Monthly Archives: October 2023

Horace Walpole and a Case of Antiquarian Eccentricity

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Stephen Clarke, Honorary Research Fellow, University of Liverpool

The Lewis Walpole Library has added an obscure and curious item to its collections. It is an anonymous pamphlet of fourteen pages containing two poems, titled on what appears to be a half-title The Origin of Language, and Idea of a Perfect Government. Two Poetical Epistles, to Thamyris. Online searches of the holdings at Yale, Harvard, the Bodleian, and the British Library reveal only electronic links, and actual copies appear to be restricted to the Library of Congress and the Royal Danish Library. The electronic copies suggest that the pamphlet is complete, and what looks like a half-title is in fact the title page. It is 17.5 x 10.cm. in size and a small octavo in format, consisting of two sections of four leaves each, with a final blank leaf. It is in a badly worn but contemporary or near-contemporary half binding, the front board detached and the marbled boards worn. On the remains of the spine is the gilt lettering “E. of Buchan on Language.”

There is a stipple-engraved profile of Buchan after Tassie dated 1797 that has been inserted after the title page, and on the front pastedown  a bookseller’s price of 12/- and a small printed cutting advertising the sale of the Buchan Papers. This describes 2,700 original papers addressed to the Earl of Buchan, including his diary, being sold by the autograph collector William Upcott, with a hand-written date 16 January 1836, the year in which Upcott printed a private catalog of his manuscripts. On the front endleaf is the Bibliotheca Heberiana stamp, and there is also a small circular label 1077 at the foot of the front board: this copy was lot 1077 on the fifth day of Part 1 of the Heber sale, 15 April 1834, where it is described as “Buchan (Earl of) on the Origin of Language and Idea of Perfect Government, in two Poetic Epistles, portraits inserted, 1785”. It would appear that Buchan never published it, but rather had a few copies printed for private circulation.

Its interest to the Lewis Walpole Library lies in two inscriptions which the cataloger of the Heber library did not trouble to mention: at the head of the title page is written “Honble. Horace Walpole from the Author”, and beneath the printed title Walpole has added the words “by the Earl of Buchan.”

title page of book with printed text: The origin of language, and Idea of a perfect government. : Two poetic epistles, to Thamyris. with annotation in manuscript: Honble Horace Walpole from the Author | By the Earl of Buchan

The Earl of Buchan, The Origin of Language, and Idea of a Perfect Government. Two Poetical Epistles, to Thamyris (privately printed, ?1785), title page inscribed by Buchan and Horace Walpole. 496 B85 785. Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University,

David Steuart Erskine, eleventh Earl of Buchan (1742–1829) was an antiquary, a radical Whig, and an eccentric, with an apparently somewhat overbearing manner. From 1747 Lord Cardross, he became Earl of Buchan on his father’s death in 1767. In the 1760s he supported John Wilkes, in the 1770s he supported the cause of American independence, and in the 1790s he corresponded with Christopher Wyvill on parliamentary reform.  But he was also an antiquary with a strong interest in Scottish history. He had been elected to the Society of Antiquaries in London and the Royal Society in 1764, and in 1780 founded the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, into which he enrolled Walpole, though he subsequently became disenchanted with that body and resigned in 1790. He bought the estate on the Borders where Dryburgh Abbey stands and adorned the grounds with a classical temple dedicated to the poets Thomson and Burns. He was painted in 1764 by Reynolds, and Walpole pasted Finlayson’s mezzotint of that portrait and an engraving by Buchan of Icolmkill Cathedral (the abbey of Iona) into his Collection of Prints engraved by various persons of quality.

Mezzotint half-length portrait of a man facing quarter turn to the right with his head turned to the left, looking over his shoulder. He wears a doublet with slashed sleeves and a lace-trimmed collar.

J. Finlayson after Reynolds Lord Cardross, 1765 mezzotint inscribed by Walpole as Earl of Buchan bound into Walpole’s Collection of Prints engraved by various persons of quality (Strawberry Hill, 1774) Folio 49 3588 v. 1 Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University,

But there was always a whiff of the self-important and the absurd about him: Emma Vincent Macleod’s ODNB article on him notes that “The story of how in 1819 he tried to storm Sir Walter Scott’s sick-room to reassure him that he would personally supervise all the arrangements for Scott’s funeral at Dryburgh has been told many times as evidence of his propensity for the ridiculous.”

