begged leave to "except " him. In one of his towering bursts of patriotism, Walpole exclaims (i. 219), "I am not corrupted; I am not a traitor." The printer has lowered the proud boast into "I am not a tailor!" We may add that, throughout, sentences constantly begin and end where they ought not. It is almost incredible that any man of literary habits should have inspected the printed sheets; but our readers will find cause for more wonder of a like kind in the sequel. While we feel ourselves obliged to complain that Mr. Mitford has so egregiously failed in editorial details, we willingly acknowledge the substantial value of the publication itself, and the special gratitude that we owe to him for having brought to light a correspondence which, though we are very far from thinking it, as he does, "of as much general and greater literary interest than any other portion of Walpole's epistolary works," does certainly fill up an important chasm in his correspondence and throws additional light on an interesting and somewhat enigmatical portion of the literary and political history of both Mason and Walpole. It will also be found not unimportant to general history, and particularly to the elucidation of that violent struggle of parties that lasted from 1770 to the conclusion of the Rockingham administration. The letters of Mason, now first printed, formed part of the collection of manuscripts purchased of the Duke of Grafton, as executor of the late Earl of Waldegrave, and were entrusted to me for publication; and while I was lamenting the imperfect manner in which they would appear, from want of the answers of the correspondent, my friend, Archdeacon Burney, informed me that the corresponding letters of Walpole were carefully, and in their entire form, preserved at the Rectory House at Aston. The introduction which I obtained from him was most kindly received by Mr. Alderson, the present possessor of the place, and with a liberality for which my thanks are now to be paid, he allowed me the use of the volumes, that for more than half a century had been under the safe protection of his father himself.*-Preface, pp. vii. viii. The editor says very truly that the two main points of interest in the correspondence are the explanation of Walpole's juvenile quarrel with Gray, and of his partnership with Mason in the celebrated "Heroic Epistle." On the first point, however, there is little more to learn than Mason had already told us in a passage of his "Life of Gray," which was dictated to him by Walpole in a very creditable spirit. When Mason submitted to Walpole the account which he proposed to give. in the "Life," of the difference between them, Walpole answered (March, 1773):— I am so far from being dissatisfied, that I must beg leave to sharpen your pen, and in that light only, with regard to myself, would make any alterations in your text. I am conscious that, in the beginning of the differences between Gray and me, the fault was mine. I was too young, too fond of my own diversions, nay, I do not doubt, too much intoxicated by indulgence, vanity, and the insolence of my situation as a prime minister's son, not to have been inattentive and insensible to the feelings of one I thought below me; of one, I blush to say it, that I knew was obliged to me; of one whom presumption and folly perhaps *This gentleman, the present rector of Aston, is son to the Rev. Ch. Alderson, Mason's intimate friend and sole executor, who immediately succeeded the poet in that valuable living and beautiful parson age. made me deem not my superior then in parts, though I have since felt my infinite inferiority to him. I treated him insolently; he loved me, and I did not think he did. I reproached him with the difference between us, when he acted from conviction of knowing of seeing places, which I would not quit other amusehe was my superior. I often disregarded his wishes without me. ments to visit, though I offered to send him to them Forgive me, if I say that his temper was not conciliating. At the same time that I will confess to you that he acted a more friendly part, had I had the sense to take advantage of it. He freely told me of my faults;—I declared I did not desire to hear them, nor would correct them. You will not wonder that, with the dignity of his spirit, and the obstinate carelessness of mine, the breach must have grown wider, till we became incompatible.-vol. i., p. 57. He says again in July: You see how easily (early) I had disgusted him ; but my faults were very trifling, and I can bear their being known, and forgive his displeasure. I still think I was as much to blame as he was.—vol. i., p. 86. And again, of West and Gray, he says:: Of my two friends and me, I only make a most indifferent figure. I do not mean with regard to parts or talents. I never one instant of my life had the superlative vanity of ranking myself with them. They not only possessed genius, which I have not, with great learning which is to be acquired, and which I never acquired; but both Gray and West had abilities marvellously premature. What wretched boyish stuff would my contemporary letters to them appear, if they existed, and which they both were so good-natured as to destroy !