The Letters of Horace Walpole, Earl of Orford
Chapter 307 : I had not time yesterday to say what I had to say about your coming hither. I should c

I had not time yesterday to say what I had to say about your coming hither. I should certainly be happy to see you and Lady Ailesbury at any time: but it would be unconscionable to expect it when you have scarce a whole day in a month to pa.s.s at your own house, and to look after your own works. Friends, I know, lay as great stress upon trifles as upon serious points; but as there never was a more sincere attachment than mine, so it is the most reasonable one too for I always think for you more than myself. Do whatever you have to do, and be a.s.sured, that is what I like best that you should do. The present hurry cannot last always. Your present object is to show how much more fit you are for your post(485) than any other man; by which you will do infinite service too, and will throw a great many private acts of good-nature and justice into the account. Do you think I would stand in the way of any of these things? and that I am not aware of them? Do you think about me? If it suits you at any moment, come. Except Sunday next, when I am engaged to dine abroad, I have nothing to do till the middle of October, when I shall go to Nuneham; and, going or coming, may possibly catch you at Park-place.

I am not quite credulous about your turning smoke into gold:(486) it is perhaps because I am ignorant. I like Mr. Mapleton extremely; and though I have lived so long, that I have little confidence, I think you could not have chosen one more likely to be faithful. I am sensible that my kind of distrust would prevent all great enterprises; and yet I cannot but fear, that unless one gives one's self' up entirely to the pursuit of a new object, this risk must be doubled. But I will say no more; for I do not even wish to dissuade you, as I am sure I understand nothing of the matter, and therefore mean no more than to keep your discretion awake.

The tempest of Monday night alarmed me too for the fleet: and as I have nothing to do but to care, I feel for individuals as well as for the public, and think of all those who may be lost, and of all those who may be made miserable by such loss. Indeed, I care most for individuals; for as to the public, it seems to be totally insensible to every thing! I know nothing worth repeating; and having now answered all your letter, shall bid you good night. Yours ever.

(485) Mr. Conway was now commander-in-chief.

(486) Alluding to the c.o.ke-ovens, for which Mr. Conway afterwards obtained a patent.

Letter 255 To The Earl Of Strafford.

Strawberry Hill, Oct. 3, 1782. (page 320)

I did think it long since I had the honour of hearing from your lords.h.i.+p; but, conscious how little I could repay you with any entertainment, I waited with patience. In fact, I believe summer-correspondences often turn on complaints of want of news.

it is unlucky that that is generally the season of correspondence, as it is of separation. People a.s.sembled in a capital contrive to furnish matter, but then they have not occasion to write it. Summer, being the season of campaigns, ought to be more fertile: I am glad when that is not the case, for what is an account of battles but a list of burials?

Vultures and birds of prey might write with pleasure to their correspondents in the Alps of such events; but they ought to be melancholy topics to those who have no beaks or talons. At this moment if I was an epicure among the sharks, I should rejoice that General Elliot has just sent the carcases of fifteen hundred Spaniards down to market under Gibraltar;(487) but I am more pleased that he despatched boats, and saved some of those whom he had overset. What must a man of so much feeling have suffered at being forced to do his duty so well as he has done! I remember hearing such another humane being, that brave old admiral Sir Charles Wager, say, that in his life be had never killed a fly.

This demolition of the Spanish armada is a great event: a very good one if it prevents a battle between Lord Howe and the combined fleets, as I should hope; and yet better if it produces peace, the only political crisis to which I look with eagerness.

Were that happy moment arrived, there is ample matter to employ our great men, if we have any, in retrieving the affairs of this country, if they are to be retrieved. But though our sedentary politicians write abundance of letters in the newspapers, full of plans of public spirit, I doubt the nation is not sober enough to set about its own work in earnest. When none reform themselves, little good is to be expected, We see by the excess of highwaymen how far evils may go before any attempt is made to cure them. I am sure, from the magnitude of this inconvenience, that I am not talking merely like an old man. I have lived here above thirty years, and used to go every where round at all hours of the night without any precaution. I cannot now stir a mile from my own house after sunset without one or two servants with blunderbusses. I am not surprised your lords.h.i.+p's pheasants were stolen: a woman was taken last Sat.u.r.day night loaded with nine geese, and they say has impeached a gang Of fourteen housebreakers -but these are undergraduates; when they should have taken their doctor's degrees, they would not have piddled in such little game. Those regius-professors the nabobs have taught men not to plunder for farthings.

I am very sensible of your lords.h.i.+p's kindness to my nephew Mr.

