66

It is curious to compare the condition and habits of life of the Clerkenwell watch-makers with those of the Swiss artisans. There are some districts in Switzerland, the inhabitants of which are almost wholly occupied in the watch manufacture. Dr. Bowring, in his Report on Swiss Manufactures (1836), states: The Jura mountains have been the cradle of much celebrity in the mechanical arts, particularly in those more exquisite productions of which a minute complication is a peculiar character. During the winter, which lasts from six to seven months, the inhabitants are, as it were, imprisoned in their dwellings, and occupied in those works which require the utmost developement of skilful ingenuity. Nearly a hundred and twenty thousand watches are produced annually in the elevated regions of Neufchatel. In Switzerland, the most remarkable of the French watchmakers, and among them one who has lately obtained the gold medal at Paris for his beautiful watch-movements, had their birth and education; and a sort of honourable distinction attaches to the watch-making trade." Without entering far into the question of the alleged injury which the English manufacturer has been said to suffer from the importation of foreign watches, there is a remark which was made to Dr. Bowring by one of the principal watch-manufacturers of Geneva, which seems to us too important to be omitted :— "The watches of English manufacture do not come into competition with those of Swiss production, which are used for different purposes, and by a different class of persons. Notwithstanding all the risks and charges, the sale of Swiss watches is large, and it has not really injured the English watch-making trade. The English watches are far more solid in construction, fitter for service, and especially in countries where no good watchmakers are to be found, as the Swiss watches require delicate treatment. English watches, therefore, are sold to the purchaser who can pay a high price the Swiss watches supply the classes to whom a costly watch is inaccessible."*

It may perhaps be right to state that the making of a clock is not subjected to so many minute divisions as that of a watch; but be they few or many, the part of the metropolis to which we must look for most of the makers of both these specimens of human ingenuity is CLERKENWELL.

Report, p. 98.

[Concluded from No. LVII.]

LET us seat ourselves with Horace Walpole in his library at Strawberry Hill, and see the relation which the clever man of fashion bears to literature, and to the men of letters his contemporaries. There he sits, as he was painted by the poor artist Muntz, whom he patronised and despised, lounging in a luxurious arm-chair, soft and bright in its silk and embroidery, the window open, through which he occasionally looks on the green meadows and the shining river, in which he feels a half-poetical delight.* He turns to his elegant room, where "the books are ranged within Gothic arches of pierced work, taken from a side door-case to the choir in Dugdale's St. Paul's." The books themselves are a valuable collection, some for use, and some for show; and it is easy to perceive that for the most part they have not been brought together as the mere furniture of the bookcases, but have been selected pretty much with reference to their possessor's tastes and acquirements. Here is a man, then, of fortune, chiefly derived from sinecures bestowed upon him by his father; of literary acquirements far beyond the fashionable people of his day; with abundance of wit and shrewd observation; early in his career heartily tired of political intrigue, and giving up himself to a quiet life of learned leisure mixed with a little dissipation; and yet that man, pursuing this life for half a century, appears to have come less in contact with the greatest minds of his day than hundreds of his contemporaries of far inferior genius and reputation. With the exception perhaps of General Conway, Walpole has no correspondence with any of the really eminent public men of his time; and the most illustrious of his literary friends, after Gray is gone, are Cole, the dullest of antiquaries, and Hannah More. * See page 156.

VOL. III.

L

Warburton, in a letter to Hurd, terms Walpole "an insufferable coxcomb;" and we have no doubt the bold churchman was right. Walpole was utterly destitute of sympathy, perhaps for the higher things of literature, certainly for the higher class of literary men. He had too much talent to be satisfied with the dullness and the vices of the people of fashion with whom he necessarily herded; but he had not courage enough to meet the more intellectual class upon a footing of equality. For the immediate purpose of this paper, it is of very little consequence what Walpole himself individually thinks of literature and men of letters; but it is of importance to show the relation in which the men of letters stood to the higher classes, and the lofty tone in which one whose passion was evidently the love of literary fame spoke of those to whom literature was a profession, and not an affair of smirking amateurship.