-What unpoetic things were mine at that age, some of which unfortunately do exist, and which I yet could never surpass!-But it is not in that light I consider my own position. We had not got to Calais before Gray was dissatisfied, for I was a boy, and he, though infinitely more a man, was not enough so to make allowances. Hence am I never mentioned once with kindness in his letters to West. This hurts me for him, as well as myself. For the oblique censures on my want of curiosity I have nothing to say. The fact was true; my eyes were tiquary, my age then made me taste pleasures and not purely classic; and though I am now a dull andiversions merely modern.* I say this to you, and to you only, in confidence. I do not object to a syllable. I know how trifling, how useless, how blamable I have been; and submit to hear my faults-both be In this Walpole seems to do himself injustice; for we have to thank Mr. Mitford for having produced the following remarkable testimony, from the classic pen of Dr. Middleton, as to the taste and judgment of the young connoisseur : "Ex his autem agri Romani divitiis, neminem profecto de peregrinatoribus nostris thesaurum inde deportasse credo, et rerum delectu et pretio majis æstimabilem ac quem amicus meus nobilis Horatius Walpole in Angliam nuper advexit: Juvenis, non tam generis nobilitate, ac paterni nominis gloria, quam ingenio, doctrinà, et virtute propriâ illustris. Ille vero haud citius fere in patriam reversus est, literas quærens, mihi ultro de copià suâ, quicquid ad quam de studiis meis, ut consuerat, familiariter per argumenti mei rationem, aut libelli ornamentum pertineret, pro arbitrio meo utendum obtulit. Quam quidem ejus liberalitatem libenter admodum amplexus essem, ni operis hujus jam prope absoluti fastidio quodam correptus, atque ad alia festinans, intra terminos ei ab initio destinatos illud continere statuissem. Attamen præclaram istam Musei Walpoliani suppellectilem, ab interprete aliquo peritiore propediem explicandam edendamque esse confido."-Middletoni, Pref. ad Germana quædam Antiq. Monumenta, &c., p. 6, published in 1745. cause I have had faults, and because I hope I have corrected some of them; and though Gray hints at my unwillingness to be told them, I can say truly that to the end of his life, he neither spared the reprimand nor mollified the terms, as you and others know, and I believe have felt.-vol. i., p. 106. This is candid and amiable; and we have made our extracts the more liberally because they are certainly the passages of the whole work in which Walpole appears to the most advantage; though, after all, they do not remove the mystery about the immediate cause of the sudden and never quite reconciled rupture which separated them at Reggio, in 1741. Upon the second and now more interesting point -the authorship of the Heroic Epistle-the editor tells us: The readers of these Letters will be interested in seeing the entire secret history of the Heroic Epistle unveiled for the first time before them, and the many cautious artifices with which it was attempted to conceal the author. It was not from the remote and tranquil solitudes of a Yorkshire rectory that a satire, which showed an intimate acquaintance with all the news and scandal of the town, and which could fix its mark on each prevailing weakness from the city to the court, might be expected to come forth; but the public eye was very soon suspiciously directed to Mason.-Preface, xi. Mason, indeed, disclaimed it in an expostulatory letter to T. Warton; but Notwithstanding this disclaim, and the other stratagems used to mislead, which are described in this correspondence, the belief gradually grew and strengthened, and then pointed sagaciously to what appears the truth, that Walpole furnished the notes and illustrations of the text, and conducted the poem through the press. The satires that followed, of far inferior merit, were brought into the world in the same manner.-Preface, xiii. later political satires and squibs of which the Heroic Epistle was the prologue, claims for himself no higher merit than of cooking the materials Walpole had prepared The idlest cook-maid in the kingdom may make a pudding if any of her fellow sarvants will pick the plumbs and make them ready to mix with the batter. She has nothing to do then but stir them about and tye them tight in the pudding-bag. So no more at present from your sinceare frind till dethe CATHERINE CULLINDAR.