the paper on which it was written, and de-, we think that an estimate approximating to manded it only for the purpose of blinding the the truth, may, without much difficulty, be English Parliament and people.

formed. The allies had been victorious in Yet, though it was at one time probable that Germany, Italy, and Flanders. It was by no the posterity of the Duke of Burgundy would means improbable that they might fight their become extinct, and though it is almost certain way into the very heart of France. But at no that if the posterity of the Duke of Burgundy time since the commencement of the war had had become extinct, Philip would have suc- their prospects been so dark in that country cessfully preferred his claim to the crown of which was the very object of the struggle. In France, we still defend the principle of the Spain they held only a few square leagues. Treaty of Utrecht. In the first place, Charles The temper of the great majority of the nation had, soon after the battle of Villa Viciosa, in- was decidedly hostile to them. If they had herited, by the death of his elder brother, all persisted, if they had obtained success equal to the dominions of the house of Austria. It their highest expectations, if they had gained a might be argued, that if to these dominions he series of victories as splendid as those of had added the whole monarchy of Spain, the Blenheim and Ramilies, if Paris had fallen, if balance of power would be seriously endan-Louis had been a prisoner, we still doubt gered. The union of the Austrian dominions whether they would have accomplished their and Spain would not, it is true, have been so object. They would still have had to carry on alarming an event as the union of France and Spain. But Charles was actually emperor. Philip was not, and never might be, King of France. The certainty of the less evil might well be set against the chance of the greater

evil.

But, in fact, we do not believe that Spain would long have remained under the government either of the emperor or of the King of France. The character of the Spanish people was a better security to the nations of Europe than any will, any instrument of renunciation, or any treaty. The same energy which the people of Castile had put forth when Madrid was occupied by the allied armies, they would have again put forth as soon as it appeared that their country was about to become a province of France. Though they were no longer masters abroad, they were by no means disposed to see foreigners set over them at home. If Philip had become King of France, and had attempted to govern Spain by mandates from Versailles, a second Grand Alliance would easily have effected what the first had failed to accomplish. The Spanish nation would have rallied against him as zealously as it had before rallied round him. And of this he seems to have been fully aware. For many years the favourite hope of his heart was that he might ascend the throne of his grandfather; but he seems never to have thought it possible that he could reign at once in the country of his adoption and in the country of his birth.

These were the dangers of the peace; and they seem to us to be of no very formidable kind. Against these dangers are to be set off the evils of war and the risk of failure. The evils of the war-the waste of life, the suspension of trade, the expenditure of wealth, the accumulation of debt-require no illustration. The chances of failure it is difficult at this distance of time to calculate with accuracy. But

interminable hostilities against the whole population of a country which affords peculiar facilities to irregular warfare; and in which invading armies suffer more from famine than from the sword.

We are, therefore, for the peace of Utrecht It is true, that we by no means admire the statesmen who concluded that peace. Hariey, we believe, was a solemn trifler. St. John a brilliant knave. The great body of their fol lowers consisted of the country clergy and the country gentry; two classes of men who were then immeasurably inferior in respectability and intelligence to decent shopkeepers of farmers of our time. Parson Barnabas, Par son Trulliber, Sir Wilful Witwould, Sir Francis Wronghead, Squire Western, Squire Sul len-such were the people who composed the main strength of the Tory party for sixty years after the Revolution. It is true, that the means by which the Tories came into power in 1710 were most disreputable. It is true, that the manner in which they used their power was often unjust and cruel. It is true, that in order to bring about their favourite project of peace, they resorted to slander and deception, without the slightest scruple. It is true, that they passed off on the British nation a renunciation which they knew to be invalid. It is true, that they gave up the Catalans to the vengeance of Philip, in a manner inconsistent with huma. nity and national honour. But on the great question of Peace or War, we cannot but think that, though their motives may have been selfish and malevolent, their decision was beneficial to the state.

But we have already exceeded our limits. It remains only for us to bid Lord Mahon heartily farewell, and to assure him, that whatever dislike we may feel for his political opinions, we shall always meet him with pleasure on the neutral ground of literature.

WALPOLE'S LETTERS TO SIR HORACE MANN.*

[EDINBURGH REVIEW, 1833.]

