oys at Strawberry Hill, despise kings and ministers, without
endangering my head by attacking them, and be over-polite to a royal
duke when he visits me on condition of laughing at him behind his back
when he is gone. Walpole does not deserve a statue; he was not a
Wilberforce or a Howard, and as little of a Burke or a Chatham. But his
faults, as well as his virtues, qualified him to be the keenest of all
observers of a society unconsciously approaching a period of tremendous
convulsions.

To claim for him that, even at his best, he is a profound observer of
character, or that he gives any consistent account of his greatest
contemporaries, would be too much. He is full of whims, and moreover,
full of spite. He cannot be decently fair to anyone who deserted his
father, or stood in Conway's light. He reflects at all times the
irreverent gossip current behind the scenes. To know the best and the
worst that can be said of any great man, the best plan is to read the
leading article of his party newspaper, and then to converse in private
with its writer. The eulogy and the sarcasm may both be sincere enough;
only it is pleasant, after puffing one's wares to the public, to glance
at their seamy side in private. Walpole has a decided taste for that
last point of view. The littleness of the great, the hypocrisy of the
virtuous, and the selfishness of statesmen in general, is his ruling
theme, illustrated by an infinite variety of brilliant caricatures
struck off at the moment with a quick eye and a sure hand. Though he
elaborates no grand historical portrait, like Burke or Clarendon, he has
a whole gallery of telling vignettes which are often as significant as
far more pretentious works. Nowhere, for example, can we find more
graphic sketches of the great man who stands a head and shoulders above
the whole generation of dealers in power and place. Most of Chatham's
contemporaries repaid his contempt with intense dislike. Some of them
pronounced him mad, and others thought him a knave. Walpole, who at
times calls him a mountebank and an impostor, does not go further than
Burke, who, in a curious comment, speaks of him as the 'grand artificer
of fraud,' who never conversed but with 'a parcel of low toad-eaters;'
and asks whether all this 'theatrical stuffing' and these 'raised heels'
could be necessary to the character of a great man. Walpole, of course,
has a keen eye to the theatrical stuffing. He takes the least
complimentary v