24 The Granville Faction. me to tell you. You share in our common loss! Don't expect me to enter at all upon the subject. After the melancholy two months that I have passed, and in my situation, you will not wonder I shun a conversation which could not be bounded by a letter, a letter that would grow into a panegyric or a piece of a moral; improper for me to write upon, and too distressful for us both! a death is only to be felt, never to be talked upon by those it touches.' Nevertheless, the world soon had Horace Walpole for her own again; during Lord Orford's last illness, George II. thought of him, it seems, even though the 'Granvilles' were the only people tolerated at court. That famous clique comprised the secretly adored of Horace (Lady Granville now), Lady Sophia Fermor. 'The Granville faction,' Horace wrote, before his father's death, 'are still the constant and only countenanced people at court. Lord Winchelsea, one of the disgraced, played at court at Twelfth-night, and won; the king asked him next morning how much he had for his own share. He replied, “Sir, about a quarter's salary." I liked the spirit, and was talking to him of it the next night at Lord Granville's. "Why yes,” said he, "I think it showed familiarity at least: tell it your father, I don't think he will dislike it."' The most trifling incidents divided the world of fashion and produced the bitterest rancour. Indeed, nothing could exceed the frivolity of the great, except their impertinence. For want of better amusements, it had become the fashion to make conundrums, and to have printed books full of them, which were produced at parties. But these were peaceful diversions. The following anecdote is worthy of the times of George II. and of Frederick of Wales : 'There is a very good quarrel,' Horace writes, on foot, be tween two duchesses: she of Queensberry sent to invite Lady Emily Lenox to a ball: her grace of Richmond, who is wonderfully cautious since Lady Caroline's elopement (with Mr. Fox), sent word "she could not determine." The other sent again the same night the same answer. The Queensberry then sent word, that she had made up her company, and desired to be A Very Good Quarrel. 25 excused from having Lady Emily's; but at the bottom of the card wrote, "Too great trust." There is no declaration of war come out from the other duchess: but I believe it will be made a national quarrel of the whole illegitimate royal family.' Her Grace of Queensberry, Prior's 'Kitty, beautiful and young,' lorded it, with a tyrannical hand, over the court. Her famed loveliness was, it is true, at this time on the wane. Her portrait delineating her in her bib and tucker, with her head rolled back underneath a sort of half cap, half veil, shows how intellectual was the face to which such incense was paid for years. Her forehead and eyebrows are beautiful: her eyes soft, though lively in expression: her features refined. She was as whimsical in her attire as in her character. When, however, she chose to appear as the grande dame, no one could cope with her. Mrs. Delany describes her at the Birth-day,-her dress of white satin, embroidered with vine leaves, convolvuluses, rose-buds, shaded after nature; but she, says her friend, was so far beyond the master-piece of art that one could hardly think of her clothes-allowing for her age I never saw so beautiful a creature.' Meantime, Houghton was shut up: for its owner died £50,000 in debt, and the elder brother of Horace, the second Lord Orford, proposed, on entering it again, after keeping it closed for some time, to enter upon 'new, and then very unknown economy, for which there was great need :' thus Horace refers to the changes. ment. It was in the South Sea scheme that Sir Robert Walpole had realized a large sum of money, by selling out at the right moIn doing so he had gained 1000 per cent. But he left little to his family, and at his death, Horace received a legacy only of £5,000, and a thousand pounds yearly, which he was to draw (for doing nothing) from the collector's place in the Custom House; the surplus to be divided between his brother Edward and himself: this provision was afterwards enhanced by some money which came to Horace and his brothers from his uncle Captain Shorter's property; but Horace was not at this period a rich man, and perhaps his not marrying was owing to his dislike of fortune-hunting, or to his dread of refusal. Two years after his father's death, he took a small house at Twickenham the property cost him nearly £14,000; in the deeds he found that it was called Strawberry Hill. He soon commenced making considerable additions to the housewhich became a sort of raree-show in the latter part of the last, and until a late period in this, century. Twickenham-so called, according to the antiquary Norden, because the Thames, as it flows near it, seems from the islands to be divided into two rivers,—had long been celebrated for its gardens, when Horace Walpole, the generalissimo of all bachelors, took Strawberry Hill. Twicknam is as much as Twynam,' declares Norden, 'a place scytuate between two rivers. So fertile a 'locality could not be neglected by the monks of old, the great gardeners and tillers of land in ancient days; and the Manor of Twickenham was consequently given to the monks of Christ Church, Canterbury, by King Edred, in 491; who piously inserted his anathema against any person -whatever their rank, sex, or order-who should infringe the rights of these holy men. 'May their memory,' the king decreed, with a force worthy of the excommunicator-wholesale, Pius IX., 'be blotted out of the Book of Life; may their strength continually waste away, and be there no restorative to repair it nevertheless, there were in the time of Lysons, a hundred and fifty acres of fruit-gardens at Twickenham: the soil being a sandy loam, raspberries grew plentifully. Even so early as Queen Elizabeth's days, Bishop Corbet's father had a nursery garden at Twickenham,—so that King Edred's curse seems to have fallen as powerlessly as it may be hoped all subsequent maledictions may do. In 1698, one of the Earl of Bradford's coachmen built a small house on a piece of ground, called in old works, Strawberry-Hill-Shot; lodgings were here let, and Colley Cibber became one of the occupants of the place, and here wrote his Comedy called 'Refusal; or the Ladies' Philosophy." The spot was so greatly admired that Talbot, Bishop of Durham, lived eight years in it, and the Marquis of Carnarvon succeeded him as a tenant: next came Mrs. Chenevix, a famous toywoman. She was probably a French woman, for Father |