er's representative, and as such to be
consulted by those who considered themselves as the heirs of his policy,
while the leader of that party in the House of Commons, General Conway,
was his cousin, and the man for whom he ever felt the strongest personal
attachment,--were all advantages which fell to the lot of but few. And
to these may be added the variety of his tastes, as attested by the
variety of his published works. He was a man who observed everything,
who took an interest in everything. His correspondents, too, were so
various and different as to ensure a variety in his letters. Some were
politicians, ministers at home, or envoys abroad; some were female
leaders of fashion, planning balls and masquerades, summoning him to
join an expedition to Ranelagh or Vauxhall; others were scholars, poets,
or critics, inviting comments on Gray's poems, on Robertson's style, on
Gibbon's boundless learning; or on the impostures of Macpherson and
Chatterton; others, again, were antiquarians, to whom the helmet of
Francis, or a pouncet-box of the fair Diana, were objects of far greater
interest than the intrigues of a Secretary of State, or the expedients
of a Chancellor of the Exchequer; and all such subjects are discussed by
him with evidently equal willingness, equal clearness, and liveliness.

It would not be fair to regard as a deduction from the value of those
letters which bear on the politics of the day the necessity of
confessing that they are not devoid of partiality--that they are
coloured with his own views, both of measures and persons. Not only were
political prejudices forced upon him by the peculiarities of his
position, but it may be doubted whether any one ever has written, or can
write, of transactions of national importance which are passing under
his own eyes, as it were, with absolute impartiality. It may even be a
question whether, if any one did so, it would not detract from his own
character, at least as much as it might add to the value of his
writings. In one of his letters, Byron enumerates among the merits of
Mitford's "History of Greece," "wrath and partiality," explaining that
such ingredients make a man write "in earnest." And, in Walpole's case,
the dislike which he naturally felt towards those who had overthrown his
father's administration by what, at a later day, they themselves
admitted to have been a factious and blamable opposition, was sharpened
by his friendship for his cousin Conway. At