Originally published in Ainsworth's Magazine: A Miscellany of Romance (Chapman and Hall) vol.1 #2 (Mar 1842).
There was no spot of ground, probably, anywhere that would have so exactly suited the tastes of Horace Walpole as Strawberry Hill. It had improvable capabilities—it had memories of its own—it was in a storied neighbourhood—it was surrounded by cheap celebrities, in the way of acquaintances—it was a sort of modern antique—and it was within an hour's drive, or thereabouts, of London. This was precisely what Walpole desired. He liked to be within reach of the echoes of town, and to be able to get into the crush at a short notice. As to the country, he had no true passion for it. Perhaps it may be doubted whether he had a true passion for anything; and whether the utmost indulgence of his genius, or his affections, in any direction, ever extended beyond a soupçon.
Strawberry Hill fitted him also in another point of view. It was small. A large place would have bewildered him; a small one afforded him endless pretexts for the exercise of his ingenuity. Precisely in proportion as he was pinched for room, his invention expanded. And see what wonderful things he did with a few acres, and a tiny villa. Te conjured up a vision of conventual architecture, a chapel, cloisters, a Gothic castle, with towers and pinnacles shooting up through the startled woods, and a sweep of verdure sprinkled with clumps of noble trees, broken by misty walks, such as had not then been seen in England, except, perhaps, at Houghton, or at Pope's grounds, or General Dormer's garden at Rousham. This method of laying out grounds was, at that time, a novelty just as strange as if a man were to go to court in his own hair. The trees used to be cut into quincunxes, coats of arms, and all manner of formal shapes. There used to be arbours and parterres and terraces and summer houses, but all minted off from the same die, and as like each as two guineas—and bore about as close a resemblance, too, to nature. When Serjeant Kite drops the broad piece into the hand of the clown he is about to enlist, the poor fellow looks at the bright thing with amazement, and then bursts out with a "The wonderful works of Nature!" The same exclamation might have been uttered, with the same appropriateness, at the first sight of one of the old gardens. The transition is almost incredible to Walpole's picturesque improvements. Fancy Mrs. Chenevix, the famous "toy-woman," called to life, and dropped under the windows of the gallery, in the shelter of the great cloister. She certainly would never have recognised the dim fields and dusky paths where she and Pere Courayer, in the cool of the swart evenings, used to discourse about French theology and rocking-horses.
In taking Strawberry Hill, Walpole had the satisfaction of having Franklin, the printer of the Craftsman, as a tenant. Franklin went with the fixtures, in one of the out-buildings, where, through the very suggestiveness of the association of ideas, Walpole afterwards established a private printing-press. Looking back upon these trifling links of personal memorabilia at this distance of time, one is apt to suspect that they had some influence upon Walpole; that they lurked at the bottom of some of his actions, for, of all men, he was the man to work out great effects (by comparison) from little causes. He took the house from Mrs, Chenevix, who kept a toy-shop; and immediately set about converting it into a curiosity-museum! He found Franklin on the premises, and he set up a printing-press!
But it was a pleasant thing to find old political animosities thus merged in a social convention, and the feuds of the father cancelled under a lease from the son. Perhaps there was a little pride, too, in question; for Walpole was an enthusiast about his father, and was not sorry, probably, to have an opportunity of exercising a little magnanimity towards poor Franklin, who had been imprisoned more than once for Pulteney's attacks on Sir Robert. Perhaps he may have met him of a morning on the road-side and bowed to him—a marvellous stretch of magnanimity from Horace Walpole to Richard Franklin. Even in that bow, however, there was a silent treaty of peace and gracious act of oblivion, which was quite as much as could have been reasonably expected; considering that the house of Orford had fallen from its high estate since the days of prosecution, and that it therefore required additional hauteur to sustain its artificial dignity.
