He was, as he has himself told us, fond of faction as an amusement.  He loved mischief:  but he loved quiet; and he was constantly on the watch for opportunities of gratifying both his tastes at once.  He sometimes contrived, without showing himself, to disturb the course of ministerial negotiations, and to spread confusion through the political circles.  He does not himself pretend that, on these occasions, he was actuated by public spirit; nor does he appear to have had any private advantage in view.  He thought it a good practical joke to set public men together by the ears; and he enjoyed their perplexities, their accusations, and their recriminations, as a malicious boy enjoys the embarrassment of a misdirected traveller.

About politics, in the high sense of the word, he knew nothing, and cared nothing.  He called himself a Whig.  His father’s son could scarcely assume any other name.  It pleased him also to affect a foolish dislike of kings as kings, and a foolish love and admiration of rebels as rebels; and perhaps, while kings were not in danger, and while rebels were not in being, he really believed that he held the doctrines which he professed.  To go no further than the letters now before us, he is perpetually boasting to his friend Mann of his aversion to royalty and to royal persons.  He calls the crime of Damien “that least bad of murders, the murder of a king.”  He hung up in his villa an engraving of the death-warrant of Charles, with the inscription “Major Charta.”  Yet the most superficial knowledge of history might have taught him that the Restoration, and the crimes and follies of the twenty-eight years which followed the Restoration, were the effects of this Greater Charter.  Nor was there much in the means by which that instrument was obtained that could gratify a judicious lover of liberty.  A man must hate kings very bitterly, before he can think it desirable that the representatives of the people should be turned out of doors by dragoons, in order to get at a king’s head.  Walpole’s Whiggism, however, was of a very harmless kind.  He kept it, as he kept the old spears and helmets at Strawberry Hill, merely for show.  He would just as soon have thought of taking down the arms of the ancient Templars and Hospitallers from the walls of his hall, and setting off on a crusade to the Holy Land, as of acting in the spirit of those daring warriors and statesmen, great even in their errors, whose names and seals were affixed to the warrant which he prized so highly.  He liked revolution and regicide only when they were a hundred years old.  His republicanism, like the courage of a bully, or the love of a fribble, was strong and ardent when there was no occasion for it, and subsided when he had an opportunity of bringing it to the proof.  As soon as the revolutionary spirit really began to stir in Europe, as soon as the hatred of kings became something more than a sonorous phrase, he was frightened into a fanatical royalist,