"Horace Walpole" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Horace Walpole, in one of his letters to Selwyn in 1785, mentions a fact which may stand for a page of narrative. "Young Wade," he says, "is reported to have lost one thousand guineas last night to that vulgarest of all the Bourbons, the Duc de Chartres, and they say the fool is not yet nineteen." From ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... name known to English literature in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the literary cream, in fact, of all the vast collection which filled the muniment room upstairs; books which had belonged to Addison, to Sir William Temple, to Swift, to Horace Walpole; the first four folios of Shakespeare, all perfect, and most of the quartos—everything that the heart of the English collector could most desire was there. And the charm of it was that only a small proportion of these precious things represented conscious and deliberate acquisition. ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... qualities of Henry Fielding's friends and truculently talkative about the vices of Henry Fielding's enemies. And what is exactly known people have somehow or other contrived to misapprehend and misapply. They have preferred the evidence of Horace Walpole to that of their own senses. They have suffered the brilliant antitheses of Lady Mary to obscure and blur the man as they might have found him in his work. Booth and Jones have been taken for definite and complete reflections of the author of their being: the parts for the whole, that is—a ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley
... fortunes in England. D'Argens's book, Memoires du Marquis de Mirmon, ou Le Solitaire Philosophe (Amsterdam, 1736) was never translated into English and apparently was not much read. But Claude Prosper Jolyot de Crebillon, the younger, was extolled by Thomas Gray and Horace Walpole, quoted by Sarah Fielding,[9] and had the honor, if one can trust Walpole, of an offer of keeping from Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. His Egaremens du Coeur et de l'Esprit (1736-38) was translated in 1751[10] and is the novel which Yorick helped the ...
— Prefaces to Fiction • Various
... to the ladies is by a course of Mrs. Behn's novels. With the oncoming of the ponderous and starched decorum of the third George's reign her vogue waned apace, but she was still read and quoted. On 12 December, 1786, Horace Walpole writes to the Countess of Upper Ossory, 'I am going to Mrs. Cowley's new play,[59] which I suppose is as instructive as the Marriage of Figaro, for I am told it approaches to those of Mrs. Behn in Spartan delicacy; but I shall see Miss Farren, who, in my poor opinion is the first of all ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. I (of 6) • Aphra Behn
... tale of this sort. But permit me to say, my dear Doctor, that this objection is rather formal than substantial. It is true, that such slight compositions might not suit the severer genius of our friend Mr Oldbuck. Yet Horace Walpole wrote a goblin tale which has thrilled through many a bosom; and George Ellis could transfer all the playful fascination of a humour, as delightful as it was uncommon, into his Abridgement of the Ancient Metrical Romances. So that, however I ...
— Ivanhoe - A Romance • Walter Scott
... the two women and a breach between Mme. du Deffand and d'Alembert. The marquise was therefore left alone, blind, but too proud to tolerate pity, yet by her conversation retaining her power of fascination. It was about this time that Horace Walpole became connected with her life. Upon the death of Mme. Geoffrin, she, hearing of the imposing ceremonies and funeral orations, exclaimed: Voila bien du bruit pour une omelette au lard. [A great ado about a lard omelet!] Her ...
— Women of Modern France - Woman In All Ages And In All Countries • Hugo P. Thieme
... eloquent thanks of such men as Horace Walpole, and other persons of distinction, to the Misses Berry, in London, who kept up their evening receptions for sixty years. But, from the trials of those who have too much visiting, we turn to the people ...
— Manners and Social Usages • Mrs. John M. E. W. Sherwood
... MARQUISE DU, a woman of society, famed for her wit and gallantry; corresponded with the eminent philosophes of the time, in particular Voltaire, as well as with Horace Walpole; her letters are specially brilliant, and display great shrewdness; she is characterised by Prof. Saintsbury as "the typical French lady of the eighteenth century"; she became blind in 1753, but retained her relish for society, ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... pseudo-classical abominations and sham Gothic, so favoured by Horace Walpole and his admirers, can be briefly dismissed. A more rampant piece of absurdity than that of erecting imitations of portions of Greek temples and adapting them for Christian worship it is difficult to imagine, and in the Pavilion at Brighton, ...
— Our Homeland Churches and How to Study Them • Sidney Heath
... Orange, and many public men of that period, as well as to the campaign of the allied army in Flanders, and the evident sincerity and soldierly bluntness of the writer renders them quite entertaining. Lord Cutts was not merely a famous commander, but a poet, and his verses are quoted by Horace Walpole. Mr. Winthrop expressed a desire to learn where a picture of him might be found, and he discussed the authority and probable date of various portraits of Governor Joseph Dudley, and ...
— The New England Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, February, 1886. - The Bay State Monthly, Volume 4, No. 2, February, 1886. • Various
... manufactured for the stage and the anecdote-books betray their artificial origin in their breadth and obviousness. The real bull carries one with it at first by an imperceptible confusion and misplacement of ideas in the mind where it has arisen, and it is not until you reason back that you see it. Horace Walpole used to say that the best of all bulls, from its thorough and grotesque confusion of identity, was that of the man who complained of having been "changed at nurse;" and perhaps he is right. An Irishman, and ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... produced him quite in their old age; for if he had not been born, I should have been the most miserable of men,—yes, positively, that horrible marquisate would have come to me! I never think over Horace Walpole's regrets, when he got the earldom of Orford, without the deepest sympathy, and without a shudder at the thought of what my dear Lady Castleton was kind enough to save me from,—all owing to the Ems waters, after twenty years' marriage! Well, my young ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... quite a circle of her own. For many years her funny little sister lived here, too. And there was a time, Freddie says, when there was almost a rivalry between them and two other famous old ladies who lived in Bruton Street—what was their name? Oh, the Miss Berrys! Horace Walpole's Miss Berrys. All sorts of famous people, I believe, have sat in these chairs. But the ...
— Lady Rose's Daughter • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... social history, often bearing punning titles, e.g., Table Traits with Something on Them (1854), and Knights and their Days. He also wrote Lives of the Queens of England of the House of Hanover (1855), and A History of Court Fools (1858), and ed. Horace Walpole's Journal of the Reign of George III. His books contain much curious and out-of-the-way information. D. was for a short time ed. ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... play "Les Precieuses Ridicules." This geographical tract appeared in the very "Recueil des Pieces Choisies," whose authors Magdelon, in the play, was expecting to entertain, when Mascarille made his appearance. There is a faculty which Horace Walpole named "serendipity,"—the luck of falling on just the literary document which one wants at the moment. All collectors of out of the way books know the pleasure of the exercise of serendipity, but they ...
— The Library • Andrew Lang
... What embassyings, bargainings, bargain-breakings; what galloping of estafettes; acres of diplomatic paper, now fallen to the spiders, who always privately were the real owners! Not in the Treaty of Utrecht, not in the Congresses of Cambray, of Soissons, Convention of Pardo, by Ripperda, Horace Walpole, or the wagging of wigs, could this matter be settled at all. Near two hundred years of chronic misery;—and had there been, under any of those wigs, a Head capable of reading the Heavenly Mandates, with heart capable of following ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... professed to have translated this romance out of the German, very much, I believe, as Horace Walpole professed to have taken The Castle of Otranto from an old Italian manuscript, was born in 1775 of a wealthy family. His father had an estate in India and a post in a Government office. His mother was daughter to Sir Thomas Sewell, Master of the Rolls in the reign of George III. ...
— The Bravo of Venice - A Romance • M. G. Lewis
... anonymous publications. I have found no mention of it in the newspapers and magazines of the time, no mention of it in contemporary letters or diaries. The one man in England who took the trouble to record the ode for posterity was, as might be expected, Horace Walpole, who in his manuscript Books of Materials merely noted that the poem had been published in 1768 (Anecdotes of Painting ... Volume the Fifth, ed. Hilles and Daghlian, Yale University Press, 1937). When challenged to locate Walpole's copy of the ode, the greatest of modern ...
— A Pindarick Ode on Painting - Addressed to Joshua Reynolds, Esq. • Thomas Morrison
... the account given of Paoli. "He is a man," he wrote, "born two thousand years after his time." Horace Walpole had written to beg him to read the book. "What relates to Paoli," he said, "will amuse you much." What merely amused Walpole "moved" Gray "strangely." It moved others besides him. Subscriptions were raised for the Corsicans, and money and arms ...
— Boswell's Correspondence with the Honourable Andrew Erskine, and His Journal of a Tour to Corsica • James Boswell
... there is any, (and perhaps such explanations, as Hume says of another matter, only push ignorance a stage farther back), seems to me to lie in what I can only call the Gallicanism of Jeffrey's mind and character. As Horace Walpole has been pronounced the most French of Englishmen, so may Francis Jeffrey be pronounced the most French of Scotchmen. The reader of his letters, no less than the reader of his essays, constantly comes across the most curious and multiform instances of this Frenchness. ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... it out with his rough chissel; Count Hamilton touched it with that slight delicacy, that finishes while it seems but to sketch; Dryden catched the living likeness; Pope compleated the historical resemblance.'—Horace Walpole, Royal and Noble Authors, ed. ...
— Characters from 17th Century Histories and Chronicles • Various
... famous as a resort of the most distinguished intellectual society. In the park a cross marks the site of Ampthill Castle, the residence of Catherine of Aragon while her divorce from Henry VIII. was pending. A commemorative inscription on the cross was written by Horace Walpole. Brewing, straw-plaiting and lace-making are ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... the thorough confidence and the friendship of the leading personages in England." All at once, on the first of July, 1870, a letter was written by the Secretary of State, requesting him to resign. This gentle form of violence is well understood in the diplomatic service. Horace Walpole says, speaking of Lady Archibald Hamilton: "They have civilly asked her and grossly forced her to ask civilly to go away, which she has done, with a pension of twelve hundred a year." Such a request is like the embrace of the "virgin" in old torture-chambers. She is robed ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... Gray and me," said Horace Walpole, "arose from his being too serious a companion." In my opinion, this was a good ground for cutting the connection. What right has any one to ...
