If at this moment there is little chance of re-reading the sixteen volumes of the Paget Toynbee edition of Walpole’s letters, while the prospect¹ of possessing the magnificent Yale edition, where all the letters are to be printed with all the answers, becomes remote, this sound and sober biography of Horace Walpole by Mr. Ketton–Cremer may serve at least to inspire some random² thoughts about Walpole and the humane³ art which owes its origin to the love of friends.

But, according to his latest biographer, Horace Walpole’s letters were inspired not by the love of friends but by the love of posterity⁴. He had meant to write the history of his own times. After twenty years he gave it up, and decided⁵ to write another kind of history — a history ostensibly inspired by friends but in fact written for posterity. Thus Mann stood for politics; Gray for literature; Montagu and Lady Ossory for society. They were pegs⁷, not friends, each chosen because he was “particularly connected . . . with one of the subjects about which he wished to enlighten and inform posterity.” But if we believe that Horace Walpole was a historian in disguise, we are denying his peculiar⁸ genius as a letter writer. The letter writer is no surreptitious historian. He is a man of short range sensibility; he speaks not to the public at large but to the individual in private. All good letter writers feel the drag of the face on the other side of the age and obey it — they take as much as they give. And Horace Walpole was no exception. There is the correspondence with Cole to prove it. We can see, in Mr. Lewis’s edition, how the Tory parson develops the radical¹⁰ and the free-thinker in Walpole, how the middle-class professional man brings to the surface the

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