But Dr. Paget Toynbee, in his supplementary volumes of Walpole letters,
recently published, has been able to print one to Lady Walpole written at
the age of eight, which suggests that Walpole was a delightful sort of
child, incapable of forgetting a parent, a friend, or a pet:

Dear mama, I hop you are wall, and I am very wall, and I hop papa
is wal, and I begin to slaap, and I hop al wall and my cosens like
there pla things vary wall

and I hop Doly phillips is wall and pray
give my Duty to papa.
HORACE WALPOLE.

and I am very glad to hear by Tom that all my cruatuars are all
wall. and Mrs. Selwyn has sprand her Fot and givs her Sarves to you
and I dind ther yester Day.

At Eton later on he was a member of two leagues of friendship--the
"Triumvirate," as it was called, which included the two Montagus, and the
"Quadruple Alliance," in which one of his fellows was Gray. The truth is,
Walpole was always a person who depended greatly on being loved. "One
loves to find people care for one," he wrote to Conway, "when they can
have no view in it." His friendship in his old age for the Miss
Berrys--his "twin wifes," his "dear Both"--to each of whom he left an
annuity of L4,000, was but a continuation of that kindliness which ran
like a stream (ruffled and sparkling with malice, no doubt) through his
long life. And his kindness was not limited to his friends, but was at the
call of children and, as we have seen, of animals. "You know," he explains
to Conway, apologizing for not being able to visit him on account of the
presence of a "poor little sick girl" at Strawberry Hill, "how courteous a
knight I am to distrest virgins of five years old, and that my castle
gates are always open to them." One does not think of Walpole primarily as
a squire of children, and certainly, though he loved on occasion to romp
with the young, there was little in him of a Dickens character. But he was
what is called "sympathetic." He was sufficient of a man of imagination to
wish to see an end put to the sufferings of "those poor victims,
chimney-sweepers." So far from being a heartless person, as he has been at
times portrayed, he had a heart as sensitive as an anti-vivisectionist.
This was shown in his attitude to animals. In 1760, when there was a great
terror of mad dogs in London, and an order was issued that all dogs found
in the streets were to be kille