14

2. OFF THE SKELLIGS. By Jean Ingelow. Part XI.,. Saint Pauls,
3. THE HISTORICAL MANUSCRIPTS COMMISSION.
John Piggott, Jun., F.S.A., .

By

Fraser's Magazine,

Macmillan's Magazine,

Macmillan's Magazine,
Saturday Review,

7. ANCIENT MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS. By Charles Reade, Pall Mall Gazette,

PUBLISHED EVERY SATURDAY BY

LITTELL & GAY, BOSTON.

TERMS OF SUBSCRIPTION.

FOR EIGHT DOLLARS, remitted directly to the Publishers, the LIVING AGE will be punctually for warded for a year, free of postage. But we do not prepay postage on less than a year, nor when we have to pay commission for forwarding the money; nor when we club THE LIVING AGE with another periodical.

An extra copy of THE LIVING AGE is sent gratis to any one getting up a club of Five New Subscribers Remittances should be made by bank draft or check, or by post-office money-order, if possible. If neither of these can be procured, the money should be sent in a registered letter. All postmasters are obliged to register letters when requested to do so. Drafts, checks and money-orders should be made payable to the order of LITTELL & ĜAY.

HORACE WALPOLE.

From The Cornhill Magazine. of George Grenville, as they sounded in contemporary ears - and it will be safe to say that, on counting them up, a good half will turn out to be reflections from the illuminating flashes of Walpole, Excise all that comes from him, and the history sinks towards the level of the solid

and, as in the Castle of Otranto, the portraits of our respectable old ancestors, which have been hanging in gloomy repose upon the wall, suddenly step from their frames and, for some brief space, assume a spectral vitality.

cause he was a fool, and applied it to the two greatest portrait painters of the times

THE history of England, throughout a very large segment of the eighteenth century, is simply a synomyn for the works of Horace Walpole. There are, indeed, some other books upon the subject. Some good stories are scattered up and down Archdeacon Coxe; add his keen touches, the Annual Register, the Gentleman's Magazine, and Nichol's Anecdotes. There is a speech or two of Burke's not without merit, and a readable letter may be disinterred every now and then from beneath the piles of contemporary correspondence. When the history of the times comes to be It is only according to rule that a writer finally written in the fashion now pre- who has been so useful should have been valent, in which some six portly octavos a good deal abused. No one is so amusing are allotted to a year, and an event and so generally unpopular as a clever retakes longer to describe than to occur, tailer of gossip. Yet it does seem rather the industrious will find ample mines of hard that Walpole should have received waste paper in which they may quarry to such hard measure from Macaulay, through their heart's content. Though Hansard whose pages so much of his light has been was not, and newspapers were in their in- transfused. The explanation, perhaps, is fancy, the shelves of the British Museum easy. Macaulay dearly loved the paradox and other repositories groan beneath that a man wrote admirably precisely bemountains of State papers, law reports, pamphlets, and chaotic raw materials, from which some precious ore may be smelted Walpole and Boswell. There is somedown. But these amorphous masses are thing which hurts our best feelings in the attractive chiefly to the philosophers who success of a man whom we heartily despise. are too profound to care for individual It seems to imply, which is intolerable, character, or to those praiseworthy stu- that our penetration has been at fault, or dents who would think the labour of a that merit that is to say, our own conyear well rewarded by the discovery of a spicuous quality is liable to be outsingle fact tending to throw a shade of stripped in this world by imposture. It is additional perplexity upon the secret of consoling if we can wrap ourselves in the Junius. Walpole's writings belong to the belief that good work can be extracted good old-fashioned type of history, which from bad brains, and that shallowness, afaspires to be nothing more than the quin- fectation, and levity can, by some strange tessence of contemporary gossip. If the chemistry, be transmuted into a substitute opinion be pardonable in these days, his- for genius. Do we not all, if we have tory of that kind has not only its charm, reached middle age, remember some idiot but its serious value. If not very profound (of course he was an idiot!) at school or or comprehensive, it impresses upon us college who had somehow managed to slip the fact so often forgotten that our past us in the race of life, and revenge ourgrandfathers were human beings. The or- selves by swearing that he is an idiot still, dinary historian reduces them to mere me- and that idiocy is a qualification for good chanical mummies; in Walpole's pages fortune? Swift somewhere says that a they are still living flesh and blood. Turn paper-cutter does its work all the better over any of the proper decorous history when it is blunt, and converts the fact books, mark every passage where for a moment, we seem to be transported to the past to the thunders of Chatham, the drivellings of Newcastle, or the prosings

