Walpi

“ He will stand the great test that one can go into the world with him and not be ashamed of him. I know, dearest, even without that shake of the head, the small value you attach to this, but it is a great element in that droll contract, by which one person agrees to pit his temper against another’s, and which we are told is made in heaven, with angels as sponsors. Mr. Walpole is sufficiently good-looking to be prepossessing, he is well bred, very courteous, converses extremely well, knows his exact place in life, and takes it quietly but firmly. ”

“ Walpole, sir, I believe it is full time you should say so.’
‘I neither approve nor disapprove of him. I don’t well know whether I have any right to do either—I mean so far as to influence her choice. He belongs to a sort of men I know as little about as I do of the Choctaw Indians. They have lives and notions and ways all unlike ours. The world is so civil to them that it prepares everything to their taste. ”

“ Of an evening, in summer-time, trim Horace and portly Clive might be seen walking in the meadows together; or Walpole and a brilliant company, gossiping, laughing, flirting, philandering, might be noted on their way across the grass to Strawberry, after a gay time of it at "Little Strawberry Hill." Not always without mishap, as Walpole himself has recorded in his narrative of his perilous passing of the stile with Miss Rich; and not invariably in the very sunniest of humours, for Miss Pope had seen Horace "gloomy of temper and dryly sarcastic of speech." ”

“ Walpole had adopted Atlee because he found him useful in a variety of ways. He was adroit, ready-witted, and intelligent; a half-explanation sufficed with him on anything—a mere hint was enough to give him for an interview or a reply. He read people readily, and rarely failed to profit by the knowledge. Strange as it may seem, the great blemish of his manner—his snobbery—Walpole rather liked than disliked it. I was a sort of qualifying element that satisfied him, as though it said, ‘With all that fellow’s cleverness, he is not “one of us.” ”

“ Can’t you see that your confounded song is driving me mad?’
‘Faix, ye’re the first I ever see disliked music,’ muttered he, in a tone almost compassionate.
And now as Walpole raised the collar of his coat to defend his ears, and prepared, as well as he might, to resist the weather, he muttered, ‘And this is the beautiful land of scenery; and this the climate; and this the amusing and witty peasant we read of. ”

“ Unhappy Prince that I am! cried Manfred—Holy Father! will you not assist me with your prayers? My Lord, replied Jerome, heaven is no doubt displeased with your mockery of its servants. Submit yourself to the church; and cease to persecute her ministers. Dismiss this innocent youth; and learn to respect the holy character I wear: Heaven will not be trifled with: you see—the trumpet sounded again. I acknowledge I have been too hasty: said Manfred. Father, do you go to the wicket, and demand who is at the gate. Do you grant me the life of Theodore? replied the Friar. I do; said Manfred ”

“ One of the latter, Lord Chief-Justice Willes, being complimented on Lord Granville’s return to Court, replied, “He my friend! He is nobody’s friend: I will give you a proof. Sir Robert Walpole had promised me to make my friend Clive one of the King’s Council; but too late! I asked him to request it of Mr. Pelham, who promised, but did not perform. When Lord Granville was in the height of his power, I one day said to him, ‘My Lord, you are going to the King; do ask him to make poor Clive one of his Council.’ He replied, ‘What is it to me who is a Judge, or who a Bishop? ”

“ Even that fine statesman, Lord Minto, pronounced him "a prim, precise, pretending, conceited savage; but a most un-English one;" and in proof, either of his primness, or of the gentle character of his savagery, Walpole loved and cherished cats. When his favourite met her tragic death, he wrote to Gray, bewailing the loss he had sustained; and the poet, in doubt as to which of his friend's cats had been drowned, replied with a playful letter of condolence, ("Learn, my son, to bear tranquilly the misfortunes of others,") and with the charming verses which have immortalized Selima's memory. ”

