Letters Of Horace Walpole Volume Ii Part 13

In vain the stealing hand of Time May pluck the blossoms of their prime; Envy may talk of bloom decay'd, How lilies droop and roses fade; But Constancy's unalter'd truth, Regardful of the vows of youth-- Affection that recalls the past, And bids the pleasing influence last, Shall still preserve the lover's flame In every scene of life the same; And still with fond endearments blend The wife, the mistress, and the friend!

"Lady Miller's collection of verses by fas.h.i.+onable people, which were put into her vase at Bath-Easton, in compet.i.tion for honorary prizes, being mentioned, Dr. Johnson held them very cheap: '_Bouts-rimes_,' said he, 'is a mere conceit, and an old conceit; I wonder how people were persuaded to write in that manner for this lady.' I named a gentleman of his acquaintance who wrote for the vase. JOHNSON--'He was a blockhead for his pains!' BOSWELL--'The d.u.c.h.ess of Northumberland wrote.'--'Sir, the d.u.c.h.ess of Northumberland may do what she pleases; n.o.body will say anything to a lady of her high rank: but I should be apt to throw ...

verses in his face." (Boswell, vol. v. p. 227.)]

_OPPOSITION OF THE FRENCH PARLIAMENTS TO TURGOT'S MEASURES._

TO DR. GEM.[1]

[Footnote 1: Dr. Gem was an English physician who had been for some time settled in Paris. He was uncle to Canning's friend and colleague, Mr.

Huskisson.]

ARLINGTON STREET, _April_ 4, 1776.

It is but fair, when one quits one's party, to give notice to those one abandons--at least, modern patriots, who often imbibe their principles of honour at Newmarket, use that civility. You and I, dear Sir, have often agreed in our political notions; and you, I fear, will die without changing your opinion. For my part, I must confess I am totally altered; and, instead of being a warm partisan of liberty, now admire nothing but despotism. You will naturally ask, what place I have gotten, or what bribe I have taken? Those are the criterions of political changes in England--but, as my conversion is of foreign extraction, I shall not be the richer for it. In one word, it is the _relation du lit de justice_ that has operated the miracle. When two ministers are found so humane, so virtuous, so excellent, as to study nothing but the welfare and deliverance of the people; when a king listens to such excellent men; and when a parliament, from the basest, most interested motives, interposes to intercept the blessing, must I not change my opinions, and admire arbitrary power? or can I retain my sentiments, without varying the object?

Yes, Sir, I am shocked at the conduct of the Parliament--one would think it was an English one! I am scandalised at the speeches of the _Avocat-general_,[1] who sets up the odious interests of the n.o.bility and clergy against the cries and groans of the poor; and who employs his wicked eloquence to tempt the good young monarch, by personal views, to sacrifice the ma.s.s of his subjects to the privileges of the few--But why do I call it eloquence? The fumes of interest had so clouded his rhetoric, that he falls into a downright Iricism.--He tells the King, that the intended tax on the proprietors of land will affect the property not only of the rich, but of the poor. I should be glad to know what is the property of the poor? Have the poor landed estates? Are those who have landed estates the poor? Are the poor that will suffer by the tax, the wretched labourers who are dragged from their famis.h.i.+ng families to work on the roads?--But _it is_ wicked eloquence when it finds a reason, or gives a reason for continuing the abuse. The Advocate tells the King, those abuses _presque consacres par l'anciennete_; indeed, he says all that can be said for n.o.bility, it is _consacree par l'anciennete_; and thus the length of the pedigree of abuses renders them respectable!

[Footnote 1: The _Avocat-General_ was M. de Seguier; and, under his guidance, the Parliament had pa.s.sed the monstrous resolution that "the _people_ in France was liable to the tax of _la taille_, and to _corvee_ at discretion" (_etait tailleable et corveable a volonte_), and that their "liability was an article of the Const.i.tution which it was not in the power of even the King himself to change" ("France under the Bourbons," iii. 422).]

His arguments are as contemptible when he tries to dazzle the King by the great names of Henri Quatre and Sully,[1] of Louis XIV. and Colbert, two couple whom nothing but a mercenary orator would have cla.s.sed together. Nor, were all four equally venerable, would it prove anything.

Even good kings and good ministers, if such have been, may have erred; nay, may have done the best they could. They would not have been good, if they wished their errors should be preserved, the longer they had lasted.

[Footnote 1: Sully and Colbert were the two great Finance Ministers of Henry IV. and Louis XIV.]

In short, Sir, I think this resistance of the Parliament to the adorable reformation planned by Messrs. de Turgot and Malesherbes[1] is more phlegmatically scandalous than the wildest tyranny of despotism. I forget what the nation was that refused liberty when it was offered.

