A Walpole Sampler

From a letter to an Eton friend about the funeral of King George II in 1760:

"The real serious part was the figure of the Duke of Cumberland heightened by a thousand melancholy circumstances . . . Attending the funeral of a father, how little reason soever he had to love him, could not be pleasant. . .

"This grave scene was fully contrasted by the burlesque Duke of Newcastle--he fell into a fit of crying--but in two minutes his curiosity got the better of his hypocrisy and he ran about the chapel with his glass to spy who was or was not there . . . Then returned the fear of catching cold, and the Duke of Cumberland, who was sinking with heat, felt himself weighed down, and turning round found it was the Duke of Newcastle standing upon his train to avoid the chill of the marble . . ."

To Diplomat Sir Horace Mann, 1774:

"We have comedies without novelty, gross satires without stings . . . and antiquarians that discover nothing.

"Don't tell me I am grown old and peevish and supercilious--name the geniuses of 1774, and I submit it. The next Augustan age will dawn on the other side of the Atlantic. There will perhaps be a Thucydides at Boston, a Xenophon at New York, and in time a Virgil at Mexico, and a Newton at Peru. "

To his friend Lady Ossory, 1781

"Why should not there be a language for the nose? The more the senses can be used indifferently for each other, the more our understandings would be enlarged. A rose, jassamine, a pink, a jonquil and a honeysuckle might signify the vowels, the consonants to be represented by other flowers. How charming it would be to smell an ode from a nosegay "

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