Hampton Court/Chapter 6
CHAPTER VI
LITERATURE AND GOSSIP IN THE LAST CENTURY
1. Hampton Court in literature: Thomson's rhapsody.—2. The "Rape of the Lock": Pope's fondness for the Thames: his country inspiration limited to its banks: the origin of the poem: its three foundations: the "Rosicrucian doctrine of spirits": Marmontel's Sylphs and Pope's "The Expedition to Hampton Court": the game of ombre: the severed lock: Pope's letters: the life of a Maid of Honour.—3. Lord Hervey's life: Miss Bellenden and Miss Lepel: Queen Caroline: George II. and his family: Prince Frederick: the hasty drive to St. James's: Queen Caroline's death: later visits of George II.: changes since his time: the Royal fondness for Hanover: English character of Hampton Court.
I
Hampton Court was so popular a resort for society under Anne and the Georges, that the difficulty in writing of its literary souvenirs is rather to exclude than to illustrate. Jimmy Thomson brings in the Palace as the climax of his enthusiastic rhapsody on the Thames:—
"In lovely contrast to this glorious view,
Calmly magnificent,then will we turn
To where the silver Thames first rural grows.
There let the feasted eye unwearied stay;
Luxurious, there, rove through the pendent woods
That nodding hang o'er Harrington's retreat.
And stooping thence to Ham's embowering walks,
Now let us trace the matchless vale of Thames,
Fair winding up to where the Muses haunt
In Twitnam's bowers, and for their Pope implore
The healing god—to Royal Hampton's pile."
The home of the court for so many years, the interests of politics and literature met within its walls. It would be difficult to say whether it was better known as the home of statesmen or the resort of wits. But one distinction it enjoys which no other royal palace can rival. It is the scene of the most characteristic, and in its way the most perfect, poem of the age, "The Rape of the Lock."
II
"Close by those meads, for ever crown'd with flow'rs,
Where Thames with pride surveys his rising tow'rs,
There stands a structure of majestic frame,
Which from theneighb'ring Hampton takes its name.
Here Britain's statesmen oft the fall foredoom
Of foreign Tyrants, and of Nymphs at home;
Here thou, great Anna, whom three realms obey,
Dost sometimes Counsel take—and sometimes Tea."
A generation which ignores Pope, as it has forgotten Dryden, should yet find time to read, in the summer afternoons on the terrace by the Thames, the poem in which the former has given Hampton Court a literary immortality.
Among all the century's delightful legacies, there is nothing more characteristic or more charming than "The Rape of the Lock." Most delicious of all poems of artificial society, most polished, most redolent of court and fashion, of wit and grace and insouciant ease, its crisp couplets seem to compress the very spirit of the life that was so naturally artificial when Anna took Tea and Pope rhymed and told scandalous stories.
"Fair Thames, flow gently from thy sacred spring
While on thy banks Sicilian Muses sing,"
young Master Pope had said, when at sixteen he lisped in numbers, the first fruits of his friendship—"at very unequal years," as the learned Mr. Warburton, his editor, has it—with Sir William Trumbal, late Secretary of State to his Majesty King William. Often, it is likely, the elderly politician had walked with the clever boy in the gardens of the Palace, whence he had retired—
Too wise for pride, too good for pow'r,
that he might
"Enjoy the glory to be great no more"[1]—
telling tales of public business and court intrigue. The scenes amid which the young poet first tried his hand at verse-making remained the favourite setting for his stories all his life long. Public life and society indeed were centred, during the first half of the eighteenth century, round the Thames valley. From Pope, in his villa at Twickenham, when he had left
"Thy forests, Windsor, and thy green retreats,
At once the monarch's and the Muses' seats,"[2]
to Horace Walpole, in his Gothic castle, is a step which includes all the literature and much of the learning of a brilliant age. It is a dazzling prospect which combines memories of Gibbon and Lord Hervey, Swift and Arbuthnot, Steele and Addison, Chesterfield and George Selwyn, essayists and poets, wits and historians. It would be interesting to inquire, too, how much of the rural poetry of the age[3] owed its inspiration to the banks of the Thames, or how many a Strephon had wandered beyond the woods and fields which skirt its
"Swelling waters and alternate tides,"
The Master Carpenter's Court
