressed the widower to marry again: he refused; and said he would devote himself to the education of his two daughters. The second son generously gave up £8oo a year to his brother, and the two motherless girls were taken to the Continent, whence they returned the 'best informed and most perfect creatures that Horace Walpole ever saw at their age.'

Sensible, natural, frank, their conversation proved most agreeable to a man who was sated of grand society, and sick of vanity until he had indulged in vexation of spirit. He discovered by chance only—for there was no pedantry in these truly well-educated women—that the eldest understood Latin, and 'was a perfect Frenchwoman in her language. Then the youngest drew well; and copied one of Lady Di Beauclerk's pictures, 'The Gipsies,' though she had never attempted colours before. Then, as to looks: Mary, the eldest, had a sweet face, the more interesting from being pale; with fine dark eyes that were lighted up when she spoke. Agnes, the younger, was 'hardly to be called handsome, but almost;' with an agreeable sensible countenance. It is remarkable that women thus delineated—not beauties, yet not plain—are always the most fascinating to men. The sisters doted on each other: Mary taking the lead in society. 'I must even tell you,' Horace wrote to the Countess of Ossory, 'that they dress within the bounds of fashion, but without the excrescences and balconies with which modern hoydens overwhelm and barricade their persons.' (One would almost have supposed that Horace had lived in the days of crinoline.')

The first night that Horace met the two sisters, he refused to be introduced to them: having heard so much of them that he concluded they would be 'all pretension.' The second night that he met them, he sat next Mary, and found her an 'angel both inside and out.' He did not know which he liked best; but Mary's face, which was formed for a sentimental novel, or, still more, for genteel comedy, riveted him, he owned. Mr. Berry, the father, was a little 'merry man with a round face,' whom no one would have suspected of sacrificing 'all for love, and the world well lost.' This delightful family visited him every Sunday evening; the region of wickenham being too 'proclamatory' for cards to be introduced on the seventh day, conversation was tried instead; thankful, indeed, was Horace, for the 'pearls,' as he styled them, thus thrown in his path. His two 'Strawberries,' as he christened them, were henceforth the theme of every letter. He had set up a printing-press many years previously at Strawberry, and on taking the young ladies to see it, he remembered the gallantry of his former days, and they found these stanzas in type:—

On the following day, Mary, whom he terms the Latin nymph sent the following lines:—

The society of this family gave Horace Walpole the truest, and perhaps the only relish he ever had of domestic life. But his mind was harassed towards the close of the eighteenth century, by the insanity not only of his nephew, but by the great national calamity, that of the king. 'Every eighty-eight seems,' he remarks, 'to be a favourite period with fate;' he was 'too ancient,' he said, 'to tap what might almost be called a new reign;' of which he was not likely to see much. He never pretended to penetration, but his foresight, 'if he gave it the reign, would not prognosticate much felicity to the country from the madness of his father, and the probable regency of the Prince of Wales. His happiest relations were now not with politics or literature, but with Mrs. Damer and the Miss Berrys, to whom he wrote:—'I am afraid of protesting how much I delight in your society, lest I should seem to affect being gallant; but, if two negatives make an affirmative, why may not two ridicules compose one piece of sense? and, therefore, as I am in love with you both, I trust it is a proof of the good sense of your devoted—H. WALPOLE,'

He was doomed, in the decline of life, to witness two great national convulsions: of the insurrection of 1745 he wrote feelingly—justly—almost pathetically: forty-five years later he was tired, he said, of railing against French barbarity and folly. 'Legislators! a Senate! To neglect laws, in order to annihilate coats-of-arms and liveries!' George Selwyn said, that Monsieur the king's brother was the only man of rank from whom they could not take a title. His alarm at the idea of his two young friends going to the Continent was excessive. The flame of revolution had burst forth at Florence: Flanders was not a safe road; dreadful horrors had been perpetrated at Avignon. Then he relates a characteristic anecdote of poor Marie Antoinette! She went with the king to see the manufacture of glass. As they passed the Halle, the poissardes hurra'd them. 'Upon my word,' said the queen, 'these folks are civiller when you visit them, than when they visit you.'

