In his old age, Horace delighted in recalling anecdotes of his infancy;
in these his mother's partiality largely figured. Brought up among
courtiers and ministers, his childish talk was all of kings and princes;
and he was a gossip both by inclination and habit. His greatest desire
in life was to see the king--George I., and his nurses and attendants
augmented his wish by their exalted descriptions of the grandeur which
he effected, in after-life, to despise. He entreated his mother to take
him to St. James's. When relating the incidents of the scene in which he
was first introduced to a court, Horace Walpole speaks of the 'infinite
good-nature of his father, who never thwarted any of his children,' and
'suffered him,' he says, 'to be too much indulged.'

Some difficulties attended the fruition of the forward boy's wish. The
Duchess of Kendal was jealous of Sir Robert Walpole's influence with the
king: her aim was to bring Lord Bolingbroke into power. The childish
fancy was, nevertheless, gratified: and under his mother's care he was
conducted to the apartments of the Duchess of Kendal in St. James's.

'A favour so unusual to be asked by a boy of ten years old,' he
afterwards wrote in his 'Reminiscences,' 'was still too slight to be
refused to the wife of the first minister and her darling child.'
However, as it was not to be a precedent, the interview was to be
private, and at night.

It was ten o'clock in the evening when Lady Walpole, leading her son,
was admitted into the apartments of Melusina de Schulenberg, Countess of
Walsingham, who passed under the name of the Duchess of Kendal's niece,
but who was, in fact, her daughter, by George I. The polluted rooms in
which Lady Walsingham lived were afterwards occupied by the two