No man who has written so much is so seldom tiresome.  In his books there are scarcely any of those passages which, in our school-days, we used to call skip.  Yet he often wrote on subjects which are generally considered as dull, on subjects which men of great talents have in vain endeavoured to render popular.  When we compare the Historic Doubts about Richard the Third with Whitaker’s and Chalmers’s books on a far more interesting question, the character of Mary Queen of Scots; when we compare the Anecdotes of Painting with the works of Anthony Wood, of Nichols, of Granger, we at once see Walpole’s superiority, not in industry, not in learning, not in accuracy, not in logical power, but in the art of writing what people will like to read.  He rejects all but the attractive parts of his subject.  He keeps only what is in itself amusing or what can be made so by the artifice of his diction.  The coarser morsels of antiquarian learning he abandons to others, and sets out an entertainment worthy of a Roman epicure, an entertainment consisting of nothing but delicacies, the brains of singing birds, the roe of mullets, the sunny halves of peaches.  This, we think, is the great merit of his romance.  There is little skill in the delineation of the characters.  Manfred is as commonplace a tyrant, Jerome as commonplace a confessor, Theodore as commonplace a young gentleman, Isabella and Matilda as commonplace a pair of young ladies, as are to be found in any of the thousand Italian castles in which condottieri have revelled or in which imprisoned duchesses have pined.  We cannot say that we much admire the big man whose sword is dug up in one quarter of the globe, whose helmet drops from the clouds in another, and who, after clattering and rustling for some days, ends by kicking the house down.  But the story, whatever its value may be, never flags for a single moment.  There are no digressions, or unseasonable descriptions, or long speeches.  Every sentence carries the action forward.  The excitement is constantly renewed.  Absurd as is the machinery, insipid as are the human actors, no reader probably ever thought the book dull.

Walpole’s Letters are generally considered as his best performances, and, we think, with reason.  His faults are far less offensive to us in his correspondence than in his books.  His wild, absurd, and ever-changing opinions about men and things are easily pardoned in familiar letters.  His bitter, scoffing, depreciating disposition does not show itself in so unmitigated a manner as in his Memoirs.  A writer of letters must in general be civil and friendly to his correspondent at least, if to no other person.