— The Atlantic Monthly , Volume 2, No. 14, December 1858 • Various
... by Godwin in his Memoirs, and he would hardly have made the statement at a time when there were many living to deny it, had it not been true. These answers naturally were received with abuse and sneers by the Tories. Burke denounced his female opponents as "viragoes and English poissardes;" and Horace Walpole wrote of them as "Amazonian allies," who "spit their rage at eighteen-pence a head, and will return to Fleet-ditch, more fortunate in being forgotten than their predecessors, immortalized in the 'Dunciad.'" Peter Burke, in ...
— Mary Wollstonecraft • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... Mrs. Landless. The cat is historic. She was one of Horace Walpole's pets at Strawberry Hill, his country-seat, when Gray visited him there. Gray's first book was printed privately by Horace, who had ample means and recognized genius. The book is scarce now; it fetches five pounds ...
— Old Valentines - A Love Story • Munson Aldrich Havens
... in a letter addressed to Horace Walpole, in September 1788, speaks of the "demoniacal mummeries" of Dr. Mainauduc, and says he was in a fair way of gaining a hundred thousand pounds by them, as Mesmer had done by his exhibitions ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... modern times is productive of so many pleasant associations as that of Horace Walpole, and certainly no name was ever more intimately connected with so many different subjects of importance in connection with literature, art, fashion, and politics. The position of various members of his family connecting Horace ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 72, March 15, 1851 • Various
... and was forced to resign that office in 1702. In 1704 he was reinstated. He became Dean of Exeter in 1705, and Bishop in 1717. He is said to have been raised to the see of York for having married George I. to the Duchess of Munster. His manners were certainly free. Horace Walpole speaks of him as "the jolly old Archbishop of York, who had all the manners of a man of quality, though he had been a buccaneer, and was a clergyman. But he retained nothing of his first profession except his seraglio." He died in London, and was buried ...
— The Cathedral Church of York - Bell's Cathedrals: A Description of Its Fabric and A Brief - History of the Archi-Episcopal See • A. Clutton-Brock
... into a surname, Dodsley has led J. J. J. into a natural, but somewhat amusing mistake. The lines quoted are in Horace Walpole's well-known epistle, from Florence, addressed to his college friend T[homas] A[shton,] tutor ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 192, July 2, 1853 • Various
... of that winter Wilkes, Sterne, Foote, Hume, and Rousseau, had been the received lions. Hume had taken up the wild philosopher whose melodramatic Armenian dress had been the attraction at the houses of the leaders of society, the ladies who (says Horace Walpole who was there this year) 'violated all the duties of life and gave very pretty suppers.' It was the day of Anglomania on the Continent, when the name of Chatham was a name to conjure with, and Hume was expounding deism to the great ladies,—'when the footmen were in the room,' adds the shocked ...
— James Boswell - Famous Scots Series • William Keith Leask
... England, and Belsham's History of George II. Smyth's Lectures are very valuable on this period of English history. See, also, Bolingbroke's State of Parties; Burke's Appeal from the Old to the New Whigs; Lord Chesterfield's Characters; and Cobbett's Parliamentary Debates. Reminiscences by Horace Walpole. For additional information respecting the South Sea scheme, see Anderson's and Macpherson's Histories of Commerce, and Smyth's Lectures. The lives of the Pretenders have been well written by Ray and Jesse. ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... announcement of reverses; not that he ever shows any real anxiety or despondency about the commonwealth. His opinions on the subject are at the mercy of the last mail. It is disappointing to find an elegant trifler like Horace Walpole not only far more discerning in his appreciation of such a crisis, but also far more patriotically sensitive as to the wisdom of the means of meeting it, than the historian of Rome. Gibbon's tone often amounts to levity, and he chronicles the most serious ...
— Gibbon • James Cotter Morison
... on him. Pursued by his relentless creditors, the ex-king was thrown into the King's Bench prison. His distresses attracted the commiseration of Horace Walpole, who, as Boswell informs us, “wrote a paper in the ‘World,’ with great elegance and humour, soliciting a contribution for the monarch in distress, to be paid to Mr. Robert Dodsley, bookseller, as lord high treasurer. This brought in a very handsome sum, and he ...
— Rambles in the Islands of Corsica and Sardinia - with Notices of their History, Antiquities, and Present Condition. • Thomas Forester
... in prose and verse, but owed his political importance to his family connection with Chatham, Temple, and George Grenville. Horace Walpole calls him a "wise moppet" ('Letters', vol. ii. p. 28, ed. Cunningham), and repeatedly sneers at his dulness. His son Thomas, second Lord Lyttelton (1744-1779), the "wicked Lord Lyttelton," appears in W. ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Letters and Journals, Vol. 1 • Lord Byron, Edited by Rowland E. Prothero
... Club," says Horace Walpole, "though generally mentioned as a set of wits, were, in fact, the patriots who saved Britain." See, for the history of its origin and name, Addisoniana, i. 120; Ward's complete and humorous account of the remarkable Clubs ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson
... excite his choler, And then his satire's keen and thin As the lithe blade of Saladin. Good letters are a gift apart, And his are gems of Flemish art, True offspring of the fireside Muse, Not a rag-gathering of news 70 Like a new hopfield which is all poles, But of one blood with Horace Walpole's. ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... in one of Horace Walpole's letters in which that virtuoso expresses his regret, after a visit to the ancestral "hotels" of Paris, whose contents had afforded him such intense gratification, that the nobility of England, like that of France, had not concentrated ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, No. 23, February, 1873, Vol. XI. • Various
... country-house, is taking his breakfast with the ladies in the afternoon, when they had their tea, for, says he, "I should infallibly have perished, had I staied in the hall, amidst the jargon of toasts and the fumes of tobacco." When Horace Walpole was staying with his father at his Norfolk country-seat, Houghton, in September 1737, Gray wrote to him from Cambridge: "You are in a confusion of wine, and roaring, and hunting, and tobacco, and, heaven be praised, you too can pretty well bear it." But Gray had no objection to ...
