Two books from Horace Walpole’s library held by the Turnbull

Turnbull Library Record, Volume XV, Issue 1, 1 May 1982, Page 5

Two books from Horace Walpole’s library held by the Turnbull

SIMON CAUCHI

The two books are George Keate’s An Account of the Pelew Islands (London, 1788) and the three-volume edition of Nugae Antiquae (London, 1779), edited by Henry Harington from the papers of his Elizabethan ancestors, John Harington of Stepney and Sir John Harington of Kelston. There are entries for both books in Allen T. Hazen’s A Catalogue of Horace Walpole’s Library (New Haven and London, 1969), where Keate’s Account is N 0.271 and Nugae Antiquae is N 0.3814. Hazen’s descriptions are full and accurate, but he had not seen the books and did not know their present location. The purpose of this note is to add a few more details taken from an examination of the books themselves and also to report the disappointing finding that only two of the annotations in Nugae Antiquae can be attributed to Walpole.

Hazen records the books’ subsequent ownership down to their appearance in Quaritch’s catalogues. Turnbull presumably bought them directly from Quaritch, Keate’s Account not before 1909 and Nugae Antiquae not before 1915. I have found no record of the purchases in Turnbull’s surviving papers, but Miss Walton advises me that a note in the front of the first volume of Nugae Antiquae is in Turnbull’s handwriting. Unless evidence is found to the contrary, I believe both books should be considered part of Turnbull’s 1918 bequest.

Walpole’s habit of annotating his books has been fully described by Wilmarth Lewis in his 1957 Sandars Lectures (included in Hazen’s Catalogue) and elsewhere. ‘I love nothing so much as writing notes in my books’, wrote Walpole in 1775. ‘There are marginalia in at least two-thirds of his books that have been recovered’, adds Lewis. Walpole read and annotated Nugae Antiquae, but Keate’s Account is not annotated in any way. One suspects Walpole never read it, but he may have studied the illustrations, for (as Hazen records) he kept the book in Press B of the Main Library at Strawberry Hill, together with books on the arts and on numismatics. The press-mark was presumably lost when the book was re-bound in calf by Zaehnsdorffor a subsequent owner, R. T. Hamilton Bruce. The bookplate on the fly-leaf is the third of Walpole’s three designs: ‘BP 2 later state’, as Hazen and

Lewis call it. Keate’s letter of presentation to Walpole is now in the Turnbull’s manuscript collection (MS Papers 2167):

Walpole’s bookplates in Nugae Antiquae are also ‘BP 2 later state’. They are placed inside the front cover of each volume. Press-marks ‘R.24’, ‘R.25’ and ‘26’ are written in ink on the versos of the marbled end-papers. These indicate the location of the set in Press R of the Round Tower, the fourth and last room at Strawberry Hill to be adapted to house Walpole’s expanding library. The catalogue entry for the 1882 Sotheby’s sale has been tipped in at the front of the first volume. This attributes the binding in red morocco to Roger Payne, but Hazen accepts Bohn’s 1842 attribution to Kalthoeber. There is no label or other positive identification of the

binder in the book itself. The binding design is simple but elegant, with gilt-stamped decoration and gilt-edged pages. Also at the front of the first volume someone, probably a dealer, has written ‘N0.3158’ (presumably a catalogue number), and Turnbull has added the phrase: ‘a few pencil notes by Horace Walpole’. One of Walpole’s two notes is on the blank page facing the press-mark in volume two. It reads: ‘see two most curious letters at p. 132, & 271. H. W.’. These are well-known letters, one written by Sir John Harington to Robert Markham and the other by Lord Thomas Howard to Sir John Harington, both of which have been reprinted by N. E. McClure in his edition of Harington’s Letters and Epigrams (Philadelphia, 1930; see pp. 32-34 and 121-26). The first letter describes Queen Elizabeth’s rage when she read Harington’s account of Essex’s Irish campaign, and the second letter advises Harington how best to conduct himself in the changed circumstances of the court of King James. Walpole’s other note is in volume three, page 286. A cross is set against the word ‘Earl’ in the heading above a poem (Wyatt’s ‘My lute awake’) and another cross at the foot of the page introduces the note: ‘This must have been the Viscount [not Earl of] Rochford, brother of Anne Boleyn, & beheaded on her account’.

W alpole owned at least one other copy of the 1779 edition (Hazen No. 411) and references in his correspondence show that he read an earlier volume of Nugae Antiquae published in 1775 as well. His use of the two books now in the Turnbull seems to have been quite typical of him. It is well known that he had literary, artistic and antiquarian interests and that he was profoundly bored by accounts of uncivilized parts of the world.

All three volumes o fNugae Antiquae have also been annotated in pencil in another hand, and two longer notes written in ink in the same or a similar non-Walpole hand were found on slips of paper placed between the pages they referred to. The separate slips of paper have now been transferred to the manuscript collection. The authorship of these non-Walpole annotations is not known, nor does it matter very much, for they are none of them original (I have checked them all). Some later owner or reader of the book has compared it with Thomas Park’s re-arranged and annotated two-volume edition of Nugae Antiquae , published in 1804 after Walpole’s death, and has copied into the book points of interest from Park’s annotations. The transcriptions are selective, abridged and usually but not quite always accurate. At least one of them, the slip of paper about a ‘pretty jewell’ presented to Queen Elizabeth, perpetuates an error of Park’s —the error is fully.documented by Ruth Hughey in her John Harington of Stepney (Columbus, Ohio, 1971; see note 312 on pp. 240-41). A pencil note in volume one,

page 176, declares the transcriber’s source. It reads:‘This should be Dr Parry. Bp 1607. & of Worcester 1610. ob 1616. see Park’s Edition’.