gest, it is for the sake of your children, who will plead when I fail. If you are in the right, in the world's eye, whatever it costs your feeling, it will be of use to them. The circumstances may change; your health, I trust in God, will be re-established, and the more sacrifices you have made, the higher you will stand in the esteem of mankind. I still flatter myself you will enjoy all the happiness and dignity due to your virtues and birth. I am not likely to see that moment, nor should profit by it if I did; but I have done my duty as your true servant, and if I was now at my last hour, I could not give you any other advice than what I now presume to lay at your feet.

P.S. If your Royal Highness should deem this advice timid, I beg it may be tried by this test, whether your Royal Highness thinks, sir, that any one of your enemies would be glad I had given this advice; undoubtedly, sir, the more you take care to be in the right yourself, the more you put those who hurt you with the King in the wrong.

TO THE DUCHESS OF GLOUCESTER.

I Do assure you, madam, your Royal Highness is totally mistaken about Lord Ch, whom I have not seen this month. I received my account from no relation or friend, but from a gentleman of the strictest honour, who came to me as not knowing else how to convey the information to you. I will upon no account name him, as I gave him my word I would not. I am extremely happy there is no truth in the idea, though it came to me in so serious a manner and from a man so incapable of an ill-meaning, that it was my duty to acquaint you with it; and as I desired to be named to your daughters, they will know how kind my intention was, and that I am, as I have professed to them, as affectionate as if I was their father.

I shall be very glad, madam, of your brother's picture, and will try to find a place for it; but it is far from being the only near relation of whom I have no portrait-I have none of Lord Dysart, of the Bishop, of Lady Malpas, of Mr. and Mrs. Cholmondeley, of Lady Cadogan, &c.—and therefore the remark of the persons' that observed your brother's being wanting, was not very good-natured to him or me. Many of the family pictures I happened to have; others I begged as I wanted them for particular places; and, indeed, furnished my house to please myself, not to please such people as those who have been so obliging as to tell your Royal Highness that my not having your brother's picture was a mark of contempt. I have no desire of pleasing those who were capable of saying such a thing to you. Your affection for his memory is most amiable, and I shall obey you with pleasure; but allow me to say, madam, that I hope you will always judge of me by what you know of me, and not from comments of others. I have been taxed with partiality for you, long

before there was a question of your present rank; nor do I believe you suspect me of attachment to you from that motive. I am too old, too independent, and too contented to have hopes or fears from any body. I have the highest respect for his Royal Highness's character and virtues, and always shall have; and am proud of paying my court to him, when it can only flow from personal reverence. Were he in the situation he ought to be, I should be but the less anxious to show it.

Indeed I little expected to be suspected of wanting attachment to any part of my family. I have been laughed at, perhaps deservedly, for family pride, which certainly is not always a proof of family affection. I trust I have given proofs that they are not disunited in me; and yet, except from my father, I never received either benefits or favours; and from him only my places, and a small fortune not paid. Thus, whatever I have except my share of Mr. Shorter's fortune that came to me by his leaving no will, and consequently was no obligation, I neither received from my family nor owe to it. It has been saved by my own prudence, is my own to dispose of as I please, and, however I distribute it, or to whom will be a gift, not a claim.

I should not say thus much, madam, but when one can think it worth while to make invidious remarks to you on a tender point with you, on what is or is not in my house, you will allow me to justify myself, and even open my heart to you, to whom I desire it should be known, though I certainly owe no account to any body on so trifling a subject as the furniture of a house which I am master to do what I please with, living or dead. It was from no disregard for your brother that I had not his picture. I love Lady Cadogan very much, as I do, surely, your daughters and nieces, yet have not happened to have their pictures; and though I have probably said a great deal too much, like an old man, it is always a mark of affection when I submit to justify myself on an unjust accusation; and as tenderness for my family is the duty in which I have in my whole life been the least culpable, though very blameable in a thousand other respects, it is very pardonable to be circumstantial and prolix to her whose reproach was kind and good, and whom I desire to convince that I have neither wanted affection for my family, nor am unjust to it. I have the honour to be, madam, your Royal Highness's Most faithful, humble servant,

May 10, 1778.

HORACE WALPOLE.

TO LORD ORFORD.

MY DEAR LORD,

YOUR Lordship is very good in thanking me for what I could not claim any thanks, as in complying with your request and assisting you to settle your affairs, according to my father's will was not only my duty; but to promote your service and benefit, to re-establish the affairs of my family, and to conform myself to the views of the Excellent Man, the glory of human nature, who made us all what we are, has been constantly one of the principal objects of my whole life. If my labours and wishes have been crowned with small success, it has been owing to my own inability in the first place, and next to tenderness, and to the dirt and roguery of wretches below my notice. For your Lordship, I may presume to say, I have spared no thought, industry, solicitude, application, or even health, when I had the care of your affairs. What I did and could have done, if you had not thought fit to prefer a most conceited and worthless fellow, I can demonstrate by reams of paper, that may one day or other prove what I say, and which, if I have not yet done, it proceeds from the same tenderness that I have ever had for your Lordship's tranquillity and repose. To acquiesce afterwards in the arrangement you have proposed to me, is small merit indeed. My honour is much dearer to me than fortune; and to contribute to your Lordship's enjoying your fortune with credit and satisfaction, is a point I would have purchased with far greater compliances; for, my Lord, as I flatter myself that I am not thought an interested man, so all who know me know that to see the lustre of my family restored to the consideration to which it was raised by Sir Robert Walpole, shining in you, and transmitted to his and your descendants, was the only ambition that ever actuated me. No personal advantage entered into those views; and if I say thus much of myself with truth, I owe still greater justice to my brother, who has many more virtues than I can pretend to, and is as incapable of forming any mean and selfish wishes as any man upon earth. We are both old men now, and without sons to inspire us with future visions. We wish to leave your Lordship in as happy and respectable a situation as you were born to; and we have both given you all the proof in our power, by acquiescing in your proposal, immediately.

