as shown in his letters from the Alps.  It is true he grew weary of them.  “Such uncouth rocks,” he wrote, “and such uncomely inhabitants.”  “I am as surfeited with mountains and inns as if I had eat them,” he groaned in a later letter.  But the enthusiasm was at least as genuine as the fatigue.  His tergiversation of mood proves only that there were two Walpoles, not that the Walpole of the romantic enthusiasms was insincere.  He was a devotee of romance, but it was romance under the control of the comic spirit.  He was always amused to have romance brought down to reality, as when, writing of Mary Queen of Scots, he said:  “I believe I have told you that, in a very old trial of her, which I bought for Lord Oxford’s collection, it is said that she was a large lame woman.  Take sentiments out of their pantaufles, and reduce them to the infirmities of mortality, what a falling off there is!” But see him in the picture-gallery in his father’s old house at Houghton, after an absence of sixteen years, and the romantic mood is upper-most.  “In one respect,” he writes, speaking of the pictures, “I am very young; I cannot satiate myself with looking,” and he adds, “Not a picture here but calls a history; not one but I remember in Downing Street or Chelsea, where queens and crowds admired them.”  And, if he could not “satiate himself with looking” at the Italian and Flemish masters, he similarly preserved the heat of youth in his enthusiasm for Shakespeare.  “When,” he wrote, during his dispute with Voltaire on the point, “I think over all the great authors of the Greeks, Romans, Italians, French and English (and I know no other languages), I set Shakespeare first and alone and then begin anew.”  One is astonished to find that he was contemptuous of Montaigne.  “What signifies what a man thought,” he wrote, “who never thought of anything but himself, and what signifies what a man did who never did anything?” This sentence might have served as a condemnation of Walpole himself, and indeed he meant it so.  Walpole, however, was an egoist of an opposite kind to Montaigne.  Walpole lived for his eyes, and saw the world as a masque of bright and amusing creatures.  Montaigne studied the map of himself rather than the map of his neighbours’ vanities.  Walpole was a social being, and not finally self-centred.  His chief purpose in life was not to know himself, but to give pleasure to his friends.  If he was bored by Montaigne, it was because he had little introspective curiosity.  Like Montaigne himself, however, he was much the servant of whim in his literary tastes.  That he was no sceptic but a disciple as regards Shakespeare and Milton and Pope and Gray suggests, on the other hand, how foolish it is to regard him as being critically a fashionable trifler.