Strawberry Hill--_Cliveden_, as it was also called, where day after day,
night after night, they gleaned stores from that rich fund of anecdote
which went back to the days of George I., touched even on the anterior
epoch of Anne, and came in volumes of amusement down to the very era
when the old man was sitting by his parlour fire, happy with his _wives_
near him, resigned and cheerful. For his young friends he composed his
'Reminiscences of the Court of England.'

He still wrote cheerfully of his physical state, in which eyesight was
perfect; hearing little impaired; and though his hands and feet were
crippled, he could use them; and since he neither 'wished to box, to
wrestle, nor to dance a hornpipe,' he was contented.

His character became softer, his wit less caustic, his heart more
tender, his talk more reverent, as he approached the term of a long,
prosperous life--and knew, practically, the small value of all that he
had once too fondly prized.

His later years were disturbed by the marriage of his niece Maria
Waldegrave to the Duke of Gloucester: but the severest interruption to
his peace was his own succession to an Earldom.

In 1791, George, Earl of Orford, expired; leaving an estate encumbered
with debt, and, added to the bequest, a series of lawsuits threatened to
break down all remaining comfort in the mind of the uncle, who had
already suffered so much on the young man's account.

Horace Walpole disdained the honours which brought him such solid
trouble, with such empty titles, and for some time refused to sign
himself otherwise but 'Uncle to the late Earl of Orford.' He was
certainly not likely to be able to walk in his robes to the House of
Lords, or to grace a levee. However, he thanked God he was free from
pain. 'Since all my fingers are useless,' he wrote to Hannah More, 'and
that I have only six hairs left, I am not very much grieved at not being
able to comb my head!' To Hannah More he wrote in all sincerity,
referring to his elevation to the peerage: 'For the other empty
metamorphosis that has happened to the outward man, you do me justice in
believing that it can do nothing but tease me; it is being called names
in one's old age:' in fact, he reckoned on being styled 'Lord
Methusalem.' He had lived to hear of the cruel deaths of the once gay
and high-born friends whom he had known in Paris, by the guillotine: he
had lived to execrate the monsters who persecuted the grandest heroine
of moder