d a genuine capacity for kindliness and
even affection; and in his later years he mellowed down into an amiable
purring old gentleman, responding with eager gratitude to the caresses
of the charming Miss Berrys. Such a man, skinless and bilious, was ill
qualified to join in the rough game of politics. He kept out of the
arena where the hardest blows were given and taken, and confined his
activity to lobbies and backstairs, where scandal was to be gathered and
the hidden wires of intrigue to be delicately manipulated. He chuckles
irrepressibly when he has confided a secret to a friend, who has let it
out to a minister, who communicates it to a great personage, who
explodes into inextinguishable wrath, and blows a whole elaborate plot
into a thousand fragments. To expect deep and settled political
principle from such a man would be to look for grapes from thorns and
figs from thistles; but to do Walpole justice, we must add that it would
be equally absurd to exact settled principle from any politician of that
age. We are beginning to regard our ancestors with a strange mixture of
contempt and envy. We despise them because they cared nothing for the
thoughts which for the last century have been upheaving society into
strange convulsions; we envy them because they enjoyed the delicious
calm which was the product of that indifference. Wearied by the
incessant tossing and boiling of the torrent which carries us away, we
look back with fond regret to the little backwater so far above Niagara,
where scarcely a ripple marks the approaching rapids. There is a charm
in the great solid old eighteenth-century mansions, which London is so
rapidly engulfing, and even about the old red brick churches with
'sleep-compelling' pews. We take imaginary naps amongst our grandfathers
with no railways, no telegraphs, no mobs in Trafalgar Square, no
discussions about ritualism or Dr. Colenso, and no reports of
parliamentary debates. It is to our fancies an 'island valley of
Avilion,' or, less magniloquently, a pleasant land of Cockaine, where we
may sleep away the disturbance of battle, and even read through
'Clarissa Harlow.' We could put up with an occasional highwayman in Hyde
Park, and perhaps do not think that our comfort would be seriously
disturbed by a dozen executions in a morning at Tyburn. In such
visionary glances through the centuries we have always the advantage of
selecting our own position in life, and perhaps there are few that f