The Letters of Horace Walpole, Earl of Orford Volume II Part 70

Knyphausen(979) diverted me yesterday with some anecdotes of the Empress's college of chast.i.ty-not the Russian Empress's.

The King of Prussia asked some of his Austrian prisoners whether their mistress consulted her college of chast.i.ty on the letters she wrote (and he intercepted) to Madame Pompadour.

You have heard some time ago of the death of the Duke of Marlborough.(980) The estate is forty-five thousand pounds a-year--nine of which are jointured out. He paid but eighteen thousand pounds a-year in joint lives. This Duke and the estate save greatly by his death, as the present wants a year of being of age, and would certainly have accommodated his father in agreeing to sell and pay. Lord Edgc.u.mbe(981) is dead too, one of the honestest and most steady men in the world.

I was much diverted with your histories of our Princess(982) and Madame de Woronzow. Such dignity as Madame de Craon's wants a little absolute power to support it! Adieu! my dear Sir.

(977) Lord Chesterfield, writing on the 21st to his son, says, "The King has been ill; but his illness has terminated in a good fit of the gout. It was generally thought he would have died, and for a very good reason; for the oldest lion in the Tower, much about the King's age, died about a fortnight ago.

This extravagancy, I can a.s.sure you, was believed by many above people. So wild and capricious is the human mind!"-E.

(978) "The King of Prussia has just compelled Daun to raise the siege of Dresden, in spite of his (the King's) late most disastrous defeat by the same general at Bochkirchen, which had taken place on the 14th of October, 1758.-D.

(979) The Prussian minister.

(980) Charles Spencer, second Duke of Marlborough. He died, on the 28th of October at Munster, in Westphalia.-E.

(981) Richard, first Lord Edgc.u.mbe; an intimate friend of Sir Robert Walpole.

(982) The Princess Craon.

467 Letter 295 To The Rev. Henry Zouch.

Arlington Street, Dec. 9, 1758.

Sir, I have desired Mr. Whiston to convey to you the second edition of my Catalogue, not so complete as it might have been, if great part had not been printed before I received your remarks, but yet more correct than the first sketch with which I troubled you. Indeed, a thing of this slight and idle nature does not deserve to have much more pains employed upon it.

I am just undertaking an edition of Lucan, my friend Mr.

Bentley having in his possession his father's notes and emendations on the first seven books. Perhaps a partiality for the original author concurs a little. with this circ.u.mstance of the notes, to make me fond of printing, at Strawberry Hill, the works of a man who, alone of all the cla.s.sics, was thought to breathe too brave and honest a spirit for the perusal of the Dauphin and the French. I don't think that a good or bad taste in poetry is of so serious a nature, that I should be afraid of owning too, that, with that great judge Corneille, and with that, perhaps, no judge Heinsius, I prefer Lucan to Virgil. To speak fairly, I prefer great sense to poetry with little sense.

There are hemistics in Lucan that go to one's soul and one's heart;--for a mere epic poem, a fabulous tissue of uninteresting battles that don't teach one even to fight, I know nothing more tedious. The poetic images, the versification and language of the Aeneid are delightful; but take the story by itself, and can any thing be more silly and unaffeCting? There are a few G.o.ds without power, heroes without character, heaven-directed wars without justice, inventions without probability, and a hero who betrays one woman with a kingdom that he might have had, to force himself upon another woman and another kingdom to which he had no pretensions, and all this to show his obedience to the G.o.ds! In short, I have always admired his numbers so much, and his meaning so little, that I think I should like Virgil better if I understood him less.

Have you seen, Sir, a book which has made some noise--Helvetius de l'Esprit? The author is so good and moral a man, that I grieve he should have published a system of as relaxed morality as can well be imagined.-. 'tis a large quarto, and in general a very superficial one. His philosophy may be new in France, but is greatly exhausted here. He tries to imitate Montesquieu, and has heaped commonplaces upon commonplaces, which supply or overwhelm his reasoning; yet he has often wit, happy allusion;, and sometimes writes finely: there is merit enough to give an obscure man fame; flimsiness enough to depreciate a great man. After his book was licensed, they forced him to retract it by a most abject recantation. Then why print this book? If zeal for his system pushed him to propagate it, did not he consider that a recantation would hurt his cause more than his arguments could support it.

We are promised Lord Clarendon in February from Oxford, though I hear shall have the surrept.i.tious edition from Holland much sooner.

You see, Sir, I am a sceptic as well as Helvetius, but of a more moderate complexion. There is no harm in telling mankind that there is not so much divinity in the Aeneid as they imagine; but, (Even if I thought so,) I would not preach that virtue and friends.h.i.+p are mere names, and resolvable into self-interest; because there are numbers that would remember the grounds of the principle, and forget what was to be engrafted on it. Adieu!

