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WALPOLE'S LETTERS TO SIR HORACE MANN.*

[EDINBURGH REVIEW, 1833.]

We cannot transcribe this title-page without strong feelings of regret. The editing of these volumes was the last of the useful and modest services rendered to literature by a nobleman of amiable manners, of untarnished public and private character, and of cultivated mind. On this, as on other occasions, Lord Dover performed his part diligently, judiciously, and without the slightest ostentation. He had two merits, both of which are rarely found together in a commentator. He was content to be merely a commentator-to keep in the background, and to leave the foreground to the author whom he had undertaken to illustrate. Yet, though willing to be an attendant, he was by no means a slave; nor did he consider it as part of his editorial duty to see no faults in the writer to whom he faithfully and assiduously rendered the humblest literary offices.

The faults of Horace Walpole's head and heart are indeed sufficiently glaring. His writings, it is true, rank as high among the delicacies of intellectual epicures as the Strasburgh pies among the dishes described in the Almanack des Gourmands. But, as the pâté-defoie-gras owes its excellence to the diseases of the wretched animal which furnishes it, and would be good for nothing if it were not made of livers preternaturally swollen, so none but an unhealthy and disorganized mind could have produced such literary luxuries as the works of Walpole.

He was, unless we have formed a very erroneous judgment of his character, the most eccentric, the most artificial, the most fastidious, the most capricious of men. His mind was a bundle of inconsistent whims and affectations. His features were covered by mask within mask. When the outer disguise of obvious affectation was removed, you were still as far as ever from seeing the real man. He played innumerable parts, and overacted them all. When he talked misanthropy, he out-Timoned Timon. When he talked philanthropy, he left Howard at an immeasurable distance. He scoffed at courts, and kept a chronicle of their most trifling scandal; at society, and was blown about by its slightest veerings of opinion; at literary fame, and left fair copies of his private letters, with copious notes, to be published after his decease; at rank, and never for a moment forgot that he was an honourable; at the practice of entail, and tasked the ingenuity of conveyancers to tie up his villa in the strictest settlement.

Letters of Horace Walpole, Earl of Orford, to Sir Ho. race Mann, British Envoy at the Court of Tuscany. Now first published from the Originals in the possession of the EARL of WALDGRAVE. Edited by LORD DOVER. 3 vols. 8vo. London. 1833.

The conformation of his mind was such, that whatever was little, seemed to him great, and whatever was great, seemed to him little. Serious business was a trifle to him, and trifles were his serious business. To chat with bluestockings; to write little copies of complimentary verses on little occasions; to superintend a private press; to preserve from natural decay the perishable topics of Ranelagh and White's; to record divorces and bets, Miss Chudleigh's absurdities and George Selwyn's good sayings; to decorate a grotesque house with piecrust battlements; to procure rare engravings and antique chimney-boards; to match odd gauntlets; to lay out a maze of walks within five acres of ground-these were the grave employments of his long life. From these he turned to politics as to an amusement. After the labours of the print-shop and the auctionroom, he unbent his mind in the House of Commons. And, having indulged in the recreation of making laws and voting millions he returned to more important pursuits-to researches after Queen Mary's comb, Wolsey's red hat, the pipe which Van Tromp smoked during his last seafight, and the spur which King William struck into the flank of Sorrel.

In every thing in which he busied himself— in the fine arts, in literature, in public affairs he was drawn by some strange attraction from the great to the little, and from the useful to the odd. The politics in which he took the keenest interest were politics scarcely deserv ing of the name. The growlings of George the Second, the flirtations of Princess Emily with the Duke of Grafton, the amours of Prince Frederic with Lady Middlesex, the squabbles between Gold Stick and the Master of the Buckhounds, the disagreements between the tutors of Prince George-these matters engaged almost all the attention which Walpole could spare from matters more important still;-from bidding for Zinckes and Petitots, from cheapening fragments of tapestry, and handles of old lances, from joining bits of painted glass, and from setting up memorials of departed cats and dogs. While he was fetching and carrying the gossip of Kensington Palace and Carlton House, he fancied that he was engaged in politics, and when he recorded that gossip, he fancied that he was writing history.

