it to believe that there was any deep genuineness in him that they ask us to regard even his enthusiasm for great literature as a pretence.  They do not realize that the secret of his attraction for us is that he was an enthusiast disguised as an eighteenth-century man of fashion.  His airs and graces were not the result of languor, but of his pleasure in wearing a mask.  He was quick, responsive, excitable, and only withdrew into, the similitude of a china figure, as Diogenes into his tub, through philosophy.  The truth is, the only dandies who are tolerable are those whose dandyism is a cloak of reserve.  Our interest in character is largely an interest in contradictions of this kind.  The beau capable of breaking into excitement awakens our curiosity, as does the conqueror stooping to a humane action, the Puritan caught in the net of the senses, or the pacifist in a rage of violence.  The average man, whom one knows superficially, is a formula, or seems to live the life of a formula.  That is why we find him dull.  The characters who interest us in history and literature, on the other hand, are perpetually giving the lie to the formulae we invent, and are bound to invent, for them.  They give us pleasure not by confirming us, but by surprising us.  It seems to me absurd, then, to regard Walpole’s air of indifference as the only real thing about him and to question his raptures.  From his first travels among the Alps with Gray down to his senile letters to Hannah More about the French Revolution, we see him as a man almost hysterical in the intensity of his sensations, whether of joy or of horror.  He lived for his sensations like an aesthete.  He wrote of himself as “I, who am as constant at a fire as George Selwyn at an execution.”  If he cared for the crownings of kings and such occasions, it was because he took a childish delight in the fireworks and illuminations.

He had the keen spirit of a masquerader.  Masquerades, he declared, were “one of my ancient passions,” and we find him as an elderly man dressing out “a thousand young Conways and Cholmondeleys” for an entertainment of the kind, and going “with more pleasure to see them pleased than when I formerly delighted in that diversion myself.”  He was equally an enthusiast in his hobbies and his tastes.  He rejoiced to get back in May to Strawberry Hill, “where my two passions, lilacs and nightingales, are in bloom.”  He could not have made his collections or built his battlements in a mood of indifference.  In his love of mediaeval ruins he showed himself a Goth-intoxicated man.  As for Strawberry Hill itself, the result may have been a ridiculous mouse, but it took a mountain of enthusiasm to produce it.  Walpole’s own description of his house and its surroundings has an exquisite charm that almost makes one love the place as he did.  “It is a little plaything house,” he told Conway, “that I got out of Mrs. Chenevix’s shop, and is the prettiest bauble you ever saw.  It is set in enamelled meadows, with filigree hedges: