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or of its leading characteristics. It is vain to talk of the advantage of bringing the two Churches to a perfect similarity by the extinction of the Office of the weaker: first, because there is a positive value in the genuine forms of the expression of national and local character-they are all homes of the affections; secondly, because the thing cannot be done. We may ape the manners and adopt the speech of Frenchmen: the result will be not a duplicate nor even a copy, but a mean and flat caricature. The English Church has much that her Scottish sister cannot have her unbroken episcopal succession, her ancient canon law, her high standing as an estate of the realm, her millions of acres and of tithes, her millions upon millions of Christian souls. Let it not be grudged then to the Church in Scotland, if she cling with fondness to an Office so honoured by our own divines, so adapted by its form to exemplify the blessed truth of our relationship to the Church at large, and to remind us of the law of love. Let no pedantic love of uniformity, none of that inclination to domineer, in which manifestly we are to recognise one of our besetting sins, urge upon the Scottish bishops the surrender of this most beautiful and affecting service. If, as seems to be God's will, their Church is to continue poor, let her hold her poverty in freedom; and cherish in her breast the one ewe lamb of her native pastures, unsolicited to barter it for dignity or gold. Indeed it is not for its intrinsic merits, nor for its nationality, alone, that it should be revered; but also because it is precious to the poor Episcopalians of Scotland; to those who have followed the fortunes of their Church, not, we grant, in revolt and bloodshed, but in silence, obscurity and contempt, throughout the dreary period of the penal laws: and it is now high time that in our ecclesiastical arrangements we should begin to have some more show of regard to those poor of this world' who are especially the chosen of God, 'rich in faith and heirs of the kingdom which he hath promised to them that love Him:'* who, when once touched by religion, seem so much more easily than others to give the whole heart to God; and who are therefore so well qualified, by the spiritual tact of the inward man, to appreciate the very forms of the ordinance appointed to be the special medium of their union with their Lord.

But although in the manner we have described schism has been introduced among the Episcopalian Protestants of Scotland, their religious condition on the whole presents a promising and a pleasing picture. The eulogium of the devout Bishop Horne, who (in the days too when their own Communion Office held an un

*St. James, ii. 5.

divided

divided empire) indicated their Church as that with which, among existing Christian societies, an Apostle returning upon earth might most joyfully communicate, has still an intelligible application to their government and laws, and to the remarkable simplicity, purity, and patient firmness of that peculiar type of Christian character which seems to belong to them. The ravages of schism have been more than repaired, under the Divine grace, by the energy of faith and love. Their churches and congregations grow. With them, as in England, the standard of character and practice rises. They are now engaged in erecting a central institution of education, both clerical and lay, on the banks of the Almond, in the county of Perth, with the active and munificent support of the three Primates of the Churches of England and Ireland, as well as of many other distinguished prelates.* They have at their command, if a small portion of the goods and therefore of the temptations of this world, an open and unencumbered position, with every advantage for the attainment of spiritual excellence. The fact of schism is to be deplored for the sake of its victims; but the question may be raised whether the condition of the Church they have left is not more healthy after the amputation than while she bore about with her such materials of convulsion and disorder. Only let us hope that, among the forms of her increased and increasing activity, will be found an ever-growing earnestness in prayer for those whom she has lost, and an unwearying toil to win them back, not only to an external but to a true obedience, by gentleness, and by those overpowering demonstrations which sanctity of life can bring in aid of authority and of argument; that so, if it be the Divine will, we may live to see removed from the face of Christendom one at least among those many feuds which are at once the shame of religion, the stumbling-block of infirmity, and the rank food of unbelief.

The wardenship of this important institution has just been conferred, as is understood, by the Scottish Bishops, upon the Rev. Robert Scott, a very eminent scholar of Shrewsbury and Oxford, and a learned and exemplary parish priest of the west of England. This gentleman's share in the Oxford Greek-English Lexicon must have made his name familiar to most of our readers; but his professional publications have also been highly meritorious.

ART. X.

ART. X.-Memoirs of the Reign of King George III.

By Horace Walpole, youngest son of Sir Robert Walpole, Earl of Orford. Now first published from the original MSS. Edited with Notes by Sir Denis Le Marchant, Bart. 4 vols. 8vo. London, 1845.

THESE Memoirs of the first ten years of George III. will add certainly not more, and we think less, to the reputation of Horace Walpole or to English history than those of the last ten years of George II. They have the same occasional merit and the same general and pervading faults. They contain many traces of his peculiar wit, and frequent touches of his graphic style-a few, and but a few, new facts and lights scattered through a very intricate mass of political intrigues-with an overbalancing proportion of prejudice, partiality, misrepresentation, and inconsistency-trivial and variable, but always rancorous, resentments—and a general and constitutional proclivity to slander and calumny. These, indeed, may be said to be the essential characteristics of his admired Letters; but the gossip and scandal, which in a familiar letter are not merely tolerated, but, as it were, expected and welcomed, are grievous offences against good taste as well as good faith when it is attempted to array them in the grave and responsible character of history. Many, otherwise tolerably strict moralists, will not scruple to enliven a conversation or a correspondence with circumstances which the loosest conscience would not venture to repeat in judicial evidence. So it is that although many, most indeed, of the objectionable topics of his two sets of Memoirs, had been already produced in his 'Letters,'' Reminiscences,' and 'Walpoliana,' they have not there created the same disgust or indignation, and, we will add, tedium and nausea, which they do in their inspissated form; and there can be no doubt that Walpole's literary as well as moral character would have stood higher if these more solemn chronicles of libel and malignity had never been published.