-ii. 262. And this was probably equally true of the first of the series, which contained so many local plums, which Walpole was most likely to have furnished. There can be no doubt that Mr. Mitford's limitation of his share to that of furnishing notes and conducting the poem through the press is a most gratuitous assumption, not only unwarranted by any proof we can discover, but so completely negatived by the letters of both parties, that we are forced to believe that the editor had either never read them or had forgotten them before he wrote his preface. Incredible as this may seem, we can discover no other explanation for the apparent facts; and we must also add that the misplacing," misdating, and misunderstanding of several other portions of the correspondence, lead us to the same conclusion, that he has not always read, or at least and illustrate. not very attentively, the letters he professes to edit He gives us no information (which we surely might, in all reason, have expected) of how or when the acquaintance of Walpole and Mason commenced. But there can be no doubt that it arose from their common friendship with Gray. We find in the collective edition of Walpole's letters, that in 1761 Gray and Mason paid him a visit at Strawberry Hill. The first letter in this correspondence is of the 29th December, 1763, when, Mason having sent Walpole his volume of poems, Walpole returns the compliment with his Anecdotes of Painters, and the volume of "Engravings" (Engravers). They seem, however, to have had little intercourse till Gray's death in August, 1771, when Mason's office of his executor and the preparation of the "Life of Gray" brought them into more frequent communication. Mason came to London, from his Yorkshire living, about the beginning of 1772, partly to forward his work, and partly, we suppose, to take his turn of duty as king's chaplain; and we find by a note of his dated "Curzon Street-the Eve of the Martyrdom, 1772," that Walpole had submitted an be played to Mason's correction, who, however, did epilogue of his own for some tragedy then about to nothing but add two lines There is hardly one item of this statement which seems to us perfectly accurate. In the first place, as we shall presently explain more fully, the entire secret history is not unveiled; and what is told, though told with greater certainty, is not told for the first time. Mason was very early suspected; and his "disclaim," as the editor calls it, to T. Warton, was certainly no denial. We see in Boswell's Life of Johnson that in 1784 Walpole was supposed to be also concerned in it; and in the edition of that work in 1831 it is stated, "There can be no doubt that the Heroic Epistle was the joint production of Mason and Walpole-Mason supplying the poetry and Walpole the points."-(vol. iv., P 485.) This opinion has been since often repeatednever, that we know of, questioned. It was maintained, in some detail, in our article on the Letters to Lady Ossory (Q. R. June, 1818); and the present publication neither adds nor subtracts anything essential to or from the general view of the case so given. It proves, indeed, what before was only suspected, that the pen was Mason's, and perhaps exclusively; but we shall see good reason for thinking that the first thought was accidentally furnished by Walpole; and-though the extreme reserve and *We add, for example, and for the information of studied mystery in which constant apprehension of a our readers who may wish to understand the original post-office espionnage induced the correspondents to correspondence, that the letters from p. 322, vol. i., envelop themselves leave us in doubt as to the extent of Walpole's subsequent suggestions-there is abundant reason to conclude that they were many and important. Mason, in allusion to some of the To mark more strongly who you mean by a wit:- We think an illustrative note, to tell us what this to p. 355, are so misplaced and jumbled as to be unin telligible. The order should be thus ;-after 322, 342, 344, 323, 352, 348, 355. There are several other less complicated misplacings and misdatings which ought to be corrected whenever these letters are reprinted. even to the very words of the Heroic Epistle(which opens with "Knight of the Polar Star!")--as well as the allusion to the verses of Mason and the prose of Walpole, render the date of 1772 at first sight somewhat perplexing, and surely would have justified some explanation. We have a suspicion that the editor may have_understood this passage as alluding to the Heroic Epistle; and the mention of Walpole's prose in connection with Mason's verse is perhaps the authority-at least we can discover nothing else that looks like an authority-for attributing to Walpole the contribution of notes to that performance. If this be so, it is all a complete mistake-for the Heroic Epistle was not yet thought of-indeed, the very work which the Epistle ridicules had not yet appeared. The verse alluded to was the first part of Mason's English Garden, just then published, and the prose, no doubt, referred to Walpole's own charming Essay on Modern Gardening. Chambers' work had been advertised, by an error of the press, as a treatise on ornamental gardening, and so Walpole calls