’Ascend the temple, join the vocal choir,
  Let harmony your raptured souls inspire. 
  Hark how the tuneful, solemn organs blow,
  Awfully strong, elaborately slow;
  Now to you empyrean seats above
  Raise meditation on the wings of love. 
  Now falling, sinking, dying to the moan
  Once warbled sad by Jesse’s contrite son;
  Breathe in each note a conscience through the sense,
  And call forth tears from soft-eyed Penitence.’

In the midst of all his gaieties, his successes, and perhaps his hopes, a cloud hovered over the destinies of his father.  The opposition, Horace saw, in 1741, wished to ruin his father ‘by ruining his constitution.’  They wished to continue their debates on Saturdays, Sir Robert’s only day of rest, when he used to rush to Richmond New Park, there to amuse himself with a favourite pack of beagles.  Notwithstanding the minister’s indifference to this his youngest son, Horace felt bitterly what he considered a persecution against one of the most corrupt of modern statesmen.

’Trust me, if we fall, all the grandeur, all the envied grandeur of our house, will not cost me a sigh:  it has given me no pleasure while we have it, and will give me no pain when I part with it.  My liberty, my ease, and choice of my own friends and company, will sufficiently counterbalance the crowds of Downing Street.  I am so sick of it all, that if we are victorious or not, I propose leaving England in the spring.

The struggle was not destined to last long.  Sir Robert was forced to give up the contest and be shelved with a peerage.  In 1742, he was created Earl of Orford, and resigned.  The wonder is that, with a mortal internal disease to contend with, he should have faced his foes so long.  Verses ascribed to Lord Hervey ended, as did all the squibs of the day, with a fling at that ‘rogue Walpole.’

  ’For though you have made that rogue Walpole retire,
  You are out of the frying-pan into the fire: 
  But since to the Protestant line I’m a friend,
  I tremble to think how these changes may end.’

Horace, notwithstanding an affected indifference, felt his father’s downfall poignantly.  He went, indeed, to court, in spite of a cold, taken in an unaired house; for the prime minister now quitted Downing Street for Arlington Street.  The court was crowded, he found, with old ladies, the wives of patriots who had not been there for ’these twenty years,’ and who appeared in the accoutrements that were in vogue in Queen Anne’s time.  ‘Then’, he writes, ’the joy and awkward jollity of them is inexpressible!  They titter, and, wherever you meet them, are always looking at their watches an hour before the time.  I met several on the birthday (for I did not arrive time enough to make clothes), and they were dressed in all the colours of the rainbow.  They seem to have said to themselves, twenty years ago, “Well, if ever I do go to court again, I will have a pink and silver, or a blue and silver;” and they keep their resolutions.’