WE cannot transcribe this title-page without | The conformation of his mind was such, strong feelings of regret. The editing of these that whatever was little, seemed to him great, volumes was the last of the useful and modest and whatever was great, seemed to him little. services rendered to literature by a nobleman Serious business was a trifle to him, and trifles of amiable manners, of untarnished public and were his serious business. To chat with blueprivate character, and of cultivated mind. On stockings; to write little copies of complimentthis, as on other occasions, Lord Dover per- ary verses on little occasions; to superintend formed his part diligently, judiciously, and a private press; to preserve from natural decay without the slightest ostentation. He had two the perishable topics of Ranelagh and White's; merits, both of which are rarely found together to record divorces and bets, Miss Chudleigh's in a commentator. He was content to be absurdities and George Selwyn's good saymerely a commentator-to keep in the back- ings; to decorate a grotesque house with pieground, and to leave the foreground to the crust battlements; to procure rare engravings author whom he had undertaken to illustrate. and antique chimney-boards; to match odd Yet, though willing to be an attendant, he was gauntlets; to lay out a maze of walks within by no means a slave; nor did he consider it as five acres of ground-these were the grave part of his editorial duty to see no faults in the employments of his long life. From these he writer to whom he faithfully and assiduously turned to politics as to an amusement. After rendered the humblest literary offices. the labours of the print-shop and the auctionroom, he unbent his mind in the House of Commons. And, having indulged in the recreation of making laws and voting millions he returned to more important pursuits-to researches after Queen Mary's comb, Wolsey's red hat, the pipe which Van Tromp smoked during his last seafight, and the spur which King William struck into the flank of Sorrel.

The faults of Horace Walpole's head and heart are indeed sufficiently glaring. His writings, it is true, rank as high among the delicacies of intellectual epicures as the Strasburgh pies among the dishes described in the Almanack des Gourmands. But, as the pâté-defoe-gras owes its excellence to the diseases of the wretched animal which furnishes it, and would be good for nothing if it were not made of livers preternaturally swollen, so none but an unhealthy and disorganized mind could have produced such literary luxuries as the works of Walpole.

He was, unless we have formed a very erroneous judgment of his character, the most eccentric, the most artificial, the most fastidious, the most capricious of men. His mind was a bundle of inconsistent whims and affectations. His features were covered by mask within mask. When the outer disguise of obvious affectation was removed, you were still as far as ever from seeing the real man. He played innumerable parts, and overacted them all. When he talked misanthropy, he Out-Timoned Timon. When he talked philanthropy, he left Howard at an immeasurable distance. He scoffed at courts, and kept a chronicle of their most trifling scandal; at Society, and was blown about by its slightest veerings of opinion; at literary fame, and left fair copies of his private letters, with copious notes, to be published after his decease; at rank, and never for a moment forgot that he was an honourable; at the practice of entail, and tasked the ingenuity of conveyancers to tie

up his villa in the strictest settlement.

Letters of Horace Walpole, Earl of Orford, to Sir Ho. race Mann, British Envoy at the Court of Tuscany. Now first published from the Originals in the possession of the EARL of WALDGRAVE. Edited by LORD DOVER. 3 vols. 8vo. London. 1833.

In every thing in which he busied himselfin the fine arts, in literature, in public affairs

he was drawn by some strange attraction from the great to the little, and from the useful to the odd. The politics in which he took the keenest interest were politics scarcely deserv ing of the name. The growlings of George the Second, the flirtations of Princess Emily with the Duke of Grafton, the amours of Prince Frederic with Lady Middlesex, the squabbles between Gold Stick and the Master of the Buckhounds, the disagreements between the tutors of Prince George-these matters engaged almost all the attention which Walpole could spare from matters more important still;-from bidding for Zinckes and Petitots, from cheapening fragments of tapestry, and handles of old lances, from joining bits of painted glass, and from setting up memorials of departed cats and dogs. While he was fetching and carrying the gossip of Kensington Palace and Carlton House, he fancied that he was engaged in politics, and when he recorded that gossip, he fancied that he was writing history.

He was, as he has himself told us, fond of faction as an amusement. He loved mischief. but he loved quiet; and he was constantly on the watch for opportunities of gratifying both his tastes at once. He sometimes contrived, Without showing himself, to disturb the course of ministerial negotiations, and to spread confusion through the political circles. He does not himself pretend that, on these occasions,

rooms and the whispers of the backstairs, and which was even capable of selecting and disposing chairs of ebony and shields of rhinoce ros-skin.

affected superciliousness and apathy of a man of ton.

