[1] _Letters of Horace Walpole_; Oxford University Press, 16 vols.,
96s. _Supplementary Letters_, 1919; Oxford University Press, 2
vols., 17s.


Horace Walpole was "a dainty rogue in porcelain" who walked badly. In his
best days, as he records in one of his letters, it was said of him that he
"tripped like a pewit." "If I do not flatter myself," he wrote when he was
just under sixty, "my march at present is more like a dab-chick's." A lady
has left a description of him entering a room, "knees bent, and feet on
tiptoe as if afraid of a wet floor." When his feet were not swollen with
the gout, they were so slender, he said, that he "could dance a minuet on
a silver penny." He was ridiculously lean, and his hands were crooked with
his unmerited disease. An invalid, a caricature of the birds, and not
particularly well dressed in spite of his lavender suit and partridge silk
stockings, he has nevertheless contrived to leave in his letters an
impression of almost perfect grace and dandyism. He had all the airs of a
beau. He affected coolness, disdain, amateurishness, triviality. He was a
china figure of insolence. He lived on the mantelpiece, and regarded
everything that happened on the floor as a rather low joke that could not
be helped. He warmed into humanity in his friendships and in his defence
of the house of Walpole; but if he descended from his mantelpiece, it was
more likely to be in order to feed a squirrel than to save an empire. His
most common image of the world was a puppet-show. He saw kings, prime
ministers, and men of genius alike about the size of dolls. When George
II. died, he wrote a brief note to Thomas Brand: "Dear Brand--You love
laughing; there is a king dead; can you help coming to town?" That
represents his measure of things. Those who love laughing will laugh all
the more when they discover that, a week earlier, Walpole had written a