“ Walpole's own account, given to Mason, is a candid confession that his own supercilious treatment of a companion socially inferior and singularly proud, shy and sensitive, was the cause of the difference. Walpole had made a will on starting, leaving whatever he possessed to Gray (Walpole, Letters, v. 443) ; but the tie between the fellow-travellers has become irksome to more congenial companions. Gray went to Venice alone, and returned through Verona, Milan, Turin, and Lyons, which he reached on 25 Aug. On his way he again visited the ‘Grande Chartreuse,’ and wrote his famous Latin ode. ”

“ What say you? 'Tis Canon Keppel, brother to Lord Albemarle; and mark you, Kitty--the Honourable Mrs Keppel has the right to be presented where Miss Laura might knock at the door in vain! We come up in the world, child; but the Walpoles had always that secret.
'Twill set the other charming daughters dreaming of bride-cake. All the world talks of Maria, a shining beauty indeed. Horry Walpole is enchanted at Miss Laura's match--sure, an illegitimate Walpole, if niece to the Baron of Strawberry, is worth a dozen of your Cavendishes and Somersets! ”

“ These epistles the fair-haired, blue-eyed, sweet-voiced woman would bring weeping to Walpole, in search of the comfort which he graciously gave, by assuring her that now that she was growing old she must expect this sort of thing! A little later Walpole drove from here to Kensington, and stood beside the King at her deathbed; Caroline commending to Walpole’s protection her husband and his monarch! Here came Bolingbroke on his return from his exile in France, to dine at the invitation of his great rival, whom he hated and envied. ”

“ They continued to reside with Mann at Florence until May in the following year. Upon Gray the 'violent delights' of the Tuscan capital had already begun to pall. It is, he says, 'an excellent place to employ all one's animal sensations in, but utterly contrary to one's rational powers.' Walpole, on the other hand, is in his element. 'I am so well within and without,' he says in the same letter which sketches Lady Mary, 'that you would scarce know me: I am younger than ever, think of nothing but diverting myself, and live in a round of pleasures. ”

“ Walpole, on account of those halfpence; I dare boldly affirm, it was entirely owing to Mr. Wood. Many persons of credit, come from England, have affirmed to me, and others, that they have seen letters under his hand, full of arrogance and insolence towards Ireland; and boasting of his favour with Mr. Walpole; which is highly probable: Because he reasonably thought it for his interest to spread such a report; and because it is the known talent of low and little spirits, to have a great man's name perpetually in their mouths. ”

“ We learn more from Walpole than from Lady Mary. In November 1751, Walpole, writing to Mann, remarks that all the letters from Paris were very ‘cautious of relating the circumstances.’ He styles Montagu and Taafe as the ‘two gentlemen who were pharaoh-bankers to Madame de Mirepoix’ in England, and ‘who had travelled to France to exercise the same profession.’ Walpole adds that they had ‘been released on excessive bail, are still to be tried, and may be sent to the galleys or dismissed home, where they will be reduced to keep the best company ”

“ He became the favourite pupil and devoted supporter of Sir Robert Walpole, achieving unequalled and unenviable proficiency in the worst political arts of his master and model. As a speaker he was fluent and self-possessed, imperturbable under attack, audacious in exposition or retort, and able to hold his own against Pitt himself. ”

“ From this sweeping question we cannot except Pitt, who was bitterly denouncing Walpole for his pacific attitude, and had afterwards to confess that Walpole had been right.
We regard Walpole, then, first and foremost as a man146 of business, led into the great error with which history reproaches him by his brother men of business. Still, his qualities in that capacity would not have maintained him for years as Prime Minister. They proved him to be a hard-working man with practical knowledge of affairs and strong common sense; a sagacious man who hated extremes. ”

“ Walpole is against this project of Mr. Wood, and is an entire friend to Ireland, only by this one invincible argument; that he has the universal opinion of being a wise man, an able minister, and in all his proceedings pursuing the true interest of the king his master: and that as his integrity is above all corruption, so is his fortune above all temptation. ”

