Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 59.djvu/180

 Reeve [q. v.] to Sir Walter—and after. With the ‘Castle of Otranto’ tentatively and inexpertly, but unmistakably, began the modern romantic revival.

By the time the ‘Castle of Otranto’ was in its second edition, Walpole had carried out a long-cherished project and started for Paris. This he did in September 1765. He saw much of cultivated French society, especially its great ladies, of whom his letters contain vivacious accounts (cf. Corresp. iv. 465–73). But the most notable incident of this visit to France, and the pretext of later ones, was the friendship he formed with the blind and brilliant Madame du Deffand, then nearing seventy, whose attraction to the mixture of independence, effeminacy, and real genius which made up Walpole's character speedily grew into a species of infatuation. He had no sooner quitted Paris than she wrote to him, and thenceforward until her death her letters, dictated to her faithful secretary, Wiart, continued, except when Walpole was actually visiting her (and she sometimes wrote to him even then), to reach him regularly. He went to Paris to see her in 1767, and again in 1775. Her attachment lasted five years later, until 1780, when she died painlessly at eighty-four. She left Walpole her manuscripts and her books. Many of her letters are included in the selection published in 1810, and eight hundred of the originals were sold at the Strawberry Hill sale of 1842. Walpole's own letters, which he had prevailed upon her to return to him, though extant in 1810, have not been printed; and those received subsequently to 1774, a few belonging to 1780 excepted, were burnt by her at Walpole's desire. Good Frenchman though he was, he no doubt felt apprehensive lest his compositions in a foreign tongue should, in a foreign land, fall into unsympathetic keeping.

One of his jeux d'esprit while at Paris in 1765 had been a mock letter from Frederick the Great to the self-tormentor Rousseau, offering him an asylum in his dominions. Touched up by Helvétius and others, this missive gave great delight to the anti-Rousseau party, and, passing to England, helped to embitter the well-known quarrel between Rousseau and David Hume (1711–1776) [q. v.] Three years later Walpole was himself the victim of spurious documents. In March 1769 Thomas Chatterton [q. v.], then at Bristol, sent to him, as author of the ‘Anecdotes of Painting,’ some fragments of prose and verse, hinting that he could supply others bearing on the subject of art in England. Walpole was drawn, and replied encouragingly. Chatterton rejoined by partly revealing his condition, and Walpole, consulting Gray and Mason, was advised that he was being imposed upon. Private inquiries at Bath brought no satisfactory account of Chatterton, and he accordingly wrote him a fatherly letter of counsel, in which he added that doubts had been thrown upon the genuineness of the documents. He appears to have neglected or forgotten Chatterton's subsequent communications, until upon receipt of one more imperative than the rest (24 July), demanding the return of the papers, he snapped up both letters and poems in a pet, enclosed them in a cover without comment, and thought no more of the matter until Goldsmith told him at the Royal Academy dinner, a year and a half later, that Chatterton had destroyed himself—an announcement which seems to have filled him with genuine concern. He might no doubt have acted more benevolently or more considerately. But he had been misled at the outset, and it is idle to make him responsible for Chatterton's untimely end because he failed to show himself an ideal patron. His own account of the circumstances, printed, as already stated, at his private press, is to be found in vol. iv. pp. 205–45 of his ‘Works’ (see also Chatterton, 1869).

In May 1767 he had resigned his seat in parliament, and in the following year produced two of his most ambitious works—the ‘Historic Doubts on Richard the Third,’ and the sombre and powerful but unpleasant tragedy of the ‘Mysterious Mother,’ already mentioned as one of the issues from the Strawberry Hill press. From 1769, however, the year of his last communication to Chatterton, until his death some eight-and-twenty years later, his life is comparatively barren of incident. It was passed pleasantly enough between his books and prints and correspondence, but, as he says himself, ‘will not do to relate.’ ‘Loo at Princess Amelie's [at Gunnersbury House], loo at Lady Hertford's, are the capital events of my history, and a Sunday alone, at Strawberry, my chief entertainment’ (Corresp. vi. 287). With being an author, he declared, he had done. Nevertheless, in 1773 he wrote a little fairy comedy called ‘Nature will prevail,’ which five years later was acted at the Haymarket with considerable success. He also printed various occasional pieces at the Strawberry Hill press, the more important of which have been enumerated; and he added to Strawberry itself in 1776–8 a special closet to contain a series of drawings in soot-water which his neighbour at Little Marble Hill, Lady Di Beau-