— The Social History of Smoking • G. L. Apperson
... pp. 153. 186.).—In reply to K., I have an impression that Horace Walpole has a kind of dissertation on the Old Countess of Desmond, to whom his attention was directed by her being said to have danced with Richard III. Having no books at hand, I cannot speak positively; but if K. turns to Walpole's Works, ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 44, Saturday, August 31, 1850 • Various
... SEYMOUR. Family name Conway. 1748-1828. She was a granddaughter of the Duke of Argyle, a relative of the Marquis of Hertford, and a cousin of Horace Walpole. Her education was conducted with great care; the history of ancient nations, especially in relation to art, was her favorite study. She had seen but few sculptures, but was fascinated by them, and almost unconsciously cherished ...
— Women in the fine arts, from the Seventh Century B.C. to the Twentieth Century A.D. • Clara Erskine Clement
... Darwin was a “votary to poetry,” a philosopher, and a clever though an eccentric man. He wrote “The Botanic Garden,” which Anna Seward pronounced to be “a string of poetic brilliants,” and in which book Horace Walpole noted a passage “the most sublime in any author or in any of the few languages with which I am acquainted.” He inserted in it, as his own work, some lines of Anna Seward’s,—which was ungallant, to say the least. Anna Seward’s mother repressed her early attempts at poetry, ...
— Anna Seward - and Classic Lichfield • Stapleton Martin
... say, it does not seem absolutely certain that Wilkes was the author of the "Essay on Woman." Horace Walpole eventually learned, or believed that he had learned, that the author was a Mr. Thomas Potter. (See Walpole's "George III.," i., 310; and Cunningham's "Note on his Correspondence," ...
— The Constitutional History of England From 1760 to 1860 • Charles Duke Yonge
... of Mr. Peirce's History of Harvard University publishes the following curious extracts from Horace Walpole's Private Correspondence, giving a description of some antique chairs found in England, exactly of the same construction with the College chair; a circumstance which corroborates the supposition that this also was ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... older, and was intimate with Lyttelton. Thomas Augustine Arne, again, famous in days to come as Dr. Arne, was doubtless also at this date practising sedulously upon that "miserable cracked common flute," with which tradition avers he was wont to torment his school-fellows. Gray and Horace Walpole belong to ...
— Fielding - (English Men of Letters Series) • Austin Dobson
... fourteenth-century castle, he had induced an eminent architect of the time to conspire with him in giving solid and permanent reality to this his awful imagining; and when he had completed it all, from portico to attic, he had extorted even the critical praise of Horace Walpole, who described it in one of his letters as a 'singular triumph of classical taste and architectural ingenuity.' It still remains unrivalled in its kind, the ugliest great country-seat in the county of Devon—some respectable authorities even say in ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... assemblage. . . . His house at Paris and his apartment at Versailles were never empty from the time be arose till the time he retired." 2 or 300 households at Paris, at Versailles and in their environs, offer a similar spectacle. Never is there solitude. It is the custom in France, says Horace Walpole, to burn your candle down to its snuff in public. The mansion of the Duchesse de Gramont is besieged at day-break by the noblest seigniors and the noblest ladies. Five times a week, under the Duc de Choiseul's ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... brilliant combination which had resulted in the capture of the army, he added these words: "But, after all, your excellency's achievements in the Jerseys were such that nothing could surpass them!" And the witty and wise old cynic, Mr. Horace Walpole, with his usual discrimination, wrote to a friend, Sir Horace Mann, when he heard of the affair at Trenton, the night march to Princeton, and the successful attack there: "Washington, the dictator, has shown himself both a Fabius and a Camillus. ...
— For Love of Country - A Story of Land and Sea in the Days of the Revolution • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... wits met on common ground, drank many a toast to the House of Hanover or to some reigning belle of London town, and exercised a patronising censorship over the world of letters. They were "the patriots that saved Briton," says Horace Walpole, in referring to their anti-Jacobitism, and yet the most of them ...
— The Palmy Days of Nance Oldfield • Edward Robins
... very edible fishes. We know of not a few. William of Leicester, Montanus, has already been mentioned. Giraldus Cambrensis (a most learned, amusing, and malicious writer, on the lines of Anthony A. Wood, or even of Horace Walpole) was another. Walter de Map a third.{12} It was part of Hugh's high sense of duty which made him fight with all his weight for a worthy though a broad-minded use of patronage. He often upbraided the archbishop with his careless use of ...
