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When the critic tells us that Walpole was a mischief-maker who “sometimes contrived, without showing himself, to disturb the course of Ministerial negotiations, and to spread confusion through the political circles,” we cannot avoid seeing in these words a resentful reference to the part taken by Conway on the occasions above referred to.

It was not Walpole’s fault that the party conflicts of his time were mainly about persons. We have seen the importance which Fox attached to these personal questions. We may safely say that this great man’s disapproval of Walpole’s conduct did not spring from any difference on matters of principle. If Horace was an opponent of Parliamentary Reform, this was an open question among Fox’s most intimate associates. If he objected to the enfranchisement of the Roman Catholics, most Whigs of his time did the same. In the dispute with America, as we shall see, he maintained, from the first, the right of the Colonies to liberty and independence. Nor did he retract his expressions of sympathy with the American Republic when the horrors of the French Revolution made him a supporter of Tory policy in England and on the Continent. He always lamented as one of the worst effects of the French excesses that they must necessarily retard the progress and establishment of civil liberty.¹²

There were questions of social politics on which he was far in advance of his times. “We have been sitting,” he wrote, on the 25th of February, 1750, “this fortnight on the African Company. 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. It has appeared to us that six-and-forty thousand of these wretches are sold every year to our plantations alone! It chills one’s blood—I would not have to say I voted for it for the Continent of America! The destruction of the miserable inhabitants by the Spaniards was but a momentary misfortune that followed from the discovery of the New World, compared with the lasting havoc which it brought upon Africa. We reproach Spain, and yet do not even pretend the nonsense of butchering these poor creatures for the good of their souls.”¹³ The sentiments thus declared by Walpole nine years before Wilberforce was born, he steadily adhered to through life. On this point, at least, no one has ever charged him with any wavering or inconsistency.

We will mention, before passing on to different topics, one other matter on which Walpole shows a liberality of feeling quite unusual at any period of his life. In the summer of 1762, he writes: “I am in distress about my Gallery and Cabinet: the latter was on the point of being completed, and is really striking beyond description. Last Saturday night my workmen took their leave, made their bow, and left me up to the knees in shavings. In short, the journeymen carpenters, like the cabinet-makers, have entered into an association not to work unless their wages are raised; and how can one complain? The poor fellows, whose all the labour is, see their masters advance their prices every day, and think it reasonable to touch their share.”¹⁴

