A GENTLEMAN'S DIVERSION.
Journal of the Printing Office at Strawberry Hill. By Horace Walpole. Edited by Paget Toynbee. (London : Constable. 42s. net.) A READER, uncharitably inclined, could bring himself to hate Horace Walpole and consider him the meanest and most trifling of men. He bears every mark of the dilettante ; he was always on the verge of believing that all pursuits were below the dignity of his birth and breeding ; he was always very delicately and guardedly a snob. He exemplifies thoroughly the opinion of his time that a gentleman should abhor seriousness, diligence, and enthusiasm. Such an attitude would seem to be a poison to originality ; but Walpole must have been to some degree imperfect in it : he was certainly original. From his novel, The Castle of Otranto, a school of fiction derived. And, in more practical affairs, he was the first Englishman of note to set up a private press and take a close interest in the work of printing. He preserved his interest in the press for more than thirty years and printed some excellent work there ; but he regarded it primarily as a hobby for himself, "a more instructive amusement . . . than the modern fashionable diversions of Billiard-tables and Fox-hunting." He wrote of himself : "I have not the patience necessary for correcting the press. Gray was ever reproaehing me with it, and in one of the letters I have just turned over, he says : Pray send me the proof-sheets to correct, for you know you are not capable of it.' it is very true ; and I hope future edition-mongers will say of those of Strawberry Hill, they have all the beautiful negligence of a gentleman." It is strange that the modern art of printing in private presses should owe so Much to so -half-hearted a beginning. Mr. Paget Toynbee has now for the first time printed the Journal of the Printing Office at Strawberry Hill, containing an account of the books printed, the progress of the work, and the visitors to the press. In itself it would have made a dry book, but Mr. Toynbee has filled it with interest by the erudition of his notes. It must have been a heavy labour to identify all the persons casually mentioned in the lists, and we suspect that hardly anyone else would have found it possible. We notice here and there that Mr. Toynbee has omitted information that would have seemed to us apposite. He gives a full account, for example, of the printing of Thi Progress of Poetry and The Bard after Gray's manuscript had reached Walpole ; but he does not mention how Walpole obtained it. He insisted on snatching it from Dodsley, with whom Gray had just concluded an agreement to publish it, and taking it for the first experiment with his press. Dodsley. seems to have been pleased enough ; he thus got his printing done for nothing, and the mild sensation of publishing for a gentleman's press ; but Gray was thoroughly alarmed and had to be persuaded out of his objections. Such omissions, however, are undoubtedly due, not to ignorance, but to a difference in selective taste. All the notes that Mr. Toynbee includes are at once interesting and -to the point. The volume is printed in admirable fashion by -the Chiswick Press.
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