The Letters of Horace Walpole, Earl of Orford Volume IV Part 17

(204) The Right Hon. William Dowdeswell, of Pull Court, member for the county of Worcester. He died at Nice, whither he had gone for the recovery of his health.-E.

(205) The Hon. Thomas Hervey, second son of John first Earl of Bristol.-E.

Letter 88 To The Rev. Mr. Cole.

Arlington Street, April 11, 1775. (page 129)

I thank you, dear Sir, for your kind letter., and the good account YOU give of yourself-nor can I blame your change from writing that is, transcribing, to reading--sure you ought to divert yourself rather than others-though I should not say s, if your pen had not confined itself to transcripts.

I am perfectly well, and heed not the weather; though I wish the seasons came a little oftener into their own places instead of each Other's. From November, till a fortnight ago, we had much warmth that I should often be glad of in summer--and since we are not sure of it then, was rejoiced when I could get it.

For myself, I am a kind of delicate Hercules; and though made of paper, have, by temperance, by using as much cold water inwardly and outwardly as I can, and by taking no precautions against catching cold, and braving all weathers, become capable of suffering by none. My biennial visitant, the gout, has yielded to the bootikins, and stayed with me this last time but five weeks in lieu of five months. Stronger men perhaps would kill themselves by my practice, but it has done so long with me, I shall trust to it.

I intended writing to you on Gray's Life,(206) if you had not prevented me. I am charmed with it, and prefer it to all the biography I ever saw. The style is excellent, simple, unaffected; the method admirable, artful, and judicious. He has framed the fragments, as a person said, so well, that they are fine drawings, if not finished pictures. For my part, I am so interested in it, that I shall certainly read it over and over. I do not find that it is likely to be the case with many yet. Never was a book, which people pretended to expect so much with impatience, less devoured-at least in London, where quartos are not of quick digestion. Faults are found, I hear, at Eton with the Latin Poems for false quant.i.ties-no matter-they are equal to the English -and can one say more?

At Cambridge, I should think the book would both offend much and please; at least if they are as sensible to humour as to ill-humour; and there is orthodoxy enough to wash down a camel.

The Scotch and the Reviewers will be still more angry. and the latter have not a syllable to pacify them. So they who wait for their decisions will probably miss of reading the most entertaining book in the world--a punishment which they who trust to such wretched judges deserve; for who are more contemptible than such judges, but they who pin their faith on them?

In answer to you, yourself, my good Sir, I shall not subscribe to your censure of Mr. Mason, whom I love and admire, and who has shown the greatest taste possible in the execution of this work. Surely he has said enough in grat.i.tude, and done far beyond what grat.i.tude could demand., It seems delicacy in expatiating on the legacy; particularizing more grat.i.tude would have lessened the evidence of friends.h.i.+p, and made the 'justice done to Gray's character look more like a debt.,_ He speaks of him in slender circ.u.mstances, not as distressed: and so he was till after the deaths of his parents and aunts; and even then surely not rich. I think he does somewhere say that he meant to be buried with his mother, and not specifying any other place confirms it. In short, Mr. Mason shall never know your criticisms; he has a good heart, and would feel them, though certainly not apprised that he would merit them. A man who has so called out all his -friend's virtues, could not want them himself.

I shall be much obliged to you for the prints you destine for me. The Earl of c.u.mberland I have, and will not rob you of. I wish you had been as successful with Mr. G. as with Mr. T. I mean, if you are not yet paid-now is the time, for he has sold his house to the Duke of Marlborough-I suppose he will not keep his prints long: he changes his pursuits Continually and extravagantly-and then sells to indulge new fancies.

I have had a piece of luck within these two days. I have long lamented our having no certain piece written by Anne Boleyn's brother, Lord Rochford. I have found a very pretty copy of verses by him in the new published volume of the Nuge Antiquae, though by mistake he is called, Earl of, instead Of Viscount, Rochford. They are taken from a MS-dated twenty-eight years after the author's death, and are much in the manner of Lord Surrey's and Sir T. Wyat's poems. I should at first have doubted if they were not counterfeited, on reading my n.o.ble Authors; but then the blunder of earl for viscount would hardly have been committed. A little modernized and softened in the cadence, they would be very pretty.

I have got the rest of the Digby pictures, but at a very high rate. There is one very large of Sir Kenelm, his wife, and two sons, in exquisite preservation, though the heads of him and his wife are not so highly finished as those I have--yet the boys and draperies are so that, together with the size, it is certainly the most capital miniature in the world: there are a few more, very fine too. I shall be happy to show them to you, whenever You Burnhamize--I mean before August, when I propose making MY dear old blind friend a visit at Paris--nothing else would carry me thither. I am too old to seek diversions, and too indolent to remove to a distance by choice, though not so immovable as YOU to much less distance. Adieu! Pray tell me what you hear is said of Gray's Life at Cambridge.

(206) "The Poems of Mr. Gray: to which are prefixed Memoirs of his Life and Writings; by W, Mason, M A, York, 1775." At the end of Mason's work Mr. Cole wrote the following memorandum:-- "I am by no means satisfied with this Life; it has too much the affectation of cla.s.sical shortness to please me, More circ.u.mstances would have suited my taste better; besides, I think the biographer had a mind to revenge himself of the sneerings Mr. Gray put upon him, though he left him, I guess, above a thousand pounds, which is slightly hinted at only; yet Mr. Walpole was quite satisfied with the work when I made my objection." A copy of Gray's will is given in the Rev. J.

Mitford's very valuable edition of the poet's works, published by Pickering, in four volumes, in 1836.-E.

Letter 89 To The Rev. Mr. Cole.

Arlington Street, April 5, 1775. (page 132)

The least I can do, dear Sir, in grat.i.tude for the cargo of prints I have received to-day from you, is to send you a medicine. A pair of bootikins will set out to-morrow morning in the machine that goes from the Queen's-head in Gray's-inn-lane. To be certain, you had better send for them where the machine inns, lest they should neglect delivering them at Milton. My not losing a moment shows my zeal; but if you can bear a little pain, I should not press you to use them.

I have suffered so dreadfully, that I constantly wear them to diminish the stock of gout in my const.i.tution; but as your fit is very slight, and will not last, and as you are pretty sure by its beginning so late, that you will never have much; and s the gout certainly carries off other complaints, had not you better endure a little, when it is rather a remedy than a disease? I do not desire to be entirely delivered from the gout, for all reformations do but make room for some new grievance: and in my opinion a disorder that requires no physician, is preferable to any that does. However, I have put relief in your power, and you will judge for yourself. You must tie them as tight as you can bear, the flannel next to the flesh; and, when you take them off, it should be in bed: rub your feet with a warm cloth, and put on warm stockings, for fear of catching cold while the pores are open. It would kill any body but me, who am of adamant, to walk out in the dew in winter in my slippers in half an hour after pulling off the bootikins. A physician sent me word, good-naturedly, that there was danger of catching cold after the bootikins, unless one was careful. I thanked him, but told him my precaution was, never taking any. All the winter I pa.s.s five days in a week without walking out, and sit often by the fireside till seven in the evening. When I do go out, whatever the weather is, I go with both gla.s.ses of the coach down, and so I do at midnight out of the hottest room. I have not had a single cold, however slight, these two years.

You are too candid in submitting at once to my defence of Mr.

Mason. It is true I am more charmed with his book than I almost ever was with one. I find more people like the grave letters than those of humour, and some think the latter a little affected, which is as wrong a judgment as they could make; for Gray never wrote any thing easily but things of humour. Humour was his natural and original turn--and though from his childhood he was grave and reserved, his genius led him to see things ludicrously and satirically; and though his health and dissatisfaction gave him low spirits, his melancholy turn was much more affected than his pleasantry in writing. You knew him enough to know I am in the right-but the world in general always wants to be told how to think, as well as what to think.