Colley Cibber had lived in the house before Walpole rented it. He wrote a play there, but left not a solitary scratch on the rind of an oak to testify his sometime whereabouts. He and Walpole are said to have met accidentally when the former was eighty years of age, and hale and cheerful, making allowances for the wear and tear of his life. Walpole complimented him on looking so well. Cibber replied that he was thankful, at his age, not that he looked so well, but that he looked at all.
An anecdotical history of Twickenham would make a curious misecllany. Walpole liked the place because it was so crowded with remarkable personalities of one sort or another. He was fond of curiosities, and these were amongst them. Twickenham was a great place, even so far back as the time of Henry VIII. It grew up under the wings of Wolsey. The celebrated Bacon lived here in Elizabeth's time, and entertained her at Twickenham Park in a style of almost regal magnificence; and Essex lived here; and the merry Bishop Corbet, one of the most bibulous of men and poets, lived in an old mansion on the Common. Some of the Commonwealth people also conferred their notoriety upon Twickenham. Sir Benjamin Rudyerd, a great speaker and Parliament man in the early times of the Stuarts, (just as Cromwell was looming upon them in the darkness of their self-reliance) resided here; and his wife, Elizabeth Rudyerd, is buried in the parish churchyard. Anthony à Wood pronounces a quaint encomium on Sir Benjamin's poetical talents; but his works have been recently collected, speeches and all, and it has been discovered, greatly to the discredit of good old Anthony's critical sagacity, that Sir Benjamin was no poet at all. In his verse, as in his oratory, he displayed a most respectable discretion—he never offended any party. Close to him, at Whitton, lived Sir John Suckling, a name affectionately known amongst the lovers of English poetry. The biographers of Suckling say that he was born in 1G12; the parish register is ready to be sworn to the fact that he was baptized in 1608-9. Now, unless a man could be baptized first and born afterwards, the biographers are likely to be wrong. Here, also, lived Katherine of Arragon, (after her divorce,) the historian Clarendon, the "infamous" Wharton, the Speaker Lenthal, and Boyle, the philosopher. About a century afterwards, Sir Godfrey Kneller died in the very same place. His house still stands—the rest are ashes.
Coming down a little later, there was Pope, who died only three or four years before Walpole went to Strawberry Hill, where he was scarcely settled when he wrote to one of his friends about Pope's ghost flitting under his windows in the moonlight. Lady Fanny Shirley, and her mother, the Dowager Lady Ferrers, lived opposite to him in the lane; and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu in a house that is now, or was, not very long ago, a lady's school. There was also Fielding, the novelist, a cousin of Lady Mary's, and Sir John Hawkins, the author of the History of Music. In fact, wherever the new-comer moved, he fell in with fine recollections, or people worthy of them.
Amongst his own actual contemporaries, Walpole reckoned Paul Whitehead, the poet, who lived on the Common, close to where Bishop Corbet had lived before him; and Hudson, the painter, who had recently retired upon an independence, and built a villa next door to Pope's. Admiral Byron, too, was one of his neighbours, the famous fellow who published the narrative upon which the shipwreck in Don Juan was founded, and who discovered the Patagonians, for which notability he was visited with a specimen of Walpole's most elaborate irony; and Cambridge, a good-natured gentleman, with a turn for making verses, author of the mock heroic poem called the Scribbleriad, which no reader of the present day is expected ever to have heard of before, and a contributor, in common with Walpole, to a globular periodical entitled The World, edited by Adam Fitz-Adam, the son of Adam before the flood.
But his principal delights, in the way of local intercourse, lay in the society of Lady Suffolk, (Pope's Mrs, Howard,) and Mrs. Clive, the actress. The former lived at Marble Hill, a splendid residence built for her by George II.; and the latter at Little Strawberry Hill, within five minutes' walk of the skirts of Walpole's lawn. They were both very old women, and great gossips; therefore no scandal can rest upon their intimacy with him! Mrs. Pritchard, the actress, also lived close at hand, in Ragman's Castle, a cottage near the river, in the purchase of which she outbid the Earl of Lichfield; and Garrick was another of his neighbours, the spirit of the "whispering gallery;" so that Walpole was at no loss for theatrical historiettes when everything else failed him.
It is rather a curious trait in Walpole's character that, with such opportunities as he possessed of cultivating the acquaintance of the most distinguished men of his day, he preferred the society of a few old women, who, for the most part, were capable of little more than listening to his disquisitions, or retailing their own adventures. On one occasion he dined with Garrick, admitted that he possessed great social resources, but confessed that he liked his wife better. The Lady Diana Beauclere was a special favourite with him. She copied some of his pictures for him, gave him drawings to embellish his cabinets, and illustrated the Mysterious Mother in a series of sketches. The secret of his admiration for her is apparent enough. Old Lady Suffolk used to tell him court stories about the Queen and the ministers; and Walpole delighted in a little high-life scandal, and her ladyship was not sorry to have so congenial a friend in her decline. Mrs. Clive, too, with her romping spirits, had been so accustomed to flattery all her life, that she could not do without it in the end, and was well content to purchase it from Walpole on any terms. Besides, she had a budget of anecdotes about the players and dramatists—Barry, Mrs. Centlivre, Arthur Murphy, Colley Cibber, and the rest, that must have helped Walpole wonderfully through the twilight, when it was getting too dark for him to work in his niches and china-closets. The society of these lively chattering ladies felicitously hit off his peculiarities. They took all his criticisms for granted; they were charmed with his wit; they were astonished at his antiquities; they were strictly deferential to his aristocracy; and they wanted nothing from him. Now it is quite clear that had he been surrounded by men of letters, his criticisms might have been questioned, his wit dined out, and his antiquities slurred over, while his aristocracy would have gone for nothing, and he might have been every now and then subjected to a loan. His vanity and his pocket alike flew for security to the blind Du Deffand and the deaf Suffolk.
Yet, although he thus clung to the female sex, he never seems to have entertained the least intention of marriage. He never even suspected himself of a suspicion of the kind. He admitted women, only upon sufferance and good behaviour, to a cup of tea or a game of loo, and there the matter ended. It entailed no consequences, no noises in the mornings, no disturbances with servants, no household ceremonies, no settling-days. (Oh! those settling-days amongst books and papers and pictures!) A Mrs. Walpole—Mrs. Horace Walpole—the Hon. Mrs. Horace Walpole, would have been an unintelligible individuality—an incomprehensible existence—a sort of un-entity. It is impossible to imagine such a person, except by some process of mental exhilaration similar to that which led Walpole to think that he saw Lord Falkland's portrait moving out of the frame—an after-dinner incident, to which we are indebted for one of the ghostly terrors of the Castle of Otranto. If we could see one of the old starched Junos, with a pea-hen perched on her thumb, swim out of the canvas in a cloud of fawn-coloured silk, and sink to the floor in a swooning curtsey of at least twenty feet in circumference, we might begin to believe in the possibility of a Mrs. Horace Walpole—but not till then.
To speak plainly, love was not in Walpole's line. There was no room in his nature for any warmth of that kind. Love would have puzzled him out of his wits, spoiled his letters, and made him break the heads of half his teapots and Wedgewood candlesticks. Love would have put him out of humour with his gimcracks, and re-priced his catalogue of curiosities at so low an average, that he would have locked up Strawberry Hill in despair, and lost the key out of fair spite. But in love, as in everything else, he went just far enough for the slightest possible flavour. One can hardly help fancying that he was fond of watching the progress of Lady Diana's drawings—and such a name, too! Then there were the Vernons, very young, and very charming; and the Miss Berrys, who knew him from childhood. Walpole had very pensive eyes, and a face as attenuated as a poet's. May he not have had struggling wishes, scattered in the utterance by a thousand self-seeking fears, nestling in his looks when he drew a long gaze at some of these fresh-hearted divinities of his? Oh! there is no doubt he ventured upon a soupçon in his own light vanishing way.
But love was not in his line. He wanted cordiality for it. His sympathies were drawn into the narrowest compass. The only person in the world he seemed to care enough about to make sacrifices for was Field-marshal Conway. His attachment to Conway began in his youth, and lasted to the hour of his death. It was an unimpeachable friendship. He offered to divide his fortune (or, rather, the income of his sinecures) with Conway when they were both starting in life; and many years afterwards, when Conway was in disgrace, he vindicated his character and conduct in a very able pamphlet—one of the best of his numerous productions, because he was in earnest in it. All this looked like a capacity for strength of feeling; but it was an exception to his whole life. There was nobody else he ever expended so much anxiety upon; his affections were not expansive; they had a perpetual tendency to contraction; and his solitary friendship for Conway was rather an illustration of it than otherwise. Conway was his cousin. He kept his attachments in the family. They went in and in from the touch of strangers.
If there be anything in blood, this passion of Walpole's may be traced to a very unexpected source. The only person in the whole world he loved was his mother. In one of his letters to Conway, he says, "If I ever felt much for anything, which I know may be questioned, it was certainly for my mother." And he actually assigns as a reason for desiring to serve Conway, not any merits of his, nor any direct personal feeling, but the fact that he was related to his mother. "I look on you," he says, "as my nearest relation by her, and think I can never do enough to shew my gratitude and affection to her." When Walpole wrote this he was only twenty-three years of age; and when we find a man at that age confessing that it was doubtful whether he ever felt much for anything, we must not be surprised if the depth or intensity of his feelings should continue to be doubted by others to the end of his life. If he did not acknowledge to much feeling at three-and-twenty himself, nobody else could be expected to give him credit for it at any subsequent period. Posterity, therefore, may be pardoned for doubting whether he had any feeling at all, outside the close circle into which he gathered up his personal enjoyments.
Nevertheless, he loved his mother, emphatically loved her; and was an unwavering friend to Conway, through triumphs and reverses, out of respect to her memory. Perhaps it was because she was his father's first wife, and had the priority in his glory and his love—the better part of him, before he fell out with fortune. There might have been something in this, in the early bridal enthusiasm, and its legacies of gratitude and devotion; but the genealogy of Walpole's love ascends to a higher and remoter source. John Dryden, the poet, was great-uncle to Catherine Shorter, Walpole's mother. Are we not more likely to discover, in that original spring of energy and passion, the explanation of the single drop of human steadfastness that lurked in his veins? The fiery powers of Dryden were dully reflected in their descent through the collateral branches; and Catherine Shorter, a pastoral, mellow, and good-humoured looking woman, bearing a remarkable resemblance to the popular ideal of Ceres, seems to have carried off the bountiful spirits and better-natured elements of the family character. The dregs of an in-door love alone were left to Horace. The inheritance was small, but what would he have been without it?
Perhaps the consciousness of his want of intellectual power restrained him from encouraging that description of society which would have laid bare his pretensions. He loved to be a wit amongst lords, and did not care to risk his character amongst wits. He would have cut a dubious figure at Button's. All his exploits in the way of repartee appear to have been performed with ladies. His forte evidently lay in being the centre of a little coterie, where he was familiarly known and relished. He was one of those men who require the prestige of their reputation to make way for their pleasantries,—who, unknown, are nothing. All this is very intelligible. You will laugh at a joke from Sidney Smith, because it springs with accumulated elasticity from his established character; but the same joke, wanting the same weight of facetious authority, might fall dead from other lips. Yet the petty vanity and filagree tastes of Walpole do not wholly account for the sternness with which he held aloof from personal intercourse with the literary men of his day; there were other and meaner motives at bottom.
