Chapter 6

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

'Henault, fameus par vos soupers Et votre "chronologie,"' &c.

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:--

'To Mary's lips has ancient Rome Her purest language taught; And from the modern city home Agnes its pencil brought.

'Rome's ancient Horace sweetly chants Such maids with lyric fire; Albion's old Horace sings nor paints, He only can admire.

'Still would his press their fame record, So amiable the pair is! But, ah! how vain to think his word Can add a straw to Berry's.'

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

'Had Rome's famed Horace thus addrest His Lydia or his Lyce, He had ne'er so oft complained their breast To him was cold and icy.

'But had they sought their joy to explain, Or praise their generous bard, Perhaps, like me, they had tried in vain, And felt the task too hard.'

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.