In his old age, Horace delighted in recalling anecdotes of his infancy; in these his mother’s partiality largely figured.  Brought up among courtiers and ministers, his childish talk was all of kings and princes; and he was a gossip both by inclination and habit.  His greatest desire in life was to see the king—­George I., and his nurses and attendants augmented his wish by their exalted descriptions of the grandeur which he effected, in after-life, to despise.  He entreated his mother to take him to St. James’s.  When relating the incidents of the scene in which he was first introduced to a court, Horace Walpole speaks of the ’infinite good-nature of his father, who never thwarted any of his children,’ and ‘suffered him,’ he says, ‘to be too much indulged.’

Some difficulties attended the fruition of the forward boy’s wish.  The Duchess of Kendal was jealous of Sir Robert Walpole’s influence with the king:  her aim was to bring Lord Bolingbroke into power.  The childish fancy was, nevertheless, gratified:  and under his mother’s care he was conducted to the apartments of the Duchess of Kendal in St. James’s.

‘A favour so unusual to be asked by a boy of ten years old,’ he afterwards wrote in his ‘Reminiscences,’ ’was still too slight to be refused to the wife of the first minister and her darling child.’  However, as it was not to be a precedent, the interview was to be private, and at night.

It was ten o’clock in the evening when Lady Walpole, leading her son, was admitted into the apartments of Melusina de Schulenberg, Countess of Walsingham, who passed under the name of the Duchess of Kendal’s niece, but who was, in fact, her daughter, by George I. The polluted rooms in which Lady Walsingham lived were afterwards occupied by the two mistresses of George II.—­the Countess of Suffolk, and Madame de Walmoden, Countess of Yarmouth.

With Lady Walsingham, Lady Walpole and her little son waited until, notice having been given that the king had come down to supper, he was led into the presence of ‘that good sort of man,’ as he calls George I. That monarch was pleased to permit the young courtier to kneel down and kiss his hand.  A few words were spoken by the august personage, and Horace was led back into the adjoining room.

But the vision of that ‘good sort of man’ was present to him when, in old age, he wrote down his recollections for his beloved Miss Berry.  By the side of a tall, lean, ill-favoured old German lady—­the Duchess of Kendal—­stood a pale, short, elderly man, with a dark tie-wig, in a plain coat and waistcoat:  these and his breeches were all of snuff-coloured cloth, and his stockings of the same colour.  By the blue riband alone could the young subject of this ‘good sort of man’ discern that he was in the presence of majesty.  Little interest could be elicited in this brief interview, yet Horace thought it his painful duty, being also the son of a prime minister, to shed tears when, with the other scholars of Eton College,