Lord Dover has justly and forcibly remarked, “that what did the most honour both to the head and the’ heart of Horace Walpole, was the friendship which he bore to Marshal Conway; a man who, according to all the accounts of him that have come down to us, was so truly worthy of inspiring such a decree of affection.” (6) He then quotes the character given of him by the editor of Lord Orford’s works in 1798.  This character of Marshal Conway was a portrait drawn from the life, and, as it proceeded from the same pen which now traces these lines, has some right to be inserted here.  “It is only those who have had the opportunity of penetrating into the most secret motives of his public conduct, and into the inmost recesses of his private life, who can do real justice to the unsullied purity of his character;-who saw and knew him in the evening of his days, retired from the honourable activity of a soldier and of a statesman, to the calm enjoyments of private -life; happy in the resources of his own mind, and in the cultivation of useful science, in the bosom of domestic peace-unenriched by pensions or places-undistinguished by titles or ribbons-unsophisticated by public life, and unwearied by retirement.”

To this man, Lord Orford’s attachment, from their boyish days at Eton school to the death of Marshal Conway in 1795, is already a circumstance of sufficiently rare occurrence among men of the world.  Could such a man, of whom the foregoing lines are an unvarnished sketch-of whose character, simplicity was one of the distinguished ornaments-could such a man have endured the intimacy of such an individual as the reviewer describes Lord Orford to have been?  Could an intercourse of uninterrupted friendship and undiminished confidence have existed between them during a period of nearly sixty
             years, undisturbed by the business and bustle of
middle life, so apt to cool, and often to terminate, youthful friendships?  Could such an intercourse ever have existed, with the supposed selfish indifference, and artificial coldness and conceit of Lord Orford’s character?

The last correspondence included in the present publication will, it is presumed, furnish no less convincing proof, that the warmth of his feelings, and his capacity for sincere affection, continued unenfeebled by age.  It is with this view, and this alone, that the correspondence alluded to is now, for the first time, given to the public.  It can add nothing to the already established epistolary fame of Lord Orford, and the public can be as little interested in his sentiments for the two individuals addressed.  But, in forming a just estimate of his character, the reader will hardly fail to observe that those sentiments were entertained at a time of life when, for the most part, the heart is too little capable of expansion to open to new attachments.  The whole tone of these letters must prove the unimpaired warmth of his feelings, and form a striking contrast to the cold harshness