Wanting constitutional vigour to become a politician, he was merely stained with the class prejudices of his birth. He never soared above them, nor sunk beneath them. He was a pensioner by virtue of his position, and he held to his position from whence he derived his pensions. Here was the line drawn between him and all men who rose into estimation by the force of their own genius. They could not pass the boundary between aristocracy and merit—he would not. This was the habitual characteristic of Walpole, in his personal relations with authors, sculptors, and painters. We find him sometimes (but very rarely) corresponding with them; never on any terms except those of the most freezing civility—strawberry ice! His intimacy with Gray shewed what sort of poetry he liked best. Gray was a man of learning—a syllogistic man—a substantial fellow, not over-rich, but with a fixed annuity which he knew how to use to the best advantage,—a classical-worldly man, if such an odd compound be practicable in reality. He was the genuine poet for Walpole. He could talk about Greek sculpture, Roman urns, Egyptian mummies; and being slow of conception, he had great weight in such recondite matters. There were few men of genius like Gray,—erudite, cautious, with a fine, chaste enthusiasm, and—a private fortune. This was the grand point, after all; and herein lay the true secret of Walpole's avoidance of authors and artists. He not only objected to their coming between the wind and his nobility, but he was afraid they would be a drag upon his pecuniary resources. He wanted all his money for his baubles: a collector lives only in the products of men's skill—he does not want the men themselves; that would be too expensive a luxury. Walpole avows that he did not care about authors—he only looked after their books; and when the books were collected, and the busts, and the portraits, he was wont occasionally to give a grand dinner, or a grander breakfast, to his grand friends, in the midst of his curiosities, to shew off his finery, and to drink in the flatteries of the generals, earls, and ladies of blood, who came to see his miraculous castle. And this was the whole use Horace Walpole condescended to recognise in the existence of the poet, the painter, or the statuary.
It would be by no means reasonable that men of fortune should be required to entertain men of genius, or to contribute to sustain them by patronage in any form. Nobody had a right to complain of Walpole's habits in this respect; but when a man builds up a staring singularity for himself by heaping together all the specimens he can procure of the works of genius, he voluntarily draws upon himself the eyes of the literary world, and must abide the consequences. Had Walpole not been a collector, a writer, a critic, a novelist, or a dramatist, (for, constant to none, he dabbled in almost all departments of authorship, including history, biography, poetry, and fiction,) he would have been irresponsible for doing what he liked with his dinners and his champagne conversation. As it was, he provoked sarcasm and ill-will. But, in sober seriousness, his heart, to use an expression of his own, was too apt to overflow inwardly with prudence.
There was, in some prominent points, a striking similitude between Horace Walpole and poor Sir Egerton Brydges. The resemblance only stopped short at the graver vigilance and selfishness of the former. Walpole had a new title in his family, Brydges an old one; and there was, so far as their nobility was concerned, exactly the same difference between them as there is between pert, new-fangled pride, and staid, old family dignity. To be sure, in Brydges' case there was a little excess of energy, and a restless, horrent sensibility on the point, arising out of peculiar circumstances; but, in the main, he had a tone of ancestry about him that could not be mistaken. Then they both had a passion for printing-presses; but if the measure of their judgment is to be taken by the works severally printed at Lee Priory and Strawberry Hill, the balance is largely in favour of the former. The obligations conferred on English literature by Sir Egerton Brydges are really very considerable; Walpole conferred none. The Censura Literaria alone is worth more than the whole of the productions of the Strawberry Press.
