to keep other People from paying them any attention.  He could not deny that Voltaire and Rousseau were clever men; but he took every opportunity of depreciating them.  Of D’Alembert he spoke with a contempt which, when the intellectual powers of the two men are compared, seems exquisitely ridiculous.  D’Alembert complained that he was accused of having written Walpole’s squib against Rousseau.  “I hope,” says Walpole, “that nobody will attribute D’Alembert’s works to me.”  He was in little danger.

It is impossible to deny, however, that Walpole’s writings have real merit, and merit of a very rare, though not of a very high kind.  Sir Joshua Reynolds used to say that, though nobody would for a moment compare Claude to Raphael, there would be another Raphael before there was another Claude.  And we own that we expect to see fresh Humes and fresh Burkes before we again fall in with that peculiar combination of moral and intellectual qualities to which the writings of Walpole owe their extraordinary popularity.

It is easy to describe him by negatives.  He had not a creative imagination.  He had not a pure taste.  He was not a great reasoner.  There is indeed scarcely any writer in whose works it would be possible to find so many contradictory judgments, so many sentences of extravagant nonsense.  Nor was it only in his familiar correspondence that he wrote in this flighty and inconsistent manner, but in long and elaborate books, in books repeatedly transcribed and intended for the public eye.  We will give an instance or two; for without instances readers not very familiar with his works will scarcely understand our meaning.  In the Anecdotes of Painting, he states, very truly, that the art declined after the commencement of the civil wars.  He proceeds to inquire why this happened.  The explanation, we should have thought, would have been easily found.  He might have mentioned the loss of a king who was the most munificent and judicious patron that the fine arts have ever had in England, the troubled state of the country, the distressed condition of many of the aristocracy, perhaps also the austerity of the victorious party.  These circumstances, we conceive, fully account for the phaenomenon.  But this solution was not odd enough to satisfy Walpole.  He discovers another cause for the decline of the art, the want of models.  Nothing worth painting, it seems, was left to paint.  “How picturesque,” he exclaims, “was the figure of an Anabaptist!”—­as if puritanism had put out the sun and withered the trees; as if the civil wars had blotted out the expression of character and passion from the human lip and brow; as if many of the men whom Vandyke painted had not been living in the time of the Commonwealth, with faces little the worse for wear; as if many of the beauties afterwards portrayed by Lely were not in their prime before the Restoration; as if the garb or the features of Cromwell and Milton were less picturesque than those of the round-faced peers, as like each