For many years Horace Walpole continued, in spite of incessant attacks of the gout, to keep almost open house at Strawberry; in short, he said, he kept an inn—­the sign, the Gothic Castle!  ‘Take my advice,’ he wrote to a friend, ’never build a charming house for yourself between London and Hampton Court; everybody will live in it but you.’

The death of Lady Suffolk, in 1767, had been an essential loss to her partial, and not too rigid neighbours.  Two days before the death of George II. she had gone to Kensington not knowing that there was a review there.  Hemmed in by coaches, she found herself close to George II. and to Lady Yarmouth.  Neither of them knew her—­a circumstance which greatly affected the countess.

Horace Walpole was now desirous of growing old with dignity.  He had no wish ’to dress up a withered person, nor to drag it about to public places;’ but he was equally averse from ’sitting at home, wrapped up in flannels,’ to receive condolences from people he did not care for—­and attentions from relations who were impatient for his death.  Well might a writer in the ‘Quarterly Review’ remark that our most useful lessons in reading Walpole’s Letters are not only derived from his sound sense, but from ’considering this man of the world, full of information and sparkling with vivacity, stretched on a sick bed, and apprehending all the tedious languor of helpless decrepitude and deserted solitude.’  His later years had been diversified by correspondence with Hannah More, who sent him her poem of the Bas Bleu, into which she had introduced his name.  In 1786 she visited him at Strawberry Hill.  He was then a martyr to the gout, but with spirits gay as ever:  ’I never knew a man suffer pain with such entire patience,’ was Hannah More’s remark.  His correspondence with her continued regularly; but that with the charming sisters was delightfully interrupted by their residence at little 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.