into an allegory of human affairs, showing that decorous dullness is an over-match for genius. Macaulay was incapable, both in a good and bad sense, of Swift's tren

chant misanthropy. His dislike to Walpole was founded not so much upon posthumous jealousy — though that passion is not so rare as absurd - but on the singular contrast between the character and intellect of the two men. The typical Englishman, with his rough, strong sense, passing at times into the narrowest insular prejudice, detested the Frenchified fine gentleman who minced his mother tongue and piqued himself on cosmopolitan indifference to patriotic sentiment: the ambitious historian was irritated by the contempt which the dilettante dabbler in literature affected for their common art; and the thorough-going Whig was scandalized by the man who, whilst claiming that sacred name, and living face to face with Chatham and Burke and the great Revolution families in all their glory, ventured to intimate his opinion that they, like other idols, had a fair share of clay and rubbish in their composition, and who, after professing a kind of sham republicanism, was frightened by the French Revolution into a paroxism of ultra-Toryism. "You wretched fribble!" exclaims Macaulay; "you shallow scorner of all that is noble! You are nothing but a heap of silly whims and conceited airs! Strip off one mask of affectation from your mind, and we are still as far as ever from the real man. The very highest faculty that can be conceded to you is a keen eye for oddities, whether old curiosity shops or in Parliament; and to that you owe whatever just reputation you have acquired." Macaulay's fervour of rebuke is amusing, though, by a righteous Nemesis, it includes a specimen of blindness as gross as any that he attributes to Walpole. The summary decision that the chief use of France is to interpret England to Europe, is a typical example of that insular arrogance for which Mr. Arnold has popularized the name of Philistinism.

Even the great clothes philosophers did not hold that a mere Chinese puzzle of mask within mask could enclose sheer vacancy; there must be some kernel within, which may be discovered by sufficient patience. And in the first place, it may be asked, why did poor Walpole wear a mask at all? The answer seems obvious. The men of that age may be divided by a line which, to the philosophic eye, is of far more importance than that which separated Jacobites from loyal Whigs or Dessenters from High Churchmen. It separated the men who could drink two bottles of port after dinner from the men who could not. To men of delicate digestions the test imposed by the jovial party in ascendancy must have been severer than those due to political or ecclesiastical bigotry. They had to choose between social disabilities on the one side, and on the other indigestion for themselves and gout for their descendants. Thackeray, in a truly pathetic passage, partly draws the veil from their sufferings. Almost all the wits of Queen Anne's reign, he observes, were fat: "Swift was fat; Addison was fat; Gay and Thompson were preposterously fat; all that fuddling and punch drinking, that club and coffee-house boozing, shortened the lives and enlarged the waistcoats of men of that age." Think of the dinner described in Swift's Polite Conversation, and compare the following bill of fare for a party of seven with the menu of a modern London dinner. First course: a sirloin of beef, fish, a shoulder of veal and a tongue; second course, almond pudding, patties, and soup; third course, a venison pasty, a hare, a rabbit, some pigeons, a goose, and a ham. All which is washed down by wine and beer, until, at length, a large tankard of October having been passed round, the gentlemen sit down to drink. Think of this and imagine supper in the perspective; imagine a man of irYet criticism of this one-sided kind hasritable nerves and without the stomach of its value. At least it suggests a problem. an ostrich, set down to such a meal, and What is the element left out of account? regarded as a milksop if he flinches. The Folly is never the real secret of a literary very report of such conviviality — before reputation, or what noble harvests of ge- which Christopher North's performances in nius we should produce! If we patiently the Noctes Ambrosianæ sink into insignifitake off all the masks we must come at cance is enough to produce nightmares in last to the animating principle beneath. the men of our degenerate times, and may

