The Letters of Horace Walpole

OF making many editions of letters there is no end. You purchase something which purports to be elaborate, complete, and final, and before you are well at home in it, another collection succeeds, revised, enlarged, and enriched with curious material, rescued from old garrets and worm-eaten trunks, where it has lain for years, unprized and unregarded. In this fashion the enormous correspondence of Voltaire has grown and grown, until it has come to include over ten thousand letters; and as new documents constantly turn up, one asks one’s self in despair whether he is not still despatching them from his present abode, — an idea not wholly lacking in piquancy.

Walpole’s correspondence is less extensive than Voltaire’s. But, by a similar process, it has developed from a modest volume or so in the first edition of Lord Orford’s works, through three volumes, and four volumes, and six volumes, to nine large volumes collected by Cunningham in 1857, and now to sixteen volumes carefully edited and elaborately annotated by Mrs. Paget Toynbee. Yet even this immense work does not contain all the material known to exist, since Mrs. Toynbee informs us that a certain number of unpublished original letters of Walpole are in the possession of the Earl of Ilchester, who “was unable to accede to my request for permission to include these letters in the present edition.” Family reasons may naturally account for this refusal, but if it is the result of a collector’s selfishness, it is not especially creditable to his lordship.

(While we are upon the subject of matter not collected by Mrs. Toynbee, it may be worth pointing out that the brief note, apparently addressed to Gray, which was facsimiled in Walpoliana and printed in Mr. Tovey’s Gray and his Friends, does not appear in the new edition under the date conjectured by Mr. Tovey, nor elsewhere in connection with Gray. Brief as it is, the scrap is interesting, if it really bears on the reconciliation between Gray and Walpole, but quite possibly it was addressed to some one else, and is to be found in some other portion of the correspondence.)

What Mrs. Toynbee has omitted is, however, of no consequence, when we consider what she has been able to add. Cunningham printed 2654 letters. Mrs. Toynbee prints 3061, 111 for the first time. Much of this new material is, of course, comparatively uninteresting, brief notes on business or family affairs, yet even these are often important for the study of Walpole’s character, as showing his nicety of feeling in money matters and his constant devotion to the interests of his friends; while the French letters to Madame du Deffand are in the highest degree valuable in connection with that lady’s brilliant and characteristic correspondence; and the extensive series to Lady Mary Coke and that to Miss Anne Pitt, already printed, but now first collected, are in Walpole’s easiest, sprightliest vein, and will afford endless delight to all lovers of the master of Strawberry Hill.

Mrs. Toynbee has done her author good service in other ways besides the collection of new letters. She has made many alterations in the chronology of Cunningham’s arrangement, which was a careful piece of work for its day, but left room for a great deal of improvement. She has also much amended the text, esspecially of the letters to Mann, restoring numerous passages which Cunningham omitted without comment. For instance, letter 2183 (edition Toynbee) is nearly three times as long as its equivalent in Cunningham, although, in this case, the editor has not troubled herself to call attention to the fact.

On the difficult point of annotation, Mrs. Toynbee’s work is, for the most part, satisfactory. In biographical details, dates, and the like, she has made a very great advance on former editions. One could wish, however, that she had been a little freer with the sort of accessory information which is all the more delightful for not being absolutely indispensable. Lack of space would naturally restrain her from supplying the abundant feast of erudition which lends such charm to Mr. Tovey’s Letters of Thomas Gray, but it seems a pity not to have retained more of the curious gossip so painstakingly accumulated by Dover, Wright, and the rest. To cite one or two examples. We do not feel especially interested to know the name and family of Sir Francis Dashwood’s wife, but any one who is familiar with the character of Sir Francis himself will be sorry to lose the piquant bit in regard to his marriage which Cunningham quotes from Lady Mary Montagu. Again, vol. viii, p. 47 (Toynbee), we have Walpole’s opinion of Charles Fox. Cunningham, in a note which the later editor omits, gives Lord Holland’s account of Fox’s opinion of Walpole.

