In the case of General Conway’s near relationship and intimacy from childhood, the cause in which his fortunes were suffering might have warmed a colder heart, and opened a closer hand, than Mr. Walpole’s:  but Madame du Deffand was a recent acquaintance, who had no claim on him, but the pleasure he received from her society, and his desire that her blind and helpless old age might not be deprived of any of the comforts and alleviations of which it was capable.  When by the financial arrangements of the French government, under the unscrupulous administration of the Abb`e Terray, the creditors of the state were considerably reduced in income, Mr. Walpole, in the most earnest manner, begged to prevent the unpleasantness of his old friend’s exposing her necessities, and imploring aid from the minister of the day, by allowing him to make up the deficit in her revenue, as a loan, Or in any manner that would be most satisfactory to her.  The loss, after all, did not fall on that stock from which she derived her income, and the assistance was not accepted; but Madame du Deffand’s confidence in, and opinion of, the offer, we see in her letters.

During his after life, although no ostentatious contributor to public charities and schemes of improvement, the friends in whose opinion he knew he could confide, had always more difficulty to repress than to excite his liberality.

That he should have wished his friend Conway to be employed as commander on military expeditions, which, as a soldier fond of his profession, he naturally coveted, although Mr. Walpole might disapprove of the policy of the minister in sending out such expeditions, surely implies neither disguise, nor contradiction in his opinions.

The dread which the reviewer supposes him to have had, lest he should lose caste as a gentleman, by ranking as a wit and an author, he was much too fine a gentleman to have believed in the possibility of feeling.  He knew he had never studied since he left college; he knew that he was not at all a learned man:  but the reputation he had acquired by his wit and by his writings, not only among fine gentlemen, but with society in general, made him nothing loath to cultivate every opportunity of increasing it.  The account he gave of the idleness of his life to Sir Horace Mann, when he disclaims the title of “the learned gentleman,” was literally true; and it is not easy to imagine any reason why a man at the age of forty-three, who admits that he is idle, and who renounces being either a learned man or a politician, should be “ashamed” of playing loo in good company till two or three o’clock in the morning, if he neither ruins himself nor others. (11) He wrote his letters as rapidly as his disabled fingers would allow him to form the characters of a remarkably legible hand.  No rough draughts or sketches of familiar letters were found amongst his papers at Strawberry Hill:  but he was in the habit of putting down on the backs of letters or on slips of paper, a note of facts, of news, of witticisms, or of any thing he wished not to forget, for the amusement of his correspondents.