His lieutenants already beat up for volunteers; but he disclaims all connexions with Lord Bath, who, he says, forced him upon the famous ministry of twenty-four hours, and by which he says he paid all his debts to him. This will soon grow a turbulent scene-it is not unpleasant to sit upon the beach and see it; but few people have the curiosity to step out to the sight. You, who knew England in other times, will find it difficult to conceive what an indifference reigns with regard to ministers and their squabbles. The two Miss Gunnings,' and a late extravagant dinner at White's, are twenty times more the subject of conversation than the two brothers [Newcastle and Pelham] and Lord Granville. These are two Irish Girls, of no fortune, who are declared the handsomest women alive. I think their being two so handsome and both such perfect figures is their chief excellence, for singly I have seen much handsomer women than either; however, they can't walk in the park, or go to Vauxhall, but such mobs follow them that they are generally driven away. The dinner was a folly of seven young men, who bespoke it to the utmost extent of expense: one article was a tart made of duke cherries from a hot-house; and another, that they tasted but one glass out of each bottle of champagne. The bill of fare is got into print, and with good people has produced the apprehension of another earthquake. Your friend St. Leger' was at the head of these luxurious heroes he is the hero of all fashion. I never saw more dashing vivacity and absurdity, with some flashes of parts. He had a cause the other day for ducking a sharper, and was going to swear: 1 The Beauties Maria and Elizabeth, of whom we shall read so much. They were the daughters of John Gunning, Esq., of Castle Coote, in Ireland, by Bridget, daughter of Theobald Bourke, sixth Viscount Mayo. The elder was now (1751) in her eighteenth year, the younger in her seventeenth year. Maria married, 5 March, 1752, the sixth Earl of Coventry, and died, 1 October, 1760, many years before her husband; Elizabeth married first, 14 February, 1752, the sixth Duke of Hamilton; and secondly, 3 March, 1759, Colonel John Campbell, afterwards fifth Duke of Argyll, for whom she had refused the Duke of Bridgewater, the father of British Inland Navigation. The Duchess of Hamilton and Argyll (the adventurer Elizabeth Gunning, who died 20 March, 1790) was the mother of two Dukes of Hamilton and two Dukes of Argyll.-CUNNINGHAM. 2 It is remarkable that this great lady [the Duchess of Hamilton] and her sister, Lady Coventry, had been originally so poor, that they had thought of being actresses; and when they were first presented to the Earl of Harrington, the Lord Lieutenant at the Castle of Dublin, Mrs. Woffington the actress lent clothes to them-Walpole Memoires of George III., vol. iii. p. 190.-CUNNINGHAM. 3 The town is grown extremely thin within this week, though White's continues numerous enough with young people only, for Mr. St. Leger's vivacity, and the idea the old ones have of it, prevent the great chairs at the old Club from being filled with their proper drowsy proprietors.—Richard Rigby to Duke of Bedford, July 2, 1751.-CUNNINGHAM. the judge said to him, "I see, Sir, you are very ready to take an oath." "Yes, my lord," replied St. Leger, "my father was a judge." We have been overwhelmed with lamentable Cambridge and Oxford dirges on the Prince's death: there is but one tolerable copy; it is by a young Lord Stormont,' a nephew of Murray, who is much commended. You may imagine what incense is offered to Stone by the people of Christchurch: they have hooked in, too, poor Lord Harcourt, and call him Harcourt the Wise! his wisdom has already disgusted the young Prince; "Sir, pray hold up your head. Sir, for God's sake, turn out your toes!" Such are Mentor's precepts ! I am glad you receive my letters; as I knew I had been punctual, it mortified me that you should think me remiss. Thank you for the transcript from Bubb de tristibus! I will keep your secret, though I am persuaded that a man who had composed such a funeral oration on his master and himself fully intended that its flowers should not bloom and wither in obscurity. We have already begun to sell the pictures that had not found place at Houghton: the sale gives no great encouragement to proceed (though I fear it must come to that!); the large pictures were thrown away; the whole-length Vandykes went for a song! I am mortified now at having printed the catalogue. Gideon the Jew,' and Blakiston the independent grocer, have been the chief 1 David Murray, seventh Viscount Stormont, ambassador at Vienna and Paris, and president of the council. He died in 1796.