government; though a peer of the realm, he neither took his seat in the House of Lords nor made use of his title; he was opposed to capital punishment, in an age when human life was so lightly thought of that men were hung if they stole enough to pay for a halter. These are strong evidences, it must be allowed, of a diseased mind, since the same things certainly could not be said of any of his contemporaries. "His mind was a bundle of inconsistent whims and affectations," continues Mr. Macaulay. "His features were covered by mask within mask, When the entire 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." What Mr. Macaulay means by his playing innumerable parts is not easy to understand, since Walpole was, in his public life, the most constant and consistent man of his time; and, in his private life, he was simply a gentleman living on his income and devoting his leisure to publishing books and collecting rare works of art. But he wrote letters, and he had among his correspondents people of widely different characters. He also had the happy faculty of adapting his style to the tastes of those to whom he wrote, while he preserved his idiosyncrasy of expression; and, perhaps, this is what Mr. Macaulay means by his acting many parts. We see no reason why a man should not be a misanthropist and a philanthropist, without being charged with affectation, for the characters of all men do in a degree partake of these seemingly opposite qualities; but we know of nothing in the character of Walpole which should entitle him to the charge of misanthropy. There is certainly nothing in his works that sounds like an affectation of it, unless we take his ridicule of the vices of men for a hatred of men themselves. But his letters are full of the broadest and kindliest expressions of good-will towards humanity, and he seems never to have neglected an opportunity of doing a kindness without regard to the quality of the person who needed his assistance. In a letter to Sir Horace Mann, while he was comparatively a young man, he says: "We, the British Senate, that Temple of Liberty, and bulwark of Protestant Christianity, have, this fortnight, been considering methods to make more effectual that horrid traffic of selling negroes. I would not have to say that I voted for it for the continent of America." Nearly twenty years after this he offered to divide his fortune with his friend General Conway, when that excellent man had been deprived of his command and pay by the ministry; and he did this in a way so generous and affectionate that the manner of doing it seemed of more worth than the gift offered. So too, some time after, when poor, old, blind Madame du Deffand lost the greater part of her pension by the financial difficulties of the French nation, he offered to make good her loss, or rather begged her to accept the sum from him, not as an evidence of his friendship for her, but as a proof of the sincerity of her esteem for him. In a letter to Bentley, he says: "I was reading the other day the Life of Col. Coddington, who founded the library at All Souls: he left a large estate in Barbadoes for the propagation of the Gospel, and ordered that three hundred negroes should be constantly employed upon it. Did one ever hear of a more truly Christian charity, than keeping up the Gospel's estate? How could one intend a religious legacy, and miss the disposition of that estate for delivering three hundred negroes from the most shocking slavery imaginable? Must devotion be twisted into the interests of trade ?” Speaking of the taking of Quebec, when the whole nation was mourning the death of Wolfe, and rejoicing in his victory, he says: "It was a very singular affair, the Generals on both sides slain, on both sides the second in command. In short, very nearly what battles should be, where only the principals ought to suffer." Sterne's beautiful picture of Uncle Toby and the Fly, which has softened many a hard nature, was a daily fact in the life of Walpole. In one of his letters he says: "I met a single officer at his house t'other day, who said he knew such a person was turning methodist; for, in the middle of conversa tion he rose, and opened the window to let out a moth. I told him I did not know the methodists had any principles so good, and that I, who certainly am not on the point of becoming one, always did so too." It was this kindliness of disposition, his hatred of oppression and bloodshed, and sympathy with suffering, which led him to oppose the persecution of Admiral Byng, and dictated the touching defence of the brave old sailor contained in one of his letters. In another letter he writes: "In London there is a more cruel cam paign than that waged by the Russians. The streets are a very picture of the murder of the innocents-one drives over nothing but poor dead dogs. The dear, good-natured, sensible creatures! Christ! How can anybody hurt them? Nobody could but those Cherokees, the English, who desire no better than to be hallooed to blood: one day, Admiral Byng, the next, Lord George Sackville, and to-day the poor dogs." On the breaking out of war with France, he indulges in a strain of eloquent and unaffected lamentation on the horrors that must follow, worthy the tender soul of Cowper; and says that he would not gain another Marlborough for the nation at the expense of a single life. These must be the affectations of philanthropy of which Mr. Macaulay speaks. This is what he means when he speaks of his leaving Howard at an immeasurable distance, and if he spoke in earnest, we might, perhaps, be inclined to argue with him. Howard only aimed at making prisoners comfortable, but Walpole would have abolished prisons and set their inmates free. "He scoffed at Courts, and kept a chronicle of their most trifling scandal. 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,”-continues Mr. Macaulay. But in what way could a scoffer at courts prove his sincerity more positively than by chronicling their scandal? Where would Mr. Macaulay look for court scandal at the present day, in the Court Journal or the opposition press? It is true that Walpole, in some of his letters, gives the scan dalous occurrences of the Court, but it is always done to show the worthlessness of the people comprising the court, and not from admiration of them. It would not be strictly proper to accuse the editor of the Newgate Calendar of a reverence for malefactors because he chronicles their doings. He thus excuses himself to one of his correspondents for dealing so often in what Mr. Macaulay calls court scandal:-"I believe I tell you strange rhapsodies; but you must consider that our follies are not only very extraordinary, but our business and our employI think they are our politics, and I ment; they enter into our politics, nay, don't know which are the simplest." It is not an easy matter to distinguish what is great from what is little in a country where the first Lord of the Treasury is formally waited upon by a Cabinet Minister to request the premier to order another minister, a "noble · Lord," not to hiss an opera dancer. When the interests of a nation are entrusted to the keeping of such a grotesque buffoon as the Duke of Newcastle, men's minds must be strangely confused in regard to what is little and what is great; and if Walpole had sometimes mistaken a trifle for a serious matter, he would have done no more than what the great majority of his countrymen did in his own day, and have been doing ever since. But in truth he made fewer mistakes of this kind than any man of his generation. Whatever affected the happiness of a human being was a serious matter to him, but no pomp or pretension could' elevate the tom-fooleries of "noble lords," above the dignity of a trifle in his eyes. He was a genuine Iconoclast. It mattered not how beautiful an idol might be, he hurled his brickbats at it, and if it were not smashed, the fault was not his. A man may do small things from great motives; and a hero may romp with his children or quarrel with his tailor, without a loss: of dignity with the world. The common necessities of our nature affect all men alike; generals, statesmen, and authors even, must eat, drink and sleep; a noble lord" will make a wry face at the toothache, and a cabinet minister must fain laugh when he is tickled: These well-understood facts seem to be forgotten by Mr. Macaulay, when he looks at Horace Walpole. He will not forgive him for being familiar. He ing. He very justly ridicules the vanhas a grudge against him for allowing ity of authors and learned men, and himself to be seen in his night-cap and scoffs at the absurd airs which bookslippers. He never considers that ish dunces give themselves; and these letters of Horace Walpole's were in a letter to Hume, thus expresses all private; that not one of them was himself: “In truth, there is nothing ever intended to be read except by the I hold so cheap as the generality person to whom it was addressed; that of learned men; and I have often many were written in ill health, that all thought young people ought to be were written in a hurry; that they made scholars lest they should grow to were mostly addressed to intimate reverence learned blockheads, and friends, who knew what was intended think there is any merit in having read for raillery and what for earnest; but more foolish books than other folks, he falls afoul of them as though they which, as there are a thousand nonsenwere philosophical essays, and con- sical books for one good one, must be demns the writer for uttering a bon the case of any man that has read much mot with the same air that he reproves more than other people." As for his: Bacon for taking a bribe. He says: letters, he did not keep copies of them, "He had, it is plain, an uneasy con- but when those he had written to Sir sciousness of the frivolity of his favor- Horace Mann were returned to him, he ite pursuits." But Walpole does not caused them to be copied into a book, condemn his pursuits. He seems to and directed in his will that they should have had an uneasy consciousness that be published on a certain contingency some person like his reviewer, would happening after his death. But it was. at some time misrepresent his motives, not necessary to instance this fact to and in several places he has taken the show that Walpole was not indifferent trouble to justify himself from to literary fame, although it helped the charge of trifling seriously, by letting Reviewer to an antithetical sentence; it appear that he trifled on purpose and the fact that he had published books for an object: and that he was not self- during his life at his own expense was deceived, as all triflers are. The Me- enough. To say that he never forgot moirs of the courts of George I. and for a moment that he was an HonoraII., which he wrote in his seventy- ble, is wicked enough, when he inherfirst year, might be considered a piece ited the title of an Earl but never used of trifling if he had offered no apology it, and even objected to what he called for it. 66 Trifling I will not call my- the Gothicism of Mister; desiring to self," he says, to the ladies for whose be called plain Horace Walpole. Who amusement he wrote, "for while I have ever heard him spoken of as Lord Orsuch charming disciples as you are to ford? When his uncle was Ambassainform, and though acute or plodding dor in France, the Queen, hearing that politicians, for whom they are not Lady Walpole was a Frenchwoman by meant, may condemn these pages, birth, asked her to what family she bewhich is preferable, the labor of an his- longed? Aucune, she replied. Upon torian who toils for fame and for ap- which her nephew declares, that though plause, he knows not from whom, or she is the daughter of a stay-maker, my careless commission to paper of in- she is more truly noble than any memsignificant passages that I remember, ber of his family. but penned for such a pair of sensible and cultivated minds as I never met at so early an age, and whose fine eyes I do know will read with candor, and allow me that mite of fame to which I aspire ?" a "He scoffed at literary fame, and left fair copies of his private letters to be published after his decease; at rank, and never for a moment forgot that he was an Honorable," continues Mr. Macaulay. But he does not scoff at literary fame. His works contain nothing that can be tortured into such a mean "To decorate a grotesque house with pie-crust 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 life. From these he turned to politics as were the grave employments of his long to an amusement. And having indulged in the recreation of making laws and voting millions, he returned to more important pursuits." This exquisite bit of raillery is probably founded on a playful passage in a letter to Bentley, the artist, or upon world. Strawberry Hill never cost its some other jocose expression-"But builder a moment's pain, or produced to leave politics and change of minis- the least suffering in a human being. tries and come to something of real What heartaches, what distresses, consequence; I must apply you to my grew out of the stone gimcrack at Ablibrary ceiling, &c., &c." But this mat- botsford! In his efforts to sustain it, ter of pie-crust battlements is really a the great genius of his age ruined his serious business. Walpole caused a fortunes, brought premature old age revival of what is called Gothic archi- and death to himself, and involved his tecture, by converting the little villa of friends in his own ruin and fall. Talk Mrs. Chenevix, at Strawberry Hill, of trifles! What a doleful piece of into a miniature baronial castle. It trifling was Scott's whole life, if any was a pretty absurdity in him, done half credit can be allowed to his biographer. in jest and half in earnest, and though "The author of the Lay," says Mr. we do not ourselves think that the Lockhart, "would rather have seen world has any great cause of gratitude his heir carry the Banner of Bellenden for the example he set it, the world it- gallantly at a foot-ball match on Carself thinks differently. Before his pie- ter Haugh, than he would have heard crust battlements were half completed, that the boy had gained the highest his little toy shop had become famous, honors of the first university in Europe. and persons came all the way from His first and last worldly ambition was France to look at it. People stared to be himself the founder of a distinct and wondered. Gothic architecture branch; he desired to plant a lasting immediately became a passion with root, and dreamt not of personal fame, builders, and Gothic castles and Gothic but of long distant generations rejoicing churches began to spring up all over in the name of Scott of Abbotsford. To England and America like gourds. this ambition we owe the gigantic monOur streets and the banks of our rivers uments of Scott's genius; in the brightare dotted over with tiny Gothicisms est meridian of his genius and his and pie-crust battlements, like a chess- fame; this was his beau ideal." board. Every jobber who retires from Pearl Street or Front Street to a high hill in the country, cannot content himself with anything less than a Gothic house and a Gothic barn, to say nothing of Gothic hen-coops and corn-cribs; and every Unitarian or Baptist meeting must have its Gothic tower and embattled roof, as though it were built with an expectation of being converted into a fortress. All these follies, including the costly absurdity at the head of Wall Street, owe their existence to Horace Walpole's pie-crust battlements. But more than all of these; more hideously ridiculous, is a proposed Gothic monument to Washington. If this disgrace should ever be inflicted upon us, it will owe its existence to the same cause. In naming Strawberry Hill it is not easy to forget Abbotsford. They are something similar in design, but how different the causes from whence they sprung. Walpole's villa was built as a recreation, in a kind of mockery of the past; Scott's was the most earnest undertaking of his life,-a serious attempt to act over in reality the barbarisms of a half savage period. It is the most melancholy history in the What a bitter satire upon the great genius whom the world delights to honor! "It pleased him," continues Mr. Macaulay, "to affect a foolish aversion to kings, and a foolish 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. 