But these are minor matters. From every point of view Mrs. Paget Toynbee has done a monumental piece of work, creditable in the highest degree for accuracy and thoroughness, and certain to be of the greatest value to every future student of English history in the eighteenth century.²

Horace Walpole, the youngest son of the great minister, Sir Robert Walpole, was born in the year 1717. Educated at Eton and Cambridge, he early became intimately acquainted with some of the foremost literary men of his time. His situation of course afforded him every opportunity for political distinction, and, for many years, he was a member of the House of Commons and personally familiar with all the great Parliamentary leaders, but he never took any prominent share in public affairs, and during the latter part of his long life he chose to observe and criticise rather than to act. He was always a dabbler in literature, though disclaiming any serious ambitions for authorship. His Catalogue of Royal and Noble Authors, Anecdotes of Painting, and Historic Doubts on the Life and Reign of King Richard the Third gave him a certain standing as a critic and historian. The Mysterious Mother, a tragedy, was highly praised by Byron, though Walpole himself called it “disgusting from the subject and totally unfit for the stage. " The Castle of Otranto is interesting as the first work of the great school of romantic fiction which astonished the earlier part of the nineteenth century with its productions, and has had such a vigorous revival in recent years. Walpole’s specimen is no worse than many of the others, and shares with most of them the disadvantage of existing apparently for the sole purpose of showing the superiority of Scott. Walpole also wrote historical memoirs of his own time, not remarkable for either accuracy or picturesqueness. When he was seventy-four years old, he succeeded his nephew in the earldom of Orford, which had been created for Sir Robert, but this new dignity brought Walpole little advantage or satisfaction. He died in 1797, after watching with melancholy foreboding the horrors of the French Revolution.

Certainly, none of the writings above referred to would have sufficed to keep Walpole’s name alive as anything more than a literary curiosity. But during the whole of his long career he was an active and unwearying letter-writer, and the vast accumulation of his correspondence constitutes a monument of which any author might well be proud. To be sure, Walpole’s letters are always literary, conscious, to a certain extent, artificial. At eighteen years of age we find him writing to his friend Montagu: “You have made me a very unreasonable request, which I will answer with another as extraordinary: you desire I would burn your letters, I desire you would keep mine.” If this was his frame of mind at eighteen, it is not likely to have altered at eighty. Therefore we must not look in Walpole for the instantaneous self-photography which makes the charm of the correspondence of Cicero, nor for the absolute simplicity and naturalness of Cowper or of Edward Fitzgerald.

Madame de Sévigné suggests a more suitable comparison. That Walpole tried to model his letter-writing upon that famous lady’s is more than probable. His enthusiastic admiration of her was expressed at every period of his life. “You have undone yourself with me, for you compare them [his letters] to Madame de Sévigné’s; absolute treason! Do you know, there is scarce a book in the world I love so much as her letters ? ” Again, he speaks of buying “the portrait that was Madame de Simiane’s;” “I am going to build an altar for it under the title of Notre Dame des Rockers.” Also, he must surely have had Madame de Sévigné in mind when he declared that women are better letter-writers than men; “for our sex is too jealous of the reputation of good sense to hazard a thousand trifles and negligences which give grace, ease, and familiarity to correspondence.”

Walpole himself was always sufficiently jealous of his reputation for good sense, yet, assuredly, no woman ever hazarded more trifles and negligences. Hazarded is hardly the word, however. Madame de Sévigné may have hazarded such things. Walpole hunts for them, gloats over them, piles them up. So, being but a clumsy male, after all, he misses much of the “ grace, ease, and familiarity,” which give “ Our Lady of the Rocks ” such immortal freshness and charm. Only, Walpole had no daughter, and in this he had distinctly the advantage of his French model.

What one looks for first in correspondence is the writer himself. Even the student, whose final object is historical facts or social pictures, must begin by observing the transmitting medium, that is, the painting and recording mind. A man cannot write letters every week or oftener, for sixty years, to scores of correspondents, without leaving a likeness of himself, more perfect and minute than was ever sketched by Rembrandt or Velasquez, Unfortunately the portrait of Walpole has not usually been found very pleasing. Indeed, Macaulay, as is well known, in his incisive fashion, labeled the author of the letters as an idler, an affected fop, socially a snob, politically a sneering indifferentist, and morally a cynical pococurante.

Allowing for Macaulay’s “heightened and telling way of putting things,” it would be difficult to deny that there is some truth in these charges. Walpole avoided the strenuous, on principle. He shunned ambition, large activities, and preferred the lighter pursuits, which, if less stimulating, are also less deceptive. His was the epigrammatic saying which may now be read on the advertisements of a popular specific: “ Life is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel.” Being inclined by nature rather to thinking than to feeling, he set himself to develop this inborn tendency, and had a good measure of success.