Walpole’s connection with him began in about 1778 and lasted until 1792. The first surviving letter, of 24 December 1778, consists of Walpole answering Buchan’s queries on Scottish royal portraits.[i] The next, of 1 December 1781, opens with Walpole’s declaration that he is “truly sensible of and grateful for your Lordship’s benevolent remembrance of me, and shall receive with great respect and pleasure the collection your Lordship had been pleased to order to be sent to me.” That collection did not include The Origin of Language, and Idea of a Perfect Government, as those two poems are both in their headings addressed “To Thamyris, on my Birth-Day, 1785.” The only publication of Buchan’s that featured in the sale of Walpole’s library at Strawberry Hill in 1842 was Buchan’s Discourse… at a meeting for the purpose of promoting the institution of a Society for the investigation of the history of Scotland, and its antiquities, November 14, 1780 (Edinburgh, ?1781), the meeting from which the Scottish Society of Antiquities was founded.[ii]

Buchan’s earnest antiquarian enquiries of Walpole (Buchan’s letters have not been traced) and Walpole’s attempts to answer or deflect them form the substance of his replies. One can sense Walpole’s attempt to distance himself in the opening paragraph of his letter of 23 September 1785:

Your Lordship is too condescending when you incline to keep up a correspondence with one who can expect to maintain it but a short time, and whose intervals of health are resigned to idleness, not dedicated, as they have sometimes been, to literary pursuits… Your Lordship’s zeal for illuminating your country and countrymen is laudable… but a man who touches the verge of his sixty-eighth year, ought to know that he is unfit to contribute to the amusement of more active minds. This consideration, my Lord, makes me much decline correspondence: having nothing new to communicate, I perceive that I fill my letters with apologies for having nothing to say.[iii]

So the letters proceed, with Walpole complaining of his being gout-ridden and superannuated while fielding Buchan’s continued enquiries on Scottish antiquities and engraved Scottish portraits. As early as 1782 Walpole told Lady Ossory that Buchan “tells me a vast deal about our Antiquarian Society at Edinburgh, and generally asks me many questions about past ages”, and again that “he will extract from me whatever in the course of my antiquarian dips, I have picked up about Scottish kings and queens, for whom in truth I never cared a straw. I have tried everything but being rude to break off the intercourse”.[iv] The concluding letter, of 29 November 1792, has Walpole firmly refusing to provide Buchan with a drawing of the Countess of Lenox’s jewel, which Walpole recorded in his Description of Strawberry Hill as “a golden heart set with jewels, and ornamented with emblematic figures enamelled, and Scottish mottoes; made by order of the Lady Margaret Douglas, mother of Henry Lord Darnley, in memory of her husband Matthew Stuart, Earl of Lenox and Regent of Scotland, murdered by the papists.” He insisted that it was too valuable and too delicate, and that he never let it out of his hands. Buchan annotated the letter “I did not indeed advert to the fiddle-faddle business of copying the jewel, but thought Lord Orford might wish to communicate its likeness, though in one point of view only, to the Antiquaries, for his own honour and glory!”[v] There is no further surviving correspondence.

As for the two poems, they do nothing to call into question Buchan’s reputation for eccentricity. Both are addressed to Thamyris, the Thracian singer who in Greek mythology was noted for his love of Hyacinth (and so is claimed to be the first male to have loved another male), and for having challenged the Nine Muses to a competition, which he inevitably lost. The first poem, The Origin of Language, after an opening lament on the political discord of the times, seeks to explain the inception of language in mimetic terms:

But know that language Reason taught to grow

From simple sounds, as Man began to know

His hopes and fears, His pleasures, and his pains,

How Fire consumes, How food his Frame maintains…

Buchan associates the sound S with the hissing of fire extinguished in water, the labial BA for no clear reason as expressing life, ABA as God, and BA. S as life extinguished, or death. The Idea of a Perfect Government is scarcely less extraordinary: a heavenly muse reveals to the poet a constitutional model consisting of Senate, nobility and King. The corruption of elections is to be avoided by the Senate being elected by rotation, with one seventh retiring every year, and potential senators being subject to veto by one fifth of the voters, and dismissal for abuse. Nobles were to “hold Patent of Rank and of superior mould” from the Senate, while the figure of Prince, Father, or King, would be responsible for enforcing laws, but could not issue pardons without consent of Senate and Nobles. As for religion, it would be divorced from the State, and all theological strife would miraculously disappear as:

In every City Temples let there be,

Where Men of ev’ry faith in each degree,

With Heav’nly Music and Seraphic praise,

To the same GOD ador’d in various ways.

Sadly, what Walpole made of this farrago is unrecorded.

__________

[i] The letters quoted from Walpole to Buchan are all in W.S. Lewis ed., the Yale Edition of Horace Walpole’s Correspondence (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1937–83), 15, between pages 138 and 234 and at 343–44.

[ii] Allen T. Hazen, A Catalogue of Horace Walpole’s Library (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1969), 2, 29. The pamphlet was bound into volume 42 of the Tracts of the Reign of George the 3rd that Walpole compiled.

[iii] Correspondence, 15, 185–88.

[iv] Letters of Walpole to Lady Ossory of 3 and 10 November 1782, Correspondence, 33, 359–64 at 3363 and 367–71 at 368.

[v] Correspondence, 15, 233–34, note 1 and heading to letter.

The Curious Case of the “Mexico” Collage

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Barbara E. Mundy, Donald and Martha Robertson Chair in Latin American Art History,  Tulane University

A collage with a wash drawing depicting native people of Mexico on a hillside with the sky above, mounted in the center of which is an engraving of a view of a walled city surrounded by a river, the arrangement giving the impression that the two drawn figures are looking out over a valley at the settlement in the distance below them. A couple prominent in the left foreground, stand in front of a tree; the man faces the viewer and wears a feathered headdress and loin cloth; the spear in his right hand rests on his shoulders and the shield in left hand is propped up against the ground. The woman with her back to the viewer, wears a sleeveless shirt, a skirt, and sandals; her long hair falls past her waist; food items are visible within the basket she carries in the crook of her right arm. Two other figures work in the clearing below.

Mexico
England?, 18th century?
Collage: brown wash with pencil, engraving. Mounted on page 134 in volume 6 of M.C.D. Borden’s extensively extra-illustrated copy of: Horace Walpole and his world edited by L. B. Seeley London: Seeley, Jackson, and Halliday, 1884 Folio 225 884S Copy 2 Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University

When Cynthia Roman, the curator of the Lewis Walpole Library collection, sent me a photo of this image and asked me to write a blog, it was a welcome assignment. Over decades of looking at printed maps, I found this one both deeply familiar and utterly strange.  A collage, certainly, but where did the pieces come from? How much was borrowed, how much invented? And what scholar–particularly the art historian–doesn’t welcome a little bit of armchair detective work?

Mounted in a 19th-century publication on Walpole, the laid paper sheet contains a cut-out and pasted-down map of the Aztec city of Tenochtitlan, now Mexico City, at center, surrounded by a painting in wash.  The painted surround was intended to seamlessly extend and add to the map’s imagery, and likely once had the same grey tones of the engraved map at center. But today the additions are shades of brown, making the contrast between printed call and painted response more evident, and heightening the artificiality of the painter’s conceit.

two-page spread print in volume showing overview of Mexico with a city in the center and hills beyond.

“Vetus Mexico” in Arnoldus Montanus De Nieuwe en onbekende weereld: of Beschryving van America en’t zuid-land Amsterdam, ca. 1671 Courtesy of The Library of Congress (https://www.wdl.org/en/item/518/) [image edited at LWL to combine pages for spread]

The cut-out map at center adopts an elevated perspective, to show Mexico City as Aztec capital before its invasion by Spaniards in 1519-21. It is a map with a long genealogy. This one is the direct offspring of an engraved map titled “Vetus Mexico,” included in Arnoldus Montanus’s De Nieuwe en onbekende weereld: of Beschryving van America en’t zuid-land, published in Amsterdam in about 1671.

black and white

John Ogilby
America, Being an Accurate Description of the New World, Printed by the author, 1671 Courtesy of The Smithsonian Libraries
(https://library.si.edu/digital-library/book/america00ogil)

The same plates were used in the English translation, America, Being an Accurate Description of the New World, by John Ogilby in 1671. Montanus’s engraving was copied by other publishers through the 18th century, including the one who created the map used in the collage. Novel are the two figures at left: an “Aztec” warrior (as imagined in the 18th century) gazes towards the viewer, as his companion, seen largely from the rear, gestures to the right and brings attention to the urban view. The vertical stripe of the figure’s tunic parallels that of the image’s frame, locking it into the composition.

By the 18th century, the many copies of “Vetus Mexico” granted it the authority that comes with ubiquity. The prototype was a map accompanying the letters written by the Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés, published in 1524. When the 1524 map was set into a text that offered vivid descriptions of the city’s complex lacustrine environment, its temples and its markets, it came to carry the same truth value as did Cortés’s eyewitness account. Later editions of the map were also paired with textual descriptions, yielding much the same truth value.

A collage with a wash drawing depicting native people of Mexico on a hillside with the sky above, mounted in the center of which is an engraving of a view of a walled city surrounded by a river, the arrangement giving the impression that the two drawn figures are looking out over a valley at the settlement in the distance below them. A couple prominent in the left foreground, stand in front of a tree; the man faces the viewer and wears a feathered headdress and loin cloth; the spear in his right hand rests on his shoulders and the shield in left hand is propped up against the ground. The woman with her back to the viewer, wears a sleeveless shirt, a skirt, and sandals; her long hair falls past her waist; food items are visible within the basket she carries in the crook of her right arm. Two other figures work in the clearing below.

Mexico (detail) The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University

The creator of this image allowed the map of the Aztec city to inspire the imaginative projection of Aztec peoples, seen in the two figures on the left. Here, the artist’s imagination has been fed by images of Amerindians that circulated in books or as single-sheet prints, particularly the engraved plates that appeared in Montanus’s, and later Ogilby’s, work: the feathered headdress and skirt; the arm and leg bracelets; the shield and spear; the bare chest and feet. By the 18th century, these items, many quite fanciful, were standard repertoire for depictions of Amerindians. Less expected is the modest dress of the accompanying figure, whose muscled arm and confident wide-fingered gesture suggests male rather than female. This gender ambiguity may be due to the painter’s lack of skill, registered in the face of the “Aztec” warrior, where an initial three-quarter’s view seems to have been extended to a frontal one. The painter avoided rendering the face of the warrior’s companion entirely.

While the cutting and pasting seem like child’s play, the figures a game of dress-up on display, the image is unsettling to me. My response is not the recoil of the bibliophile when scissors dismember the volume, nor is it the scholar’s distaste for the fantasy over the factual. Indeed, the art historian in me sees much that is familiar, which presumably should be comforting.

The pairing of a city view in the background with foreground figural “types” found widespread expression beginning in the 16th century. Braun and Hogenberg’s Civitates Orbis Terrarum published in many editions across the 16th and 17th century offers the most prominent examples of setting the complexion and habits of urban residents against the background of a city view.

View of a 16th century plan of Mexico City, with a 3/4 aerial view of the buildings set in hilly countryside, several figures and a large identifyinjg title in a rectangle in the foreground

Mexico Regia et Celebris Hispaniae Novae Civitas
in
Georg Braun and Frans Hogenberg
“Civitates Orbis Terrarum”
Cologne, 1572
Folio 49 3675 vol. 1 The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University

What is unsettling is the creator’s confidence in the assignment of types to place. There’s the confidence to recycle a centuries-old trope of certain bodies belonging to certain places. And in the cutting, pasting, and quick strokes of wash on the page, I see the creator’s visual assertion of a powerful control over bodies and places. The imaginary bodies are like pieces in a game of chess: the “Aztec” warrior here, the pawn/peon by his side. It would be child’s play, except that we live today in the aftermath of such confident assignments. These assignments were grounded in 16th- century notions that human bodies are constituted by places of origin, that stars and climate have a determinative effect on who a person fundamentally is. Such an ideology was adopted and adapted by the nation-state, to tether people to place, and naturalize that connection through citizenship. It’s an ideology that is tested and contested in our present moment, as real life people, many of them of Amerindian descent, dislocated by political violence and climate change, are uprooting in a desperate search for a hospitable place. The ideology articulated on this page, with bodies assigned to a place and locked into a landscape, finds new life in the closing of borders. While an old collage cannot be blamed for today’s mass deportations and forced repatriations, this well-educated and affluent creator’s confident cutting, his or her easy assignment of fantastic people to places on the map needs to be taken seriously if one is to ponder the shape of the modern world and imagine the future desired for it.