In 1791, George, Earl of Orford, expired; leaving an estate encumbered with debt, and, added to the bequest, a series of lawsuits threatened to break down all remaining comfort in the mind of the uncle, who had already suffered so much on the young man’s account.

Horace Walpole disdained the honours which brought him such solid trouble, with such empty titles, and for some time refused to sign himself otherwise but ‘Uncle to the late Earl of Orford.’  He was certainly not likely to be able to walk in his robes to the House of Lords, or to grace a levee.  However, he thanked God he was free from pain.  ‘Since all my fingers are useless,’ he wrote to Hannah More, ’and that I have only six hairs left, I am not very much grieved at not being able to comb my head!’ To Hannah More he wrote in all sincerity, referring to his elevation to the peerage:  ’For the other empty metamorphosis that has happened to the outward man, you do me justice in believing that it can do nothing but tease me; it is being called names in one’s old age:’  in fact, he reckoned on being styled ’Lord Methusalem.’  He had lived to hear of the cruel deaths of the once gay and high-born friends whom he had known in Paris, by the guillotine:  he had lived to execrate the monsters who persecuted the grandest heroine of modern times, Marie Antoinette, to madness; he lived to censure the infatuation of religious zeal in the Birmingham riots.  ’Are not the devils escaped out of the swine, and overrunning the earth headlong?’—­he asked in one of his letters.

He had offered his hand, and all the ambitious views which it opened, to each of the Miss Berrys successively, but they refused to bear his name, though they still cheered his solitude:  and, strange to say, two of the most admired and beloved women of their time remained single.

In 1796, the sinking invalid was persuaded to remove to Berkeley Square, to be within reach of good and prompt advice.  He consented unwillingly, for his ‘Gothic Castle’ was his favourite abode.  He left it with a presentiment that he should see it no more; but he followed the proffered advice, and in the spring of the year was established in Berkeley Square.  His mind was still clear.  He seems to have cherished to the last a concern for that literary fame which he affected to despise.  ‘Literature has,’ he said, ’many revolutions; if an author could rise from the dead, after a hundred years, what would be his surprise at the adventures of his works!  I often say, perhaps my books may be published in Paternoster Row!’ He would indeed have been astonished at the vast circulation of his Letters, and the popularity which has carried them into every aristocratic family in England.  It is remarkable that among the middle and lower classes they are far less known, for he was essentially the chronicler, as well as the wit and beau, of St. James’s, of Windsor, and Richmond.