Walpole's affection for the Miss Berrys cast a glow of happiness over the fast-ebbing years of his life, 'In happy days,' he wrote to them when they were abroad, 'I called you my dear wives; now I can only think of you as darling children, of whom I am bereaved.' He was proud of their affection; proud of their spending many hours with 'a very old man,' whilst they were the objects of general admiration. These charming women survived until our own time: the centre of a circle of the leading characters in literature, politics, art, rank, and virtue. They are remembered with true regret. The fulness of their age perfected the promise of their youth. Samuel Rogers used to say that they had lived in the reign of Queen Anne, so far back seemed their memories which were so coupled to the past; but the youth of their minds, their feelings, their intelligence, remained almost to the last.

For many years Horace Walpole continued, in spite of incessant attacks of the gout, to keep almost open house at Strawberry; in short, he said, he kept an inn—the sign, the Gothic Castle! 'Take my advice,' he wrote to a friend, 'never build a charming house for yourself between London and Hampton Court; everybody will live in it but you.'

The death of Lady Suffolk, in 1767, had been an essential loss to her partial, and not too rigid neighbours. Two days before the death of George II. she had gone to Kensington not knowing that there was a review there. Hemmed in by coaches, she found herself close to George II. and to Lady Yarmouth. Neither of them knew her—a circumstance which greatly affected the countess.

Horace Walpole was now desirous of growing old with dignity. He had no wish 'to dress up a withered person, nor to drag it about to public places;' but he was equally averse from 'sitting at home, wrapped up in flannels,' to receive condolences from people he did not care for—and attentions from relations who were impatient for his death. Well might a writer in the 'Quarterly Review' remark that our most useful lessons in reading Walpole's Letters are not only derived from his sound sense, but from 'considering this man of the world, full of information and sparkling with vivacity, stretched on a sick bed, and apprehending all the tedious languor of helpless decrepitude and deserted solitude.' His later years had been diversified by correspondence with Hannah More, who sent him her poem of the Bas Bleu, into which she had introduced his name. In 1786 she visited him at Strawberry Hill. He was then a martyr to the gout, but with spirits gay as ever: 'I never knew a man suffer pain with such entire patience,' was Hannah More's remark. His correspondence with her continued regularly; but that with the charming sisters was delightfully interrupted by their residence at little Strawberry Hill—Cliveden, as it was also called, where day after day, night after night, they gleaned stores from that rich fund of anecdote which went back to the days of George I., touched even on the anterior epoch of Anne, and came in volumes of amusement down to the very era when the old man was sitting by his parlour fire, happy with his wives near him, resigned and cheerful. For his young friends he composed his 'Reminiscences of the Court of England.'

He still wrote cheerfully of his physical state, in which eyesight was perfect; hearing little impaired; and though his hands and feet were crippled, he could use them; and since he neither 'wished to box, to wrestle, nor to dance a hornpipe,' he was contented.

His character became softer, his wit less caustic, his heart more tender, his talk more reverent, as he approached the term of a long, prosperous life—and knew, practically, the small value of all that he had once too fondly prized.

His later years were disturbed by the marriage of his niece Maria Waldegrave to the Duke of Gloucester: but the severest interruption to his peace was his own succession to an Earldom.

In 1791, George, Earl of Orford, expired; leaving an estate encumbered with debt, and, added to the bequest, a series of lawsuits threatened to break down all remaining comfort in the mind of the uncle, who had already suffered so much on the young man's account.

