the greater part of his administration, in which he was fortunately assisted by the concurrence of Fleury of France, contributed in no slight degree to the permanent establishment of the present dynasty on the throne.  He received his education at the greatest of English schools, Eton, to which throughout his life he preserved a warm attachment; and where he gave a strong indication of his preference for peaceful studies and his judicious appreciation of intellectual ability, by selecting as his most intimate friend Thomas Gray, hereafter to achieve a poetical immortality by the Bard and the Elegy.  From Eton they both went to Cambridge, and, when they quitted the University, in 1738, joined in a travelling tour through France and Italy.  They continued companions for something more than two years; but at the end of that time they separated, and in the spring of 1741 Gray returned to England.  The cause of their parting was never distinctly avowed; Walpole took the blame, if blame there was, on himself; but, in fact, it probably lay in an innate difference of disposition, and consequently of object.  Walpole being fond of society, and, from his position as the Minister’s son, naturally courted by many of the chief men in the different cities which they visited; while Gray was of a reserved character shunning the notice of strangers, and fixing his attention on more serious subjects than Walpole found attractive.

In the autumn of the same year Walpole himself returned home.  He had become a member of Parliament at the General Election in the summer, and took his seat just in time to bear a part in the fierce contest which terminated in the dissolution of his father’s Ministry.  His maiden speech, almost the only one he ever made, was in defence of the character and policy of his father, who was no longer in the House of Commons to defend himself.[1] And the result of the conflict made no slight impression on his mind; but gave a colour to all his political views.

He began almost immediately to come forward as an author:  not, however, as—­

    Obliged by hunger and request of friends;

for in his circumstances he was independent, and even opulent; but seeking to avenge his father by squibs on Mr. Pulteney (now Lord Bath), as having been the leader of the attacks on him, and on the new Ministry which had succeeded him.  In one respect that age was a happy one for ministers and all connected with them.  Pensions and preferments were distributed with a lavish hand; and, even while he was a schoolboy, he had received more than one “patent place,” as such were called, in the Exchequer, to which before his father’s resignation others were added, which after a time raised his income to above L5,000 a year, a fortune which in those times was exceeded by comparatively few, even of those regarded as wealthy.  So rich, indeed, was he, that before he was thirty he was able to buy Strawberry Hill, “a small house near Twickenham,” as he describes it at first, but which he gradually enlarged and embellished till it grew into something of a baronial castle on a small scale, somewhat as, under the affectionate diligence of a greater man, Abbotsford in the present century became one of the lions of the Tweed.