river floods that the tragedy has occurred. When he stays with my Lord Bathurst at Cirencester, he is dreaming of a great canal which shall wed the Severn to the river by whose streams he was nurtured. Thames is the presiding deity of his rustic pantheon, and round him circle the satellites, the little streams which combine to enhance his glory:—
"Around his throne the sea-born brothers stood,
Who swell with tributary arms his flood;
First the famed authors of his ancient name,
The winding Isis, and the fruitful Thame;
The Kennet swift, for silver eels renown'd;
The Loddon slow, with verdant alders crown'd;
Cole, whose dark streams his flow'ry islands lave;
And chalky Wey, that rolls a milky wave;
The blue, transparent Vandalis appears;
The gulphy Lee his sedgy tresses rears;
And sullen Mole, that hides his diving flood;
And silent Darent, stained with Danish blood."[4]
"The Rape of the Lock" is the culmination of this influence. The story, like its fair heroine, is
"Launched on the bosom of the silver Thames,"
and under all its brilliant epigram, and dipt, biting phrase, the ripple of the water is heard in every line. An excursion to Hampton Court was the foundation of the "heroi-comical poem," as its author calls it; and in nothing is the charm of the Palace in its renewed youth more happily expressed. To compose a serious dissension was the object, it is said, of Mr. Caryll ("a gentleman," in Warburton's words,"who was secretary to Queen Mary, wife of James II., whose fortunes he followed into France, author of the comedy of Sir Solomon Single, and of several translations in Dryden's Miscellanies"), in proposing to Mr. Pope that he should record in verse—
"What dire offence from am'rous causes springs,
What mighty contests rise from trivial things,"
"on the trifling occasion" of Lord Petre's having cut off a lock of the hair of Miss Arabella Fermor. At first a mere jeu d'esprit, for the entertainment of the lady herself and her friends, it grew into a long poem, by the addition of the "machinery of the sylphs." The Thames, the sylphs, and a lock of hair are the foundations for this most charming of all delicate satires on human folly.
For the Thames, the love of it was in Pope's blood, and no one, till Thomas Love Peacock in "Crochet Castle," so happily could paint the pleasures of a water party:—
"But now secure the painted vessel glides,
The sunbeams trembling on the floating tides;
While melting music steals upon the sky,
And softened sounds along the waters die.
Smooth flow the waves, the zephyrs gently play,
Belinda smiled, and all the world was gay."
And no less happy in mastery is Pope when he adds the sylphs to the "machinery" of the poet's craft. The "Rosicrucian doctrine of spirits" he calls it in his slyly ceremonious introduction, and "I know how disagreeable it is to make use of hard words before a lady:" so "the Rosicrucians are a people I must bring you acquainted with. The best account I know of them is in a French book called Le Comte de Gabalis, which both in its title and size is so like a novel, that many of the fair sex have read it for one by mistake." What the Count of Gabalis has introduced into literature and Mr. Pope into poetry, Monsieur J. F. Marmontel[5] has shown as entering into the most intimate thoughts of the fanciful ladies of the age. Pope's delightful "machinery" made the sylphs the fashion. "La fable des Sylphes étoit à la mode." The "Airy Beings "who wait upon Belinda become of the very texture of the dreams of the fair Elise when she quits the convent to be the wife of the Marquis de Volange, persuaded that next to a lover the most dangerous being in all nature is a husband. So "il lui étoit tombé sous la main quelques-uns de ces romans où l'on peint le commerce délicieux de ces esprits avec les mortelles; et pour elle ces brillantes chimeres avoient tout le charme de la vérite." Belinda, or Mrs. Arabella Fermor, must needs be informed of the gentle spirits who wait upon her; as that "the four elements are inhabited by spirits, which they call Sylphs, Gnomes, Nymphs, and Salamanders. The gnomes, or Dæmons of Earth, delight in mischief, but the Sylphs, whose habitation is in the air, are the best-conditioned creatures imaginable. For they say any mortals may enjoy the most intimate familiarities with these gentle spirits, upon a condition very easy to all true Adepts, an inviolate preservation of Chastity." But Elise accepts them as a part of her religion. "Elle croyait aux Sylphes et brûloit d'envie d'en avoir un." The transition from "The Rape of the Lock" to "Le Mari Sylphe" is an easy one. In both there is the charm which invests the Hampton Court of the prosy Anne and the phlegmatic George of Denmark with an original air of fanciful mystification—a " je ne sais quoi d'aérien," as Marmontel says.
