It is curious to contrast the comparative enthusiasm with which the Whartons write about Horace Walpole with the invective of Lord Macaulay.  To the great historian Walpole was the most eccentric, the most artificial, the most capricious of men, who played innumerable parts and over-acted them all, a creature to whom whatever was little seemed great and whatever was great seemed little.  To Macaulay he was a gentleman-usher at heart, a Republican whose Republicanism like the courage of a bully or the love of a fribble was only strong and ardent when there was no occasion for it, a man who blended the faults of Grub Street with the faults of St. James’s Street, and who united to the vanity, the jealousy and the irritability of a man of letters, the affected superciliousness and apathy of a man of ton.  The Whartons over-praise Walpole where Lord Macaulay under-rates him; the truth lies between the two.  He was not in the least an estimable or an admirable figure, but he wrote admirable, indeed incomparable letters to which the world is indebted beyond expression.  If we can almost say that we know the London of the last century as well as the London of to-day it is largely to Horace Walpole’s letters that our knowledge is due.  They can hardly be over-praised, they can hardly be too often read by the lover of last century London.  Horace Walpole affected to despise men of letters.  It is his punishment that his fame depends upon his letters, those letters which, though their writer was all unaware of it, are genuine literature, and almost of the best.

We could linger over almost every page of the Whartons’ volumes, for every page is full of pleasant suggestions.  The name of George Villiers, second Duke of Buckingham brings up at once a picture of perhaps the brilliantest and basest period in English history.  It brings up too memories of a fiction that is even dearer than history, of that wonderful romance of Dumas the Elder’s, which Mr. Louis Stevenson has placed among the half-dozen books that are dearest to his heart, the “Vicomte de Bragelonne”.  Who that has ever followed, breathless and enraptured, the final fortunes of that gallant quadrilateral of musketeers will forget the part which is played by George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, in that magnificent prose epic?  There is little to be said for the real Villiers; he was a profligate and a scoundrel, and he did not show very heroically in his quarrel with the fiery young Ossory.  It was one thing to practically murder Lord Shrewsbury; it was quite another thing to risk the wrath and the determined right hand of the Duke of Ormond’s son.  But the Villiers of Dumas’ fancy is a fairer figure and a finer lover, and it is pleasant after reading the pages in which the authors of these essays trace the career of Dryden’s epitome to turn to those volumes of the great Frenchman, to read the account of the duel with de Wardes and invoke a new blessing on the muse of fiction.