The print, I agree with you, though like, is a very disagreeable likeness, and the worst likeness of him. It gives the primness he had under constraint; and there is a blackness in the countenance which was like him only the last time I ever saw him, when I was much struck with it: and, though I did not apprehend him in danger, it left an impression on me that was uneasy, and almost prophetic of what I heard but too soon after leaving him. Wilson drew the picture under such impression, and I could not bear it in my room; Mr. Mason altered it a little, but Still it is not well, nor gives any idea of the determined virtues of his heart. It just serves to help the reader to an image of the person whose genius and integrity they must admire, if they are so happy as to have a taste for either.

The Peep into the Gardens at Twickenham is a silly little book, of which a few little copies were printed some years ago for presents, and which now sets up for itself as a vendible book.

It is a most inaccurate, superficial, blundering account of Twickenham and other places, drawn up by a Jewess, who has married twice, and turned Christian, poetess, and auth.o.r.ess.

She has printed her poems, too, and one complimentary copy of mine, which, in good breeding, I could not help Sending her in return for violent compliments in verse to me. I do not remember that hers were good; mine I know were very bad, and certainly never intended for the press.

I bought the first volume of Manchester, but could not read it; it was much too learned for me, and seemed rather an account of Babel than Manchester, I mean in point of antiquity.(207) To be sure, it is very kind in an author to promise one the history of a country town, and give one a circ.u.mstantial account of the antediluvian world into the bargain. But I am simple and ignorant, and desire no more than I pay for. And then for my progenitors, Noah and the Saxons, I have no curiosity about them. Bishop Lyttelton used to plague me to death about barrows, and tumuli, and Roman camps, and all those b.u.mps in the ground that do not amount to a most imperfect ichnography; but, in good truth, I am content with all arts when perfected, nor inquire how ingeniously people contrive to do without them--and I care still less for remains of art that retain no vestiges of art. Mr. Bryant,)208) who is sublime in unknown knowledge, diverted me more, yet I have not finished his work, no more than he has. There is a great ingenuity in discovering all his history [though it has never been written]

by etymologies. Nay, he convinced me that the Greeks had totally mistaken all they went to learn in Egypt, etc. by doing, as the French do still, judge wrong by the ear--but as I have been trying now and then for above forty years to learn something, I have not time to unlearn it all again, though I allow this our best sort of knowledge. If I should die when I am not clear in the History of the World below its first three thousand years, I should be at a sad loss on meeting with Homer and Hesiod, or any of those moderns in the Elysian fields, before I knew what I ought to think of them. Pray do not betray my ignorance: the reviewers and such literati have called me a learned and ingenious gentleman. I am sorry they ever heard my name, but don't let them know how irreverently I speak of the erudite, whom I dare to say they admire. These wasps, I suppose, will be very angry at the just contempt Mr.

Gray had for them, and will, as insects do, attempt to sting, in hopes that their twelvepenny readers will suck a little venom from the momentary tumour they raise--but good night-and once more, thank you for the prints. Yours ever.

(207) "The History of Manchester," by John Whitaker, B. D.

London, 1771-3-5. 2 vols. 4to. "We talked," says Boswell, "of antiquarian researches. Johnson. 'All that is really known Of the ancient state of Britain is contained in a few Pages. We can know no more than what the old writers have told us; Yet what large books we have upon it; the whole of which, excepting such parts as are taken from these old writers, is all a dream, such as Whitaker's Manchester.'" Life of Johnson, vol. vii. p.

189.-E.

(208) Jacob Bryan, the learned author of "A New System; or, n a.n.a.lysis of Ancient Mythology," 4to. 1774-6, 3 vols.; and of many other works. His character was thus finely drawn, in 1796, by Mr. Matthias, in "The Pursuits of Literature:"--"No man of literature can pa.s.s by the name of Mr. Bryant without grat.i.tude and reverence. He is a gentleman of attainments peculiar to himself, and of cla.s.sical erudition without an equal in Europe. His whole life has been spent in laborious researches, and the most curious investigations. He has a youthful fancy and a playful wit; with the mind, and occasionally with the pen of a poet; and with an ease and simplicity of style aiming only at perspicuity, and, as I think, attaining it. He has lived to see his eightieth winter (and May he yet long live!) with the esteem of the wise and good; in honourable retirement from the cares of life; with a gentleness of manners, and a readiness and willingness of literary communication seldom found. He is admired and sought after by the young who are entering on a course of study, and revered, and often followed, by those who have completed it.

