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. About politics, in the high sense of the word, he knew nothing and cared nothing. He called himself a Whig. His father's son could scarcely assume any other name. It pleased him also to affect a foolish aversion to kings as kings, and a foolish love and admiration of rebels as rebels; and, perhaps, while kings were not in danger, and while rebels were not in being, he really believed that he held the doctrines which he professed. To go no farther than the letters now before us, he is perpetually boasting to his friend Mann of his aversion to royalty and to royal persons. He calls the crime of Damien "that least bad of murders, the murder of a king." He hung up in his villa a fac-simile of the death-warrant of Charles, with the inscription, "Major Charta." Yet the most superficial knowledge of history might have taught him that the Restoration, and the crimes and follies of the twenty-eight years which followed the Restoration, were the effects of this "Greater Charter." Nor was there much in the means by which the instrument was obtained which could gratify a judicious lover of liberty. A man must hate kings very bitterly, before he can think it desirable that the representatives of the people should be turned out of doors by dragoons, in order to get at a king's head. Walpole's Whigism, however, was of a very harmless kind. He kept it, as he kept the old spears and helmets at Strawberry Hill, merely for show. He would just as soon have thought of taking down the arms of the ancient Templars and Hospitallers from the walls of his hall, and setting off on a crusade to the Holy Land, as of acting in the spirit of those daring warriors and statesmen, great even in their errors, whose 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 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 language of these men, and he repeated it by rote, though it was at variance with all his tastes and feelings; just as some old Jacobite families persisted in praying for the Pretender, and passing their glasses over the water-decanter when they drank the king's health, long after they had become zealous supporters of the government of George the Third. He was a Whig by the accident of hereditary connec tion; but he was essentially a courtier, and not the less a courtier because he pretended to sneer at the object which excited his admiration and envy. His real tastes perpetually show themselves through the thin disguise. While professing all the contempt of Bradshaw or Ludlow for crowned heads, he took the trouble to write a book concerning Royal Authors. He pried with the utmost anxiety into the most minute particulars relating to the royal family. When he was a child, he was haunted with a longing to see George the First, and gave his mother no peace till she had found a way of gratifying his curiosity. The same feeling, covered with a thousand disguises, attended him to the grave. No obser vation that dropped from the lips of majesty seemed to him too trifling to be recorded. The French songs of Prince Frederic, compositions certainly not deserving of preservation on account of their intrinsic merit, have been carefully preserved for us by this contemner of royalty. In truth, every page of Walpole's works betrayed him. This Diogenes, who would be thought to prefer his tub to a palace, and who has nothing to ask of the masters of Windsor and Versailles but that they will stand out of his light, is a gentleman-usher at heart. 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 wat were too insignificant to detain a mind which was occupied in recording the scandal of club rooms and the whispers of the backstairs, and which was even capable of selecting and disposing chairs of ebony and shields of rhinoceros-skin. affected superciliousness and apathy of a man of ton. 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 64 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 ap-pearance 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 gentleman-which would have been allowed to them in a one 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 gentleman. 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 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 would have done if his letters had never been pulished. 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 for a century the vehicle of all the polite nothings of Europe: as the sign by which the freema 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, Walpole had neither hopes nor fears. as the language of memoirs, as the language Though the most Frenchified English writer of correspondence. Its higher uses he alto- of the eighteenth century, he troubled himself gether disregarded. The literature of France little about the portents which were daily to be has been to ours what Aaron was to Moses- discerned in the French literature of his time. the expositor of great truths, which would else While the most eminent Frenchmen were have perished for want of a voice to utter studying with enthusiastic delight English polithem with distinctness. The relation which tics and English philosophy, he was studyexisted between Mr. Bentham and M. Dumont ing as intently the gossip of the old court of is an exact illustration of the intellectual rela-France. The fashions and scandal of Vertion in which the two countries stand to each sailles and Marli, fashions and scandal a hunother. The great discoveries in physics, in dred years old, occupied him infinitely more metaphysics, in political science, are ours. than a great moral revolution which was But no foreign nation except France has re-taking place in his sight. He took a prodi ceived 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. 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 speaks with enthusiasm. And even of Monthe mind of France, that shaking of the foun- tesquieu he speaks with less enthusiasm than dations of all established opinions, that up- of that abject thing, Crebillon the younger, a rooting of old truth and old error. It was plain scribbler as licentious as Louvet and as dull that mighty principles were at work, whether as Rapin. A man must be strangely constifor evil or for good. It was plain that a great tuted who can take interest in pedantic jourchange in the whole social system was at nals of the blockades laid by the Duke of A. to hand. Fanatics of one kind might anticipate the hearts of the Marquise de B. and the Com a golden age, in which men should live under tesse de C. This trash Walpole extols in lan the simple dominion of reason, in perfect guage sufficiently high for the merits of "Don equality and perfect amity, without property, Quixote." He wished to possess a likeness of or marriage, or king, or God. A fanatic of Crebillon, and Liotard, the first painter of another kind might see nothing in the doc- miniatures then living, was employed to pretrines of the philosophers but anarchy and serve the features of the profligate twaddler. atheism, might cling more closely to every old The admirer of the Sopha and of the Lettres abuse, and might regret the good old days Athéniennes had little respect to spare for the when St. Dominic and Simon de Montfort put men who were then at the head of French down the growing heresies of Provence. A literature. He kept carefully out of their way. wise man would have seen with regret the ex- He tried to keep other people from paying cesses into which the reformers were running, them any attention. He could not deny that but he would have done justice to their genius Voltaire and Rousseau were clever men; but and to their philanthropy. He would have he took every opportunity of depreciating censured their errors; but he would have re-them. Of D'Alembert he spoke with a conmembered 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 tempt, 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 nobedy 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- "Turned every man the wrong side out, It is said that the hasty and rapacious Kneller used to send away the ladies who sate to him after sketching their faces, and to paint the gure 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! 