The literary character has undoubtedly its full share of faults, and of very serious and offensive faults.  If Walpole had avoided those faults, we could have pardoned the fastidiousness with which he declined all fellowship with men of learning.  But from those faults Walpole was not one jot more free than the garreteers from whose contact he shrank.  Of literary meannesses and literary vices, his life and his works contain as many instances as the life and the works of any member of Johnson’s club.  The fact is, that Walpole had the faults of Grub Street, with a large addition from St. James’s Street, the vanity, the jealousy, and the irritability of a man of letters, the affected superciliousness and apathy of a man of ton.

His judgment of literature, of contemporary literature especially, was altogether perverted by his aristocratical feelings.  No writer surely was ever guilty of so much false and absurd criticism.  He almost invariably speaks with contempt of those books which are now universally allowed to be the best that appeared in his time; and, on the other hand, he speaks of writers of rank and fashion as if they were entitled to the same precedence in literature which would have been allowed to them in a drawing-room.  In these letters, for example, he says that he would rather have written the most absurd lines in Lee than Thomson’s Seasons.  The periodical paper called The World, on the other hand, was by “our first writers.”  Who, then, were the first writers of England in the year 1750?  Walpole has told us in a note.  Our readers will probably guess that Hume, Fielding, Smollett, Richardson, Johnson, Warburton, Collins, Akenside, Gray, Dyer, Young, Warton, Mason, or some of those distinguished men, were in the list.  Not one of them.  Our first writers, it seems, were Lord Chesterfield, Lord Bath, Mr. W. Whithed, Sir Charles Williams, Mr. Soame Jenyns, Mr. Cambridge, Mr. Coventry.  Of these seven personages, Whithed was the lowest in station, but was the most accomplished tuft-hunter of his time.  Coventry was of a noble family.  The other five had among them two seats in the House of Lords, two seats in the House of Commons, three seats in the Privy Council, a baronetcy, a blue riband, a red riband, about a hundred thousand pounds a year, and not ten pages that are worth reading.  The writings of Whithed, Cambridge, Coventry, and Lord Bath are forgotten.  Soame Jenyns is remembered chiefly by Johnson’s review of the foolish Essay on the Origin of Evil.  Lord Chesterfield stands much lower in the estimation of posterity than he would have done if his letters had never been published.  The lampoons of Sir Charles Williams are now read only by the curious, and, though not without occasional flashes of wit, have always seemed to us, we must own, very poor performances.