“ That was Walpole's method; with this to aid his great natural faculty, long-headed, deep-bellied, suitable to the English Parliament and Nation, he went along with perfect success for ten or twenty years. And it might have been for longer,—had not the English Nation accidentally come to wish, that it should CEASE jumbling NO-whither; and try to jumble SOME-whither, at least for a little while, on important business that had risen for England in a certain quarter. Had it not been for Jenkins's Ear blazing out in the dark English brain, Walpole might have lasted still a long while. ”

“ He quitted King's College in 1739, and at the end of March in that year left England in company with Gray on the regulation grand tour. Walpole was to be paymaster, but Gray was to be independent. They made a short stay in Paris and then went to Rheims, where they remained three months to improve themselves in the language. From Rheims they went to Dijon and Lyons, where, after an excursion to Geneva, Walpole found letters from his father telling him to go on to Italy. Accordingly they crossed the Alps, travelling from Turin to Genoa, and ultimately, in the Christmas of 1739, entered Florence. ”

“ Walpole was again and again placed in the position of having to encounter {233} some little faction of this kind by open exercise of power or by the process of corruption, and he usually found the latter course more convenient and ready. Nor could such a man at any period of English history have remained long without more or less formidable rivals. Walpole himself must have known well enough that the death of men like Sunderland, or the death or any number of men, could not, so long as England was herself, secure him for long an undisturbed political field, with no head raised against him. ”

“ The news of his receiving priest's orders at Rome was before long carried home by the spies who were watching him, and in 1597 he was outlawed ‘for a supposed treason done at Rome.’ Undeterred by this proclamation, Walpole returned to England the next year, and began to exercise his functions as a Roman priest and Jesuit missioner, though hunted about from place to place, not seldom in great peril of his life. After his return to England he passed under the name of Rich as an alias. ”

“ In his foreign policy Walpole was influenced by similar principles. Though the Peace of Utrecht was a Tory peace, its maintenance, and that of the balance of power it had established, was his chief object. Anything was better than that England should be engaged in war. War at once opened the door for Jacobite hopes. War at once touched that material prosperity which was to be the surest claim of gratitude to the reigning house. Moreover, as a financier, Walpole hated war. It was in this capacity, if we set aside his general ability and skill in management, that Walpole was greatest. ”

“ Walpole, if we may trust the title-page of the 'little lounging miscellany' known as 'Walpoliana,' reported his friend's dictum with greater moderation. 'Mr. Gray the poet has often observed to me, that, if any person were to form a Book of what he had seen and heard himself, it must, in whatever hands, prove a most useful and entertaining one.' As a generalisation, this leaves nothing to be desired. ”

“ It seems an odd sort of reward for the shrewd, practical, and somewhat coarse-fibred squire-statesman. The close connection between man and the child, civilized man and the savage, is never more clearly illustrated than in the joy and pride which the wisest statesman feels in the wearing of a ribbon or a star. In the next year the King made Walpole a Knight of the Garter; after this honor all other mark of dignity {253} would be but an anti-climax. From the time of his introduction to the Order of the Bath, the great minister ceased to be plain Mr. Walpole, and became Sir Robert Walpole. ”

“ Although, during his stay in Italy, Walpole had neglected to accumulate the store of erudition which his friend Gray had been so industriously hiving for home consumption, he can scarcely be said to have learned nothing, especially at an age when much is learned unconsciously. His epistolary style, which, with its peculiar graces and pseudo-graces, had been already formed before he left England, had now acquired a fresh vivacity from his increased familiarity with the French and Italian languages ”

“ An able speaker, without being a great orator, a superb administrator, eager rather for power than for good, rating men low by instinct and corrupting them by intelligence, Walpole was not the man, either in type of mind or of temperament, to bring great questions to the foreground of debate. He was content to maintain his hold over the respect of the Crown, and to punish able rivals by exclusion from office. One by one, the younger men of talent, Carteret, Pulteney, Chesterfield, Pitt, were driven into hostility. ”