Horace Walpole was “a dainty rogue in porcelain” who walked badly.  In his best days, as he records in one of his letters, it was said of him that he “tripped like a pewit.”  “If I do not flatter myself,” he wrote when he was just under sixty, “my march at present is more like a dab-chick’s.”  A lady has left a description of him entering a room, “knees bent, and feet on tiptoe as if afraid of a wet floor.”  When his feet were not swollen with the gout, they were so slender, he said, that he “could dance a minuet on a silver penny.”  He was ridiculously lean, and his hands were crooked with his unmerited disease.  An invalid, a caricature of the birds, and not particularly well dressed in spite of his lavender suit and partridge silk stockings, he has nevertheless contrived to leave in his letters an impression of almost perfect grace and dandyism.  He had all the airs of a beau.  He affected coolness, disdain, amateurishness, triviality.  He was a china figure of insolence.  He lived on the mantelpiece, and regarded everything that happened on the floor as a rather low joke that could not be helped.  He warmed into humanity in his friendships and in his defence of the house of Walpole; but if he descended from his mantelpiece, it was more likely to be in order to feed a squirrel than to save an empire.  His most common image of the world was a puppet-show.  He saw kings, prime ministers, and men of genius alike about the size of dolls.  When George II. died, he wrote a brief note to Thomas Brand:  “Dear Brand—­You love laughing; there is a king dead; can you help coming to town?” That represents his measure of things.  Those who love laughing will laugh all the more when they discover that, a week earlier, Walpole had written a letter, rotund, fulsome, and in the language of the bended knee, begging Lord Bute to be allowed to kiss the Prince of Wales’s hand.  His attitude to the Court he described to George Montagu as “mixing extreme politeness with extreme indifference.”  His politeness, like his indifference, was but play at the expense of a solemn world.  “I wrote to Lord Bute,” he informed Montagu; “thrust all the unexpecteds, want of ambition, disinterestedness, etc., that I could amass, gilded with as much duty, affection, zeal, etc., as possible.”  He frankly professed relief that he had not after all to go to Court and act out the extravagant compliments he had written.  “Was ever so agreeable a man as King George the Second,” he wrote, “to die the very day it was necessary to save me from ridicule?” “For my part,” he adds later in the same spirit, “my man Harry will always be a favourite; he tells me all the amusing news; he first told me of the late Prince of Wales’s death, and to-day of the King’s.”  It is not that Walpole was a republican of the school of Plutarch.  He was merely a toy republican who enjoyed being insolent at the expense of kings, and behind their backs.  He was scarcely capable of open rudeness in the fashion