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some delicious story of bribery and cor- who then constituted society, and played ruption the House of Commons was such queer pranks in quiet unconsciousness frivolous in those benighted days; he tells of the revolutionary elements that were how Pitt suddenly stalked down from the seething below. He is the best of comgallery and administered his thundering mentators on Hogarth, and gives us Ginreproof; how Murray, then Attorney- Lane on one side and the Marriage à la General, crouched, silent and terrified," mode on the other. As we turn over the and the Chancellor of the Exchequer well-known pages we come at every turn faltered out a humble apology for the un- upon characteristic scenes of the great seemly levity. It is Walpole who best de- tragi-comedy that was being played out. scribes the great debate when Pitt, In one page a highwayman puts a bullet "haughty, defiant, conscious of injury and through his hat, and on the next we read supreme abilities," burst out in that tre- how three thousand ladies and gentlemen mendous speech - tremendous if we may visited the criminal in his cell, on the believe the contemporary reports, of which Sunday before his execution, till he fainted the only tolerably preserved fragment is away_twice from the heat; then we hear the celebrated metaphor about the conflu- how Lord Lovat's buffooneries made the ence of the Rhone and the Saone. Alas! whole brilliant circle laugh as he was beChatham's eloquence has all gone to rags ing sentenced to death; and how Balmeand tatters; though, to say the truth, it rino pleaded "not guilty," in order that has only gone the way of nine-tenths of the ladies might not be deprived of their our contemporary eloquence. We have in- sport; how the Hsuse of Commons addeed what are called accurate reports journed to see a play acted by persons of of spoken pamphlets, dried specimens quality, and the gallery was hung round of rhetoric from which the life has de- with blue ribands; how the Gunnings had parted as completely as it is strained out a guard to protect them in the park; what of the specimens in a botanical collection. strange pranks were played by the bigaIf there is no Walpole amongst us, we mous Miss Chudleigh; what jokes now, shall know what our greatest living orator alas! very faded and dreary were made has said; but how he said it, and how it by George Selwyn, and how that amiable moved his audience, will be as obscure as favourite of society went to Paris in orif the reporters' gallery was still unknown. der to see the cruel tortures inflicted Walpole when he was not affecting phi- upon Damiens, and was introduced to losophy, or smarting from the failure of the chief performer on the scaffold as an intrigue, or worried by the gout, or a distinguished amateur in executions. disappointed of a bargain at a sale - One of the best of all these vignettes could throw electric flashes of light on the portrays the funeral of George II., and is figure he describes which reveal the true worthy of Thackeray. It opens with the man. He errs from petulancy, but not solemn procession to the torch-lighted from stupidity. He can appreciate great Abbey, whose "long-drawn aisles and qualities by fits, though he cannot be fretted vault" excite the imagination of steadily loyal to their possessor. And if the author of the Castle of Otranto. Then he wrote down most of our rulers as the comic element begins to intrude; the knaves and fools, we have only to lower procession jostles and falls into disorder those epithets to selfish and blundering, to at the entrance of Henry Seventh's Chapget a very fair estimate of their charac-el; the bearers stagger under the heavy ters. To the picturesque historian his coffin and cry for help; the bishop blunservices are invaluable; though no single ders in the prayers, and the anthem, as statement can be accepted without careful fit, says Walpole, for a wedding as a funeral, becomes immeasurably tedious. Walpole's social, as distinguished from Against this tragi-comic background are his political, anecdotes do in one sense relieved two characteristic figures. The what Leech's drawings have done for this."butcher" Duke of Cumberland, the hero But the keen old man of the world puts a far bitterer and deeper meaning into his apparently superficial scratches than the kindly modern artist, whose satire was narrowed, if purified, by the decencies of modern manners. Walpole reflects in a thousand places that strange combination of brutality and polish which marked the little circle of fine ladies and gentlemen

correction.

of Culloden, stands with the obstinate courage of his race gazing into the vault where his father is being buried, and into which he is soon to descend. His face is distorted by a recent stroke of paralysis, and he is forced to stand for two hours on a bad leg. To him enters the burlesque Duke of Newcastle, who begins by bursting into tears and throwing himself

