hires, and is his usual residence. The single chamber without a bed is a parlour seven feet high, directly under my lord's bed chamber, without shutters, and so smoky that there is no setting in it unless the door is open. I am forced to lie here, five miles off, in an inn-a palace to his dwelling. The morning after my arrival, a physician I had sent for from Norwich, forty miles from hence, coming down to tell me how he had found my lord, we were alarmed with a scream and a bustle. The doctor had ordered the window to be opened to let out the smoke, and, the moment he had quitted his patient, my lord attempted to fling himself out of the window, but was prevented by his keeper and servants, who flung him on the bed. You will scarcely believe that, on my arrival, his mistress, his steward, and a neighbouring parson of the confederacy, on my declaring I should remove him directly to London for proper assistance, cried out, that I should kill him if I conveyed him from that Paradise in which was all his delight, and where he has so long swallowed every apple that every serpent has offered to him. The very day before he had asked where he was.

At the desire of the Norwich physician, I sent for Dr. Jebb from London. Before he came, the fever was gone, and an interval of sense was returned. Yet, as before, he would only speak in a whisper, and could not be persuaded to show his tongue to Dr. Jebb, though he made rational answers. Dr. Jebb pronounced, that he had neither fever nor understanding. He has had a slight return of the former, and no delirium. Yet both his physicians, the apothecary, and even his mistress, think his disorder will still last some weeks. Perhaps it may not; nor is it the worst consideration that he will have these relapses: as this arrived in very cold weather, and from no apparent cause, the madness is evidently constitutional, and leaves both himself and his family with all their apprehensions. Mine are, that as both now and formerly he has betrayed mischievous designs, he will after some lucid interval destroy himself; and I have seen that the crew about him will not call in help till perhaps too late. They had not even sent for a physician; because, as they told me, my lord (a lunatic) has no opinion of physicians. Judge of my distress! My brother and I have too much tenderness and delicacy to take out the statute of lunacy. All my care and attention to him, his mistress, and fortune, in his former illness, have not made the smallest impression. I have not even seen him these three years, though he declared on his recovery that he approved all I had done; and I must say that I meant to set an example of tenderness which, I believe, was never seen before in a parallel case. I cannot resent it from him; for his misfortune

tran

ons about the parsonage-house, and Mr. Walpole directing his letter to him, ign of his titular advancement, "To Mr. Ball," the man in his answer was so absurd to add a postscript in these words, "Dr. Ball, if you please, the next time you favour me."

* Dr. Richard Jebb. In the following year the King conferred the honour of a baronetage upon him, in consideration of his attention to the Duke of Gloucester during his severe illness in Italy.-ED.

acquits him of every thing. I had greatly improved his fortune, and should have effected much more, had he not instantly taken every thing out of my hands. This treatment, and many such reasons, had determined me never more to meddle with his affairs: indeed, the fatigue, joined to my apprehension, had half killed me. I had done every thing at my own risk, and some things at my own cost. Thus, without the sanction of law, which I will not claim for my lord's sake, I could not undertake his affairs again. I now declared I would take on me the care of his person and health, but never of his fortune-what will become of that I know not! My own peace, at the end of my life, and broken as I am, must weigh something. I have, from the instant my lord came of age, laboured to serve him-in vain. I have struggled hard to rescue and restore my family; a proud view, perhaps, yet as reasonable as most we have! Vision for vision, That insubstantial and transitory one, called Philosophy, that is, indifference, is, I suppose, the best. What are distant views in this world? To be realized when we are past knowing it. How idle are hopes about futurity, whether about our family or our country; and how little different in duration and extent, when compared with the succession of ages! If we hope our name and race, or if, on a grander scale, we wish the constitution of our country may last, are not those lofty views confined to two or three hundred years, which are but a moment in the revolution of endless centuries? The moment we step beyond the diminutive sphere of our familiar ideas, all is boundless and lost in immensity!-I descend to earth, to me and my little concerns.

