After the completion of Strawberry Hill and the printing of the Catalogue, Walpole's life grows comparatively barren of events. There are still four volumes of his Correspondence, but they take upon them imperceptibly the nature of nouvelles À la main, and are less fruitful in personal traits. Between his books and his prints, his time passes agreeably, 'but will not do to relate.' Indeed, from this period until his death, in 1797, the most notable occurrences in his history are his friendship with the Miss Berry's in 1787-8, and his belated accession to he Earldom of Orford. Both at Strawberry and Arlington Street, his increasing years and his persistent malady condemn him more and more to seclusion and retirement. He is most at Strawberry, despite its dampness, for in the country he holds 'old, useless people ought to live.' 'If you were not to be in London,' he tells Lady Ossory in April, 1774, 'the spring advances so charmingly, I think I should scarce go thither. One is frightened with the inundation of breakfasts and balls that are coming on. Every one is engaged to everybody for the next three weeks, and if one must hunt for a needle, I had rather look for it in a bottle of hay in the country than in a crowd.' 'By age and situation,' he writes from Strawberry in September, 'at this time of the year I live with nothing but old women. They do very well for me, who have little choice left, and who rather prefer common nonsense to wise nonsense,—the only difference I know between old women and old men. I am out of all politics, and never think of elections, which I think I should hate even if I loved politics,—just as, if I loved tapestry I do not think I could talk over the manufacture of worsteds. Books I have almost done with too,—at least, read only such as nobody else would read. In short, my way of life is too insipid to entertain anybody but myself; and though I am always employed, I must own I think I have given up every thing in the world, only to be busy about the most arrant trifles.' His London life was not greatly different. 'How should I see or know anything?' he says a year later, apologizing for his dearth of news. 'I seldom stir out of my house [at Arlington Street] before seven in the evening, see very few persons, and go to fewer places, make no new acquaintance, and have seen most of my old wear out. Loo at Princess Amelie's, loo at Lady Hertford's, are the capital events of my history, and a Sunday alone, at Strawberry, my chief entertainment. All this is far from gay; but as it neither gives me ennui, nor lowers my spirits, it is not uncomfortable, and I prefer it to being dÉplacÉ in younger company.' Such is his account of his life in 1774-5, when he is nearing sixty, and it probably represents it with sufficient accuracy. But a trifling incident easily stirs him into unwonted vivacity. While he is protesting that he has nothing to say, his letters grow under his pen, and, almost as a necessary consequence of his leisure, they become more frequent and more copious. In the edition of Cunningham, up to September, 1774, they number fourteen hundred and fifty. Speaking roughly, this represents a period of nearly forty years. During the two-and-twenty years that remained to him, he managed to swell them by what was, proportionately, a far greater number. The last letter given by Cunningham is marked 2665; and this enumeration does not include a good many letters and fragments of letters belonging to this later period, which were published in 1865 in Miss Berry's Journals and Correspondence. Nevertheless, as stated above, they more and more assume what he somewhere calls 'their proper character of newspapers.'

During the remainder of his life, they were his chief occupation, and his gout was seldom so severe but that he could make shift to scribble a line to his favourite correspondents, calling in his printer Kirgate as secretary in cases of extremity.[168] Of literature generally he professed to have taken final leave. 'I no longer care about fame,' he tells Mason in 1774; 'I have done being an author.' Nevertheless, the Short Notes piously chronicle the production of more than one trifle, which are reprinted in his Works. When, in the above year, Lord Chesterfield's letters to his son were published, Walpole began a parody of that famous performance in a Series of Letters from a Mother to a Daughter, with the general title of the New Whole Duty of Woman. He grew tired of the idea too soon to enable us to judge what his success might have been with a subject which, in his hands, should have been diverting as a satire; for, although he was a warm admirer of Chesterfield's parts, as he had shown in his character of him in the Royal and Noble Authors, he was thoroughly alive to the assailable side of what he styles his 'impertinent institutes of education.'[169] Another work of this year was a reply to some remarks by Mr. Masters in the ArchÆologia upon the old subject of the Historic Doubts, which calls for no further notice. But early in 1775 he was persuaded into writing an epilogue for the Braganza of Captain Robert Jephson, a maiden tragedy of the Venice Preserved order, which was produced at Drury Lane in February of that year, with considerable success. In a correspondence which ensued with the author, Walpole delivered himself of his views on tragedy for the benefit of Mr. Jephson, who acted upon them, but not (as his Mentor thought) with conspicuous success, in his next attempt, the Law of Lombardy. Jephson's third play, however, the Count of Narbonne, which was well received in 1781, had a natural claim upon Walpole's good opinion, since it was based upon the Castle of Otranto.[170] Besides the above letters on tragedy, Walpole wrote, 'in 1775 and 1776,' a rather longer paper on comedy, which is printed with them in the second volume of his works (pp. 315-22). He held, as he says, 'a good comedy the chef-d'oeuvre of human genius;' and it is manifest that his keenest sympathies were on the side of comic art. His remarks upon Congreve are full of just appreciation. Yet, although he mentions the School for Scandal (which, by the way, shows that he must have written rather later than the dates given above), he makes no reference to the most recent development, in She Stoops to Conquer, of the school of humour and character, and he seems rather to pose as the advocate of that genteel or sentimental comedy which Foote and Goldsmith and Sheridan had striven to drive from the English stage. When his prejudices are aroused, he is seldom a safe guide, and in addition to his personal contempt for Goldsmith,[171] that writer had irritated him by his reference to the Albemarle Street Club, to which many of his friends belonged. It was an additional offence that the 'Miss Biddy [originally Miss Rachael] Buckskin' of the comedy was said to stand for Miss Rachael Lloyd, long housekeeper at Kensington Palace, and a member of the club well known both to himself and to Madame du Deffand.[172]

In the second of the letters to Mr. Jephson, Walpole refers to his own efforts at comedy, and implies that he had made attempts in this direction even before the tragedy of The Mysterious Mother. He had certainly the wit, and much of the gift of direct expression, which comedy requires. But nothing of these earlier essays appears to have survived, and the only dramatic effort included among his Works (his tragedy excepted) is the little piece entitled Nature will Prevail, which, with its fairy machinery, has something of the character of such earlier productions of Mr. W. S. Gilbert as the Palace of Truth. This he wrote in 1773, and, according to the Short Notes, sent it anonymously to the elder Colman, then manager of Covent Garden. Colman (he says) was much pleased with it, but regarding it as too short for a farce, wished to have it enlarged. This, however, its author thought too much trouble 'for so slight and extempore a performance.' Five years after, it was produced at the little theatre in the Haymarket, and, being admirably acted,—says the Biographia Dramatica,—met with considerable applause. But it is obviously one of those works to which the verdict of Goldsmith's critic, that it would have been better if the author had taken more pains, may judiciously be applied. It is more like a sketch for a farce than a farce itself; and it is not finished enough for a proverbe. Yet the dialogue is in parts so good that one almost regrets the inability of the author to nerve himself for an enterprise de longue haleine.

Between 1774 and 1780 the Strawberry Hill Press still now and then showed signs of vitality. In 1775, it printed as a loose sheet some verses by Charles James Fox,—celebrating, as Amoret, that lover of the Whigs, the beautiful Mrs. Crewe,—and three hundred copies of an Eclogue by Mr. Fitzpatrick,[173] entitled Dorinda, which contains the couplet,—

