At the same time, his aversions were not always assumed as part of a family inheritance.  He had by temperament a small opinion of men and women outside the circle of his affections.  It was his first instinct to disparage.  He even described his great friend Madame du Deffand, at the first time of meeting her, as “an old blind debauchee of wit.”  His comments on the men of genius of his time are almost all written in a vein of satirical intolerance.  He spoke ill of Sterne and Dr. Johnson, of Fielding and Richardson, of Boswell and Goldsmith.  Goldsmith he found “silly”; he was “an idiot with once or twice a fit of parts.”  Boswell’s Tour of the Hebrides was “the story of a mountebank and his zany.”  Walpole felt doubly justified in disliking Johnson owing to the criticism of Gray in the Lives of the Poets.  He would not even, when Johnson died, subscribe to a monument.  A circular letter asking for a subscription was sent to him, signed by Burke, Boswell, and Reynolds.  “I would not deign to write an answer,” Walpole told the Miss Berrys, “but sent down word by my footman, as I would have done to parish officers with a brief, that I would not subscribe.”  Walpole does not appear in this incident the “sweet-tempered creature” he had earlier claimed to be.  His pose is that of a schoolgirl in a cutting mood.  At the same time his judgment of Johnson has an element of truth in it.  “Though he was good-natured at bottom,” he said of him, “he was very ill-natured at top.”  It has often been said of Walpole that, in his attitude to contemporary men of genius, he was influenced mainly by their position in Society—­that he regarded an author who was not a gentleman as being necessarily an inferior author.  This is hardly fair.  The contemporary of whom he thought most highly was Gray, the son of a money broker.  He did not spare Lady Mary Wortley Montagu any more than Richardson.  If he found an author offensive, it was more likely to be owing to a fastidious distaste for low life than to an aristocratic distaste for low birth; and to him Bohemianism was the lowest of low life.  It was certainly Fielding’s Bohemianism that disgusted him.  He relates how two of his friends called on Fielding one evening and found him “banqueting with a blind man, a woman, and three Irishmen, on some cold mutton and a bone of ham, both in one dish, and the dirtiest cloth.”  Horace Walpole’s daintiness recoiled from the spirit of an author who did not know how to sup decently.  If he found Boswell’s Johnson tedious, it was no doubt partly due to his inability to reconcile himself to Johnson’s table manners.  It can hardly be denied that he was unnaturally sensitive to surface impressions.  He was a great observer of manners, but not a great portrayer of character.  He knew men in their absurd actions rather than in their motives—­even their absurd motives.  He never admits us into the springs of action in his portraits as Saint-Simon does.  He was too studied a believer in the puppetry of men and women to make them more than ridiculous.  And unquestionably the vain race of authors lent itself admirably to his love of caricature.  His account of the vanity of Gibbon, whose history he admired this side enthusiasm, shows how he delighted in playing with an egoistic author as with a trout: