peace like being a maudlin! But don't say this in Gath, where you äre. '

It is worthy of remark, indeed, that Walpole never speaks with respect of any man of genius or talent, and, least of all, of those master spirits who have got the start of this majestic world. ' He envied all great minds; and shrunk from encountering them, lest his own should suffer by the comparison. He contrived indeed to quarrel with all his better-spirited friends. Even the gentleman to whom these epistles were addressed, a correspondent of three score years' standing, fell at last under his displeasure, and was dismissed his friendship. He turned out the domestics of the heart as easily as those of the house; with little or no notice, and with threats of giving them a bad character as a return for their past services. He wished to have genius to wait upon him; but was always surprised that it would not submit to be a servant of all work. Poor Bentley, of whom we hear praises high fantastical' in the early letters, meets with but scurvy treatment the moment he gets out of fashion with his half-patron and half-friend. He is all spirit, goodness and genius, till it falls to his turn to be disliked; and then the altered patron sneers at his domestic misfortunes, depreciates his talents, and even chuckles at the failure of a play which the artist's necessities required should be successful. The following is the ill-natured passage to which we allude.

6 No, I shall never cease being a dupe, till I have been undeceived round by every thing that calls itself a virtue. I came to town yesterday, through clouds of dust, to see The Wishes, and went actually feeling for Mr Bentley, and full of the emotions he must be suffering. What do you think, in a house crowded, was the first thing I saw ? Mr and Madame Bentley perched up in the front boxes, and acting audience at his own play! No, all the impudence of false patriotism never came up to it. Did one ever hear of an author that had courage to see his own first night in public? I don't believe Fielding or Foote himself ever did; and this was the modest, bashful Mr Bentley, that died at the thought of being known for an author even by his own acquaintance! In the stage-box was Lady Bute, Lord Halifax, and Lord Melcombe. I must say, the two last entertained the house as much as the play. Your King was prompter, and called out to the actors every minute to speak louder. The other went backwards and forwards behind the scenes, fetched the actors into the box, and was busier than Harlequin. The curious prologue was not spoken-the whole very ill acted. It turned out just what I remembered it: the good parts extremely good; the rest very flat and vulgar, &c.

A poor painter of the name of Müntz is worse off even than Bentley; and is abused in a very ungenerous way for want of

gratitude, and unmerciful extortion. There is a sad want of feeling and dignity in all this; but the key to it is, that Walpole was a miser. He loved the arts after a fashion; but his avarice pinched his affections. He would have had that which he esteemed the ornament of life,' but that he lived a coward in his own esteem.' The following haggling passage in one of his letters would disgrace a petty merchant in Duke's Place, in a bargain for the reversion of an old pair of trowsers.

I am disposed to prefer the younger picture of Madame Grammont by Lely; but I stumbled at the price; twelve guineas for a

copy in enamel is very dear. Mrs Vesey tells me his originals cost

sixteen, and are not so good as his copies. I will certainly have none of his originals, His, what is his name? I would fain resist this copy; I would more fain excuse myself for having it. I say to myself it would be rude not to have it, now Lady Kingsland and Mr Montagu have had so much trouble. Well-I think I must have it, as my Lady Wishfort says, why does not the fellow take me? Do try if he will take ten ;-remember it is the younger picture. Thus did he coquet with his own avarice. Of poor Mason, another of his dear friends, he speaks thus spitefully

'Mr Mason has published another drama, called Caractacus. There are some incantations poetical enough, and odes so Greek as to have very little meaning. But the whole is laboured, uninteresting, and no more resembling the manners of Britons than of Japanese. It is introduced by a piping elegy; for Mason, in imitation of Gray, will cry and roar all night, without the least provocation. '

Mason might have endured the paltriness of this remark, if he could have seen the following pertinent remark on the Cymbeline of Shakespeare.

You want news. I must make it if I send it. To change the dulness of the scene, I went to the play, where I had not been this winter. They are so crowded, that though I went before six, I got no better place than a fifth row, where I heard very ill, and was pent for five hours without a soul near me that I knew. It was Cymbeline; and appeared to me as long as if every body in it went really to Italy in every act, and back again. With a few pretty passages and a scene or two, it is so absurd and tiresome, that I am persuaded Garrick **

This precious piece of criticism is cut short; whether from the sagacity of the editor or the prudence of the publishers, we cannot say. But it is much to be lamented. For it must have been very edifying to have seen Shakespeare thus pleasantly put down with a dash of the Honourable Mr Walpole's pen-as if he had never written any thing better than the Mysterious Mother.

A conversation is here recorded between Hogarth and Walpole, which seems to us very curious and characteristic: though

we cannot help smiling a little at the conclusion, where our author humanely refrains from erasing the line of praise which he had consecrated' to Hogarth ;-as if the painter would infallibly have been damned into oblivion by that portentous erasure. But he is of the stuff that cannot die. With many defects, he was a person of great and original powers-a true and terrific historian of the human heart and his works will be remembered and read, as long as men and women retain their old habits, passions and vices. The following is the conversation of which we have spoken.