These were followed, in 1778, by the Sleep Walker, a comedy from the French of Madame du Deffand's friend Pont de Veyle, translated by Lady Craven, afterwards Margravine of Anspach, and played for a charitable purpose at Newbury. A year later came the vindication of his conduct to Chatterton, already mentioned at pp. 196-200; and after this a sheet of verse by Mr. Charles Miller to Lady Horatia Waldegrave,[174] a daughter of the Duchess of Gloucester by her first husband. The last work of any importance was the fourth volume of the Anecdotes of Painting, which had been printed as far back as 1770, but was not issued until Oct., 1780. This delay, the Advertisement informs us, arose 'from motives of tenderness.' The author was 'unwilling [he says] to utter even gentle censures, which might wound the affections, or offend the prejudices, of those related to the persons whom truth forbad him to commend beyond their merits.'[175] But despite his unwillingness to 'dispense universal panegyric,' and the limitation of his theme to living professors, he manages, in the same Advertisement, to distribute a fair amount of praise to some of his particular favourites. Of H. W. Bunbury, the husband of Goldsmith's 'Little Comedy,' he says that he is the 'second Hogarth,' and the 'first imitator who ever fully equalled his original,'—which is sheer extravagance. He lauds the miniature copying of Lady Lucan, as almost depreciating the 'exquisite works' of the artists she follows,—to wit, Cooper and the Olivers; and he speaks of Lady Di. Beauclerk's drawings as 'not only inspired by Shakespeare's insight into nature, but by the graces and taste of Grecian artists.' After this, the comparison of Mrs. Damer with Bernini seems almost tame.

Yet her works 'from the life are not inferior to the antique, and those ... were not more like.' One can scarcely blame Walpole severely for this hearty backing of the friends who had added so much to the attractions of his Gothic castle; but the value of his criticisms, in many other instances sound enough, is certainly impaired by his loyalty to the old-new practice of 'log-rolling.'

Lady Di. Beauclerk, whose illustrations to Dryden's Fables are still a frequent item in second-hand catalogues, has a personal connection with Strawberry through the curious little closet bearing her name, which, with the assistance of Mr. Essex, a Gothic architect from Cambridge, Walpole in 1776-8 managed to tuck in between the Cabinet and the Round Tower. It was built on purpose to hold the 'seven incomparable drawings,' executed in a fortnight, which her Ladyship prepared, to illustrate The Mysterious Mother. These were the designs to which he refers in the Anecdotes of Painting, and, in a letter to Mann, says could not be surpassed by Guido and Salvator Rosa. They were hung on Indian blue damask, in frames of black and gold; and Clive's friend, Miss Pope, the actress, when she dined at Strawberry, was affected by them to such a degree that she shed tears, although she did not know the story,—an anecdote which may be regarded either as a genuine compliment to Lady Di., or a merely histrionic tribute to her entertainer. 'The drawings,' Walpole says, 'do not shock and disgust, like their original, the tragedy;' but they were not to be shown to the profane. They were, nevertheless, probably exhibited pretty freely, as a copy of the play, carefully annotated in MS. by the author, and bound in blue leather to match the hangings, was always kept in a drawer of one of the tables, for the purpose of explaining them.[176] Walpole afterwards added one or two curiosities to this closet. It contained, according to the last edition of the Catalogue, a head in basalt of Jupiter Serapis, and a book of Psalms illuminated by Giulio Clovio, the latter purchased for £168 at the Duchess of Portland's sale in May, 1786. There was also a portrait by Powell, after Reynolds, of Lady Di. herself, who lived for some time at Twickenham in a house now known as Little Marble Hill, many of the rooms of which she decorated with her own performances. These were apparently the efforts which prompted the already mentioned postscript to the Parish Register of Twickenham:

Mention has been made of the intermittent attacks of insanity to which Walpole's nephew, the third Earl of Orford, was subject. At the beginning of 1774, he had returned to his senses, and his uncle, on whom fell the chief care of his affairs during his illnesses, was, for a brief period, freed from the irksome strain of an uncongenial and a thankless duty. In April, 1777, however, Lord Orford's malady broke out again, with redoubled severity. In August, he was still fluctuating 'between violence and stupidity;' but in March, 1778, a lucid interval had once more been reached, and Walpole was relieved of the care of his person. Of his affairs he had declined to take care, as his Lordship had employed a lawyer of whom Walpole had a bad opinion. 'He has resumed the entire dominion of himself,' says a letter to Mann in April, 'and is gone into the country, and intends to command the militia.' One of the earliest results of this 'entire dominion' was a step which filled his relative with the keenest distress. He offered the famous Houghton collection of pictures to Catherine of Russia,—'the most signal mortification to my idolatry for my father's memory that it could receive,' says Walpole to Lady Ossory. By August, 1779, the sale was completed. 'The sum stipulated,' he tells Mann, 'is forty or forty-five thousand pounds,[178] I neither know nor care which; nor whether the picture merchant ever receives the whole sum, which probably he will not do, as I hear it is to be discharged at three payments,—a miserable bargain for a mighty empress!... Well! adieu to Houghton! about its mad master I shall never trouble myself more.... Since he has stript Houghton of its glory, I do not care a straw what he does with the stone or the acres!'[179]

