right and the Whigs in the wrong. That question was, whether England ought to conclude peace without exacting from Philip a resignation of the Spanish crown.

might become heir by blood to the French crown, and that thus two great monarchies might be united under one sovereign.

The first danger appears to us altogether chimerical. Family affection has seldom produced much effect on the policy of princes. The state of Europe at the time of the peace of Utrecht proved that in politics the ties of interest are much stronger than those of consanguinity. The Elector of Bavaria had been driven from his dominions by his father-inlaw; Victor Amadeus was in arms against his sons-in-law; Anne was seated on a throne from which she had assisted to push a most indulgent father. It is true that Philip had been accustomed from childhood to regard his grandfather with profound veneration. It was probable, therefore, that the influence of Louis at Madrid would be very great; but Louis was more than seventy years old; he could not live long; his heir was an infant in the cradle. There was surely no reason to think that the policy of the King of Spain would be swayed by his regard for a nephew whom he had never seen.

No parliamentary struggle from the time of the Exclusion Bill to the time of the Reform Bill, has been so violent as that which took place between the authors of the Treaty of Utrecht and the War Party. The Commons were for peace; the Lords were for vigorous nostilities. The queen was compelled to choose which of her two highest prerogatives she would exercise: whether she would create Peers or dissolve the Parliament. The ties of party superseded the ties of neighbourhood and of blood; the members of the hostile factions would scarcely speak to each other or bow to each other; the women appeared at the theatres bearing the badges of their political sect. The schism extended to the most remote counties of England. Talents such as had Rever before been displayed in political controvery were enlisted in the service of the hostile parties. On the one side was Steele, gay, lively, drunk with animal spirits and with factious animosity; and Addison, with his polished In fact, soon after the peace the two branches satire, his inexhaustible fertility of fancy, and of the house of Bourbon began to quarrel. A his graceful simplicity of style. In the front close alliance was formed between Philip and of the opposite ranks appeared a darker and Charles, lately competitors for the Castilian fiercer spirit-the apostate politician, the ribald crown. A Spanish princess, betrothed to the priest, the perjured lover—a heart burning with King of France, was sent back in the most inhatred against the whole human race-a mind sulting manner to her native country, and a richly stored with images from the dunghill decree was put forth by the court of Madrid and the lazar-house. The ministers triumphed, commanding every Frenchman to leave Spain. and the peace was concluded. Then came the It is true that, fifty years after the peace of reaction. A new sovereign ascended the throne. Utrecht, an alliance of peculiar strictness was The Whigs enjoyed the confidence of the king formed between the French and Spanish goand of the Parliament. The unjust severity | vernments. But it is certain that both governwith which the Tories had treated Marlborough ments were actuated on that occasion, not by and Walpole was more than retaliated. Har-domestic affection, but by common interests ley and Prior were thrown into prison; Boling- and common enmities. Their compact, though broke and Ormond were compelled to take re- called the Family Compact, was as purely a fuge in a foreign land. The wounds inflicted political compact as the league of Cambrai or in this desperate conflict continued to rankle the league of Pilnitz. for many years. It was long before the mem- The second danger was, that Philip might bers of either party could discuss the question | have succeeded to the crown of his native of the peace of Utrecht with calmness and im- country. This did not happen. But it might partiality. That the Whig ministers had sold have happened; and at one time it seemed us to the Dutch, and the Tory ministers had very likely to happen. A sickly child alone sold us to the French; that the war had been stood between the King of Spain and the hericarried on only to fill the pockets of Marlbo- tage of Louis the Fourteenth. Philip, it is true, rough; that the peace had been concluded only solemnly renounced his claims to the French to facilitate the bringing over the Pretender; crown. But the manner in which he had obthese imputations and many others, utterly un-tained possession of the Spanish crown had founded or grossly exaggerated, were hurled backward and forward by the political disputants of the last century. In our time the question may be discussed without irritation. We will state, as concisely as possible, the reasons which have led us to the conclusion at which we have arrived.

The dangers which were to be apprehended from the peace were two; first, the danger that Philip might be induced, by feelings of private affection, to act in strict concert with the elder branch of his house, to favour the French trade at the expense of England, and to side with the French government in future wars; secondly, the danger that the posterity of the Duke of Burgundy might become extinct, that Philip

lately proved the inefficacy of such renuncia tions. The French lawyers declared the renunciation null, as being inconsistent with the fundamental law of the monarchy. The French people would probably have sided with him whom they would have considered as the rightful heir. Saint Simon, though much less the slave of prejudice than most of his coun trymen, and though strongly attached to the regent, declared, in the presence of that prince, that he never would support the claims of the house of Orleans against those of the King of Spain. "If such," he said, "be my feelings, what must be the feelings of others?" Bolingbroke, it is certain, was fully convinced that the renunciation was worth no more than

the paper on which it was written, and demanded it only for the purpose of blinding the English Parliament and people.

