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Those who are interested in it should read the review of it in the Nation early this year, which awards it high and unusual commendation. The readers of Walpole's histories may easily detect in them a treatment not possible from a mere closet student of books and manuscripts. A knowledge of the science of government and of practical politics is there. For Walpole was of a political family.
Some of the speakers on Walpole's side indeed, Walpole himself occasionally strove to show their willingness to serve the prince by utterances which must have caused the prince to smile a grim, sardonic smile if he had any existing sense of humor. Please do not imagine this was the line of observation that we think one hundred thousand a year too much for his Royal Highness.
Walpole's testimony in such a matter is particularly valuable, because he had not only been intimately acquainted with all the gossip of the French capital for many years, but also because his principal friends in France did not belong to the party which might have been expected to be most favorable to the queen.
The blockheads, however, have capacity enough to snatch hastily at the money lying on their council table. Walpole's jealousy of power, it may be remembered, had driven almost every man of ability out of his ministry. Then comes a vivacious parody on the fashionable auctions of the day.
But I do not believe one can rise from reading these volumes without being glad of a knowledge of these two men whose patriotism was of a high order. Walpole's several characterizations, in a summing up of Palmerston, display his knowledge of men. "Men pronounced Lord Melbourne indifferent," he wrote, "Sir Robert Peel cold, Lord John Russell uncertain, Lord Aberdeen weak, Lord Derby haughty, Mr.
The last pronounced appearance of it was in 1742, when Sir Robert Walpole's enemies, not content with his political fall, sought his life. They failed utterly, and for one hundred and twenty years the course of English politics has been strictly constitutional, an opposition party being, as it were, the complement of the administration or ministry.
Hutchinson, the Prime Serjeant in Ireland, contrasting him with Lord G. Sackville, "Lord George having parts, but no integrity; Conway integrity, but no parts: and now they were governed by one who had neither." And Walpole's comment on this comparison is: "There was more wit than truth in this description. Before I have done with Charles Townshend, I must tell you one of his admirable bon mots.
Horace Walpole, on Lord Cornwallis's capitulation in 1781, wrote: 'The newspapers on the Court side had been crammed with paragraphs for a fortnight, saying that Lord Cornwallis had declared he would never pile up his arms like Burgoyne; that is, he would rather die sword in hand. Walpole's Journal of the Reign of George III, ii. 475. See ante, i. 342.
He had expected, and probably deserved, to be placed at the head of the administration. When disappointed, he bent all his energies to undermine Townsend and Walpole, and succeeded for a while. But Walpole's opposition to the new administration was so powerful, that it did not last long.
James Gordon Bennett in 1828, when in his thirtieth year, became the Washington correspondent of the New York Enquirer, which was then on the topmost round of the journalistic ladder. It is related of him that during his stay in this position he came across a copy of Walpole's Letters and resolved to try the effect of a few letters written in a similar strain. The truth of this is doubtful.
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