Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 04.djvu/404

 of the Courts of George I and II,’ which he completes on 13 Jan. 1789. To them in the same year he inscribed his ‘Catalogue of Strawberry Hill.’ He secured a house for them at Teddington in 1789. In 1791 he prevailed upon them to take possession of Little Strawberry Hill, previously known as Cliveden from its having been the abode of his friend Kitty Clive, the famous actress. Little Strawberry Hill was for many years the favourite home of the Berrys. George, the third earl of Orford, died 5 Dec. 1791, and the earldom devolved upon Horace Walpole. The only value of the earldom in his eyes was that it enabled him to place within reach of Mary Berry's acceptance the title of countess. ‘There is a tradition handed down by Lord Lansdowne,’ says the ‘Edinburgh Review’ (October 1865, cxxii. 298), ‘that he was ready to go through the formal ceremony of marriage with either sister, to make sure of their society, and confer rank and fortune on the family; as he had the power of charging the Orford estate with a jointure of 2,000l. a year.’ Mary Berry had, in 1779, been sought in marriage by a Mr. Bowman, and wrote long afterwards that she had ‘suffered as people do’ at sixteen ‘from what, wisely disapproved of, I resisted and dropped.’ General O'Hara, governor of Gibraltar, had met Miss Berry in 1784 in Italy, and was engaged to her before leaving England in the November of 1795 for Gibraltar. Her reluctance to leave her home at once as his bride led to their gradual estrangement, and to the ultimate breaking off of the proposed marriage at the end of April 1796. Lord Orford died on 2 March 1797. He left to each the sum of 4,000l., and to Mary and Agnes jointly, for their lives, the house and garden of Little Strawberry Hill, together with the long meadow in front of it, and all the furniture. He also bequeathed to Robert, Mary, and Agnes Berry, to be divided among them, share and share alike, his printed works, and a box containing manuscripts, to be published at their discretion and for their emolument. In 1798 was published in five quarto volumes the collective edition of the ‘Works of Horace Walpole.’ Nominally edited by Mr. Berry, it was in reality all Mary Berry's doing, save only one brief passage, a reference to herself, in the preface. A comedy in five acts, written by Mary Berry, and entitled ‘Fashionable Friends,’ having been performed with some success at Strawberry Hill (among other amateurs) by Robert Berry and his two daughters, was afterwards, in May 1802, brought out at Drury Lane Theatre, where it was represented for three nights only, and then summarily withdrawn. It failed on the score of its lax morality. Pure-souled woman though she was, she had not shrunk, four years previously, from including among Horace Walpole's works the ‘Mysterious Mother.’ Oddly enough, too, she prefixed to her published play of ‘Fashionable Friends’ a note, imputing it to her dead and buried friend, Horace Walpole! Another dramatic work of her own, a farce called ‘The Martins,’ set down in a manuscript list of her writings, was never produced either in print or on the stage. Immediately before her failure at Drury Lane, Miss Berry had returned from Paris, whither she had gone on her second visit, on the occasion of the peace of Amiens. During her stay she was presented to Napoleon in the palace of the Tuileries. Returning to France 30 Oct. with her sister and father, she went on to Nice, and thence round through Switzerland and Germany, being back again in England in September 1803. Agnes was at this time engaged (probably) to her first cousin, Colonel Ferguson (Edin. Rev. cxxii. 311), but the engagement was broken off. In 1810 Mary Berry brought out in four volumes, annotated by herself, the letters of Mme. du Deffand to Horace Walpole between 1766 and 1780, as well as those written by her to Voltaire between 1759 and 1775, all from the French originals at Strawberry Hill. For her editorial labours on this occasion Miss Berry received 200l. On 18 May 1817 Robert Berry died of old age at Genoa, and, his brother William's annuity to him of 1,000l. a year then ceasing, his two daughters had thenceforth to live upon an annual income of 700l. In 1819 Mary Berry brought out ‘Some Account of the Life of Rachel Wriothesley, Lady Russell, followed by a series of Letters from Lady Russell to her husband, Lord William Russell, from 1672 to 1682, together with some Miscellaneous Letters to and from Lady Russell.’ The work was published from the originals in the possession of the Duke of Devonshire. The first volume of her most ambitious work, ‘A comparative View of the Social Life of England and France from the Restoration of Charles the Second to the French Revolution,’ was published in 1828; a second appeared in March 1831, called ‘Social Life in England and France from the French Revolution in 1789 to that of July 1830.’ It was reissued as a collected whole in the complete edition of her ‘Works’ in 1844, with this new title, ‘England and France: a comparative View of the Social Condition of both Countries.’ During her whole life Mary Berry had had but one serious illness, namely, on 16 March 1825, when she was struck down by an all but