was his peculiar domain.  The motto which he prefixed to his Catalogue of Royal and Noble Authors might have been inscribed with perfect propriety over the door of every room in his house, and on the title-page of every one of his books; “Dove Diavolo, Messer Ludovico, avete pigliate tante coglionerie?” In his villa, every apartment is a museum; every piece of furniture is a curiosity; there is something strange in the form of the shovel; there is a long story belonging to the bell-rope.  We wander among a profusion of rarities, of trifling intrinsic value, but so quaint in fashion, or connected with such remarkable names and events, that they may well detain our attention for a moment.  A moment is enough.  Some new relic, some new unique, some new carved work, some new enamel, is forthcoming in an instant.  One cabinet of trinkets is no sooner closed than another is opened.  It is the same with Walpole’s writings.  It is not in their utility, it is not in their beauty, that their attraction lies.  They are to the works of great historians and poets, what Strawberry Hill is to the Museum of Sir Hans Sloane or to the Gallery of Florence.  Walpole is constantly showing us things, not of very great value indeed, yet things which we are pleased to see, and which we can see nowhere else.  They are baubles; but they are made curiosities either by his grotesque workmanship or by some association belonging to them.  His style is one of those peculiar styles by which everybody is attracted, and which nobody can safely venture to imitate.  He is a mannerist whose manner has become perfectly easy to him, His affectation is so habitual and so universal that it can hardly be called affectation.  The affectation is the essence of the man.  It pervades all his thoughts and all his expressions.  If it were taken away, nothing would be left.  He coins new words, distorts the senses of old words, and twists sentences into forms which make grammarians stare.  But all this he does, not only with an air of ease, but as if he could not help doing it.  His wit was, in its essential properties, of the same kind with that of Cowley and Donne.  Like theirs, it consisted in an exquisite perception of points of analogy and points of contrast too subtile for common observation.  Like them, Walpole perpetually startles us by the ease with which he yokes together ideas between which there would seem, at first sight, to be no connection.  But he did not, like them, affect the gravity of a lecture, and draw his illustrations from the laboratory and from the schools.  His tone was light and fleering; his topics were the topics of the club and the ballroom; and therefore his strange combinations and far-fetched allusions, though very closely resembling those which tire us to death in the poems of the time of Charles the First, are read with pleasure constantly new.