Hogarth.-I am told you are going to entertain the town with something in our way. Walpole. Not very soon, Mr Hogarth.H. I wish you would let me have it to correct; I should be very sorry to have you expose yourself to censure; we painters must know more of those things than other people. W. Do you think nobody understands painting but painters? H. Oh! so far from it, there's Reynolds who certainly has genius; why but t'other day he offered a hundred pounds for a picture that I would not hang in my cellars; and indeed to say truth, I have generally found that persons, who had studied painting least, were the best judges of it; but what I particularly wished to say to you was about Sir James Thornhill (you know he married Sir James's daughter); I would not have you say any thing against him: There was a book published some time ago, abusing him, and it gave great offence. He was the first that attempted history in England; and I assure you, some Germans have said that he was a very great painter. W. My work will go no lower than the year one thousand seven hundred, and I really have not considered whether Sir J. Thornhill will come into my plan or not: If he does, I fear you and I shall not agree upon his merits. H. I wish you would let me correct it; besides I am writing something of the same kind myself—I should be sorry we should clash. W. I believe it is not much known what my work is; very few persons have seen it. H. Why it is a critical history of painting is it not? W. No, it is an antiquarian history of it in England. I bought Mr Vertue's MSS. and I believe the work will not give much offence; besides if it does I cannot help it: when I publish any thing I give it to the world to think as they please. H. Oh! if it is an antiquarian work we shall not clash; mine is a critical work; I don't know whether I shall ever publish it. It is rather an apology for painters. I think it is owing to the good sense of the English that they have not paint... ed better. W. My dear Mr Hogarth, I must take leave of you; my you now grow too wild-and I left him. If I had staid, there remained nothing but for him to bite me. I give you my honour this conversation is literal and, perhaps as long as you have known Englishmen and painters you never met with any thing so distracted. I had consecrated a line to his genius (I mean for wit) in my preface; I shall not erase it; but I hope no one will ask me if he is not mad.

We do not think he was mad:-But the self-idolatry of fanciful persons often exhibits similar symptoms. A man of limited genius, accustomed to contemplate his own conceptions, has long settled his ideas as to every thing, and every other person existing in the world. He thinks nothing truly bright that does not reflect his own image back upon himself;-nothing truly beautiful, that is not made so by the lustre of his own feelings. He lives in a sort of chaste singleness; and holds every approach of a stronger power as dangerous to his solitary purity. He thinks nothing so important as his own thoughts-nothing so low, that his own fancy cannot elevate into greatness. He sees only himself and the universe; and will admit no discourse to his beauty.' He is himself-alone! If such a man had had a voice in the management of the flood, he would have suffered no creeping thing to enter the ark but himself; and would have floated about the waters for forty days in lonely magnificence.

Passages of the kind, we have hitherto instanced, are very plentiful in all parts of the work; and we are glad they are so numerous, because they will set Walpole's higher pretensions at rest with posterity. Time is a disinterested personage, and does his work on dull or rash men fairly and effectually. He knows nothing of criticism but its austerity and its sarcasm. He cannot feel poetry; and has, therefore, no right to settle. its laws, or imitate its language. His taste in painting was affected and dogmatical. His conduct to men of genius was a piece of insolence, which Posterity is bound to resent! The true heirs of fame are not to be disturbed in the enjoyment of their property, by every insolent pretender who steps in and affects a claim upon it. The world is called on to defend the right.'

To come, however, to the better side of our subject.-Walpole is, as we have said, an inimitable gossip,-a most vivacious garrulous historian of fair-haired women, and curious blue china. His garrulity, moreover, hath a genius of its own-and a transparent tea-cup lets in the light of inspiration upon it, and makes it shine with colours nigh divine. An inlaid commode is, with him, the mind's easy chair. We shall select a few passages from the letters before us, which, for pleasantry, ease and alertness, are by far the gayest morceau of description we have read of late. We may begin with a curious anecdote of Fielding, which is almost as interesting as any thing in the book. Thus it is

Take sentiments out of their pantoufles, and reduce them to the infirmities of mortality, what a falling off there is! I could not help

laughing in myself t'other day, as I went through Holborn in a very All those foul old-clothes hot day, at the dignity of human nature. women panting without handkerchiefs, and mopping themselves all the way down within their loose jumps. Rigby gave me as strong a He and Peter Bathurst, t'other night, carried a picture of nature. servant of the latter's, who had attempted to shoot him, before Fielding; who, to all his other vocations, has, by the grace of Mr Lyttleton, added that of Middlesex Justice. He sent them word that he was at supper; that they must come next morning. They did not understand that freedom, and ran up, where they found him banqueting with a blind man, a w, and three Irishmen, on some cold mutton and a bone of ham, both in one dish, and the dirtiest cloth. He never stirred, nor asked them to sit. Rigby, who had seen him so often come to beg a guinea of Sir C. Williams, and Bathurst, at whose father's he had lived for victuals, understood that dignity as little, and pulled themselves chairs,-on which he civilized."

It is very certain that the writings of men are coloured by their indolence, their amusements, and their occupations; and this little peep into Fielding's private hours, lets us at once into his course of studies, and is an admirable illustration of his Tom Jones, Jonathan Wild, and other novels. We are taken into the artist's workshop, and shown the models from which he works; or rather, we break in upon him at a time when he is copying from the life. It is a very idle piece of morality, to lament over Fielding for this low indulgence of his appetite for character. If he had been found quietly at his tea, he would never have left behind him the name he has done. There is nothing of a tea inspiration in any of his novels. They are assuredly the finest things of the kind in the language; and we are Englishmen enough to consider them the best in any language. They are indubitably the most English of all the works of Englishmen.

The descriptions of Lord Ferrers's fatal murder, and of Balmerino's death, are given with considerable spirit-(our author, indeed, is extremely piquant in matters of life and death); and we are puzzled which to select for our readers. They are both strongly illustrative of the times in which Walpole and the heroes of them lived; but we cannot afford room for them both; and we choose the latter on Lord Ferrers,-not because it is better written, or that the subject is more interesting, but because the book before us is open at that part, and because we would not idly meddle with so heroic a fall as that of the Lord Balmerino.

The extraordinary history of Lord Ferrers is closed: He was executed yesterday. Madness, that in other countries is a disorder, is here a systematic character: It does not hinder people from form