Not very long after the date of the above letter Walpole made what was, for him, an important change of residence. The lease of his house in Arlington Street running out, he fixed upon a larger one in the then very fashionable district of Berkeley Square. The house he selected, now (1892) numbered 11, was then 40,[180] and he had commenced negotiations for its purchase as early as November, 1777, when, he tells Lady Ossory, he had come to town to take possession. But difficulties arose over the sale, and he found himself involved in a Chancery suit. He was too adroit, however, to allow this to degenerate into an additional annoyance, and managed (by his own account) to turn what promised to be a tedious course of litigation into a combat of courtesy. Ultimately, in July, 1779, he had won his cause, and was hurrying from Strawberry to pay his purchase money and close the bargain. Two months later, he is moving in, and is delighted with his acquisition. He would not change his two pretty mansions for any in England, he says. On the 14th October, he took formal possession, upon which day—his 'inauguration day'—he dates his first letter 'Berkeley Square.' 'It is seeming to take a new lease of life,' he tells Mason. 'I was born in Arlington Street, lived there about fourteen years, returned thither, and passed thirty-seven more; but I have sober monitors that warn me not to delude myself.' He had still a decade and a half before him.

Little more than twelve months after he had settled down in his new abode, he lost the faithful friend at Paris, to whom, for the space of fifteen years, he had written nearly once a week. By 1774, he had become somewhat nervous about this accumulated correspondence in a language not his own. For an Englishman, his French was good, and, as might be expected of anything he wrote, characteristic and vivacious. But, almost of necessity, it contained many minor faults of phraseology and arrangement, besides abounding in personal anecdote; and he became apprehensive lest, after Madame du Deffand's death, his utterances should fall into alien hands. General Conway, who visited Paris in October, 1774, had therefore been charged to beg for their return—a request which seems at first to have been met by the reply on the lady's part that sufficient precautions had already been taken for ensuring their restoration. Ultimately, however, they were handed to Conway.[181] It was in all probability under a sense of this concession that Walpole once more risked a tedious journey to visit his blind friend. In the following year he went to Paris, to find her, as usual, impatiently expecting his arrival. She sat with him until half-past two, and before his eyes were open again, he had a letter from her. 'Her soul is immortal, and forces her body to keep it company.' A little later he complains that he never gets to bed from her suppers before two or three o'clock. 'In short,' he says, 'I need have the activity of a squirrel, and the strength of a Hercules, to go through my labours,—not to count how many dÉmÊlÉs I have had to raccommode and how many mÉmoires to present against Tonton,[182] who grows the greater favourite the more people he devours.' But Tonton's mistress is more worth visiting than ever, he tells Selwyn, and she is apparently as tireless as of yore. 'Madame du Deffand and I [says another letter] set out last Sunday at seven in the evening, to go fifteen miles to a ball, and came back after supper; and another night, because it was but one in the morning when she brought me home, she ordered the coachman to make the tour of the Quais, and drive gently because it was so early.' At last, early in October, he tears himself away, to be followed almost immediately by a letter of farewell. Here it is:—

'Adieu, ce mot est bien triste; souvenez-vous que vous laissez ici la personne dont vous Êtes le plus aimÉ, et dont le bonheur et le malheur consistent dans ce que vous pensez pour elle. Donnez-moi de vos nouvelles le plus tÔt qu'il sera possible.