— Hugh, Bishop of Lincoln - A Short Story of One of the Makers of Mediaeval England • Charles L. Marson
... abuse Horace Walpole, but I really think him the most delightful writer that ever existed. I wonder who is to be the Horace Walpole of the present century? some one, ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield
... the private press of M. Horace Walpole at Strawberry-Hill, and the impression was limited to one hundred copies, of which thirty were sent to Paris. So much for its attractions—now for its flaws. In reprinting the dedication to madame du Deffand, I had to insert eight accents to make decent French of it! The avis ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 219, January 7, 1854 • Various
... that can never be made anything but commonplace in the telling, or anything but wonderful in the fulfilling. What Emerson says of the landscape is true here: no particular foreign country is so remarkable as the necessity of being remarkable under which every foreign country lies. Horace Walpole found nothing in Europe so astonishing as Calais; and we felt that at every moment the first edge of novelty was being taken off for life, and that, if we were to continue our journey round the world, we never could have that ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860 • Various
... and Dedication, together with Ray's letter of the 27th October, 1691, as addenda to his edition of Aubrey's "History of Surrey," (1719.) The same manuscript was also noticed by Thomas Warton and William Huddesford in a list of the author's works in the Ashmolean Museum. Horace Walpole referred to the Royal Society's copy in his Anecdotes of Painting (1762); but though his reference seems to have excited the curiosity of Gough, the latter contented himself with stating that he could not find the work mentioned ...
— The Natural History of Wiltshire • John Aubrey
... influence of the queen, retained his place, Compton having confessed "his incapacity to undertake so arduous a task." As Lord Wilmington, he is constantly ridiculed by Sir Chas. Hanbury Williams. See his Works, with notes by Horace Walpole, edit. 1822.—W. ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift
... been touched by the years which by that time had followed it. The house, which was of considerable antiquity, had been, for my great-grandmother's benefit, modernized or Elizabethanized under the influence of Horace Walpole and Wyat. It was backed by a rookery of old and enormous elms. It was approached on one side by a fine avenue of limes, and was otherwise surrounded by gardens with gray walls or secretive laurel ...
— Memoirs of Life and Literature • W. H. Mallock
... Pre-Raphaelites, as well as in the foregoing section of the present chapter. But the three departments have other tangential points which should not pass without some further mention. The revival of Gothic architecture which began with Horace Walpole[19] went on in an unintelligent way through the eighteenth century. One of the queerest monuments of this new taste—a successor on a larger scale to Strawberry Hill—was Fonthill Abbey, near Salisbury, ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... that have lived and died, to the glory and disgrace of history—of places whose bare names we cherish and love! Every step, almost, along its banks is sacred to some noble name. 'Stat magno nominis umbra' should be its motto. Strawberry Hill reminds you of witty, keen-sighted Horace Walpole, and his gossiping chit-chat concerning wrangling princes, feeble-minded ministers, and all the other imbecilities of the last century. Twickenham brings back to one, bitter-tongued Pope, his distorted body and waspish mind. Richmond Hill recalls the Earl of Chatham in his enforced retirement, ...
— She and I, Volume 1 • John Conroy Hutcheson
... of an impartial friend. All this was known to the English Government, as we shall show, through Pickle, and the knowledge must have strained the relations between George II. and 'our Nephew,' as Horace Walpole calls Frederick of Prussia. ...
— Pickle the Spy • Andrew Lang
... has been kind to me. Have your researches into English literature ever chanced to lead you into reading Horace Walpole, I wonder? That polite trifler is fond of a word which he coined himself—'Serendipity.' It derives from the name of a certain happy Indian Prince Serendip, whom he unearthed (or invented) in some obscure Oriental story; a prince for whom the fairies or the genii always ...
— Miss Cayley's Adventures • Grant Allen
... an immense bibliography of memoirs of the period of George III., and such books throw an interesting light upon the lives of many of Reynolds's sitters. Some of the most valuable are Horace Walpole's "Letters," Fanny Burney's "Diary," Mrs. Piozzi's "Memoirs," ...
— Sir Joshua Reynolds - A Collection of Fifteen Pictures and a Portrait of the - Painter with Introduction and Interpretation • Estelle M. Hurll
... reign of Louis XV. the French manufacturers began to regard it with jealousy and petitioned their king for special privileges. Ranelagh, too, that old pleasure-garden which Dr. Johnson declared was "the finest thing he had ever seen," deserves a word; Horace Walpole was constantly there, though at first, he owns, he preferred Vauxhall; and Lord Chesterfield was so fond of it that he used to say he should order all his letters to ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... no Jacobite, when at Rome with Horace Walpole speaks very kindly of the two gay young Princes. He sneers at their melancholy father, of whom Montesquieu writes, 'ce Prince a une bonne physiononie et noble. Il paroit triste, pieux.' {18a} Young Charles was neither ...
— Pickle the Spy • Andrew Lang
... intervals, of which a bell gave due warning. Carriages were stopped in broad daylight in Hyde Park, and even in Piccadilly itself, and pistols presented at the breasts of fashionable people, who were called upon to deliver up their purses. Horace Walpole relates a number of curious instances of this sort, he himself having been robbed in broad day, with Lord Eglinton, Sir Thomas Robinson, Lady Albemarle, and many more. A curious robbery of the Portsmouth mail, in 1757, ...
— The Life of Thomas Telford by Smiles • Samuel Smiles
... fourth volume of this series was published three years ago, many of the critics who had up till then, as Horace Walpole said of God, been the dearest creatures in the world to me, took another turn. Not only did they very properly disapprove my choice of poems: they went on to write as if the Editor of 'Georgian Poetry' were a kind of public functionary, like the President of the Royal Academy; and they asked—again, ...
— Georgian Poetry 1920-22 • Various
... authority, therefore, over any other book, and is just as liable to be in error as any other. If you should bind in one volume the histories of Herodotus, Tacitus, Gibbon, and Mr. Bancroft, the poems of Horace, Hafiz, and Dante, and the letters of Cicero and Horace Walpole, this collection would have to the Naturalist just as much authority ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... Chatham's madness? I know that Lord Grenville treated it with contempt. I know others now living who did so too, and I know that so stout a Whig as Sir P. Francis was clearly of that opinion, and he knew Lord Chatham personally. I had every ground to believe that Horace Walpole, a vile, malignant, and unnatural wretch, though a very clever writer of Letters, was nine-tenths of the Holland House authority for the tale. I knew that a baser man in character, or a meaner in capacity than the first Lord Holland existed not, even in those days of job and mediocrity. Why, then, ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... discussed in all social gatherings of the upper circles. The afflicted ones fed on Gray; the repentant quoted Richardson; while Smollett and Fielding were read aloud in parlor gatherings where fair ladies threatened to leave the room—but didn't. Out at Strawberry Hill, his country home, Horace Walpole was running that little printing-shop, making books that are now priceless, and writing long, gossipy letters that body forth the spirit of the time, its form and pressure. The Dilettante Society, composed of young noblemen devoted to high art and good-fellowship, was ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 4 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Painters • Elbert Hubbard
... Horace Walpole confidently hoped that his famous collection of virtu would be the envy and admiration of the relic-mongers and the curiosity-seekers of two or three hundred years hence; but he had not been dead fifty years before the red flag was waving over Strawberry Hill, and it was not taken down till ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 84, October, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... reproach of M. l'Abbe when the Count (proprietor of the pretty Countess) made him eat partridge every day for a month; on which the Abbe says, "Alway partridge is too much of a good thing!" Upon this text the Count speaks. A correspondent mentions that it was told by Horace Walpole concerning the Confessor of a French King who reproved him for conjugal infidelities. The degraded French (for "toujours de la perdrix" or "des perdrix") suggests a foreign origin. Another friend refers me to No. ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... Sterne, makes her appearance once more for a moment in or about the year 1758. Horace Walpole, and after him Byron, accused Sterne of having "preferred whining over a dead ass to relieving a living mother," and the former went so far as to declare "on indubitable authority" that Mrs. Sterne, "who kept a school (in ...
— Sterne • H.D. Traill
... "Mr. Shorter, Horace Walpole's mother's father, was walking down Norfolk Street in the Strand, to his house there, just before poor Mountfort the player was killed in that street by assassins hired by Lord Mohun. This nobleman lying in for his prey, came up and embraced ...
— Notes and Queries, Issue No. 61, December 28, 1850 • Various
... professing to be drawn from the writings of 'ane gode prieste, Thomas Rowley'—issued in thick succession from this wonderful, and, to use the Shakspearean word in a twofold sense, 'forgetive' brain. He next ventured to send to Horace Walpole, who was employed on a History of British Painters, an account of eminent 'Carvellers and Peyneters,' who, according to him, once flourished in Bristol. These labours he plied in secret, and with the utmost enthusiasm. He used to write ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... succeeded in "tickling the midriff of the English-speaking races" with a single story; and in time he showed himself to be, not only a man of letters, but also a man of action. His humour has been defined as the sunny break of his serious purpose. Horace Walpole has said that the world is a comedy to the man of thought, a tragedy to the man of feeling. To the great humorist—to Mark Twain—the world was a tragi-comedy. Like Smile Faguet, he seemed at times to ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson
... not come, but Irving did. He is lively and unassuming, rather vulgar, very good-humoured. We went to Strawberry Hill to-day—Moore, Ellis, Lady Georgiana, and I. Ellis is an excellent cicerone; everything is in the state in which old Horace Walpole left it, and just as his catalogue and description describe it. He says in that work that he makes that catalogue to provide against the dispersion of his collections, and he tied up everything as strictly as possible. Moore sang in the evening ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William - IV, Volume 1 (of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... Horace Walpole, on the authority of the last Earl of Arran, of the Butler family, has confounded her with Mary, one of the daughters of George Kirke, Esq., a groom of the bedchamber to Charles I., by Mary his wife, daughter of Aurelian Townsend, ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 211, November 12, 1853 • Various
... observation at this time would not have disgraced a Seminole Indian. In the matter of reading he was not entirely without advice and guidance, but was, on the whole, allowed unusual freedom of choice. He afterwards told Mrs. Orr that Milton, Quarles, Voltaire, Mandeville, and Horace Walpole were the authors in whom, as a boy, he particularly delighted. His love for art was established and developed by visits to the Dulwich picture gallery, of which he afterwards wrote to Miss Barrett with "love and gratitude" ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... PRICE." Horace Walpole's cynical remark is not true now, nor was it true even in his own corrupt era. Of what sort are the men ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... never printed. We are told that Sir Robert Walpole, who found Hervey a convenient tool in court intrigues, bribed Pope not to print it by securing a good position in France for one of the priests who had watched over the poet's youth. If this story be true, and we have Horace Walpole's authority for it, we may well imagine that the entry of the bribe, like that of Uncle Toby's oath, was blotted out by a tear from the books of the ...
