Some Books of the Week
A SELECTION from Horace Walpole's letters which Mr. Alfred Bishop Mason has made and called Horace Walpole's England (Constable, 215.) is a book to buy and keep. Full of wit and interest, it is the very thing we want when we are dull or depressed. There is hardly a page which will not make us smile and cause us to exclaim that the world has changed for the better. Yet we may exaggerate the improvement. De. Johnson's world was surely not as Horace Walpole paints it. For all his eager curiosity and his even temper, Horace was always a cynic whether he is describing a ball where he met 'all the beauties and not a few of the uglies " of London, or whether he depicts the political scene. When first he heard of the Lisbon earthquake he said that judging by that and other strange phenomena "one would think the world exceed- ingly out of repair." Surely it is in a better state now But to quote the engaging Horace once more : "one of the worst effects of living in one's own time is that one never knows the truth of it till one's dead."
Previous page