it; and expects to find it a work on architectural gardening. It was not till it afterwards appeared in its real character of a panegyric on oriental gardening, as exemplified under royal patronage at Kew, that the two whig wits could have thought of working into a political satire the germ of Walpole's sneer at the Knight of the Polar Star. And we can easily imagine how much they must both have been offended at finding the style of gardening which they were celebrating in verse and in prose, condemned as the "mean and paltry manner which, to our national disgrace, is called the English style of gardening." rather more necessary than that which tells us that by "Davies' Life of Garrick" was meant the "Life of Garrick by Thomas Davies." As we happen to possess the great quarto edition of Walpole's works, we are enabled to supply ourselves and our readers with the information that the epilogue in question was for Jephson's tragedy of Braganza, and that Mason's epigrammatic couplet was directed against Lord Chesterfield. Very well; but, on looking a little closer, we were rather surprised at finding our Court Chaplain adopting, so early as January, 1772, one of Walpole's very peculiar prejudices by sneering at the Martyrdom. This induced us to go a step further, and we gathered from other works which we have the good luck to have at hand that Braganza was first played on the 17th February, 1775; so that, unless the epilogue was written above three years before the representation of the play, the date which the editor so peremptorily prefixes to the letter must be erroneous; and so it certainly is; for on the 1st February, 1775, Walpole mentions the epilogue to Lady Ossory as just written; and in his own autobiographical sketch he says that "he wrote this epilogue in February, 1775." It is clear, then, that the date of 1772 is a mistake. If the editor found it on the original letter, he surely ought to have detected and endeavored to account for it. If he has added the date, he has, besides the anachronism, fallen into a second and more serious editorial error-that of not specifying that it is an addition of his own. We lay considerable stress on this point, because in all such publications it is of great importance to know what variances-whether by addition or suppression-an editor may have thought proper to make; and we Mason had now returned into Yorkshire, whence, see reason to suspect that in this correspondence as we find by Walpole's answer (21st July) to a many have been made without any acknowledg-letter that does not appear, he sends him up some ment; at least, we see allusions to foregoing pas-pleasantry against "Alma Mater,"* and announces sages which we cannot find-answers to letters" a new poem cast in the same mint," which that do not appear-references to names not before Walpole is impatient to see. This was no doubt mentioned, and the like. The editor may perhaps the rudiments of the Heroic Epistle. A few days not be to blame for these discrepancies or lacuna- after Walpole himself went down into Yorkshire, they may arise from chasms in the original papers; paying a visit to Lord Strafford at Wentworth -but he ought at least-even in his own defence-Castle, and passing some days with Mason at his to have noticed them. In one or two very critical parsonage of Aston. Then and there, we have places there seem to have been suppressions or omissions. We should be curious to know whether they were made by Walpole or Mason, or by the editor-if by the last, they may have been very properly made, but it would have also been proper to have mentioned the fact. We return to what is the main interest of the correspondence the Heroic Epistle. On the 9th of May, 1772, Walpole writes to Mason The newspapers tell me that Mr. Chambers, the architect, who has Sir-Williamized himself, by the desire (as he says) of the Knights of the Polar Star, his brethren, who were angry at his not assuming his proper title, is going to publish a treatise on ornamental gardening; that is, I suppose, considering a garden as a subject to be built upon. In that light it will not interfere with your verses or my prose.vol. i., p. 23. On this passage the editor does not favor us with a note—yet its apparent relation to the subject and *Walpole professed a violent antipathy to Charles I. He had the engraved fac-simile of Magna Charta framed and glazed; and as a pendant to it appeared also framed and glazed, and hung up by his bed-side, the fac-simile of the death-warrant of the king, under which he had written Major Charta. little doubt that the poem, already, we suppose, on the stocks, received some, at least, of those brilliant touches, which indicate the local knowledge and peculiar feelings of Walpole, and of which Mason can hardly be suspected. This visit to Astonwhich the editor does not notice-of which we never before heard, and now only pick out of two half lines of Walpole's letters-determines, we think, in addition