Pope had been dead two or three years when Horace Walpole bought Strawberry Hill: they were not therefore neighbours. In 1773, Walpole, speaking depreciatingly of his contemporaries, says, "Recollect that I have seen Pope, and lived with Gray;" but he writes not a word to any one of what he had seen of Pope, and the only notice we have (except a party account of the quarrel between Pope and Bolingbroke) is, in 1742, of Cibber's famous pamphlet against Pope, which subsequently raised its author to be the hero of the Dunciad.' Walpole is evidently rubbing his hands with exultation when he says, "It will notably vex him." Pope died in 1744. Of the small captains who scrambled for the crowns of the realms of poetry, after the death of this Alexander, there was one who founded a real empire-James Thomson. Walpole says, “ I had rather have written the most absurd lines in Lee, than Leonidas or The Seasons; as I had rather be put into the round-house for a wrong-headed quarrel, than sup quietly at eight o'clock with my grandmother. There is another of these tame geniuses, a Mr. Akenside, who writes Odes: in one he has lately published he says, 'Light the tapers, urge the fire.' Had not you rather make gods jostle in the dark, than light the candles for fear they should break their heads?"* Gray, as every one knows, was Walpole's friend from boyhood. The young men quarrelled upon their travels, and after three years were reconciled. Walpole, no doubt, felt a sort of self-important gratification in the fame of Gray as a poet; yet, while Gray was alive, Walpole thus described his conversation: "I agree with you most absolutely in your opinion about Gray; he is the worst company in the world. From a melancholy turn, from living reclusely, and from a little too much dignity, he never converses easily; all his words are measured and chosen, and formed into sentences: his writings are admirable; he himself is not agreeable."† Yet Walpole was furious when Boswell's book came out, and Johnson is made to say of Gray, "Sir, he was dull in company, dull in his closet, dull everywhere: he was dull in a new way, and that made many people think him great: he was a mechanical poet." In 1791 Walpole writes, In 1791 Walpole writes, "After the Doctor's death, Burke, Sir Joshua Reynolds, and Boswell sent an ambling circular letter to me, begging subscriptions for a monument for him-the two last, I think, impertinently, as they could not but know my opinion, and could not suppose I would contribute to a monument for one who had endeavoured, poor soul! to degrade my friend's superlative poetry. I would not deign to write an answer, but sent *Horace Walpole to Mann, March 29, 1745. Horace Walpole to Montagu, Sept. 3, 1748.

down word by my footman, as I would have done to parish officers with a brief, that I would not subscribe."* Walpole, we have little doubt, considered himself as the patron of Gray, and Johnson's opinion was an attack upon his amourpropre. His evident hatred of Johnson probably belonged as much to the order as to the individual. The poor man of genius and learning, who, by his stern resolves and dogged industry, had made himself independent of patronage, was a dangerous example. The immortal letter to Chesterfield on the dedication of the Dictionary was an offence against a very numerous tribe.

It is easy to understand, from Walpole's letters, how an author, however eminent, was looked upon in society, except he had some adventitious quality of wealth or birth to recommend him. In 1766 Walpole thus writes to Hume: "You know, in England, we read their works, but seldom or never take any notice of authors. We think them sufficiently paid if their books sell, and, of course, leave them to their colleges and obscurity, by which means we are not troubled with their vanity and impertinence. In France they spoil us, but that was no business of mine. I, who am an author, must own this conduct very sensible; for, in truth, we are a most useless tribe." It is difficult to understand whether this passage is meant for insolence to the person to whom it is addressed for what was Hume but an author? "We read their works "-we, the aristocratic and the fashionable-to which class Hume might fancy he belonged, after he had proceeded from his tutorship to a mad lord into the rank of a chargé d'affaires. But then "in France they spoil us;" here the aristocrat is coquetting with the honours of authorship in the face of his brother author. Perhaps the whole was meant for skilful flattery. Walpole's real estimate of the literary class is found in a letter to Cole, who was too obtuse to take any portion of the affront to himself:-" Mr. Gough wants to be introduced to me! He is so dull, that he would only be troublesome; and besides, you know I shun authors, and would never have been one myself, if it obliged me to keep such bad company. They are always in earnest, and think their profession serious, and dwell upon trifles, and reverence learning. I laugh at all those things, and write only to laugh at them and divert myself. Mr. Gough is

