FAMILY MISFORTUNES. 295 As he lingered in the Gallery, with mingled pride and sadness, a party arrived to see the house-a man and three women, in riding-dresses-who "rode post" through the apartments. "I could not," he adds, "hurry before them fast enough; they were not so long in seeing the whole gallery as I could have been in one room, to examine what I knew by heart. I remember formerly being often diverted with this kind of 's seers; they come, ask what such a room is called in which Sir Robert lay, write it down, admire a lobster or a cabbage in a Market Piece, dispute whether the last room was green or purple, and then hurry to the inn, for fear the fish should be overdressed. How different my sensations! not a picture here but recalls a history; not one but I remember in Downing Street, or Chelsea, where queens and crowds admired them, though seeing them as little as these travelers!"* After tea he strolled into the garden. They told him it was now called a pleasure-ground. To Horace it was a scene of desolation—a floral Nineveh. "What a dissonant idea of pleasure! those groves, those allées, where I have passed so many charming moments, were now stripped up or overgrown -many fond paths I could not unravel, though with an exact clew in my memory. I met two gamekeepers, and a thousand hares! In the days when all my soul was tuned to pleasure and vivacity (and you will think perhaps it is far from being out of tune yet), I hated Houghton and its solitude; yet I loved this garden, as now, with many regrets, I love Houghton-Houghton, I know not what to call it—a monument of grandeur or ruin!" Although he did not go with the expectation of finding a land flowing with milk and honey, the sight of all this ruin long saddened his thoughts. All was confusion, disorder, debts, mortgages, sales, pillage, villainy, waste, folly, and madness. The nettles and brambles in the park were up to his shoulders; horses had been turned into the garden, and banditti lodged in every cottage. The perpetuity of livings that came up to the very park palings had been sold, and the farms let at half their value. Certainly, if Houghton were bought by Sir Robert Walpole with public money, that public was now avenged. The owner of this ruined property had just stemmed the torrent; but the worst was to come. The pictures were sold, and to Russia they went. While thus harassed by family misfortunes, other annoy * Sir Robert Walpole purchased a house and garden at Chelsea in 1722, near the college adjoining Gough House.-Cunningham's "London." ances came. The mournful story of Chatterton's fate was painfully mixed up with the tenor of Horace Walpole's life. The gifted and unfortunate Thomas Chatterton was born at Bristol in 1752. Even from his birth fate seemed to pursue him, for he was a posthumous son: and if the loss of a father in the highest ranks of life be severely felt, how much more so is it to be deplored in those which are termed the working classes! The friendless enthusiast was slow in learning to read; but when the illuminated capitals of an old book were presented to him, he quickly learned his letters. This fact, and his being taught to read out of a black-letter Bible, are said to have accounted for his facility in the imitation of antiquities. Pensive and taciturn, he picked up education at a charityschool, until apprenticed to a scrivener, when he began that battle of life which ended to him so fatally. Upon very slight accidents did his destiny hinge. In those days women worked with thread, and used thread-papers. Now paper was dear: dainty matrons liked tasty thread-papers. A pretty set of thread-papers, with birds or flowers painted on each, was no mean present for a friend. Chatterton, a quiet child, one day noticed that his mother's threadpapers were of no ordinary materials. They were made of parchment, and on this parchment were some of the black-letter characters by which his childish attention had been fixed to his book. The fact was, that his uncle was sexton to the ancient church of St. Mary Redcliffe, at Bristol; and the parchment was the fruit of theft. Chatterton's father had carried off, from a room in the church, certain ancient manuscripts, which had been left about; being originally extracted from what was called Mr. Canynge's coffin. Now, Mr. Canynge, an eminent merchant, had rebuilt St. Mary Redcliffe in the reign of Edward IV.: and the parchments, therefore, were of some antiquity. The antiquary groans over their loss in vain : Chatterton's father had covered his books with them; his mother had used up the strips for thread-papers; and Thomas Chatterton himself contrived to abstract a considerable portion also, for his own purposes. He was ingenious, industrious, a poet by nature, and, wonderful to say, withal a herald by taste. Upon his nefarious possessions, he founded a scheme of literary forgeries; purporting to be ancient pieces of poetry found in Canynge's chest; and described as being the production of Thomas Canynge and of his friend, one Thomas Rowley, a priest. Money and books were sent to Chatterton in return for little strips of vellum, which he passed off as the original itself; and the suc WALPOLE'S CONCERN WITH CHATTERTON. 297 cessful forger might now be seen in deep thought, walking in the meadows near Redcliffe; a marked, admired poetic youth. In 1769, Chatterton wrote to Horace Walpole, offering to send him some accounts of eminent painters who had flourished at Bristol, and at the same time mentioning the discovery of the poems, and inclosing some specimens. In a subsequent letter he begged Walpole to aid him in his wish to be freed from his then servile condition, and to be placed in one more congenial to his pursuits. In his choice of a patron poor Chatterton made a fatal mistake. The benevolence of Horace was of a general kind, and never descended to any thing obscure or unappreciated. There was a certain hardness in that nature of his which had so pleasant an aspect. "An artist," he once said, "has his pencilsan author his pens-and the public must reward them as it pleases." Alas! he forgot how long it is before penury, even ennobled by genius, can make itself seen, heard, approved, repaid: how vast is the influence of prestige! how generous the hand which is extended to those in want, even if in error! All that Horace did, however, was strictly correct: he showed the poems to Gray and Mason, who pronounced them forgeries; and he wrote a cold and reproving letter to the starving author: and no one could blame him: Chatterton demanded back his poems; Walpole was going to Paris, and forgot to return them. Another letter came: the wounded poet again demanded them, adding, that Walpole would not have dared to use him so had he not been poor. The poems were returned in a blank cover: and here all Walpole's concern with Thomas Chatterton ends. All this happened in 1769. In August, 1770, the remains of the unhappy youth were carried to the burial-ground of Shoe Lane workhouse, near Holborn. He had swallowed arsenic; had lingered a day in agonies; and then, at the age of eighteen, expired. Starvation had prompted the act: yet on the day before he had committed it, he had refused a dinner, of which he was invited by his hostess to partake, assuring her that he was not hungry. Just or unjust, the world has never forgiven Horace Walpole for Chatterton's misery. His indifference has been contrasted with the generosity of Edmund Burke to Crabbe: a generosity to which we owe "The Village," "The Borough," and to which Crabbe owed his peaceful old age, and almost his existence. The cases were different; but Crabbe had his faults-and Chatterton was worth saving. It is well for genius that there are souls in the world more sympathizing, less worldly, and more indulgent, than those of such men as Horace Walpole. Even the editor of "Walpoliana" lets judgment go by default. "As 298 ANECDOTE OF MADAME GEOFFRIN. to artists," he says, "he paid them what they earned, and he commonly employed mean ones, that the reward might be smaller." 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 Deffand 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 "Hénault, fameux par vos soupers 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; while, among 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 THE MISS BERRYS. 66 299 portion of that society which centred 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-every thing 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 enamored 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" (afterward George IV.) "when he asked me if I was a Freemason,' I replied, 'No, sir; I never was any thing.' 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 £5000 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 |