year? I thought you would at last come and while away the remainder of
life on the banks of the Thames in gaiety and old tales. I have quitted
the stage, and the Clive[1] is preparing to leave it. We shall neither
of us ever be grave: dowagers roost all around us, and you could never
want cards or mirth. Will you end like a fat farmer, repeating annually
the price of oats, and discussing stale newspapers? There have you got,
I hear, into an old gallery, that has not been glazed since Queen
Elizabeth, and under the nose of an infant Duke and Duchess, that will
understand you no more than if you wore a ruff and a coif, and talk to
them of a call of Serjeants the year of the Spanish Armada! Your wit and
humour will be as much lost upon them, as if you talked the dialect of
Chaucer; for with all the divinity of wit, it grows out of fashion like
a fardingale. I am convinced that the young men at White's already laugh
at George Selwyn's _bon mots_ only by tradition. I avoid talking before
the youth of the age as I would dancing before them; for if one's tongue
don't move in the steps of the day, and thinks to please by its old
graces, it is only an object of ridicule, like Mrs. Hobart in her
cotillon. I tell you we should get together, and comfort ourselves with
reflecting on the brave days that we have known--not that I think people
were a jot more clever or wise in our youth than they are now; but as my
system is always to live in a vision as much as I can, and as visions
don't increase with years, there is nothing so natural as to think one
remembers what one does not remember.

[Footnote 1: Mrs. Clive was a celebrated comic actress and wit, and a
near neighbour of Walpole at Twickenham.]

[Illustration: STRAWBERRY HILL, FROM THE NORTH-WEST.]

I have finished my Tragedy ["The Mysterious Mother"], but as you would