the third son of Sir Robert, was born in 1717, became fourth earl of Orford in 1791, and died on the 2d of March 1797, in the eightieth year of his age.

After having been educated at Eton and Cambridge, Horace Walpole passed two years on the continent, the greater part of the time being devoted to Italy, where he acquired that taste for art which afterwards furnished the main employment of his life. In the autumn of 1741, he returned to England; and he took his seat in the parliament which, meeting in the end of that year, drove his father from power before the close of its first session. He continued to be a member of the House of Commons for twenty-six years, retiring at the age of fifty-one. His political career was by no means distinguished. We do not hear of his having delivered more than three speeches in all, and of these the two that have been preserved exhibit no great talent for oratory. For political business he possessed neither industry nor ambition; and the character in which he appeared throughout was little more than that of a spectator, who took greater pleasure in watching the acts of others, and recording his own impressions in regard to them, than in endeavouring himself to act either for his own benefit or for that of others.

As an observer of public men, however, he never allowed his attention to flag; and his observations were most diligently set down in a multifarious correspondence with friends, and, for a part of his life, in political memoirs, avowedly intended for publication when the writer and his contemporaries should have quitted the scene. Politics, however, like all things else, were for Horace Walpole no this more than an amusement. Literature, art, and antiquities ministered by turns to the same end, although all these pursuits were followed in the same careless and Epicurean spirit. But his pen never lay long idle; few themes demanded but little study for their treatment proved able to it; and among his works there gradually accumulated, not only an immense mass of letters, as evidently calculated for publication as any thing else he ever wrote, but specimens of his aptitude for the composition of novels, of dramas serious and comic, of political tracts and satires, of grave historical disquisitions, of memoirs for the history of English art and of English aristocratic literature, and of those light verses which may be written by gentlemen having no slender pretensions to the name of poets.

Walpole's circumstances however allowed him to indulge, in more dignified fashion, his taste for art and literature. One who was ashamed of writing plays and poems, had no need to be ashamed of collecting books and antiques, or of buying baronial castles, and designing romantic gardens. Although Sir Robert Walpole himself left his affairs exceedingly embarrassed, he had carefully provided for the younger branches of his family by grants of public posts. Several sinecure offices conferred on Horace made up his income, during the greater part of his life, to £4,000 at least or perhaps considerably more. To a bachelor, sufficiently methodical and cautious in money-matters, a sum like this offered no inconsiderable facilities for the indulgence of one or two expensive tastes. Walpole began to collect a few antiques while in Italy; but his passion for collecting did not arrive at its height till much later. In 1747, when he was thirty years old, he purchased a cottage and piece of ground at one end of the village of Twickenham. Subsequent purchases increased the domain to a extent of several acres, the whole of which was laid out as pleasure-grounds; and the "little playing house," inclosedly altered and enlarged, grew at length into the Gothic castle of Strawberry Hill. Its owner's taste had received partly perhaps from his friend Gray, an early direction towards this style of architecture, as well as to the branches of antiquarian study connected with it.

The erection and decoration of his mansion, in desultory study and composition, in the enjoyments of society which embraced many of the aristocracy, and a very few of the literary men of the country, and in several excursions to Paris, which introduced him to the philosophical precursor of the revolution,—in employments such as these, varied only by his retirement from parliament, passed the life of Horace Walpole, till he had attained his seventy-fourth year. The death of his unfortunate nephew then gave him his father's earldom, an honour unaccompanied by any substantial accession of fortune. He had for many years been a victim of gout, and the short remainder of his life was spent in utter helplessness of body. But the mind was unshaken to the last.

The works in which Walpole exhibits most characteristic qualities of mind, both moral and intellectual, are his Letters, especially those in which the politics of the country are the matters chiefly handled. Accordingly his correspondence with Sir Horace Mann (which was prudently suppressed till the present generation) may be most advantageously studied as a likeness of the writer; and to this interesting series other sets of letters, such as those to the Corvays, and even the posthumous Memoirs, may be regarded as little else than supplementary. The dissection of motives, which is the task undertaken with the greatest readiness, is that which is performed least satisfactorily. The analysis of the springs of action is often evidently just, but as often it is clearly performed by one who was incapable alike of believing that men whom he disliked could act patriotically or nobly, and of even conceiving that any party or any individual could be actuated by motives of a higher class than those by which, unconsciously in part, he himself was led. The selfishness of Strawberry Hill, though not its refinement, was indeed a fair enough measure by which to estimate such statesmen as the Pelhams; but both the selfish indolence and the confined though acute intellect were utterly alien to the mind of Pitt, and utterly incapable of estimating him and the few other spirits which in that age of intrigue and detail possessed real strength and elevation. Akin to this temper of universal censoriousness, and indeed springing from the same source, is another distinctive peculiarity of all Walpole's political sketches; namely, his incapacity for determining the relative importance either of principles or actions. An intrigue which substitutes in the ministry a Holderness for a Pelham, possesses in his eyes equal consequence with the agitation which decides whether the foreign policy of the nation is to be swayed by strength and patriotism or by weakness and corruption—by William Pitt, or by the creatures who, during the greater part of his life, thwarted and crippled his exertions. Nay, the politics of the day themselves appear, in Walpole's eyes, as standing on the same level with the amusements, the family history, the debauchery of the fashionable world: Lady Orford is satirized in the same breath with the Chancellor Hardwicke, and the king of Prussia is not less a theme of merriment than "Prince Pigwiggin" or the duchess of Kingston.

These very qualities, which at once bear unfavourable witness to the state of the writer's mind, and diminish the value of the writings as historical documents, do nevertheless give a peculiar attraction to them as literary compositions of a certain class. The class is not a high one, but in it the best parts of this Correspondence occupy the very foremost place. The Letters are inimitable pictures of society and of human character, drawn by the hand of one who was a master in the delineation of scenes from familiar life; not, it is true, inspiring his figures with poetic truth or serious significance, but shedding over all of them a gay comic light. They are a kind of satires, and few compositions claiming that name are equal to them in lively wit; in striking grasp of character, in picturesque colouring of incidents, and in apposite, epigrammatic, vigorous language. They have been criticised at great length, and with consummate talent, in the Edinburgh Review, vol. Ixiii.