Biography of Lionel Cranfield Sackville 1st Duke Dorset 1688-1765

Letters of Horace Walpole. 12 May 1752. Arlington Street. To George Montagu Esq (age 39).

You deserve no charity, for you never write but to ask it. When you are tired of yourself and the country, you think over all London, and consider who will be proper to send you an account of it. Take notice, I won't be your gazetteer; nor is my time come for being a dowager, a maker of news, a day-labourer in scandal. If you care for nobody but for what they can tell you, you must provide yourself elsewhere. The town is empty, nothing in it but flabby mackerel, and wooden gooseberry tarts, and a hazy east wind. My sister is gone to Paris; I go to Strawberry Hill in three days for the summer, if summer there will ever be any.

If you want news you must send to Ireland, where there is almost a civil war, between the Lord Lieutenant and Primate on one side (observe, I don't tell you what that side is), and the Speaker on the other, who carries questions by wholesale in the House of Commons against the Castle; and the teterrima belli causa is not the common one.

Reams of scandalous verses and ballads are come over, too bad to send you, if I had them, but I really have not. What is more provoking for the Duke of Dorset (age 64), an address is come over directly to the King (not as usual through the channel of the Lord Lieutenant), to assure him of their great loyalty, and apprehensions of being misrepresented. This is all I know, and you see, most imperfectly.

I was t'other night to see what is now grown the fashion, Mother Midnight's Oratory.³⁰⁹ It appeared the lowest buffoonery in the world even to me, who am used to my uncle Horace (age 73). There is a bad oration to ridicule, what it is too like, Orator Henley; all the rest is perverted music: there is a man who plays so nimbly on the kettle-drum, that he has reduced that noisy instrument to an object of sight; for, if you don't see the tricks with his hands, it is no better than ordinary: another plays on a violin and trumpet together: another mimics a bagpipe with a German flute, and makes it full as disagreeable. There is an admired dulcimer, a favourite salt-box, and a really curious jew's-harp. Two or three men intend to persuade you that they play on a broomstick, which is drolly brought in, carefully shrouded in a case, so as to be mistaken for a bassoon or bass-viol; but they succeed in nothing but the action. The last fellow imitates * * * * * curtseying to a French horn. There are twenty medley overtures, and a man who speaks a prologue and an epilogue, in which he counterfeits all the actors and singers upon earth: in short, I have long been convinced, that what I used to imagine the most difficult thing in the world, mimicry, is the easiest; for one has seen for these two or three years, at Foote's and the other theatres, that when they lost one mimic, they called,Odd man!" and another came and succeeded just as well.

Adieu! I have told you much more than I intended, and much more than I could conceive I had to say, except how does Miss Montagu?

P. S. Did you hear Captain Hotham's bon-mot on Sir Thomas Robinson's making an assembly from the top of his house to the bottom? He said, he wondered so many people would go to Sir Thomas's, as he treated them all de haut en bas.

Note 309. "Among other diversions and amusements which increase upon us, the town," says the Gentleman's Magazine for January 1752, "has been lately entertained with a kind of farcical performance, called 'The Old Woman's Oratory,' conducted by Mrs. Mary Midnight and her family, intended as a banter on Henley's Oratory, and a puff for the Old Woman's Magazine."-E.

Letters of Horace Walpole. 13 May 1752. Arlington Street. To Horace Mann 1st Baronet (age 45).

By this time you know my way, how much my letters grow out of season, as it grows summer. I believe it is six weeks since I wrote to you last; but there is not only the usual deadness of summer to account for my silence; England itself is no longer England. News, madness, parties, whims, and twenty other causes, that used to produce perpetual events are at an end; Florence itself is not more inactive. Politics, "Like arts and sciences are travelled west."

They are cot into Ireland, where there is as much bustle to carry a question in the House of Commons, as ever it was here in any year forty-one. Not that there is any opposition to the King's measures; out of three hundred members, there has never yet been a division of above twenty-eight against the government: they are much the most zealous subjects the king has. The Duke of Dorset (age 64) has had the art to make them distinguish between loyalty and aversion to the Lord Lieutenant.

I last night received yours of May 5th; but I cannot deliver your expressions to Mr. Conway (age 31), for he and Lady Ailesbury (age 31) are gone to his regiment in Ireland for four months, which is a little rigorous, not only after an exile in Minorca, but more especially unpleasant now as they have just bought one of the most charming places in England, Park-place, which belonged to Lady Archibald Hamilton (age 48), and then to the Prince. You have seen enough of Mr. Conway to judge how patiently he submits to his duty. Their little [his granddaughter-in-law] girl (age 3) is left with me.

The Gunnings [Maria Gunning Countess Coventry (age 19) and Elizabeth Gunning Duchess Hamilton and Argyll (age 18)]are gone to their several castles, and one hears no more of them, except that such crowds flock to see the Duchess Hamilton pass, that seven hundred people sat up all night in and about an inn in Yorkshire to see her get into her postchaise next morning.

I saw lately at Mr. Barret's a print of Valombrosa, which I should be glad to have, if you please; though I don't think it gives much idea of the beauty of the place: but you know what a passion there is for it in England, as Milton has mentioned it.

Miss Blandy (deceased) died with a coolness of courage that is astonishing, and denying the fact³¹⁰, which has made a kind of party in her favour as if a woman who would not stick at parricide, would scruple a lie!

We have made a law for immediate execution on conviction of murder: it will appear extraordinary to me if it has any effect;³¹¹ for I can't help believing that the terrible part of death must be the preparation for it.

Note 310. Miss Blandy was executed at Oxford, on the 6th of April, "I am perfectly innocent," she exclaimed, "of any intention to destroy or even hurt my dear father; so help me God in these my last moments!"-E.

Note 311. Smollett, on the contrary, was of opinion that the expedient had been productive of very good effects.-E.