Horace Walpole disdained the honours which brought him such solid trouble, with such empty titles, and for some time refused to sign himself otherwise but 'Uncle to the late Earl of Orford.' He was certainly not likely to be able to walk in his robes to the House of Lords, or to grace a levee. However, he thanked God he was free from pain. 'Since all my fingers are useless,' he wrote to Hannah More, 'and that I have only six hairs left, I am not very much grieved at not being able to comb my head!' To Hannah More he wrote in all sincerity, referring to his elevation to the peerage: 'For the other empty metamorphosis that has happened to the outward man, you do me justice in believing that it can do nothing but tease me; it is being called names in one's old age:' in fact, he reckoned on being styled 'Lord Methusalem.' He had lived to hear of the cruel deaths of the once gay and high-born friends whom he had known in Paris, by the guillotine: he had lived to execrate the monsters who persecuted the grandest heroine of modern times, Marie Antoinette, to madness; he lived to censure the infatuation of religious zeal in the Birmingham riots. 'Are not the devils escaped out of the swine, and overrunning the earth headlong?'—he asked in one of his letters.

He had offered his hand, and all the ambitious views which it opened, to each of the Miss Berrys successively, but they refused to bear his name, though they still cheered his solitude: and, strange to say, two of the most admired and beloved women of their time remained single.

In 1796, the sinking invalid was persuaded to remove to Berkeley Square, to be within reach of good and prompt advice. He consented unwillingly, for his 'Gothic Castle' was his favourite abode. He left it with a presentiment that he should see it no more; but he followed the proffered advice, and in the spring of the year was established in Berkeley Square. His mind was still clear. He seems to have cherished to the last a concern for that literary fame which he affected to despise. 'Literature has,' he said, 'many revolutions; if an author could rise from the dead, after a hundred years, what would be his surprise at the adventures of his works! I often say, perhaps my books may be published in Paternoster Row!' He would indeed have been astonished at the vast circulation of his Letters, and the popularity which has carried them into every aristocratic family in England. It is remarkable that among the middle and lower classes they are far less known, for he was essentially the chronicler, as well as the wit and beau, of St. James's, of Windsor, and Richmond.

At last he declared that he should 'be content with a sprig of rosemary' thrown on him when the parson of the parish commits his 'dust to dust.' The end of his now suffering existence was near at hand. Irritability, one of the unpitied accompaniments of weakness, seemed to compete with the gathering clouds of mental darkness as the last hour drew on. At intervals there were flashes of a wit that appeared at that solemn moment hardly natural, and that must have startled rather than pleased, the watchful friends around him. He became unjust in his fretfulness, and those who loved him most could not wish to see him survive the wreck of his intellect. Fever came on, and he died on the 2nd of March, 1797.

He had collected his letters from his friends: these epistles were deposited in two boxes, one marked with an A., the other with a B. The chest A. was not to be opened until the eldest son of his grandniece, Lady Laura, should attain the age of twenty-five. The chest was found to contain memoirs, and bundles of letters ready for publication.

It was singular, at the sale of the effects at Strawberry Hill, to see this chest, with the MSS. in the clean Horatian hand, and to reflect how poignant would have been the anguish of the writer could he have seen his Gothic Castle given up for fourteen days, to all that could pain the living, or degrade the dead.

Peace to his manes, prince of letter-writers; prince companion of beaux; wit of the highest order! Without thy pen, society in the eighteenth century would have been to us almost as dead as the beau monde of Pompeii, or the remains of Etruscan leaders of the ton. Let us not be ungrateful to our Horace: we owe him more than we could ever have calculated on before we knew him through his works: prejudiced, he was not false; cold, he was rarely cruel; egotistical, he was seldom vain-glorious. Every age should have a Horace Walpole; every country possess a chronicler so sure, so keen to perceive, so exact to delineate peculiarities, manners, characters, and events.

GEORGE SELWYN.

A Love of Horrors.—Anecdotes of Selwyn's Mother.—Selwyn's College Days.—Orator Henley.—Selwyn's Blasphemous Freak.—The Profession of a Wit.—The Thirst for Hazard.—Reynolds's Conversation-Piece.— Selwyn's Eccentricities and Witticisms.—A most Important Communication.—An Amateur Headsman.—The Eloquence of Indifference.— Catching a Housebreaker.—The Family of the Selwyns.—The Man of the People.—Selwyn's Parliamentary Career.—True Wit.—-Some of Selwyn's Witty Sayings.—The Sovereignty of the People.—On two kinds of Wit.— Selwyn's Love for Children.—Mie Mie, the Little Italian.—Selwyn's Little Companion taken from him.—His Later Days and Death.

