Horace Walpole and His World: Select Passages from His LettersWalpole, Horace
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Horace Walpole and His World: Select Passages from His Letters
Walpole, Horace
Walpole, Horace, 1717-1797 -- Correspondence
A few months later we have the following letter to Miss More:
“Strawberry Hill, June 23, 1789.
“MADAM HANNAH,
“You are an errant reprobate, and grow wickeder and wickeder
every day. You deserve to be treated like a _nègre_; and
your favourite Sunday, to which you are so partial, that you
treat the other poor six days of the week as if they had no
souls to be saved, should, if I could have my will, ‘shine no
Sabbath-day for you.’ Now, don’t simper, and look as innocent
as if virtue would not melt in your mouth. Can you deny the
following charges?--I lent you the ‘Botanic Garden,’ and you
returned it without writing a syllable, or saying where you
were, or whither you was going; I suppose for fear I should
know how to direct to you. Why, if I did send a letter after
you, could not you keep it three months without an answer, as
you did last year?
“In the next place, you and your _nine_ accomplices, who, by
the way, are too good in keeping you company, have clubbed the
prettiest Poem imaginable,[114] and communicated it to Mrs.
Boscawen, with injunctions not to give a copy of it; I suppose
because you are ashamed of having written a panegyric. Whenever
you _do_ compose a satire, you are ready enough to publish it;
at least, whenever you do, you will din one to death with it.
But now, mind your perverseness: that very pretty novel poem,
and I must own it is charming, have you gone and spoiled,
flying in the faces of your best friends the Muses, and keeping
no _measures_ with them. I’ll be shot if they dictated two of
the best lines with two syllables too much in each--nay, you
have weakened one of them,
“‘Ev’n Gardiner’s mind’
is far more expressive than _steadfast_ Gardiner’s; and,
as Mrs. Boscawen says, whoever knows anything of Gardiner,
could not want that superfluous epithet; and whoever does
not, would not be the wiser for your foolish insertion--Mrs.
Boscawen did not call it foolish, but I do. The second line, as
Mesdemoiselles the Muses handed it to you, Miss, was,
“‘Have all be free and saved--’
not, ‘All be free and all be saved:’ the second _all be_ is a
most unnecessary tautology. The poem was perfect and faultless,
if you could have let it alone. I wonder how your mischievous
flippancy could help maiming that most new and beautiful
expression, ‘sponge of sins;’ I should not have been surprised,
as you love verses too full of feet, if you had changed it to
‘that scrubbing-brush of sins.’
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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