For EIGHT DOLLARS, remitted directly to the Publishers, the LIVING AGE will be punctually forwarded for a year, free of postage. Remittances should be made by bank draft or check, or by post-office money-order, if possible. If neither of these can be procured, the money should be sent in a registered letter. All postmasters are obliged to register letters when requested to do so. Drafts, checks, and money-orders should be made payable to the order of LITTELL & Co. Siugle Numbers of THE LIVING AGE, 18 cents. Alone, alone I die on this wide heath, No help, no hope; and yet I die content. The stiff blood freezes o'er my wound of death: But for the cause my life is gladly spent ; No moan, no idle moan. Farewell, farewell, GLOAM and a greyness as of breaking night Once fitted to my finger in that bower Life holds the mem'ry of that golden hour. And darkness rises from the fallen sun. Whate'er thy joys, they vanish with the day; Sleep, mournful heart, and let the past be past! Sleep, happy soul! all life will sleep at last. To sleep! to sleep! TENNYSON. New Review. Aн, love, I cannot die, I cannot go Dead in the grave! And I can never hear A. MARY F. ROBINSON. From Temple Bar. HORACE WALPOLE'S TWIN WIVES. IT is generally and correctly-supposed that the brilliant cynic of Strawberry Hill lived and died a bachelor. But there were two charming sisters who in later life he called his "wives," to whom his caustic pen was always gentle, for whose welfare he showed the most chivalrous consideration, and who occupied his thoughts as constantly as Stellar and Vanessa did those of Swift, without their having to pay much of Stella and Vanes sa's bitter penalty. Some small portion of that penalty, indeed, fell on the sensitive and high-spirited Mary Berry and caused her acute pain. Envious and narrow-minded people professed to see mercenary motives in the friendship of a beautiful young woman for a septuagenarian, and were contemptuously incredulous of the intellectual sympathy which united them. As regards Horace Walpole himself, it seems possible that the suspicions of his jealous relatives had some foundation, and that for one brief moment he vainly urged Mary Berry to become the "wife" he loved to call her. If so, it does them both the greater honor that his loyal devotion never failed, from the meeting at which he "found her an angel," until, nine years later, she and her sister were the only comforters he desired by his deathbed. 66 Walpole's sarcastic levity of tongue and frequent want of charity are familiar as household words; it is only fair to see him sometimes in the cordial and sympathetic mood which he showed consistently to Marshal Conway, Sir Horace Mann, and a few other friends, occasionally to some of his own family, but most warmly to the two favorite companions of his last years. As it is impossible to walk through the rich woods of Mapledurham without seeing in "the mind's eye " Pope loitering by the side of his Fair-haired Martha and Theresa brown, so the bowery gardens of Strawberry Hill, by the same winding Thames, are haunted by the spare form of Horace Walpole, with his keen face and observant eyes, attended by the graceful sisters the elder "sweet, with fine dark eyes that are very Mary and Agnes were the daughters of Robert Berry, who began life with "great expectations "" from a maternal uncle named Ferguson; a Scotch merchant who made £300,000, bought an estate in Fifeshire, and married Miss Townshend of Honnington Hall, but could never be persuaded to leave his gloomy house of business in Austin Friars. Mr. Ferguson had no children, and his elder nephew, whom he sent to college, "bred to the law," and then despatched on a continental tour, was naturally regarded as his heir. But Robert displeased his uncle by marrying a portionless daughter of the Yorkshire Setons, and further disappointed him by having no sons himself, and by refusing to marry again immediately, when his beautiful young wife died in 1767, after four happy years. Of my mother [writes Miss Berry] I have only the idea of having seen a tall, thin young woman in a pea-green gown, seated in a chair, seeming unwell, from whom I was sent away to play elsewhere. Of my own irreparable loss I never acquired a just idea till some years after, when my father told us that my mother, on hearing some one say I was a fine child and they hoped I should be handsome, replied, "All she prayed to Heaven for her child was that it might receive a vigorous understanding." This prayer of a mother of eighteen for her first daughter impressed on my mind all I must have lost in such a parent.