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 There are contradictions without end in the picturesque," he exclaims, "was the figure of sketches of character which abound in Walan Anabaptist!" As if puritanism had put out pole's works. But if we were to form our the sun and withered the trees; as if the civil opinion of his eminent contemporaries from a 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 books deliberately written and repeatedly corrected. He appears to have thought that he saw very far into men; but we are under the ne 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 discerning 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 a choose to be intimate with Mr. Pitt; and why? | of Florence. Walpole is constantly showing Because Mr. Pitt had been among the perse- us things-not of very great value indeed-yet cutors of his father; or because, as he repeat-things which we are pleased to see, and which edly assures us, Mr. Pitt was a disagreeable we can see nowhere else. They are baubles; man in private life? Not at all; but because but they are made curiosities either by his gro Mr. Pitt was too fond of war, and was great tesque workmanship, or by some association with too little reluctance. Strange, that an belonging to them. His style is one of those habitual scoffer like Walpole should imagine peculiar styles by which everybody is attractthat this cant could impose on the dullested, and which nobody can safely venture to reader! If Molière had put such a speech imitate. He is a mannerist whose manner into the mouth of Tartuffe, we should have said that the fiction was unskilful, and that Orgon could not have been such a fool as to be taken in by it. Of the twenty-six years during which Walpole sat in Parliament, thirteen were years of war. Yet he did not, during all those thirteen years, utter a single word, or give a single vote, tending to peace. His most intimate friend, the only friend, indeed, to whom he appears to have been sincerely attached, Conway, was a soldier, was fond of his profession, and was perpetually, entreating Mr. Pitt to give him employment. In this, Walpole saw nothing but what was admirable.sisted in an exquisite perception of points of Conway was a hero for soliciting the command of expeditions, which Mr. Pitt was a monster for sending out. has become perfectly easy to him. His affectation is so habitual, and so universal, that it can hardly be called affectation. The affectation is the essence of the man. It pervades all his thoughts and all his expressions. If it were taken away, nothing would be left. He coins new words, distorts the senses of old words, and twists sentences into forms which make grammarians stare. But all this he does, not only with an air of ease, but as if he could not help doing it. His wit was, in its essential properties, of the same kind with that of Cowley and Donne. Like theirs, it con analogy, and points of contrast too subtle for common observation. Like them, Walpole perpetually startles us by the ease with which What then is the charm, the irresistible he yokes together ideas between which there charm of Walpole's writings? It consists, would seem, at first sight, to be no connection. we think, in the art of amusing without ex- But he did not, like them, affect the gravity of citing. He never convinces the reason, nor a lecture, and draw his illustrations from the fills the imagination, nor touches the heart; laboratory and from the schools. His tone but he keeps the mind of the reader constantly was light and fleering; his topics were the attentive and constantly entertained. He had topics of the club and the ball-room. And a strange ingenuity peculiarly his own, an therefore his strange combinations and faringenuity which appeared in all that he did, fetched allusions, though very closely resem in his building, in his gardening, in his up-bling those which tire us to death in the poems holstery, in the matter and in the manner of of the time of Charles the First, are read with his writings. If we were to adopt the classi-pleasure constantly new. fication-not a very accurate classificationwhich Akenside has given of the pleasures of the Imagination, we should say that with the Sublime and the Beautiful Walpole had nothing to do, but that the third province, the Odd, was his peculiar domain. The motto which he prefixed to his "Catalogue of Royal and Noble Authors," might have been inscribed with perfect propriety over the door of every room in his house, and on the titlepage of every one of his books. "Dove diavolo, Messer Ludovico, avete pigliate tante coglionerie?" In his villa, every apartment is a museum, every piece of furniture is a curiosity; there is something strange in the form of the shovel; there is a long story belonging to the bell-rope. We wander among a profusion of rarities, of trifling intrinsic value, but so quaint in fashion, or connected with such remarkable names and events, that they may No man who has written so much is so seldom tiresome. In his books there are scarcely any of those passages which, in our school days, we used to call skip. Yet he often wrote on subjects which are generally considered as dull; on subjects which men of great talents have in vain endeavoured to render popular. When we compare the "Historic Doubts" about Richard the Third with Whitaker's and Chalmer's book on a far more interesting question, the character of Mary Queen of Scots; when we compare the "Anecdotes of Painting" with Nichols's "Anecdotes," or even with Mr. D'Israeli's "Quarrels of Authors," and "Calamities of Authors," we at once see Walpole's superiority, not in industry, not in learning, not in accuracy, not in logical power, but in the art of writing what people will like to read. He rejects all but the attractive parts of his subject. He keeps only what is in itself well detain our attention for a moment. amusing, or what can be made so by the arti moment is enough. Some new relic, some fice of his diction. The coarser morsels of new unique, some new carved work, some antiquarian learning he abandons to others; new enamel, is forthcoming in an instant. and sets out an entertainment worthy of a One cabinet of trinkets is no sooner closed Roman epicure, an entertainment consisting than another is opened. It is the same with of nothing but delicacies-the brains of sing Walpole's writings. It is not in their utility, ing birds, the roe of mullets, the sunny halves it is not in their beauty, that their attraction of peaches. This, we think, is the great merit lies. They are to the works of great histori- of his "Romance." There is little skill in the ans and poets, what Strawberry Hill is to the delineation of the characters. Manfred is as useum of Sir Hans Sloane, or to the Gallery commonplace a tyrant, Jerome as commonplace A |