to all the other circumstances, that Walpole may have had a considerable share even in the concoction of the Epistle, and accounts for the fact that all Mason's subsequent satires Walpole's personal cooperation was likely to have were visibly inferior in that point and gayety which supplied. Walpole was a bad versifier and may not have actually written a line of the poem, though we have no doubt that during the visit at Aston he suggested many, and sharpened more. As this once celebrated piece is now only to be * One of Mason's earliest productions was his Isis -a satire on Oxford and toryism; but the censure of the Whig Cantab was speedily answered and overpowered by Tom Warton's Triumph of Isis. We presume that this new satire must have been against Mason's own alma mater Cambridge. Mr. Mitford's readers will wish that he had illustrated this passage, which, we confess, we cannot at once explain. found in some voluminous collections of fugitive poetry, our readers will not be displeased at seeing a specimen or two; though, as we cannot produce Chambers' original absurdities, much of the pleasantry will be lost. We shall observe by and by on the peculiar malevolence with which King George III. is treated in this and some subsequent poems from the same source, and which are, in truth, in many instances a versification of the prose libels of Junius, and especially of Wilkes. The poet invites the Polar Knight to teach the Like thee, to scorn dame Nature's simple fence, Dr. Shebbeare, be it recollected, had been pilloried for a libel. There was a time, "in Esher's peaceful grove," But Chambers discovers that "Nature affords but For what is Nature? Ring her changes round— And finished Richmond open to his view Chambers had gone on to describe the kind of masquerade scenes in which the Eastern court amuses itself "menageries, manufactories, fortified towns with their ports, streets, temples, markets, shops, tribunals, criminal trials, executions, gibbets, &c." This is sarcastically travestied : Strange as it may seem, this last illustration is literally versified from the Architectural Knight's prose. The poet then charges his majesty with a zealous adoption of all this absurdity in his improvements at Kew--somewhat unjustly, however; for though we have no high opinion of the good king's taste in these matters, the Chinese garden was but a small portion of the general design, and might be well enough admitted to diversify the remote and uninteresting corner in which it was placed. Nor should it be forgotten that the gardens were meant to exhibit a variety of styles, including specimens of Grecian, Roman, Italian, and even Gothic, decoration, and, above all, that a much larger share was appropriated to the advancement of botany, horticulture, and natural history. To George III. we owe those splendid exotic gardens which, at this hour do so much honor to both English science and taste. But the satirists would see nothing but the Chinese corner, and-by which still better suited their purpose-the pedantic conceit and servile fustian of Chambers' lucubration. Haste bid yon livelong terrace reäscend; This to achieve no foreign aids we try— Brentford with London charms will we adorn, gin; Now Nowell preaches of rebellion's sin; But, hark! the voice of battle shouts from far :- *Nature shall join you-time shall make it grow A work to wonder at-perhaps a Stowe! Pope's Epistle on Taste. Here is Walpole's hand distinctly; see, his lively descriptions of the damages done at Strawberry Hill the explosion of these mills. Written while Wilkes was Sheriff of London, and when it was feared he would rattle his chain a year longer as lord mayor.-Original Note. § Earl Talbot, then lord steward, Wilkes' antago All this, our readers see, is not a very highing so much as seen one of these things-should order of satire. Its chief merit now is the lively have conducted half a dozen of them through the exposure of Chambers' nonsense; but its great press? But this is not all; with a very moderate Vogue at the time was owing undoubtedly to its degree of attention the editor might have found ridicule of the king's personal habits and tastes-a palpable traces of the mode in which the publicasure enough road to temporary popularity, of which tion was really conducted. First, we find, just after we cannot wonder that Walpole and Mason should the appearance of the Epistle, Mason writing to live to be ashamed, and particularly when they Walpole,subsequently saw their own more polished malevolence grossly travestied by the vulgar impudence of Peter Pindar, who, we have no doubt, drew much of his muddy inspiration from the Heroic Epistle. The Muse of Mason had in those base hands degenerated, to use his own illustration, into "drab ;" and he testified his repentance by directing in his will the republication of those works only to which he had prefixed his name. a How Mr. Mitford could state that Walpole conducted this and the