I have heard, at times, of maiden ladies of a certain age who found pleasure in the affection of 'spotted snakes with double tongue, thorny hedge-hogs, newts, and in live worms.' I frequently meet ladies who think conversation lacks interest without the recital of 'melancholy deaths,' 'fatal diseases,' and 'mournful cases;' on ne dispute pas les goûts, and certainly the taste for the night side of nature seems immensely prevalent among the lower orders—in whom, perhaps, the terrible only can rouse from a sullen insensibility. What happy people! I always think to myself, when I hear of the huge attendance on the last tragic performance at Newgate; how very little they can see of mournful and horrible in common life, if they seek it out so eagerly, and relish it so thoroughly, when they find it! I don't know; for my own part, gaudeamus. I have always thought that the text, 'Blessed are they that mourn,' referred to the inner private life, not to a perpetual display of sackcloth and ashes; but I know not. I can understand the weeping-willow taste among people, who have too little wit or too little Christianity to be cheerful, but it is a wonder to find the luxury of gloom united to the keenest perception of the laughable in such a man as George Selwyn.

If human beings could be made pets, like Miss Tabitha's snake or toad, Selwyn would have fondled a hangman. He loved the noble art of execution, and was a connoisseur of the execution of the art. In childhood he must have decapitated his rocking-horse, hanged his doll in a miniature gallows, and burnt his baubles at mimic stakes. The man whose calm eye was watched for the quiet sparkle that announced—and only that ever did announce it—the flashing wit within the mind, by a gay crowd of loungers at Arthur's, might be found next day rummaging among coffins in a damp vault, glorying in a mummy, confessing and preparing a live criminal, paying any sum for a relic of a dead one, or pressing eagerly forward to witness the dying agonies of a condemned man.

Yet Walpole and Warner both bore the highest testimony to the goodness of his heart; and it is impossible to doubt that his nature was as gentle as a woman's. There have been other instances of even educated men delighting in scenes of suffering; but in general their characters have been more or less gross, their heads more or less insensible. The husband of Madame Récamier went daily to see the guillotine do its vile work during the reign of Terror; but then he was a man who never wept over the death of a friend. The man who was devoted to a little child, whom he adopted and treated with the tenderest care, was very different from M. Récamier—and that he had a heart there is no doubt. He was an anomaly, and famous for being so; though, perhaps, his well-known eccentricity was taken advantage of by his witty friends, and many a story fathered on Selwyn which has no origin but in the brain of its narrator.

George Augustus Selwyn, then, famous for his wit, and notorious for his love of horrors, was the second son of a country gentleman, of Matson, in Gloucestershire, Colonel John Selwyn, who had been an aide-de-camp of Marlborough's, and afterwards a frequenter of the courts of the first two Georges. He inherited his wit chiefly from his mother, Mary, the daughter of General Farington or Farringdon, of the county of Kent. Walpole tells us that she figured among the beauties of the court of the Prince and Princess of Wales, and was bedchamber-woman to Queen Caroline. Her character was not spotless, for we hear of an intrigue, which her own mistress imparted in confidence to the Duchess of Orleans (the mother of the Regent: they wrote on her tomb Cy gist l'oisiveté, because idleness is the mother of all vice), and which eventually found its way into the 'Utrecht Gazette.' It was Mrs. Selwyn, too, who said to George II., that he was the last person she would ever have an intrigue with, because she was sure he would tell the queen of it: it was well known that that very virtuous sovereign made his wife the confidante of his amours, which was even more shameless than young De Sévigné's taking advice from his mother on his intrigue with Ninon de l'Enclos. She seems to have been reputed a wit, for Walpole retails her mots as if they were worth it, but they are not very remarkable: for instance, when Miss Pelham lost a pair of diamond earrings, which she had borrowed, and tried to faint when the loss was discovered, some one called for lavender-drops as a restorative. 'Pooh!' cries Mrs. Selwyn, 'give her diamond-drops.'