468 Letter 296 To Sir Horace Mann.

Strawberry Hill, Christmas-day, 1758.

Adieu! my dear Sir--that is, adieu to our correspondence, for I am neither dying nor quarrelling with you; but as we, Great- Britons, are quarrelling with all Europe, I think very soon I shall not be able to convey a letter to you, but by the way of Africa, and am afraid the post-offices are not very well regulated. In short, we are on the brink of a Dutch war too.

Their merchants are so enraged that we will not only not suffer them to enrich themselves by carrying all the French trade, and all kinds of military stores to the French settlements, but that they lose their own s.h.i.+ps into the bargain, that they are ready to despatch the Princess Royal(983) into the other world even before her time; if her death arrives soon, and she is thought in great danger, it will be difficult for any body else to keep the peace. Spain and Denmark are in little better humour--well, if We have not as many lives as a cat or the King of Prussia! However, our spirits do not droop; we are raising thirteen millions, we look upon France as totally undone, and that they have not above five loaves and a few small fishes left; we intend to take all America from them next summer, and then if Spain and Holland are not terrified, we shall be at leisure to deal with them. Indeed, we are rather in a hurry to do all this, because people may be weary of paying thirteen millions; and besides it may grow decent for Mr. Pitt to visit his gout, which this year he has been forced to send to the Bath without him. I laugh, but seriously we are in a critical situation; and it is as true, that if Mr. Pitt had not exerted the spirit and activity that he has, we should ere now have been past a critical situation. Such a war as ours carried on by my Lord Hardwicke, with the dull dilatoriness of a Chancery suit, would long ago have reduced us to what suits in Chancery reduce most people! At present our unanimity is prodigious-- you Would as soon hear No from an old maid as from the House of Commons--but I don't promise you that this tranquillity will last.(984) One has known more ministries overturned of late years by their own squabbles than by any a.s.sistance from Parliaments.

Sir George Lee, formerly an heir-apparent(985) to the ministry is dead. it was almost sudden, but he died with great composure. Lord Arran(986) went off with equal philosophy. Of the great house of Ormond there now remains only his sister, Lady Emily Butler, a young heiress of ninety-nine.

It is with great pleasure I tell you that Mr. Conway is going to Sluys to settle a cartel with the French. The commission itself is honourable, but more pleasing as it re-establishes him--I should say his merit re-establishes him. All the world now acknowledges it--and the insufficiency of his brother-generals makes it vain to oppress him any longer.

I am happy that you are pleased with the monument, and vain that you like the Catalogue(987)--if it would not look too vain, I would tell you that it was absolutely undertaken and finished within five months. Indeed, the faults in the first edition and the deficiencies show it was; I have just printed another more correct.

Of the Pretender's family one never hears a word: unless our Protestant brethren the Dutch meddle in their affairs, they will be totally forgotten; we have too numerous a breed of our own, to want Princes from Italy. The old Chevalier by your account is likely to precede his rival, who with care may still last a few years, though I think will scarce appear again out of his own house.

I want to ask you if it is possible to get the royal edition of the Antiquities of Herculaneum?(988) and I do not indeed want you to get it for me unless I am to pay for it. Prince San Severino has told the foreign ministers here that there are to be twelve hundred volumes, of it--and they believe it. I imagine the fact is, that there are but twelve hundred copies printed. Could Cardinal Albani get it for me? I would send him my Strawberry-editions, and the Birmingham-editions(988) in exchange--things here much in fas.h.i.+on.

The night before I came from town, we heard of the fall of the Cardinal de Bernis,(989) but not the cause of it(990)--if we have a Dutch war, how many cardinals will fall in France and in England, before you hear of these or I of the former! I have always written to you with the greatest freedom, because I care more that you should be informed of the state of your own country, than what secretaries of state or their clerks think of me,--but one must be more circ.u.mspect if the Dey of Algiers is to open one's letters. Adieu!

(983) The Princess Dowager of Orange, eldest daughter of George II.

(984) Lord Chesterfield, in a letter of the 15th, says, "The estimates for the expenses of the year 1759 are made up. I have seen them; and what do you think they amount to? No less than twelve millions three hundred thousand pounds: a most incredible sum, and its yet already all subscribed, and even more offered! The unanimity in the House of Commons in voting such a sum, and such forces, both by sea and land, is not less astonis.h.i.+ng. This is Mr. Pitt's doing, and it is marvellous in our eyes."-E.

(985) Frederick, Prince of Wales, had designed, if he outlived the King, to make Sir George Lee chancellor of the exchequer.

(986) He was Charles Butler, the second and last surviving son of Thomas, Earl of Ossory, eldest son of the first Duke of Ormond. He had been created, in 1693, Baron Clogligrenan, Viscount Tullough, and Earl of Arran, in Ireland; and at the same time Baron Butler of Weston, in the Peerage of England.

