animal.”  The war against America he described as “a wretched farce of fear daubed over with airs of bullying.”  War at any time was, in his eyes, all but the unforgivable sin.  In 1781, however, his hatred had lightened into contempt.  “The Dutch fleet is hovering about,” he wrote, “but it is a pickpocket war, and not a martial one, and I never attend to petty larceny.”  As for mobs, his attitude to them is to be seen in his comment on the Wilkes riots, when he declares: 

I cannot bear to have the name of Liberty profaned to the destruction of the cause; for frantic tumults only lead to that terrible corrective, Arbitrary Power—­which cowards call out for as protection, and knaves are so ready to grant.

Not that he feared mobs as he feared governments.  He regarded them with an aristocrat’s scorn.  The only mob that almost won his tolerance was that which celebrated the acquittal of Admiral Keppel in 1779.  It was of the mob at this time that he wrote to the Countess of Ossory:  “They were, as George Montagu said of our earthquakes, so tame you might have stroked them.”  When near the end of his life the September massacres broke out in Paris, his mob-hatred revived again, and he denounced the French with the hysterical violence with which many people to-day denounce the Bolshevists.  He called them “inferno-human beings,” “that atrocious and detestable nation,” and declared that “France must be abhorred to latest posterity.”  His letters on the subject to “Holy Hannah,” whatever else may be said against them, are not those of a cold and dilettante gossip.  They are the letters of the same excitable Horace Walpole who, at an earlier age, when a row had broken out between the manager and the audience in Drury Lane Theatre, had not been able to restrain himself, but had cried angrily from his box, “He is an impudent rascal!” But his politics never got beyond an angry cry.  His conduct in Drury Lane was characteristic of him: 

The whole pit huzzaed, and repeated the words.  Only think of my being a popular orator!  But what was still better, while my shadow of a person was dilating to the consistence of a hero, one of the chief ringleaders of the riot, coming under the box where I sat, and pulling off his hat, said, “Mr. Walpole, what would you please to have us do next?” It is impossible to describe to you the confusion into which this apostrophe threw me.  I sank down into the box, and have never since ventured to set my foot into the playhouse.

There you have the fable of Walpole’s life.  He always in the end sank down into his box or clambered back to his mantelpiece.  Other men might save the situation.  As for him, he had to look after his squirrels and his friends.