For me, my Lord, I should with pleasure accept the honour of waiting on you at Houghton, at the time you mention, if my lameness and threats of the gout did not forbid my taking so long a journey at this time of the year. At sixty-one it would not become me to talk of another year; perhaps I may never go to Houghton again, till I go thither for ever-but without affectation of philosophy, even the path to that journey will be sweetened to me, if I leave Houghton the flourishing monument of one of the best Ministers that ever blest

this once flourishing country. I am, my dear Lord,

most affectionately,

Strawberry Hill, Oct. 5, 1778.

Yours

HORACE WALPOLE.

TO GEORGE SELWYN.

Strawberry Hill, July 5, 1779.

I TAKE the liberty, which I know you will forgive, my dear sir, of troubling you with the enclosed, begging that you will add any thing that is necessary to the direction,-as par la Hollande, or whatever else is requisite, and to put it into the post as soon as you receive it. Pray tell me too, what is necessary to the direction, and where my maid in town must put in my future letters to Paris, that I may not trouble you any more with them. I fear they will not go so safely and regularly as in the old way, which will vex our good old friend,* who cannot bear to lose any of her stated occupations.

I have just received a present of four beautiful drawings of Grignan, which far exceed my ideas of its magnificence and charming situation. I had concluded that Madame de Sévigné, either from partiality or to please the Seigneur, had exceeded its pomps and command.t I long to show them to you and talk the mover, and am glad to have any thing new that may tempt you hither. Can you tell me if the Duchess of Leinster still goes to Aubigny; and, if she does, when; and if she is in London? I shall be much abliged to you for a true account of Lord Bolingbroke. It is not common curiosity that makes me anxious, though not particularly interested about him, nor is he the husband I most wish dead.

* Madame du Deffand.

Yours most sincerely,

H. W.

Walpole writes to the Hon. George Hardinge, on the 4th,-"I have now received the drawings of Grignan, and know not how to express my satisfaction and gratitude but by a silly witticism, that is like the studied quaintness of the last age. In short they are so much more beautiful than I expected, that I am not surprised at your having surprised me by exceeding even what I expected from your well-known kindness to me; they are charmingly executed, and with great taste. I own, too, that Grignan is grander, and in a much finer situation, than I had imagined; as I concluded that the witchery of Madame de Sévigné's ideas and style had spread the same leaf-gold over places with which she gilded her friends."-Collective Edit. vol. vi. p. 56.

Frederick, second Viscount Bolingbroke, Selwyn's early friend. He survived till May 5, 1787. -35

VOL. II.

TO LORD HARCOURT.

1780.

MY LORD,

THOUGH I think myself so inconsiderable a man that it will be impertinent to give an account of my conduct to the public; yet, as 1 should be most unhappy to lie under any suspicion, in the eyes of my friends, of acting or being silent, from mercenary views, in the present most serious moment, I declare that my reasons for not appearing in Westminster Hall, and signing a petition to Parliament for a necessary and effectual reform of the expenditure of public money, are not from disapprobation of the measure, or from a wish that so salutary a measure should miscarry, or from the least disposition to court favour any where, or with any party; the last of which mean and interested views would be inconsistent with the whole tenor of my life, and shall never stain the small remaining part of it.

But the reason of my not signing such petition is, that possessing nothing but sinecure places, I must consider myself rather as a remote object of the Reformation, than as a proper person to demand it. To petition for the abolition of sinecure places, and to hope not to be included in the reduction, would be unworthy of a man. To say I was ready to resign mine, would be hypocritic ostentation (for no man, I believe, is ready to part with his whole income) and would be a hardship on others in the same predicament, who should be unwilling to offer the same sacrifice, and would be honester men as more sincere.

The line of conduct, therefore, that I think the most decent for me to take, is to be totally silent, and submit myself to the determination of the legislature of my country, and to be content with what in its wisdom it shall decide for the benefit of the nation. I hold nothing from personal merit or services, and must not complain if my ease and comforts are diminished for the public good. But I cannot in conscience sign a request for the abolition of the places of others, who hold them by law, as I do mine, and who are more worthy of them than I am of mine. Neither can I demand the abolition of places not held for life, but the possessors of which are more useful members of society, have smaller incomes than mine, and execute more business than I do, who execute none-for I must speak the truth, and the whole truth. It would a be a great want of feeling and of generosity in me, to desire that any man should be discarded, who is removeable at pleasure, because nothing but a new law can remove me from my place.

Upon the whole, my Lord, it is no selfishness, or change in my principles, that makes me decline signing the petition. I shall die in the principles I have ever invariably professed. My fortune may be decreased, or taken away; but it never shall be augmented by any