Dying without issue his t.i.tles became extinct.-D.

(987) The Catalogue of Royal and n.o.ble Authors.

(988) Editions printed with the Baskerville types.-D.

(989) The Cardinal de Bernis was a frivolous and incapable minister, who was equally raised and overthrown by the influence of the King of France's mistress, Madame de Pompadour.-D.

(990) "Cardinal Bernis's disgrace," says Lord Chesterfield, "is as sudden, and hitherto as little understood, as his elevation was. I have seen his poems printed at Paris, not by a friend, I dare say; and, to judge by them, I humbly conceive his excellency is a puppy. I will say nothing of that excellent headpiece that made him and unmade him in the same month, except O King, live for ever!"-E.

470 Letter 297 To George Montagu, Esq.

Arlington Street, Dec. 26th, 1758.

it is so little extraordinary to find you doing what is friendly and obliging, that one don't take half notice enough of it. Can't you let Mr. Conway go to Sluys without taking notice of it? How would you be hurt, if he continued to be oppressed? what is it to you whether I am glad or sorry? Can't you enjoy yourself whether I am happy or not'--'@ I suppose If I were to have a misfortune, you would immediately be concerned at it! How troublesome it is to have you sincere and good-natured! Do be a little more like the rest of the world.

I have been at Strawberry these three days, and don't know a t.i.ttle. The last thing I heard before I went was that Colonel Yorke is to be married to one or both of the Miss Crasteyns, nieces of the rich grocer that died three years ago. They have two hundred and sixty thousand pounds apiece. A marchioness-- or a grocer---nothing comes amiss to the digestion of that family.(991) If the rest of the trunk was filled with money, I believe they would really marry Carafattatouadaht--what was the lump of deformity called in the Persian Tales, that was sent to the lady in a coffer? And as to marrying both the girls, it would cost my Lord Hardwicke but a new marriage-bill: I suppose it is all one to his conscience whether he prohibits matrimony or licenses bigamy. Poor Sir Charles Williams is relapsed, and strictly confined.

As you come so late, I trust you will stay with us the longer.

Adieu!

(991) Colonel Yorke, afterwards Lord Dover, married in 1783 the Dowager Baroness de Boetzalaer, widow of the first n.o.ble of the province of Holland.-E.

471 Letter 298 To The Rev. Henry Zouch.

Strawberry Hill, Jan. 12, 1759.

Sir, I shall certainly be obliged to you for an account of that piece of Lord Lonsdale:(992) besides my own curiosity in any thing that relates to a work in which I have engaged so far, I think it a duty to the public to perfect, as far as one can, whatever one gives to it; and yet I do not think of another edition; two thousand have peen printed, and though nine hundred went off at once, it would be presumption in me to expect that the rest will be sold in any short time. I only mean to add occasionally to my private copy whatever more I can collect and correct; and shall perhaps, but leave behind me materials for a future edition, in which should be included what I have hitherto omitted. Yet it is very vain in me to expect that any body should care for such a trifle after the novelty is worn off; I ought to be content with the favourable reception I have found; so much beyond my first expectations, that, except in two Magazines, not a word of censure has pa.s.sed on me in print. You may easily believe, Sir, that having escaped a trial, I am not mortified by having dirt thrown at me by children in the kennel. With regard to the story of Lord Suffolk, I wish I had been lucky enough to have mentioned it to you in time, it should not have appeared: yet it was told me by Mr. Mallet, who did not seem to have any objection that I should even mention his name as the very person to whom it happened. I must suppose that Lord Suffolk acted that foolish scene in imitation of Lord Rochester.(993)

I am happy, Sir, that I have both your approbation to my opinion of Lucan, and to my edition of him; but I a.s.sure you there will not be one word from me. I am sensible that it demands great attention to write even one's own language well: how can one pretend to purify a foreign language? to any merit in a dead one? I would not alone undertake to correct the press; but I am so lucky as to live in the strictest friends.h.i.+p with Dr. Bentley's Only Son, Who, to all the ornament of learning, has the amiable turn of mind, disposition, and easy wit. Perhaps you have heard that his drawings and architecture are admirable,--perhaps you have not: he is modest--he is poor- -he is consequently little known, less valued.

I am entirely ignorant of Dr. Burton and his Monasticon,(994) and after the little merit you tell me it has, I must explain to you that I have a collection of books of that sort, before I own that I wish to own it; at the same time, I must do so much justice to myself as to protest that I don't know so contemptible a cla.s.s of writers as topographers, not from the study itself, but from their wretched execution. Often and often I have had an inclination to show how topography should be writ, by pointing out the curious particulars of places, with descriptions of princ.i.p.al houses, the pictures, portraits, and Curiosities they contain.