of Johnson probably belonged as much to the order as to the individual. The poor man of genius and learning, who, by his stern resolves and dogged industry, had made himself independent of patronage, was a dangerous example. The immortal letter to Chesterfield on the dedication of the Dictionary was an offence against a very numerous tribe.

It is easy to understand from Walpole's letters, how an author, however eminent, was looked upon in society, except he had some adventitious quality of wealth or birth to recommend him. In 1766 Walpole thus writes to Hume: "You know, in England, we read their works, but seldom or never take any notice of authors. We think them sufficiently paid if their books sell, and, of course, leave them to their colleges and obscurity, by which means we are not troubled with their vanity and impertinence. In France they spoil us, but that was no business of mine. I, who am an author, must own this conduct very sensible; for, in truth, we are a most useless tribe." It is difficult to understand whether this passage is meant for insolence to the person to whom it is addressed: for what was Hume but an author? "We read their works"-we, the aristocratic and the fashionable - to which class Hume might fancy he belonged, after he had proceeded from his tutorship to a mad lord into the rank of a chargé d'affaires. But then "in France they spoil us;" here the aristocrat is coquetting with the honours of authorship in the face of his brother author. Perhaps

the whole was meant for skilful flattery. Walpole's real estimate of the literary class is found in a letter to Cole, who was too obtuse to take any portion of the affront to himself:-"Mr. Gough wants to be introduced to me! He is so dull, that he would only be troublesome; and besides, you know I shun authors, and would never have been one myself, if it obliged me to keep such bad company. They are always in earnest, and think their profession serious, and dwell upon trifles, and reverence learning. I laugh at all those things, and write only to laugh at them and divert myself.

I

Mr. Gough is very welcome to see Strawberry Hill, or I would help him to any scraps in my possession that would assist his publication; though he is one of those industrious who are only re-burying the dead: but I cannot be acquainted with him. It is contrary to my system and my humour. have no thirst to know the rest of my contemporaries, from the absurd bombast of Dr. Johnson, down to the silly Dr. Goldsmith; though the latter changeling has had bright gleams of parts, and the former had sense till he changed it for words, and sold it for a pension. Don't think me scornful. Recollect that I have seen Pope, and lived with Gray."+

Walpole was too acute not to admire Fielding ; yet he evidently delights to lower the man, in the gusto with which he tells the following anecdote :Rigby and Peter Bathurst t'other night carried

66

Horace Walpole to Cole, April 27, 1773.

a servant of the latter's, who had attempted to shoot him, before Fielding; who, to all his other vocations, has, by the grace of Mr. Lyttelton, added that of Middlesex justice. He sent them word he was at supper-that they must come next morning. They did not understand that freedom, and ran up, where they found him banqueting, with a blind man, a -, and three Irishmen, on some cold. mutton and a bone of ham, both in one dish, and the dirtiest cloth. He never stirred nor asked them to sit. Rigby, who had seen him so often come to beg a guinea of Sir C. Williams, and Bathurst, at whose father's he had lived for victuals, understood that dignity as little, and pulled themselves chairs, on which he civilised."* Scott, in his life of Fielding, suggests that something of this anecdote may belong to the "aristocratic exaggeration" of Walpole; and that the blind man might have been Fielding's brother, who was blind. In the same way the three Irishmen might not necessarily have been denizens of St. Giles's; and the female, whom Walpole designates by the most opprobrious of names, might have been somewhat more respectable than his own Lady Caroline. We are not sure that, under the worst aspect, the supper at Fielding's was more discreditable than the banquet of minced chickens at Vauxhall. Fielding at this period, when his crime was a dirty tablecloth, thus writes of himself:-"By composing, instead of inflaming, the quarrels of porters and

*Horace Walpole to Montagu, May 18, 1749.

beggars, and by refusing to take a shilling from a man who most undoubtedly would not have had another left, I had reduced an income of about five hundred a-year, of the dirtiest money upon earth, to little more than three hundred; a considerable portion of which remained with my clerk."

Walpole himself, in the outset of his literary career, appears, as was to be expected from his temperament and education, miserable under what was then, and is now, called criticism. After the publication of the Royal and Noble Authors,' he writes, "I am sick of the character of author; I am sick of the consequences of it; I am weary of seeing my name in the newspapers; I am tired with reading foolish criticisms on me, and as foolish defences of me; and I trust my friends will be so good as to let the last abuse of me pass unanswered."* If he had lived in these times, he might have been less thin-skinned. Those were not the days of critical newspapers; there was only an 'Evening Post,' and one or two other starveling journals. Those were the days when the old Duchess of Rutland, being told of some strange casualty, says, "Lucy, child, step into the next room and set that down." "Lord, Madam," says Lady Lucy, "it can't be true." "Oh, no matter, child, it will do for news into the country, next post."+ Horace Walpole might well have compounded for a little of the pert criticism of the reviews of his day, to be exempt from the flood of opinion which now floats

*Horace Walpole to the Rev. Henry Zouch, May 14, 1759.
Horace Walpole to Mann, Dec. 23, 1742.

the straws and rushes over the things which are stable. Fortunate was it for him and for us that he lived before the days of newspapers, or half he has told us would have been told in a perishable form. A Strawberry Hill man could not have existed in the glare of journalising. He would have been a slave in the Republic of Letters, although he affected to despise court slavery. He must, in the very nature of things, have been president and member of council of some halfdozen of the thousand and one societies with which London now abounds; and he would have had the satisfaction of walking in the conversazione horsemill of hot rooms and cold coffee three times a week during the season, amidst the same round of masks, all smiling, envious, jobbing, puffing, and bepuffed.* He was only familiar with one Society, the Antiquarian; and he thus speaks of it:-"I dropped my attendance there four or five years ago, from being sick of their ignorance and stupidity, and have not been three times amongst them since." The Antiquarian Society then consisted of a few harmless and crotchety people, who wrote dull books which nobody read but themselves. But the dull men in time came to understand the full value of gregariousness; the name of Society at length became Legion; and literary and scientific London resolved itself into one mighty

*This was written twelve years ago. Special Societies, where men of real knowledge work harmoniously, have redeemed the name of Society from being synonymous with clique.