were so various and different as to ensure a variety in his letters.  Some were politicians, ministers at home, or envoys abroad; some were female leaders of fashion, planning balls and masquerades, summoning him to join an expedition to Ranelagh or Vauxhall; others were scholars, poets, or critics, inviting comments on Gray’s poems, on Robertson’s style, on Gibbon’s boundless learning; or on the impostures of Macpherson and Chatterton; others, again, were antiquarians, to whom the helmet of Francis, or a pouncet-box of the fair Diana, were objects of far greater interest than the intrigues of a Secretary of State, or the expedients of a Chancellor of the Exchequer; and all such subjects are discussed by him with evidently equal willingness, equal clearness, and liveliness.

It would not be fair to regard as a deduction from the value of those letters which bear on the politics of the day the necessity of confessing that they are not devoid of partiality—­that they are coloured with his own views, both of measures and persons.  Not only were political prejudices forced upon him by the peculiarities of his position, but it may be doubted whether any one ever has written, or can write, of transactions of national importance which are passing under his own eyes, as it were, with absolute impartiality.  It may even be a question whether, if any one did so, it would not detract from his own character, at least as much as it might add to the value of his writings.  In one of his letters, Byron enumerates among the merits of Mitford’s “History of Greece,” “wrath and partiality,” explaining that such ingredients make a man write “in earnest.”  And, in Walpole’s case, the dislike which he naturally felt towards those who had overthrown his father’s administration by what, at a later day, they themselves admitted to have been a factious and blamable opposition, was sharpened by his friendship for his cousin Conway.  At the same time we may remark in passing that his opinions and prejudices were not so invincible as to blind him to real genius and eminent public services; and the admirers of Lord Chatham may fairly draw an argument in favour of his policy from Walpole’s admission of its value in raising the spirit of the people; an admission which, it may be supposed, it must have gone against his grain to make in favour of a follower of Pulteney.

But from his letters on other topics, on literature and art, no such deduction has to be made.  His judgement was generally sound and discriminating.  He could appreciate the vast learning and stately grandiloquence of Gibbon, and the widely different style of Robertson.  Nor is it greatly to his discredit that his disgust at what he considers Hume’s needless parade of scepticism and infidelity, which did honour to his heart, blinded him in a great degree to the historian’s unsurpassed acuteness and insight, and (to borrow the eulogy of Gibbon) “the careless inimitable felicities” of his narrative.