He retained his faculties to the last, but his limbs became helpless from his frequent attacks of gout:  as he himself expresses it,

“Fortune, who scatters her gifts out of season, Though unkind to my limbs, has yet left me my reason.” (55)

As a friend of his, who only knew him in the last years of his life, speaks of “his conversation as singularly brilliant as it was original,” (56) we may conclude his liveliness never deserted him; that his talent for letter-writing did not, we have a proof in a letter written only six weeks before his death, in which, with all his accustomed grace of manner he entreats a lady of his acquaintance not to show “the idle notes of her ancient servant."-Lord Orford died in the eightieth year `of his life, at his house in Berkeley Square, on the 2d of March 1797, and was buried with his family in the church at Houghton and with him concluded the male line of the descendants of Sir Robert Walpole.

(20) Originally prefixed to his lordship’s edition of Walpole’s Letters to Sir Horace Mann, first published in 1833.

(21) In a ms. note by Walpole, in his own copy of collins’s Peerage, it is stated, that Sir Robert Walpole had, by his first wife, “another son, William, who died young, and a daughter, Catherine, who died of a consumption at Bath, aged nineteen."-E.

(22) The occasion of the death of sir John Shorter was a curious one.  It is thus related in the Ellis Correspondence:-"Sir John Shorter, the present Lord Mayor. is very ill with a fall off his horse, under Newgate, as he was going to proclaim Bartholomew Fair.  The city custom is, it seems, to drink always under Newgate when the Lord Mayor passes that way; and at this time the Lord Mayor’s horse, being somewhat skittish,-started at the sight of the large glittering tankard which was reached to his lordship.”  Letter of Aug. 30th, 1688.

“On Tuesday last died the Lord Mayor, Sir John Shorter:  the occasion of his distemper was his fall under Newgate, which bruised him a little, and put him into a fever.”  Letter of September 6th, 1688.

(23 )birthdate) In Chalmers’s Biographical Dictionary it is stated, that Horace Walpole was born in 1718; and Sir Walter Scott says he was born in 1716-17, which, according to the New Style, would mean that he was born in one of the three first months of the year 1717.  Both these statements are, however, erroneous, as he himself fixes the day of his birth, in a letter to Mr. Conway, dated October 5th, 1764, where he says “What signifies what happens when one is seven-and-forty, as I am to-day?  They tell me ’tis my birthday,” And again, in a letter to the same correspondent, dated October 5th, 1777, he says, “I am three-score to-day.”