If we read the espièglerie of Marmontel into the witty scheme of Pope, we have a clear impression of what the court beauties and the beaux thought of the "Rape of the Lock." So "Beauty draws us with a single hair." Belinda's locks, nourished to the destruction of mankind, allure the Baron; and the expedition to Hampton Court furnishes the occasion for the bold attempt. It is the home of scandal and of wit, of beaux' audacity, and of the triumphs of the fair:—
"Hither the heroes and the nymphs resort,
To taste awhile the pleasures of a Court;
In various talk th' instructive hours they past,
Who gave the ball, or paid the visit last;
One speaks the glory of the British Queen,
And one describes a charming Indian screen;
A third interprets motions, looks, and eyes;
At ev'ry word a reputation dies.
Snuff, or the fan, supply each pause of chat,
With singing, laughing, ogling,and all that."
River Front
Doubtless they sat in some stately parlour looking upon the gardens, where the work of homely Queen Mary adorned the couches, and the ceiling displayed the genius of Signor Verrio or Sir James Thornhill. A game of ombre beguiles the afternoon, and all goes happily till
"On one nice trick depends the gen'ral fate."
Belinda triumphs and
"exulting fills with shouts the sky.
The walls, the woods, and long canals reply."
Coffee relieves their excited feelings and inspires the Baron to a dauntless deed. The sylphs in vain interpose to check the robber or rouse the thoughtless fair. He draws nearer with the glitt'ring Forfex; her looks remain fixed on her coffee-cup of rich "china earth," or on the long expanse of garden, canal, and wood. In a moment the crime is committed, and the severed lock is in the hands of the victor. As for the "wretched maid," she
"spread her hands and cry'd,
While Hampton's echoes, wretched maid! reply'd."
The Palace itself is cursed by her tragic misfortune, and only an apotheosis of the lock can satisfy the maiden and poetic justice alike.
It is impossible to pass up the Thames to the river front, which Mr. Railton has so charmingly imaged, without memories of Pope's lines. Hampton Court preserves Belinda, the Baron, and Sir Plume; and Pope's immortality is safe in its keeping.
What served the most polished of poets for the setting of his true (but not too true) story served him also for subject when he wrote some of the pleasantest of his very artificial letters. "I went by water," he wrote[6] in 1717, "to Hampton Court, unattended by all but my own virtues, which were not of so modest a nature as to keep themselves or me concealed; or met the Prince, with all his ladies, on horseback, coming from hunting. Mrs. B. and Mrs. L.[7] took me into protection, contrary to the laws against harbouring papists, and gave me a dinner, with something I liked better, an opportunity of conversing with Mrs. H.[8] We all agreed that the life of a Maid of Honour was of all things the most miserable, and wished that every woman who envied it had a specimen of it. To eat Westphalia ham in morning, ride over hedges and ditches on borrowed hacks, come home in the heat of the day with a fever, and (what is worse an hundred times) with a red mark on the forehead from an uneasy hat—all this may qualify them to make them excellent wives for foxhunters, and bear abundance of ruddy-complexioned children. As soon as they can wipe off the sweat of the day, they must simper an hour and catch cold in the Princess's apartment; from thence (as Shakespeare has it) to dinner, with what appetite they may;—and after that, till midnight, walk, work, or think, which they please. I can easily believe no lone house in Wales, with a mountain and a rookery, is more contemplative than this Court; and as a proof of it I need only tell you Miss L. walked with me three or four hours by moonlight, and we met no creature of any quality but the King, who gave audience to the Vice-Chamberlain, all alone under the garden wall."
Mr. Alexander Pope was very proud of his neat phrases, for he must needs repeat them next year in a letter to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu.
III
Pope and Lord Hervey represent not inadequately to us the literary associations of Hampton Court, and it is that Palace which first makes us link their names together. It was the charming maids of honour, Miss Lepel and Miss Bellenden, who brought the poet to Hampton Court, taking him none too seriously,
"Tuneful Alexis on the Thames' fair side,
The ladies' plaything and the Muses' pride."
And here it was, or at Richmond, that Lord Hervey found a home when his kindred were engaged in their duties of waiting on the Prince and Princess of Wales—"dapper George" and "cette diablesse la Princesse." Soon he won the heart of the charming half French beauty, than whom, says Lady Louisa Stuart, "there never was so perfect a model of the finely polished, highly bred, genuine woman of fashion." In 1720 the attachment was notorious.
