The Royal Academy.

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writes to Mason, "is much inferior to last year's ;* nobody shines there but Sir Joshua and Gainsborough. The head of the former's Dido is very fine; I do not admire the rest of the piece. His Lord Richard Cavendish is bold and stronger than he ever coloured. The picture of my three nieces is charming. Gainsborough has two pieces with land and sea, so free and natural that one steps back for fear of being splashed. The back front of the Academy is handsome, but like the other to the street, the members are so heavy, that one cannot stand back enough to see it in any proportion, unless in a barge moored in the middle of the Thames." The same day, May 6, he writes to Conway from Strawberry Hill:

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Though it is a bitter north-east, I came hither today to look at my lilacs, though à la glace; and to get from pharaoh, for which there is a rage. I doated on it above thirty years ago; but it is not decent to sit up all night now with boys and girls. My nephew, Lord Cholmondeley, the banker à la mode, has been demolished. He and his associate, Sir Willoughby Aston, went early t'other night to Brooks's, before Charles Fox and Fitzpatrick, who keep a bank there, were come; but they soon arrived, attacked their rivals, broke their bank, and won above four thousand pounds. There,' said Fox, 'so should all usurpers be served!' He did still better; for he sent for his tradesmen, and paid as far as the money would go. In the

*This was the second Exhibition at Somerset House. The first was in May, 1780.

mornings he continues his war on Lord North, but cannot break that bank.

"I told you in my last that Tonton was arrived. I brought him this morning to take possession of his new villa, but his inauguration has not been at all pacific. As he has already found out that he may be as despotic as at St. Joseph's, he began with exiling my beautiful little cat; upon which, however, we shall not quite agree. He then flew at one of my dogs, who returned it by biting his foot till it bled, but was severely beaten for it. I immediately rung for Margaret to dress his foot; but in the midst of my tribulation could not keep my countenance; for she cried, 'Poor little thing, he does not understand my language!' I hope she will not recollect, too, that he is a Papist!"

We have a further anecdote of Charles Fox told a few days later, also in a letter to Conway :

I had been to see if Lady Aylesbury was come to town: as I came up St. James's Street, I saw a cart and porters at Charles's door; coppers and old chests of drawers loading. In short, his success at faro has awakened his host of creditors; but unless his bank has swelled to the size of the Bank of England, it could not have yielded a sop apiece for each. Epsom, too, had been unpropitious; and one creditor has actually seized and carried off his goods, which did not seem worth removing. As I returned full of this scene, whom should I find sauntering by my own door but Charles? He came up, and talked to me at the coach-window on

the Marriage Bill,* with as much sang-froid as if he knew nothing of what had happened. I have no admiration for insensibility to one's own faults, especially when committed out of vanity. Perhaps the whole philosophy consisted in the commission. If you could have been as much to blame, the last thing you would bear well would be your own reflections. The more marvellous Fox's parts are, the more one is provoked at his follies, which comfort so many rascals and blockheads, and make all that is admirable and amiable in him only matter of regret to those who like him as I do.t

* On the 7th of June, Mr. Fox moved for leave to bring in a bill to amend the Act of the 26th of George II., for preventing clandestine marriages. The bill passed the Commons, but was rejected by the Lords.

"Mr. Fox never had much intimate intercourse with Horace Walpole; did not, I think, like him at all; had no opinion of his judgment or conduct; probably had imbibed some prejudice against him, for his ill-usage of his father; and certainly entertained an unfavourable, and even unjust, opinion of his abilities as a writer." So says Lord Vassall-Holland in one of the passages from his pen printed in Russell's Memorials of Fox. See vol. i., p. 276. It may be mentioned here, that Lord Holland's Collections for the Life of Fox, which are contained in the work just referred to, include numerous extracts from manuscript papers of Horace Walpole. "These papers, the property of Lord Waldegrave, were lent to me," says Lord Holland, "and have been long in my possession." That the manuscripts to which Lord Holland thus had access comprised the portion of Walpole's correspondence with Mann, which was first published in 1843, appears by several passages which his lordship quotes from these letters. Is it possible that this circumstance may furnish a solution of the ethnological question, to which we have adverted on p. 141, as to the descent of Macaulay's New Zealander from Walpole's Peruvian? From 1831 Macaulay had been an habitué of Holland House. Trevelyan's "Life of Lord Macaulay,” vol. i. p. 176, et seq.

"I did intend to settle at Strawberry on Sunday; but must return on Thursday, for a party made at Marlborough House for Princess Amelia. I am continually tempted to retire entirely; and should, if I did not see how very unfit English tempers are for living quite out of the world. We grow abominably peevish and severe on others, if we are not constantly rubbed against and polished by them. I need not name friends and relations of yours and mine as instances. My prophecy on the short reign of faro is verified already. The bankers find that all the calculated advantages of the game do not balance pinchbeck parolis and debts of honourable women. The bankers, I think, might have had a previous and more generous reason, the very bad air of holding a bank:-but this country is as hardened against the petite morale, as against the greater.What should I think of the world if I quitted it entirely ?"

Again a few days, and we come upon an early mention of the youthful William Pitt: "The young William Pitt has again displayed paternal oratory. The other day, on the Commission of Accounts, he answered Lord North, and tore him limb from limb. If Charles Fox could feel, one should think such a rival, with an unspotted character, would rouse him. What if a Pitt and Fox should again be rivals!" Some time later, Walpole asks Lady Ossory: "Apropos of bon-mots, has our lord told you that George Selwyn calls Mr. Fox and Mr. Pitt' the idle and the industrious

Mrs. Hobart's Sans Souci.

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apprentices'? If he has not, I am sure you will thank me, Madam."

In the summer of 1781, Horace has a touch of rheumatism, but still he keeps up his juvenile tone. Witness the two following letters to Lady Ossory:

"Strawberry Hill, July 7, 1781.

"You must be, or will be, tired of my letters, Madam ; every one is a contradiction to the last; there is alternately a layer of complaints, and a layer of foolish spirits. To-day the wind is again in the dolorous For these four days I have been confined with a pain and swelling in my face.

corner.

says it is owing to the long drought;

The apothecary but as I should

not eat grass were there ever such plenty, and as my cows, though starving, have no swelled cheeks, I do not believe him. I humbly attribute my frequent disorders to my longevity, and to that Proteus the gout, who is not the less himself for being incog. Excuses I have worn out, and, therefore, will not make any for not obeying your kind invitation again to Ampthill. I can only say, I go nowhere, even when Tonton is invitedexcept to balls-and yet though I am the last Vestris that has appeared, Mrs. Hobart did not invite me to her Sans Souci last week, though she had all my other juvenile contemporaries, Lady Berkeley, Lady Fitzroy, Lady Margaret Compton, and Mrs. French, etc. Perhaps you do not know that the lady of the fête, having made as many conquests as the King of Prussia, has borrowed the name of that hero's villa for her hut on