Cholmondeley. He is a sensible, well-behaved young man, and, I trust, would not have abused your goodness. Mr. Mason writes to me, that he shall be at York at the end of this month. I was to have gone to Nuneham; but the house is so little advanced, that it is a question whether they can receive me. Mason, I doubt, has been idle there. I am sure, if he found no muses there, he could pick up none at Oxford, where there is not so much as a bedmaker that ever lived in a muse's family. Tonton begs his duty to all the lambs, and trusts that Lady Strafford will not reject his homage.

(487) On the 13th of September, when General Elliot repulsed the grand attack made on Gibraltar - and Captain Curtis of the Brilliant, who commanded the marine brigade upon the occasion, and his men, saved numbers of the Spaniards, at the hazard of their own lives.-E.

Letter 256 To The Rev. Mr. Cole.

Strawberry Hill, Nov. 5, 1782. (page 321)

I had begun a letter in answer to another person, which I have broken off on receiving yours, dear Sir. I am exceedingly concerned at the bad account you give of yourself; and yet on weighing it, I flatter myself that you are not Only out of all danger, but have had a fortunate crisis, which I hope will Prolong your life. A bile surmounted is a present from nature to us, who are not boys: and though you speak as weary of life from sufferings, and yet with proper resignation and philosophy, it does not frighten me, as I know that any humour and gathering, even in the gum, is strangely dispiriting. I do not write merely from sympathizing friends.h.i.+p, but to beg that if your bile is not closed or healing, you will let me know; for the bark is essential, yet very difficult to have genuine. My apothecary here, I believe, has some very good, and I will send you some directly.

I will thank you, but not trouble you with an account of myself.

I had no fit of the gout, nor any new complaint; but it is with the utmost difficulty I keep the humour from laming me entirely, especially in my hands, which are a mine of chalk-stones; but, as they discharge themselves, I flatter myself they prevent heavier attacks.

I do take in the European Magazine, and think it in general one of the best. I forgot what was said of me: sometimes I am corrected, sometimes flattered, and care for neither. I have not seen the answer to Mr. Warton, but will send for it.

I shall not be sorry on my own account if Dr. Lort quits Lambeth, and comes to Saville-row, which is in my neighbourhood; but I did not think a wife was the stall where he would set up his staff.

You have given me the only reason why I cannot be quite sorry that you do not print what you had prepared for the press. No kind intention towards me from you surprises me-but then I want no new proofs. My wish, for whatever shall be the remainder of my life is to be quiet and forgotten. Were my course to recommence, and one could think in youth as one does at sixty-five, I have no notion I should have courage to appear as an author. Do you know, too, that I look on fame now as the idlest of all visions? but this theme would lead me too far.

I collect a new comfort from your letter. The writing is much better than in most of your latest letters. If your pain were not ceased, you could not have formed your letters so firmly and distinctly. I will not say more, lest I should draw you into greater fatigue; let me have but a single line in answer. Yours most cordially.(488)

(488) This is the last letter addressed by Walpole to Mr. Cole; who died within six weeks of the date of it. The event is thus recorded by Mr. Gough, in the second volume of his edition of Camden's Britannia. "At Milton a small village on the Ely road, was the retirement of the Rev. William Cole. Here, Dec. 16, 1782, in his sixty-eighth year, he closed a life spent in learned research into the history and antiquities of this county in particular, which nothing but his declining state of health prevented this work from sharing the benefit of. He was buried under the belfry of St. Clement's Church in Cambridge."-E.

Letter 257 To George Colman, Esq.(489) Strawberry Hill, May 10, 1783. (page 322)

Dear Sir, For so you must allow me to call you, after your being so kind as to send me so valuable and agreeable a present as your translation of Horace(490)--I wish compliment had left any term uninvaded, Of which sincerity could make use without suspicion.

Those would be precisely what I would employ in commending your poem; and, if they proved too simple to content my grat.i.tude, I would be satisfied with an offering to truth, and wait for a n.o.bler opportunity of sacrificing to the warmer virtue. If I have not lost my memory, your translation is the best I have ever seen of that difficult epistle. Your expression is easy and natural, and when requisite, poetic. In short, it has a prime merit, it has the air of an original.

Your hypothesis in your commentary is very ingenious. I do not know whether it is true, which now cannot be known; but if the scope of the epistle was, as you suppose, to hint in a delicate and friendly manner to the elder of Piso's sons that he had written a bad tragedy, Horace had certainly executed his plan with great address; and, I think, n.o.body will be able to show that any thing in the poem clashes with your idea. Nay, if he went farther, and meant to disguise his object, by giving his epistle the air of general rules on poetry and tragedy, he achieved both purposes; and while the youth his friend was at once corrected and put to no shame, all other readers were kept in the dark, except you, and diverted to different scents.(491) Excuse my commenting your comment, but I had no other way of proving that I really approve both your version and criticism than by stating the grounds of my applause. If you have wrested the sense of the original to favour your own hypothesis, I have not been able to discover your art; for I do not perceive where it has been employed. If you have given Horace more meaning than he was int.i.tled to, you have conferred a favour on him, for you have made his whole epistle consistent, a beauty all the spectacles of all his commentators could not find out-but, indeed, they proceed on the profound laws of criticism, you by the laws of common sense, which, marching on a plain natural path, is very apt to arrive sooner at the goal, than they who travel on the Appian Way; which was a very costly and durable work, but is very uneasy, and at present does not lead to a quarter of the places to which it was originally directed.