very welcome to see Strawberry Hill, or I would help him to any scraps in my possession that would assist his publication; though he is one of those industrious who are only re-burying the dead: but I cannot be acquainted with him. It is contrary to my system and my humour. . . . . I have no thirst to know the rest of my contemporaries, from the absurd bombast of Dr. Johnson, down to the silly Dr. Goldsmith; though the latter changeling has had bright gleams of parts, and the former had sense till he changed it for words, and sold it for a pension. Don't think me scornful. Recollect that I have seen Pope, and lived with Gray."+

Walpole was too acute not to admire Fielding; yet he evidently delights to lower the man, in the gusto with which he tells the following anecdote:-" Rigby and Peter Bathurst t'other night carried a servant of the latter's, who had attempted to shoot him, before Fielding; who, to all his other vocations, has, by the grace of Mr. Lyttelton, added that of Middlesex justice. He sent them word he was at supper-that they must come next morning. They did not understand that * Horace Walpole to Miss Berry, May 26, 1791. Horace Walpole to Cole, April 27, 1773.

freedom, and ran up, where they found him banqueting, with a blind man, a and three Irishmen, on some cold mutton and a bone of ham, both in one dish, and the dirtiest cloth. He never stirred nor asked them to sit. Rigby, who had seen him so often come to beg a guinea of Sir C. Williams, and Bathurst, at whose father's he had lived for victuals, understood that dignity as little, and pulled themselves chairs, on which he civilized.”* Scott, in his life of Fielding, suggests that something of this anecdote may belong to the " aristocratic exaggeration" of Walpole; and that the blind man might have been Fielding's brother, who was blind; in the same way the three Irishmen might not necessarily have been denizens of St. Giles's; and the female, whom Walpole designates by the most opprobrious of names, might have been somewhat more respectable than his own Lady Caroline. We are not sure that, under the worst aspect, the supper at Fielding's was more discreditable than the banquet of minced chickens at Vauxhall. (Sce No. LVII., page 104.) Fielding at this period, when his crime was a dirty table-cloth, thus writes of himself:-" By composing, instead of inflaming, the quarrels of porters and beggars, and by refusing to take a shilling from a man who most undoubtedly would not have had another left, I had reduced an income of about five hundred a-year, of the dirtiest money upon earth, to little more than three hundred; a considerable portion of which remained with my clerk."

Walpole himself, in the outset of his literary career, appears, as was to be expected from his temperament and education, miserable under what was then, and is now, called criticism. After the publication of the Royal and Noble Authors,' he writes, "I am sick of the character of author; I am sick of the consequences of it; I am weary of seeing my name in the newspapers; I am tired with reading foolish criticisms on me, and as foolish defences of me; and I trust my friends will be so good as to let the last abuse of me pass unanswered." If he had lived in these times, he might have been less thin-skinned. Those were not the days of reviews and magazines, and newspapers. The Monthly Review' was set up in 1749, and the Critical Review' in 1756. There was only an Evening Post,' and one or two other starveling journals. Those were the days when the old Duchess of Rutland, being told of some strange casualty, says, “Lucy, child, step into the next room and set that down." "Lord, Madam," says Lady Lucy, "it can't be true." Oh, no matter, child, it will do for news into the country, next post." Horace Walpole might well have compounded for a little of the pert criticism of the reviews of his day, to be exempt from the flood of opinion which now floats the straws and rushes over the things which are stable. Fortunate was it for him and for us that he lived before the days of newspapers, or half he has told us would have been told in a perishable form. A Strawberry Hill man could not have existed in the glare of journalising. He would have been a slave in the Republic of Letters, although he affected to despise court slavery. He must, in the very nature of things, have been president and member of council of some half-dozen of the thousand and one societies with which London now abounds; and he would have had the satisfaction of walking in the conversazione horse-mill of hot rooms and cold coffee three times a week *Horace Walpole to Montagu, May 18, 1749. Horace Walpole to the Rev. Henry Zouch, May 14, 1759.

Horace Walpole to Mann, Dec, 23, 1742.