George Augustus was born on the 11th of August, 1719. Walpole says that he knew him at eight years old, and as the two were at Eton about the same time, it is presumed that they were contemporaries there. In fact, a list of the boys there, in 1732, furnished to Eliot Warburton, contains the names of Walpole, Selwyn, Edgecumbe, and Conway, all in after-life intimate friends and correspondents. From Eton to Oxford was the natural course, and George was duly entered at Hertford College. He did not long grace Alma Mater, for the grand tour had to be made, and London life to be begun, but he was there long enough to contract the usual Oxford debts, which his father consented to pay more than once. It is amusing to find the son getting Dr. Newton to write him a contrite and respectful letter to the angry parent, to liquidate the 'small accounts' accumulated in London and Oxford as early as 1740. Three years later we find him in Paris, leading a gay life, and writing respectful letters to England for more money. Previously to this, however, he had obtained, through his father, the sinecure of Clerk of the Irons and surveyor of the Meltings at the Mint, a comfortable little appointment, the duties of which were performed by deputy, while its holder contented himself with honestly acknowledging the salary, and dining once a week, when in town, with the officers of the Mint, and at the Government's expense.

So far the young gentleman went on well enough, but in 1744 he returned to England, and his rather rampant character showed itself in more than one disgraceful affair.

Among the London shows was Orator Henley, a clergyman and clergyman's son, and a member of St. John's, Cambridge. He had come to London about this time, and instituted a series of lectures on universal knowledge and primitive Christianity. He styled himself a Rationalist, a title then more honourable than it is now; and in grandiloquent language, 'spouted' on religious subjects to an audience admitted at a shilling a-head. On one occasion he announced a disputation among any two of his hearers, offering to give an impartial hearing and judgment to both. Selwyn and the young Lord Carteret were prepared, and stood up, the one to defend the ignorance, the other the impudence, of Orator Henley himself; so, at least, it is inferred from a passage in D'Israeli the Elder. The uproar that ensued can well be imagined. Henley himself made his escape by a back door. His pulpit, all gilt, has been immortalized by Pope, as 'Henley's gilt tub;' in which—

The affair gave rise to a correspondence between the Orator and his young friends; who, doubtless, came off best in the matter.

This was harmless enough, but George's next freak was not so excusable. The circumstances of this affair are narrated in a letter from Captain Nicholson, his friend, to George Selwyn; and may, therefore, be relied on. It appears that being at a certain club in Oxford, at a wine party with his friends, George sent to a certain silversmith's for a certain chalice, intrusted to the shopkeeper from a certain church to be repaired in a certain manner. This being brought, Master George—then, be it remembered, not at the delicate and frivolous age of most Oxford boys, but at the mature one of six-and-twenty—filled it with wine, and handing it round, used the sacred words, 'Drink this in remembrance of me.' This was a blasphemous parody of the most sacred rite of the Church. All Selwyn could say for himself was, that he was drunk when he did it. The other plea, that he did it in ridicule of the transubstantiation of the Romish Church, could not stand at all; and was most weakly put forward. Let Oxford Dons be what they will; let them put a stop to all religious inquiry, and nearly expel Adam Smith for reading Hume's 'Essay on Human Nature;' let them be, as many allege, narrow-minded, hypocritical, and ignorant; we cannot charge them with wrong-dealing in expelling the originator of such open blasphemy, which nothing can be found to palliate, and of which its perpetrator did not appear to repent, rather complaining that the treatment of the Dons was harsh. The act of expulsion was, of course, considered in the same light by his numerous acquaintance, many of whom condoled with him on the occasion. It is true, the Oxford Dons are often charged with injustice and partiality, and too often the evidence is not sufficiently strong to excuse their judgments; but in this the evidence was not denied; only a palliative was put in, which every one can see through. The only injustice we can discover in this case is, that the head of Hart Hall, as Hertford College was called, seemed to have been influenced in pronouncing his sentence of expulsion by certain previous suspicions, having no bearing on the question before him, which had been entertained by another set of tutors—those of Christchurch—where Selwyn had many friends, and where, probably enough, he indulged in many collegian's freaks. This knack of bringing up a mere suspicion, is truly characteristic of the Oxford Don, and since the same Head of this House—Dr. Newton—acknowledged that Selwyn was, during his Oxford career, neither intemperate, dissolute, nor a gamester, it is fair to give him the advantage of the doubt, that the judgment on the evidence had been influenced by the consideration of 'suspicions' of former misdeeds, which had not been proved, perhaps never committed. Knowing the after-life of the man, we can, however, scarcely doubt that George had led a fast life at the University, and given cause for mistrust. But one may ask whether Dons, whose love of drinking, and whose tendency to jest on the most solemn subjects, are well known even in the present day, might not have treated Selwyn less harshly for what was done under the influence of wine? To this we are inclined to reply, that no punishment is too severe for profanation; and that drunkenness is not an excuse, but an aggravation. Selwyn threatened to appeal, and took advice on the matter. This, as usual, was vain. Many an expelled man, more unjustly treated than Selwyn, has talked of appeal in vain. Appeal to whom? To what? Appeal against men who never acknowledge themselves wrong, and who, to maintain that they are right, will listen to evidence which they can see is contradictory, and which they know to be worthless! An appeal from an Oxford decision is as hopeless in the present day as it was in Selwyn's. He wisely left it alone, but less wisely insisted on reappearing in Oxford, against the advice of all his friends, whose characters were lost if the ostracised man were seen among them.