subsequent productions of the same class through the press is to us incomprehensible, for the very contrary is plainly established in the Letters which he edits. About a year after the Epistle appeared the second satire, under the title of a Postscript to the Heroic Epistle-which, if not so light and lively as its predecessor, was equally vigorous and venomous. This remarkable piece, though frequently alluded to, and mentioned by name, and largely quoted in the Correspondence, the editor, most strange to say, seems not to have seen or heard of-certainly never to have read, as we shall show by and by; at present we refer to it only to disprove, as the following statement will do, the assertion that Walpole conducted these things through the press. The MS. of the second satire Mason sent up to town to a common friend, one Dr. to be by him delivered to Walpole, who was to keep it till called for by a secret emissary of Mason's, who ultimately was to send it to the press. So alarmed was Walpole at the idea of having any connection with the publication -so impatient to get rid of the MS.-that he would not trust so tardy and unsafe a communication as the post, but actually despatched a special express all the way from London to York, to urge Mason to relieve him from this terrible deposit. Mason, very much surprised, it seems, at this panic, writes in reply: As to the Dr., you may be quite as easy on his subject, and have nothing to do but to seal the paquet up, and send it to him by your servant with charge to deliver it into his own hand. If, after all, you have any fears as to being made privy to it, I give you full liberty to burn it instantly; and as there is no other copy extant, you may be assured it will perish completely. But for God's sake no more expresses. I have been at my wits' end to account for this.-vol. i., pp. 122, 123. There are in the earlier letters several indications that Walpole was entirely ignorant of the mode, and even the time, of these publications. These hints might escape the notice of a careless editorbut how could any one who had read and understood the two letters we have just quoted imagine that Walpole-so panic-stricken at the risk of hav *The editor does not say whether he finds this blank in the original correspondence. We should like to know who the doctor was. We are somewhat inclined to suspect Dr. Brocklesby, an able, amiable, and generous man, but a very keen politician. Walpole says, however, the doctor seemed almost as frightened at his commission as he was himself;and that is not like Brocklesby. I have an excellent story to tell you relative to it. It is an account of a stratagem, by which ten good golden another, to which such a sum was of great service; guineas were obtained from a certain person, by this is all I can say but the detail of the matter is highly comic, and you shall have it the first safe opportunity.-vol. i., p. 66. Then, by and by, to allay Walpole's terror about Warmed with the memory of that golden time Of George the good, the gracious, and the great. Mason, it seems, had employed a young friend to convey the MS. of the "Epistle to Almon, the publisher, and Almon, after some hesitation and delay, (which Mason attributed to a bribe from the court, i. 55,) gave the messenger ten guineas. The subsequent publications, which the editor thinks were passed through the press by Walpole, were in truth in the hands of a similar-perhaps in all cases the same-emissary. In February, 1782, Mason put forth with equal secrecy the "Archæological Epistle," and in May followed it up by an attack on Soame Jenyns and Dean Tucker, under the title of "The Dean and the Squire." There was no intrinsic reason that we can now see why either of these pieces required such a strict incognito, but we suppose Mason feared that they might be recognized as from the same pen as the Heroic Epistle. The person employed on this occasion, Mason tells Walpole, was Mr. Bains, an ingenious young Yorkshireman, a student in Gray's Inn, who could not well conceal himself on a prior occasion, because it was absolutely necessary he should revise the press, but in the latter he disguised himself en militaire, and managed the matter excellently.vol. ii., p. 289. Is it not clear that when the editor asserted that Walpole conducted these pieces through the press, he could not have read the letters he has illustrated? We must first All this is strange, but still stranger is the fact of the editor's ignorance of the Postscript itself— of which, however, he himself furnishes us with the most indisputable evidence. observe that in his frequent enumerations and notices of these works he mentions the "Heroic Epistle," the "Epistle to Shebbeare," the "Archæological Epistle," and so forth, but not once, we believe, the "Postscript;" but as both the letter-writers mention-nay even, as we have said, quote the "Postscript over and over again-we suppose the editor must have thought that there was |