'To Mary's lips has ancient Rome Her purest language taught; And from the modern city home Agnes its pencil brought.
'Rome's ancient Horace sweetly chants Such maids with lyric fire; Albion's old Horace sings nor paints, He only can admire.
'Still would his press their fame record, So amiable the pair is! But, ah! how vain to think his word Can add a straw to Berry's.'
On the following day, Mary, whom he terms the Latin nymph sent the following lines:--
'Had Rome's famed Horace thus addrest His Lydia or his Lyce, He had ne'er so oft complained their breast To him was cold and icy.
'But had they sought their joy to explain, Or praise their generous bard, Perhaps, like me, they had tried in vain, And felt the task too hard.'
The society of this family gave Horace Walpole the truest, and perhaps the only relish he ever had of domestic life. But his mind was harassed towards the close of the eighteenth century, by the insanity not only of his nephew, but by the great national calamity, that of the king. 'Every _eighty-eight_ seems,' he remarks, 'to be a favourite period with fate;' he was 'too ancient,' he said, 'to tap what might almost be called a new reign;' of which he was not likely to see much. He never pretended to penetration, but his foresight, 'if he gave it the reign, would not prognosticate much felicity to the country from the madness of his father, and the probable regency of the Prince of Wales. His happiest relations were now not with politics or literature, but with Mrs. Damer and the Miss Berrys, to whom he wrote:--'I am afraid of protesting how much I delight in your society, lest I should seem to affect being gallant; but, if two negatives make an affirmative, why may not two ridicules compose one piece of sense? and, therefore, as I am in love with you both, I trust it is a proof of the good sense of your devoted--H. WALPOLE,'
He was doomed, in the decline of life, to witness two great national convulsions: of the insurrection of 1745 he wrote feelingly--justly--almost pathetically: forty-five years later he was tired, he said, of railing against French barbarity and folly. 'Legislators! a Senate! To neglect laws, in order to annihilate coats-of-arms and liveries!' George Selwyn said, that Monsieur the king's brother was the only man of rank from whom they could not take a title. His alarm at the idea of his two young friends going to the Continent was excessive. The flame of revolution had burst forth at Florence: Flanders was not a safe road; dreadful horrors had been perpetrated at Avignon. Then he relates a characteristic anecdote of poor _Marie Antoinette!_ She went with the king to see the manufacture of glass. As they passed the Halle, the _poissardes_ hurra'd them. 'Upon my word,' said the queen, 'these folks are civiller when you visit them, than when they visit you.'