You will be diverted to hear that Mr. Gibbon has quarrelled with me.  He lent me his second volume in the middle of November.  I returned it with a most civil panegyric.  He came for more incense.  I gave it, but, alas, with too much sincerity!  I added, “Mr. Gibbon, I am sorry you should have pitched on so disgusting a subject as the Constantinopolitan History.  There is so much of the Arians and Eumonians, and semi-Pelagians; and there is such a strange contrast between Roman and Gothic manners, and so little harmony between a Consul Sabinus and a Ricimer, Duke of the palace, that though you have written the story as well as it could be written, I fear few will have patience to read it.”  He coloured; all his round features squeezed themselves into sharp angles; he screwed up his button mouth, and rapping his snuff-box, said, “It had never been put together before”—­so well he meant to add—­but gulped it.  He meant so well certainly, for Tillemont, whom he quotes in every page, has done the very thing.  Well, from that hour to this I have never seen him, though he used to call once or twice a week; nor has he sent me the third volume, as he promised.  I well knew his vanity, even about his ridiculous face and person, but thought he had too much sense to avow it so palpably.

“So much,” he concludes, “for literature and its fops.”  The comic spirit leans to an under-estimate rather than an over-estimate of human nature, and the airs the authors gave themselves were not only a breach of his code, but an invitation to his contempt.  “You know,” he once wrote, “I shun authors, and would never have been one myself if it obliged me to keep such bad company.  They are always in earnest and think their profession serious, and will dwell upon trifles and reverence learning.  I laugh at all these things, and write only to laugh at them and divert myself.  None of us are authors of any consequence, and it is the most ridiculous of all vanities to be vain of being mediocre." He followed the Chinese school of manners and made light of his own writings.  “What have I written,” he asks, “that was worth remembering, even by myself?” “It would be affected,” he tells Gray, “to say I am indifferent to fame.  I certainly am not, but I am indifferent to almost anything I have done to acquire it.  The greater part are mere compilations; and no wonder they are, as you say, incorrect when they were commonly written with people in the room.”

It is generally assumed that, in speaking lightly of himself, Walpole was merely posturing.  To me it seems that he was sincere enough.  He had a sense of greatness in literature, as is shown by his reverence of Shakespeare, and he was too much of a realist not to see that his own writings at their best were trifles beside the monuments of the poets.  He felt that he was doing little things in a little age.  He was diffident both for his times and for himself.  So difficult do some writers find