-DOVER. 2 A letter to Mr. Mann from Bubb Dodington on the Prince's death. It is dated June 4, and contains the following bombastic and absurd passage; which, however, proves how great were the expectations of Dodington, if the Prince had lived to succeed his father: "We have lost the delight and ornament of the age he lived in, the expectations of the public-in this light I have lost more than any subject in England, but this is light; public advantages confined to myself do not, ought not, to weigh with me. But we have lost the refuge of private distress, the balm of the afflicted heart, the shelter of the miserable against the fang of private calamity; the arts, the graces, the anguish, the misfortunes of society have lost their patron and their remedy. I have lost my protector, my companion, my friend that loved me, that condescended to hear, to communicate, and to share in all the pleasures and pains of the human heart, where the social affections and emotions of the mind only presided, without regard to the infinite disproportion of our rank and condition. This is a wound that cannot, ought not, to heal-if I pretended to fortitude here, I should be infamous, a monster of ingratitude; and unworthy of all consolation, if I was not inconsolable."-DOVER. 3 Sir Sampson Gideon, a rich Jew broker, remarkable for his slovenly dress. He died at his seat, Belvedere in Kent, 17 Oct. 1762. His son was created, in 1789, an Irish Peer by the title of Baron Eardley of Spalding. See Letter to Bentley, July 9, 1754, vol. ii. 395..-CUNNINGHAM. 4 Blakiston had been caught in smuggling, and pardoned by Sir Robert Walpole ; but continuing the practice, and being again detected, was fined five thousand pounds; purchasers of the pictures sold already moralising! there, if you love Adicu! I have no more articles to-day for my literary gazette. 328. TO SIR HORACE MANN. Arlington Street, July 16, 1751. I SHALL do little more to-day than answer your last letter of the 2nd of this month; there is no kind of news. My chief reason for writing to you is to notify a visit that you will have at Florence this summer from Mr. Conway, who is forced to go to his regiment at Minorca, but is determined to reckon Italy within his quarters. You know how particularly he is my friend; I need not recommend him to you; but you will see something very different from the staring boys that come in flocks to you new, once a-year, like woodcocks. Mr. Conway is deservedly reckoned one of the first and most rising young men in England. He has distinguished himself in the greatest style both in the Army and in Parliament. This is for you: for the Florentine ladies, there is still the finest person and the handsomest face I ever saw-no, I cannot say that all this will be quite for them; he will not think any of them so handsome as my Lady Aylesbury. It is impossible to answer you why my Lord Orford would not marry Miss Nicoll. I don't believe there was any particular reason or attachment anywhere else; but, unfortunately for himself and for us, he is totally insensible to his situation, and talks of selling Houghton with a coolness that wants nothing but being intended for philosophy to be the greatest that ever was. Mind, it is a virtue that I envy more than I honour. I am going into Warwickshire [to Ragley'] to Lord Hertford, and set out this evening, and have so many things to do that you must excuse me, for I neither know what I write, nor have time to write Adieu! more. on which he grew a violent party man, and a ringleader of the Westminster independent electors, and died an alderman of London.-WALPOLE. Sir Matthew Blakiston, alderman of Bishopsgate ward, was Lord Mayor of London in 1760-1, and died in Jermyn-street, London, 14 July, 1774.-CUNNINGHAM. 1 The seat of the Earl of Hertford, in Warwickshire.-CUNNINGHAM. 