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I wish he may have the leisure to cultivate, and the skill to encourage them, with due regard to merit, otherwise, it is better to neglect them. You, Sir, have pointed out the true sources, and the best examples, to your Countrymen. They have nothing to do, but to be what they once were; and yet, 'perhaps, it is more difficult to restore good taste to a nation that has degenerated, than to introduce it in one, where, as yet, it has never flourished. You are generous enough to wish, and sanguine enough to foresee, that it shall one day flourish in England. I too must wish, but can hardly extend my hopes so far. It is well for us that you do not see our public exhibitions, but our artists are yet in their infancy, and therefore I will not absolutely despair.

I owe to Mr Howe the honour I have of conversing with Count Algarotti, and it seems as if I meant to indulge myself in the opportunity: but I have done, Sir;-I will only add, that I am proud of your approbation, having no relish for any other fame than what is confer'd by the few real Judges, that are so thinly scattered over the face of the earth.—I am, Sir, with great respect,

Your most obliged humble servant,
T. GRAY.

A. S. E.

Il Conte Francesco Algarotti Ciambellan di S. M. Il Ré di Prussia &c. &c. &c. Bolognia Italia

LETTER FROM THE HON. HORACE WALPOLE TO.

[The following letter of Horatio Walpole, Lord Orford, in defence of Sir Robert Wal

pole, against a charge of his having instigated George II. to burn his father's will, contains a curious history, which is but partially told in the 6th chapter of his "Reminiscences."-" At the first council," he says, "held by the new sovereign (George II.), Dr Wake, archbishop of Canterbury; produced the will of the late king, and delivered it to the successor, expecting it would be opened, and read in council. On the contrary, his majesty put it in his pocket, and stalked out of the room, without uttering a word on the subject. The poor prelate was thunderstruck, and had not the presence of mind, or the courage, to demand the testament's being opened; or, at least, to have it registered." He then goes on to

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say, that as the king never mentioned the will more, whispers only by degrees informed the public that the will was burnt; the contents of course were never ascertained; but rumour assigned to the Duchess of Kendal forty thousand pounds, and a large legacy to the Queen of Prussia. Discoursing," says his Lordship, "once with Lady Suffolk, on that suppressed testament, she made the only plausible shadow of an excuse that could be made for George the Second; she told me that George the First had burnt two wills made in favour of his son.". "The crime," he adds, "of the First George could only palliate, not justify, the criminality of the Second; for the Second did not punish the guilty, but the innocent. But bad precedents are always dangerous, and too likely to be copied."]

October 14, 1778. I THINK you take in no newspapers, nor, I believe, condescend to read any more modern than the Paris à la main at the time of the Ligue-consequently, you have not seen a new scandal on my father, which, you will not wonder, offends me. You cannot be interested in his defence, but as it comprehends some very curious anecdotes, you will not grudge me indulging myself to a friend in vindicating a name so dear to me.

In the account of Lady Chesterfield's death and fortune, it is said, that the late king, at the instigation of Sir R. W., burnt his father's will, which contained a large legacy to that his supposed daughter, and I believe his real one, (for she was very like him,) as her brother General Schulembourg is in black to the late king. The fact of suppressing the will is indubitably true; the instigator most false, as I can demonstrate thus.

When the news arrived of the death of George I., my father carried the account from Lord Townshend to the

then Prince of Wales. One of the first acts of royalty is for the new monarch to make a speech to the privy council. Sir Robert asked the king, who he would please to have draw the speech; which was, in fact, asking who was to be prime minister. His Majesty replied, Sir Spencer Comp

ton.*

It is a wonderful anecdote, and

*Sir Spencer Compton," says Lord Orford, "was speaker of the House of Commons, and treasurer, I think, at that time to his Royal Highness, who, by that first command, implied his intention of making Sir Spencer his prime minister. He

Duke of N- ; the late Lord Waldegrave shewed me a letter from that Duke to the Earl of Waldegrave, then Embassador at Paris, with directions about that transaction, or at least about payment of the pension, I forget which. I have somewhere, but cannot turn to it now, a memorandum of that affair, and who the prince was, whom I may mistake in calling the Duke of Wolfenbuttle. There was a third copy of the will, I likewise forget with whom deposited. The newspapers say, which is true, that Lord Chesterfield filed a bill in Chancery against the late king, to oblige him to produce the will, and was silenced, I think, by payment of £20,000. There was another legacy to his own daughter, the Queen of Prussia, which has at times been, and I believe is still, claimed by the King of Prussia.