In the domain of literature, Walpole’s opinions were largely influenced by his social position and personal connexions. He rated the class of professional writers as much below as they have ever been rated above their real deserts; and this may perhaps help to explain the rancour with which he has been pursued by some critics. He could see nothing wonderful in the art of stringing sentences together. He met famous authors daily in society, and did not find that they were wiser or more accomplished than their neighbours. Most of them showed to little advantage in the drawing-rooms in which he felt his own life completest. Gray seldom opened his lips; Goldsmith “talked like poor poll”; Johnson was Ursa Major—a brute with whom Horace declined to be acquainted; Hume’s powers of mind did not appear in his broad unmeaning face, nor animate his awkward conversation; even Gibbon made a bad figure as often as any doubt was hinted as to the transcendent importance of his luminous or voluminous history. As for the novelists, neither Fielding nor Richardson ever ascended to the sublime heights in which Horace dwelt at ease. Stories circulated there of vulgar orgies amidst which the biographer of Tom Jones performed his police functions, and of requests made by the author of “Clarissa” to his female admirers for information as to the manners of polite life. Walpole shrank from the coarseness of the one, and smiled at the attempts of the other to describe a sphere which he had never entered. We are not to suppose, however, that Horace was as blind to the gradations of literary rank as some would have us believe. When he told Mann that The World was the work of “our first writers,” instancing Lord Chesterfield, Sir Charles Hanbury Williams, and other well-born dilettanti whose names have now sunk into oblivion or neglect, it is clear that he was speaking with reference to the matter in hand. It did not occur to him that great historians and poets would be likely or suitable contributors to a series of light papers intended for the macaronis of the hour. What he regarded as the chief qualification of himself and his friends who wrote for this fashionable journal was their familiarity with the tone of the best society. For himself, Walpole constantly disclaimed all pretence to learning or exact knowledge of any kind, and, due allowance made for the vanity of which undoubtedly he owned an ample share, there seems no reason to question his sincerity. We conceive, indeed, that his estimate of his own talents and acquirements was much more accurate than it has usually been considered. In all that related to literary fame, his vanity showed itself rather in depreciating the advantages which he had not, than in exalting those which he possessed. If he did not worship style, still less was he disposed to bow down before study and research. Hence the low esteem in which he held authors of all kinds. Some excuses may be made for his disparaging criticisms. The literati of his day were certainly eclipsed by the contemporary orators. What writer was left in prose or verse, on the death of Swift, who could compare with Mansfield or the first William Pitt? Which of the poets or historians of the next generation won the applause which was called forth by the speeches of Fox or Sheridan or the younger Pitt? If Fox and Sheridan could obtain their greatest triumphs in the midst of gambling and dissipation, and apparently without pains or application, there was some apology for slighting the labours of Robertson and the carefully polished verses of Goldsmith. With the exception of Lord Chatham, whom he strongly disliked, Walpole generally does justice to the great speakers of his time, on whichever side in politics they were ranged; if he gives no credit for genius to the writers of the age, this was partly at least because their genius was of no striking or signal order. Judgment, sense, and spirit were Pope’s three marks for distinguishing a great writer from an inferior one, and these continued to be the criteria applicable, even in the department of so-called works of imagination, down to the end of the century.

Walpole, as in duty bound, was a professed worshipper of Shakespeare and Milton, but we suspect that his worship was not very hearty. It is clear that Pope was the poet of his choice; and he seems to have known every line of his favourite by heart. He admired also the exquisite poetry of Gray, and this admiration was no doubt sincere; but we are disposed to think that it arose entirely from the early connexion between Horace and the author, and from the feeling that Gray, in some sort, belonged to him. Gray was Walpole’s poet, as Conway was his statesman; and the sense of ownership, which converted his cousinly regard for Conway into a species of idolatry, turned to enthusiasm for Gray’s “Odes” the critical estimate which would otherwise, we feel sure, have ended in a pretty strong aversion.

What Walpole said, rather uncharitably, of Sir Joshua Reynolds, may, we fear, be applied with more justice to Walpole himself. All his geese were swans, as the swans of others were geese in his eyes. Conway was a man of integrity and honour, an excellent soldier, a fluent speaker, but he was a timid and vacillating politician. That phase of their weakness which makes the vainglorious pique themselves on having remarkable friends, is certainly not unamiable, though it is sometimes fatiguing. We all know the man who congratulates himself on his good fortune in being the associate of the versatile Dr. A., the high-souled Mr. B., the original Mr. C., and so on. Had Horace possessed a wife, he would have wearied all his acquaintance with encomiums on her beauty, wit, wisdom, and other matchless perfections. Having no wife to celebrate, he chose to sing the praises of General Conway, and sang them lustily, and with good courage. This was the more disinterested, as Conway appears to have been distinctly one of those persons who allow themselves to be loved. There is no questioning the genuineness of a devotion which undoubtedly entailed on Walpole great sacrifices. The time and labour which Horace bestowed in the service of his friend’s ambition entitle him to full credit for honesty in the offer which he made to share his fortune with the latter, when, at an early stage of his career, he was dismissed from his employments for opposing the Ministry of the day.