The passion for political distinction he early and completely laid aside. “My books, my virtu, and my other follies and amusements take up too much of my time to leave me much leisure to think of other peoples’ affairs; and of all affairs, those of the public are least my concern.” So he wrote in his youth, and the note in his old age was the same: “I will never think on politics more. What has a man to do with them, who never felt a titillation of ambition ? ”

The passion for literature was never more to him than a whim or fancy, which was, doubtless, the reason why his literary work was never anything more than whimsical or fanciful. In his heart of hearts he had the feeling, always so common in England, that writing is an occupation unworthy of a gentleman. “What is the merit of a mere man of letters?” “You know I have always thought a running footman as meritorious a being as a learned man.”

In the common relations of life he was equally averse to any intensity of emotion. At twenty-four years of age he wrote, “I am neither young enough nor old enough to be in love.” Apparently he never got to be old enough — nor young enough. He never married, and when Madame du Deffand, nearly seventy years old, and more than a score of years older than he, conceived for him that singular passion which was the crowning grace of a singular life, his response to it was marked much more by the fear of ridicule than by the ardor of affection. With friendship it was the same. “ Though I don’t love loving, I could have poured out all the fulness of my heart to such an old and true friend,” he writes to George Montagu; and to Lady Mary Coke: “ You must not give way to all the friendship you are capable of. By some means or other it will embitter your whole life; and though it is very insipid to be indifferent, the vexations consequential of attachments are much too dearly bought by any satisfaction they produce.”

It might be thought that a man of this temper would at least love nature. Listen to him: “I hate the country: I am past the shepherdly age of groves and streams, and am not arrived at that of hating everything but what I do myself, as building and planting.” Yet he hastens to tell us that this distaste for natural pleasures does not arrive from any overfondness for society: “I am so far from growing used to mankind by living amongst them, that my natural ferocity and wildness does but every day grow worse. They tire me, they fatigue me; I don’t know what to do with them; I don’t know what to say to them; I fling open the windows and fancy I want air; and when I get by myself, I undress myself, and seem to have had people in my pockets, in my plaits, and on any shoulders.”

The sum of the whole matter is, that life taken seriously is intolerable. “ II faut glisser sur les pensées, ” says “ Our Lady of the Rocks, ” “ et ne pas les approfondir.” Live on the surface. Play with trifles which amuse and neither deceive nor entangle. “This world is one great Alas! Most men suffer, yet all extol their chief plagues.” If we would drown the groans and stifle the yawns, let us keep Folly’s bells a-jangling, — “Folly, the cordial drop that Heaven in our cup has thrown.”

A prophet, this, not likely to appeal to an age of strenuousness, like ours, an age overburdened with the seriousness of life and perhaps also, just a little, with its own importance. Yet there were worse men than Walpole, in his own day, and there are worse now.

For his disinterestedness in money matters we have his own word, and I think we may accept it — with other evidence. “Thank you for your Exchequer-ward wishes for me,” he writes to George Montagu, “but I am apt to think that I have enough from thence already — don’t think my horns and hoofs are growing, when I profess indifference to my interest. Disinterestedness is no merit in me; it happens to be my passion.”

Theoretical disclaimers of friendship often go hand in hand with devoted attachments, and, though extreme devotion was hardly in Walpole’s nature, it is impossible to doubt that he sincerely loved a few persons who were near to him. It would be difficult to improve on his attitude toward his father. “A son who adores his father,” he calls himself; and on the numerous occasions which arise for defending Sir Robert’s memory, he acquits himself always with tact and dignity. Nor can we question his genuine affection for Conway, for Montagu, for Chute, for Mann, an affection which even sometimes manifested itself in actions. His reception of Madame du Deffand’s caresses may not have been always sympathetic during her life; but his words, when she was on her deathbed, have every mark of sincere grief: “Should she be capable of hearing it, when you receive this, I entreat you to tell her — but I do not know how to express how much I love her and how much I feel.”

