er mentions hell in discussing
the theories of Edwards.

_HORACE WALPOLE_

The history of England, throughout a very large segment of the
eighteenth century, is simply a synonym for the works of Horace Walpole.
There are, indeed, some other books upon the subject. Some good stories
are scattered up and down the 'Annual Register,' the 'Gentleman's
Magazine,' and Nichols' 'Anecdotes.' There is a speech or two of Burke's
not without merit, and a readable letter may be disinterred every now
and then from beneath the piles of contemporary correspondence. When the
history of the times comes to be finally written in the fashion now
prevalent, in which some six portly octavos are allotted to a year, and
an event takes longer to describe than to occur, the industrious will
find ample mines of waste paper in which they may quarry to their
heart's content. Though Hansard was not, and newspapers were in their
infancy, the shelves of the British Museum and other repositories groan
beneath mountains of State papers, law reports, pamphlets, and chaotic
raw materials, from which some precious ore may be smelted down. But
these amorphous masses are attractive chiefly to the philosophers who
are too profound to care for individual character, or to those
praiseworthy students who would think the labour of a year well rewarded
by the discovery of a single fact tending to throw a shade of additional
perplexity upon the secret of Junius. Walpole's writings belong to the
good old-fashioned type of history, which aspires to be nothing more
than the quintessence of contemporary gossip. If the opinion be
pardonable in these days, history of that kind has not only its charm,
but its serious value. If not very profound or comprehensive, it
impresses upon us the fact--so often forgotten--that our grandfathers
were human beings. The ordinary historian reduces them to mere
mechanical mummies; in Walpole's pages they are still living flesh and
blood. Turn over any of the proper decorous history books, mark every
passage where, for a moment, we seem to be transported to the past--to
the thunders of Chatham, the drivellings of Newcastle, or the prosings
of George Grenville, as they sounded in contemporary ears--and it will
be safe to say that, on counting them up, a good half will turn out to
be reflections from the illuminating flashes of Walpole. Excise all that
comes from him, and the history sinks towards the level of the solid
Archdeacon