of Beau Brummell’s “Who’s your fat friend?” His ridicule was never a public display; it was a secret treasured for his friends.  He was the greatest private entertainer of the eighteenth century, and he ridiculed the great, as people say, for the love of diversion.  “I always write the thoughts of the moment,” he told the dearest of his friends, Conway, “and even laugh to divert the person I am writing to, without any ill will on the subjects I mention.”  His letters are for the most part those of a good-natured man.

It is not that he was above the foible—­it was barely more than that—­of hatred.  He did not trouble greatly about enemies of his own, but he never could forgive the enemies of Sir Robert Walpole.  His ridicule of the Duke of Newcastle goes far beyond diversion.  It is the baiting of a mean and treacherous animal, whose teeth were “tumbling out,” and whose mouth was “tumbling in.”  He rejoices in the exposure of the dribbling indignity of the Duke, as when he describes him going to Court on becoming Prime Minister in 1754: 

On Friday this august remnant of the Pelhams went to Court for the first time.  At the foot of the stairs he cried and sunk down; the yeomen of the guard were forced to drag him up under the arms.  When the closet-door opened, he flung himself at his length at the King’s feet, sobbed, and cried, “God bless your Majesty!  God preserve your Majesty!” and lay there howling, embracing the King’s knees, with one foot so extended that my Lord Coventry, who was luckily in waiting, and begged the standers-by to retire, with, “For God’s sake, gentlemen, don’t look at a great man in distress!” endeavouring to shut the door, caught his grace’s foot, and made him roar with pain.

The caricature of the Duke is equally merciless in the description of George II.’s funeral in the Abbey, in which the “burlesque Duke” is introduced as comic relief into the solemn picture: 

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 the other.  Then returned the fear of catching cold; and the Duke of Cumberland, who was sinking with heat, felt himself weighed down, and turning round found it was the Duke of Newcastle standing upon his train to avoid the chill of the marble.

Walpole, indeed, broke through his habit of public decorum in his persecution of the Duke; and he tells how on one occasion at a ball at Bedford House he and Brand and George Selwyn plagued the pitiful old creature, who “wriggled, and shuffled, and lisped, and winked, and spied” his way through the company, with a conversation at his expense carried on in stage whispers.  There was never a more loyal son than Horace Walpole.  He offered up a Prime Minister daily as a sacrifice at Sir Robert’s tomb.