This was not the only occasion on which Walpole showed himself capable of uncommon generosity. He made a similar offer to Madame du Deffand, when she was threatened with the loss of her pension. That clever leader of French society was not, like Conway, a connexion of long standing, but a mere recent acquaintance of Horace, who had no claim on him beyond the pleasure she had shown in his company, and the pity which her blind and helpless old age demanded. In the event, the lady did not require his assistance, but her letters prove that she had full confidence in his intentions, notwithstanding the harshness with which he sometimes repressed her expressions of affection. The same temperament which made him fond of displaying his intimacy with Conway, caused him to dread the ridicule of being supposed to have an attachment for the poor old Marquise. Hence arose the occasional semblance of unkindness, which was contradicted by substantial proofs of regard, and which must be set down to undue sensitiveness on the gentleman’s side rather than to want of consideration.

The coldness of heart with which Walpole is reproached has, we think, been exaggerated. “His affections were bestowed on few; for in early life they had never been cultivated.” So much is admitted by Miss Berry, a most favourable witness. But in society generally, Horace appears to have shown himself friendly and obliging. His aristocratic pride did not prevent him from mixing freely with persons much his inferiors in station. Miss Hawkins, daughter of the historian of music, who for many years lived near him at Twickenham, testifies to his sociable and liberal temper; and Walpole’s own letters show that he was at some trouble to assist Sir John Hawkins in collecting materials for his work. The correspondence between Horace and his deputies in the Exchequer proves the kindly feeling that subsisted between him and them; and also reveals the fact that he employed them from time to time in dispensing charities which he did not wish to have disclosed. And Miss Berry records that, during his later life, although no ostentatious contributor to public charities and schemes of improvement, the friends in whose opinion he could confide had always more difficulty to repress than to excite his liberality.

His temper, says Sir Walter Scott, was precarious. Walpole, we believe, would readily have pleaded guilty to this charge. That he felt his infirmity in this respect his Letters sufficiently show; he assigns it as the chief reason why he preferred to live alone. Gray was not the only one of his early friends with whom he quarrelled. He became estranged at different times from Ashton, another college companion; from Bentley, whose taste and talent he had employed in decorating his Castle; from George Montagu,¹⁵ who, next to Conway, was long his most intimate friend; and from Mason the poet; not to mention other names. Whatever blame may attach to Walpole for these ruptures, it seems to be now pretty well agreed that in the matter of Chatterton he was guiltless. On this subject, we need only quote a few sentences from Scott. “His memory,” says Sir Walter, “has suffered most on account of his conduct towards Chatterton, in which we have always thought he was perfectly defensible. That unhappy son of genius endeavoured to impose upon Walpole a few stanzas of very inferior merit, as ancient; and sent him an equally gross and palpable imposture under the shape of a pretended ‘List of Painters.’ Walpole’s sole crime lies in not patronizing at once a young man who only appeared before him in the character of a very inartificial impostor, though he afterwards proved himself a gigantic one. The fate of Chatterton lies, not at the door of Walpole, but of the public at large, who two years, we believe, afterwards were possessed of the splendid proofs of his natural powers, and any one of whom was as much called upon as Walpole to prevent the most unhappy catastrophe.”¹⁶