"Now Hervey, fair of face, I mark full well
With thee youth's youngest daughter, sweet Lepel,"
wrote Gay; and indeed, on April 21, as Lord Bristol's diary records, they had been privately married. On October 28 the marriage was announced. Three years later, on the death of his elder brother, the husband became Lord Hervey. At the beginning of George II.'s reign he attached himself to Walpole and his Administration. From that time, if not before, until her death, he was essential to Queen Caroline. He came at length to be with her for many hours each day, save for his Saturday and Sunday holiday, of which he writes so slyly; her adviser, gossip, buffoon—in sickness or in health alike indispensable. In the same year Pope dates his own quarrel with him; and he left off his familiarity with Chesterfield and Hervey for the same reason, he says, "merely because they both had too much wit for him." It was soon a pretty squabble, and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu did not pour oil on the waters. "Verses to the Imitator of Horace" and "A Letter from a Nobleman at Hampton Court to a Doctor of Divinity" were Hervey's contributions to the fray; and Pope's culminated in the bitter character of Sporus, "that mere white curd of asses' milk." The sharpest personal taunts are joined to political references, stinging alike to the Queen and the favourite.
"Eve's tempter thus the rabbins have express'd:—
A cherub's face—a reptile all the rest!
Beauty that shocks you, parts than none can trust,
Wit that can creep, and pride that licks the dust."
... at the ear of Eve, familiar toad,
Half froth, half venom, spits himself abroad."
This came out years later, and later still Hervey's feeble rejoinder. And meanwhile the peer was living on asses' milk and biscuits, a miserable life enough, of which almost the only pleasure was the honourable one of being of service to Queen Caroline. He lived till 1743; and six years before, the great Duchess of Marlborough, more bitter and more witty than ever in her old age, speaking of him as "always with the King and in vast favour," added "he has certainly parts and wit, but is the most wretched profligate man that ever was born, besides ridiculous; a painted face and not a tooth in his head." In 1740 he at last obtained political office, and in 1742 he was dismissed after Walpole's fall. A wretched career was his, which achieved nothing worthy, and only in its devotion to the Queen was above contempt. He began life a Whig and a Ministerialist: he died a "patriot" by the side of those young statesmen, Lord Lyttelton and Cornet Pitt, whom he had ridiculed.
And yet Lord Hervey was not the worst member of the court which resided at Hampton Court in the early years of George II.'s reign. One feels inclined to cry, like Matthew Arnold of the party, the Godwins and the sordid hangers-on, that surrounded Shelley, "What a set!"
The King, utterly brutal, licentious, coarse, unfeeling, passionate, and reckless; the Queen, cynical, cold-hearted, without any fixed standard of religion or morals; the Prince dissolute, false, fatuously conceited; the Princesses hypocritical, or weak, or callous. "What a set!" It was a court which the manners of a Chesterfield might adorn, and which certainly his morals did not disgrace.
My Lord Hervey, who writes his "Letter to a Doctor of Divinity from a Nobleman at Hampton Court," was scornful enough against the clergy, contemptuous and bitter by turns, and, like most men of ill life in that age, he professed to hold the most sceptical opinions on religion. But he had at least one Bishop to his friend, and was by no means unconcerned in the matter of ecclesiastical patronage. Here he copied the Queen his mistress, who, says Chesterfield, "after puzzling herself with all the whimsies and fantastical speculations of different sects, fixed herself ultimately in Deism," but who was keenly active in the distribution of Church appointments, and commended Butler on her deathbed. It is not unnatural that he should never give credit for a good motive or hesitate to attribute a bad one. But though he certainly extenuates nothing, he makes of the Queen, after all, not a little of a heroine. Lord Chesterfield in a few words gives a view not dissimilar to the impression that comes from all Lord Hervey's Memoirs: "Upon the whole, the agreeable woman was liked by most people, while the Queen was neither esteemed, beloved, nor trusted by any one but the King"—and, we may add, Lord Hervey.
Queen Caroline, living her hard life in those fine rooms that look out upon the Fountain Garden, was, with all her coarseness, a very different woman from the Schulenberg or the Kilmansegge, or the "avaricious fury of a niece" Lady Walsingham, or Lady Deloraine with her utter disregard of self-respect, or Madame de Walmoden, or even the good-natured, kind-hearted Lady Suffolk. She was a stateswoman, not a mere leader of a court.
"You may strut, dapper George, but 'twill all be in vain;
We know 'tis Queen Caroline, not you that reign—
You govern no more than Don Philip of Spain.
Then if you would have us fall down and adore you,
Lock up your fat spouse, as your dad did before you."
Yet very different was her life to that of Elizabeth Farnese, to whom this squib compared her. Elizabeth's was a servitude, but Caroline's was slavery. George's "fat Venus" was snubbed, and bullied, and worried night and day. Hour after hour she must listen to her husband's silly gasconading, or his immoral tales, or his ill-tempered condemnation of everything and every person that did not suit his humour.