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back in a stall whilst the Archbishop | Beauclerk's drawings were unsurpassable hovers over him with a smelling-bottle." by "Salvator Rosa and Guido," or that Then curiosity overcomes him, and he runs Lady Ailesbury's landscape in worsteds" about the chapel with a spyglass in one was a work of high art; and we doubt hand, to peer into the faces of the com- whether Walpole believed it; nor do we pany, and mopping his eyes with the fancy that he expected Sir Horace Mann other. "Then returned the fear of catch- to believe that when sitting in his room at ing cold; and the Duke of Cumberland, Strawberry Hill, he was in the habit of who was sinking with heat, felt himself apostrophizing the setting sun in such weighed down, and turning round found it terms as these: "Look at yon sinking was the Duke of Newcastle standing upon beams! His gaudy reign is over; but the his train to avoid the chill of the marble." silver moon above that elm succeeds to a What a perch to select! Imagine the tranquil horizon," &c. Sweeping aside all contrast of the two men, and remember this superficial rubbish, as mere concesthat the Duke of Newcastle was for an sions to the faded taste of the age of hoops unprecedented time the great dispenser and wigs, Walpole has something to say of patronage, and by far the most impor- for himself. He has been condemned for tant personage in the government. Wal- the absurdity of his criticisms, and it is pole had reason for some of his sneers. undeniable that he sometimes blunders strangely. It would, indeed, be easy to show, were it worth while, that he is by no means so silly in his contemporary verdicts as might be supposed from scattered passages in his letters. But what are we to say to a man who compares Dante to "a Methodist parson in Bedlam?" The first answer is that, in this instance Walpole was countenanced by greater men. Voltaire, with all his faults the most consummate literary artist of the century, says with obvious disgust that there are people to be found who force themselves to admire "feats of imagination as stupidly extravagant and barbarous " as those of the Divina Commedia. Walpole must be reckoned as belonging both in his faults and his merits to the Voltairian school of literature, and amongst other peculiarities common to the master and his disciple, may be counted an incapacity for reverence and an intense dislike to being bored. For these reasons he hates all epic poets from Dante to Blackmore; he detests all didactic poems, including those of Thomson and Akenside; and he is utterly scandalized by the French enthusiasm for Richardson. In these last judgments, at least, nine-tenths of the existing race of mankind agree with him; though few people have the courage to express their agreement in print. We may be thankful that Walpole, which is not always the case, is as incapable of boring as of enduring bores. He is one of the few Englishmen who share the quality sometimes ascribed to the French as a nation, and certainly enjoyed by his teacher, Voltaire; namely, that though they may be frivolous, blasphemous, indecent, and faulty in every other way, they can never for a single moment be dull. His letters show that crisp, sparkling quality of style which accompanies this power, and which is so un

The literary power implied in these brilliant sketches is remarkable, and even if Walpole's style is more Gallicized than is evident to me, it must be confessed that with a few French idioms he has caught something of that unrivalled dexterity and neatness of touch in which the French are our undisputed masters. His literary character is of course marked by an affectation analogous to that which debases his politics. Walpole was always declaring with doubtful sincerity (that is one of the matters in which a man is scarcely bound to be quite sincere). that he has no ambition for literary fame, and that he utterly repudiates the title of "learned gentleman." There is too much truth in his disavowals to allow us to write them down as mere mock-modesty; but doubtless his principal motive was a dislike to entering the arena of open criticism. He has much of the feeling which drove Pope into paroxysms of unworthy fury on every mention of Grub-street. The anxiety of men in that day to disavow the character of professional authors, must be taken with the fact that professional authors were then an unscrupulous, scurrilous and venal race. Walpole feared collision with them as he feared collision with the "mountains of roast beef." Though literature was emerging from the back-lanes and alleys, the two greatest potentates of the day, Johnson and Warburton, had both a decided cross of the bear in their composition. Walpole was nervously anxious to keep out of their jurisdiction, and to sit at the feet of such refined law-givers as Mason and Grey, or the feebler critics of polite society. In such courts there naturally passes a good deal of very flimsy flattery between persons who are alternately at the bar or on the bench. We do not quite believe that Lady Di