little known, that the new premier, a very dull man, could not draw the speech, and the person to whom he applied was the deposed premier. The Queen, who favoured my father, observed how unfit a man he was for successor, who was reduced to beg assistance of his predecessor. The council met as soon as possible, the next morning at latest. Then Archbishop Wake, with whom one copy of the will had been deposited, (as another was, I think, with the Duke of Wolfenbuttle, who had a pension for sacrificing it, which, I know, the late Duke of Newcastle transacted,) advanced and delivered the will to the king, who put it into his pocket, and went out of council without opening the archbishop not having courage, or presence of mind, to desire it to be read, as he ought to have done.

it;

These circumstances, which I solemnly assure you are strictly true, prove that my father neither advised, nor was consulted; nor is it credible that the king, in one night's time, should have passed from the intention of disgracing him, to make him his bosom confidant in so delicate an affair.

I was once talking to the late Lady Suffolk, the former mistress, on that extraordinary event. She said, "I cannot justify the deed to the legatees, but towards his father, the late king, it was justifiable; for George I. had burnt two wills made in favour of George II."-I suppose they were the testaments of the Duke and Duchess of Zell, parents of George the First's wife, whose treatment of her they always resented.

I said I know the transaction of the

was a worthy man, of exceeding grave formality, but of no parts-as his conduct immediately proved. The poor gentleman was so little qualified to accommodate himself to the grandeur of the moment, and to conceive how a new sovereign should address himself to his ministers, and he had also been so far from meditating to supplant the premier, that in his distress it was to Sir Robert himself he had recourse, and whom he besought to make the draught of the king's speech for him ;"-" from that moment," he adds, " there was no more question of Sir Spencer Compton as prime minister. He was created an earl, soon received

the garter, and became president of that council, at the head of which he was much fitter to sit than to direct."-Lord Orford's Reminiscences. VOL. IV.

Do not mention any part of this story; but it is worth preserving, as I am assured you are satisfied of my scrupulous veracity. It may, perhaps, be authenticated hereafter, by collateral evidence that may come out. If ever true history does come to light, my father's character will have just honour paid to it. Lord Chesterfield, one of his sharpest enemies, has not, with all his prejudices, left a very unfavourable account of him, and it would alone be raised by comparison of their two characters. Think of one, who calls Sir Robert the corrupter of youth, leaving a system of education to poison them from their nursery Chesterfield, Pulteney, and Bolingbroke, were the saints that reviled my father.

!

I beg your pardon, but you allow me to open my heart to you when it is full. Yours ever, H. W.

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land, and the Mistress of the great Parliament thereof, happiness to every one that followeth the right way, and believes in God, and is so directed.

This premised, we have heard from more than one of the comers and goers from that country, that thou hast seized our Armenian servant, a person of great esteem. We sent him to thee to compose a difference between us and thee, and we wrote to thee concerning him, that thou shouldst use him well. Then after this we heard that thou hadst set him at liberty. But for what reason didst thou take him, and for what reason didst thou set him at liberty? Hath he exceeded any covenant, or hath he made any covenant with thee and broke it? We had not sent him unto thee but upon the account of our knowledge and assurance of his understanding and integrity; and when he resolved upon his journey into that country, we gave directions to dispatch some of our affairs. Wherefore we wrote unto thee concerning him, and said, If thou hast any necessity or business with us, he will convey it to us from thee. And we said unto thee, speak with him, which if it should be, what thou talkest about with him will come to us, without addition or diminution.

As for what our servant Alkaid Ali Abdo'llah did to thy servant the Christian, by God we know nothing of it, nor gave him any permission as to any thing that passed between them. And in the instant that we heard from him that he had taken thy man, we commanded him to set him at liberty, and he set him at liberty forthwith, out of hand; and from that we never shewed any favour to Alkaid Ali, nor was our mind right towards him till he died.

Our Christian servant, the merchant (Balih), told us that thou hadst a mind to an ostrich, and we gave him two, a male and a female, which shall come to thee if God will. And lo, O Secretary! the goods of our servant, much esteemed with us, when he cometh he shall bring what is with him, if it please God. And we are in expectation of thy messenger, the ambassador; and if he comes, he shall see nothing from us but what is fair, and we will deliver to him the Christians, and do what he pleases, if

God will. Wherefore be kind to our servant with respect.

