[Footnote 2:  The Rev. J.E.  Yonge, Preface to an edition of “Cicero’s Letters.”]

He, however, was not the first among the moderns to achieve a reputation by his correspondence.  In the generation before his birth, a French lady, Madame de Sevigne, had, with an affectionate industry, found her chief occupation and pleasure in keeping her daughters in the provinces fully acquainted with every event which interested or entertained Louis XIV. and his obsequious Court; and in the first years of the eighteenth century a noble English lady, whom we have already mentioned, did in like manner devote no small portion of her time to recording, for the amusement and information of her daughter, her sister, and her other friends at home, the various scenes and occurrences that came under her own notice in the foreign countries in which for many years her lot was cast, as the wife of an ambassador.  In liveliness of style, Lady Mary Montague is little if at all inferior to her French prototype; while, since she was endowed with far more brilliant talents, and, from her foreign travels, had a wider range of observation, her letters have a far greater interest than could attach to those of a writer, however accomplished and sagacious, whose world was Paris, with bounds scarcely extending beyond Versailles on one side, and Compiegne on the other.  To these fair and lively ladies Walpole was now to succeed as a third candidate for epistolary fame; though, with his habit of underrating his own talents, he never aspired to equal the gay Frenchwoman; (the English lady’s correspondence was as yet unknown).  There is evident sincerity in his reproof of one of his correspondents who had expressed a most flattering opinion:  “You say such extravagant things of my letters, which are nothing but gossiping gazettes, that I cannot bear it; you have undone yourself with me, for you compare them to Madame de Sevigne’s.  Absolute treason!  Do you know there is scarcely a book in the world I love so much as her letters?”

Yet critics who should place him on an equality with her would not be without plausible grounds for their judgement.  Many circumstances contributed to qualify him in a very special degree for the task which, looking at his letters in that light, he may be said to have undertaken.  His birth, as the son of a great minister; his comparative opulence; even the indolent insignificance of his elder brothers, which caused him to be looked upon as his father’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,