Macaulay is very bitter about Walpole’s politics, accusing him of hypocritically praising liberty, while remaining at heart a thorough aristocrat; but who of us is really in a position to throw stones at such an inconsistency as this ? I do not in the least doubt that Walpole loved liberty and would even have made some — not excessive — sacrifices for it. When he says, “ The spirit of liberty alone has made me at any time attend to them [politics]; for life without freedom has but a narrower or a wider prison,” I believe he means as much as nine tenths of those who have uttered similar sentiments — Macaulay not excepted. On a more tangible ground, that of humanity, Walpole is still more worthy of admiration. During the whole of his long life, like a true son of his father, he raised his voice unfalteringly against the stupid wickedness of war and the barrenness of military glory. There are still a few persons by whom this will be counted unto him for righteousness. The following somewhat lengthy passage is well worth quoting for the credit of that age and the benefit of this: “We cannot live without destroying animals, but shall we torture them for our sport, sport in their destruction ? I met a rough officer at his house t’ other day, who said he knew such a person was turning Methodist, for, in the middle of conversation, he rose and opened the window to let out a moth. I told him I did not know the Methodists had any principle so good, and that I, who am certainly not on the point of becoming one, always did so too. One of the bravest and best men I ever knew, Sir Charles Wager, I have often heard declare he never killed a fly willingly. It is a comfortable reflection to me that all the victories of last year have been gained since the suppression of the Bear Garden and prize-fighting; as it is plain, and nothing else would have made it so, that our valour did not singly and solely depend upon these two Universities.”

Lastly, we, on this side of the Atlantic, should have some tenderness for Walpole, because he sympathized very little with the tyrannical methods of George the Third, and because of his enthusiastic prophecies as to our future. “You have seen the accounts from Boston. The tocsin seems to be sounded in America. I have many visions about that country and fancy I see twenty empires and republics forming upon vast scales over all that continent, which is growing too mighty to be kept in subjection to half a dozen exhausted nations in Europe.”

But, after all, the man in Walpole’s letters interests us less than the powerful painter of the times. Pepys had more vividness and more genuineness than his successor. Saint-Simon had more passion and more genius. But Pepys’s vision was slow and limited, and Saint-Simon’s was obscured by his fantastic hobbies. Walpole touched every thing, saw everything, heard everything, recorded everything. If we want grand, historic scenes, what can satisfy us better than the trial of the rebel lords or the burial of George the Second ? If we want lifelike pictures of statesmen and orators, which of these volumes does not abound in them ? It is true, Macaulay charges Walpole with systematic depreciation of all the greatest men of his age, and the charge cannot be wholly refuted. A satirist and a contemporary, who sees the hero without his robes and laurels, is always too prone to insist upon details which posterity would willingly forget. Chatham, the greatest hero of all, is too frequently the object of Walpole’s unkindly comment; yet, for that very reason, what intense sincerity do we feel in this glowing account of his oratory: “He spoke at past one, for an hour and thirty-five minutes; there was more humour, wit, vivacity, finer language, more boldness, in short, more astonishing perfections than even you, who are used to him, can conceive.”

When we turn to lesser men, whom we are not so accustomed to imagining upon a pedestal, Walpole’s portraits have an extraordinary and fascinating vivacity and brilliancy. For instance, Mrs. Paget Toynbee, in a hitherto unprinted letter, gives us this sketch of the versatile Charles Townshend, whose willful short-sightedness was so important an element in bringing on the American Revolution: “Charles Townshend has entertained us with another interlude: took part against Lord Chatham; declared himself out of place, nobody knew whether turned out or resigning; kept away on a great day of his own business; hatched a quarrel with Colonel Barré; returned yesterday to the House; acted as Chancellor of the Exchequer; outwent the rest of the ministers; made no mention of Barré; talked of his measures for the rest of the session; and probably dines with Lord Rockingham to-day and sups with the Duke of Grafton. What he will do next, besides exposing himself, you, nor I, nor he can tell.”

And in a memorandum found among Miss Berry’s papers and now first printed, Walpole gives us another vivid glimpse of the same eccentric personage, addressing the House of Commons, when he was half-drunk: “In this speech he beat Lord Chatham in language, Burke in metaphors, Grenville in presumption, Rigby in impudence, himself in folly, and everybody in good-humour, for he pleased while he provoked at random; was malicious to nobody, cheerful to all; and if his speech was received with delight, it was only remembered with pity.”

