Coxe; add his keen touches, and, as in the 'Castle of
Otranto,' the portraits of our respectable old ancestors, which have
been hanging in gloomy repose upon the wall, suddenly step from their
frames, and, for some brief space, assume a spectral vitality.

It is only according to rule that a writer who has been so useful should
have been a good deal abused. No one is so amusing and so generally
unpopular as a clever retailer of gossip. Yet it does seem rather hard
that Walpole should have received such hard measure from Macaulay,
through whose pages so much of his light has been transfused. The
explanation, perhaps, is easy. Macaulay dearly loved the paradox that a
man wrote admirably precisely because he was a fool, and applied it to
the two greatest portrait painters of the times--Walpole and Boswell.
There is something which hurts our best feelings in the success of a
man whom we heartily despise. It seems to imply, which is intolerable,
that our penetration has been at fault, or that merit--that is to say,
our own conspicuous quality--is liable to be out-stripped in this world
by imposture. It is consoling if we can wrap ourselves in the belief
that good work can be extracted from bad brains, and that shallowness,
affectation, and levity can, by some strange chemistry, be transmuted
into a substitute for genius. Do we not all, if we have reached middle
age, remember some idiot (of course he was an idiot!) at school or
college who has somehow managed to slip past us in the race of life, and
revenge ourselves by swearing that he is an idiot still, and that idiocy
is a qualification for good fortune? Swift somewhere says that a
paper-cutter does its work all the better when it is blunt, and converts
the fact into an allegory of human affairs showing that decorous dulness
is an over-match for genius. Macaulay was incapable, both in a good and
bad sense, of Swift's trenchant misanthropy. His dislike to Walpole was
founded not so such upon posthumous jealousy--though that passion is not
so rare as absurd--as on the singular contrast between the character and
intellect of the two men. The typical Englishman, with his rough, strong
sense, passing at times into the narrowest insular prejudice, detested
the Frenchified fine gentleman who minced his mother tongue and piqued
himself on cosmopolitan indifference to patriotic sentiment: the
ambitious historian was irritated by the contempt which the dilettante
dabbler in literatur