* Thenceforward Mr. Ferguson chose to consider as his heir William Berry, who married a rich wife of the house of Crawford, had two sons, and was "a sharp lad with a mercantile training," altogether better suited to Austin Friars than his literary and indolent elder brother. allowance of three hundred pounds a year was made to Robert, and An education was denied us, and all the thought When Mary and Agnes were twelve and eleven, the extreme precocity of his elder daughter led Mr. Berry to suppose that the cost of a governess could be dispensed with, and the sisters were left to their own devices, To be as idle and read what books we pleased; for neither of us had the least religious education been at all thought of. It was the age of Voltaire, and his doctrines had been adopted by all the soi-disant Scotch wits. My dear grandmother, indeed, made me read the Psalms and chapters every morning, but as neither comment nor explanation of their history was given, I hated the duty and escaped it when I could. . . . In 1774 my grandmother took me to visit Mr. Loveday, at Caversham, Berks, an old Tory country gentleman who had married a cousin of hers. . . . He saw much of all the clergymen in his neighborhood. At dinner the first toast was always" Church and King; "the second, "To the flourishing of the two Universities; the third, "To Maudlin College," where he had been educated. He was an accomplished scholar, and delighted to find me apt in recalling to his mind passages from the Roman poets. In 1781 Mr. Ferguson died, aged ninetythree; William Berry inherited £300,000 in the funds and the Scotch estate of £4,000 a year, whilst Robert only received £10,000. William then settled a thousand a year on his brother, and Robert celebrated his improved circumstances by taking his daughters for a tour in England and a long visit to the Crawfords in Rotterdam, after which they went up the Rhine to Switzerland, and thence to Italy. From this period Mary Berry dates the awakening of her mind and the formation of her character. I felt my understanding and imagination in crease every day [she says] but I soon found When the will was read the chief executor asked Robert Berry if he thought his share too much! that I had to lead those who ought to have led me; that I must be a protecting mother instead of a gay companion to my sister, and to my father a guide and monitor, instead of finding in him a tutor and protector. One cannot but suspect that the melancholy temperament, of which Miss Berry makes frequent and full confession, led her to exaggerate the disadvantages of her early years - or at all events their lasting effects; for her success when she did enter society was marked and instantaneous. She and her sister were amongst the few English women who, without superlative rank, beauty, intellect, or wealth, held a salon to which the possessors of these advantages constantly crowded. For half a century they knew every one best worth knowing, and they had that sympathetic charm which creates reputations amongst contemporaries more diffi any others to convey or explain cult than to posterity. While in Rome, where they arrived in November, 1783, the Berrys went to see the pope celebrate a high mass, at which the emperor Joseph (son of Maria Theresa), and the unfortunate Gustavus III. of Sweden were also spectators; and which Mary, with a touch of the Voltairianism she deprecated, calls "the grandest and best acted pantomime that can be imag. ined." They were presented to the pope (Pius VI.), and to the Duchess of Parma (a sister of Marie Antoinette), whom they found "tall, well-made, like the emperor, but not near so well-looking, ill and oddly dressed, rather masculine in her voice and manner, with a considerable degree of hauteur." Nelson's Caroline, queen of Naples, on the other hand, another daughter of “King Maria Theresa," was "very gracious in her manner, and very ready at the necessary conversation." The king of Sweden became friendly with the Berrys, accompanying them on several of their excursions, and showing himself an excellent traveller, always good-humored and regardless of bad weather. They "did" everything, whilst in Italy, with most praiseworthy energy -picture-galleries, ruins, churches, Herculaneum, and Vesuvius; besides the reigning royalties, they became acquainted with the eclipsed greatness of Madame | talents. I must even tell you they dress D'Albany; with Madame de Staël, then within the bounds