I shall stay here to see the physician from Norwich to-morrow. If he pronounces, as I expect, that my lord is recovered, I shall take my leave, and resign him to the rudder of his own poor brain. I pity him, but it must be so. My character and Sir Edward's are at stake, and to preserve them we must obey the law literally. The last time, the moment the physicians pronounced him sane, we submitted and threw open his doors; though neither of us were of that opinion. I attended him to Houghton, and saw nothing but evidence of distraction. The gentlemen of the country came to congratulate him on his recovery; yet, for more than six weeks, he would do nothing but speak in the lowest voice, and would whisper to them at the length of the table, when the person next to him could not distinguish what he said. Every evening, precisely at the same hour, sitting round a table, he would join his forehead to his mistress's (who is forty, redfaced, and with black teeth, and with whom he has lived these twenty years,) and there they would sit for a quarter of an hour, like two parroquets, without speaking. Every night, from seven to nine, he regularly, for the whole fortnight, made his secretary of militia, an old drunken, broken tradesman, read Statius to the whole company, though the man could not hiccup the right quantity of the syllables. Imagine what I suffered. One morning I asked the company, before

my lord was up, how they found him? They answered, just as he had always been. Then, thought I, he has always been distracted.

Forgive my tiring you with these details! They have rushed into my memory again, and I cannot help venting them. I must expel them once more; though every sudden knock at my door at an unusual hour will terrify me, as it did for thirteen months three years ago. I have gone the round of all my thoughts, and can rest on no plan. Were families to have more power, it would be abused; and, as the law has fixed the criterion of sense, no private man for the best purposes must or can control it. I have done all I can; which is, to warn my lord's dependants of the danger of concealing the first symptoms of his infirmity; and have endeavoured to alarm them, for their own sakes, with the risk of his not observing rigid temperance.

Their interest in his health must combat their interest in flattering him. Adieu !

Arlington Street, May 2.

The Norwich physician said he found my lord so much better, that I left him two days ago; though his mistress desired I would leave the keeper, at least for a month.

LETTER CCLXVIII.

Arlington Street, May 14, 1777. YOUR last has given me both pain and pleasure. I know the gout too well not to suffer for you; though, when it begins but late in life, it is never very violent, and certainly is very wholesome discipline. It is ten times worse to have ceremony and princes to struggle with at such a moment; and I tremble lest your efforts against an enemy that will not bear an instant of contradiction, should have redoubled your torOh! death itself does not regard princes less than the gout does. Then, on the other hand, I am charmed with the Duke's condescension; and the more, as he will have witnessed your disability. I am sure, in some ministers, he might with reason have suspected your confinement was political.

You do not owe to me, I assure you, the Duchess's graciousness. I did not even imagine they would pass through Florence. She has not at all forgotten that she was not royally born, and her good-nature and familiarity are not expelled by dignity. I am sure you found her as easy and natural, as if she had not married even Lord Waldegrave. When she left England, her beauty had lost no more than her good qualities. I am glad your Court† have behaved as they ought.

The Duke and Duchess of Gloucester were then at Florence.

Leopold, Grand-Duke of Tuscany, son of Francis of Lorraine and the EmpressQueen Maria Theresa. He married Maria Louisa, Infanta of Spain. Under his

I am glad the English see that there is no nation so contemptibly servile as our own. Europe, that has hated our fierté, is reaping revenge fast. Our Western sun is setting, and dark clouds hang over our East. France and Spain have spoken pretty intelligibly. The former offered us for themselves, and for the latter, a naval disarmament. We jumped at it; and France coldly answered, that Spain would not come into it. So a war is sure, whenever they think us enough undone to be totally ruined. I believe a younger minister than Monsieur de Maupras* would think so at present.

I rejoice that you got your nephew again, and Lady Lucy, and that she is so much better than you expected. I trust Lord Orford's agreement with his grandfather's creditors, which he had just signed, is good. The law will probably think so. In my private opinion, he has been mad these twenty years and more. On his coming of age, I obtained, a fortune of one hundred and fifty-two thousand pounds for him: he would not look at her.† Had I remained charged with his affairs six

mild and parental government, which continued twenty-five years, Tuscany is acknowledged to have enjoyed a great degree of felicity, as well as prosperity. His political conduct was distinguished by his simplification of the laws, remission of oppressive taxes, some regulations for the comfort of strangers in his dominion, and a readiness of access to his own subjects of all ranks. In 1790, he succeeded his brother, Joseph II., as Emperor of Germany, and died in 1792.—ED.

* One of the first measures of Louis XVI., on his accession to the throne in 1774, was the recall of the Count de Maurepas to Court; whence he had been banished twenty-three years. He had formerly been Minister of Marine; the superintendency of which he now declined, but accepted a seat in the Privy Council, and was considered the chief mover in all public affairs. Walpole, in a letter to General Conway, describes him as by far the ablest and most agreeable man he knew at Paris. M. de Maurepas was at this time in his seventy-seventh year. He died in 1781. His "Mémoires," in four volumes octavo, were published in 1790-1792, by his secretary, M. Sallé.-ED.