From this time he entered upon his 'profession,' that of a wit, gambler, club-lounger, and man about town; for these many characters are all mixed in the one which is generally called 'a wit.' Let us remember that he was good-hearted, and not ill-intentioned, though imbued with the false ideas of his day. He was not a great man, but a great wit.

The localities in which the trade of wit was plied were, then, the clubs, and the drawing-rooms of fashionable beauties. The former were in Selwyn's youth still limited in the number of their members, thirty constituting a large club; and as the subscribers were all known to one another, presented an admirable field for display of mental powers in conversation. In fact, the early clubs were nothing more than dining-societies, precisely the same in theory as our breakfasting arrangements at Oxford, which were every whit as exclusive, though not balloted for. The ballot, however, and the principle of a single black ball suffering to negative an election were not only, under such circumstances, excusable, but even necessary for the actual preservation of peace. Of course, in a succession of dinner-parties, if any two members were at all opposed to one other, the awkwardness would be intolerable. In the present day, two men may belong to the same club and scarcely meet even on the stairs, oftener than once or twice in a season.

Gradually, however, in the place of the 'feast of reason and flow of soul' and wine, instead of the evenings spent in toasting, talking, emptying bottles and filling heads, as in the case of the old Kit-kat, men took to the monstrous amusement of examining fate, and on club-tables the dice rattled far more freely than the glasses, though these latter were not necessarily abandoned. Then came the thirst for hazard that brought men early in the day to try their fortune, and thus made the club-room a lounge. Selwyn was an habitual frequenter of Brookes.'

Brookes' was, perhaps, the principal club of the day, though 'White's Chocolate House' was almost on a par with it. But Selwyn did not confine his attention solely to this club. It was the fashion to belong to as many of them as possible, and Wilberforce mentions no less than five to which he himself belonged: Brookes', Boodle's, White's, Miles and Evans's in New Palace Yard, and Goosetree's. As their names imply, these were all, originally, mere coffee-houses, kept by men of the above names. One or two rooms then sufficed for the requirements of a small party, and it was not till the members were greatly increased that the coffee-house rose majestically to the dignity of a bow-window, and was entirely and exclusively appropriated to the requirements of the club.