He was, as he has himself told us, fond of faction as an amusement. He loved mischief. but he loved quiet; and he was constantly on the watch for opportunities of gratifying buth his tastes at once. He sometimes contrived, without showing himself, to disturb the course of ministerial negotiations, and to spread confusion through the political circles. He does not himself pretend that, on these occasions,

he was actuated by public spirit; nor does he appear to have had any private advantage in view. He thought it a good practical joke to set public men together by the ears; and he enjoyed their perplexities, their accusations, and their recriminations, as a malicious boy enjoys the embarrassment of a misdirected traveller.

Houghton or in Downing street, men who had been Whigs when it was as dangerous to be a Whig as to be a highwayman; men who had voted for the exclusion bill, who had been concealed in garrets and cellars after the battle of Sedgmoor, and who had set their names to the declaration that they would live and die with the Prince of Orange. He had acquired the About politics, in the high sense of the word, language of these men, and he repeated it by he knew nothing and cared nothing. He called rote, though it was at variance with all his himself a Whig. His father's son could scarce- tastes and feelings; just as some old Jacobite ly assume any other name. It pleased him families persisted in praying for the Pretender, also to affect a foolish aversion to kings as and passing their glasses over the water-dekings, and a foolish love and admiration of canter when they drank the king's health, long rebels as rebels; and, perhaps, while kings after they had become zealous supporters of were not in danger, and while rebels were not the government of George the Third. He was in being, he really believed that he held the a Whig by the accident of hereditary connecdoctrines which he professed. To go no far- tion; but he was essentially a courtier, and ther than the letters now before us, he is per- not the less a courtier because he pretended to petually boasting to his friend Mann of his sneer at the object which excited his admiraaversion to royalty and to royal persons. He tion and envy. His real tastes perpetually calls the crime of Damien "that least bad of show themselves through the thin disguise. murders, the murder of a king." He hung up While professing all the contempt of Bradshaw in his villa a fac-simile of the death-warrant or Ludlow for crowned heads, he took the of Charles, with the inscription, "Major Charta." trouble to write a book concerning Royal AuYet the most superficial knowledge of history thors. He pried with the utmost anxiety into might have taught him that the Restoration, the most minute particulars relating to the and the crimes and follies of the twenty-eight royal family. When he was a child, he was years which followed the Restoration, were the haunted with a longing to see George the First, effects of this "Greater Charter." Nor was and gave his mother no peace till she had there much in the means by which the instru- found a way of gratifying his curiosity. The ment was obtained which could gratify a judi- same feeling, covered with a thousand discious lover of liberty. A man must hate kings guises, attended him to the grave. No observery bitterly, before he can think it desirable vation that dropped from the lips of majesty that the representatives of the people should seemed to him too trifling to be recorded. The be turned out of doors by dragoons, in order French songs of Prince Frederic, compositions to get at a king's head. Walpole's Whigism, certainly not deserving of preservation on achowever, was of a very harmless kind. He count of their intrinsic merit, have been carekept it, as he kept the old spears and helmets fully preserved for us by this contemner of at Strawberry Hill, merely for show. He royalty. In truth, every page of Walpole's would just as soon have thought of taking works betrayed him. This Diogenes, who down the arms of the ancient Templars and would be thought to prefer his tub to a palace, Hospitallers from the walls of his hall, and and who has nothing to ask of the masters of setting off on a crusade to the Holy Land, as Windsor and Versailles but that they will of acting in the spirit of those daring warriors stand out of his light, is a gentleman-usher at and statesmen, great even in their errors, whose heart. names and seals were affixed to the warrant which he prized so highly. He liked revolution and regicide only when they were a hundred years old. His republicanism, like the courage of a bully or the love of a fribble, was strong and ardent when there was no occasion for it, and subsided when he had an opportunity of bringing it to the proof. As soon as the revolutionary spirit really began to stir in Europe, as soon as the hatred of kings became something more than a sonorous phrase, he was frightened into a fanatical royalist, and became one of the most extravagant alarmists of those wretched times. In truth, his talk about liberty, whether he knew it or not, was from the beginning a mere cant, the remains of a phraseology which had meant something in the mouths of those from whom he had learned it, but which, in his mouth, meant about as much as the oath by which the Knights of the Bath bind themselves to redress the wrongs of all injured ladies. He had been fed in his boyhood with Whig speculations on government. He must often have seen, at