His judgment of literature, of contemporary literature especially, was altogether perverted One of his innumerable whims was an ex- by his aristocratical feelings. No writer surely treme dislike to be considered as a man of let- was ever guilty of so much false and absurd ters. Not that he was indifferent to literary criticism. He almost invariably speaks with fame. Far from it. Scarcely any writer has contempt of those books which are now univerever troubled himself so much about the ap- sally allowed to be the best that appeared in pearance which his works were to make before his time; and, on the other hand, he speaks of posterity. But he had set his heart on incom- writers of rank and fashion as if they were patible objects. He wished to be a celebrated entitled to the same precedence in literature author, and yet to be a mere idle gentleman- which would have been allowed to them in a one of those epicurean gods of the earth who drawing-room. In these letters, for example, do nothing at all, and who pass their existence he says, that he would rather have written the in the contemplation of their own perfections. most absurd lines in Lee than Thomson's He did not like to have any thing in common "Seasons." The periodical paper called "The with the wretches who lodged in the little World," on the other hand, was by "our first courts behind St. Martin's Church, and stole writers." Who, then, were the first writers of out on Sundays to dine with their bookseller. England in the year 1753 Walpole has told He avoided the society of authors. He spoke us in a note. Our readers will probably guess with lordly contempt of the most distinguished that Hume, Fielding, Smollett, Richardson, among them. He tried to find out some way Johnson, Warburton, Collins, Akenside, Gray, of writing books, as M. Jourdain's father sold Dyer, Young, Warton, Mason, or some of cloth, without derogating from his character those distinguished men, were on the list. Not of gentilhomme. "Lui, marchand? C'est pure one of them. Our first writers, it seems, were médisance: il ne l'a jamais été. Tout ce qu'il Lord Chesterfield, Lord Bath, Mr. W. Whitefaisait, c'est qu'il était fort obligeant, fort offi- head, Sir Charles Williams, Mr. Soame Jenyns, cieux; et comme il se connaissait, fort bien Mr. Cambridge, Mr. Coventry. Of these seven en étoffes, il en allait choisir de tous les côtés, gentlemen, Whitehead was the lowest in sta les faisait apporter chez lui, et en donnait à tion, but was the most accomplished tuft-hunter ses amis pour de l'argent." There are several of his time. Coventry was of a noble family. amusing instances of his feeling on this sub- The other five had among them two peerages, ject in the letters now before us. Mann had two seats in the House of Commons, three complimented him on the learning which ap-seats in the Privy Council, a baronetcy, a blue peared in the "Catalogue of Royal and Noble Authors;" and it is curious to see how impatiently Walpole bore the imputation of having attended to any thing so unfashionable as the improvement of his mind. "I know nothing. How should I? I who have always lived in the big busy world; who lie a-bed all the morning, calling it morning as long as you please; who sup in company; who have played at faro half my life, and now at loo till two and three in the morning; who have always loved pleasure, haunted auctions... How I have laughed when some of the Magazines have called me the learned gentleman. Pray don't be like the Magazines." This folly might be pardoned in a boy. But a man of forty-three, as Walpole then was, ought to be quite as much ashamed of playing at loo till three every morning, as of being so vulgar a thing as a learned gen

tleman.

The literary character has undoubtedly its full share of faults, and of very serious and offensive faults. If Walpole had avoided those faults, we could have pardoned the fastidiousness with which he declined all fellowship with men of learning. But from those faults Walpole was not one jot more free than the garreteers from whose contact he shrank. Of literary meannesses and literary vices, his life and his works contain as many instances as the life and the works of any member of Johnson's club. The fact is, that Walpole had the faults of Grub street, with a large addition from St. James's street, the vanity, the jeabusy, the irritability of a man of letters, the

riband, a red riband, about a hundred thousand pounds a year, and not ten pages that are worth reading. The writings of Whitehead, Cambridge, Coventry, and Lord Bath are forgotten. Soame Jenyns is remembered chiefly by John son's review of the foolish Essay on the Origin of Evil. Lord Chesterfield stands much lower in the estimation of posterity than he we'd have done if his letters had never been p lished. The lampoons of Sir Charles Williams are now read only by the curious; and, though not without occasional flashes of wit, have always seemed to us, we must own, very poor performances.

Walpole judged of French literature after the same fashion. He understood and loved the French language. Indeed, he loved it too well. His style is more deeply tainted with Gallicisms than that of any other English writer with whom we are acquainted. His composition often reads, for a page together, like a rude translation from the French. We meet every minute with such sentences as these, "One knows what temperaments Annibal Caracci painted." "The impertinent personage!" "She is dead rich." "Lord Dalkeith is dead of the small-pox in three days." "What was ridiculous, the man who seconded the motion happened to be shut out." "It will now be seen whether he or they are most pa triot."

His love of the French language was of a peculiar kind. He loved it as having been for a century the vehicle of all the polite nothings of Europe: as the sign by which the freema

sons of fashion recognised each other in every close with a good hope for France and for capital from Petersburg to Naples; as the lan- mankind. guage of raillery, as the language of anecdote,

Walpole had neither hopes nor fears. as the language of memoirs, as the language Though the most Frenchified English writer of correspondence. Its higher uses he alto- of the eighteenth century, he troubled himself gether disregarded. The literature of France little about the portents which were daily to be has been to ours what Aaron was to Moses-discerned in the French literature of his time. the expositor of great truths, which would else While the most eminent Frenchmen were have perished for want of a voice to utter studying with enthusiastic delight English poli them with distinctness. The relation which tics and English philosophy, he was study. existed between Mr. Bentham and M. Dumont |ing as intently the gossip of the old court of is an exact illustration of the intellectual rela- France. The fashions and scandal of Ver tion in which the two countries stand to each sailles and Marli, fashions and scandal a hun. other. The great discoveries in physics, in dred years old, occupied him infinitely more metaphysics, in political science, are ours. than a great moral revolution which was But no foreign nation except France has re-taking place in his sight. He took a predi ceived them from us by direct communication. gious interest in every noble sharper whose Isolated in our situation, isolated by our man- vast volume of wig and infinite length of ners, we found truth, but we did not impart it. riband had figured at the dressing or at the France has been the interpreter between Eng- tucking up of Louis the Fourteenth, and of land and mankind. every profligate woman of quality who had carried her train of lovers backward and for ward from king to Parliament, and from Parliament to king, during the wars of the Fronde These were the people of whom he treasured up the smallest memorial, of whom he loved to hear the most trifling anecdote, and for whose likenesses he would have given any price. Of the great French writers of his own time, Montesquieu is the only one of whom he speaks with enthusiasm. And even of Mon tesquieu he speaks with less enthusiasm than of that abject thing, Crebillon the younger, a scribbler as licentious as Louvet and as dull as Rapin. A man must be strangely consti tuted who can take interest in pedantic jour nals of the blockades laid by the Duke of A. to the hearts of the Marquise de B. and the Com tesse de C. This trash Walpole extols in lan guage sufficiently high for the merits of “Don Quixote." He wished to possess a likeness of Crebillon, and Liotard, the first painter of miniatures then living, was employed to pre serve the features of the profligate twaddler. The admirer of the Sopha and of the Lettres Athéniennes had little respect to spare for the men who were then at the head of French literature. He kept carefully out of their way. He tried to keep other people from paying them any attention. He could not deny that Voltaire and Rousseau were clever men; but he took every opportunity of depreciating them. Of D'Alembert he spoke with a con tempt, which, when the intellectual powers of the two men are compared, seems exquisitely ridiculous. D'Alembert complained that he was accused of having written Walpole's squib against Rousseau. "I hope," says Wal pole, "that nobody will attribute D'Alembert's works to me." He was in little danger.

In the time of Walpole, this process of interpretation was in full activity. The great French writers were busy in proclaiming through Europe the names of Bacon, of Newton, and of Locke. The English principles of toleration, the English respect for personal liberty, the English doctrine that all power is a trust for the public good, were making rapid progress. There is scarcely any thing in his tory so interesting as that great stirring up of the mind of France, that shaking of the foundations of all established opinions, that uprooting of old truth and old error. It was plain that mighty principles were at work, whether for evil or for good. It was plain that a great change in the whole social system was at hand. Fanatics of one kind might anticipate a golden age, in which men should live under the simple dominion of reason, in perfect equality and perfect amity, without property, or marriage, or king, or God. A fanatic of another kind might see nothing in the doctrines of the philosophers but anarchy and atheism, might cling more closely to every old abuse, and might regret the good old days when St. Dominic and Simon de Montfort put down the growing heresies of Provence. A wise man would have seen with regret the excesses into which the reformers were running, but he would have done justice to their genius and to their philanthropy. He would have censured their errors; but he would have remembered that, as Milton has sal, error is but opinion in the making. While he condemned their hostility to religion, he would have acknowledged that it was the natural effect of a system under which religion had been constantly exhibited to them, in forms which common sense rejected, and at which humanity shuddered. While he condemned some of their political doctrines as incompatible with all law, all property, and all civilization, he would have acknowledged that the subjects of Louis the Fifteenth had every excuse which men could have for being eager to pull down, and for being ignorant of the far higher art of setting up. While anticipating a fierce condict, a great and wide-wasting destruction, he would yet have looked forward to the final

It is impossible to deny, however, that Wal pole's works have real merit, and merit of 1 very rare, though not of a very high kind Sir Joshua Reynolds used to say, that thoug nobody would for a moment compare Cland to Raphael, there would be another Raphael before there was another Claude. And w own that we expect to see fresh Humes and fresh Burkes before we again fall in with that peculiar combination of moral and intellectual