'Je me porte bien, j'ai un peu dormi, ma nuit n'est pas finie; je serai trÈs-exacte au rÉgime, et j'aurai soin de moi puisque vous vous y intÉressez.'

The correspondence thus resumed was continued for five years more. Walpole does not seem to have visited Paris again, and the references to Madame du Deffand in his general correspondence are not very frequent. Towards the middle of 1780, her life was plainly closing in. In July and August, she complained of being more than usually languid, and in a letter of the 22nd of the latter month intimates that it may be her last, as dictation grows painful to her. 'Ne vous devant revoir de ma vie,'—she says pathetically,—'je n'ai rien À regretter.' From this time she kept her bed, and in September Walpole tells Lady Ossory that he is trembling at every letter he gets from Paris. 'My dear old friend, I fear, is going!... To have struggled twenty days at eighty-four shows such stamina that I have not totally lost hopes.' On the 24th, however, after a lethargy of several days, she died quietly, 'without effort or struggle.' 'Elle a eu la mort la plus douce,'—says her faithful and attached secretary, Wiart,—'quoique la maladie ait ÉtÉ longue.' She was buried, at her own wish, in the parish church of St. Sulpice. By her will she made her nephew, the Marquis d'Aulan, her heir. Long since, she had wished Walpole to accept this character. Thereupon he had threatened that he would never set foot in Paris again if she carried out her intention; and it was abandoned. But she left him the whole of her manuscripts[183] and books.

As his own letters to her have not been printed, her death makes no difference in the amount of his correspondence. The war with the American Colonies, of which he foresaw the disastrous results, and the course of which he follows to Mann with the greatest keenness, fully absorbs as much of his time as he can spare from the vagaries of the Duchess of Kingston and the doings of the Duchess of Gloucester. Not many months before Madame du Deffand died had occurred the famous Gordon Riots, which, as he was in London most of the time, naturally occupy his pen. It was General Conway who, as the author of Barnaby Rudge has not forgotten, so effectively remonstrated with Lord George upon the occasion of the visit of the mob to the House of Commons; and four days later Walpole chronicles from Berkeley Square the events of the terrible 'Black Wednesday.' From the roof of Gloucester House he sees the blazing prisons,—a sight he shall not soon forget. Other subjects for which one dips in the lucky bag of his records are the defence of Gibraltar, the trial of Warren Hastings, the loss of the Royal George. But it is generally in the minor chronicle that he is most diverting. The last bon mot of George Selwyn or Lady Townshend, the newest 'royal pregnancy,' the details of court ceremonial, the most recent addition to Strawberry, the endless stream of anecdote and tittle-tattle which runs dimpling all the way,—these are the themes he loves best; this is the element in which his easy persiflage delights to disport itself. He is, above all, a rieur. About his serious passages there is generally a false ring, but never when he pours out the gossip that he loves, and of which he has so inexhaustible a supply. 'I can sit and amuse myself with my own memory,' he says to Mann in February, 1785, 'and yet find new stores at every audience that I give to it. Then, for private episodes [he has been speaking of his knowledge of public events], varieties of characters, political intrigues, literary anecdotes, etc., the profusion that I remember is endless; in short, when I reflect on all I have seen, heard, read, written, the many idle hours I have passed, the nights I have wasted playing at faro, the weeks, nay months, I have spent in pain, you will not wonder that I almost think I have, like Pythagoras, been Panthoides Euphorbus, and have retained one memory in at least two bodies.'