— The Rape of the Lock and Other Poems • Alexander Pope
... luxury. In time he grew to feel contempt for the Bristol people, high and low, and then he turned his eyes upon London. Application to Dodsley, the leading publisher, was discouraged for want of acquaintance with his condition and responsibility. He then essayed Horace Walpole, sending an ode on King Richard I. for his work "Anecdotes of Painting," and undertaking to furnish the names of several great painters, natives of Bristol. This application was signed "John Abbot of St. Austin's Minster, Bristol." In ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... published Adam Smith's "Wealth of Nations," Hume's "History of England," and Gibbon's "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire." The two great literary frauds in our language were then given to the world in Chatterton's "Poems," and Macpherson's "Ossian." It was the age of Pitt and Burke, and Fox, of Horace Walpole and Chesterfield in English politics, Benjamin Franklin was then a potent force in America, Butler and Paley and Warburton, and Jonathan Edwards and Doddridge with many other equally powerful names were moulding the ...
— William Black - The Apostle of Methodism in the Maritime Provinces of Canada • John Maclean
... founders of the newspaper, destined to attain so high a degree of power and utility. Addison, Steele, and Johnson made the essay one of the most attractive and popular forms of literature. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Horace Walpole, Chesterfield, and Junius brought letter-writing to perfection. Defoe, Addison, Richardson, and Fielding developed the realistic novel. A prosaic and conventional tone pervaded even the poetry of the period. Appreciation of poetry was almost extinguished, Addison, writing of ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... upon the particular mode of the narrative. For narration itself, as applied to history, admits of a triple arrangement—dogmatic, sceptical, and critical; dogmatic, which adopts the current records without examination; sceptical, as Horace Walpole's Richard III., Laing's Dissertation on Perkin Warbeck, or on the Gowrie Conspiracy, which expressly undertakes to probe and try the unsound parts of the story; and critical, which, after an examination of this nature, selects from the whole body of materials such as are coherent. ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v2 • Thomas de Quincey
... much stronger in that part of the world than in any other I had visited. There was nothing new in the disposition of the people of small places to gossip, and it was often done in large towns; more especially those that did not possess the tone of a capital. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and Horace Walpole wrote gossip, but it was spiced with wit, as is usual with the scandal of such places as London and Paris; whereas this, to which I was doomed to listen, was nothing more than downright impertinent, vulgar, meddling with the private affairs of all those whom the gossips thought of sufficient ...
— Afloat And Ashore • James Fenimore Cooper
... taste in landscape-gardening which just now grew up in England, out of a new reading of Milton, out of the admirable essays of Addison, out of the hints of Pope, out of the designs of Kent, and which was stimulated by Gilpin, by Horace Walpole, and, still more, by the delightful little ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... years," wrote Horace Walpole of his father, "was asleep as soon as his head touched the pillow ... now never sleeps above an ...
— "Stops" - Or How to Punctuate. A Practical Handbook for Writers and Students • Paul Allardyce
... Fielding, Smollett, and Sterne; of Tom Jones, Squire Western, Lady Bellaston, and Parson Adams; of the "Rake's Progress" and "Marriage a la Mode;" of the lords and ladies who yet live in the undying gossip of Horace Walpole, be-powdered, be-patched, and be-rouged, flirting at masked balls, playing cards till daylight, retailing scandal, and exchanging double meanings. Beau Nash reigned king over the gaming-tables of Bath; the ostrich-plumes of ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman
... On February 3rd, 1785, Horace Walpole writes from London to Sir Horace Mann at Florence:—"I have lately been lent a volume of poems composed and printed at Florence, in which another of our exheroines, Mrs. Piozzi, has a considerable share; her associates three of ...
— Autobiography, Letters and Literary Remains of Mrs. Piozzi (Thrale) (2nd ed.) (2 vols.) • Mrs. Hester Lynch Piozzi
... appearance, during her absence, of her volume of "Anecdotes of Dr. Johnson" had given unfriendly critics an opportunity to pass harsh judgment upon her literary merits, and had excited the jealousy of rival biographers of the dead lion. Boswell, Hawkins, Baretti, Chalmers, Peter Pindar, Gifford, Horace Walpole, all had their fling at her. Never was an innocent woman in private life more unfeelingly abused, or her name dragged before the public more wantonly, in squibs and satires, jests and innuendoes. The ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 43, May, 1861 • Various
... but he could make nothing at all of the cat. There is no record of the inquiry in the Archaeologia, but it is mentioned in a letter from Gough to Tyson, 27 Dec. 1771 (Nichols's Literary Anecdotes, vol. viii. p. 575). Horace Walpole was annoyed at the Society for criticising his "Richard III." and in his Short Notes on his Life he wrote—"Foote having brought them on the stage for sitting in council, as they had done on Whittington and his Cat, I was not ...
