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His death.

Scott's epitaph.

smith. And so, with varying symptoms, he lay on in his chambers in Brick Court till Monday, the 4th of April, 1774, on which day it was known through town that Goldsmith was dead. He died at half-past four that morning in strong convulsions.

When Burke was told the news, he burst into tears. When Reynolds was told it, he left his painting-room, where he then was, and did no more work that day. How Johnson was affected at the moment we can only guess; but three months afterward he wrote as follows to Bennet Langton, in Lincolnshire :

Chambers, you find, is gone far, and poor Goldsmith is gone much farther. He died of a fever, exasperated, as I believe, by the fear of distress. He raised money and squandered it by every artifice of acquisition and folly of expense. not his frailties be remembered; he was a very great man.

But let

When Goldsmith died he was forty-five years and five months old. His body was buried, on the 9th of April, in the burying-ground of the Temple Church. The monument to him in Westminster Abbey, with the Latin inscription by Johnson, was erected in 1776.

In the Temple Church there is a modern monument to Oliver Goldsmith erected in 1860.

Sir Walter Scott's epitaph for him is :

The wreath of Goldsmith is unsullied; he wrote to exalt virtue and expose vice; and he accomplished his task in a manner which raises him to the highest rank among British authors.

BIBLIOGRAPHY.

Goldsmith's Complete Works, with memoir by David Mas

son.

Oliver Goldsmith. William Black. (English Men of Letters.)
Biography of Oliver Goldsmith. Washington Irving.
(London, 1886.)

Famous Plays. J. F. Molloy.

BOOK VII.

HORACE WALPOLE AND GRAY.

CHAPTER XX.

The corre

THE correspondence of Horace Walpole is a great mine of facts and fancies, too extensive to explore for spondence. any one without ample leisure and strong inclination to the task. These letters were pronounced by Walter Scott to be the best in our language, and Lord Byron declared them to be incomparable. Since these verdicts, the collections of letters by Walpole that were known to Scott and Byron have received the addition of several others, published at different times, besides many separate letters which have come to light. The total number of Walpole's published letters cannot now fall much short of three thousand; the earliest of these is dated in November, 1735, the latest in January, 1797. Thus we see that the correspondence extends nearly over our period. Throughout all these sixty years, the writer, to Its extent. use his own phrase, lived always in the big, busy world, and whatever there passed before him, his restless fingers, restless even when stiffened by the gout, recorded and commented on for the amusement of his correspondents. It is a serious piece of work to attack this mass of narrative and description, anecdotes and criticisms, and very much of it is irrelevant to our purpose, and has ceased to be interesting.

Mr. Seeley's excellent, and not too large, book gives admirable selections from the letters, with reference to

Birth and parentage.

Gray.

just those things that are interesting to my subject, and it is from his careful selections that I further condense. Horace Walpole was born on the 24th of September, 1717, the youngest son of the foremost Englishman of his time, Sir Robert Walpole. Walpole tells us that in the first years of his life he was much indulged both by his mother and Sir Robert, being a delicate child; and he relates the story of being carried, on account of his longing to see the king, to St. James's to kiss the hand of George I., just before His Majesty began his last journey to Hanover. He was sent to Eton and from there to King's College, Cambridge. As soon as he became of age he was put in the possession of a handsome income, from several purely sinecure offices procured for him by his father, all capable of being executed by deputy, and leaving him with plenty of money and nothing to do.

Thus at leisure, he set out on the continental tour Traveling with which was then considered indispensable for a man of fashion. His companion was the poet Gray, with whom Walpole then formed a friendship which lasted through their lives, in spite of the interruption caused by a slight dissension that came up between them in traveling, as so often happens in the midst of the fatigues of journeys.

Walpole took his seat in Parliament, and delivered his maiden speech in 1742, but it does not appear that he acquired any reputation in debate. His constant attendance at the House had the chief merit, it would seem, for furnishing material for his correspondence, and the same may be said for his wide acquaintance with fashionable society.

During his active life the war of parties was largely carried on by anonymous pamphlets, and Walpole gave

powerful help in this way to the subjects which aroused

his interest.

employment.

But he found in art and literature his chief employ- Art and literament. He read widely, especially in the line of history ture his chief and archæology, and thus developed a passion for collecting and imitating antiquities and curiosities of all kinds. For this he had means and leisure, as his duties, for instance as Usher of the Exchequer, were nominally to shut the gates of the Exchequer, and to provide the Exchequer and Treasury with the paper, parchment, pens, ink, sand, wax, tape, and other articles of the sort used in their department.

His chief amusement for many years was the erection and adornment of his villa at Twickenham, an eccentric little building on the Thames, in which he gathered a collection of pictures and all sorts of curiosities. called it Strawberry Hill.

He

He bought the place with only a cottage on it from Mrs. Chenevix, who kept a fashionable toy-shop, and he

writes:

It's a little plaything house that I got out of Mrs. Chenevix's Villa at shop, and is the prettiest bauble that ever you saw. It is set in Twickenham. enameled meadows, with filagree hedges :

A small Euphrates through the piece is rolled,
And little finches wave their wings in gold.

Walpole had acquired in his antiquarian research a fatal fondness for Gothic architecture; but his zeal was not according to much knowledge, not guided by a very pure taste. The cottage grew into a strange nondescript edifice, half castle, half cloister, still small in its proportions, with all kinds of grotesque decorations, with a library, refectory, gallery, round tower, hexagon closet -titles to make the mouth water of an Ann Radcliffe. In a small cloister, outside the house, stood the blue

A curiosity shop.

ence.

and white china bowl in which Walpole's cat was really drowned, so worthily celebrated by Gray's poem.

The buildings were not solid in construction, and to this day their "ginger-bread Gothic" and "pie-crust battlements" are subjects for ridicule, but I think it was charming of Walpole to amuse himself exactly as he pleased in the matter of building him a house, without the slightest deference to his neighbor's opinions or any feeling that he must be and do like the rest of the world. In fact, he rather enjoyed the defects in his work and was as well aware as anybody of its flimsiness.

The place was filled with all sorts of wonderful objects. Lord Macaulay says:

In his villa every apartment is a museum, every piece of furniture is a curiosity; there is something strange in the form of the shovel, there is a long story belonging to the bell-rope. We wander among a profusion of rarities of trifling intrinsic value, but so quaint in fashion or connected with such remarkable names and events that they may well detain our attention a moment. A moment is enough. Some new relic, some new unique, some new carved work, some new enamel, is forthcoming in an instant. One cabinet of trinkets is no sooner closed than another is opened.

Walpole established a printing press, amongst other things, on the grounds, with which he amused the company who came incessantly to visit him.

Thus employed, and always actively in society, and Mode of exist- always writing away at his letters, this remarkable man passed a cheerful, airy kind of existence. When he was seventy-four he became by the death of his nephew Earl of Oxford, but he never took his seat in the House of Lords and seldom used the new title. Some of his letters after the succession are signed "the late H. W.,” and some of them "the uncle of the late Earl of Oxford." He died in 1797 in his eightieth year, in the

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