by public life, and unwearied by retirement.”  The offer of Walpole to share his fortune with Conway, when the latter was dismissed from his places, an offer so creditable to both parties, has been already mentioned; and if we wish to have a just idea of the esteem in which Marshal Conway was held by his contemporaries, it is only necessary to mention, that upon the same occasion, similar offers were pressed upon him by his brother Lord Hertford, and by the Duke of Devonshire, without any concert between them.

The rest of’ Walpole’s friends and correspondents it is hardly necessary to dwell upon; they are many of them already well known to the public from various causes. it may, however, be permitted to observe, that, they were, for the most part, persons distinguished either by their taste in the fine arts, their love of antiquities, their literary attainments, or their conversational talents.  To the friends already mentioned, but with whom Walpole did not habitually correspond, must be added, Mason the poet, George Selwyn, Richard second Lord Edgecumbe, George James Williams, Esq.  Lady Suffolk, and Mrs. Clive the actress.

With the Marquise du Deffand, the old, blind, but clever leader of French society, he became acquainted at Paris late in her life.  Her devotion for him appears to have been very great, and is sometimes expressed in her letters with a warmth and tenderness, which Walpole, who was most sensitive of ridicule, thought so absurd in a person of her years and infirmities, that he frequently reproves her very harshly for it; so much so, as to give him the appearance of a want of kindly feeling towards her, which his general conduct to her, and the regrets he expressed on her death, do not warrant us in accusing him of. (51)

In concluding the literary part of the character of Walpole, it is natural to allude to the transactions which took place between him and the unfortunate Chatterton; a text upon which so much calumny and misrepresentation have been embroidered.  The periodicals of the day, and the tribe of those “who daily scribble for their daily bread,” and for whom Walpole had, perhaps unwisely, frequently expressed his contempt, attacked him bitterly for his inhumanity to genius, and even accused him as the author of the subsequent misfortunes and untimely death of that misguided son of genius; nay, even the author of “The Pursuits of Literature,” who wrote many years after the transaction had taken place, and who ought to have known better, gave in to the prevailing topic of abuse. (52) It therefore becomes necessary to state shortly what really took place upon this occasion, a task which is rendered easier by the clear view of the transaction taken both by Walter Scott in his “Lives of the Novelists,” and by Chalmers in his “Biographical Dictionary,” which is also fully borne out by the narrative drawn up by Walpole himself, and accompanied by the correspondence.