Nomen in exemplum sero servabirnus evo!" Mr. Bryant died in 1804, in his eighty-ninth year, in consequence Of a wound on his s.h.i.+n, occasioned by his foot slipping from a chair which he had stepped on to reach a book in his library-E.

Letter 90 To The Rev. Mr. Cole.

Strawberry Hill, June 5, 1775. (page 134)

I am extremely concerned, dear Sir, to hear you have been so long confined by the gout. The painting of your house may, from the damp, have given you cold-I don't conceive that paint can affect one otherwise, if it does not make one sick, as it does me of all things. Dr. Heberden(209) (as every physician, to make himself talked of, will Set up Some new hypothesis,) pretends that a damp house, and even damp sheets, which have ever been reckoned fatal, are wholesome: to prove his faith he went into his own new house totally Unaired, and survived it.

At Malvern, they certainly put patients into sheets just dipped in the spring-however, I am 'glad you have a better proof that dampness is not mortal, and it is better to be too cautious than too rash. I am perfectly well, and expect to be so for a year and a half-I desire no more of the bootikins than to curtail my fits.

Thank you for the note from North's Life, though, having reprinted my Painters, I shall never have an opportunity of using it. I am still more obliged to you for the offer of an Index to my Catalogue but, as I myself know exactly where to find every thing in it, and as I dare to say n.o.body else will want it, I shall certainly not put YOU to that trouble.

Dr. Glynn will certainly be most welcome to see my house, and shall, if I am not at home:-still I had rather know a few days before, because else he may happen to come when I have company, as I have often at this time of the year, and then it is impossible to let it be seen, as I cannot ask my company, who may have come to see it too, to go out, that somebody else may see it, and I should be Very sorry to have the Doctor disappointed. These difficulties, which have happened more than once, have obliged me to give every ticket for a particular day; therefore, if Dr. Glynn will be so good as to advertise me of the day he intends to come here, with a direction, I shall send him word what day he can see it.

I have just run through the two vast folios of Hutchins's Dorsets.h.i.+re.(210) He has taken infinite pains; indeed, all but those that would make it entertaining.

Pray can you tell me any thing of some relations of my own, the Burwells? My grandfather married Sir Jeffery Burwell's daughter, of Rongham, in Suffolk. Sir Jeffery's mother, I imagine, was daughter of a Jeffery Pitman, of Suffolk; at least I know there was such a man in the latter, and that we quarter the arms of Pitman. But I cannot find who Lady Burwell, Sir Jeffery's wife, was. Edmondson has searched in vain in the Heralds' office; and I have outlived all the ancient of my family so long, that I know not of whom to Inquire, but you of the neighbourhood. There is an old walk in the park at Houghton, called "Sir Jeffery's Walk," where the old gentleman used to teach my father (Sir Robert) his book. Those very old trees encouraged my father to plant at Houghton. When people used to try to persuade him nothing would grow there, he said, why Will not other trees grow as well as those in Sir Jeffery's Walk?--Other trees have grown to some purpose! Did I ever tell you that ,my father was descended from Lord Burleigh? The latter's granddaughter, by his son Exeter, married Sir Giles Allington, whose daughter married Sir Robert Crane, father of Sir Edward Walpole's .'Wife. I want but Lady Burwell's name to Make my genealogic tree Shoot out stems every way. I have recovered a barony in fee, which has no defect but in being antecedent to any summons to Parliament, that of the Fitz Osberts: and On MY Mother's side it has mounted the Lord knows whither by the Philipps,s to Henry VIII. and has sucked in Dryden for a great-uncle: and by Lady Philipps's mother, Darcy, to Edward III. and there I stop for brevity's sake--especially as Edward III. is a second Adam; who almost is not descended from Edward 1 as posterity will be from Charles II. and all the princes in Europe from James I. I am the first antiquary of my race. People don't know how entertaining a study it is. Who begot whom is a most amusing kind of hunting; one recovers a grandfather instead of breaking one's own neck--and then one grows so pious to the memory of a thousand persons one never heard of before. One finds how Christian names came into a family, with a world of other delectable erudition. You cannot imagine how vexed I was that Bloomfield(211) died before he arrived at Houghton--I had promised myself a whole crop of notable ancestors-but I think I have pretty well unkennelled them myself. Adieu! Yours ever.