Lord Hervey tells a story of the change in the pictures in the great drawing-room at Kensington as an instance of the "accumulated trifles" that marked his ill-temper and insolence; and he ends it by a picture of a typical morning scene.[9] "His Majesty stayed about five minutes in the gallery, snubbed the Queen, who was drinking chocolate, for being always stuffing; the Princess Emily for not hearing him; the Princess Caroline for being grown fat; the Duke [of Cumberland] for standing awkwardly; Lord Hervey for not knowing what relation the Prince of Sultzbach was to the Elector Palatine; and then carried the Queen to walk and be re-snubbed in the garden." And all the while, as so often—Lord Hervey tells it of another occasion when George was explaining the singularlv inappropriate pictures which he had brought over from Hanover to hang in the Queen's drawing-room—the only friend the Queen could rely upon, "whilst he was peeping over his Majesty's shoulder at these pictures, was shrugging up his own, and now and then stealing a look to make faces at the Queen, who, a little angry, a little peevish, and a little tired with her husband's absurdity, and a little entertained with his lordship's grimaces, used to sit and knot in a corner of the room, sometimes yawning and sometimes smiling, and equally afraid of betraying those signs either of her lassitude or of her mirth."[10]
As time went on, and after a new entanglement in Hanover, George from uncivil became absolutely brutal, "abominably and perpetually so harsh and rough, that she could never speak one word uncontradicted, nor do any act unreproved; and though the Queen, whilst she knew the King's heart was as warm to her as his temper, could, for the sake of the agreeable advantages she reaped from the one, support and forgive the irksome inconveniences she was exposed upon the other, yet now the case was altered, for, as his heart grew cooler and his temper warmer, so her sufferings were increased, and the usual recompense for them lessened."[11]
Into this unhappy relation there was introduced the miserable, and, as it seemed then and for some time after, traditional hostility between the sovereign and the heir to the throne. Frederick, Prince of Wales, a profligate, faithless, intriguing puppy—his parents used much worse words of him—was married to the Princess Augusta of Saxe-Gotha in 1736, and from that time the family dissensions, bad enough already, became worse than ever. The Prince must needs tell his wife to approach as near to insulting the Queen as she could do without open insolence, and for himself, he must pass the bounds of deliberate affront. The last scene of the domestic tragi-comedy was the hurrying of the Princess of Wales from Hampton Court on Sunday, 31st July 1737, when her child was on the point of being born, full gallop to Saint James's.
It was a marvel that the Princess did not die, and the indignation of the King and Queen was for once justifiable in its extravagance. The night, which Lord Hervey describes with such vivacity, was one such as many another at the Palace, which the courtiers professed to find so dull. The King, Queen, Prince and Princess of Wales had dined together. Then the King retired below-stairs to rooms on the ground-floor of the Fountain Court—where years before he could often be seen, watch in hand, waiting for the exact moment of his visit to Lady Suffolk—and was playing commerce. The Queen sat in her rooms playing quadrille, and with her "the Princess Emily at her commerce-table, and the Princess Caroline and Lord Hervey at cribbage, just as usual." And meanwhile the poor Princess was hurried down the staircase from her apartments, which were at the end of the east front beyond the Queen's and separated from them by the public dining-room, into a coach without any one knowing.
They kept early hours in those days, for the royal party separated at ten, and every one went to bed by eleven. At half-past one the King and Queen were awoke, and told of what was happening, and by four o'clock the Queen with her daughters, the Duke of Grafton and Lord Hervey, was at Saint James's and saw the "little rat of a girl," her new-born grand-child. When she had seen it, she walked across the court to Lord Hervey's rooms and took chocolate, and she was back at Hampton by eight o'clock.
The extraordinary story, almost incredible as we read it in Lord Hervey's calmly realistic Memoirs, is not out of keeping with the amazing character of the court life at that day. The vice, and meanness, and brutality, the wit, and charm, and politeness, make a picture difficult to realise. Caroline on her death-bed, piteous sight, while George is sobbing out before her "J'aurai des maîtresses," is hardly more human in her heroism than in her horrible hatred of her son. "I will give it you under my hand, if you are in any fear of relapsing, that my dear first-born is the greatest ass, and the greatest liar, and the greatest canaille, and the greatest beast in the whole world, and I most heartily wish he was out of it."