We turn from Walpole’s life and character to his Letters. We have already mentioned the friends to whom the earlier portion of these were chiefly addressed. Other friends to whom he occasionally wrote were Lord Hertford, Conway’s elder brother, Lord Strafford, Cole, the antiquary of Cambridge, and John Chute, with whom he had been intimate at Florence. The names of some later correspondents will appear as we proceed, of whom such an account as may seem necessary will be given as they come before us. Of the pains and skill with which the matter of each letter is adapted to the person for whom it was intended, our readers will be able to judge for themselves. That the author had studied letter-writing as an art, is a remark almost too trivial to be repeated. It is hardly too much to say that he made it his chief literary business. “Mine,” he said, “is a life of letter-writing.” That he counted on being remembered by his letters far more than by any other of his writings, we hold to be as certain as any statement of the kind can be. He had, we believe, gauged his powers far more correctly than is commonly supposed, and was satisfied that in this kind of composition, more than in any other, he had produced something of permanent value. He had studied closely the letters of Gray and Madame de Sévigné, and formed his own style from them. The letters of the latter were his especial delight. He read them over until they became part of his own mind. Nothing interested him so much as a rumour that some fresh letters of “Notre Dame des Rochers” had been discovered. It may be too much to say, as Miss Berry has said, that Walpole has shown our language to be capable of all the graces and all the charms of the French of the great writer whom he imitated. But, due allowance made for the superiority of French idiom and French finesse in a department where they appear to most advantage, it may safely be affirmed that, if variety and interest of topics be regarded as well as style, Walpole’s letters are unrivalled. It was only by degrees that Horace attained to the perfection of easy engaging writing. His earlier letters betray signs of considerable labour. It is said that a summary prepared beforehand of one of his letters to Montagu was found in looking over some of his correspondence. In later days he wrote with the greatest facility, even carrying on a conversation the while. But he continued to the last the habit of putting down on the backs of letters or slips of paper, a note of facts, of news, of witticisms, or of anything he wished not to forget for the amusement of his correspondents.

CHAPTER II

Country Life.—Ranelagh Gardens.—The Rebel Lords.—The Earthquake.—A Frolic at Vauxhall.—Capture of a Housebreaker.—Strawberry Hill.—The Beautiful Gunnings.—Sterne.

We pass over such of Walpole’s letters as were written before his return from his travels. They are interesting chiefly as parts of a correspondence carried on by four young men of talent—Gray, West, Ashton, and Horace himself—who, having been schoolfellows, had formed what they called a quadruple alliance; and it must be owned that Walpole in this correspondence shines less than Gray, who appears to have been the mentor of the group, and less, too, perhaps than West, whose early death disappointed great hopes. We omit, besides, all reference to the letters in which Horace described the great Walpolean battle, and traced the fortunes of the Broad Bottom Administration. And, with few exceptions, his accounts of later political events have also been excluded. The additions which his gossiping chronicles have made to our knowledge of these matters have been incorporated in most recent histories of the period; the extracts given in the present volume are designed, as a rule, to illustrate the history of manners rather than of politics.

From the moment of his return from the Continent until he lost his father, Horace lived in the old statesman’s house, dividing his time, for the most part, between the House of Commons and the amusements of fashionable society. In the latter sphere, the Honourable Mr. Walpole soon achieved success. Several years afterwards, he defined himself as a dancing senator. His first season witnessed the opening of Ranelagh Gardens, which at once became the resort of the great world. Grave ministers and privy councillors were to be seen there in the crowd of beauties and macaronis. Horace relates that he carried Sir Robert thither just before attending him on his retreat to Houghton. Constrained by filial duty, the young man revisited the family seat in each of the two following years, but he went sorely against his will. With his father’s coarse habits and boisterous manners he had nothing in common; his feeble constitution was unequal to the sports of the field, and the drinking that then accompanied them; nor could the scenery of Norfolk, which he disliked, make him forget the excitements of Westminster and Chelsea. Yet to these visits to Houghton his readers owe some entertaining sketches of English country life in the middle of the eighteenth century. Take, for instance, the following lively letter addressed to John Chute, whose acquaintance he had made at Florence:

“Houghton, August 20, 1743.

