HORACE WALPOLE.*

• Extracts/rent the Loam of Horace Walpole. Edited by E. Seeley, London: Seeley and Co. 18E44. Hon acs WALPOLE is at least as well qualified to farnialt "wit and wisdom" as some of the writers in whom we are, supposed to find these good things. It is true that neither wit nor wisdom in him goes very deeply to the root of things. They are essentially of the world, dealing with social conventions, and so of a transitory sort. As the- distance, not only of time, but of different customs and. habits of thought, widens between the world of which Walpole: was so brilliant a chronicler, and the posterity which reads him,. he becomes increasingly difficult to understand. Even in thin- volume, carefully selected as it is, there are some allusions whick the ordinary reader will not appreciate at all, and much that. he will appreciate only in part. Still, the brilliancy is there,. and it must be long before it will altogether cease to delight. Meanwhile, Mr. Seeley has done good service in patting together this book. Horace Walpole, as he is one of the best, so is also. the most voluminous of letter-writers. His letters, extending as they do over a period of between fifty and sixty years, number- about three thousand, more than triple the amount which have. come down to us from the pen of Cicero. The whole collection. must be studied by any one who will pretend to write the his- tory of the eighteenth century ; yet a fair idea of its general . tone and character can be given within the compass of a. moderate volume.

Walpole's world was not a wide one; and though his pictures. are too skilfully drawn to be tiresome, they are often little more. than repetitions one of another. One striking characteristic of them is the high level, not so much of interest, for that, ofi course, must vary with the subject, but of literary merit which, they maintain. To the very last, his style showed little or no. signs of weakness. His last letter, written within seven weeks. of his death, aad when he had passed his seventy-ninth birth- day, has no dotage about it. The writer complains pathetically, of failing powers, but he does not show them.

Early in the book we have the often quoted account of the execution of the Jacobite lords Balmerino and Kilmarnock... Walpole was present at the scene, for the taste of those days did not revolt against such spectacles ; but though he abhorred. the politics of the sufferers, he writes about them with good- feeling, doing justice to the sturdy courage of Lord Balmerino, and to the constancy with which the more timid nature of Lord Kilmarnock braced itself up to suffer with dignity. Four- years afterwards we come to an incident which is made the subject of some very amusing narratives, the earthquake, of 1750. Walpole makes great fun of the people who left London to avoid the second and more formidable- shock which those who pretended to be wise in such-• things foretold. "They say they are not frightened, but that it is such fine weather, 'Why, one can't help going into the country.'" The preachers who took the occasion to enforce' repentance seemed to him as ridiculous as the fine ladies and gentlemen who tried to make a composition between their fears andtheir pleasures. He must have admired the presence of mind of the women who, true to the ruling passion for dress,. seized the occasion of increasing their wardrobes by "earth-- quake gowns," gowns, it is explained, made warm, so that they- might sit out of doors all night. The abstinence from gaiety didl not last very long ; Vauxhall and kindred resorts were soon in full swing ; and Walpole gives us a curious picture of "the Upper Ten" as they were in the middle of the last century,. when he describes his frolic to Vauxhall in company with some of the "best people" in London society (pp. 49-52).

From Vauxhall we may pass to Westminster Abbey, to wit- ness the funeral of George II. Walpole writes :—

"Do you know, I had the curiosity to go to the burying t'other night ; I had never seen a Royal funeral ; nay, I walked as a sprig of quality, which I found would be, and so it was, the easiest way of seeing it. It was absolutely a noble sight. The Prince's chamber, hang with purple, and a quantity of silver lamps, the coffin under a canopy of velvet, and six vast chandeliers of silver on high stands, had a very good effect The procession through a line of foot guards, every seventh man bearing a torch, the horse guards lining the outside, their officers, with drawn sabres and crape eagles, on horseback, the drums muffled, the fifes, bells tolling, and minute guns,—all this was very solemn."

But comedy and tragedy were strangely mingled together, nothing being more comic than the foolish Duke of Newcastle,

whom a curious irony of fate had raised to be one of the chief personages in English political life :—

" He fell into a fit of crying the moment he came into the chapel, and flung himself back in a stall, the Archbishop hovering over him with a smelling-bottle; but in two minutes his curiosity got the better of his hypocrisy, and he ran about the chapel to spy who was or was not there, spying with one hand, and mopping his eyes with the other."

This description is not inappropriately followed by the account of a visit to Houghton, Walpole's birthplace, which his father, Sir Robert, had hoped to make into the seat of a great family The hope was doomed to the bitterest disap- pointment. His first successor in the title was a lunatic, his second, Horace himself; who received the honour with =concealed disgust, and with whose death it became ex- tinct,—a happier ending, perhaps, than that it should have been handed down, as far higher distinctions have been, to be en- joyed by a series of profligates and spendthrifts. The Royal funeral was speedily followed by a Royal marriage. Here is Walpole's picture of Queen Charlotte :—

"She is not tall, nor a beauty ; pale, and very thin ; but looks sensible, and is genteel. Her hair is darkish and fine ; her forehead low ; her nose very well, except the nostrils spreading too wide ; her month and teeth are good. She talks a gooll deal, and French tolerably ; possesses herself, is frank, but with great respect to the King."

There were beauties among her ten bridesmaids :—" Lady Caroline Russell is extremely handsome ; Lady Elizabeth Keppel very pretty ; but with neither features nor air, nothing ever looked so charming as Lady Sarah Lenox. She has all the glow of beauty peculiar to her family." How old Lord Westmoreland mistook Lady Sarah for the Queen—a curiously significant mistake, when one remembers the King's early passion for her— is a well-known incident. It is curious to find the Queen saying that the Hanoverian dialect was the "worst of all." Fashion seems to have changed since then, unless it was at the time a Mecklenburgh prejudice.

Passing on a good many years, we come to the George-Gordon riots. Walpole's descriptions have furnished the chief material for the history of these days of trouble and disgrace. "I re- member," he writes, "the Excise and the Gin Act, and the rebels at Derby, and Wilkes's interlude, and the French at Ply- mouth, or I should have a very bad memory ; but I never till last night saw London and Southwark in flames." He is scornful of the want of spirit displayed by Parliament, describes with satirical minuteness the aspect of the House of Lords, "sunk from a temple of dignity to an asylum of lamentable objects," and asks, "What will you say to the House of Commons meeting by twelve o'clock to-day, and adjourning, ere fifty Members were arrived, to Monday se'nnight ?" Altogether, it is an amazing picture that he draws,—the Bavarian Minister's chapel broken open, and his house found full of "run tea and contraband goods," for he was a "prince of smugglers," as well as a Minister ; the populace breaking open the toll-houses on Blackfriars Bridge, and carrying off "bushels of halfpence ;" a lady robbed at Mrs. Keppel's door in Pall Mall between ten eleven in the morning, by a horseman ; London, in short, was like a town that is being sacked. It is a curious satire on a Protestant riot, that none were so active in plundering as the Irish chairmen.

It is curious to compare Walpole's complaints on the extra- vagant prices given for works of art and curiosities. He thinks it strange that "one West" should get "three hundred pounds for a piece not too large to hang over a chimney." Perhaps he is right in saying "he is far unworthy such prices." But the prices are very third-rate now. He complains that mezzotint° portraits, for which, when he began collecting, he never gave more than one or two shillings, are "now a crown,

and most from half-guinea to a guinea ;" that" Etruscan vases," made of earthenware in Staffordshire, will sell for from two to five guineas ; and that an ormordu teakettle fetched one hundred and twenty guineas. "In short," he concludes, "we are at the height of extravagance."

Elsewhere, be is astonished at the growth of London :—

"I remember, when my father was out of place and was to return visit, which Ministers are excused from doing, could not guess where he was, finding himself in so many new streets and squares,- This was thirty years ago. They have been building ever since, and

one would think they had imported two or three capitals Rows of houses shoot out every way like a polypus America

and France must tell us bow long this exuberance of opulence is to last. The East Indies, I believe, will not contribute to it much longer. . . . . . This little island will be ridiculously proud some ages hence of its former brave days, and swear its capital was once as big again as Paris, or —. What is to be the name of the city that will then give laws to Europe P—perhaps New York or Philadelphia."

Highwaymen, of course, figure prominently in these pages. In 1781, Walpole's coach was stopped by a highwayman. The man came to the window and cried, "Your purses and watches !" Walpole had hidden his watch under his arm, but gave up his purse, with nine guineas. His fellow-traveller, one Lady Browne, gave up hers also, and was offering her watch, when the man said, "I am much obliged to you," lifted his hat, and rode off. Lady Browne seems to have had much the best of it for this prudent person lost only a purse with bad money, which she carried on purpose.

In politics, Walpole was "not quite a Republican." But it is impossible to credit him with anything like earnestness. His conviction probably did not go much beyond the belief that the

honours and emoluments of power should go to the Whig, and

not to the Tory, set of families. There were very few men in those days who cared for the people, and he was not one of them. Of literary matters, there is not much mention in this volume. We read that Walpole thought Tristram Shandy was " a very insipid and tedious performance." He was nearer the truth when he said that there "was a good deal of indecency in it." His own works are almost forgotten. Mr. Seeley is probably too sanguine when he says "moat people have read The Castle of Otranto." We doubt whether a hundred people under thirty in England have done so. We shall conclude with a picture of Wesley :—

" Wesley is a lean, elderly man, fresh-coloured, his hair smoothly combed, with a soupcon of curl at the ends. Wondrous clean but as evidently an actor as Garrick. He spoke his sermon, but so Ant, and with so little accent, that I am sure he has often uttered it, for it was like a lesson. There were parts and eloquence in it, but towards the end he exalted his voice, and acted very ugly enthusiasm, decried learning, and told stories, like Latimer, of the fool of his college, who said, thanks God for everything.' Except a few from curi- osity, and some honourable women, the congregation was very mean."'

But then Walpole was not the right artist for a portrait of Wesley.