Written the first of the glorious
Ramadan, in the year 1125.

SABINA.

Morning-Scenes in the Dressing-room of a rich Roman Lady.

(From the German of Böttiger.)

SCENE I.

Sabina comes from her Bed-chamber into her Dressing-room-Restaurations-Skaphion brings the Asses' Milk-Phiale the Paint-Stimmi the black Eye-tincture-Mastiche the Teeth.

IN the Royal Museum at Portici, among the immense numbers of ancient paintings brought from Herculaneum and Pompeii, there are four little pieces which have attracted particular attention, for this reason, that they were not, like the others, painted upon the wall, but attached to it separately, a circumstance which implies that, by their possessors, fifteen hundred years ago, they had been regarded as of something more than common value. The third of these pieces represents the dressing-chamber of an Herculanean lady. One of the virtuosi, who have described the curiosities of Portici, speaks of it in these terms:

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A young woman is standing among her attendants; one of these dresses her hair, another sits by her, a third stands near; they are all elegantly attired." After having bestowed a more accurate attention upon this beautiful and nearly uninjured painting as engraved in the Pitture D'Erculano,* I am inclined to suppose that the following would be a more correct description of it. It is a family piece, representing a mother with her two beautiful daughters, whose features sufficiently indicate their relation to her. The mother is seated upon a chair somewhat elevated, with a footstool before it, of the kind always mentioned, as constituting a principle article of ornamental furniture in the female apartments of these

* Pitture D'Erculano, t. iv. tab. xliii.

times, adorned with carving, gilding, coverlids, and cushions, all of the most costly execution and quality. With her right hand she leans tenderly upon her younger daughter, whose face is turned to her witn an affectionate expression. On the other side stands the elder daughter. occupied with a female slave, who is arranging something in the back part of her hair. In other respects her dress is already finished, the hair is encircled with a double band, in the front it is fastened with long dressing-pins, whose heads alone are visible; the locks behind float in careless ringlets over the shoulders. The whole dress, with its exquisite border, the ear-rings, armlets, &c. shew that the day is that of a festival. It may be, that the scene represents a bride in the attire of her wedding-day. Near her, upon a beautiful little table, a white and blue band lies beneath a dressing-box, together with a few green leaves, probably meant for an offering-garland. At the foot of the table there stands a slender gently curved ewer. The whole gives us a view of a female toilette of that age and country, in which the most agree able mixture was exhibited of Grecian taste with Roman splendour.

We hear much and often of the extravagant and costly dresses of the Roman ladies of that age, when the spoils and luxuries of a plundered world were all collected in the imperial city; when the whole earth was ruled by the proud Romans, and these by their yet prouder wives. Many of our readers, we doubt not, will consider a peep into the morning and toilette hours of a lady of that time, as likely to furnish nearly as much amusement as the perusal of a heroic romance, founded on the manners of our tilting and tournaying forefathers, or a tale of ghosts and goblins in the Radcliff taste. They may perhaps remember something of a description of this sort in the travels of Anacharsis; but there, they will recollect, they saw only the modes and fashions of the retired and domestic matrons of Athens. In Rome, things wore a quite different aspect. most luxurious lady of an English Nabob, the most expensive Knesin of St Petersburgh, however extravagant her wishes may be, can never hope for a a moment to rival the profuse splendour which was daily commanded by the wife of one of those Roman

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knights or senators, who robbed whole countries, who saw kings at their feet, who brought hundreds of slaves of every complexion from their subjugated provinces, to administer to the pomp of their Roman insulæ, or their Italian villas.

A whole regiment of female slaves, each having her own particular department in the great work of the toilette or the wardrobe, attended on the nod of the Domina; for by that name was she called by her domestics, no less than by her lovers and dependants. That great painter of manners, Lucian, has given us a true and lively description of the levée of one of these ladies, which we shall begin with translating.