329. TO GEORGE MONTAGU, ESQ. Daventry, July 22, 1751. You will wonder in what part of the county of Twicks lies this Daventry. It happens to be in Northamptonshire. My letter will scarce set out till I get to London, but I choose to give it its present date lest you should admire, that Mr. Usher of the Exchequer, the lord treasurer of pen, ink, and paper, should write with such coarse materials. I am on my way from Ragley, and if ever the waters subside and my ark rests upon dry land again, I think of stepping over to Tonghes: but your journey has filled my postchaise's head with such terrible ideas of your roads, that I think I shall let it have done raining for a month or six weeks, which it has not done for as much time past, before I begin to grease my wheels again, and lay in a provision of French books, and tea, and blunderbusses, for my journey. Before I tell you a word of Ragley, you must hear how busy I have been upon Grammont. You know I have long had a purpose of a new edition, with notes, and cuts of the principal beauties and heroes, if I could meet with their portraits. I have made out all the people at all remarkable, except my Lord Janet, whom I cannot divine unless he be Thanet. Well, but what will entertain you is, that I have discovered the philosophe Whitnell; and what do you think his real name was? Only Whetenhall! Pray do you call cousins ?1 Look in Collins's Baronets, and under the article Bedingfield you will find that he was an ingenious gentleman, and la blanche Whitnell, though one of the greatest beauties of the age, an excellent wife. I am persuaded the Bedingfields crowded in these characters to take off the ridicule in Grammont; they have succeeded to a miracle. Madame de Mirepoix told me t'other day, that she had known a daughter of the Countess de Grammont, an Abbess in Lorrain, who, to the ambassadress's great scandal, was ten times more vain of the blood of Hamilton than of an equal quantity of that of Grammont. She had told her much of her sister my Lady Stafford, whom I remember to have seen when I was a child. She 1 A sister of Mr. Montagu's was married to Nathaniel Whetenhall, Esq.-WALPOLE. 2 Claude Charlotte, Countess of Stafford, wife of Henry, Earl of Stafford, and daughter of Philibert, Count of Grammont, and Elizabeth Hamilton, his wife.CUNNINGHAM. used to live at Twickenham when Lady Mary Wortley and the Duke of Wharton lived there; she had more wit than both of them. What would I give to have had Strawberry Hill twenty years ago ! I think any thing but twenty years. Lady Stafford used to say to her sister, "Well, child, I have come without my wit to-day; that is, she had not taken her opium, which she was forced to do if she had any appointment, to be in particular spirits. This rage of Grammont carried me a little while ago to old Marlborough's at Wimbledon, where I had heard there was a picture of Lady Denham;' it is a charming one. The house you know stands in a hole, or, as the whimsical old lady said, seems to be making a curtsey. She had directed my Lord Pembroke not to make her go up any steps; "I won't go up steps; "-and so he dug a saucer to put it in, and levelled the first floor with the ground. There is a bust of Admiral Vernon, erected I suppose by Jack Spencer, with as many lies upon it as if it was a tombstone; and a very curious old picture up-stairs, that I take to be Louis Sforza the Moor, with his nephew Galeazzo. There are other good pictures in the house, but perhaps you have seen them. As I have formerly seen Oxford and Blenheim, I did not stop till I came to Stratford-upon-Avon, the wretchedest old town I ever saw, which I intended for Shakspeare's sake to find snug, and pretty, and antique, not old. His tomb, and his wife's, and John à Combes', are in an agreeable church, with several other monuments; as one of the Earl of Totness, and another of Sir Edward Walker, the Memoirs writer. There are quantities of Cloptons, too; but the bountiful corporation have exceedingly bepainted Shakspeare and the principal personages.' I was much struck with Ragley; the situation is magnificent; the house far beyond any thing I have seen of that bad age: for it was begun, as I found by an old letter in the library from Lord Ranelagh to Earl Conway, in the year 1680. By the way, I have had, and am to have, the rummaging of three chests of pedigrees and letters to that secretary Conway, which I have interceded for 1 Margaret Brooke, the second wife of Sir John Denham the poet. (See Johnson's Lives of the Poets by Cunningham, vol. i. p. 71.) There is a fine portrait of her by Lely at Hampton Court.-CUNNINGHAM. 2 See Walpole's Reminiscences, vol. i. p. cxxxix.-CUNNINGHAM. 3 Shakespeare's tomb was repainted and bepainted in 1748. When Walpole visited Stratford, Shakespeare's own house, New Place and the Mulberry Tree were still standing. Sir Hugh Clopton, who died in the December of 1751, at the age of eighty, took pride in showing the Mulberry Tree of Shakespeare. We have unhappily no view of New Place.-CUNNINGHAM. |