He had, it is plain, an uneasy consciousness of the frivolity of his favourite pursuits; and this consciousness produced one of the most diverting of his ten thousand affectations. His busy idleness, his indifference to matters which the world generally regards as important, his passion for trifles, he thought fit to dignify with the name of philosophy. He spoke of himself as of a man whose equanimity was proof to ambitious hopes and fears; who had learned to rate power, wealth, and fame at their true value, and whom the conflict of parties, the rise and fall of statesmen, the ebbs and flows of public opinion, moved only to a smile of mingled compassion and disdain. It was owing to the peculiar elevation of his character, that he cared about a lath and plaster pinnacle more than about the Middlesex election, and about a miniature of Grammont more than about the American Revolution. Pitt and Murray might talk themselves hoarse about trifles. But questions of government and war were too insignificant to detain a mind which was occupied in recording the scandal of club

rooms and the whispers of the backstairs, and affected superciliousness and apathy of a man which was even capable of selecting and dis- of ton, posing chairs of ebony and shields of rhinoceros-skin.

One of his innumerable whims was an extreme dislike to be considered as a man of letters. Not that he was indifferent to literary fame. Far from it. Scarcely any writer has ever troubled himself so much about the appearance which his works were to make before posterity. But he had set his heart on incompatible objects. He wished to be a celebrated author, and yet to be a mere idle gentlemanone of those epicurean gods of the earth who do nothing at all, and who pass their existence in the contemplation of their own perfections. He did not like to have any thing in common with the wretches who lodged in the little courts behind St. Martin's Church, and stole out on Sundays to dine with their bookseller. He avoided the society of authors. He spoke with lordly contempt of the most distinguished among them. He tried to find out some way of writing books, as M. Jourdain's father sold cloth, without derogating from his character of gentilhomme. "Lui, marchand? C'est pure médisance: il ne l'a jamais été. Tout ce qu'il | faisait, c'est qu'il était fort obligeant, fort officieux; et comme il se connaissait, fort bien en étoffes, il en allait choisir de tous les côtés, les faisait apporter chez lui, et en donnait à ses amis pour de l'argent." There are several amusing instances of his feeling on this subject in the letters now before us. Mann had complimented him on the learning which appeared in the "Catalogue of Royal and Noble Authors" and it is curious to see how impatiently Walpole bore the imputation of having attended to any thing so unfashionable as the improvement of his mind. "I know nothing. How should I? I who have always lived in the big busy world; who lie a-bed all the morning, calling it morning as long as you please; who sup in company; who have played at faro half my life, and now at loo till two and three in the morning; who have always loved pleasure, haunted auctions... How I have laughed when some of the Magazines have called me the learned gentleman. Pray don't be like the Magazines." This folly might be pardoned in a boy. But a man of forty-three, as Walpole then was, ought to be quite as much ashamed of playing at loo till three every morning, as of being so vulgar a thing as a learned gen

tleman.

The literary character has undoubtedly its full share of faults, and of very serious and offensive faults. If Walpole had avoided those faults, we could have pardoned the fastidiousness with which he declined all fellowship with men of learning. But from those faults Walpole was not one jot more free than the garreteers from whose contact he shrank. Of literary meannesses and literary vices, his life and his works contain as many instances as the life and the works of any member of Johnson's club. The fact is, that Walpole had the faults of Grub street, with a large addition | from St. James's street, the vanity, the jealousy, the irritability of a man of letters, the