"Could any one see this fair creature," says Lucian, " at the moment when she awakes from her sleep, he would have no great difficulty in believing him to be in company with a monkey or baboon,-according to all authorities a bad omen to begin the day with. It is for this reason she takes especial care that no male eyes shall see her at this hour. Now she takes her seat amidst a circle of officious old hags and dainty waiting damsels, whose skill and dexterity are all zealously engaged to call from their grave the dead charms of their mistress. To wash sleep from the eyes with a basin of fresh well-water, and then set alertly and merrily about the management of household concernswhat a tasteless old-fashioned idea! No, the first concerns to be attended to are the salves, and powders, and essences, and lotions! The room has the appearance of a millinery shop. Every slave has her own department at the toilette: one bears a silver washhand-basin, another a silver pot-dechambre, another a silver ewer, others hold up as many looking-glasses and boxes as the apartment will admit of; and in all these, nothing but Deceit, and Treachery, and Falsehood-in one, teeth and gums-in another, eyelashes and eyebrows, and such like trumpery. But the most, both of art and time, are devoted to the hair. Some, that have the rage for turning their naturally black locks into white and yellow, besmear them all over with salves, and then expose them to be sucked in and burned in under the sun's rays at noontide. Others are contented to keep them as black as they are; but they

lavish the whole substance of their husbands upon them, so that the whole of Arabia breathes from the hair of one of them. Burning lotions are kept boiling on the fire to crimp and twist what nature has made smooth and sleek. The hair of one must be brought down from the head, and taught to lie close to the eyebrows, lest the Cupids, I suppose, should have too much play-ground on the forehead; but behind, the locks float over the back in bundles of vanity.'

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But is it not possible that Lucian has been too hard upon the poor ladies of his age? Lucian was a great satirist, but he had so much wit, that we, for our parts, do not suspect him of having had frequent recourse to caricature. Were it necessary, however, to bring any authority in confirmation of his, we might point out abundant passages, at least as strong as the above, in the most reverend fathers of the church, particularly from the Pedagogus of Clement of Alexandria, but most of all from that invaluable mine of information, Tertullian's famous treatise on the Dress of Women. But here too, we well know that our authorities would be represented as suspicious, and the over austerity of these divines would be said to have incapa citated them from giving a just account of things as they stood. Our fair readers, however, must ascribe it to their own well-known spirit of incredulity, that we trouble them even with the threatening of such formidable citations.

Our Domina-without injury to all the other ladies, Roman and not Roman, who bore the same name, she may be called Sabina-at her first awakening is any thing but an amiable object. Perhaps Lucian's similitude of the she-baboon may not be far amiss. But you shall judge for yourselves. According to the custom of her times, she had placed on her face over-night, a plaster of bread soaked in asses milk. The inventor of this embrocation, by means of which the skin was rendered very soft and white, was the illustrious Poppea, the wife of Nero, and it had preserved her name. During the night, part of the beauty-plaster had been sucked into, and part of it had dried upon, her face, so that Sabina's physiognomy re

Amores, T. ii. p. 440. ed. Wetsten.

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If we take into our consideration the fact that, in addition to all this, our Domina had laid aside, with the rest of her dress, several not unimportant items of the "human face divine,” such, for example, as the eyebrows, the teeth, the hair, &c. and that therefore she probably bore much more likeness to the death's head, over which Hamlet moralized, than to the living model of the Venus of Praxiteles,-we shall, perhaps, upon the whole, be forced to admit that Lucian's comparison of the monkey was, if not the most gallant that he might have selected, the most graphic, piquant, and just. In truth, old Ennius had observed the same likeness several centuries before;

"Simia quam similis turpissima Bestia nobis."

Before, however, Sabina comes into what is, properly speaking, the dressing-room, her own body-damsel, the much-teased Smaragdis, has already her person, the signal for which, from performed certain little services about these lazy lords and ladies of the world, was a crack of the fingers.*

*There is not much of caricature, after all, in the famous question put into the mouth of a Roman lady by Juvenal—“ Is

then a slave a man ?" That idea, if not expressed openly in words, was the ruling principle of much of their conduct-it was one part of this to give directions to their slaves, not by language, but by nods and gestures. The pious Clement of Alexandria, the fingers (οι δια των δακτύλων ψοφοι, των for this reason, mentions the cracking of

οικετων προκλητικο) as instances of the mode

in which slavery brought men down to the condition of beasts. The digitis concrepare was a common signal to the servant in waiting; but its most usual meaning was, that he or she should bring the pot-de-chambre. It is thus, that in the Trimalchio of Petronius we read, "Trimalchio homo lautissimus digitos concrepuit ad quos signum spado ludenti matellam supposuit." one of Martial's epigrams, we read of a Castratus, who was, it seems, skilful in this part of his vocation, delicatæ sciscitator

In

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