I am, Sir, with great regard, your most obedient and obliged humble servant.

(489) Now first collected.

(490) His translation of Horace's Epistola ad Pisones de Arte Poeticae.-E.

(491) It had been the opinion of Bishop Hurd, that - it was the proper and sole purpose of ,Horace simply to criticise the Roman drama;" but Mr. Colman a.s.sumed a contrary ground. "If my partiality to my lamented friend, Mr. Colman," says Dr. Joseph Warton, "does not mislead me, I should think his account of the matter the most judicious of any yet published. He conceives that the elder Piso had written, or meditated, a Poetical work-probably, a tragedy, and had communicated his piece in confidence to Horace; but Horace, either disapproving of the work, or doubting of the poetical faculties of the elder Piso, or both, wished to dissuade him from all thoughts of publication.

With this view he wrote his Epistle, addressing it, with a courtliness and delicacy perfectly agreeable to his acknowledged character, indifferently to the whole family, the father and his two sons."-E.

Letter 258 To The Earl Of Buchan.(492) Strawberry Hill, May 12, 1783. (page 324)

My lord, I did not know, till I received the honour of your lords.h.i.+p's letter, that any obstruction had been given to your charter. I congratulate your lords.h.i.+p and the Society on the defeat of that opposition, which does not seem to have been a liberal one. The pursuit of national antiquities has rarely been an object, I believe, with any university: why should they obstruct others from marching in that track? I have often thought the English Society of Antiquaries have gone out of their way when they meddled with Roman remains, especially if not discovered within our island. Were I to speak out, I should own, that I hold most reliques of the Romans that have been found in Britain, of little consequence, unless relating to such emperors as visited us.

Provincial armies stationed in so remote and barbarous a quarter as we were then, acted little, produced little worth being remembered. Tombstones erected to legionary officers and their families, now dignified by the t.i.tle of inscriptions; and banks and ditches that surrounded camps, which we understand much better by books and plans, than by such faint fragments, are given with much pomp, and tell us nothing new. Your lords.h.i.+p's new foundation seems to proceed on a much more rational and useful plan. The biography of the ill.u.s.trious of your country will be an honour to Scotland, to those ill.u.s.trious, and to the authors: and may contribute considerably to the general history; for the investigation of particular lives may bring out many anecdotes that may unfold secrets of state, or explain pa.s.sages in such histories as have been already written; especially as the manners of the times may enter into private biography, though before Voltaire manners were rarely weighed in general history, though very often the sources of considerable events. I shall be very happy to see such lives as shall be published, while I remain alive. I cannot contribute any thing of consequence to your lords.h.i.+p's meditated account of John Law. I have heard many anecdotes of him, though none that I can warrant, particularly that of the duel for which he fled early.(493) I met the other day with an account in some French literary gazette, I forget which, of his having carried off the wife of another man. Lady Catherine Law, his wife, lived, during his power in France, in the most stately manner. Your lords.h.i.+p knows, to be sure, that he died and is buried at Venice. I have two or three different prints of him, and an excellent head of him in crayons by Rosalba, the best of her portraits. It is certainly very like, for, were the flowing wig converted into a female head-dress, it would be the exact resemblance of Lady Wallingford, his daughter, whom I See frequently at the d.u.c.h.ess of Montrose's, and who has by no means a look of the age to which she is arrived. Law was a very extraordinary man, but not at all an estimable one.

I don't remember whether I ever told your lords.h.i.+p that there are many charters of your ancient kings preserved in the Scots College at Paris, and probably many other curiosities. I think I did mention many paintings of the old house of Lenox in the ancient castle at Aubigny.

(492) Now first collected.

