Not that it is possible to represent him as a man with anything Dionysiac in his temperament.  The furthest that one can go is to say that he was a man of sincere strong sentiment with quivering nerves.  Capricious in little things, he was faithful in great.  His warmth of nature as a son, as a friend, as a humanitarian, as a believer in tolerance and liberty, is so unfailing that it is curious it should ever have been brought in question by any reader of the letters.  His quarrels are negligible when put beside his ceaseless extravagance of good humour to his friends.  His letters alone were golden gifts, but we also find him offering his fortune to Conway when the latter was in difficulties.  “I have sense enough,” he wrote, “to have real pleasure in denying myself baubles, and in saving a very good income to make a man happy for whom I have a just esteem and most sincere friendship.”  “Blameable in ten thousand other respects,” he wrote to Conway seventeen years later, “may not I almost say I am perfect with regard to you?  Since I was fifteen have I not loved you unalterably?” “I am,” he claimed towards the end of his life, “very constant and sincere to friends of above forty years.”  In his friendships he was more eager to give than to receive.  Madame du Deffand was only dissuaded from making him her heir by his threat that if she did so he would never visit her again.  Ever since his boyhood he was noted for his love of giving pleasure and for his thoughtfulness regarding those he loved.  The earliest of his published letters was until recently one written at the age of fourteen.  But Dr. Paget Toynbee, in his supplementary volumes of Walpole letters, recently published, has been able to print one to Lady Walpole written at the age of eight, which suggests that Walpole was a delightful sort of child, incapable of forgetting a parent, a friend, or a pet: 

    Dear mama, I hop you are wall, and I am very wall, and I hop papa
    is wal, and I begin to slaap, and I hop al wall and my cosens like
    there pla things vary wall

    and I hop Doly phillips is wall and pray
    give my Duty to papa. 
          
                                             HORACE WALPOLE.

    and I am very glad to hear by Tom that all my cruatuars are all
    wall. and Mrs. Selwyn has sprand her Fot and givs her Sarves to you
    and I dind ther yester Day.

At Eton later on he was a member of two leagues of friendship—­the “Triumvirate,” as it was called, which included the two Montagus, and the “Quadruple Alliance,” in which one of his fellows was Gray.  The truth is, Walpole was always a person who depended greatly on being loved.  “One loves to find people care for one,” he wrote to Conway, “when they can have no view in it.”  His friendship in his old age for the Miss Berrys—­his “twin wifes,” his “dear Both”—­to each of whom he left an annuity of L4,000, was but a continuation of that kindliness which ran like a stream (ruffled