TO GEORGE MONTAGU, ESQ.

Strawberry Hill, April 15, 1768.

MR. CHUTE tells me that you have taken a new house in Squireland, and have given yourself up for two years more to port and parsons. I am very angry, and resign you to the works of the devil or the church, I don't care which. You will get the gout, turn Methodist, and expect to ride to heaven upon your own great toe. I was happy with your telling me how well you love me, and though I don't love loving, I could have poured out all the fulness of my heart to such an old and true friend; but what am I the better for it, if I am to see you but two or three days in the year? I thought you would at last come and while away the remainder of life on the banks of the Thames in gaiety and old tales. I have quitted the stage, and the Clive is preparing to leave it. We shall neither of us ever be grave: dowagers roost all round us, and you could never want cards or mirth. Will you end like a fat farmer, repeating annually the price of oats, and discussing stale newspapers? There have you got, I hear, into an old gallery, that has not been glazed since Queen Elizabeth, and under the nose of an infant Duke and Duchess, that will understand you no more than if you wore a ruff and a coif, and talked to them of a call of serjeants the year of the Spanish armada! Your wit and humour will be as much lost upon them, as if you talked the dialect of Chaucer; for with all the divinity of wit, it grows out of fashion like a fardingale. I am convinced that the young men at White's already laugh at George Selwyn's bon-mots only by tradition. I avoid talking before the youth of the age as I would dancing before them; for if one's tongue don't move in the steps of the day, and thinks to please by its old graces, it is only an object of ridicule, like Mrs. Hobart in her cotillon. I tell you we should get together, and comfort ourselves with reflecting on the brave days that we have known—not that I think people were a jot more clever or wise in our youth than

they are now; but as my system is always to live in a vision as much as I can, and as visions don't increase with years, there is nothing so natural as to think one remembers what one does not remember.

I have finished my tragedy,' but as you would not bear the subject, I will say no more of it, but that Mr. Chute, who is not easily pleased, likes it, and Gray, who is still more difficult, approves it. I am not yet intoxicated enough with it to think it would do for the stage, though I wish to see it acted; but, as Mrs. Pritchard3 leaves the stage next month, I know nobody could play the Countess; nor am I disposed to expose myself to the impertinences of that jackanapes Garrick, who lets nothing appear but his own wretched stuff, or that of creatures still duller, who suffer him to alter their pieces as he pleases. I have written an epilogue in character for the Clive, which she would speak admirably; but I am not so sure that she would like to speak it. Mr. Conway, Lady Aylesbury, Lady Lyttelton, and Miss Rich, are to come hither the day after to-morrow, and Mr. Conway and I are to read my play to them; for I have not strength enough to go through the whole alone.*

My press is revived, and is printing a French play written

The Mysterious Mother. See vol. i. p. xxxix.-E.

Of this tragedy Lord Byron was also an approver: "It is the fashion," he says, 66 to underrate Horace Walpole; firstly, because he was a nobleman; and secondly, because he was a gentleman; but, to say nothing of the composition of his incomparable Letters, and of the Castle of Otranto, he is the ultimus Romanorum, the author of the Mysterious Mother; a tragedy of the highest order, and not a puling love-play".-E.

3 This celebrated actress, who excelled alike in tragedy and comedy, took leave of the stage in May, in the part of Lady Macbeth, and died at Bath in the following August.-E.

Walpole, in a letter to Madame du Deffand, of the 11th of March, speaking of the "Honnête Criminel," a copy of which she had sent him, gives her the following account of his own tragedy::-" L'Honnête Criminel me paroit assez médiocre. Ma propre tragédie a de bien plus grands défauts, mais au moins elle ne ressemble pas au ton compassé et réglé du siècle. Il ne vous plairoit pas assurément; il n'y a pas de beaux sentimens il n'y a que des passions sans envelope, des crimes, des repentis, et des horreurs. Je crois qu'il y a beaucoup plus de mauvais que de bon, et je sais sûrement que depuis le premier acte jusqu'à la dernière scène l'intérèt languit au lieu d'augmenter: peut-il avoir un plus grand défaut ?"—E.

:

by the old President Henault. It was damned many years ago at Paris, and yet I think is better than some that have succeeded, and much better than any of our modern tragedies. I print it to please the old man, as he was exceedingly kind to me at Paris; but I doubt whether he will live till it is finished. He is to have a hundred copies, and there are to be but a hundred more, of which you shall have one.

Adieu! though I am very angry with you, I deserve all your friendship, by that I have for you, witness my anger and disappointment. Yours ever.

P. S. Send me your new direction, and tell me when I must begin to use it.

TO THE REV. MR. COLE.

