lady, Madame de Sévigné, had, with an affectionate industry, found her
chief occupation and pleasure in keeping her daughters in the provinces
fully acquainted with every event which interested or entertained Louis
XIV. and his obsequious Court; and in the first years of the eighteenth
century a noble English lady, whom we have already mentioned, did in
like manner devote no small portion of her time to recording, for the
amusement and information of her daughter, her sister, and her other
friends at home, the various scenes and occurrences that came under her
own notice in the foreign countries in which for many years her lot was
cast, as the wife of an ambassador. In liveliness of style, Lady Mary
Montague is little if at all inferior to her French prototype; while,
since she was endowed with far more brilliant talents, and, from her
foreign travels, had a wider range of observation, her letters have a
far greater interest than could attach to those of a writer, however
accomplished and sagacious, whose world was Paris, with bounds scarcely
extending beyond Versailles on one side, and Compiègne on the other. To
these fair and lively ladies Walpole was now to succeed as a third
candidate for epistolary fame; though, with his habit of underrating his
own talents, he never aspired to equal the gay Frenchwoman; (the English
lady's correspondence was as yet unknown). There is evident sincerity in
his reproof of one of his correspondents who had expressed a most
flattering opinion: "You say such extravagant things of my letters,
which are nothing but gossiping gazettes, that I cannot bear it; you
have undone yourself with me, for you compare them to Madame de
Sévigné's. Absolute treason! Do you know there is scarcely a book in the
world I love so much as her letters?"

Yet critics who should place him on an equality with her would not be
without plausible grounds for their judgement. Many circumstances
contributed to qualify him in a very special degree for the task which,