His judgment of literature, of contemporary literature especially, was altogether perverted by his aristocratical feelings. No writer surely was ever guilty of so much false and absurd criticism. He almost invariably speaks with contempt of those books which are now universally allowed to be the best that appeared in his time; and, on the other hand, he speaks of writers of rank and fashion as if they were entitled to the same precedence in literature which would have been allowed to them in a drawing-room. In these letters, for example, he says, that he would rather have written the most absurd lines in Lee than Thomson's "Seasons." The periodical paper called "The World," on the other hand, was by "our first writers." Who, then, were the first writers of England in the year 1753 Walpole has told us in a note. Our readers will probably guess that Hume, Fielding, Smollett, Richardson, Johnson, Warburton, Collins, Akenside, Gray, Dyer, Young, Warton, Mason, or some of those distinguished men, were on the list. Not one of them. Our first writers, it seems, were Lord Chesterfield, Lord Bath, Mr. W. Whitehead, Sir Charles Williams, Mr. Soame Jenyns, Mr. Cambridge, Mr. Coventry. Of these seven gentlemen, Whitehead was the lowest in station, but was the most accomplished tuft-hunter of his time. Coventry was of a noble family. The other five had among them two peerages, two seats in the House of Commons, three seats in the Privy Council, a baronetcy, a blue riband, a red riband, about a hundred thousand pounds a year, and not ten pages that are worth reading. The writings of Whitehead, Cambridge, Coventry, and Lord Bath are forgotten. Soame Jenyns is remembered chiefly by John son's review of the foolish Essay on the Origin of Evil. Lord Chesterfield stands much lower in the estimation of posterity than he we'd have done if his letters had never been p lished. The lampoons of Sir Charles Williams are now read only by the curious; and, though not without occasional flashes of wit, have always seemed to us, we must own, very poor performances.

Walpole judged of French literature after the same fashion. He understood and loved the French language. Indeed, he loved it too well. His style is more deeply tainted with Gallicisms than that of any other English writer with whom we are acquainted. His composition often reads, for a page together, like a rude translation from the French. We meet every minute with such sentences as these, "One knows what temperaments Annibal Caracci painted." "The impertinent personage!" "She is dead rich." "Lord Dalkeith is dead of the small-pox in three days." "What was ridiculous, the man who seconded the motion happened to be shut out." "It will now be seen whether he or they are most pa triot."

His love of the French language was of a peculiar kind. He loved it as having been fo a century the vehicle of all the polite nothings of Europe: as the sign by which the freenia

sons of fashion recognised each other in every close with a good hope for France and for capital from Petersburg to Naples; as the lan- mankind. guage of raillery, as the language of anecdote, as the language of memoirs, as the language of correspondence. Its higher uses he altogether disregarded. The literature of France has been to ours what Aaron was to Mosesthe expositor of great truths, which would else have perished for want of a voice to utter them with distinctness. The relation which existed between Mr. Bentham and M. Dumont is an exact illustration of the intellectual relation in which the two countries stand to each other. The great discoveries in physics, in metaphysics, in political science, are ours. But no foreign nation except France has received them from us by direct communication. Isolated in our situation, isolated by our manners, we found truth, but we did not impart it. France has been the interpreter between England and mankind.

Walpole had neither hopes nor fears. Though the most Frenchified English writer of the eighteenth century, he troubled himself little about the portents which were daily to be discerned in the French literature of his time. While the most eminent Frenchmen were studying with enthusiastic delight English politics and English philosophy, he was studying as intently the gossip of the old court of France. The fashions and scandal of Versailles and Marli, fashions and scandal a hundred years old, occupied him infinitely more than a great moral revolution which was taking place in his sight. He took a prodi gious interest in every noble sharper whose vast volume of wig and infinite length of riband had figured at the dressing or at the tucking up of Louis the Fourteenth, and of every profligate woman of quality who had In the time of Walpole, this process of in- carried her train of lovers backward and forterpretation was in full activity. The great ward from king to Parliament, and from ParFrench writers were busy in proclaiming | liament to king, during the wars of the Fronde. through Europe the names of Bacon, of New- These were the people of whom he treasured ton, and of Locke. The English principles of up the smallest memorial, of whom he loved toleration, the English respect for personal to hear the most trifling anecdote, and for liberty, the English doctrine that all power is whose likenesses he would have given any a trust for the public good, were making rapid price. Of the great French writers of his own progress. There is scarcely any thing in his-time, Montesquieu is the only one of whom he tory so interesting as that great stirring up of the mind of France, that shaking of the foundations of all established opinions, that uprooting of old truth and old error. It was plain that mighty principles were at work, whether for evil or for good. It was plain that a great change in the whole social system was at hand. Fanatics of one kind might anticipate a golden age, in which men should live under the simple dominion of reason, in perfect equality and perfect amity, without property, or marriage, or king, or God. A fanatic of another kind might see nothing in the doctrines of the philosophers but anarchy and atheism, might cling more closely to every old abuse, and might regret the good old days when St. Dominic and Simon de Montfort put down the growing heresies of Provence. A wise man would have seen with regret the excesses into which the reformers were running, but he would have done justice to their genius and to their philanthropy. He would have censured their errors; but he would have remembered that, as Milton has said, error is but opinion in the making. While he condemned their hostility to religion, he would have acknowledged that it was the natural effect of a system under which religion had been constantly exhibited to them, in forms which common sense rejected, and at which humanity shuddered. While he condemned some of their political doctrines as incompatible with all law, all property, and all civilization, he would have acknowledged that the subjects of Louis the Fifteenth had every excuse which men could have for being eager to pull down, and for being ignorant of the far higher art of setting up. While anticipating a fierce conflict, a great and wide-wasting destruction, he would yet have looked forward to the final

speaks with enthusiasm. And even of Montesquieu he speaks with less enthusiasm than of that abject thing, Crebillon the younger, a scribbler as licentious as Louvet and as dull as Rapin. A man must be strangely constituted who can take interest in pedantic journals of the blockades laid by the Duke of A. to the hearts of the Marquise de B. and the Com tesse de C. This trash Walpole extols in lan guage sufficiently high for the merits of "Don Quixote." He wished to possess a likeness of Crebillon, and Liotard, the first painter of miniatures then living, was employed to preserve the features of the profligate twaddler. The admirer of the Sopha and of the Lettres Athéniennes had little respect to spare for the men who were then at the head of French literature. He kept carefully out of their way. He tried to keep other people from paying them any attention. He could not deny that Voltaire and Rousseau were clever men; but he took every opportunity of depreciating them. Of D'Alembert he spoke with a contempt, which, when the intellectual powers of the two men are compared, seems exquisitely ridiculous. D'Alembert complained that he was accused of having written Walpole's squib against Rousseau. "I hope," says Walpole, "that nobody will attribute D'Alembert's works to me." He was in little danger.

It is impossible to deny, however, that Walpole's works have real merit, and merit of a very rare, though not of a very high kind. Sir Joshua Reynolds used to say, that though nobody would for a moment compare Claude to Raphael, there would be another Raphael before there was another Claude. And we own that we expect to see fresh Humes and fresh Burkes before we again fall in with that peculiar combination of moral and intellectual

qualities to which the writings of Walpole owe | cessity of altogether dissenting from his opi their extraordinary popularity.

nion. We do not conceive that he had any power of discerning the finer shades of character. He practised an art, however, which, though easy and even vulgar, obtains for those who practise it the reputation of discernment with ninety-nine people out of a hundred. He sneered at everybody, put on every action the worst construction which it would bear, "spelt every man backward;" to borrow the Lady Hero's phrase,

"Turned every man the wrong side out, And never gave to truth and virtue that Which simpleness and merit purchaseth." In this way any man may, with little sagacity and little trouble, be considered, by those whose good opinion is not worth having, as a great judge of character.

It is said that the hasty and rapacious Kneller used to send away the ladies who sate to him fter sketching their faces, and to paint the fure and hands from his housemaid. It was much in the same way that Walpole portrayed the minds of others. He copied from the life only those glaring and obvious peculiarities, which could not escape the most superficial observation. The rest of the canvass he filled up in a careless dashing way, with knave and fool, mixed in such proportions as pleased Heaven. What a difference between these daubs and the masterly portraits of Clarendon!

