(Horace, Earl of Orford), was the youngest son of the celebrated Sir Robert Walpole, afterwards Earl of Orford, by his first wife, Catharine, daughter of Robert Shorter, Esq., of Bybrook in Kent. He was born 1716; and was educated, first at Eton school, and afterwards at Cambridge. At Eton he formed an intimate acquaintance with the celebrated poet Gray; and they went together on the tour of Europe, in the years 1739, 1740, and 1741. Unhappily they had a dispute in the course of their travels, which produced a separation.

Mr Walpole was able to make a splendid figure during the remainder of his destined course; but poor Gray, after the separation, was obliged to observe a very severe economy. "This difference arose from the difference of their tempers: the latter being, from his earliest years, curious, pensive, and philosophical; the former, gay, lively, and inconsiderate. This, therefore, occasioned their separation at Reggio. Mr Gray went before him to Venice; and staying there till he could find means of returning to England, he made the best of his way home, repelling the Alps, and following almost the same route, through France, which he had before gone to Italy. In justice to the memory of so respectable a friend, Mr Walpole (says Mr Mazon, Life of Gray, 4to, p. 4.) enjoins me to charge him with the chief blame in their quarrel, confining that more attention, complaisance, and deference, to a warm friend-

ship, and superior judgment and prudence, might have prevented a rupture that gave much uneasiness to them both, and a lasting concern to the survivor; though in the year 1744 a reconciliation was effected between them, by a lady who wished well to both parties."—This event took place after their return to England; but the wound in their friendship left a scar that never was totally effaced.

We do not, indeed, think that Horace Walpole and Mr Gray were formed, either by nature or by habits, to continue long in a state of intimate friendship. Gray appears to have been a man of the purest moral principles, a friend to religion, pensive, and at least sufficiently conscious of his intellectual powers and intellectual attainments. Walpole's morality was certainly of a looser kind; he seems to have had no religion; he was often unreasonably gay; and to an equal share of intellectual pride, though without equal reason, he added the pride of birth. It can therefore excite no surprise that a man of Gray's independent spirit could not bear the supercilious freaks of such a character.

Mr Walpole was nominated to represent the city of Norwich, when his father visited it July 3rd, 1733; having acquired consequence, not only as the son of the minister, but as having attended the Prince of Orange to England in that year. He was chosen member for Collington, in Cornwall, in the parliament which met June 23rd, 1741; was a second time in parliament as representative for Cattle-Rifling, in Norfolk, in 1747; and for King's Lynn in 1754 and 1761; and, at the expiration of that parliament, he finally retired from the stage of politics, and confined himself wholly to literary pursuits. He held to his death the office of usher of his Majesty's exchequer, comptroller of the pipe, and clerk of the effects. Upon the death of his nephew, George, third Earl of Orford, 1791, he succeeded to the title and estates; but that event made so little alteration in his mode of living, that we know not whether he ever took his seat in the house of peers. During almost the whole course of his life he was the victim of the gout, which at last reduced him to a cripple; but it never impaired his faculties; and, to the very moment of death, his understanding seemed to bid defiance to the shock of Nature. He died at his house in Berkeley Square, in 1796, having just entered his 80th year; and was interred in the family vault at Houghton, in a private manner, agreeably to his particular directions.

Horace, Lord Orford, was never married, and, by one of his biographers, his chief mistress through life is said to have been the muse. It is certain that he devoted the greater part of his life to belles lettres and virtues, though he ridiculously affected, in his letters to his friends, to despise learning and learned men, for which he was very properly reprimanded both by Gray and Hume. It was an affectation peculiarly absurd in him, who was constantly publishing something, and who wrote with uncommon acrimony against all who presumed to call in question the fidelity of the picture which he had drawn of Richard III., or indeed to controvert any of his opinions. Hence his antipathy to Johnson, because he was a tory, a Christian, and a rigid moralist; whilst he himself was a whig, an infidel, and such a moralist as could retail, without blushing, all the scandalous anecdotes, whether true or false, of that august family, from whom