He was sixty-eight when he wrote the above letter. Mann was eighty-four, and the long correspondence—a correspondence 'not to be paralleled in the annals of the Post Office'—was drawing to a close. 'What Orestes and Pylades ever wrote to each other for four-and-forty years without meeting?' Walpole asks. In June, 1786, however, the last letter of the eight hundred and nine specimens printed by Cunningham was despatched to Florence.[184] In the following November, Mann died, after a prolonged illness. He had never visited England, nor had Walpole set eyes upon him since he had left him at Florence in May, 1741. His death followed hard upon that of another faithful friend (whose gifts, perhaps, hardly lay in the epistolary line),—bustling, kindly Kitty Clive. Her cheerful, ruddy face, 'all sun and vermilion,' set peacefully in December, 1785, leaving Cliveden vacant, not, as we shall see, for long.[185] Earlier still had departed another old ally, Cole, the antiquary, and the lapse of time had in other ways contracted Walpole's circle. In 1781, Lady Orford had ended her erratic career at Pisa, leaving her son a fortune so considerable as to make his uncle regret vaguely that the sale of the Houghton pictures had not been delayed for a few months longer. Three years later, she was followed by her brother-in-law, Sir Edward Walpole,—an occurrence which had the effect of leaving between Horace Walpole and his father's title nothing but his lunatic and childless nephew.

If his relatives and friends were falling away, however, their places—the places of the friends, at least—were speedily filled again; and, as a general rule, most of his male favourites were replaced by women. Pinkerton, the antiquary, who afterwards published the Walpoliana, is one of the exceptions; and several of Walpole's letters to him are contained in that book, and in the volumes of Pinkerton's own correspondence published by Dawson Turner in 1830. But Walpole's appetite for correspondence of the purely literary kind had somewhat slackened in his old age, and it was to the other sex that he turned for sympathy and solace. He liked them best; his style suited them; and he wrote to them with most ease. In July, 1785, he was visited at Strawberry by Madame de Genlis, who arrived with her friend Miss Wilkes and the famous Pamela,[186] afterwards Lady Edward Fitzgerald. Madame de Genlis at this date was nearing forty, and had lost much of her good looks. But Walpole seems to have found her less prÉcieuse and affected than he had anticipated, and she was, on this occasion, unaccompanied by the inevitable harp. A later visit was from Dr. Burney and his daughter Fanny,—'Evelina-Cecilia' Walpole calls her,—a young lady for whose good sense and modesty he expresses a genuine admiration. Miss Burney had not as yet entered upon that court bondage which was to be so little to her advantage. Another and more intimate acquaintanceship of this period was with Miss Burney's friend, Hannah More. Hannah More ultimately became one of Walpole's correspondents, although scarcely 'so corresponding' as he wished; and they met frequently in society when she visited London. On her side, she seems to have been wholly fascinated by his wit and conversational powers; he, on his, was attracted by her mingled puritanism and vivacity. He writes to her as 'St. Hannah;' and she, in return, sighs plaintively over his lack of religion. Yet (she adds) she 'must do him the justice to say, that except the delight he has in teasing me for what he calls over-strictness, I have never heard a sentence from him which savoured of infidelity.'[187] He evidently took a great interest in her works, and indeed in 1789 printed at his press one of her poems, Bonner's Ghost.[188] His friendship for her endured for the remainder of his life; and not long before his death he presented her with a richly bound copy of Bishop Wilson's Bible, with a complimentary inscription which may be read in the second volume of her Life and Correspondence.