George III. has been blamed for giving up the Palace as a royal residence; and the little story of his grandfather having boxed his ears is made to account for it. But can one wonder that a prince of such a fine moral feeling should shrink from associations such as his youth would recall of the palace of George II.? For the last years, when the Queen was dead, were worse than ever. Now Madame Walmoden had come over from Hanover, and was Countess of Yarmouth, and she would drive with the King to Hampton Court on Saturday afternoons, says Horace Walpole, "in coaches and six, with heavy horseguards kicking up the dust before them—dined, walked an hour in the garden, returned in the same dusty parade, and his Majesty fancied himself the most gallant and lively prince in Europe."
The short visits of George II. are almost the last royal memories of Hampton Court. Some of the rooms are just as he left them. In the Queen's bathing-closet one can fancy that the chaplains may be heard praying next door, as in Lord Hervey's satiric play. The public dining-room, of which the decoration is said to date from 1740, with its rather later Georgian pictures, effectively recalls the last years 
The East Front
of George II. The little rooms of the Prince of Wales's suite next to it have lost their furniture, save the pieces of tapestry worked at Mortlake in Charles II.'s time to commemorate the battle of Solebay. The Venus has gone from the chimneypiece of the Queen's private chapel, but the little marble bath which Caroline used is still in the next room. The King's Gallery has lost the Raffaelle cartoons, and there is little else save the rooms themselves from this point that recalls dapper George till we come to the Queen's great staircase, of which the decoration, unpleasing and uncomely, is by Kent. We turn away our eyes from the work of this architect in the Clock-court; and we may best end our chapter with the charming story Horace Walpole tells of the "beautiful Gunnings" in 1751. They came to the Palace, as folk do now, to see the sights. As they entered the room where hung Kneller's beauties of William III.'s court, another party arrived, and the housekeeper said, "This way, ladies; there are the beauties." "The Gunnings flew into a passion and asked her what she meant; that they came to see the Palace, not to be shown as a sight themselves."
Already the Palace was becoming a show place. It was left to the reminiscences of royalty and to literary associations. Every one, as time went on, came to see it, but no sovereign lived there again. And yet, as Miss Mitford said, "How can anybody leave Hampton Court and live in the Pavilion?"
There is an air of homeliness about the royal life there in the eighteenth century, with all its coarseness, which, in spite of the early Hanoverian hatred of everything English, has an air strongly national about it.
"Hanover," says Lord Hervey in one of his bitterest passages about George II., "had so completed the conquest of his affections, that there was nothing English ever commended in his presence that he did not always show, or pretend to show, was surpassed by something of the same kind in Germany. No English, or even French cook, could dress a dinner; no English confectioner set out a dessert; no English player could act; no English coachman could drive, or English jockey ride; nor were any English horses fit to be drove or fit to be ridden; no Englishman knew how to come into a room, nor any Englishwoman how to dress herself; nor were there any diversions in England, public or private; nor any man or woman in England whose conversation was to be borne—the one, as he said, talking of nothing but their dull politics, and the others of nothing but their ugly clothes. Whereas at Hanover all these things were in their utmost perfection."[12]
Yet King George might storm as he would, Hampton Court, even in his time, was a thoroughly English house. The pictures, the furniture, the house and grounds, were, in the most obvious manner, those of an English King, not a German Elector. Space, and light, and decoration—thoroughly English characteristics—are the marks of the age as they are left at Hampton Court. There is nothing extravagant or fantastic. Even the richness is sobriety itself. The decoration in woodwork, seen so happily here, as in stucco, is homely as well as classical: and so the effect remains to-day. What splendour there may have been of Gobelin tapestry, of Louis Quinze furniture, foreign both, has become insignificant. The rooms may be dingy and brown, but they have never ceased to be homely and national.
- ↑ Pope's "Pastorals," Spring.
- ↑ "Windsor Forest."
- ↑ And, of course, of the preceding age. Cf. Dunciad, iii. 19-20:—
"Taylor, their better Charon, lends an oar,
Once swan of Thames, tho' now he sings no more." - ↑ "Windsor Forest."
- ↑ Contes Moraux, "Le Mari Sylphe."
- ↑ "Works," ed. Warburton (1751), vol. vii. p. 132.
- ↑ Mary Bellenden, whom Horace Walpole says contemporaries always remembered as the most perfect creature they had ever known; and "dear Molly Lepel."
- ↑ Mrs. Howard, afterwards Countess of Suffolk.
- ↑ Memoirs, vol. ii. p. 35.
- ↑ Memoirs, vol. ii. p. 84.
- ↑ Memoirs, vol. ii. p. 43.
- ↑ Memoirs, vol.ii. p. 29.