We considered it our duty to trace, in our account of the first set of Memoirs, the real motive of Walpole's personal animosity to the leading political men of the period; and again in our recent review of the second livraison of the Letters to Mann,' the same task was forced upon us by the strange blunder of the editor of that publication, who was so blind or so indiscreet as to seem to question the justice of our opinion, even while he or she reproduced the very documents under Walpole's own hand

*

which

* It seems to be generally understood that the Advertisement' we allude to was not in fact written by the Editor, but supplied to him by Miss Berry, whose amiable

partiality

which established the proof of corrupt jobbing and mercenary slander against him even more flagrantly than we had originally stated it.

If the peculiar temper and personal bias of the writer were important ingredients in our consideration of the earlier Memoirs, they are much more so in the present work, which comes closer to our own time, and deals with persons and events better known and, on many accounts, more interesting. Referring, therefore, to our former Numbers, and particularly to that for October, 1844, for the extraordinary details of the influences under which Walpole acted and wrote, during the period comprised in the first Memoirs,' we shall here repeat so much of the general facts as may refresh our reader's memory, and we shall afterwards produce some remarkable elucidations and confirmations of our opinions afforded by the work that we are about to examine.

There can be no doubt that Walpole's wit, various and abundant as it was, had always an ill-natured, selfish, and cynical turn; and under any circumstances we might have expected that Memoirs from his pen would have been tinged by the same greedy appetite for scandal and the same unscrupulous propensity to satire which are the characteristics of his letters; but it required additional and deeper influences to chain this lively and mercurial spirit to the daily labour of a chronicler, and to evolve a disregard of truth, a perversity of judgment, and a rancour of feeling so intense, so gloomy, and we must add so dull, as these Memoirs exhibit. These influences were principally two-one pecuniary and accidental, and the other physical and constitutional. Walpole's sole income arose out of no less than five sinecure places or shares of places conferred on him by Sir Robert-amounting, he admits, when he first received them, to about 3000l. a-year. They afterwards more than doubled in value; but we at present take Walpole's own earliest estimate. Of this sum nearly onehalf was derived from a rider, as it was called, of 1400l. on the patent office of Collector of the Customs, of which his elder brother Edward was the patentee, receiving only about 4001. a-year of the present profits, but having the reversion of the whole 18007. if he should survive Horace. It would be useless to our present purpose to inquire why Sir Robert made this distribution of the income of the office; but the result was that Horace was

partialty (if the paper was indeed hers) must have obscured either her memory or her judgment as to the real and indisputable facts of the case. The writer (whoever that was) forgot or did not observe that the facts which Walpole himself confessed for a narrow and temporary object, were irrefragable evidence for the larger and more permanent purpose to which we have applied them with a force that we venture to assert defies rational contradiction.

thereby

thereby placed, as he himself tells us, in the 'precarious' and very unpleasant position of having so large a proportion of his income dependent on the life of a brother ten years older than himself. But there was also another more powerful though less prominent interest of the same nature constantly at work. Walpole, besides this precarious sinecure of 1400l. a-year, had another office which grew up, under a cloak of almost menial humility, to an enormous income. He was Usher of the Exchequer—

' and the duties of my office are to shut the gates of the Exchequer, and to furnish paper, pens, ink, wax, pencils, tape, penknives, scissors, parchment, and a great variety of other articles, to the Treasury, Exchequer, &c.'-Appendix to Letters to Mann, 1844, vol. iv. p. 330.

This office was performed by deputy, and produced a clear profit, as stated in 1780 by the Commissioners of accounts, of 42001.though Walpole himself had made a return of only 18007., and it was to defend this erroneous return of his emoluments that he drew up the statement which has led to elucidations of his literary character which its author never thought of.

Walpole says these profits were made on the articles supplied by him, and that the time of payment of his bills and of course some previous inspection of them

'depends on the good will and pleasure of the First Lord of the Treasury; and yet, though a mere tradesman in that respect, I believe no man will ever accuse me of having paid court to any First Lord of the Treasury.'-ib. 331.

We not only accuse, but shall convict him, on his own evidence, of having paid obsequious court to every First Lord in succession; he was in a constant fever of uneasy dependence on what he peevishly calls the First Lord's good will and pleasure,' and in a restless anxiety about the examination and discharge of these accounts, which, it appears from his correspondence with his deputy (Works, vol. ii. p. 381), were sometimes chargeable with gross abuse, and always liable to question.

Such precariousness and annoyances attached to so large a portion of his income would have been a source of reasonable uneasiness to any man, and would have justified efforts to obtain a more secure position. The attempts he made we do not blame in themselves; but we blame, with some mixture of pity, the species of monomania under which Walpole, while pursuing this natural, but certainly interested object, was eternally protesting that disinterestedness was the passion of his life-that he despised place and profit, and that it was his pride and glory to soar above all such selfish influences. We are satisfied that Walpole's anxiety about his offices, combining with the constitutional peculiarities

of

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