Strawberry Hill, April 16, 1768. WELL, dear Sir, does your new habitation improve as the spring advances? There has been dry weather and east wind enough to parch the fens. We find that the severe beginning of this last winter has made terrible havoc among the evergreens, though of old standing. Half my cypresses have been bewitched, and turned into brooms; and the laurustinus is everywhere perished. I am Goth enough to choose now and then to believe in prognostics; and I hope this destruction imports, that, though foreigners should take root here, they cannot last in this climate. I would fain persuade myself, that we are to be our own empire to eternity.

The Duke of Manchester has lent me an invaluable curiosity: I mean invaluable to us antiquaries: but perhaps I have already mentioned it to you; I forget whether I have or no. It is the original roll of the Earls of Warwick, as long as my gallery, and drawn by John Rous3 himself. Ay, and and what is more, there are portraits of Richard III, his

1 Cornélie, a manuscript tragedy, written by the President Henault in early life.-E.

2 He died in November 1770, at the age of eighty-six.-E.

3 John Rous, the historian of Warwickshire, "who," according to Walpole, in his Anecdotes of Painting, "drew his own portrait, and other semblances, but in too rude a style to be called painting."—E.

Queen, and son; the two former corresponding almost exactly with my print; and a panegyric on the virtues of Richard, and a satire, upwards and downwards, on the illegal marriage of Edward IV, and on the extortions of Henry VII. I have had these, and seven other portraits copied, and shall, some time or other, give plates of them. But I wait for an excuse; I mean till Mr. Hume shall publish a few remarks he has made on my book: they are very far from substantial; yet still better than any other trash that has been written against it, nothing of which deserves an answer.

I have long had thoughts of drawing up something for London like St. Foix's Rues de Paris,1 and have made some collections. I wish you would be so good, in the course of your reading, to mark down any passage to that end: as where any great houses of the nobility were situated; or in what street any memorable event happened. I fear the subject will not furnish much till later times, as our princes kept their courts. up and down the country in such a vagrant manner.

I expect Mr. Gray and Mr. Mason to pass the day with me here to-morrow. When I am more settled here I shall put you in mind of your promise to bestow more than one day on

me.

I hope the Methodist, your neighbour, does not, like his patriarch Whitfield, encourage the people to forge, murder, &c. in order to have the benefit of being converted at the gallows. That arch-rogue preached lately a funeral sermon on one Gibson, hanged for forgery, and told his audience, that he could assure them Gibson was now in heaven, and that another fellow, executed at the same time, had the happiness of touching Gibson's coat as he was turned off. As little as you and I agree about a hundred years ago, I don't desire a reign of fanatics. Oxford has begun with these rascals, and I hope Cambridge will wake. I don't mean that I would have them persecuted, which is what they wish; but I would have the clergy fight them and ridicule them. Adieu! dear Sir. Yours ever.

Essais Historiques sur Paris, par Germain-François-Poulain de Saint Foix; of which an English translation was published in 1767.-E.

TO THE REV. MR. COLE.

Strawberry Hill, June 6, 1768. You have told me what makes me both sorry and glad.' Long have I expected the appearance of Ely, and thought it at the eve of coming forth. Now you tell me it is not half written; but then I am rejoiced you are to write it. Pray do; the author is very much in the right to make you author for him. I cannot say you have addressed yourself quite so judiciously as he has. I never heard of Cardinal Lewis de Luxembourg in my days, nor have a scrap of the history of Normandy, but Ducarel's tour to the Conqueror's kitchen. But the best way will be to come and rummage my library yourself: not to set me to writing the lives of prelates: I shall strip them stark, and you will have them to re-consecrate. Cardinal Morton is at your service: pray say for him, and of me, what you please. I have very slender opinion of his integrity; but, as I am not spiteful, it would be hard to exact from you a less favourable account of him than I conclude your piety will bestow on all his predecessors and successors. Seriously, you know how little I take contradiction to heart, and beg you will have no scruples about defending Morton. When I bestow but a momentary smile on the abuse of my answerers, I am not likely to stint a friend in a fair and obliging remark.

The man that you mention, who calls himself "Impartialis," is, I suppose, some hackney historian, I shall never inquire whom, angry at being censured in the lump, and not named. I foretold he would drop his criticisms before he entered on Perkin Warbeck, which I knew he could not answer; and so it happened. Good night to him!

This is in reply to one of Mr. Cole's letters, wherein he had informed Mr. Walpole, that he had undertaken to write the history of some of the Bishops of Ely for the History of Ely Cathedral, and requested some particulars relating to Cardinal Lewis de Luxembourg ; and to be informed the meaning of the French word sotalle or sotelle. Mr. Cole also proposed to controvert an opinion of Mr. Walpole's respecting Cardinal Morton.