Litchfield could not agree. We shall be as celebrated as Baiæ or Tivoli; and if we have not as sonorous names as they boast, we have very famous people: Clive and Pritchard, actresses; Scott and Hudson, painters; my Lady Suffolk, famous in her time; Mr. H[ickey], the impudent Lawyer, that Tom Hervey wrote against; Whitehead, the poet; and Cambridge, the everything.' Cambridge has already been referred to as a contributor to The World, and the Whitehead was the one mentioned in Churchill's stinging couplet :

'May I (can worse disgrace on manhood fall?)
Be born a Whitehead, and baptiz'd a Paul,'

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who then lived on Twickenham Common. Hickey, a jovial Irish attorney, was the legal adviser of Burke and Reynolds, and the 'blunt, pleasant creature' of Goldsmith's Retaliation.' Scott was Samuel Scott, the English Canaletto; Hudson, Sir Joshua's master, who had a house on the river near Lord Radnor's. But Walpole's best allies were two of the other sex. One was Lady Suffolk, the whilom friend (as Mrs. Howard) of Pope and Swift and Gay, whose home at Marble Hill is celebrated in the Walpole - cum - Pulteney poem; the other was red-faced Mrs. Clive, who occupied a house

known familiarly as 'Clive-den,' and officially as Little Strawberry. She had not yet retired from the stage. Lady Suffolk's stories of the Georgian Court and its scandals, and Mrs. Clive's anecdotes of the green-room, and of their common neighbour at Hampton, the great 'Roscius' himself (with whom she was always at war), must have furnished Walpole with an inexhaustible supply of just the particular description of gossip which he most appreciated.

CHAPTER VI.

Letter from Xo Ho. - The Robinson the Printer. Gray's

Gleanings from the Short Notes.
Strawberry Hill Press.
Odes.

- Other Works. Catalogue of Royal and Noble Authors. Anecdotes of Painting. Humours of the Press. The Parish Register of Twickenham. — Lady Fanny Shirley. Fielding. The Castle of Otranto.

IN

N order to take up the little-variegated thread of Walpole's life, we must again resort to the Short Notes, in which, as already stated, he has recorded what he considered to be its most

important occurrences. In 1754, he had been chosen member, in the new Parliament of that year, for Castle Rising, in Norfolk. In March, 1755, he says, he was very ill-used by his nephew, Lord Orford [i. e., the son of his eldest brother, Robert], upon a contested election in the House of Commons, on which I wrote him a long letter, with an account of my own conduct in politics.' This letter does not seem to have been preserved, and it is difficult to conceive that its theme could have involved very lengthy explanations. In February, 1757,

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he vacated his Castle Rising seat for that of Lynn, and about the same time, he tells us, used his best endeavours, although in vain, to save the unfortunate Admiral Byng, who was executed, pour encourager les autres, in the following March. But with the exception of his erection of a tablet to Theodore of Corsica, and the dismissal, in 1759, of Mr. Müntz, with whom his connection seems to have been exceptionally prolonged, his record for the next decade, or until the publication of the Castle of Otranto, is almost exclusively literary, and deals with the establishment of his private printing press at Strawberry Hill, his publication thereat of Gray's Odes and other works, his Catalogue of Royal and Noble Authors, his Anecdotes of Painting, and his above-mentioned romance. This accidental absorption of his chronicle by literary production will serve as a sufficient reason for devoting this chapter to those efforts of his pen which, from the outset, were destined to the permanence of type.

Already, as far back as March, 1751, he had begun the work afterwards known as the Memoires of the last Ten Years of the Reign of George II., to the progress of which there are scattered references in the Short Notes. He

had intended at first to confine them to the history of one year, but they grew under his hand. His first definite literary effort in 1757, however, was the clever little squib, after the model of Montesquieu's Lettres Persanes, entitled A Letter from Xo Ho, a Chinese Philosopher at London, to his Friend Lien Chi, at Peking, in which he ingeniously satirizes the 'late political revolutions' and the inconstant disposition of the English nation, not forgetting to fire off a few sarcasms à propos of the Byng tragedy. The piece, he tells Mann, was written. ' in an hour and a half' (there is always a little of Oronte's Je n'ai demeuré qu'un quart d'heure à le faire about Walpole's literary efforts), was sent to press next day, and ran through five editions in a fortnight.' Mrs. Clive was of opinion that the rash satirist would be sent to the Tower; but he himself regarded it as 'perhaps the only political paper ever written, in which no man of any party could dislike or

1 It may be observed that when Walpole's letter was published, it was briefly noticed in the Monthly Review, where at this very date Oliver Goldsmith was working as the hind of Griffiths and his wife. It is also notable that the name of Xo Ho's correspondent, Lien Chi, seems almost a foreshadowing of Goldsmith's Lien Chi Altangi. Can it be possible that Walpole supplied Goldsmith with his first idea of the Citizen of the World?