already suffered so much on the young man's account.

Horace Walpole disdained the honours which brought him such solid
trouble, with such empty titles, and for some time refused to sign
himself otherwise but 'Uncle to the late Earl of Orford.' He was
certainly not likely to be able to walk in his robes to the House of
Lords, or to grace a levee. However, he thanked God he was free from
pain. 'Since all my fingers are useless,' he wrote to Hannah More, 'and
that I have only six hairs left, I am not very much grieved at not being
able to comb my head!' To Hannah More he wrote in all sincerity,
referring to his elevation to the peerage: 'For the other empty
metamorphosis that has happened to the outward man, you do me justice in
believing that it can do nothing but tease me; it is being called names
in one's old age:' in fact, he reckoned on being styled 'Lord
Methusalem.' He had lived to hear of the cruel deaths of the once gay
and high-born friends whom he had known in Paris, by the guillotine: he
had lived to execrate the monsters who persecuted the grandest heroine
of modern times, Marie Antoinette, to madness; he lived to censure the
infatuation of religious zeal in the Birmingham riots. 'Are not the
devils escaped out of the swine, and overrunning the earth
headlong?'--he asked in one of his letters.

He had offered his hand, and all the ambitious views which it opened, to
each of the Miss Berrys successively, but they refused to bear his name,
though they still cheered his solitude: and, strange to say, two of the
most admired and beloved women of their time remained single.

In 1796, the sinking invalid was persuaded to remove to Berkeley Square,
to be within reach of good and prompt advice. He consented unwillingly,
for his 'Gothic Castle' was his favourite abode. He left it with a