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." His aversion to kings was manifested in every way that he could show it short of regicide. It may have been foolish, but that is a matter of opinion. He kept the death-warrant of Charles the First hung up by his bedside, and labelled Major Charta. He commiserated the tortures inflicted upon the poor wretch Damien, and calls his crime, "the least bad of murders, the murder of a king. As much as he abhorred bloodshed, we would not have insured the safety of a king's head if placed at his mercy. If kings were not proof against ridicule, he would have unthroned more princes than Napoleon did. As to his admiration of "rebels as rebels," it was expressed at a time when the Tower was full of them, and the heads of the Scotch lords were grinning on the top of Temple Bar. His account of Balmarino and Kilmarnock is more touching than Scott's; his description of their conduct on the scaffold is as graphic and sympathetic as anything in the whole Waverley series. What greater proof of his sincerity need be given than his open expression of sympathy for these rebels when they were on trial? What can the brilliant reviewer mean by saying that he had a foolish admiration for rebels while rebels were not? So in regard to revolutions: he took the part of the colonies, openly espoused their interests, rejoiced in their victories, and voted with their friends, from the time of the first outbreak at Lexington, until their independence was acknowledged. So too did he applaud the first outburst of the French Revolution, which promised to give a constitution to the nation; it was not in his nature to approve of the horrid butcheries which so soon followed, and because he did not do so, Mr. Macaulay charges him with affectation in having favored the cause at first. He might with as much propriety charge Lafayette, and Bailly, and Roland, with affectation. "His real tastes 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 about royal authors." This, as Mr. Pecksniff would say, is dreadful. It is laughable. He took the trouble, did he, to write a book about royal authors, and yet had the hypocrisy to pretend to hate kings? So did Milton take the trouble-trouble is a good word-to write a book about the devil and yet pretended to be a Christian-though it was all a pretence with the latter, for it has been discovered that he was an Arminian or an Unitarian. It is true that Walpole did take the trouble (as though taking trouble in the composition of a book were a novel proceeding) to write a book about royal authors, which he modestly called a catalogue of royal and noble authors. But did he not, most epigrammatic of reviewers, also write books, and take a vast deal of trouble about them too, much more than he did with his royal authors, about engravers, and painters, and architects? And did he not take the trouble to write a book about Richard the Third, too? and must he therefore be written down an admirer of all crooked-back tyrants? Never mind, there is worse than "When he that, says Mr. Macaulay. 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 his grave. If we mistake not he was about eight years old when he was introduced to George the First; truly it was a grave offence in the little rascal to want to see the king. But he says himself, that having seen a king when a child he never wanted to see one afterwards. However, Mr. Macaulay knows best. When we remember how all of Mr. Macaulay's countrymen, with Walter Scott at their head, went out in the raw air with bare breeks to welcome that excellent and exemplary personage, George the Fourth, into Scotland, we cannot sufficiently admire his indignation towards the little boy, Walpole, for wanting to see the king a hundred years before. "One of his innumerable whims was an extreme dislike to be considered a man of letters." This is said of a man who kept a printing press in his own house; who wrote books and published them at his own expense; who even condescended to act in the humble capacity of an editor of other men's labors; who corresponded with all the eminent literary men of his time on literary subjects. But this grave charge is made on the foundation of a jocose passage in a letter to Sir Horace Mann, who had complimented him on his learning. Mr. Macaulay says it is "curious to see how impatiently Walpole bore the imputation of having attended to anything so unfashionable as the improvement of the mind." It is curious indeed. See how ashamed he is of knowing anything. "I know nothing. How should I? I who have always |