of fashion, though fashMademoiselle Necker, sixteen years old, ionably, without the excrescences and balcoand "much neglected by the young En-nies with which modern hoydens overwhelm glish from the boldness of her manners," their persons. The first night I met them I and with General O'Hara - the most im- heard so much in their praise that I concluded would not be acquainted with them, having portant introduction of all, as regarded they would be all pretension. Now, I do not Mary's future happiness. know which I like best, except Mary's face, While at Naples they were much amused which is formed for a sentimental novel, but by two ballets at the Festino. In the first ten times better for a fifty times better thing Queen Caroline appeared as Ceres, at- - genteel comedy. This delightful family tended by Minerva, Mars, and some comes to me almost every Sunday evening. groups of peasants, who united in hand-... I forgot to tell you that Mr. Berry is a ing up to the king of Sweden's box on little merry man with a round face. . . . If the point of a spear, wreaths of artificial your ladyship insists on hearing the humors flowers bearing the inscriptions, "Au of my district you must indulge me with sendsauveur de sa Patrie;" "Au Protecteur ing you two pearls I found in my path.* des Beaux-Arts;” “A l'Alliance perpétuelle." After supper the kings of Sweden and Naples, sixteen gentlemen and six bears, represented "The Hunters of Lap land." "Their dresses," writes Miss Berry, were elegant and characteristic, and both kings, men, and bears performed their parts admirably." They concluded by handing up to the queen in her box some garlands of flowers and a parcel of Swedish gloves. 66 In 1785 the Berrys returned to England, and three years later they took a house at Twickenham. If I have picked up no recent anecdotes on our common [writes Walpole to Lady Ossory in October, 1788] I have made a much more precious acquisition. It is the acquaintance of two young ladies named Berry. . . . They were carried by their father for two or three years to France and Italy, and have returned the best informed and the most perfect creatures I ever saw at their age. They are exceedingly sensible, entirely natural and unaffected, frank, and qualified to talk on any subject. The eldest, I discovered by chance, understands Latin, and is a perfect Frenchwoman in her language. The younger draws charmingly. . . . She is less animated than Mary, and seems, out of deference to her sister, to speak seldomer, for they dote on each other, and Mary is always praising her sister's "From our great acquaintance in Italy with the king of Sweden, we became very intimate with his ambassador in Paris, M. de Staël. He spoke to me in all, confidence about his intended marriage with Mademoiselle Necker, asked my opinion and consulted me on the subject. But the match was already settled." (By the intervention, it was said, of Marie Antoinette. Journal, vol. i., p. 147.) Even in the first of the series of published letters addressed by Walpole to the sisters, as in nearly all its successors, may be traced, says Lady Theresa Lewis : -- The constant struggle in his mind between the tenderness with which he dwells on the pleasure of their society, and the fear of its expression making him ridiculous. He concludes his letter thus: If two negatives make an affirmative, why may not two ridicules compose one piece of sense? and therefore, as I am in love with you both, I trust it is a proof of the good sense of your devoted-H. WALPOLE. A little later he writes: You have not half the quickness that I thought you had, or, which is much more probable, I suspect that I am a little in love, and you are not, for I think I should have understood you in two syllables, which has not been your case. 1 had sealed my note, and was going to send it, when yours arrived with the invitation for Saturday. I had not time to break open my note, and so lifted What up a corner and squeezed in I will. could those syllables mean, but that I will do whatever you please? Yes, you may keep them as a note of hand, always payable at sight of your commands- -or your sister's. For I am not less in love with my wife Rachel than my wife Leah; and though I had a little forgotten my matrimonial vows at the beginning of this note, and haggled a little about owning my passion, now I recollect that I have taken a double dose, I am mighty proud of it. And being more in the right than ever lover Letters of Horace Walpole, edited by Peter Cunningham, vol. ix., p. 153. |