we think that an estimate approximating to the truth, may, without much difficulty, be formed. The allies had been victorious in Germany, Italy, and Flanders. It was by no means improbable that they might fight their way into the very heart of France. But at no time since the commencement of the war had their prospects been so dark in that country which was the very object of the struggle. In Spain they held only a few square leagues. The temper of the great majority of the nation was decidedly hostile to them. If they had persisted, if they had obtained success equal to their highest expectations, if they had gained a series of victories as splendid as those of Blenheim and Ramilies, if Paris had fallen, if

Yet, though it was at one time probable that the posterity of the Duke of Burgundy would become extinct, and though it is almost certain that if the posterity of the Duke of Burgundy had become extinct, Philip would have successfully preferred his claim to the crown of France, we still defend the principle of the Treaty of Utrecht. In the first place, Charles had, soon after the battle of Villa Viciosa, inherited, by the death of his elder brother, all the dominions of the house of Austria. It might be argued, that if to these dominions he had added the whole monarchy of Spain, the balance of power would be seriously endan-Louis had been a prisoner, we still doubt gered. The union of the Austrian dominions and Spain would not, it is true, have been so alarming an event as the union of France and Spain. But Charles was actually emperor. Philip was not, and never might be, King of France. The certainty of the less evil might well be set against the chance of the greater evil.

But, in fact, we do not believe that Spain would long have remained under the government either of the emperor or of the King of France. The character of the Spanish people was a better security to the nations of Europe than any will, any instrument of renunciation, or any treaty. The same energy which the people of Castile had put forth when Madrid was occupied by the allied armies, they would have again put forth as soon as it appeared that their country was about to become a province of France. Though they were no longer masters abroad, they were by no means disposed to see foreigners set over them at home. If Philip had become King of France, and had attempted to govern Spain by mandates from Versailles, a second Grand Alliance would easily have effected what the first had failed to accomplish. The Spanish nation would have rallied against him as zealously as it had before rallied round rim. And of this he seems to have been fully aware. For many years the favourite hope of his heart was that he might ascend the throne of his grandfather; but he seems never to have thought it possible that he could reign at once in the country of his adoption and in the country of his birth.

These were the dangers of the peace; and they seem to us to be of no very formidable kind. Against these dangers are to be set off the evils of war and the risk of failure. The evils of the war-the waste of life, the suspension of trade, the expenditure of wealth, the accumulation of debt-require no illustration. The chances of failure it is difficult at this dislance of time to calculate with accuracy. But

whether they would have accomplished their object. They would still have had to carry on interminable hostilities against the whole population of a country which affords peculiar facilities to irregular warfare; and in which invading armies suffer more from famine than from the sword.

We are, therefore, for the peace of Utrecht. It is true, that we by no means admire the statesmen who concluded that peace. Hariey, we believe, was a solemn trifler. St. John a brilliant knave. The great body of their followers consisted of the country clergy and the country gentry; two classes of men who were then immeasurably inferior in respectability and intelligence to decent shopkeepers or farmers of our time. Parson Barnabas, Par son Trulliber, Sir Wilful Witwould, Sir Francis Wronghead, Squire Western, Squire Sul len-such were the people who composed the main strength of the Tory party for sixty years after the Revolution. It is true, that the means by which the Tories came into power in 1710 were most disreputable. It is true, that the manner in which they used their power was often unjust and cruel. It is true, that in order to bring about their favourite project of peace, they resorted to slander and deception, without the slightest scruple. It is true, that they passed off on the British nation a renunciation which they knew to be invalid. It is true, that they gave up the Catalans to the vengeance of Philip, in a manner inconsistent with humanity and national honour. But on the great question of Peace or War, we cannot but think that, though their motives may have been selfish and malevolent, their decision was beneficial to the state.

But we have already exceeded our limits. It remains only for us to bid Lord Mahon heartily farewell, and to assure him, that whatever dis like we may feel for his political opinions, we shall always meet him with pleasure on the neutral ground of literature.

WALPOLE'S LETTERS TO SIR HORACE MANN.*

[EDINBURGH REVIEW, 1833.]

The conformation of his mind was such, that whatever was little, seemed to him great, and whatever was great, seemed to him little. Serious business was a trifle to him, and trifles were his serious business. To chat with bluestockings; to write little copies of compliment ary verses on little occasions; to superintend a private press; to preserve from natural decay the perishable topics of Ranelagh and White's; to record divorces and bets, Miss Chudleigh's absurdities and George Selwyn's good say

WE cannot transcribe this title-page without strong feelings of regret. The editing of these volumes was the last of the useful and modest services rendered to literature by a nobleman of aniiable manners, of untarnished public and private character, and of cultivated mind. On this, as on other occasions, Lord Dover performed his part diligently, judiciously, and without the slightest ostentation. He had two merits, both of which are rarely found together in a commentator. He was content to be merely a commentator-to keep in the back-ings; to decorate a grotesque house with pieground, and to leave the foreground to the author whom he had undertaken to illustrate. Yet, though willing to be an attendant, he was by no means a slave; nor did he consider it as part of his editorial duty to see no faults in the writer to whom he faithfully and assiduously rendered the humblest literary offices.

The faults of Horace Walpole's head and heart are indeed sufficiently glaring. His writings, it is true, rank as high among the delicacies of intellectual epicures as the Strasburgh pies among the dishes described in the Almanack des Gourmands. But, as the pâté-defoie-gras owes its excellence to the diseases of the wretched animal which furnishes it, and would be good for nothing if it were not made of livers preternaturally swollen, so none but an unhealthy and disorganized mind could have produced such literary luxuries as the works of Walpole.

He was, unless we have formed a very erroneous judgment of his character, the most eccentric, the most artificial, the most fastidious, the most capricious of men. His mind was a bundle of inconsistent whims and affectations. His features were covered by mask within mask. When the outer disguise of obvious affectation was removed, you were still as far as ever from seeing the real man. He played innumerable parts, and overacted them all. When he talked misanthropy, he out-Timoned Timon. When he talked philanthropy, he left Howard at an immeasurable distance. He scoffed at courts, and kept a chronicle of their most trifling scandal; at society, and was blown about by its slightest veerings of opinion; at literary fame, and left fair copies of his private letters, with copious notes, to be published after his decease; at rank, and never for a moment forgot that he was an honourable; at the practice of entail, and tasked the ingenuity of conveyancers to tie up his villa in the strictest settlement.

* Letters of Horace Walpole, Earl of Orford, to Sir Ho. race Mann, British Envoy at the Court of Tuscany. Now first published from the Originals in the possession of the EARL of WALDGRAVE. Edited by LORD DOVER. 3 vols. vo. London. 1833.

crust battlements; to procure rare engravings and antique chimney-boards; to match odd gauntlets; to lay out a maze of walks within five acres of ground-these were the grave employments of his long life. From these he turned to politics as to an amusement. After the labours of the print-shop and the auctionroom, he unbent his mind in the House of Commons. And, having indulged in the recreation of making laws and voting millions he returned to more important pursuits-to researches after Queen Mary's comb, Wolsey's red hat, the pipe which Van Tromp smoked during his last seafight, and the spur which King William struck into the flank of Sorrel.

In every thing in which he busied himself— in the fine arts, in literature, in public affairs he was drawn by some strange attraction from the great to the little, and from the useful to the odd. The politics in which he took the keenest interest were politics scarcely deserving of the name. The growlings of George the Second, the flirtations of Princess Emily with the Duke of Grafton, the amours of Prince Frederic with Lady Middlesex, the squabbles between Gold Stick and the Master of the Buckhounds, the disagreements between the tutors of Prince George-these matters engaged almost all the attention which Walpole could spare from matters more important still;-from bidding for Zinckes and Petitots, from cheapening fragments of tapestry, and handles of old lances, from joining bits of painted glass, and from setting up memorials of departed cats and dogs. While he was fetching and carrying the gossip of Kensington Palace and Carlton House, he fancied that he was engaged in politics, and when he recorded that gossip, he fancied that he was writing history.

He was, as he has himself told us, fond of faction as an amusement. He loved mischief. but he loved quiet; and he was constantly on the watch for opportunities of gratifying both his tastes at once. He sometimes contrived, without showing himself, to disturb the course of ministerial negotiations, and to spread confusion through the political circles. He does not himself pretend that, on these occasions,

he was actuated by public spirit; nor does he appear to have had any private advantage in view. He thought it a good practical joke to set public men together by the ears; and he enjoyed their perplexities, their accusations, and their recriminations, as a malicious boy enjoys the embarrassment of a misdirected traveller.