A man so shut up as Walpole was, could not expect to escape calumny, whenever his conduct suggested the slightest excuse for it. The caprice with which he treated Chatterton was tortured into cruelty, and the suicide of that "ingenious youth" was laid at his door, although it did not take place for two years after Walpole had had anything to do with him. The whole facts of the case were these:—Chatterton having conceived the design of the Rowley forgeries, and executed some of them, looked about for a soft-headed patron. Walpole's notoriety as a curiosity-hunter pointed him out as the very person in all the world most likely to be easily imposed upon. Chatterton was quite right in the speculation, so far as the facility of imposition went; but wrong in calculating upon making any money of it. Walpole was flattered by Chatterton's communication, enclosing some of the fabricated specimens; and in the first gush of his vanity at having been selected as the confidential depositary of the supposed discovery, he overflowed with complaisance to his new correspondent, of whose circumstances at this time he knew nothing. "I cannot but think myself singularly obliged," he replied to Chatterton," by a gentleman with whom I have not the pleasure of being acquainted, when I read your very curious and kind letter, which I have this minute received. I give you a thousand thanks for it, and for the very obliging offer you make me of communicating your MSS. to me. What you have already sent me is very valuable, and full of information; but instead of correcting you, sir, you are far more able to correct me. I have not the happiness of understanding the Saxon language, and without your learned notes should not have been able to comprehend Rowley's text." It is clear enough from this, that Walpole was really taken in, that he was incompetent to form a sound critical opinion upon the authenticity of the poems, and that he sincerely believed them to be the genuine productions of a monk of the fifteenth century. But Chatterton wanted something more than this, and grew pressing. Walpole immediately gave him some—good advice. Chatterton demanded back his MSS. A delay ensued. He asked for them more peremptorily. No answer; for Walpole shrunk into his shell every time Chatterton approached, He demanded them again in a tone of strong, and, it must be confessed, natural resentment, openly declaring, "I think myself injured, sir; and, did you not know my circumstances, you would not dare to treat me thus." In ten days after this vital thrust, the MSS. were returned, Walpole meditating an acrimonious answer, which he partly wrote, but never finished. It was extraordinary how rapidly Walpole discovered the cheat. Lis eyes were opened by Chatterton's impatience. Had Chatterton continued quiescent, and left the papers with him to enrich the next edition of his Anecdotes, for which purpose he intended to use them, Walpole would have been a strong believer. He had great faith in cheap curiosities. But the moment Chatterton began to complain of poverty, Walpole's faith took wing, and he became all of a sudden inspired with a complete knowledge of that ancient branch of literature of which he was totally ignorant only a few months before. In March, he frankly acknowledged that he knew nothing about Saxon, that he could not read Rowley's text without the help of Chatterton's learned notes, and that Chatterton was fur more able to correct him than he Chatterton. In August—Chatterton having been a little restive in the interval—he declares that Rowley's poetry resembles Spenser and the moderns, and that it is written In metre invented long since Rowley, that he does not believe in its authenticity, and that he has a suspicion it was designed to laugh at him! He afterwards met Goldsmith in company, and sneered at his simplicity in being deceived by so palpable a fraud!
It was quite obvious why and wherefore ad Walpole fell off from Chatterton. So long as he confined himself to the pure abstract question of pen and ink, all was well; but the moment he threw out signals of distress, Walpole closed his correspondence with him. Two years afterwards, Chatterton, in the haughty despair of a wounded and disappointed spirit, terminated his life. Walpole was certainly not responsible for that. He treated Chatterton capriciously—he treated him ill; but he was no further mixed up in his affairs. It is said that Chatterton never overcame the feelings of mortification he endured on that occasion, that his first experience of the world was at the hands of Walpole, and that it rankled in his heart, and made him hopeless of all men. That might have been so; it is of the nature of the poetical temperament to be fragile in its contest with the world, and painfully impressionable.
