whose only wish was to go to heaven in a coronet, Onslow a pompous proser, Washington a braggart, Lord Camden sullen, Lord Townshend malevolent, Secker an atheist who had shammed Christian for a mitre, Whitefield an impostor who swindled his converts out of their watches.  The Walpoles fare little better than their neighbours.  Old Horace is constantly represented as a coarse, brutal, niggardly buffoon, and his son as worthy of such a father.  In short, if we are to trust this discerning judge of human nature, England in his time contained little sense and no virtue, except what was distributed between himself, Lord Waldegrave, and Marshal Conway.

Of such a writer it is scarcely necessary to say, that his works are destitute of every charm which is derived from elevation, or from tenderness of sentiment.  When he chose to be humane and magnanimous,—­for he sometimes, by way of variety, tried this affectation,—­he overdid his part most ludicrously.  None of his many disguises sat so awkwardly upon him.  For example, he tells us that he did not choose to be intimate with Mr. Pitt.  And why?  Because Mr. Pitt had been among the persecutors of his father?  Or because, as he repeatedly assures us, Mr. Pitt was a disagreeable man in private?  Not at all; but because Mr. Pitt was too fond of war, and was great with too little reluctance.  Strange that a habitual scoffer like Walpole should imagine that this cant could impose on the dullest reader!  If Moliere had put such a speech into the mouth of Tartuffe, we should have said that the fiction was unskilful, and that Orgon could not have been such a fool as to be taken in by it.  Of the twenty-six years during which Walpole sat in Parliament, thirteen were years of war.  Yet he did not, during all those thirteen years, utter a single word or give a single vote tending to peace.  His most intimate friend, the only friend, indeed, to whom he appears to have been sincerely attached, Conway, was a soldier, was fond of his profession, and was perpetually entreating Mr. Pitt to give him employment.  In this Walpole saw nothing but what was admirable.  Conway was a hero for soliciting the command of expeditions which Mr. Pitt was a monster for sending out.

What then is the charm, the irresistible charm, of Walpole’s writings?  It consists, we think, in the art of amusing without exciting.  He never convinces the reason or fills the imagination, or touches the heart; but he keeps the mind of the reader constantly attentive and constantly entertained.  He had a strange ingenuity peculiarly his own, an ingenuity which appeared in all that he did, in his building, in his gardening, in his upholstery, in the matter and in the manner of his writings.  If we were to adopt the classification, not a very accurate classification, which Akenside has given of the pleasures of the imagination, we should say that with the Sublime and the Beautiful Walpole had nothing to do, but that the third province, the Odd,