pied the minds of much greater artists ever since. And thus his initiative in literature has been as fruitful as his initiative in art. The Castle of Otranto and the Mysterious Mother were the progenitors of Mrs. Radcliffe's romances, and probably had a strong influence upon the author of Ivanhoe. Frowning castles and gloomy

attainable to most of his countrymen. The quality is less conspicuous in the rest of his works, and the light verses and essays in which we might expect him to succeed are disappointingly weak. Xoho's letter to his countrymen is now as dull as the work of most imaginary travellers, and the essays in The World are remarkably inferior to the Spectator, to say nothing of the Ram- monasteries, knights in armour, and ladies bler. Yet Walpole's place in literature is in distress, and monks and nuns and herunmistakable, if of equivocal merit. Byron mits, all the scenery and characters that called him the author of the last tragedy have peopled the imagination of the and the first romance in our language. romantic school, may be said to have had The tragedy, with Byron's leave, is revolt- their origin on the night when Walpole ing (perhaps the reason why Byron ad- lay down to sleep, his head crammed full mired it), and the romance passes the bor- of Wardour-street curiosities and dreamt ders of the burlesque. And yet the re- that he saw a gigantic hand in armour mark hits off a singular point in Walpole's resting on the banister of his staircase. history. A thorough child of the eigh-In three months from that time he had teenth century, we might have expected elaborated a story, the object of which, as him to share Voltaire's indiscriminating defined by himself, was to combine the contempt for the middle ages. One would charms of the old romance and the modern have supposed that in his lips, as in those novel, and which, to say the least, strikes of all his generation, Gothic would have us now like an exaggerated caricature of been synonymous with barbaric, and the later school. Scott criticises the the admiration of an ancient abbey as Castle of Otranto seriously and even Maredundant as admiration of Dante. So far caulay speaks of it with a certain respect. from which, Walpole is almost the first Absurd as the burlesque seems, our ancesmodern Englishman who found out that tors found it amusing, and, what is our old cathedrals were really beautiful. stranger, awe inspiring. Excitable readHe discovered that a most charming toy ers shuddered when a helmet of more than might be made of mediævalism. Straw-gigantic size fell from the clouds, in the berry Hill, with all its gimcracks, its paste- first chapter, and crushed the young baron board battlements, and stained-paper carv- to atoms on the eve of his wedding, as a ings, with the lineal ancestor of the new trap smashes a mouse. This, however, law-courts. The restorers of churches, was merely a foretaste of a series of unthe manufacturers of stained glass, the precedented phenomena. At one moment modern decorators and architects of all the portrait of Manfred's grandfather, vanities perhaps, we may venture to without the least premonitory warning, add, the Ritualists and the High Church utters a deep sigh, and heaves its breast, party - should think of him with kindness. after which it descends to the floor with a It cannot be said that they should give grave and melancholy air. Presently the him a place in their calendar, for he was menials catch sight of a leg and foot in not of the stuff of which saints are made. armour to match the helmet, and apparIt was a very thin veneering of medieval- ently belonging to a ghost which has lain ism which covered his modern creed; and down promiscuously in the picture gallery. the mixture is not particularly edifying. Most appalling, however, of all is the adStill he undoubtedly found out that charm-venture which happened to Count Freding plaything which, in other hands, has erick in the oratory. Kneeling before the been elaborated and industriously con- altar was a tall figure in a long cloak. As structed till it is all but indistinguishable he approached it rose, and, turning round, from the genuine article. Some persons disclosed to him the fleshless jaws and hold it to be merely a plaything, when all empty eyesockets of a skeleton. has been said and done, and maintain that ghost disappeared as ghosts generally do when the root has once be severed, the after giving a perfectly unnecessary warntree can never be made to grow. How-ing, and the catastrophe is soon reached ever that may be, Walpole's trifling was the first forerunner of much that has occu

It is odd that in one of these papers Walpole proposes, in jest, precisely our modern system of postage cards, only charging a penny instead of a halfpenny.

