Besides, he had the weakness common to several other fine gentlemen who have combined letters and haut ton, of being ashamed of the literary character.  The vulgarity of the court, its indifference to all that was not party writing, whether polemical or political, cast a shade over authors in his time.

Never was there, beneath all his assumed Whig principles, a more profound aristocrat than Horace Walpole.  He was, by birth, one of those well-descended English gentlemen who have often scorned the title of noble, and who have repudiated the notion of merging their own ancient names in modern titles.  The commoners of England hold a proud pre-eminence.  When some low-born man entreated James I. to make him a gentleman, the well-known answer was, ’Na, na, I canna!  I could mak thee a lord, but none but God Almighty can mak a gentleman.’

Sir Robert Walpole, afterwards minister to George II., and eventually Lord Orford, belonged to an ancient family in Norfolk; he was a third son, and was originally destined for the Church, but the death of his elder brethren having left him heir to the family estate, in 1698, he succeeded to a property which ought to have yielded him L2,000 a year, but which was crippled with various encumbrances.  In order to relieve himself of these, Sir Robert married Catherine Shorter, the granddaughter of Sir John Shorter, who had been illegally and arbitrarily appointed Lord Mayor of London by James II.

Horace was her youngest child, and was born in Arlington Street, on the 24th of September, 1717, O.S.  Six years afterwards he was inoculated for the small-pox, a precaution which he records as worthy of remark, since the operation had then only recently been introduced by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu from Turkey.

He is silent, however, naturally enough, as to one important point—­his real parentage.  The character of his mother was by no means such as to disprove an assertion which gained general belief:  this was, that Horace was the offspring, not of Sir Robert Walpole, but of Carr, Lord Hervey, the eldest son of the Earl of Bristol, and the elder brother of Lord Hervey, whose ‘Memoirs of the Court of George II.’ are so generally known.

Carr, Lord Hervey, was witty, eccentric, and sarcastic:  and from him Horace Walpole is said to have inherited his wit, his eccentricity, his love of literature, and his profound contempt for all mankind, excepting only a few members of a cherished and exclusive clique.

In the Notes of his life which Horace Walpole left for the use of his executor, Robert Berry, Esq., and of his daughter, Miss Berry, he makes this brief mention of Lady Walpole:—­’My mother died in 1737.’  He was then twenty years of age.

But beneath this seemingly slight recurrence to his mother, a regret which never left him through life was buried.  Like Cowper, he mourned, as the profoundest of all sorrows, the loss of that life-long friend.