father, and the son's energy and ingenuity in his father's defence are always commendable and usually dignified. But what a world of thoughts is bred by the elder Walpole's remark, which his son records: "that but few men should ever be ministers, for it lets them see too much of the badness of mankind." There is the great Pitt, later the great Chatham. It is interesting to see how Walpole's personal grudge checks and colors his laudation of the mighty minister. Yet through the grudge are always to be seen the energy, the large ambition, the passionate earnestness, the unfailing genius. And there is Fox, all gifts and no stability. And there is Rockingham, with little more stability and no gifts. And there is North, that strangely winning yet fatal spirit, so auspicious to America, so disastrous to England, whom Walpole gibbets, perhaps justly, as "a bad minister and a selfish man, who had abilities enough to have made a very different figure." But a singular observation on them all, after fifty years' study, may be taken for what it is worth: "I told her it was a settled maxim of mine that no great country was ever saved by good men, because good men will go the lengths that may be necessary. Beside the great and serious statesmen there

not

" 4

are the freaks and oddities who diversify solemn moments with whim and antic. A detached spectator like Walpole naturally takes great delight in these, and his picturesque account of them compels the reader to share his amusement. Many of the stories that he tells are trivial and he admits them to be so; but there is shrewd justice in his excuse: "I don't know whether you will not think all these very trifling histories; but for myself, I love anything that marks a character strongly." So the wayward and fantastic figures dance across the stage; those of greater note and importance like the witty and brilliant Charles Townshend, or the social Selwyn with his strangely mortuary tastes, and those less familiar but often more piquant, like Scrope or the Duchess of Kingston. Most singular, most clownish of all, at least, in Walpole's presentation of him, is the ever-reappearing Duke of Newcastle, with his extravagant silliness, his inevitable gesture of colossal ineptitude. Take him crying, capering, cowering at the solemn ceremony of the interment of George the Second in 1760: "This grave scene was fully contrasted by the burlesque Duke of Newcastle. He fell into a fit of crying the moment he came into the chapel, and flung himself back in a stall, the Archbishop

hovering over him with a smelling-bottle-but in two minutes his curiosity got the better of his hypocrisy, and he ran about the chapel with his glass to spy who was or was not there, spying with one hand, and mopping his eyes with t'other. Then returned the fear of catching cold, and the Duke of Cumberland, who was sinking with heat, felt himself weighed down, and turning round, found it was the Duke of Newcastle standing upon his train to avoid the chill of the marble." "

Such scenes, with or without conspicuous historical figures, are scattered everywhere through Walpole's pages and prove what theatrical delight he took in the vast, disordered show to which he had such intimate access. There are the elaborate trials and executions of the rebel Stuart lords in the beginning; later there are the Gordon riots; there is the superbly picturesque trial of Warren Hastings at the end. And all between there are vivid, telling incidents of every kind; a public wedding or a public hanging, a hot debate in the House of Commons, perhaps an earthquake, which jars the observer as well as the rest of the world, but cannot prevent his getting amusement out of it afterwards, and recording odd occurrences and clever speeches, as that of the parson "who came into White's the