(493) Evelyn, in his Diary, gives the following account of this duel:--"April 22 1694. A very young man, named Wilson, the younger son of one who had not above two hundred pounds a-year estate, lived in the garb and equipage of the richest n.o.bleman, for house, furniture, coaches, saddle-horses, and kept a table and all things accordingly, redeemed his father's estate, and gave portions to his sisters, being challenged by one Laws, a Scotchman, was killed in a duel, not fairly. The quarrel arose from his taking away his own sister from a lodging in a house where this Laws had a mistress , which the mistress of the house thinking a disparagement to it, and losing by it, instigated Laws to this duel. He was taken, and condemned for murder. The mystery is, how this so young a gentleman, very sober and of good fame, could live in such an expensive manner; it could not be discovered by all possible industry, or entreaty of his friends to make him reveal it. It did not appear that he was kept by women, play, coining, padding, or dealing in chemistry; but he would sometimes say, that, if he should live ever so long, he had wherewith to maintain himself in the same manner, This was a subject Of much discourse." Law was found guilty of murder, and sentence of death was pa.s.sed upon him. He however, found means to escape, and got clear off to the Continent. A reward of fifty bounds for is apprehension appeared in the London Gazette of the 7th of January, 1695.-E.

Letter 259 To The Hon. George Hardinge.

Berkeley Square, May 17, 1783. (page 325)

Though I shall not be fixed at Strawberry on this day fortnight, I will accept your offer, dear Sir, because my time is more at my disposal than yours, and you May not have any other day to bestow upon me later. I thank you for your second: which I shall read as carefully as I did the former. It is not your fault if you have not yet made Sir Thomas Rumbold white as driven snow to Me.(494) Nature has providentially given us a powerful antidote to eloquence, or the criminal that has the best advocate would escape. But, when rhetoric. and logic stagger my lords the judges, in steps prejudice, and, without one argument that will make a syllogism, confutes Messrs. Demosthenes, Tully, and Hardinge, and makes their lords.h.i.+ps see as clearly as any old woman in England, that belief is a much better rule Of faith than demonstration. This is Just my case: I do believe, nay, and I will believe, that no man ever went to India with honest intentions. If he returns with 100,000 pounds it is plain that I was in the right. But I have still a stronger proof; my Lord c.o.ke says "Set a thief to catch a thief;" my Lord Advocate(495) says, "Sir Thomas is a rogue:" ergo.--I cannot give so complete an answer to the rest of your note, as I trust I have done to your pleadings, because the latter is in print, and your note is ma.n.u.script. Now, unfortunately, I cannot read half of it; for, give me leave to say, that either your hand or my spectacles are so bad, that I generally guess at your meaning rather than decipher it, and this time the context has not served me well.

(494) The bill of pains and penalties against Sir Thomas Rumbold, late governor of Madras, was at this time in its progress through the House of Commons. On the 1st of July, the further proceedings upon the bill were adjourned to the 1st of October; by which means the whole business fell to the ground.-E.

(495) Mr. Dundas, afterwards Lord Melville. "I think him," said Mr. Wilberforce, in June, 1781, "the first speaker on the ministerial side in the House of Commons, and there is a manliness in his character which prevents his running away from the question; he grants all his adversaries' premises, and fights them On their own ground." Life, vol. i. P. 21.-E.

Letter 260 To The Earl Of Strafford.

Strawberry Hill, June 24, 1783. (page 326)

Though your lords.h.i.+p's partiality extends even to my letters, you must perceive that they grow as antiquated as the writer. News are the soul of letters: when we give them a body of our own invention, it is as unlike to life as a statue. I have withdrawn so much from the -world, that the newspapers know every thing before me, especially since they have usurped the province of telling every thing, private as -well as public: and consequently, a great deal more than I should -wish to know, or like to report. When I do hear the transactions of much younger people, they do not pa.s.s from my ears into my memory; nor does your lords.h.i.+p interest yourself more about them than I do. Yet still, when one reduces one's departments to such narrow limits, one's correspondence suffers by it. However, as I desire to show only my grat.i.tude and attachment, not my wit, I shall certainly obey your lords.h.i.+p as long as you are content to read my letters, after I have told you fairly how little they can entertain you.

For imports of French, I believe we shall have few more. They have not ruined us so totally by the war, much less enriched themselves so much by it, but that they who have been here, complained so piteously of the expensiveness of England, that probably they will deter others from a similar jaunt; nor, such is their fickleness, are the French Constant to any thing but admiration of themselves. Their Anglomanie I hear has mounted, or descended, from our customs to our persons. English people are in fas.h.i.+on at Versailles. A Mr. Ellis,(496) who wrote some pretty verses at Bath two or three years ago, is a favourite there. One who was so, or may be still, the Beau Dillon, came upon a very different errand; in short, to purchase at any price a book written by Linguet, which was just coming out, called "Antoinette." That will tell your lords.h.i.+p why the Beau Dillon(497) was the messenger.

Monsieur de Guignes and his daughters came hither; but it was at eight o'clock at night in the height of the deluge. You may be sure I was much flattered by such a visit! I was forced to light candles to show them any thing; and must have lighted the moon to show them the views. If this is their way of seeing England, they might as well look at it with an opera-gla.s.s from the sh.o.r.es of Calais.