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It was only to tell you that your ticket was a blank: it came up the 2nd instant. Mr. Walpole's book will not be out this month; I will send it by the first opportunity I can find. The apology for Lord B., that is, Lord Baltimore, I sent for, but it contained nothing to the purpose, and it was a title formed to draw people in.
This is not the temper, these are not the conditions, for carrying out a policy of war. But, as a question of principle, Walpole's conduct admits of no defence. His plain duty was to refuse to administer a policy of which he did not approve, and to leave the responsibility of the war to those who did approve of it.
When a statesman who has fought hard against a war policy suddenly yields to it, and consents to put it into action, would it be unreasonable, if disaster should occur, that his enemies should say, "This comes of trying to conduct a war in which you have no heart or spirit?" Burke passes severe censure even on Walpole's manner of carrying on his opposition to the war party.
George was anxious to lend him a helping hand, clamored to be allowed to take the field himself and win glory in battle; camps and battle-fields were what he loved most, he kept dinning into Walpole's unappreciative ear. Even the Queen was not disinclined to draw the sword in defence of an imperilled and harassed ally. Walpole stuck to his policy of masterly inactivity.
Walpole's last hope of rescuing Austria was broken by this resolve; and Frederick was driven to conclude the alliance with France from which he had so stubbornly held aloof. But the Queen refused to despair.
The stir showed itself markedly in a religious revival which dates from the later years of Walpole's ministry; and which began in a small knot of Oxford students, whose revolt against the religious deadness of their times expressed itself in ascetic observances, an enthusiastic devotion, and a methodical regularity of life which gained them the nickname of "Methodists."
It would be unjust and even absurd to suppose that Walpole's opponents believed England had a direct interest in the question of the Polish succession, or that they would have shed the blood of English grenadiers merely in order that this candidate and not that should be on the throne of Poland.
Walpole's earliest publication was a biography of Perceval. And Spencer Walpole himself was a man of affairs. A clerk in the War Office in 1858, private secretary to his father in 1866, next year Inspector of Fisheries, later Lieutenant-Governor of the Isle of Man, and from 1893 to 1899 Secretary to the Post-office.
It is interesting, then, as well as surprising, to find traces of the romantic spirit in his fiction over ten years before Walpole's Castle of Otranto. It is also interesting to find so much melodramatic feeling in him, because it makes stronger the connection between him and his nineteenth-century disciple, Dickens.
Johnson, to which a properer answer would have been to fling a glass of wine in his face. I have no patience with an unfortunate monster trusting to his helpless deformity for indemnity for any impertinence that his arrogance suggests, and who thinks that what he has read is an excuse for everything he says. Horace Walpole's Letters, vi. 302.
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