There are contradictions without end in the sketches of character which abound in Walpole's works. But if we were to form our opinion of his eminent contemporaries from a

It is easy to describe him by negatives. He had not a creative imagination. He had not a pure taste. He was not a great reasoner. There is indeed scarcely any writer, in whose works it would be possible to find so many contradictory judgments, so many sentences of extravagant nonsense. Nor was it only in his familiar correspondence that he wrote in this flighty and inconsistent manner; but in long and elaborate books, in books repeatedly transcribed and intended for the public eye. We will give an instance or two; for, without instances, readers not very familiar with his works will scarcely understand our meaning. In the "Anecdotes of Painting," he states, very truly, that the art declined after the commencement of the civil wars. He proceeds to inquire why this happened. The explanation, we should have thought, would have been easily found. The loss of the most munificent and judicious patron that the fine arts ever had in England-for such undoubtedly was Charles-the troubled state of the country, the distressed condition of many of the aristocracy, perhaps also the austerity of the victorious party-these circumstances, we conceive, fully account for the phenomenon. But this solution was not odd enough to satisfy Walpole. He discovers another cause for the decline of the art, the want of models. Nothing worth painting, it seems, was left to paint. "How picturesque," he exclaims, "was the figure of an Anabaptist!" As if puritanism had put out the sun and withered the trees; as if the civil wars had blotted out the expression of charac-general survey of what he has written conter and passion from the human lip and brow; as if many of the men whom Vandyke painted, had not been living in the time of the Commonwealth, with faces little the worse for wear; as if many of the beauties afterwards portrayed by Lely were not in their prime before the Restoration; as if the costume or the features of Cromwell and Milton were less picturesque than those of the round-faced peers, as like each other as eggs to eggs, who look out from the middle of the periwigs of Kneller. In the "Memoirs," again, Walpole sneers at the Prince of Wales, afterwards George the Third, for presenting a collection of books to one of the American colleges during the Seven Years' War, and says that, instead of books, His Royal Highness ought to have sent arms and ammunition; as if a war ought to suspend all study and all education; or as if it were the business of the Prince of Wales to supply the colonies with military stores out of his own pocket. We have perhaps dwelt too long on these passages, but we have done so because they are specimens of Walpole's manner. Everybody who reads his works with attention, will find that they swarm with loose and foolish observations like those which we have cited; observations which might pass in conversation or in a hasty letter, but which are unpardonable in book deliberately written and repeatedly corrected.

He appears to have thought that he saw very far into men but we are under the ne

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cerning them, we should say that Pitt was a strutting, ranting, mouthing actor; Charles Townshend, an impudent and voluble jackpudding; Murray, a demure, cold-blooded, cowardly hypocrite; Hardwicke, an insolent upstart, with the understanding of a pettifogger and the heart of a hangman; Temple, an impertinent poltroon; Egmont, a solemn coxcomb; Lyttleton, a poor creature, whose only wish was to go to heaven in a coronet; Onslow, a pompous proser; Washington, a braggart; Lord Camden, sullen; Lord Townshend, malevolent; Secker, an atheist who had shammed Christian for a mitre; Whitefield, an impostor who swindled his converts out of their watches. The Walpoles fare little better than their neighbours. Old Horace is constantly represented as a coarse, brutal, niggardly buffoon, and his son as worthy of such a father. In short, if we are to trust this dis cerning judge of human nature, England in his time contained little sense and no virtue, except what was distributed between himself, Lord Waldgrave, and Marshal Conway.

Of such a writer it is scarcely necessary to say, that his works are destitute of every charm which is derived from elevation or from tenderness of sentiment. When he chose to be humane and magnanimous-for he some times, by way of variety, tried this affectation -he overdid his part most ludicrously. None of his many disguises sate so awkwardly upon him. For example, he tells us that he did not

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