P. S. I found a family of Whaplode in Lincolns.h.i.+re who give our arms, and have persuaded myself that Whaplode is a corruption of Walpole, and came from a branch when we lived at Walpole in Lincolns.h.i.+re.

(209) Dr. William Heberden, the distinguished physician and medical writer, who died on the 17th of March, 1801, at the advanced age of ninety-one.-E.

(210) "The History and Antiquities of the County of Dorset."

London, 1774, in two volumes, folio. A second edition, corrected, augmented, and improved, by Richard Gough and John Bowyer Nichols, in four Volumes, folio, appeared in 1796-1815.-E.

(211) The Rev. Francis Blomefield, the author of an " Essay towards a Topographical History of the County of Norfolk,"

which was left unfinished by him, and continued by the Rev.

Charles Parkin. It was first printed in five folio volumes: 1739-1773. A second edition, in eleven volumes, octavo, appeared in 1805-1810.-E.

Letter 91 To The Hon. H. S. Conway.

Strawberry Hill, July 9, 1775. (page 136)

The whole business of this letter would lie in half a line.

Shall you have room for me on Tuesday the 18th? I am putting myself into motion that I may go farther. I told Madame du Deffand how you had scolded me on her account, and she has charged me to thank you, and tell you how much she wishes to see you, too. I would give any thing to go-But the going!--However, I really think I shall, but I grow terribly affected with a maladie de famille, that of taking root at home.

I did but put my head into London on Thursday, and more bad news from America.(211) I wonder when it will be bad enough to make folks think it so, without going on! The stocks, indeed, begin to grow a little nervous, and they are apt to affect other pulses. I heard this evening here that the Spanish fleet is sailed, and that we are not in the secret whither-but I don't answer for Twickenham gazettes, and I have no better. I have a great mind to tell you a Twickenham story; and yet it will be good for nothing, as I cannot send you the accent in a letter.

Here it is, and you must try to set it to the right emphasis.

One of our maccaronis is dead, a Captain Mawhood, the teaman's son. He had quitted the army, because his comrades called him Captain Hyson, and applied himself to learn the cla.s.sics and freethinking; and was always disputing with the parson of the parish about Dido and his own soul. He married Miss Paulin's warehouse, who had six hundred a-year; but, being very much out of conceit with his own canister, could not reconcile himself to her riding-hood--so they parted beds in three nights. Of late he has taken to writing comedies, which every body was welcome to hear him read, as he could get n.o.body to act them. Mrs. Mawhood has a friend, one Mrs. V * * *, a mighty plausible good sort of body, who feels for every body, and a good deal for herself, is of a certain age, wears well, has some pretensions that she thinks very reasonable still, and a gouty husband. Well! she was talking to Mr. Rafter about Captain Mawhood a little before he died. "Pray, Sir, does the Captain ever communicate his writings to Mrs. Mawhood?" "Oh, dear no, Madam; he has a sovereign contempt for her understanding." "Poor woman!" "And pray, Sir,- - give me leave to ask you: I think I have heard they very seldom sleep together!" "Oh, never, Madam! Don't you know all that?"

"Poor woman!" I don't know whether you will laugh; but Mr.

Raftor,(213) who tells a story better than any body, made me laugh for two hours. Good night!

(212) Of the commencement of hostilities with the Americans at Lexington on the 19th of April.-E.