The

by the final appearance of the whole suit of armour with the ghost inside it, who bursts the castle to bits like an eggshell, and, towering towards the sky, exclaims, "Theodore is the true heir of Alfonso!" This proceeding fortunately made a law

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suit unnecessary, and if the castle was friend Gray, who shared his Gothic tastes ruined at once, it is not quite impossible with greatly superior knowledge. But he that the same result might have been at- was indefinitely superior to that knowltained more slowly by litigation. The edge. But he was indefinitely superior to whole machinery strikes us as simply the great mass of commonplace writers babyish, and sometimes we suspect Wal- who attain a kind of bastard infallibility pole of laughing in his sleeve; as, for ex- by always accepting the average verdict ample, in the solemn scene in the chapel, of the time; which on the principle of the which closes thus::-"As he spake these vox populi, is more often right than that of words, three drops of blood fell from the any dissenter. There is an intermediate nose of Alphonso's statue (Alphonso is class of men who are useful as sensitive the spectre in armour). Manfred turned barometers to foretell coming changes of pale, and the princess sank on her knees. opinion. Their intellects are mobile if Behold!' said the friar, mark this shallow: and, perhaps, their want of serimiraculous indication that the blood of ous interest in contemporary intellects Alfonso will never mix with that of Man- renders them more accessible to the earfred!" Nor can we think that the story liest symptoms of superficial shiftings of is rendered much more interesting by Wal- taste. They are anxious to be at the head pole's simple expedient of introducing of the fashions in thought as well as in into the midst of these portents a set of dress and pure love of novelty serves to waiting-maids and peasants, who talk in some extent in place of genuine originalthe familiar style of the smart valets in ity. Amongst such men, Walpole deCongreve's or Sheridan's comedies. serves a high place; and it is not easy to obtain a high place even amongst such men. The people who succeed best at trifles are those who are capable of something better. In spite of Johnson's aphor

can cut the best head upon cherry-stones, as well as hew statues out of rock. Walpole was no colossus; but his peevish anxiety to affect even more frivolity than was really natural to him, has blinded his critics to the real power of a remarkably acute, versatile, and original intellect. We cannot regard him with much respect, and still less with much affection; but the more we examine his work, the more we shall admire his extreme cleverness.

Yet, babyish as this mass of nursery tales may appear to us, it is curious that the theory which Walpole advocated has been exactly carried out. He wished to relieve the prosaic realism of the school ofism, it is the colossus who, when he tries, Fielding and Smollett by making use of the romantic associations, without altogether taking leave of the language of common life. He sought to make real men and women out of medieval knights and ladies, or, in other words, he made a first experimental trip into the province afterwards occupied by Scott. The Mysterious Mother is in the same taste; and his interest in Ossian, in Chatterton, and in Percy's Relics, is another proof of his anticipation of the coming change of sentiment. He was an arrant trifler, it is true; too delicately constituted for real work in literature and politics, and inclined to take a cynical view of his contemporaries generally, he turned for amusement to antiquarianism, and was the first to set modern art and literature masquerading in the antique dresses.

That

he was quite conscious of the necessity for more serious study, appears in his letters, in one of which, for example, he proposes a systematic history of Gothic architecture, such as has since been often enough executed. It does not, is may be said, require any great intellect or even any exquisite taste for a fine gentleman to strike out a new line of dilettante amusement. In truth, Walpole has no pretensions whatever to be regarded as a great original creator, or even as one of the few infallible critics. The only man of his kind who had more claim to that lost title was his

From Saint Pauls.

OFF THE SKELLIGS.

BY JEAN INGELOW.

CHAPTER XIV.

"And 'tis sentiment kills me, says I."

SOUTHAMPTON. My first view of it showed a gloomy background of cloud with lines of angry red running between its thunderous folds, and a dark foreground of old wall. Roman wall, I was informed. It looked as old as the hills, and almost as substantial. A very shallow reach of water that hardly covered the green weed lay between us and the pier, and derived an unquiet beauty from the broken reflections of a long row of lamps just being lighted on shore.

Tom and Mr. Brandon were about to