This was especially the case with White's, of which so many of the wits and talkers of Selwyn's day were members. Who does not know that bow-window at the top of St. James's Street, where there are sure, about three or four in the afternoon, to be at least three gentlemen, two old and one young, standing, to the exclusion of light within, talking and contemplating the oft-repeated movement outside. White's was established as early as 1698, and was thus one of the original coffee-houses. It was then kept by a man named Arthur: here Chesterfield gamed and talked, to be succeeded by Gilly Williams. Charles Townshend, and George Selwyn. The old house was burnt down in 1733. It was at White's—or as Hogarth calls it in his pictorial squib, Black's—that, when a man fell dead at the door, he was lugged in and bets made as to whether he was dead or no. The surgeon's operations were opposed, for fear of disturbing the bets. Here, too, did George Selwyn and Charles Townshend pit their wit against wit; and here Pelham passed all the time he was not forced to devote to politics. In short it was, next to Brookes', the club of the day, and perhaps in some respects had a greater renown than even that famous club, and its play was as high.

In Brookes' and White's Selwyn appeared with a twofold fame, that of a pronouncer of bon-mots and that of a lover of horrors. His wit was of the quaintest order. He was no inveterate talker, like Sydney Smith; no clever dissimulator, like Mr. Hook. Calmly, almost sanctimoniously, he uttered those neat and telling sayings which the next day passed over England as 'Selwyn's last.' Walpole describes his manner admirably—-his eyes turned up, his mouth set primly, a look almost of melancholy in his whole face. Reynolds, in his Conversation-piece, celebrated when in the Strawberry Collection, and representing Selwyn leaning on a chair, Gilly Williams, crayon in hand, and Dick Edgecumbe by his side, has caught the pseudo-solemn expression of his face admirably. The ease of the figure, one hand empochée, the other holding a paper of epigrams, or what not, the huge waistcoat with a dozen buttons and huge flaps, the ruffled sleeve, the bob-wig, all belong to the outer man; but the calm, quiet, almost enquiring face, the look half of melancholy, half of reproach, and, as the Milesian would say, the other half of sleek wisdom; the long nose, the prim mouth and joined lips, the elevated brow, and beneath it the quiet contemplative eye, contemplative not of heaven or hell, but of this world as it had seen it, in its most worldly point of view, yet twinkling with a flashing thought of incongruity made congruous, are the indices of the inner man. Most of our wits, it must have been seen, have had some other interest and occupation in life than that of 'making wit:' some have been authors, some statesmen, some soldiers, some wild-rakes, and some players of tricks: Selwyn had no profession but that of diseur de bons mots; for though he sat in the House, ne took no prominent part in politics; though he gambled extensively, he did not game for the sake of money only. Thus his life was that merely of a London bachelor, with few incidents to mark it, and therefore his memoir must resolve itself more or less into a series of anecdotes of his eccentricities and list of his witticisms.

His friend Walpole gives us an immense number of both, not all of a first-rate nature, nor many interesting in the present day. Selwyn, calm as he was, brought out his sayings on the spur of the moment, and their appropriateness to the occasion was one of their greatest recommendations. A good saying, like a good sermon, depends much on its delivery, and loses much in print. Nothing less immortal than wit! To take first, however, the eccentricities of his character, and especially his love of horrors, we find anecdotes by the dozen retailed of him. It was so well known, that Lord Holland, when dying, ordered his servant to be sure to admit Mr. Selwyn if he called to enquire after him, 'for if I am alive,' said he, 'I shall be glad to see him, and if I am dead, he will be glad to see me.' The name of Holland leads us to an anecdote told by Walpole. Selwyn was looking over Cornbury with Lord Abergavenny and Mrs. Frere, 'who loved one another a little,' and was disgusted with the frivolity of the woman who could take no interest in anything worth seeing. 'You don't know what you missed in the other room,' he cried at last, peevishly. 'Why, what?'—'Why, my Lord Holland's picture.'—'Well, what is my Lord Holland to me?' 'Don't you know,' whispered the wit mysteriously, 'that Lord Holland's body lies in the same vault in Kensington Church with my Lord Abergavenny's mother?' 'Lord! she was so obliged,' says Walpole, 'and thanked him a thousand times!'

Selwyn knew the vaults as thoroughly as old Anthony Wood knew the brasses. The elder Craggs had risen by the favour of Marlborough, whose footman he had been, and his son was eventually a Secretary of State. Arthur Moore, the father of James Moore Smyth, of whom Pope wrote—