Walpole here alludes to the effort made by him in 1751 to procure a suitable match for his nephew. The nature of that effort, and the causes of its failure, are thus stated in a letter to Sir Horace Mann, of the 30th of May in that year :—“ If I could be mortified anew, I should be with a new disappointment. The immense and uncommon friendship of Mr. Chute had found a method of saving both my family and yours. In short, in the height of his affliction for Whithed, whom he still laments immoderately, he undertook to get Miss Nicholl, a fortune of above 150,000. whom Whithed was to have had, for Lord Orford. He actually persuaded her to run away from her guardians, who used her inhumanly, and are her next heirs. How clearly he is justified, you will see, when I tell you that the man, who had eleven hundred a-year for her maintenance, with which he stopped the demands of his own creditors, instead of employing it for her maintenance and education, is since gone into the Fleet. After such fair success, Lord Orford has refused to marry her; why, nobody can guess. Thus had I placed him in a greater situation than even his grandfather hoped to bequeath to him, had retrieved all the oversights of my family, had saved Houghton and all our glory! Now, all must go!-and what shocks me infinitely more, Mr. Chute, by excess of treachery, is embroiled with his own brother."-Collective Edition, vol. ii. p. 3:38. "I have been forced," he says, in another letter, "to write an account of the whole transaction, and have been kept with difficulty from publishing it." The original manuscript of this curious document, now in the possession of Mr. Bently, is entitled "A Narrative of the Proceedings on the intended Marriage between Lord Orford and Miss Nicholl; in a Letter addressed to Mrs. Harris, my Lord's grandmother." Miss Nicholl was the daughter VOL. II.-4

months longer on his last illness, he would have been five thousand a-year richer than the day he fell ill. My reward was, not to see him for three years. But I see I cannot help talking of this. I had twice expunged all thoughts of Houghton and my family from my memory. They are forced on me again when I can do no good. Well, it was not my plan of old age to pass my time with princes or madmen! Mine has been a chequered life of very various scenes! But it has taught me some temper, which I was not born with; and the best of all lessons, to do right, because others do wrong. It is not enough to be indignant, if one does not mend one's self. I had much to mend, and corrections made in age have very little grace. One seldom conquers one's passions till time has delivered them up bound hand and foot. Therefore I have very little esteem for my own philosophy. It is at most but solicitude to make a decent exit, and applying to one's character what Pope makes an expiring beauty say of her face

"One would not sure be frightful when one's dead!"

Alas! we are ridiculous animals. Folly and gravity equally hunt shadows. The deepest politician toils but for a momentary rattle. There is nothing worth wishing for but the smile of conscious innocence; and that consciousness would make the smile of age more beautiful than even the lovely infant's simplicity. I possess no such jewel; but one may admire a diamond, though one cannot obtain it. You see how my nephew throws my mind into a moral train, which is naturally more gay; and my wisdom commonly prefers accepting the vision life as a something, to analyzing it. But one is the creature of the hour, and this happens to be a serious one. Adieu !

May 15.

I have received your long letter, and thank you for it most particularly; especially for one part, which you may guess by my not mentioning. But you were so pleased with the Duchess's manner, that you forgot her beauty; which I thought would strike you. The little Princess is a dear soul, and I do not intend to be inconstant and prefer her Brother; nor do I think the Duke will.

and sole heiress of John Nicholl, of Southgate in Middlesex, Esq. In March 1753 she married James, Marquis of Caernarvon, afterwards third and last Duke of Chandos, and died in 1768 without issue. That Walpole's choice was in every respect a judicious one, would appear from the following character of the lady, drawn by Sir Egerton Brydges:-"Her great abilities, amiable temper, and agreeable person qualified her to have made a most shining figure in public life amongst those of her own high rank; but her natural disposition, joined to a tender and delicate constitution, induced her rather to cultivate the virtues of a more retired life. Her benevolence extended to all mankind; her charity to many; her intimacy only to a few."-ED.

*The Princess Sophia Matilda, born at Gloucester House, May 29, 1773.-Ed.

Prince William Frederick of Gloucester, born at the Theodole Palace, in the City of Rome, January 15th, 1776. On the death of his father, in 1805, he became