uffered, and he was compelled by pain to have recourse to heavy doses
of opium, which kept him insensible for the greater part of every day
during more than six weeks. When the stupefying effect of the opium
was not on him--that is, for {196} some two or three hours each day--he
talked with all that former vivacity which of late years seemed to have
deserted him. He knew that the end was coming, and he bore the
knowledge with characteristic courage. On March 18, 1745, he died at
his London house in Arlington Street. Life could have had of late but
little charm for him. He had always lived for public affairs and for
power. He had none of the gifts of seclusion. Except for his love of
pictures, he had no in-door intellectual resources. He could not bury
himself in literature as Carteret could do; or, at a later day, Charles
James Fox; or, at a later day still, Mr. Gladstone. Walpole's life
really came to an end the day he left the House of Commons; the rest
was silence. He was only in his sixty-ninth year when he died. It was
fitting that he should lose his life in striving to assist and counsel
the sovereign whose family he more than any other man or set of men had
seated firmly on the throne of England. His faults were many; his
personal virtues perhaps but few. One great and consummate public
virtue he certainly had: he was devoted to the interests of his
country. In the building of Nelson's ships it was said that the oak of
Houghton Woods excelled all other timber. Oak from the same woods was
used to make musket-stocks for Wellington's soldiers in the long war
against Napoleon. Walpole's own fibre was something like that of the
oaks which grew on his domain. His policy on two of the most eventful
occasions of his life has been amply justified by history. He was
right in the principles of his Excise Bill; he was right in opposing
the war policy of the Patriots. The very men who had leagued against
him in both these instances acknowledged afterwards that he was right
and that they were wrong. It was in an evil moment for himself that he
yielded to the policy of the Patriots, and tried to carry on a war in
which he had no sympathy, and from which he had no hope. He was a
great statesman; almost, but not quite, a great man.

[Sidenote: 1744--Death of Pope]

Not very long before Walpole's death a star of all but {197} the first
magnitude had set in the firmament of English literature. Alexander
Pope