ofesses a few years
afterwards, must end in 'despotism, a civil war, or assassination,' and
he remarks that the age will not, as he had always thought, be an age of
abortion, but rather 'the age of seeds that are to produce strange crops
hereafter.' The next century, he says at a later period, 'will probably
exhibit a very new era, which the close of this has been, and is,
preparing.' If these sentences had been uttered by Burke, they would
have been quoted as proofs of remarkable sagacity. As it is, we may
surely call them shrewd glances for a frivolous coxcomb.

Walpole regarded these symptoms in the true epicurean spirit, and would
have joined in the sentiment, _apres moi le deluge_. He was on the whole
for remedying grievances, and is put rather out of temper by cruelties
which cannot be kept out of his sight. He talks with disgust of the old
habit of stringing up criminals by the dozen; he denounces the
slave-trade with genuine fervour; there is apparent sincerity in his
platitudes against war; and he never took so active a part in politics
as in the endeavour to prevent the judicial murder of Byng. His
conscience generally discharged itself more easily by a few pungent
epigrams, and though he wished the reign of reason and humanity to dawn,
he would rather that it should not come at all than be ushered in by a
tempest. His whole theory is given forcibly and compactly in an answer
which he once made to the republican Mrs. Macaulay, and was fond of
repeating:--'Madam, if I had been Luther, and could have known that for
the _chance_ of saving a million of souls I should be the cause of a
million of lives, at least, being sacrificed before my doctrines could
be established, it must have been a most palpable angel, and in a most
heavenly livery, before he should have set me at work.' We will not ask
what angel would have induced him to make the minor sacrifice of six
thousand a year to establish any conceivable doctrine. Whatever may be
the merit of these opinions, they contain Walpole's whole theory of
life. I know, he seems to have said to himself, that loyalty is folly,
that rank is contemptible, that the old society in which I live is
rotten to the core, and that explosive matter is accumulating beneath
our feet. Well! I am not made of the stuff for a reformer: I am a bit of
a snob, though, like other snobs, I despise both parties to the bargain.
I will take the sinecures the gods provide me, amuse myself with my
t