ART. IX.-WALPOLE AND CHESTERFIELD.

In the early day of his literary struggles Oliver Goldsmith wrote for the Public Ledger a series of letters to which he gave the general title of "The Citizen of the World." They purported to be the work of a shrewd, humorous Chinese traveler who came to London to study phases of English civilization. He goes about the great city accompanied by a character known as The Man in Black. Their conversations are most entertaining. The Chinese traveler discovers that London contains not only professional authors, but certain noblemen who now and then condescend to write a book. And he is amazed to find that the nobleman's books sell better than those of the man of letters. He writes to his friend in China: "A nobleman has but to take a pen, ink, and paper, write away through three large volumes, and then sign his name to the title-page." The book may be a wretched performance, but what matter so long as a nobleman's name is attached to it? The appellation of "lord" is equivalent to genius. And thus it comes about that in England, as soon as a book is published, people begin to ask if the author keeps a coach, has an estate, and dines on turtle. If they are satisfied on these points they at once buy and praise his books. On the other hand, if he is only a poor devil of an author, it makes no odds how much he knows or how well his book is written. Through the phrases of his pretended Chinese traveler Goldsmith voiced the feeling that many a struggling man of genius must have had when he saw how easily social distinction cleared the path to literary renown. He spoke not for himself alone but for many about him who were in the same plight. This was one of the petty annoyances of English literary life in the eighteenth century. The aristocrats would persist in entering the arena with professed men of letters and, what was worse, they would carry off many of the prizes. To-day it is impossible for a man to make any name in letters by virtue of his equipage or his titles. A man of rank may have a literary gift as well as a commoner. Many of the aristocrats could write well, and not a few could write superbly. Walpole and Chesterfield were among these.

I have called these men "the aristocrats," for that is exactly what they were. They thought themselves better than the rank and file of humanity. In a technical sense they were better. Society in the days of Walpole and Chesterfield was divided into strata, just as it is now, but at that time the lines of demarcation were more sharply drawn than they are to-day. Some men looked down and others looked up. Neither class thought there was anything odd about this arrangement. The upper classes more or less pitied the lower, the lower more or less envied the upper. There were sturdy members of the lower stratum who preserved a fierce personal independence while they perfectly acquiesced in the established order of the world. They sometimes came into collision with their social betters, but this did not mean that they had democratic ideas. They had no wish to drag noblemen down to their commonplace sphere, they merely wished to teach noblemen the wisdom of keeping in their own sphere and the virtue of minding their own business. Many of these assaults came from the world of letters. Writers and students have in all ages constituted a republic of their own, a little independent state inside the great monarchy, the members of which, forever quarreling, quickly unite against a common enemy. The aristocrats, albeit they made books themselves, despised professional authors. The feeling that it is degrading to write books for a living is very ancient. "I am not an author," Congreve testily remarked to Voltaire; "I am not an author, I am a gentleman." This was Horace Walpole's idea; he was not an author, he was a gentleman. For men of letters he had only a sneer. He wrote a novel, but he was a gentleman in spite of it. He compiled his Anecdotes of Painters in England, his Catalogue of Noble and Royal Authors, his Historic Doubts on the Life and Reign of Richard III, but these books were all done as a gentleman should do such work-for pleasure, and not for the sake of competing with the vulgar mob that writes for a living. Walpole had a good-natured contempt for accurate scholarship; accuracy was inconsistent with the character of a gentleman. There are many things one would better not know; leave horrid details to the poor drudges in Grub Street! With this conception of authorship it is not surprising that Walpole

should put a low estimate on men who to-day stand in the first ranks for literary skill or profound scholarship. Imagine Walpole patronizing Gibbon; the author of the Historic Doubts on Richard III patronizing the author of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire! It was a fearful mistake to make, but possibly Walpole was all unconscious of it. A still greater mistake was his attitude toward Fielding. It is grotesque to think that the man whose idea of fiction was The Castle of Otranto should have given two fingers instead of his whole hand to the author of Tom Jones. Walpole went through life making blunders of this sort, trying to apply the social measuring rod to men of genius. Hence his attitude toward Johnson, Richardson, Hume, and Goldsmith. No one of them was a gentleman by Horace Walpole's standard.

Now what kind of a life did an aristocrat like Horace Walpole lead? Let us get at some of the conditions of existence as he understood them.

