with them as he feared
collision with the 'mountains of roast beef.' Though literature was
emerging from the back lanes and alleys, the two greatest potentates of
the day, Johnson and Warburton, had both a decided cross of the bear in
their composition. Walpole was nervously anxious to keep out of their
jurisdiction, and to sit at the feet of such refined lawgivers as Mason
and Gray, or the feebler critics of polite society. In such courts there
naturally passes a good deal of very flimsy flattery between persons who
are alternately at the bar or on the bench. We do not quite believe that
Lady Di Beauclerk's drawings were unsurpassable by 'Salvator Rosa and
Guido,' or that Lady Ailesbury's 'landscape in worsteds' was a work of
high art; and we doubt whether Walpole believed it; nor do we fancy that
he expected Sir Horace Mann to believe that when sitting in his room at
Strawberry Hill, he was in the habit of apostrophising the setting sun
in such terms as these: 'Look at yon sinking beams! His gaudy reign is
over; but the silver moon above that elm succeeds to a tranquil
horizon,' &c. Sweeping aside all this superficial rubbish, as a mere
concession to the faded taste of the age of hoops and wigs, Walpole has
something to say for himself. He has been condemned for the absurdity of
his criticisms, and it is undeniable that he sometimes blunders
strangely. It would, indeed, be easy to show, were it worth while, that
he is by no means so silly in his contemporary verdicts as might be
supposed from scattered passages in his letters. But what are we to say
to a man who compares Dante to 'a Methodist parson in Bedlam'? The first
answer is that, in this instance, Walpole was countenanced by greater
men. Voltaire, with all his faults the most consummate literary artist
of the century, says with obvious disgust that there are people to be
found who force themselves to admire 'feats of imagination as stupidly
extravagant and barbarous' as those of the 'Divina Commedia.' Walpole
must be reckoned as belonging both in his faults and his merits to the
Voltairian school of literature, and amongst other peculiarities common
to the master and his disciple, may be counted an incapacity for
reverence and an intense dislike to being bored. For these reasons he
hates all epic poets, from Dante to Blackmore; he detests all didactic
poems, including those of Thomson and Akenside; and he is utterly
scandalised by the French enthusiasm for Richa