a ring of the bed-curtain, at half-an-hour after twelve at night, at May Fair chapel."*

The people of rank at last grew frightened at their own practices. The Act against Clandestine Marriages came into operation on the 26th of March, 1754. On the 25th there were two hundred and seventeen marriages at the Fleet entered in one register; and on the same day sixty-one ceremonies of the like agreeable nature took place at May Fair. After the Act was passed in 1753 there was to be an interval of some months before its enactments were to be law. Walpole says, "The Duchess of Argyle harangues against the Marriage Bill not taking place immediately, and is persuaded that all the girls will go off before next Lady Day."+

*Horace Walpole to Mann, Feb. 27, 1752

Horace Walpole to Montagu, July 17, 1753.

HORACE WALPOLE'S WORLD OF LETTERS.

LET us seat ourselves with Horace Walpole in his library at Strawberry Hill, and see the relation which the clever man of fashion bears to literature, and to the men of letters his contemporaries. There he sits, as he was painted by the poor artist Muntz, whom he patronised and despised, lounging in a luxurious arm-chair, soft and bright in its silk and embroidery, the window open, through which he occasionally looks on the green meadows and the shining river, in which he feels a half-poetical delight. He turns to his elegant room, where "the books are ranged within Gothic arches of pierced work, taken from a side door-case to the choir in DugThe books themselves are a valuable collection, some for use and some for show; and it is easy to perceive that for the most part they have not been brought together as the mere furniture of the bookcases, but have been selected pretty much with reference to their possessor's tastes and acquirements. He is a man, then, of fortune, chiefly derived from sinecures bestowed upon him by his father; of literary acquirements far beyond the fashionable people of his day; with abundance of wit and shrewd observation; early in his career heartily tired of political

dale's St. Paul's."

intrigue, and giving up himself to a quiet life of learned leisure mixed with a little dissipation; and yet that man, pursuing this life for half a century, appears to have come less in contact with the greatest minds of his day than hundreds of his contemporaries of far inferior genius and reputation. With the exception perhaps of General Conway, Walpole has no correspondence with any of the really eminent public men of his time; and the most illustrious of his literary friends, after Gray is gone, are Cole, the dullest of antiquaries, and Hannah More. Warburton, in a letter to Hurd, terms Walpole "an insufferable coxcomb;" and we have no doubt the bold churchman was right. Walpole was utterly destitute of sympathy, perhaps for the higher things of literature, certainly for the higher class of literary men. He had too much talent to be satisfied with the dullness and the vices of the people of fashion with whom he necessarily herded; but he had not courage enough to meet the more intellectual class upon a footing of equality. For the immediate purpose of this paper, it is of very little consequence what Walpole himself individually thinks of literature and men of letters; but it is of importance to show the relation in which the men of letters stood to the higher classes, and the lofty tone in which one whose passion was evidently the love of literary fame spoke of those to whom literature was a profession, and not an affair of smirking amateurship.

Pope had been dead two or three years when

Horace Walpole bought Strawberry Hill: they were not therefore neighbours. In 1773, Walpole, speaking depreciatingly of his contemporaries, says, "Recollect that I have seen Pope, and lived with Gray; but he writes not a word to any one of what he had seen of Pope, and the only notice we have (except a party account of the quarrel between Pope and Bolingbroke) is, in 1742, of Cibber's famous pamphlet against Pope, which subsequently raised its author to be the hero of the Dunciad.'

Walpole is evidently rubbing his hands with exultation when he says, "It will notably vex him." Pope died in 1744. Of the small captains who scrambled for the crowns of the realms of poetry, after the death of this Alexander, there was one who founded a real empire-James Thomson. Walpole says, "I had rather have written the most absurd lines in Lee, than Leonidas or The Seasons; as I had rather be put into the round-house for a wrong-headed quarrel, than sup quietly at eight o'clock with my grandmother. There is another of these tame geniuses, a Mr. Akenside, who writes Odes in one he has lately published he says, Light the tapers, urge the fire.' Had not you rather make gods jostle in the dark, than light the candles for fear they should break their heads?" * Gray, as every one knows, was Walpole's friend from boyhood. The young men quarrelled upon their travels, and after three years were reconciled. Walpole, no doubt, felt a sort of self-important *Horace Walpole to Mann, March 29, 1745.

:

gratification in the fame of Gray as a poet; yet,
while Gray was alive, Walpole thus described his
conversation: "I agree with you most absolutely
in your opinion about Gray; he is the worst com-
pany in the world. From a melancholy turn, from
living reclusely, and from a little too much dignity,
he never converses easily; all his words are mea-
sured and chosen, and formed into sentences: his
writings are admirable; he himself is not agree-
able." *
Yet Walpole was furious when Boswell's
book came out, and Johnson is made to say of
Gray, "Sir, he was dull in company, dull in his
closet, dull everywhere: he was dull in a new way,
and that made many people think him great: he
was a mechanical poet." In 1791 Walpole writes,
"After the Doctor's death, Burke, Sir Joshua
Reynolds, and Boswell sent an ambling circular
letter to me, begging subscriptions for a monument
for him-the two last, I think, impertinently, as
they could not but know my opinion, and could
not suppose I would contribute to a monument for
one who had endeavoured, poor soul! to degrade
my friend's superlative poetry. I would not deign
to write an answer, but sent down word by my foot-
man, as I would have done to parish officers with
a brief, that I would not subscribe."+ Walpole,
we have little doubt, considered himself as the
patron of Gray, and Johnson's opinion was an
attack upon his amour-propre. His evident hatred

*Horace Walpole to Montagu, Sept. 3, 1748.
Horace Walpole to Miss Berry, May 26, 1791.