Strawberry Hill passed to Mrs. Damer for life, together with £2000 to keep it in repair. After living in it for some years, she resigned it, in 1811, to the Countess Dowager of Waldegrave, in whom the remainder in fee was vested. It subsequently passed to George, seventh Earl of Waldegrave, who sold its contents in 1842. At his death, in 1846, he left it to his widow, Frances, Countess of Waldegrave, who subsequently married the Rt. Hon. Chichester S. Parkinson-Fortescue, now Lord Carlingford. Lady Waldegrave died in 1879; but she had greatly added to and extended the original building, besides restoring many of the objects by which it had been decorated in Walpole's day.

CHAPTER X.

Macaulay on Walpole. Effect of the Edinburgh Essay. Macaulay and Mary Berry. - Portraits of Walpole. — Miss Hawkins's Description. - Pinkerton's Rainy Day at Strawberry. Walpole's Character as a Man; as a Virtuoso; as a Politician; as an Author and Letter-writer.

WHEN, in October, 1833, Lord (then Mr.)

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Macaulay completed for the Edinburgh his review of Lord Dover's edition of Walpole's letters to Sir Horace Mann, he had apparently performed to his entire satisfaction the operation known, in the workmanlike vocabulary of the time, as dusting the jacket' of his unfortunate reviewee. I was up at four this morning to put the last touch to it,' he tells his sister Hannah. I often differ with the majority about other people's writings, and still oftener about my own; and therefore I may very likely be mistaken; but I think that this article will be a hit. . . . Nothing ever cost me more pains than the first half; I never wrote anything so flowingly as the latter half; and I like the latter half the best. [The latter half, it should

be stated, was a rapid and very brilliant sketch of Sir Robert Walpole; the earlier, which involved so much labour, was the portrait of Sir Robert's youngest son.] I have laid it on Walpole [i. e., Horace Walpole] so unsparingly,' he goes on to say, 'that I shall not be surprised if Miss Berry should cut me. Neither am I sure that Lord and Lady Holland will be well pleased.' 1

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His later letters show him to have been a true prophet. Macvey Napier, then the editor of the Blue and Yellow,' was enthusiastic, praising the article 'in terms absolutely extravagant.' He says that it is the best that I ever wrote,' the critic tells his favourite correspondent, a statement which at this date must be qualified by the fact that he penned some of his most famous essays subsequent to its appearance. On the other hand, Miss Berry resented the review so much that Sir Stratford Canning advised its author not to go near her. But apparently her anger was soon dispelled, for the same letter which makes this announcement relates that she was already appeased. Lady Holland, too, was in a rage,' though with what part of the article does not transpire, while her good-natured husband told Macaulay

1 Trevelyan's Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay, ch. v.

privately that he quite agreed with him, but that they had better not discuss the subject. Lady Holland's irritation was probably prompted by her intimacy with the Waldegrave family, to whom the letters edited by Lord Dover belonged, and for whose benefit they were published. But, as Macaulay said justly, his article was surely not calculated to injure the sale of the book. Her imperious ladyship's displeasure, however, like that of Miss Berry, was of brief duration. Macaulay was too necessary to her réunions to be long exiled from her little court.

Among those who occupy themselves in such enquiries, it has been matter for speculation what particular grudge Macaulay could have cherished against Horace Walpole when, to use his own expression, he laid it on him 'so unsparingly.' To this his correspondence affords no clue. Mr. Cunningham holds that he did it to revenge the dislike which Walpole bore to the Bedford faction, the followers of Fox and the Shelburne school.' It is possible, as another authority has suggested, that in the Whig circles of Macaulay's time, there existed a traditional grudge against Horace Walpole,' owing to obscure political causes connected with his influence over his friend

Conway. But these reasons do not seem relevant enough to make Macaulay's famous onslaught a mere vendetta. It is more reasonable to suppose that between his avowed delight in Walpole as a letter-writer, and his robust contempt for him as an individual, he found a subject to his hand, which admitted of all the brilliant antithesis and sparkle of epigram which he lavished upon it. Walpole's trivialities and eccentricities, his whims and affectations, are seized with remorseless skill, and presented with all the rhetorical advantages with which the writer so well knew how to invest them. As regards his literary estimate, the truth of the picture can scarcely be gainsaid; but the personal character, as Walpole's surviving friends felt, is certainly too much en noir. Miss Berry, indeed, in her 'Advertisement' to vol. vi. of Wright's edition of the Letters, raised a gentle cry of expostulation against the entire representation. She laid stress upon the fact that Macaulay had not known Walpole in the flesh (a disqualification to which too much weight may easily be assigned); she dwelt upon the warmth of Walpole's attachments; she contested the charge of affectation; and, in short, made such a gallant attempt at a defence as her loyalty