It was, however, neither the author of Evelina nor the author of The Manners of the Great who was destined to fill the void created by the death of Madame du Deffand. In the winter of 1787-8, he had first seen, and a year later he made the formal acquaintance of, 'two young ladies of the name of Berry.' They had a story. Their father, at this time a widower, had married for love, and had afterwards been supplanted in the good graces of a rich uncle by a younger brother who had the generosity to allow him an annuity of a thousand a year. In 1783, Mr. Berry had taken his daughters abroad to Holland, Switzerland, and Italy, whence, in June, 1785, they had returned, being then highly cultivated and attractive young women of two-and-twenty and one-and-twenty respectively. Three years later, Walpole met them for the second time at the house of a Lady Herries, the wife of a banker in St. James's Street. The first time he saw them he 'would not be acquainted with them, having heard so much in their praise that he concluded they would be all pretension.' But on the second occasion, 'in a very small company,' he sat next the elder, Mary, 'and found her an angel both inside and out.' 'Her face'—he tells Lady Ossory—'is formed for a sentimental novel, but it is ten times fitter for a fifty times better thing, genteel comedy.' The other sister was speedily discovered to be nearly as charming. 'They are exceedingly sensible, entirely natural and unaffected, frank, and, being qualified to talk on any subject, nothing is so easy and agreeable as their conversation, nor more apposite than their answers and observations. The eldest, I discovered by chance, understands Latin, and is a perfect Frenchwoman in her language. The younger draws charmingly, and has copied admirably Lady Di.'s gipsies,[189] which I lent, though for the first time of her attempting colours. They are of pleasing figures: Mary, the eldest, sweet, with fine dark eyes that are very lively when she speaks, with a symmetry of face that is the more interesting from being pale; Agnes, the younger, has an agreeable, sensible countenance, hardly to be called handsome, but almost. She is less animated than Mary, but seems, out of deference to her sister, to speak seldomer; for they dote on each other, and Mary is always praising her sister's talents. I must even tell you they dress within the bounds of fashion, though fashionably; but without the excrescences and balconies with which modern hoydens overwhelm and barricade their persons. In short, good sense, information, simplicity, and ease characterize the Berrys; and this is not particularly mine, who am apt to be prejudiced, but the universal voice of all who know them.'[190]

'This delightful family,' he goes on to say, 'comes to me almost every Sunday evening. [They were at the time living on Twickenham Common.] Of the father not much is recorded beyond the fact that he was 'a little merry man with a round face,' and (as his eldest daughter reports) 'an odd inherent easiness in his disposition,' who seems to have been perfectly contented in his modest and unobtrusive character of paternal appendage to the favourites. Walpole's attachment to his new friends grew rapidly. Only a few days after the date of the foregoing letter, Mr. Kirgate's press was versifying in their honour, and they themselves were already 'his two Straw Berries,' whose praises he sang to all his friends. He delighted in devising new titles for them,—they were his 'twin wives,' his 'dear Both,' his 'Amours.' For them in this year he began writing the charming little volume of Reminiscences of the Courts of George the 1st and 2nd, and in December, 1789, he dedicated to them his Catalogue of Strawberry Hill. It was not long before he had secured them a home at Teddington and finally, when, in 1791, Cliveden became vacant, he prevailed upon them to become his neighbours. He afterwards bequeathed the house to them, and for many years after his death, it was their summer residence. On either side the acquaintance was advantageous. His friendship at once introduced them to the best and most accomplished fashionable society of their day, while the charm of their 'company, conversation and talents' must have inexpressibly sweetened and softened what, on his part, had begun to grow more and more a solitary, joyless, and painful old age.

His establishment of his 'wives' in his immediate vicinity was not, however, accomplished without difficulty. For a moment some ill-natured newspaper gossip, which attributed the attachment of the Berry family to interested motives, so justly aroused the indignation of the elder sister that the whole arrangement threatened to collapse. But the slight estrangement thus caused soon passed away; and at the close of 1791, they took up their abode in Mrs. Clive's old house, now doubly honoured. On the 5th of the December in the same year, after a fresh fit of frenzy, Walpole's nephew died, and he became fourth Earl of Orford. The new dignity was by no means a welcome one, and scarcely compensated for the cares which it entailed. 'A small estate, loaded with debt, and of which I do not understand the management, and am too old to learn; a source of law suits amongst my near relations, though not affecting me; endless conversations with lawyers, and packets of letters to read every day and answer,—all this weight of new business is too much for the rag of life that yet hangs about me, and was preceded by three weeks of anxiety about my unfortunate nephew, and a daily correspondence with physicians and mad-doctors, falling upon me when I had been out of order ever since July.'[191] 'For the other empty metamorphosis,' he writes to Hannah More, 'that has happened to the outward man, you do me justice in concluding that it can do nothing but tease me; it is being called names in one's old age. I had rather be my Lord Mayor, for then I should keep the nickname but a year; and mine I may retain a little longer,—not that at seventy-five I reckon on becoming my Lord Methusalem.' For some time he could scarcely bring himself to use his new signature, and occasionally varied it by describing himself as 'The uncle of the late Earl of Orford.' In 1792, he delivered himself, after the fashion of Cowley, of the following Epitaphium vivi Auctoris:—

The last line seems like another of the many echoes of Goldsmith's Retaliation. As for the fear indicated in the third, it is hinted that this at one time bade fair to be something more than a poetical apprehension. If we are to credit a tradition handed down by Lord Lansdowne, he had been willing to go through the form of marriage with either of the Berrys, merely to secure their society, and to enrich them, as he had the power of charging the Orford estate with a jointure of £2000 per annum. But this can only have been a passing thought at some moment when their absence, in Italy or elsewhere, left him more sensitive to the loss of their gracious and stimulating presence. He himself was far too keenly alive to ridicule, and too much in bondage to les biensÉances, to take a step which could scarcely escape ill-natured comment; and Mary Berry, who would certainly have been his preference, was not only as fully alive as was he to the shafts of the censorious, but, during the greater part of her acquaintanceship with him, was, apparently with his knowledge, warmly attached to a certain good-looking General O'Hara, who, a year before Walpole's death, in November, 1796, definitely proposed. He had just been appointed Governor of Gibraltar, and he wished Miss Berry to marry him at once, and go out with him. This, 'out of consideration for others,' she declined to do. A few months later the engagement was broken off, and she never again saw her soldier admirer. Whether Lord Orford's comfort went for anything in this adjournment of her happiness, does not clearly appear; but it is only reasonable to suppose that his tenacious desire for her companionship had its influence in a decision which, however much it may have been for the best (and there were those of her friends who regarded it as a providential escape), was nevertheless a lifelong source of regret to herself. When, in 1802, she heard suddenly at the Opera of O'Hara's death, she fell senseless to the floor.

The 'late Horace Walpole' never took his seat in the House of Lords. He continued, as before, to divide his time between Berkeley Square and Strawberry, to eulogize his 'wives' to Lady Ossory, and to watch life from his beloved Blue Room. Now and then he did the rare honours of his home to a distinguished guest,—in 1793, it was the Duchess of York; in 1795, Queen Charlotte herself. In the latter year died his old friend Conway, by this time a Field-Marshal; and it was evident at the close of 1796 that his faithful correspondent would not long survive him. His ailments had increased, and in the following January, he wrote his last letter to Lady Ossory:—

Six weeks after the date of the above letter, he died at his house in Berkeley Square, to which he had been moved at the close of the previous year. During the latter days of his life, he suffered from a cruel lapse of memory, which led him to suppose himself neglected even by those who had but just quitted him. He sank gradually, and expired without pain on the 2nd of March, 1797, being then in his eightieth year. He was buried at the family seat of Houghton.

His fortune, over and above his leases, amounted to ninety-one thousand pounds. To each of the Miss Berrys he left the sum of £4000 for their lives, together with the house and garden of 'Little Strawberry' (Cliveden), the long meadow in front of it, and all the furniture. He also bequeathed to them and to their father his printed works and his manuscripts, with discretionary power to publish. It was understood that the real editorship was to fall on the elder sister, who forthwith devoted herself to her task. The result was the edition, in five quarto volumes, of Lord Orford's Works, which has been so often referred to during the progress of these pages, and which appeared in 1798. It was entirely due to Mary Berry's unremitting care, her father's share being confined to a final paragraph in the preface, in which she is eulogized.[192]

Strawberry Hill passed to Mrs. Damer for life, together with £2000 to keep it in repair. After living in it for some years, she resigned it, in 1811, to the Countess Dowager of Waldegrave, in whom the remainder in fee was vested. It subsequently passed to George, seventh Earl of Waldegrave, who sold its contents in 1842. At his death, in 1846, he left it to his widow, Frances, Countess of Waldegrave, who married the Rt. Hon. Chichester S. Parkinson-Fortescue, later Lord Carlingford. Lady Waldegrave died in 1879; but she had greatly added to and extended the original building, besides restoring many of the objects by which it had been decorated in Walpole's day.