entioned, Barbey d'Aurevilly, though he
admits Horace's _esprit_ pronounces it _un fruit brillant, amer, et
glace_. There are undoubtedly many things to be said against him as a
man--if you take the "Letters-a-telltale-of-character" view, especially
so. He was certainly spiteful, and he had the particularly
awkward--though from one point of view not wholly unamiable--peculiarity
of being what may be called spiteful at second hand. To stand up for
your friends at the proper time and in the proper place is the duty, and
should be the pleasure, of every gentleman. But to bite and for the most
part, if not almost always, to _back_-bite your friends' supposed
enemies--often when they have done nothing adverse to those friends on
the particular occasion--is the act at the best of an intempestively
officious person, at the worst of a cur. And Horace was always doing
this in regard to all sorts of people--his abuse of Johnson himself, of
Chesterfield and Lady Mary, of Fielding and others, having no personal
excuse or reason whatsoever.

His taste in collecting, building, etc., is not a matter in which men of
other times should be too ready to throw stones, for taste in all such
matters at almost all times, however sure a stronghold it may seem to
those who occupy it, is the most brittle of glass-houses to others. He
had also a considerable touch of almost original genius in important
kinds of literature, as _The Mysterious Mother_ and _The Castle of
Otranto_ showed--a touch which undoubtedly helped him in his letters.
But of critical power he had nothing at all; and his knowledge (save,
perhaps in Art) was anything but extensive and still less accurate.
Politically he was a mere baby, all the eighty years of his life; though
he passed many of them in the House of Commons and might have passed
several in the House of Lords, had he chosen to attend it. When he was
young he was a theoretical republican rejoicing in the execution of
Charles I.: when he was old the French Revolution was to him anathema
and he was horrified at the execution of Louis XVI. He was incapable of
sustaining, perhaps of understanding, an argument: everything with him
was a matter, as the defamers of women say it is with them, of personal
and arbitrary fancy, prejudice, or whim.

But all this does not prevent him from being one of the best
letter-writers in the English language: and if you take bulk of work
along with variety of subject; maintenance of inte