every country, and an easy and genteel conformity to them, or rather
the assuming of them at proper times and proper places, is what
particularly constitutes a man of the world, and a well-bred man!" All
true enough, but how shallow, and how ineffably conceited! Here is
another absurd fragment--"My dear boy, let us resume our reflections
upon men, their character, their manners--in a word, our reflections
upon the World." It is quite like Mr. Pecksniff's finest vein. There
is not a touch of nature or vital truth in the Chesterfield letters,
and the most that can be said of them is that they are the work of a
fairly clever man who was flattered until he lost all sense of his
real size. If we take the whole bunch of finikin sermons and compare
them with the one tremendous knock-down letter which Johnson sent to
the dandy earl, we can easily see who was the Man of the pair. When we
return to Walpole, the case is different. Horace never posed at all;
he was a natural gentleman, and anything like want of simplicity was
odious to him. The age lives in his charming letters; after going
through them we feel as though we had been on familiar terms with that
wicked, corrupt, outwardly delightful society that gambled and drank,
and scandalised the grave spirits of the nation, in the days when
George III. was young. Horace Walpole was the letter-writer of
letter-writers; his gossip carries the impress of truth with it; and,
though he had no style, no brilliancy, no very superior ability, yet,
by using his faculties in a natural way, he was able to supply
material for two of the finest literary fragments of modern times. I
take it that the most stirring and profoundly wise piece of modern
history is Carlyle's brief account of William Pitt, given in the "Life
of Frederick the Great." Once we have read it we feel as though the
great commoner had stood before us for a while under a searching
light; his figure is imprinted on the very nerves, and no man who has
read carefully can ever shake off an impression that seems burnt into