Part 4

In the midst of all his gaieties, his successes, and perhaps his hopes, a cloud hovered over the destinies of his father. The opposition, Horace saw, in 1741, wished to ruin his father 'by ruining his constitution.' They wished to continue their debates on Saturdays, Sir Robert's only day of rest, when he used to rush to Richmond New Park, there to amuse himself with a favourite pack of beagles. Notwithstanding the minister's indifference to this his youngest son, Horace felt bitterly what he considered a persecution against one of the most corrupt of modern statesmen.

'Trust me, if we fall, all the grandeur, all the envied grandeur of our house, will not cost me a sigh: it has given me no pleasure while we have it, and will give me no pain when I part with it. My liberty, my ease, and choice of my own friends and company, will sufficiently counterbalance the crowds of Downing Street. I am so sick of it all, that if we are victorious or not, I propose leaving England in the spring.

The struggle was not destined to last long. Sir Robert was forced to give up the contest and be shelved with a peerage. In 1742, he was created Earl of Orford, and resigned. The wonder is that, with a mortal internal disease to contend with, he should have faced his foes so long. Verses ascribed to Lord Hervey ended, as did all the squibs of the day, with a fling at that 'rogue Walpole.'

'For though you have made that rogue Walpole retire, You are out of the frying-pan into the fire: But since to the Protestant line I'm a friend, I tremble to think how these changes may end.'

Horace, notwithstanding an affected indifference, felt his father's downfall poignantly. He went, indeed, to court, in spite of a cold, taken in an unaired house; for the prime minister now quitted Downing Street for Arlington Street. The court was crowded, he found, with old ladies, the wives of patriots who had not been there for 'these twenty years,' and who appeared in the accoutrements that were in vogue in Queen Anne's time. 'Then', he writes, 'the joy and awkward jollity of them is inexpressible! They titter, and, wherever you meet them, are always looking at their watches an hour before the time. I met several on the birthday (for I did not arrive time enough to make clothes), and they were dressed in all the colours of the rainbow. They seem to have said to themselves, twenty years ago, "Well, if ever I do go to court again, I will have a pink and silver, or a blue and silver;" and they keep their resolutions.'

Another characteristic anecdote betrays his ill-suppressed vexation:--

'I laughed at myself prodigiously the other day for a piece of absence. I was writing, on the king's birthday, and being disturbed with the mob in the street, I rang for the porter and with an air of grandeur, as if I was still at Downing Street, cried, "Pray send away those marrow-bones and cleavers."

The poor fellow, with the most mortified air in the world, replied, "Sir, they are not at our door, but over the way, at my Lord Carteret's."--"Oh!" said I, "then let them alone; may be, he does not dislike the noise!" I pity the poor porter, who sees all his old customers going over the way too.'

The retirement of Sir Robert from office had an important effect on the tastes and future life of his son Horace. The minister had been occupying his later years in pulling down his old ancestral house at Houghton, and in building an enormous mansion, which has since his time been, in its turn, partially demolished. When Harley, Earl of Orford, was known to be erecting a great house for himself, Sir Robert had remarked that a minister who did so committed a great imprudence. When Houghton was begun, Sir Hynde Aston reminded Sir Robert of this speech. 'You ought to have recalled it to me before,' was the reply; 'for before I began building, it might have been of use to me.'

This famous memorial of Walpolean greatness, this splendid folly, constructed, it is generally supposed, on public money, was inhabited by Sir Robert only ten days in summer, and twenty days in winter; in the autumn, during the shooting season, two months. It became almost an eyesore to the quiet gentry, who viewed the palace with a feeling of their own inferiority. People as good as the Walpoles lived in their gable-ended, moderate-sized mansions; and who was Sir Robert, to set them at so immense a distance?

To the vulgar comprehension of the Premier, Houghton, gigantic in its proportions, had its purposes. He there assembled his supporters; there, for a short time, he entertained his constituents and coadjutors with a magnificent, jovial hospitality, of which he, with his gay spirits, his humourous, indelicate jokes, and his unbounded good-nature, was the very soul. Free conversation, hard-drinking, were the features of every day's feast. Pope thus describes him:--

'Seen him, I have, but in his happier hour, Of social pleasure, ill exchanged for power; Seen him uncumbered with the venal tribe, Smile without art, and win without a bribe.'