Walpole's apology was conclusive, on the worldly side of the question. He knew nothing of Chatterton, but that he was an attorney's clerk, and had found some old poems. "Might I not be allowed to plead my own discretion," he says, "against Chatterton's inspiration, which, by the way, he concealed from me, shrouding himself, like a pagan divinity, under the mortal garb of an attorney's clerk, who had only borrowed some divine poems." His whole defence is in his own statement of the circumstances:—"A lad at Bristol, whom I never saw then, before, or since, sends me two or three copies of verses in old English, which, he tells me, had been found there, and were lent to him by another person; acquaints me that he is clerk to an attorney, but, having more inclination to poetry, wishes that I would procure him a place that would enable him to follow his propensity: I suspect the poetry to be modern, [but not at first, nor until Chatterton asked for a place!] he is angry, re-demands it, I return it; and two years after, the youth is found dead; and by the strength of a warm imagination, Lam accused of blasting this promising genius, and of depriving the world of the Lord knows what Iliads and Lost Paradises, which this youth might have procreated in his own or any other name,—for, in truth, he was fonder of inventing great bards than of being one." The levity of this is revolting; but it mixes up famously with Walpole's character. The defence, as addressed to the hard, real, pounds, shillings, and pence world, was perfect. It put the case in its true commercial aspect; the poetry was exorcised, to give the statement the desired currency with the unpoetical million. Why should an attorney's clerk apply for assistance to a stranger, so much above him in rank?—an attorney's clerk, too! The antithesis was decisive.
In all these traits of Walpole's life, there is more to deplore, perhaps, than blame; at least it is pleasant to try and persuade oneself into that opinion, He was a charming writer, when he got upon subjects that fell in with his tastes and pursuits. His letters are delicious; they are even more various than Sévigné's. He wanted the terse, adjective satire of Pope; but he made up for it by inexhaustible vivacity. He was never out of humour in his letters: even when he scolded his correspondents, and sparred with them, half in earnest and half in jest, there was always a smile at the bottom that threw up its rose-colour to the surface. There was no man who could relate the history of a bon-mot with such success. In most cases the repetition of a witticism is flat for lack of the original circumstances out of which it was generated--Walpole restored them with a happy coup de plume, brought back the very atmosphere of mirth which gave birth to the repartee, and added new graces to it in the telling. He was a marvellously agreeable tea-table companion; his spirits did not mount fast enough or high enough for after-dinner sociality; there was not enough of animal life and sincerity in him for so severe a test. But he was great in the evenings, when he used to sidle down to sup with Mrs. Clive, or sit in the shady meadows with Lady Suffolk. Lord! what gossip there was amongst them! what carte and tierce! what memories plucked up by the root! what delightful malice!
Poor Walpole! nothing puzzled him so much "as the difficulties of old age. When he heard of Gray's death, it made him start in his chair. He was only one year younger than Gray. It was a corporal blow to him. "Who can one talk to without reserve," he exclaimed, "if one lives to be old?" This was what perplexed him. Who could he talk to? But hear what heresies of heart and imagination he committed on this subject. "It is impossible," he said, in a letter to Conway, "to be intimate with the young, because they and the old cannot converse on the same common topics; and of the old that survive, there are few one can commence a friendship with, because one has probably all one's life despised their hearts or their understandings. These are the steps through which one passes to the unenviable loss of life!" Such was the language of a man who really did not know mankind, who looked out upon the world like a caged bird, that judged of the whole universe by the harshness of its bars. A little more sympathy, and a little less egotism, and Walpole in his last days might have received and communicated delight in the society of his youngest contemporaries. But that was a pleasure beyond his reach.
He was seventy-four when the earldom fell to him. In a moment a thought of adding a new countess to the roll of the nobility flashed across his mind; but he abandoned it, and wrote an epigram. Instead of an epithalamium, it is an
EPITAPHIUM VIVI AUCTORIS. 1792.
"An estate and an earldom at seventy-four!
Had | sought them, or wish'd them, 'twould add one fear more,
That of making a countess when almost fourscore.
But Fortune, who scatters her gifts out of season,
Though unkind to my limbs, has still left me my reason;
And whether she lowers or lifts me, I'll try
In the plain simple style I have lived in to die;
For ambition too humble, for meanness too high."
Alas! it required but a small resolution, at seventy-four, to continue to the end the same mode of life! Vale! vale!