are

66

ashes upon his wig; a hideous old hag is picking his pockets; a boy is brewing oceans of punch in a mash-tub; a man is blowing bagpipes in his ear; a fat parson close by is gorging the remains of a haunch of venison; a butcher is pouring gin on his neighbour's broken head; an allerman- - a very mountain of roast beef

66

help us to understand the peevishness of feeble invalids such as Pope and Lord Harvey in the elder generation, or Walpole in that which was rising. Amongst these Garagantuan consumers, who combined in one the attributes of "gorging Jack and guzzling Jemmy," Sir Robert Walpole was celebrated for his powers and seems to have owed to them no small share of his is sinking back in a fit, whilst a barber popularity. Horace writes piteously from is trying to bleed him; brickbats are flythe paternal mansion, to which he had re- ing in at the windows; the room reeks turned in 1743, not long after his tour in with the stale smell of heavy viands and Italy, to one of his artistic friends: Only the fresh vapours of punch and gin, whilst imagine," he exclaims, "that I here the very air is laden with discordant every day see men who moun- howls and thick with oaths and ribald tains of roast beef, and only seem songs. Only think of the smart young just roughly hewn out into outlines of candidate's headache next morning in the human form, like the giant rock at Prato- days when soda-water was not invented! lino! I shudder when I see them brandish And remember too that the representatheir knives in act to carve, and look on tives were not entirely free from sympathem as savages that devour one another. thy with the coarseness of their constituI should not stare at all more than I do ents. Just at the period of Hogarth's if yonder alderman at the lower end of painting, Walpole, when speaking of the the table were to stick his fork into his feeling excited by a Westminster elecneighbour's jolly cheek, and cut a brave tion, has occasion to use this pleasing slice of brown and fat. Why, I'll swear I new fashionable proverb ""We spit see no difference between a country gen- in his hat on Thursday, and wiped it off tleman and a sirloin; whenever the first on Friday." It owed its origin to a feat laughs or the second is cut, there run out performed by Lord Cobham at an assemjust the same streams of gravy! Indeed, bly given at his own house. For a bet of the surloin does not ask quite so many a guinea he came behind Lord Hervey, questions." What was the style of con- who was talking to some ladies, and made versation at these tremendous entertain- use of his hat as a spittoon. The point ments had better be left to the imagina- of the joke was that Lord Hervey - son tion. Sir R. Walpole's theory on that of Pope's "mere white curd of asses' subject is upon record; and we can dimly milk," and related, as the scandal went, guess at the feelings of a delicate young rather too closely to Horace Walpole gentleman who had just learned to talk himself was a person of effeminate apabout Domenichinos and Guidos, and to pearance, and therefore considered unbuy ancient bronzes, when plunged into likely wrongly, as it turned out to rethe coarse society of these mountains of sent the insult. We may charitably hope roast beef. As he grew up manners be- that the assailants, who thus practically came a trifle more refined, and the cus- exemplified the proper mode of treating toms described so faithfully by Fielding milksops, were drunk. The two-bottleand Smollett belonged to a lower social men who lingered till our day were surstratum. Yet we can fancy Walpole's viving relics of the type which then gave occasional visit to his constituents, and the tone to society. Within a few years imagine him forced to preside at one of there was a prime minister who always those election feasts which still survive on consoled himself under defeats and celeHogarth's canvas. Substitute him for the brated triumphs with his bottle; a chanluckless fine gentleman in a laced coat, cellor who abolished evening sittings on who represents the successful candidate the ground that he was always drunk in in the first picture of the series. A the evening; and even an archbishopdrunken voter is dropping lighted pipe an Irish archbishop, it is true-whose