“Indeed, my dear Sir, you certainly did not use to be stupid, and till you give me more substantial proof that you are so, I shall not believe it. As for your temperate diet and milk bringing about such a metamorphosis, I hold it impossible. I have such lamentable proofs every day before my eyes of the stupifying qualities of beef, ale, and wine, that I have contracted a most religious veneration for your spiritual nouriture. Only imagine that I here every day see men, who are mountains of roast beef, and only seem just roughly hewn out into the outlines of human form, like the giant-rock at Pratolino! I shudder when I see them brandish their knives in act to carve, and look on them as savages that devour one another. I should not stare at all more than I do, if yonder Alderman at the lower end of the table was to stick his fork into his neighbour’s jolly cheek, and cut a brave slice of brown and fat. Why, I’ll swear I see no difference between a country gentleman and a sirloin; whenever the first laughs, or the latter is cut, there run out just the same streams of gravy! Indeed, the sirloin does not ask quite so many questions. I have an Aunt here, a family piece of goods, an old remnant of inquisitive hospitality and economy, who, to all intents and purposes, is as beefy as her neighbours. She wore me so down yesterday with interrogatories, that I dreamt all night she was at my ear with ‘who’s’ and ‘why’s,’ and ‘when’s’ and ‘where’s,’ till at last in my very sleep I cried out, ‘For heaven’s sake, Madam, ask me no more questions!’

“Oh! my dear Sir, don’t you find that nine parts in ten of the world are of no use but to make you wish yourself with that tenth part? I am so far from growing used to mankind by living amongst them, that my natural ferocity and wildness does but every day grow worse. They tire me, they fatigue me; I don’t know what to do with them; I don’t know what to say to them; I fling open the windows, and fancy I want air; and when I get by myself, I undress myself, and seem to have had people in my pockets, in my plaits, and on my shoulders! I indeed find this fatigue worse in the country than in town, because one can avoid it there and has more resources; but it is there too. I fear ’tis growing old; but I literally seem to have murdered a man whose name was Ennui, for his ghost is ever before me. They say there is no English word for ennui; I think you may translate it most literally by what is called ‘entertaining people,’ and ‘doing the honours:’ that is, you sit an hour with somebody you don’t know and don’t care for, talk about the wind and the weather, and ask a thousand foolish questions, which all begin with, ‘I think you live a good deal in the country,’ or, ‘I think you don’t love this thing or that.’ Oh! ’tis dreadful!

“I’ll tell you what is delightful—the Dominichin!¹⁷ My dear Sir, if ever there was a Dominichin, if there was ever an original picture, this is one. I am quite happy; for my father is as much transported with it as I am. It is hung in the gallery, where are all his most capital pictures, and he himself thinks it beats all but the two Guidos. That of the Doctors and the Octagon—I don’t know if you ever saw them? What a chain of thought this leads me into! but why should I not indulge it? I will flatter myself with your some time or other passing a few days here with me. Why must I never expect to see anything but Beefs in a gallery which would not yield even to the Colonna?”

Again the following to Sir Horace Mann:

“Newmarket, Oct. 3, 1743.

“I am writing to you in an inn on the road to London. What a paradise should I have thought this when I was in the Italian inns! in a wide barn with four ample windows, which had nothing more like glass than shutters and iron bars! no tester to the bed, and the saddles and portmanteaus heaped on me to keep off the cold. What a paradise did I think the inn at Dover when I came back! and what magnificence were two-penny prints, salt cellars, and boxes to hold the knives; but the summum bonum was small-beer and the newspaper.

 
“‘I bless’d my stars, and call’d it luxury!’
 

“Who was the Neapolitan ambassadress¹⁸ that could not live at Paris, because there was no macaroni? Now am I relapsed into all the dissatisfied repinement of a true English grumbling voluptuary. I could find in my heart to write a Craftsman against the Government, because I am not quite so much at my ease as on my own sofa. I could persuade myself that it is my Lord Carteret’s fault that I am only sitting in a common arm-chair, when I would be lolling in a péché-mortel. How dismal, how solitary, how scrub does this town look; and yet it has actually a street of houses better than Parma or Modena. Nay, the houses of the people of fashion, who come hither for the races, are palaces to what houses in London itself were fifteen years ago. People do begin to live again now, and I suppose in a term we shall revert to York Houses, Clarendon Houses, etc. But from that grandeur all the nobility had contracted themselves to live in coops of a dining-room, a dark back-room, with one eye in a corner, and a closet. Think what London would be, if the chief houses were in it, as in the cities in other countries, and not dispersed like great rarity-plums in a vast pudding of country. Well, it is a tolerable place as it is! Were I a physician, I would prescribe nothing but recipe, ccclxv drachm. Londin. Would you know why I like London so much? Why, if the world must consist of so many fools as it does, I choose to take them in the gross, and not made into separate pills, as they are prepared in the country. Besides, there is no being alone but in a metropolis: the worst place in the world to find solitude is the country: questions grow there, and that unpleasant Christian commodity, neighbours. Oh! they are all good Samaritans, and do so pour balms and nostrums upon one, if one has but the toothache, or a journey to take, that they break one’s head. A journey to take—ay! they talk over the miles to you, and tell you, you will be late in. My Lord Lovel says, John always goes two hours in the dark in the morning, to avoid being one hour in the dark in the evening. I was pressed to set out to-day before seven: I did before nine; and here am I arrived at a quarter past five, for the rest of the night.