Amid the coarse taste one gentle refinement existed: this was the love of gardening, both in its smaller compass and it its nobler sense of landscape gardening. 'This place,' Sir Robert, in 1743, wrote to General Churchill, from Houghton, 'affords no news, no subject of entertainment or amusement; for fine men of wit and pleasure about town understand neither the language and taste, nor the pleasure of the inanimate world. My flatterers here are all mutes: the oaks, the beeches, the chestnuts, seem to contend which best shall please the lord of the manor. They cannot deceive; they will not lie. I in sincerity admire them, and have as many beauties about me as fill up all my hours of dangling, and no disgrace attending me, from sixty-seven years of age. Within doors we come a little nearer to real life, and admire, upon the almost speaking canvas, all the airs and graces the proudest ladies can boast.'

In these pursuits Horace cordially shared. Through his agency, Horace Mann, still in the diplomatic service, at Florence, selected and purchased works of art, which were sent either to Arlington Street, or to form the famous Houghton Collection, to which Horace so often refers in that delightful work, his 'Anecdotes of Painting.'

Amongst the embellishments of Houghton, the gardens were the most expensive.

'Sir Robert has pleased himself,' Pulteney, Earl of Bath, wrote, 'with erecting palaces and extending parks, planting gardens in places to which the very earth was to be transported in carriages, and embracing cascades and fountains whose water was only to be obtained by aqueducts and machines, and imitating the extravagance of Oriental monarchs, at the expense of a free people whom he has at once impoverished and betrayed.'

The ex-minister went to a great expense in the cultivation of plants, bought Uvedale's 'Hortus Siccus;' and received from Bradley, the Professor of Botany at Cambridge, the tribute of a dedication, in which it was said that 'Sir Robert had purchased one of the finest collections of plants in the kingdom.'

What was more to his honour still, was Sir Robert's preservation of St. James's Park for the people. Fond of outdoor amusements himself, the Premier heard, with dismay, a proposal on the part of Queen Caroline to convert that ancient park into a palace garden. 'She asked my father,' Horace Walpole relates, 'what the alteration might possibly cost?'--Only three crowns' was the civil, witty, candid answer. The queen was wise enough to take the hint. It is possible she meant to convert the park into gardens that should be open to the public as at Berlin, Mannheim, and even the Tuileries. Still it would not have been ours.

Horace Walpole owed, perhaps, his love of architecture and his taste for gardening, partly to the early companionship of Gray, who delighted in those pursuits. Walpole's estimation of pictures, medals, and statues, was however the fruit of a long residence abroad. We are apt to rail at continental nations; yet had it not been for the occasional intercourse with foreign nations, art would have altogether died out among us. To the 'Grandes Tours,' performed as a matter of course by our young nobility in the most impressionable period of their lives we owe most of our noble private collections. Charles I. and Buckingham, renewed, in their travels in Spain, the efforts previously made by Lord Arundel and Lord Pembroke, to embellish their country seats. Then came the Rebellion; and like a mighty rushing river, made a chasm in which much perished. Art languished in the reign of the second Charles, excepting in what related to portrait painting. Evelyn stood almost alone in his then secluded and lovely retirement at Wotton; apart in his undying exertions still to arrest the Muses ere they quitted for ever English shores. Then came the deadly frost of William's icy influence. The reign of Anne was conspicuous more for letters than for art: architecture, more especially, was vulgarized under Vanbrugh. George I. had no conception of anything abstract: taste, erudition, science, art, were like a dead language to his common sense, his vulgar profligacy, and his personal predilections. Neither George II. nor his queen had an iota of taste, either in language, conduct, literature, or art. To be vulgar, was haut-ton; to be refined, to have pursuits that took one from low party gossip, or heterodox disquisitions upon party, was esteemed odd: everything original was cramped; everything imaginative was sneered at; the enthusiasm that is elevated by religion was unphilosophic; the poetry that is breathed out from the works of genius was not comprehended.