Houghton or in Downing street, men who had been Whigs when it was as dangerous to be a Whig as to be a highwayman; men who had voted for the exclusion bill, who had been con cealed in garrets and cellars after the battle of Sedgmoor, and who had set their names to the declaration that they would live and die with the Prince of Orange. He had acquired the About politics, in the high sense of the word, language of these men, and he repeated it by he knew nothing and cared nothing. He called rote, though it was at variance with all his himself a Whig. His father's son could scarce- tastes and feelings; just as some old Jacobite ly assume any other name. It pleased him families persisted in praying for the Pretender, also to affect a foolish aversion to kings as and passing their glasses over the water-dekings, and a foolish love and admiration of canter when they drank the king's health, long rebels as rebels; and, perhaps, while kings after they had become zealous supporters of were not in danger, and while rebels were not the government of George the Third. He was in being, he really believed that he held the a Whig by the accident of hereditary connec doctrines which he professed. To go no far- tion; but he was essentially a courtier, and ther than the letters now before us, he is per- not the less a courtier because he pretended to petually boasting to his friend Mann of his sneer at the object which excited his admiraaversion to royalty and to royal persons. He tion and envy. His real tastes perpetually calls the crime of Damien "that least bad of show themselves through the thin disguise. murders, the murder of a king." He hung up While professing all the contempt of Bradshaw in his villa a fac-simile of the death-warrant or Ludlow for crowned heads, he took the of Charles, with the inscription, "Major Charta." trouble to write a book concerning Royal AuYet the most superficial knowledge of history thors. He pried with the utmost anxiety into might have taught him that the Restoration, the most minute particulars relating to the and the crimes and follies of the twenty-eight royal family. When he was a child, he was years which followed the Restoration, were the haunted with a longing to see George the First, effects of this "Greater Charter." Nor was and gave his mother no peace till she had there much in the means by which the instru- found a way of gratifying his curiosity. The ment was obtained which could gratify a judi- same feeling, covered with a thousand discious lover of liberty. A man must hate kings guises, attended him to the grave. No observery bitterly, before he can think it desirable vation that dropped from the lips of majesty that the representatives of the people should seemed to him too trifling to be recorded. The be turned out of doors by dragoons, in order French songs of Prince Frederic, compositions to get at a king's head. Walpole's Whigism, certainly not deserving of preservation on achowever, was of a very harmless kind. He count of their intrinsic merit, have been carekept it, as he kept the old spears and helmets fully preserved for us by this contemner of at Strawberry Hill, merely for show. He royalty. In truth, every page of Walpole's would just as soon have thought of taking works betrayed him. This Diogenes, who down the arms of the ancient Templars and would be thought to prefer his tub to a palace, Hospitallers from the walls of his hall, and and who has nothing to ask of the masters of setting off on a crusade to the Holy Land, as Windsor and Versailles but that they will of acting in the spirit of those daring warriors stand out of his light, is a gentleman-usher at and statesmen, great even in their errors, whose heart. names and seals were affixed to the warrant which he prized so highly. He liked revolution and regicide only when they were a hundred years old. His republicanism, like the courage of a bully or the love of a fribble, was strong and ardent when there was no occasion for it, and subsided when he had an opportunity of bringing it to the proof. As soon as the revolutionary spirit really began to stir in Europe, as soon as the hatred of kings became something more than a sonorous phrase, he was frightened into a fanatical royalist, and became one of the most extravagant alarmists of those wretched times. In truth, his talk about liberty, whether he knew it or not, was from the beginning a mere cant, the remains of a phraseology which had meant something in the mouths of those from whom he had learned it, but which, in his mouth, meant about as much as the oath by which the Knights of the Bath bind themselves to redress the wrongs of all injured ladies. He had been fed in his boyhood with Whig speculations on government. He must often have seen, at

He had, it is plain, an uneasy consciousness of the frivolity of his favourite pursuits; and this consciousness produced one of the most diverting of his ten thousand affectations. His busy idleness, his indifference to matters which the world generally regards as important, his passion for trifles, he thought fit to dignify with the name of philosophy. He spoke of himself as of a man whose equanimity was proof to ambitious hopes and fears; who had learned to rate power, wealth, and fame at their true value, and whom the conflict of parties, the rise and fall of statesmen, the ebbs and flows of public opinion, moved only to a smile of mingled compassion and disdain. It was owing to the peculiar elevation of his character, that he cared about a lath and plaster pinnacle more than about the Middlesex election, and about a miniature of Grammont more than about the American Revolution. Pitt and Murray might talk themselves hoarse about trifles. But questions of government and wa: were too insignificant to detain a mind which was occupied in recording the scandal of club

Walpole judged of French literature after the same fashion. He understood and loved the French language. Indeed, he loved it too well. His style is more deeply tainted with Gallicisms than that of any other English writer with whom we are acquainted. His The literary character has undoubtedly its composition often reads, for a page together, full share of faults, and of very serious and like a rude translation from the French. We offensive faults. If Walpole had avoided those meet every minute with such sentences as faults, we could have pardoned the fastidious- these, "One knows what temperaments Annibal ness with which he declined all fellowship Caracci painted." "The impertinent person. with men of learning. But from those faults age!" "She is dead rich." "Lord Dalkeith Walpole was not one jot more free than the is dead of the small-pox in three days." garreteers from whose contact he shrank. Of" What was ridiculous, the man who seconded literary meannesses and literary vices, his life the motion happened to be shut out." "It wil. and his works contain as many instances as now be seen whether he or they are most pa the life and the works of any member of triot." Johnson's club. The fact is, that Walpole had the faults of Grub street, with a large addition from St. James's street, the vanity, the jealousy, the irritability of a man of letters, the