the heart, as if she had just bought a sheep's pluck in St. James's market. As I was going, Hogarth put on a very grave face and said, Mr. Walpole, I want to speak to you.' I sat down and said I was ready to receive his commands. For shortness I will mark this wonderful dialogue by initial letters.

H. I am told you are going to entertain the town with something in our way.

W. Not very soon, Mr. Hogarth. H. I wish you would let me have it to correct it: I should be very sorry to have you expose yourself to censure; we painters must know more of these things than other people.

W. Do you think nobody understands painting but painters? H. Oh so far from it, there's Reynolds who certainly has genius; why, but t'other day he offered a hundred pounds for a picture that I would not hang in my cellar; and indeed, to say truth, I have generally found that persons who had studied painting least were the best judges of it; but what I particularly wished to say to you was about Sir James Thornhill (you know he married Sir James' daughter): I would not have you say anything against him; there was a book published some time ago, abusing him, and it gave great offence. He was the first that attempted history in England, and, I assure you, some Germans have said that he was a very great painter. W. My work will go no lower than the year 1700, and I really have not considered whether Sir J. Thornhill will come within my plan or not; if he does, I fear you and I shall not agree upon his merits.

H. I wish you would let me correct it; besides I am writing something of the same kind myself; I should be sorry we should clash.

W. I believe it is not much known what my work is, very few persons have seen it.

H. Why it is a critical history of painting is it not? W. No, it is an antiquarian history of it in England; I bought Mr. Vertue's MSS. and, I believe, the work will not give much offence; besides, if it does, I cannot help it: when I publish anything I give it to the world to think of it as they please.

H. Oh; if it is an antiquarian work, we shall not clash; mine is a critical work; I don't know whether I shall ever publish it. It is rather an apology for painters. I think it is owing to the

good sense of the English they have not painted better. W. My dear Mr. Hogarth, I must take my leave of you, you now grow too wild-and I left him. If I had stayed, there remained nothing but for him to bite me. I give you my honour this conversation is literal, and, perhaps as long as you have known Englishmen and painters you have never met with anything so distracted. I had consecrated a line to his genius (I mean, for wit) in my preface; I shall not erase it; but I hope nobody will ask me if he is not mad. Adieu!

CLXV.

The Hon. Horace Walpole to the Earl of Strafford.

Paris: September 8, 1769.

T'other night at the Duchess of Choiseul's at supper, the intendant of Rouen asked me if we had roads of communication all over England and Scotland? I suppose he thinks that in general we inhabit trackless forests and wild mountains, and that once a year a few legislators come to Paris to learn the arts of civil life, as to sow corn, plant vines and make operas. If this letter should contrive to scramble through that desert Yorkshire, where your lordship has attempted to improve a dreary hill and uncultivated vale, you will find I remember your commands of writing from this capital of the world, whither I am come for the benefit of my country, and where I am intensely studying those laws and that beautiful frame of government, which can alone render a nation happy, great and flourishing; where lettres de cachet soften manners, and a proper distribution of luxury and beggary ensures a common felicity. As we have a prodigious number of students in legislature of both sexes here at present, I will not anticipate their discoveries; but, as your particular friend, will communicate a rare improvement on nature which these great philosophers have made and which would add considerable beauties to those parts which your lordship has already recovered from the waste, and taught to look a little like a Christian country. secret is very simple, and yet demanded the effort of a mighty genius to strike it out. It is nothing but this: trees ought to be educated as much as men, and are strange awkward productions when not taught to hold themselves upright or bow on proper

The

occasions. The academy de belles lettres have even offered a prize for the man that shall recover the long lost art of an ancient Greek, called le sieur Orphée, who instituted a dancing school for plants, and gave a magnificent ball on the birth of the Dauphin of France which was performed entirely by forest-trees. In this whole. kingdom there is no such thing as seeing a tree that is not well behaved. They are first stripped up and then cut down; and you would as soon meet a man with his hair about his ears as an oak or ash. As the weather is very hot now, and the soil chalk, and the dust white, I assure you it is very difficult, powdered as both are all over, to distinguish a tree from a hair dresser. Lest this should sound like a travelling hyperbole, I must advertise your lordship, that there is little difference in their heights: for, a tree of thirty years' growth being liable to be marked as royal timber, the proprietors take care not to let their trees live to the age of being enlisted, but burn them, and plant others as often almost as they change their fashions. This gives an air of perpetual youth to the face of the country, and if adopted by us would realize Mr. Addison's visions, and Make our bleak rocks and barren mountains smile.'

What other remarks I have made in my indefatigable search after knowledge must be reserved to a future opportunity; but as your lordship is my friend, I may venture to say without vanity to you, that Solon nor any of the ancient philosophers who travelled to Egypt in quest of religions, mysteries, laws, and fables, never sat up so late with the ladies and priests and presidents du parlement at Memphis, as I do here--and consequently were not half so well qualified as I am to new-model a commonwealth. I have learned how to make remonstrances,' and how to answer them. The latter, it seems, is a science much wanted in my own country; and yet it is as easy and obvious as their treatment of trees, and not very unlike it. It was delivered many years ago in an oracular sentence of my namesake-Odi profanum vulgus, et arceo.' You must drive away the vulgar, and you must have an hundred and fifty thousand men to drive them away with-that is all. I do not wonder the intendant of Rouen thinks we are still in a state of barbarism, when we are ignorant of the very rudiments of government.

Alluding to the Remonstrances from the City of London, and other corporate bodies, after a majority of the House of Commons had voted against the claims of John Wilkes to take his seat as member for Middlesex.

The Duke and Duchess of Richmond have been here a few days, and have gone to Aubigné. I do not think him at all well, and am exceedingly concerned for it; as I know no man who has more estimable qualities. They return by the end of the month. I am fluctuating whether I shall not return with them, as they have pressed me to do, through Holland. I never was there, and could never go so agreeably; but then it would protract my absence three weeks, and I am impatient to be in my own cave, notwithstanding the wisdom I imbibe every day. But one cannot sacrifice one's self wholly to the public: Titus and Wilkes have now and then lost a day. Adieu, my dear lord! Be assured that I shall not disdain yours and Lady Strafford's conversation, though you have nothing but the goodness of your hearts, and the simplicity of your manners, to recommend you to the more enlightened understanding of your old friend.

CLXVI.

In refusing to be made the dummy of Thomas Chatterton's literary forgeries of the Rowley poems, Horace Walpole acted in a sensible and dignified manner. The partisans of Chatterton charged the great conoscente not only with arrogance and unkindness, but with being the indirect cause of poor Chatterton's death, as though Walpole could have guessed that the very life of this extraordinary boy depended on his being hoaxed by means of certain spurious legends. If,' wrote Walpole, Rowley could rise from the dead and acknowledge every line ascribed to him, he could not prove that I used Chatterton ill. I would take the ghost's word, and am sure it would be in my favour.' Among the letters and statements written to vindicate his own conduct, is to be found the following tribute of admiration for 'the marvellous boy,

The sleepless soul that perished in his pride.'

6

The Hon. Horace Walpole to the Editor of the Miscellanies of Chatterton.

Strawberry Hill: May, 1778. As the warmest devotees to Chatterton cannot be more persuaded than I am of the marvellous vigour of his genius at so very premature an age, I shall here subjoin the principal æras1 of his life,

In the original correspondence these data are given at the end of this latter, but they are very incomplete.

which, when compared with the powers of his mind, the perfection of his poetry, his knowledge of the world, which, though in some respects erroneous, spoke quick intuition, his humour, his vein of satire, and above all the amazing number of books he must have looked into, though chained down to a laborious and almost incessant service, and confined to Bristol, except at most for the last five months of his life, the rapidity with which he seized all the topics of conversation then in vogue, whether of politics, literature, or fashion; and when, added to all this mass of reflection, it is remembered that his youthful passions were indulged to excess, faith in such a prodigy may well be suspended-and we should look for some secret agent behind the curtain, if it were not as difficult to believe that any man possessed of such a vein of genuine poetry would have submitted to lie concealed, while he actuated a puppet; or would have stopped to prostitute his muse to so many unworthy functions. But nothing in Chatterton can be separated from Chatterton. His noblest flights, his sweetest strains, his grossest ribaldry, and his most common-place imitations of the productions of magazines, were all the effervescences of the same ungovernable impulse, which, cameleon-like, imbibed the colours of all it looked on. It was Ossian, or a Saxon monk, or Gray, or Smollet, or Junius-and if it failed most in what it most affected to be, a poet of the fifteenth century, it was because it could not imitate what had not existed. I firmly believe that the first impression made on so warm and fertile an imagination was the sight of some old parchments at Bristol; that meeting with Ossian's poems, his soul, which was all poetry, felt it was a language in which his invention could express itself; and having lighted on the names of Rowley and Canninge, he bent his researches towards the authors of their age; and as far as his means could reach, in so confined a sphere, he assembled materials enough to deceive those who have all their lives dealt in such uncouth lore, and not in our classic authors, nor have perceived that taste had not developed itself in the reign of Edward IV. It is the taste in Rowley's supposed poems that will for ever exclude them from belonging to that period. Mr. Tyrrwhit and Mr. Warton have convicted them of being spurious by technical criterions; and Rowley I doubt will remain in possession of nothing that did not deserve to be forgotten, even should some fragments of old parchments and old verses be ascertained antique.

T