’My mother, when I learn’d that thou wast dead,
  Say, wast thou conscious of the tears I shed? 
  Hovered thy spirit o’er thy sorrowing son? 
  Wretch even then, life’s journey just begun.’

Although Horace in many points bore a strong resemblance to Sir Robert Walpole, he rarely if ever received from that jovial, heartless, able man, any proof of affection.  An outcast from his father’s heart, the whole force of the boy’s love centred in his mother; yet in after-life no one reverenced Sir Robert Walpole so much as his supposed son.  To be adverse to the minister was to be adverse to the unloved son who cherished his memory.  What ‘my father’ thought, did, and said, was law; what his foes dared to express was heresy.  Horace had the family mania strong upon him; the world was made for Walpoles, whose views were never to be controverted, nor whose faith impugned.  Yet Horace must have witnessed, perhaps with out comprehending it, much disunion at home.  Lady Walpole. beautiful and accomplished, could not succeed in riveting her husband to his conjugal duties.  Gross licentiousness was the order of the day, and Sir Robert was among the most licentious; he left his lovely wife to the perilous attentions of all the young courtiers who fancied that by courting the Premier’s wife they could secure Walpole’s good offices.  Sir Robert, according to Pope, was one of those who—­

  ’Never made a friend in private life,
  And was, besides, a tyrant to his wife.

At all events, if not a tyrant, he was indifferent to those circumstances which reflected upon him, and were injurious to her.  He was conscious that he had no right to complain of any infidelity on her part, and he left her to be surrounded by men whom he knew to be profligates of the most dangerous pretensions to wit and elegance.

It was possibly not unfrequently that Horace, his mother’s pet, gleaned in the drawing-rooms of Arlington Street his first notions of that persiflage which was the fashion of the day.  We. can fancy him a precocious, old-fashioned little boy, at his mother’s apron-string, whilst Carr, Lord Hervey, was paying his devoirs; we see him gazing with wondering eyes at Pulteney, Earl of Bath, with his blue ribbon across his laced coat; whilst compassionating friends observing the pale-faced boy in that hot-house atmosphere, in which both mind and body were like forced plants, prophesied that ‘little Horace’ could not possibly live to be a man.

He survived, however, two sisters, who died in childhood, and became dearer and dearer to his fond mother.