Gray had been a school friend of Walpole, as has been before mentioned, they travelled together, and quarrelled during the Journey.  Walter Scott suggests as a reason for their differences, “that the youthful vivacity, and perhaps aristocratic assumption, of Walpole, did not agree with the somewhat formal opinions and habits of the professed man of letters.” (48) This conjecture may very possibly be the correct one; but we have no clue to guide us with certainty to the causes of their rupture.  In after-life they were reconciled, though the intimacy of early friendship never appears to have been restored between them. (49) Scott says of Walpole, that , his temper was precarious;” and we may, perhaps, affirm the same of Gray.  At all events, they were persons of such different characters, that their not agreeing could not be surprising.  What could be more opposite than “the self-sequestered, melancholy Gray,” and the eager, volatile Walpole, of whom Lady Townshend said, when some one talked of his good spirits, “Oh, Mr. Walpole is spirits of hartshorn.”  When Mason was writing the life of Gray, Walpole bade him throw the whole blame of the quarrel upon him.  This might be mere magnanimity, as Gray was then dead; what makes one most inclined to think it was the truth, is the fact, that Gray was not the only intimate friend of Walpole with whom he quarrelled.  He did so with Bentley, for which the eccentric conduct of that man of talent might perhaps account.  But what shall we say to his quarrel with the good-humoured, laughing George Montagu, with whom for the last years of the life of the latter, he held no intercourse?  It is true, that in a letter to Mr. Cole, Walpole lays the blame upon Montagu, and says, “he was become such an humourist;” but it must be remembered that we do not know Montagu’s version of the story; and that undoubtedly three quarrels with three intimate friends rather support the charge, brought by Scott against Walpole, of his having “a precarious temper.”

The friendship, however, which does honour both to the head and heart of Horace Walpole, was that which he bore to Marshal Conway; a man who, accordant to all the accounts of him that have come down to us, was so truly worthy of inspiring such a degree of affection.  Burke’s panegyric (50)upon his public character and conduct is well-known; while the Editor of Lord Orford’s Works thus most justly eulogizes his private life.  “It is only those who have had the opportunity of penetrating into the most secret motives of his public conduct and the inmost recesses of his private life, that 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 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 ribands, unsophisticated