The “Pope” of Holland House
John Whishaw to Thomas Smith, 23 July 1817
July 23, 1817.
I hope to send you some extracts from Mr. Edgeworth’s letters which are really interesting and very
creditable to his memory. He has left something in the shape of memoirs, which will
probably require omissions and corrections. It will give you great pleasure to hear
that there is a prospect of letters and papers of poor Horner, which promise to be very interesting and instructive. We
had a pleasant day with Warburton on
Saturday, and were all much pleased with Chiswick, which is a beautiful specimen of
a villa, containing besides several fine pictures. We went also to hear the
Apollonicon, which is a very fine organ with six sets of keys, but played by a
barrel (the two pieces are Cherubini’s
overture of Anacreon and Mozart’s Clemenza di Tito). It
is a noble instrument, but not equal in effect to the organ at Haarlem; and
Leonard Horner, who has heard both,
agrees with me entirely in this opinion.
I had also obtained an order for our seeing Canova’s magnificent colossal statue of
Napoleon, which is at Wellington House. It
is wretchedly placed at the bottom staircase; but we were all much delighted with
it, and I came away with a much higher opinion of
Canova’s powers; the style of the statue being much
more simple and severe than any of his works which I had before seen. The attitude,
as Warburton justly observed, is borrowed
from the Apollo Belvedere.
Madame de Staël has left a great
correspondence, consisting of many volumes of letters from eminent
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people, many in particular from Talleyrand. Before her death she acknowledged
Rocca as her husband, and a child she
had by him six or seven years ago as her legitimate son.
Antonio Canova (1757-1822)
Italian neoclassical sculptor who worked at Rome.
Luigi Cherubini (1762-1812)
Italian composer of operas and sacred music who worked in France, where he was director
of the Conservatoire.
Richard Lovell Edgeworth (1744-1817)
Irish magnate and writer on education; he published
Practical
Education, 2 vols (1788), and other works in collaboration with his daughter the
novelist.
Francis Horner (1778-1817)
Scottish barrister and frequent contributor to the
Edinburgh
Review; he was a Whig MP and member of the Holland House circle.
Leonard Horner (1785-1864)
Scottish geologist, brother of Francis Horner; he was educated at Edinburgh University
and was secretary of the Geological Society (1810) and fellow of the Royal Society
(1813).
Emperor Napoleon I (1769-1821)
Military leader, First Consul (1799), and Emperor of the French (1804), after his
abdication he was exiled to Elba (1814); after his defeat at Waterloo he was exiled to St.
Helena (1815).
Albert Jean-Michel Rocca (1788-1818)
Swiss Hussar, the second husband of Germaine de Staël (1816); they had a son,
Louis-Alphonse Rocca (1812-42).
Germaine de Staël (1766-1817)
French woman of letters; author of the novel
Corinne, ou L'Italie
(1807) and
De l'Allemagne (1811); banned from Paris by Napoleon, she
spent her later years living in Germany, Britain, and Switzerland.
Henry Warburton [Eliot Warburton] (1784-1858)
Educated at Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge, he was a Radical MP for Bridport in
Dorset (1826-41) who took an interest in bodysnatching.
