and sparkling with malice, no doubt) through his long life.  And his kindness was not limited to his friends, but was at the call of children and, as we have seen, of animals.  “You know,” he explains to Conway, apologizing for not being able to visit him on account of the presence of a “poor little sick girl” at Strawberry Hill, “how courteous a knight I am to distrest virgins of five years old, and that my castle gates are always open to them.”  One does not think of Walpole primarily as a squire of children, and certainly, though he loved on occasion to romp with the young, there was little in him of a Dickens character.  But he was what is called “sympathetic.”  He was sufficient of a man of imagination to wish to see an end put to the sufferings of “those poor victims, chimney-sweepers.”  So far from being a heartless person, as he has been at times portrayed, he had a heart as sensitive as an anti-vivisectionist.  This was shown in his attitude to animals.  In 1760, when there was a great terror of mad dogs in London, and an order was issued that all dogs found in the streets were to be killed, he wrote to the Earl of Strafford: 

In London there is a more cruel campaign than that waged by the Russians:  the streets are a very picture of the murder of the innocents—­one drives over nothing but poor dead dogs!  The dear, good-natured, honest, sensible creatures!  Christ! how can anybody hurt them?  Nobody could but those Cherokees the English, who desire no better than to be halloo’d to blood—­one day Samuel Byng, the next Lord George Sackville, and to-day the poor dogs!

As for Walpole’s interest in politics, we are told by writer after writer that he never took them seriously, but was interested in them mainly for gossip’s sake.  It cannot be denied that he made no great fight for good causes while he sat in the House of Commons.  Nor had he the temper of a ruler of men.  But as a commentator on politics and a spreader of opinion in private, he showed himself to be a politician at once sagacious, humane, and sensitive to the meaning of events.  His detestation of the arbitrary use of power had almost the heat of a passion.  He detested it alike in a government and in a mob.  He loathed the violence that compassed the death of Admiral Byng and the violence that made war on America.  He raged against a public world that he believed was going to the devil.  “I am not surprised,” he wrote in 1776, “at the idea of the devil being always at our elbows.  They who invented him no doubt could not conceive how men could be so atrocious to one another, without the intervention of a fiend.  Don’t you think, if he had never been heard of before, that he would have been invented on the late partition of Poland?” “Philosophy has a poor chance with me,” he wrote a little later in regard to America, “when my warmth is stirred—­and yet I know that an angry old man out of Parliament, and that can do nothing but be angry, is a ridiculous