So amiable the pair is!
But, ah! how vain to think his word
Can add a straw to Berry's.'

On the following day, Mary, whom he terms the Latin nymph sent the
following lines:--

'Had Rome's famed Horace thus addrest
His Lydia or his Lyce,
He had ne'er so oft complained their breast
To him was cold and icy.

'But had they sought their joy to explain,
Or praise their generous bard,
Perhaps, like me, they had tried in vain,
And felt the task too hard.'

The society of this family gave Horace Walpole the truest, and perhaps
the only relish he ever had of domestic life. But his mind was harassed
towards the close of the eighteenth century, by the insanity not only of
his nephew, but by the great national calamity, that of the king. 'Every
_eighty-eight_ seems,' he remarks, 'to be a favourite period with fate;'
he was 'too ancient,' he said, 'to tap what might almost be called a new
reign;' of which he was not likely to see much. He never pretended to
penetration, but his foresight, 'if he gave it the reign, would not
prognosticate much felicity to the country from the madness of his
father, and the probable regency of the Prince of Wales. His happiest
relations were now not with politics or literature, but with Mrs. Damer
and the Miss Berrys, to whom he wrote:--'I am afraid of protesting how
much I delight in your society, lest I should seem to affect being