In the first place, he was entirely exempt from the conditions laid upon Adam at the time Adam was expelled from the garden of Eden. Horace Walpole never knew what it was to earn his bread in the sweat of his brow. He was cut off from the most exacting penalty of human existence-the necessity of maintaining that life which has come to each of us unsought. He looked about him and saw men struggling for daily bread. The spectacle diverted him as would the spectacle of street arabs scrambling for pennies. He not only took no part in it, he could not even conceive of such a thing, any more than he could conceive of jumping out of his chariot to scramble after pennies in the dust with the street arabs. A man in this situation cannot help feeling superior. All the facts of life testify to his superiority. He is not as other men, and he knows it. Contrast Walpole with Richard Savage. Without a groat in his pocket, hardly a shirt to his back, too proud to ask his friends for help, Savage wanders through the London streets and when darkness comes on curls up in a doorway and falls asleep. Presently Floyd, another indigent author, passes along, recognizes Savage, and wakes him up. Savage springs to his feet and exclaims, "My dear Floyd, I'm shocked to

find you in this destitute condition! Will you go home with me to my lodgings?" These men had wit, but their wit and their desperate courage were not always sufficient; not a few Grub Street authors took refuge in suicide. The story of Goldsmith's struggles, Johnson's hardships, Christopher Smart's impecuniosities, is very picturesque, but the life these men led was cruelly exacting. Your literary Bohemian of to-day is a prince in comparison with the literary Bohemians of the eighteenth century. Freedom from the necessity of work encourages a man to throw off other responsibilities. Walpole was essentially the critic and the mocker. He took no share in the conduct of affairs. While other men bore the heat and burden of the day he sat under a sunshade and looked on. For a wonder, nobody threw stones at him; England is accustomed to its leisure class, believes in it and wouldn't know what to do without it. Walpole took his seat in Parliament in 1741 at the age of twenty-four years. He made two or three speeches, but for the most part he was content to be a listener. There is nothing to show that he ever espoused an unpopular cause or sacrificed an hour of ease for the good of the people at large. He was not vulgarly selfish, scheming, a plotter. In a corrupt state of society he was remarkably free from the grosser traits. We shall find some amusement in studying the life of this polite idler who in his nonchalant way was the busiest man alive. A man of intelligence and taste who has nothing to do will devise something to suit his whim or his genius. If he have a coarse vein he will indulge in coarse pleasures and people will call him a brute; if he be a man of delicate fancy he will go in for delicate delights and people will call him effeminate. Walpole became a virtuoso. He built himself a gingerbread Gothic mansion on the banks of the Thames at Twickenham. He set up a press for his private satisfaction and made limited editions of curious books to give away to his friends. And he became an indefatigable collector of paintings, statuary, engravings, relics, and oddities of all sorts. He set the fashion for this sort of thing in his day. It is owing to Walpole's influence, no doubt, that thousands of priceless treasures have been preserved which might otherwise have found their way to the junkshop. His own collection became so

renowned that he began to feel like the keeper of a museum. People applied in throngs; it became necessary to regulate by stringent rule the number who should be admitted each week. Walpole was pleased to have his collection so honored, but he laughingly admitted the inconvenience of the reputation he had acquired. "His whole time," says one of his biographers, "was passed in giving tickets to his gallery and hiding himself when it was on view." He used to declare that he kept an inn-the Sign of the Gothic Castle. In one of his letters to Montagu he says, serio-comically, "Take my advice: never build a charming house for yourself between London and Hampton Court. Everybody will live in it but you."

Walpole's mansion, while it was neither one of the greatest nor one of the noblest of England's stately homes, may well be accounted one of the most famous and interesting. It has become historic under the name of "Strawberry Hill," a name which Walpole found in one of the old title deeds. This cottage or villa, which began as a toy, became in the course of twenty-five years a castle, a palace; for nearly a quarter of a century elapsed between the time when Walpole made the original purchase and the moment when he was putting the last touches to what he called the Round Tower and the apartment known as the State Bedchamber. In Walpole's day building was a stately and dignified process. The great mass rose slowly from the ground. A deal of thought went into the laying of every stone. When finished the house partook of the builder's nature; it was an embodiment of his genius. On this principle it is easy to explain the fantastic and bizarre character of Strawberry Hill. The house was like its owner. Goldwin Smith says that Thomas Jefferson invented that type of residence which displayed the front of a Grecian temple with culinary appurtenances in the rear. Horace Walpole invented that type of residence which looked like a Gothic castle of the Middle Ages but was intended to be a comfortable home for a gouty and finical English bachelor of modern times. One plainly sees that the Gothic idea must undergo considerable modification to make it fit the requirements. Strawberry Hill was not a complete success. The parts conceived in the true Gothic spirit