an revel was
inflamed into national frenzy--that this riot of naked vice was to be
punished and extinguished by the dungeon and the scaffold?

Walpole, though formed in courts, fashioned in politics, and a haunter
of high life to the last, now and then exhibits a feeling worthy of a
manlier vocation, and an honester time. "If I do not forbid myself
censure," says he, "at least I shall shun that poison of histories,
flattery. How has it predominated in writers. My Lord Bacon was almost
as profuse of his incense to the memory of dead kings, as he was
infamous for clouding the memory of the living with it. Commines, an
honester writer, though I fear, by the masters whom he pleased, not a
much less servile courtier, says that the virtues of Louis XI.
preponderated over his vices. Even Voltaire has in a manner purified the
dross of adulation which contemporary authors had squandered on Louis
XIV. by adopting and refining it after the tyrant was dead."

He then becomes courageous, and writes in his castle of Strawberry Hill,
what he never would have dared to breathe in the circle of St. James's.
"If any thing can shock one of those mortal divinities, and they must be
shocked before they can be corrected, it would be to find, that the
truth would be related of them at last. Nay, is it not cruel to them to
hallow their memories. One is sure that they will never hear truth;
shall they not even have a chance of reading it?"

In all great political movements, where the authority of a nation has
been shaken, we are strongly inclined to think that the shock has
originated in mal-administration at home. Some of the most remarkable
passages in these volumes relate to our early neglect of the American
Colonies. In the perpetual struggles of public men for power, the remote
world of the West seemed to be wholly forgotten, or to be remembered
only when an old governor was recalled, or a new creature of office sent
out. Those great provinces had been in the especial department of the
Secretary of State, assisted by the Board of Trade. That secretary had
been the Duke of Newcastle, a man whose optics seem never to have
reached beyond Whitehall. It would scarcely be credited, what reams of
papers, representations, memorials, and petitions from that quarter of
the world lay mouldering and unopened in his office. He even knew as
little of the geography of his province, as of the state of it. During
the war, while the French were encroaching