his own eyes, as it were, with absolute impartiality. It may even be a
question whether, if any one did so, it would not detract from his own
character, at least as much as it might add to the value of his
writings. In one of his letters, Byron enumerates among the merits of
Mitford's "History of Greece," "wrath and partiality," explaining that
such ingredients make a man write "in earnest." And, in Walpole's case,
the dislike which he naturally felt towards those who had overthrown his
father's administration by what, at a later day, they themselves
admitted to have been a factious and blamable opposition, was sharpened
by his friendship for his cousin Conway. At the same time we may remark
in passing that his opinions and prejudices were not so invincible as to
blind him to real genius and eminent public services; and the admirers
of Lord Chatham may fairly draw an argument in favour of his policy from
Walpole's admission of its value in raising the spirit of the people; an
admission which, it may be supposed, it must have gone against his grain
to make in favour of a follower of Pulteney.

But from his letters on other topics, on literature and art, no such
deduction has to be made. His judgement was generally sound and
discriminating. He could appreciate the vast learning and stately
grandiloquence of Gibbon, and the widely different style of Robertson.
Nor is it greatly to his discredit that his disgust at what he considers
Hume's needless parade of scepticism and infidelity, which did honour
to his heart, blinded him in a great degree to the historian's
unsurpassed acuteness and insight, and (to borrow the eulogy of Gibbon)
"the careless inimitable felicities" of his narrative. He was among the
first to recognize the peculiar genius of Crabbe, and to detect the
impostures of Macpherson and Chatterton, while doing full justice to
"the astonishing prematurity" of the latter's genius. And in matters of
art, so independent as well as correct was his taste, that he not only,