Of all the figures so satirically sketched by Walpole none is more striking than that of the Duke of Newcastle. A cunning flatterer, a juggling schemer, a prince of corruption in the most corrupt of ages, a clown, a mountebank, at times almost a driveling idiot, — we should certainly conclude that this fantastic caricature was the mere invention of Walpole’s personal hatred, if we did not find Lord Hervey confirming it in language which the Atlantic could not possibly print. How immense is the power of these memoir and letter writers, when with a few deft turns of the pen they can create or mar a reputation, can pose a character before posterity in any attitude they please, can overcome the sober testimony of fact, and impress their own love and hatred on the memory of mankind to endless generations! What statesman of to-day, glorious in the flattery of his contemporaries, petted and spoiled by the press and the place-hunter, but would shudder to think of himself dancing forever in naked ignominy before the ages, like the Duke of Newcastle at the funeral of George the Second ?

“This grave scene was fully contrasted by the burlesque Duke of Newcastle. He fell into a fit of crying the moment he came into the chapel, and flung himself back in a stall, the Archbishop hovering over him with a smelling-bottle — but in two minutes his curiosity got the better of his hypocrisy, and he ran about the chapel, with his glass, to spy who was or was not there, spying with one hand and mopping his eyes with t’ other. Then returned the fear of catching cold, and the Duke of Cumberland, who was sinking with heat, felt himself weighed down, and found it was the Duke of Newcastle, standing upon his train to avoid the chill of the marble.”

Walpole’s literary gossip is less interesting than his political. As regards taste in general he is fairly representative of his contemporaries, although leaning somewhat toward innovation. The strange, the romantic, the picturesque, tempted him, filled him with a sort of timid joy. The Castle of Otranto is pseudo-mediæval, and Strawberry Hill was pseudoGothic; but the author of both was really more comfortable in the trimmed and finished surroundings of his own eighteenth century. There was genuine English stuff in him somewhere, however. Again and again he proclaims his enthusiasm for Shakespeare; and one of the most interesting of the letters newly collected by Mrs. Paget Toynbee is that to Jephson which speaks of certain Shakespearean passages as “texts out of the book of nature, in comparison of which the works of all other writers in every language that I understand are to me apocryphal.”

To the authors of his own time, as men, Walpole is generally indifferent, as one would expect from what I quoted above about his contempt, for the literary profession, and from his remark as to the youthful Burke: “ a sensible man, but has not worn off his authorism yet, and thinks there is nothing so charming as writers, and to be one. He will know better one of these days.” Gray Walpole first patronized, then quarreled with, then flattered. His conduct to Chatterton was long considered to have been cruel and heartless, and although these adjectives are probably too strong, there was much in it to be regretted, much which Walpole himself regretted at a later period of his life. His comments on the great French writers, whom he knew more or less intimately, are usually slighting and depreciative. Of Voltaire, for instance, he says that he was “as mean and dirty as he was envious.” As for literary personages against whom he had a political or social grudge, he loses no opportunity of presenting them in an odious or ridiculous light. He can never say enough of the objectionable eccentricities of Lady Mary Montagu, and he abuses Dr. Johnson as savagely as Dr. Johnson would probably have abused him: “The saucy Caliban; ” “the tasteless pedant;” “Dr. Johnson has indubitably neither taste nor ear, [nor any] criterion of judgment, but his old woman’s prejudices.”

Two books, which were immensely popular in their own day and have ever since ranked among the greatest productions of English literature, receive from Walpole a severe condemnation. Clarissa Harlowe he calls “a picture of high life as conceived by a bookseller, and a romance as it would be spiritualized by a Methodist teacher.” Of Sterne’s masterpiece he says: “At present nothing is talked of, nothing admired, but what I cannot help calling a very insipid and tedious performance . . . the great humour of which consists in the whole narrative always going backwards. . . . It makes one smile two or three times at the beginning, but in recompense makes one yawn for two hours.”

The most characteristic feature of Walpole’s correspondence is, undoubtedly, the picture of the social world in which he lived. He was intimately acquainted with the best society of his day in both England and France, and that society was something which had never been seen before and may never be seen again. The crudeness of the seventeenth century had worn off, and the vast cosmopolitanism of the nineteenth had not yet obliterated that personal feature which must always be the most vital element of conversation. The grace, the ease, the vivacity, the courtly polish, the ready wit, of George Selwyn and Gilly Williams, of Madame du Deffand and Madame de Choiseul, and of scores of others like them, — all this is too delicate and evanescent in its charm ever to be perfectly conveyed to us by the dull medium of ink and paper. Yet we are grateful for even a dim reflection of a world so fascinating.