It was at Houghton, under the roof of that monster palace, that Horace Walpole indulged that tastes for pictures which he had acquired in Italy. His chief coadjutor, however, as far as the antiquities of painting are concerned, was George Vertue, the eminent engraver. Vertue was a man of modest merit, and was educated merely as an engraver; but, conscious of talent, studied drawing, which he afterwards applied to engraving. He was patronised both by the vain Godfrey Kneller and by the intellectual Lord Somers: yet his works have more fidelity than elegance, and betray in every line the antiquary rather than the genius. Vertue was known to be a first-rate authority as to the history of a painter; he was admitted and welcomed into every great country house in England; he lived in an atmosphere of vertù; every line a dilettante collector wrote, every word he uttered, was minuted down by him; he visited every collection of rarities; he copied every paper he could find relative to art; registers of wills, and registers of parishes, for births and deaths were his delight; sales his recreation. He was the 'Old Mortality' of pictures in this country. No wonder that his compilations were barely contained in forty volumes, which he left in manuscript. Human nature has singular varieties: here was a man who expended his very existence in gathering up the works of others, and died without giving to the world one of his own. But Horace Walpole has done him justice. After Vertue's death he bought his manuscripts from his widow. In one of his pocket-books was contained the whole history of this man of one idea: Vertue began his collection in 1713, and worked at it until his death in 1757, forty-four years.

He died in the belief that he should one day publish an unique work on painting and painters: such was the aim of his existence, and his study must have been even more curious than the wonderfully crammed, small house at Islington, where William Upcott, the 'Old Mortality' in his line, who saved from the housemaid's fire-lighting designs the MSS. Of Evelyn's

Life and Letters, which he found tossing about in the old gallery at Wotton, near Dorking, passed his days. Like Upcott, like Palissy, Vertue lived and died under the influence of one isolated aim, effort, and hope.

In these men, the cherished and amiable monomania of gifted minds was realized. Upcott had every possible autograph from every known hand in his collection: Palissy succeeded in making glazed china; but Vertue left his ore to the hands of others to work out into shape, and the man who moulded his crude materials was Horace Walpole, and Vertue's forty volumes were shaped into a readable work, as curious and accurate in facts as it is flippant and prejudiced in style and opinions.

Walpole's 'Anecdotes of Painting' are the foundation of all our small amount of knowledge as to what England has done formerly to encourage art.

One may fancy the modest, ingenious George Vertue arranging first, and then making a catalogue of the Houghton Gallery; Horace, a boy still, in looks,--with a somewhat chubby face, admiring and following: Sir Robert, in a cocked hat, edged with silver lace, a curled short wig, a loose coat, also edged with silver lace, and with a half humorous expression on his vulgar countenance, watching them at intervals, as they paraded through the hall, a large square space, adorned with bas-reliefs and busts, and containing a bronze copy of the Laocoon, for which Sir Robert (or rather we English) paid a thousand pounds; or they might be seen hopping speedily through the ground-floor apartments where there could be little to arrest the footsteps of the mediaeval-minded Vertue. Who but a courtier could give one glance at a portrait of George I., though by Kneller? Who that was a courtier in that house would pause to look at the resemblance, also by Kneller, of the short-lived, ill-used Catherine Shorter, the Premier's first wife--even though he still endured it in his bed-room? a mute reproach for his neglect and misconduct. So let us hasten to the yellow dining-room where presently we may admire the works of Titian, Guido, Vanderwerf, and last, not least, eleven portraits by Vandyck, of the Wharton family, which Sir Robert bought at the sale of the spendthrift Duke of Wharton.

Then let us glance at the saloon, famed for the four large 'Market Pieces,' as they were called, by Rubens and Snyders: let us lounge into what were called the Carlo Maratti and the Vandyck rooms; step we also into the green velvet bed-chamber, the tapestry-room, the worked bed chamber; then comes another dining-room: in short, we are lost in wonder at this noble collection, which cost £40,000.

Many of the pictures were selected and bargained for by Vertue, who, in Flanders, purchased the Market Pieces referred to, for £428; but did not secure the 'Fish Market,' and the 'Meat Market,' by the same painter. In addition to the pictures, the stateliness and beauty of the rooms were enhanced by rich furniture, carving, gilding, and all the subsidiary arts which our grandfathers loved to add to high merit in design or colouring. Besides his purchases, Sir Robert received presents of pictures from friends, and expectant courtiers; and the gallery at Houghton contained at last 222 pictures. To our sorrow now, to our disgrace then, this splendid collection was suffered to go out of the country: Catherine, empress of Russia, bought it for £40,000, and it adorns the Hermitage Palace of St. Petersburgh.

After Sir Robert's retirement from power, the good qualities which he undoubtedly possessed, seemed to re-appear as soon as the pressure of party feeling was withdrawn. He was fast declining in health when the insurrection of 1745 was impending. He had warned the country of its danger in his last speech, one of the finest ever made in the House of Lords: after that effort his voice was heard no more. The gallant, unfortunate Charles Edward was then at Paris, and that scope of old experience