Carr, Lord Hervey, was witty, eccentric, and sarcastic: and from him
Horace Walpole is said to have inherited his wit, his eccentricity, his
love of literature, and his profound contempt for all mankind, excepting
only a few members of a cherished and exclusive _clique_.

In the Notes of his life which Horace Walpole left for the use of his
executor, Robert Berry, Esq., and of his daughter, Miss Berry, he makes
this brief mention of Lady Walpole:--'My mother died in 1737.' He was
then twenty years of age.

But beneath this seemingly slight recurrence to his mother, a regret
which never left him through life was buried. Like Cowper, he mourned,
as the profoundest of all sorrows, the loss of that life-long friend.

'My mother, when I learn'd that thou wast dead,
Say, wast thou conscious of the tears I shed?
Hovered thy spirit o'er thy sorrowing son?
Wretch even then, life's journey just begun.'

Although Horace in many points bore a strong resemblance to Sir Robert
Walpole, he rarely if ever received from that jovial, heartless, able
man, any proof of affection. An outcast from his father's heart, the
whole force of the boy's love centred in his mother; yet in after-life
no one reverenced Sir Robert Walpole so much as his supposed son. To be
adverse to the minister was to be adverse to the unloved son who
cherished his memory. What 'my father' thought, did, and said, was law;
what his foes dared to express was heresy. Horace had the family mania
strong upon him; the world was made for Walpoles, whose views were never
to be controverted, nor whose faith impugned. Yet Horace must have