Walpole judged of French literature after the same fashion.  He understood and loved the French language.  Indeed, he loved it too well.  His style is more deeply tainted with Gallicism than that of any other English writer with whom we are acquainted.  His composition often reads, for a page together, like a rude translation from the French.  We meet every minute with such sentences as these, “One knows what temperaments Annibal Caracci painted.”  “The impertinent personage!” “She is dead rich.”  “Lord Dalkeith is dead of the small-pox in three days.”  “It will now be seen whether he or they are most patriot.”

His love of the French language was of a peculiar kind.  He loved it as having been for a century the vehicle of all the polite nothings of Europe, as the sign by which the freemasons of fashion recognised each other in every capital from Petersburgh to Naples, as the language of raillery, as the language of anecdote, as the language of memoirs, as the language of correspondence.  Its higher uses he altogether disregarded.  The literature of France has been to ours what Aaron was to Moses, the expositor of great truths which would else have perished for want of a voice to utter them with distinctness.  The relation which existed between Mr. Bentham and M. Dumont is an exact illustration of the intellectual relation in which the two countries stand to each other.  The great discoveries in physics, in metaphysics, in political science, are ours.  But scarcely any foreign nation except France has received them from us by direct communication.  Isolated by our situation, isolated by our manners, we found truth, but we did not impart it.  France has been the interpreter between England and mankind.

In the time of Walpole, this process of interpretation was in full activity.  The great French writers were busy in proclaiming through Europe the names of Bacon, of Newton, and of Locke.  The English principles of toleration, the English respect for personal liberty, the English doctrine that all power is a trust for the public good, were making rapid progress.  There is scarcely anything in history so interesting as that great stirring up of the mind of France, that shaking of the foundations of all established opinions, that uprooting of old truth and old error.  It was plain that mighty principles were at work whether for evil or for good.  It was plain that a great change in the whole social system was at hand.  Fanatics of one kind might anticipate a golden age, in which men should live under the simple dominion of reason, in perfect equality and perfect amity, without property, or marriage, or king, or God.  A fanatic of another kind might see nothing in the doctrines of the philosophers but anarchy and atheism, might cling more closely to every old abuse, and might regret the good old days when St. Dominic and Simon de Montfort put down the growing heresies of Provence.  A wise man would have seen with regret the excesses into which the reformers