This opposition to so n.o.ble a work is worse. A whole people may refuse its own happiness; but these profligate magistrates resist happiness for others, for millions, for posterity!--Nay, do they not half vindicate Maupeou, who crushed them? And you, dear Sir, will you now chide my apostasy? Have I not cleared myself to your eyes? I do not see a shadow of sound logic in all Monsieur Seguier's speeches, but in his proposing that the soldiers should work on the roads, and that pa.s.sengers should contribute to their fabric; though, as France is not so luxuriously mad as England, I do not believe pa.s.sengers could support the expense of their roads. That argument, therefore, is like another that the Avocat proposes to the King, and which, he modestly owns, he believes would be impracticable.

[Footnote 1: Malesherbes was the Chancellor, and in 1792 he was accepted by Louis XVI. as his counsel on his trial--a duty which he performed with an ability which drew on him the implacable resentment of Robespierre and the Jacobins, and which led to his execution in 1794.]

I beg your pardon, Sir, for giving you this long trouble; but I could not help venting myself, when shocked to find such renegade conduct in a Parliament that I was rejoiced had been restored. Poor human kind! is it always to breed serpents from its own bowels? In one country, it chooses its representatives, and they sell it and themselves; in others, it exalts despots; in another, it resists the despot when he consults the good of his people! Can we wonder mankind is wretched, when men are such beings? Parliaments run wild with loyalty, when America is to be enslaved or butchered. They rebel, when their country is to be set free!

I am not surprised at the idea of the devil being always at our elbows.

They who invented him, no doubt could not conceive how men could be so atrocious to one another, without the intervention of a fiend. Don't you think, if he had never been heard of before, that he would have been invented on the late part.i.tion of Poland! Adieu, dear Sir. Yours most sincerely.

_HIS DECORATIONS AT "STRAWBERRY"--HIS ESTIMATE OF HIMSELF, AND HIS ADMIRATION OF CONWAY._

TO THE HON. H.S. CONWAY.

STRAWBERRY HILL, _June_ 20, 1776.

I was very glad to receive your letter, not only because always most glad to hear of you, but because I wished to write to you, and had absolutely nothing to say till I had something to answer. I have lain but two nights in town since I saw you; have been, else, constantly here, very much employed, though doing, hearing, knowing exactly nothing. I have had a Gothic architect [Mr. Ess.e.x] from Cambridge to design me a gallery, which will end in a mouse, that is, in an hexagon closet of seven feet diameter. I have been making a Beauty Room, which was effected by buying two dozen of small copies of Sir Peter Lely, and hanging them up; and I have been making hay, which is not made, because I put it off for three days, as I chose it should adorn the landscape when I was to have company; and so the rain is come, and has drowned it.

However, as I can even turn calculator when it is to comfort me for not minding my interest, I have discovered that it is five to one better for me that my hay should be spoiled than not; for, as the cows will eat it if it is damaged, which horses will not, and as I have five cows and but one horse, is not it plain that the worse my hay is the better? Do not you with your refining head go, and, out of excessive friends.h.i.+p, find out something to destroy my system. I had rather be a philosopher than a rich man; and yet have so little philosophy, that I had much rather be content than be in the right.

Mr. Beauclerk and Lady Di have been here four or five days--so I had both content and exercise for my philosophy. I wish Lady Ailesbury was as fortunate! The Pembrokes, Churchills, Le Texier, as you will have heard, and the Garricks have been with us. Perhaps, if alone, I might have come to you; but you are all too healthy and harmonious. I can neither walk nor sing; nor, indeed, am fit for anything but to amuse myself in a sedentary trifling way. What I have most certainly not been doing, is writing anything: a truth I say to you, but do not desire you to repeat. I deign to satisfy scarce anybody else. Whoever reported that I was writing anything, must have been so totally unfounded, that they either blundered by guessing without reason, or knew they lied--and that could not be with any kind intention; though saying I am going to do what I am not going to do, is wretched enough. Whatever is said of me without truth, anybody is welcome to believe that pleases.

In fact, though I have scarce a settled purpose about anything, I think I shall never write any more. I have written a great deal too much, unless I had written better, and I know I should now only write still worse. One's talent, whatever it is, does not improve at near sixty--yet, if I liked it, I dare to say a good reason would not stop my inclination;--but I am grown most indolent in that respect, and most absolutely indifferent to every purpose of vanity. Yet without vanity I am become still prouder and more contemptuous. I have a contempt for my countrymen that makes me despise their approbation. The applause of slaves and of the foolish mad is below ambition. Mine is the haughtiness of an ancient Briton, that cannot write what would please this age, and would not, if he could.

Whatever happens in America, this country is undone. I desire to be reckoned of the last age, and to be thought to have lived to be superannuated, preserving my senses only for myself and for the few I value. I cannot aspire to be traduced like Algernon Sydney, and content myself with sacrificing to him amongst my lares. Unalterable in my principles, careless about most things below essentials, indulging myself in trifles by system, annihilating myself by choice, but dreading folly at an unseemly age, I contrive to pa.s.s my time agreeably enough, yet see its termination approach without anxiety. This is a true picture of my mind; and it must be true, because drawn for you, whom I would not deceive, and could not, if I would. Your question on my being writing drew it forth, though with more seriousness than the report deserved--yet talking to one's dearest friend is neither wrong nor out of season. Nay, you are my best apology. I have always contented myself with your being perfect, or, if your modesty demands a mitigated term, I will say, unexceptionable. It is comical, to be sure, to have always been more solicitous about the virtue of one's friend than about one's own; yet, I repeat it, you are my apology--though I never was so unreasonable as to make you answerable for my faults in return; I take them wholly to myself. But enough of this. When I know my own mind, for hitherto I have settled no plan for my summer, I will come to you.

Adieu!

_ANGLOMANIE IN PARIS--HORSE-RACING._

TO SIR HORACE MANN.

STRAWBERRY HILL, _Dec._ 1, 1776.

I don't know who the Englishwoman is of whom you give so ridiculous a description; but it will suit thousands. I distrust my age continually, and impute to it half the contempt I feel for my countrymen and women.

If I think the other half well-founded, it is by considering what must be said hereafter of the present age. What is to impress a great idea of us on posterity? In truth, what do our contemporaries of all other countries think of us? They stare at and condemn our politics and follies; and if they retain any respect for us, I doubt it is for the sense we have had. I do know, indeed, one man who still wors.h.i.+ps us, but his adoration is testified so very absurdly, as not to do us much credit. It is a Monsieur de Marchais, first Valet-de-Chambre to the King of France. He has the _Anglomanie_ so strong, that he has not only read more English than French books, but if any valuable work appears in his own language, he waits to peruse it till it is translated into English; and to be sure our translations of French are admirable things!

To do the rest of the French justice, I mean such as like us, they adopt only our egregious follies, and in particular the flower of them, horse-racing![1] _Le Roi Pepin_, a racer, is the horse in fas.h.i.+on. I suppose the next shameful practice of ours they naturalize will be the personal scurrilities in the newspapers, especially on young and handsome women, in which we certainly are originals! Voltaire, who first brought us into fas.h.i.+on in France, is stark mad at his own success. Out of envy to writers of his own nation, he cried up Shakspeare; and now is distracted at the just encomiums bestowed on that first genius of the world in the new translation. He sent to the French Academy an invective that bears all the marks of pa.s.sionate dotage. Mrs. Montagu happened to be present when it was read. Suard, one of their writers, said to her, "Je crois, Madame, que vous etes un peu fache de ce que vous venez d'entendre." She replied, "Moi, Monsieur! point du tout! Je ne suis pas amie de Monsieur Voltaire." I shall go to town the day after to-morrow, and will add a postscript, if I hear any news.

[Footnote 1: "A rage for adopting English fas.h.i.+ons (Anglomanie, as it was called) began to prevail; and, among the different modes in which it was exhibited, it is especially noticed that tea was introduced, and began to share with coffee the privilege of affording sober refreshment to those who aspired in their different ways to give the tone to French society. A less innocent novelty was a pa.s.sion for horse-racing, in which the Comte d'Artois and the Duc de Chartres set the example of indulging, establis.h.i.+ng a racecourse in the Bois de Boulogne. The Count had but little difficulty in persuading the Queen to attend it, and she soon showed so decided a fancy for the sport, and became so regular a visitor of it, that a small stand was built for her, which in subsequent years provoked unfavourable comments, when the Prince obtained her leave to give luncheon to some of their racing friends, who were not in every instance of a character ent.i.tled to be brought into a royal presence"

(the Editor's "Life of Marie Antoinette," c. II).]

_Dec. 3rd._

I am come late, have seen n.o.body, and must send away my letter.

_OSSIAN--CHATTERTON._

TO THE REV. WILLIAM COLE.

STRAWBERRY HILL, _June_ 19, 1777.

I thank you for your notices, dear Sir, and shall remember that on Prince William. I did see the _Monthly Review_, but hope one is not guilty of the death of every man who does not make one the dupe of a forgery. I believe M'Pherson's success with "Ossian"[1] was more the ruin of Chatterton[2] than I. Two years pa.s.sed between my doubting the authenticity of Rowley's poems and his death. I never knew he had been in London till some time after he had undone and poisoned himself there.

The poems he sent me were transcripts in his own hand, and even in that circ.u.mstance he told a lie: he said he had them from the very person at Bristol to whom he had given them. If any man was to tell you that monkish rhymes had been dug up at Herculaneum, which was destroyed several centuries before there was any such poetry, should you believe it? Just the reverse is the case of Rowley's pretended poems. They have all the elegance of Waller and Prior, and more than Lord Surrey--but I have no objection to anybody believing what he pleases. I think poor Chatterton was an astonis.h.i.+ng genius--but I cannot think that Rowley foresaw metres that were invented long after he was dead, or that our language was more refined at Bristol in the reign of Henry V. than it was at Court under Henry VIII. One of the chaplains of the Bishop of Exeter has found a line of Rowley in "Hudibras"--the monk might foresee that too! The prematurity of Chatterton's genius is, however, full as wonderful, as that such a prodigy as Rowley should never have been heard of till the eighteenth century. The youth and industry of the former are miracles, too, yet still more credible. There is not a symptom in the poems, but the old words, that savours of Rowley's age--change the old words for modern, and the whole construction is of yesterday.

[Footnote 1: Macpherson was a Scotch literary man, who in 1760 published "Fingal" in six books, which he declared he had translated from a poem by Ossian, son of Fingal, a Gaelic prince of the third century. For a moment the work was accepted as genuine in some quarters, especially by some of the Edinburgh divines. But Dr. Johnson denounced it as an imposture from the first. He pointed out that Macpherson had never produced the ma.n.u.scripts from which he professed to have translated it when challenged to do so. He maintained also that the so-called poem had no merits; that "it was a mere unconnected rhapsody, a tiresome repet.i.tion of the same images;" and his opinion soon became so generally adopted, that Macpherson wrote him a furious letter of abuse, even threatening him with personal violence; to which Johnson replied "that he would not be deterred from exposing what he thought a cheat by the menaces of a ruffian"--a reply which seems to have silenced Mr.

Macpherson (Boswell's "Life of Johnson," i. 375, ii. 310).]

[Footnote 2: Chatterton's is a melancholy story. In 1768, when a boy of only sixteen, he published a volume of ballads which he described as the work of Rowley, a priest of Bristol in the fifteenth century, and which he affirmed he had found in an old chest in the crypt of the Church of St. Mary Redcliffe at Bristol, of which his father was s.e.xton. They gave proofs of so rich and precocious a genius, that if he had published them as his own works, he would "have found himself famous" in a moment, as Byron did forty years afterwards. But people resented the attempt to impose on them, Walpole being among the first to point out the proofs of their modern composition; and consequently the admiration which his genius might have excited was turned into general condemnation of his imposture, and in despair he poisoned himself in 1770, when he was only eighteen years old.]

_AFFAIRS IN AMERICA--THE CZARINA AND THE EMPEROR OF CHINA._

TO SIR HORACE MANN.

ARLINGTON STREET, _Oct._ 26, 1777.

It is past my usual period of writing to you; which would not have happened but from an uncommon, and indeed, considering the moment, an extraordinary dearth of matter. I could have done nothing but describe suspense, and every newspaper told you that. Still we know nothing certain of the state of affairs in America; the very existence where, of the Howes, is a mystery. The General is said to have beaten Was.h.i.+ngton, Clinton to have repulsed three attacks, and Burgoyne[1] to be beaten.

The second alone is credited. Impatience is very high, and uneasiness increases with every day. There is no sanguine face anywhere, but many alarmed ones. The pains taken, by circulating false reports, to keep up some confidence, only increase the dissatisfaction by disappointing.

Some advantage gained may put off clamour for some months: but I think, the longer it is suspended, the more terrible it will be; and how the war should end but in ruin, I am not wise enough to conjecture. France suspends the blow, to make it more inevitable. She has suffered us to undo ourselves: will she allow us time to recover? We have begged her indulgence in the first: will she grant the second prayer?...

[Footnote 1: In June and July General Burgoyne, a man of some literary as well as military celebrity, achieved some trifling successes over the colonial army, alternating, however, with some defeats. He took Ticonderoga, but one of his divisions was defeated with heavy loss at Bennington--a disaster which, Lord Stanhope says, exercised a fatal influence over the rest of the campaign; and finally, a week before this letter was written, he and all his army were so hemmed in at Saratoga, that they were compelled to lay down their arms--a disgrace which was the turning-point of the war, and which is compared by Lord Stanhope to the capitulation of his own ancestor at Brihuega in the war of the Spanish Succession. The surrender of Saratoga was the event which determined the French and Spaniards to recognise the independence of the colonies, and consequently to unite with them in the war against England.]