Any one who wishes to come as nearly as possible into direct contact with this eighteenth-century life will do well to look through Jesse’s George Selwyn and his Contemporaries. There, in the carefully preserved correspondence of a man who was himself one of the central social figures of his time, we have the actual letters of men and women of birth, breeding, and wit, who open their hearts to us without a thought of attitudinizing or literary effect. It is one of the most significant and striking records of genuine human nature that exist.

Few men could be better qualified to be the literary reporter of this brilliant period than Horace Walpole. His curiosity was, indeed, less passionate than SaintSimon’s; but perhaps it was all the better suited to a more frivolous age. And, though not passionate, Walpole’s curiosity was ever-present. If he did not love humanity, he was always interested in it, in all its moods and phases. He studied the complex motives of great statesmen, which stirred three or four continents, and it amused him to see that those motives were sometimes as great as the men and sometimes of a pettiness all the more astonishing for the mass of the results that flowed from them. It was, in part, this pettiness which made him so alive to the trifles that called forth Macaulay’s buskined rhetoric, — trifles oftentimes important because significant of human life and human character. The wafting of a billet-doux, the flutter of a fan, the new fashion of a garment, the chatter of gay youths about a card table, the elopement of a beauty, a duel, a robbery on the highway, an odd funeral, or a brilliant wedding, — all these thin and glittering threads which make up the tissue of common existence, — how deftly Walpole twists and turns and disentangles them!

Now it is a day at Strawberry Hill, “the puppet show of the time.” Walpole does the honors to a group of French and English ladies, under the leadership of the Duchess of Grafton, “who perfectly entered into the air of enchantment and fairyism, which is the tone of the place.” Or he visits Esher with the same company: “ I never passed a more agreeable day than yesterday. ... It was Parnassus, as Watteau would have painted it.”

Now it is Vauxhall, with its more mixed company, its crowds, and gayety; or Ranelagh, with the “vast amphitheatre, finely gilt, painted, and illuminated, into which everybody that loves eating, drinking, staring, or crowding, is admitted for twelvepence.”

Now it is cards, but Walpole is no great friend to them. Then, as to-day, they were a substitute for conversation, and were its worst enemy, whist especially, which “has spread an universal opium over the whole nation; it makes courtiers and patriots sit down to the same pack of cards.” And our chronicler again and again refers to the gambling fever which, hand in hand with cards, had taken possession of every order of society. “We have the most delightful of all summers, — fruit, flowers, corn, grass, leaves,— in short, though Judæa flowed with milk and honey, I do not believe it was much richer than the present face of England. I know of but one richer spot, which is Almack’s, where a thousand meadows and cornfields are staked at every throw, and as many villages lost as in the earthquake that overwhelmed Herculaneum and Pompeii.”

So the gay and the rich and the careless trifled away the time. And because, after all, their life, charming as it was, was lived only for themselves, only for trifles, those among them who really thought were always on the verge of deadly ennui. Madame du Deffand, the noble heart, the serious intellect, found herself bored from youth to age. Even Walpole, who had a gift for distraction, cried out in his early days, “One can’t pass one’s youth too amusingly; for one must grow old, and that in England; two most serious circumstances, either of which makes people gray in the twinkling of a bedstaff.” And forty years later comes the quiet comment, “Nothing can be more insipid than my life.”

Yes, they thought only of themselves, of their own society, their own order, these brilliant, charming ladies, these gay, witty, courtly gentlemen. The narrow world in which they lived was to them the sole possible world, the best world. They had no idea of the stupendous changes which were so soon to come, of the new heaven and the new earth which were to take the place of their pleasant dalliance and graceful vanities. Walpole lived through the French Revolution; but the impression of it in his correspondence is only one of horror. He was a liberal, but after the stiffly conservative fashion of English liberalism. From the first volume to the last, his letters are eighteenth century and nothing but eighteenth century. He would have been out of sympathy not only with the politics of the age which followed, its democracy, its humanitarianism, but with all its dreamy desires, its vast and vague aspirings, its spiritual agony, its passionate hope. One wonders — or no, one knows — what Walpole would have thought of the poetry of Shelley, of the music of Beethoven, of the philosophy of Hegel.