872 



WALPOLE. 



debates, and a most excellent and diligent man of 

 business. In private life, he was distinguished by 

 frankness of manners and a species of jovial good- 

 nature ; but his mirth was coarse, and his moral 

 conduct assumed much of the easy license of rank 

 and fashion. Letters he neither loved nor patronis- 

 ed, except the productions of subaltern writers in 

 his praise or defence, whom he rewarded liberally. 

 On the whole, without being an exalted character, 

 he was an able minister. His ministry was finally 

 shaken by the unpopularity of his exertions to 

 maintain peace with Spain, in 1739, from which 

 time the opposition to him gained ground, until, in 

 l~4 - 2, he resigned, and was created earl of Orford. 

 A parliamentary inquiry into his conduct was sub- 

 sequently instituted ; but, after repeated fruitless 

 attacks, all proceedings against him were dropped. 

 His health soon after began to decline, owing to 

 repeated attacks of the stone, which at length 

 carried him off, March 18, 1745, in the sixty-ninth 

 year of his age See Coxe's Memoirs of Sir Robert 

 Walpole (3 vols., 4to., 1790) His brother Hora- 

 tio (lord Walpole) was born in 1678. He filled 

 several offices under government, and was an able 

 diplomatist. He was raised to the peerage in 1756, 

 and died the following year. He wrote several 

 political tracts, and an answer to Bolingbroke's 

 Letters on History. See Coxe's Memoirs of Hora- 

 tio Lord Walpole. 



WALPOLE, HORACE, earl of Orford, third and 

 youngest son of Sir Robert Walpole, was born in 

 1718. He received his early education at Eton, 

 whence he removed to King's college, Cambridge. 

 He quitted the university without a degree, and, 

 by the interest of his father, was nominated to 

 three valuable sinecures, which he held to the time 

 of his death. In 1739, he set out on a tour to the 

 continent, accompanied by the poet Gray, with 

 whom he had a difference, and they parted, Wal- 

 pole subsequently taking all the blame upon him- 

 self. He entered parliament in 1741, as member 

 for Callington, and spoke spiritedly in opposition 

 to a motion against his father, but was, in general, 

 a very silent and inactive member. It was soon 

 apparent that he was not destined for the paths of 

 public life. With much vivacity and love of oc- 

 cupation, has chief delight was in the indulgence 

 of literary curiosity, and a taste for antiquity and 

 the fine arts. In 1747, he represented the borough 

 of Castle Rising, and, in 1754 and 1761, that of 

 King's Lynn, and always adhered to the whig prin- 

 ciples in which he was educated ; and his parlia- 

 mentary conduct was uniformly correct and inde- 

 pendent. In 1748, he purchased his small but cele- 

 brated villa at Twickenham, called Strawberry hill, 

 which it formed no small part of the business of his 

 future life to render a miniature specimen of Gothic 

 architecture, and a splendid collection of pieces of 

 art, and relics of antiquity, many of them curious 

 and valuable, and others of rather a trifling descrip- 

 tion. He first made himself known as a writer by 

 some papers in the World, and a few poems in 

 Dodsley's Collections. His first separate publica- 

 tion appeared in 1752, entitled ^Edes Walpoliana, 

 being a description of his father's seat at Houghton. 

 In 1757, he set up a printing-press at Strawberry 

 hill, at which he printed Gray's Odes, and various 

 other works. From his own press also appeared, 

 in 1758, the first edition of his Catalogue* of Royal 

 and Noble Authors. This was followed by a col- 

 lection of Fugitive Pieces, and, in 1761, by his 

 Anecdotes of Painting in England (2 vols., 4to.), 



compiled from the papers of the arti&t George Ver- 

 tue. Two more volumes were afterwards added ; 

 and the whole forms a valuable collection. In 

 1764, his friendship for general Conway drew from 

 him a pamphlet on the dismissal of that officer from 

 the army, on account of the vote which he gave on 

 general warrants. In 1765, appeared his romantic 

 fiction of the Castle of Otranto, the prolific parent 

 of the Radcliffe romance, and a vast variety of simi- 

 lar fictions. Being at Paris in 1765, he composed 

 a French letter to Rousseau, in the name of the 

 king of Prussia, by way of exposing the vanity and 

 self-consequence of that singular character, who 

 acted on the occasion with his usual extravagance. 

 Walpole was, however, scarcely excusable for this 

 attack upon the morbid sensibility of a man who 

 had given him no provocation ; but his correspon- 

 dence with Hume supplies a very extraordinary 

 specimen of his aristocratical contempt for authors 

 by profession. In 1767, he declined being again 

 chosen to sit in parliament ; soon after which ap- 

 peared his Historic Doubts on the Life and Reign 

 of King Richard III. It is an acute and ingenious 

 performance, but failed in convincing the public ; 

 and the brief, but conclusive investigation of it by 

 Gibbon, in his miscellaneous works, has probably 

 disposed of the question for ever. Mr Walpole 

 forgot his dignity so much in regard to this per- 

 formance, as to expunge his name from the list of 

 members of the antiquarian society, because two 

 papers were read before them controverting part of 

 his evidence. In 1768, he printed his Mysterious 

 Mother a very powerfully written tragedy, on a 

 disagreeable subject, and one which altogether pre- 

 cludes it from the stage. About this time occurred 

 the transaction with the unhappy Chatterton, which 

 subjected him to so much censure ; but his fault, 

 on this occasion, appears to have been mainly his 

 general apathy towards literary men. He visited 

 Paris in 1771 and 1775, and became much distin- 

 guished in the circle of the celebrated madame du 

 Deffand, who particularly admired him. The prin- 

 cipal incident of his advanced years was his acces- 

 sion to the earldom of Orford, by the death of his 

 nephew an elevation which gave him more trouble 

 than satisfaction, and which made no alteration in 

 his mode of living or literary pursuits. His death, 

 which was hastened by a hereditary gout, that had 

 reduced him to a cripple, took place in March, 1797, 

 in his seventy-ninth year. He bequeathed to Robert 

 Berry, esquire, and his two daughters, all his printed 

 and manuscript works, of which a collective edition 

 was published in 1798 (5 vols., 4to.). The most 

 valuable addition to what had formerly appeared 

 consisted in his letters to a great variety of corres- 

 pondents, written with great ease and vivacity, but 

 occasionally exhibiting affectation and effort. He 

 is certainly, however, one of the most lively and 

 witty of letter-writers, but too frequently deemed 

 his letters a grace and a favour accorded to his lite- 

 rary correspondents, which superseded the necessity 

 of any thing more substantial. His Memoirs of 

 the last ten Years of the Reign of George II. (2 

 vols., 4to., 1822) are of the highest value for the 

 domestic history of that period. In 1825, appeared 

 his Letters to the Earl of Hereford, forming the 

 ninth volume of a quarto edition of his works. See, 

 also, the Walpoliana (2 vols., 18mo), and the Re- 

 miniscences of Horace Walpole (1826). His plan 

 of life was formed upon a selfish principle of self- 

 enjoyment. As an author, he ranks respectably 

 among general writers. 