— The History of Sir Richard Whittington • T. H.
... gifts in tea-drinking, cassino, and quadrille (whist was too many for him), his popularity could not be questioned. When he expired, all Hazelby mourned. The lamentation was general. The women of every degree (to borrow a phrase from that great phrase-monger, Horace Walpole) "cried quarts;" and the procession to the churchyard—that very churchyard to which he had himself attended so many of his patients—was now followed by all of them that ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, No. - 288, Supplementary Number • Various
... of "Thackeray's Extract". The true essence of the life that exhibits itself in fiction from Pamela and Joseph Andrews down to Pompey the Little and the Spiritual Quixote; in essay from the Tatler to the Mirror; in Lord Chesterfield and Lady Mary and Horace Walpole; in Pope and Young and Green and Churchill and Cowper, in Boswell and Wraxall, in Mrs. Delany and Madame d'Arblay, seems to me to deserve warrant of excise and guarantee of analysis as it lies in these ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... we to go on a hundred pages, or two hundred, farther. Readers have already seen truly what Madame de Sevigne is. They have only not seen fully all that she is. And that they would not see short of reading her letters entire. Horace Walpole aspired to do in English for his own time something like what Madame de Sevigne had done in French for hers. In a measure he succeeded. The difference is, that he was imitative and affected, where ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... "Of Carey," he says, "the second editor, like the first, only knew the name and the spirit of the verses. He has since been enabled to ascertain that the poetic cavalier was a younger brother of the celebrated Henry Lord Carey, who fell at the battle of Newberry, and escaped the researches of Horace Walpole, to whose list of noble authors he would have been an important addition." The first edition of the poems appeared under the following title, Poems from a Manuscript written in the Time of Oliver Cromwell, 4to. 1771, 1s. 6d.: Murray. It contains only nine pieces, whereas the ...
— Notes and Queries, No. 209, October 29 1853 • Various
... day this week to engage us to dine with her on Wednesday, but yesterday she came to say that she wanted Lord Brougham to meet us, and he could not come till Friday. Fortunately we had no dinner engagement on that day, and we are to meet also the Miss Berrys; Horace Walpole's Miss Berrys, who with Lady Charlotte herself, are the last remnants of the old ...
— Letters from England 1846-1849 • Elizabeth Davis Bancroft (Mrs. George Bancroft)
... to be simply a gentleman he would not have troubled to call on him at all. Congreve, who really regarded himself as the peer of Shakespeare, was won, and sent Voltaire on his way with letters to Horace Walpole of Strawberry Hill. Thomson, who lived at Hammersmith, and wrote his "Seasons" in a "public" next door to Kelmscott, corrected and revised some of Voltaire's attempts at English poetry. Young evolved ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... mediation, for sixty pounds; and ten years after, the author died. With what love do we hang over its pages! What springs of feeling it has opened! Goldsmith's books are influences and friends forever, yet the five thousandth copy was never announced, and Oliver Goldsmith, M. D., often wanted a dinner! Horace Walpole, the coxcomb of literature, smiled at him contemptuously from his gilded carriage. Goldsmith struggled cheerfully with his adverse fate, and died. But then sad mourners, whom he had aided in their affliction, gathered around his bed, and a lady of distinction, ...
— Architects of Fate - or, Steps to Success and Power • Orison Swett Marden
... creatures; a deist, with superstition too gross for the most secluded cloister. These observations are not founded on the report of others, but on the fragment which remains of his own sketch of his life,—a piece of infinite curiosity." His autobiography has been edited by Horace Walpole and Scott. He is also the author of a volume of poems written in the style of Donne, frequently marred by harsh rhythm and violent conceits, but occasionally displaying artistic excellence of ...
— Lives of John Donne, Henry Wotton, Rich'd Hooker, George Herbert, - &C, Volume Two • Izaak Walton
... than a new literary mode; a taste cultivated by dilettante virtuosos, like Horace Walpole, college recluses like Gray, and antiquarian scholars like Joseph and Thomas Warton. It was the effort of the poetic imagination to create for itself a richer environment; but it was also, in its deeper significance, ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... Frederick the Great when in France, the Swedish Creutz, and Kaunitz, the whole of the Voltaire school, and at first Rousseau; (3) of Madame Du Deffant, contemporary with Geoffrin. This was less a coterie of fashion, and more entirely of intellect; and included Voltaire, D'Alembert, Henault, and Horace Walpole when in Paris. Later Mlle. Espinasse took the place of Deffant, and this became the union-point for all the philosophical reformers, D'Alembert, Diderot, Turgot, and the Encyclopaedists; (4) of D'Holbach, consisting of ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar
... Mr Hogarth, the painter, was one of those who found occasion to visit Newgate to view the notorious murderess. He even painted her portrait. It is said that Sarah dressed specially for him in a red dress, but that copy—one which belonged to Horace Walpole—which is now in the National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh, shows her in a grey gown, with a white cap and apron. Seated to the left, she leans her folded hands on a table on which a rosary and a crucifix lie. Behind her is a dark grey wall, with a heavy ...
— She Stands Accused • Victor MacClure |