“I am more convinced every day, that there is not only no knowledge of the world out of a great city, but no decency, no practicable society—I had almost said not a virtue. I will only instance in modesty, which all old Englishmen are persuaded cannot exist within the atmosphere of Middlesex. Lady Mary has a remarkable taste and knowledge of music, and can sing—I don’t say, like your sister; but I am sure she would be ready to die if obliged to sing before three people, or before one with whom she is not intimate. The other day there came to see her a Norfolk heiress; the young gentlewoman had not been three hours in the house, and that for the first time of her life, before she notified her talent for singing, and invited herself upstairs, to Lady Mary’s harpsichord; where, with a voice like thunder, and with as little harmony, she sang to nine or ten people for an hour. ‘Was ever nymph like Rossymonde?’—no, d’honneur. We told her she had a very strong voice. ‘Why, Sir! my master says it is nothing to what it was.’ My dear child, she brags abominably; if it had been a thousandth degree louder, you must have heard it at Florence.”

Arrived in London, he is again in his element. “You must be informed,” he writes to Conway, “that every night constantly I go to Ranelagh, which has totally beat Vauxhall. Nobody goes anywhere else—everybody goes there. My Lord Chesterfield is so fond of it, that he says he has ordered all his letters to be directed thither. If you had never seen it, I would make you a most pompous description of it, and tell you how the floor is all of beaten princes—that you can’t set your foot without treading on a Prince of Wales or Duke of Cumberland. The company is universal: there is from his Grace of Grafton down to children out of the Foundling Hospital—from my Lady Townshend to the kitten—from my Lord Sandys¹⁹ to your humble cousin and sincere friend.”

From scenes like this Conway’s humble cousin was removed, though not for long, by the last illness and death of Lord Orford. The Rebellion of 1745, which quickly followed, produced only a momentary stir in London. But the trials and executions of the rebel Lords, occurring in the Capital itself, excited longer interest. We give Walpole’s narrative of the execution of Lords Kilmarnock and Balmerino:

“Just before they came out of the Tower, Lord Balmerino drank a bumper to King James’s health. As the clock struck ten, they came forth on foot, Lord Kilmarnock all in black, his hair unpowdered in a bag, supported by Forster, the great Presbyterian, and by Mr. Home, a young clergyman, his friend. Lord Balmerino followed, alone, in a blue coat, turned up with red, (his rebellious regimentals,) a flannel waistcoat, and his shroud beneath; their hearses following. They were conducted to a house near the scaffold: the room forwards had benches for spectators, in the second Lord Kilmarnock was put, and in the third backwards Lord Balmerino: all three chambers hung with black. Here they parted! Balmerino embraced the other, and said, ‘My lord, I wish I could suffer for both!’ He had scarce left him, before he desired again to see him, and then asked him, ‘My Lord Kilmarnock, do you know anything of the resolution taken in our army, the day before the battle of Culloden, to put the English prisoners to death?’ He replied, ‘My lord, I was not present; but since I came hither, I have had all the reason in the world to believe that there was such order taken; and I hear the Duke has the pocket-book with the order.’ Balmerino answered, ‘It was a lie raised to excuse their barbarity to us.’—Take notice, that the Duke’s charging this on Lord Kilmarnock (certainly on misinformation) decided this unhappy man’s fate! The most now pretended is, that it would have come to Lord Kilmarnock’s turn to have given the word for the slaughter, as lieutenant-general, with the patent for which he was immediately drawn into the rebellion, after having been staggered by his wife, her mother, his own poverty, and the defeat of Cope. He remained an hour and a half in the house, and shed tears. At last he came to the scaffold, certainly much terrified, but with a resolution that prevented his behaving in the least meanly or unlike a gentleman.²⁰ He took no notice of the crowd, only to desire that the baize might be lifted up from the rails, that the mob might see the spectacle. He stood and prayed some time with Forster, who wept over him, exhorted and encouraged him. He delivered a long speech to the Sheriff, and with a noble manliness stuck to the recantation he had made at his trial; declaring he wished that all who embarked in the same cause might meet the same fate. He then took off his bag, coat and waistcoat, with great composure, and after some trouble put on a napkin-cap, and then several times tried the block; the executioner, who was in white, with a white apron, out of tenderness concealing the axe behind himself. At last the Earl knelt down, with a visible unwillingness to depart, and after five minutes dropped his handkerchief, the signal, and his head was cut off at once, only hanging by a bit of skin, and was received in a scarlet cloth by four of the undertaker’s men kneeling, who wrapped it up and put it into the coffin with the body; orders having been given not to expose the heads, as used to be the custom.

“The scaffold was immediately new-strewed with saw-dust, the block new-covered, the executioner new-dressed, and a new axe brought. Then came old Balmerino, treading with the air of a general. As soon as he mounted the scaffold, he read the inscription on his coffin, as he did again afterwards: he then surveyed the spectators, who were in amazing numbers, even upon masts of ships in the river; and pulling out his spectacles, read a reasonable speech, which he delivered to the Sheriff, and said, the young Pretender was so sweet a Prince, that flesh and blood could not resist following him; and lying down to try the block, he said, ‘If I had a thousand lives, I would lay them all down here in the same cause.’ He said, if he had not taken the sacrament the day before, he would have knocked down Williamson, the lieutenant of the Tower, for his ill-usage of him. He took the axe and felt it, and asked the headsman how many blows he had given Lord Kilmarnock; and gave him three guineas. Two clergymen, who attended him, coming up, he said, ‘No, gentlemen, I believe you have already done me all the service you can.’ Then he went to the corner of the scaffold, and called very loud for the warder, to give him his periwig, which he took off, and put on a night-cap of Scotch plaid, and then pulled off his coat and waistcoat and lay down; but being told he was on the wrong side, vaulted round, and immediately gave the sign by tossing up his arm, as if he were giving the signal for battle. He received three blows, but the first certainly took away all sensation. He was not a quarter of an hour on the scaffold; Lord Kilmarnock above half a one. Balmerino certainly died with the intrepidity of a hero, but with the insensibility of one too. As he walked from his prison to execution, seeing every window and top of house filled with spectators, he cried out, ‘Look, look, how they are all piled up like rotten oranges!’”

Horace was now in the full tide of fashion, not to say dissipation. For a good many years the opera, plays, balls, routs, and other diversions public and private occupy as much space in his letters as the war or the peace, the debates in Parliament, and the intrigues of party leaders. Mingled with topics of both kinds, we have journeys to visit great houses in the country, schemes for their improvement, designs for the Gothic villa at Strawberry Hill, abundance of scandal, and playful satire on the follies of the day. Here is an amusing account of the sensation produced by the earthquake which alarmed London in 1750. It will be seen that the more serious feelings which the event awakened were as ridiculous in Walpole’s eyes as any part of the panic: