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 gallant; but, if two negatives make an affirmative, why may not two ridicules compose one piece of sense? and, therefore, as I am in love with you both, I trust it is a proof of the good sense of your devoted—­H.  WALPOLE,’

He was doomed, in the decline of life, to witness two great national convulsions:  of the insurrection of 1745 he wrote feelingly—­justly—­almost pathetically:  forty-five years later he was tired, he said, of railing against French barbarity and folly.  ’Legislators! a Senate!  To neglect laws, in order to annihilate coats-of-arms and liveries!’ George Selwyn said, that Monsieur the king’s brother was the only man of rank from whom they could not take a title.  His alarm at the idea of his two young friends going to the Continent was excessive.  The flame of revolution had burst forth at Florence:  Flanders was not a safe road; dreadful horrors had been perpetrated at Avignon.  Then he relates a characteristic anecdote of poor Marie Antoinette! She went with the king to see the manufacture of glass.  As they passed the Halle, the poissardes hurra’d them.  ’Upon my word,’ said the queen, ’these folks are civiller when you visit them, than when they visit you.’

Walpole’s affection for the Miss Berrys cast a glow of happiness over the fast-ebbing years of his life, ‘In happy days,’ he wrote to them when they were abroad, ’I called you my dear wives; now I can only think of you as darling children, of whom I am bereaved.’  He was proud of their affection; proud of their spending many hours with ’a very old man,’ whilst they were the objects of general admiration.  These charming women survived until our own time:  the centre of a circle of the leading characters in literature, politics, art, rank, and virtue.  They are remembered with true regret.  The fulness of their age perfected the promise of their youth.  Samuel Rogers used to say that they had lived in the reign of Queen Anne, so far back seemed their memories which were so coupled to the past; but the youth of their minds, their feelings, their intelligence, remained almost to the last.