or
such purposes we should prefer to Walpole's. We should lap ourselves
against eating cares in the warm folds of a sinecure of 6,000_l._ a year
bestowed because our father was a Prime Minister. There are many
immaculate persons at the present day to whom truth would be truth even
when seen through such a medium. There are--we have their own authority
for believing it--men who would be republicans, though their niece was
married to a royal duke. Walpole, we must admit, was not of the number.
He was an aristocrat to the backbone. He was a gossip by nature and
education, and had lived from infancy in the sacred atmosphere of court
intrigue; every friend he possessed in his own rank either had a place,
or had lost a place, or was in want of a place, and generally combined
all three characters; professed indifference to place was only a cunning
mode of angling for a place, and politics was a series of
ingeniously-contrived manoeuvres in which the moving power of the
machinery was the desire of sharing the spoils. Walpole's talk about
Magna Charta and the execution of Charles I. could, it is plain, imply
but a skin-deep republicanism. He could not be seriously displeased with
a state of things of which his own position was the natural out-growth.
His republicanism was about as genuine as his boasted indifference to
money--a virtue which is not rare in bachelors who have more than they
can spend. So long as he could buy as much bric-a-brac, as many
knicknacks, and old books and bronzes and curious portraits and odd
gloves of celebrated characters as he pleased; add a new tower and a set
of battlements to Strawberry Hill every few years; keep a comfortable
house in London, and have a sufficiency of carriages and horses; treat
himself to an occasional tour, and keep his press steadily at work; he
was not the man to complain of poverty. He was a republican, too, as
long as that word implied that he and his father and uncles and cousins
and connections by marriage and their intimate friends were to have
everything precisely their own way; but if a vision could have shown him
the reformers of a coming generation who would inquire into civil lists
and object to sinecures--to say nothing of cutting off the heads of the
first families--he would have prayed to be removed before the evil day.
Republicanism in his sense was a word exclusive of revolution. Was it,
then, a mere meaningless mask intended only to conceal the real man?
Before