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no reason is, nor, we believe, can be, given for this assertion. On the contrary, recollecting how comparatively few of the already published letters are addressed to the persons with whom we know he much delighted to correspond-Madame du Deffand, General Conway, Lord Harcourt, Mrs. Damer, Lady Aylesbury, Lady Suffolk, Lady Harvey, the Chutes, the Beauclercs, the whole tribe of Waldegraves, and so many others of his nearest and most familiar friends and relations-we are led to hope that we are not even yet au fond du sac. Probably the most curious batch of all would be those to Mrs. Clive, which at her death no doubt returned into his own hands, and have never been heard of.

When we reflect that the mass of published letters and memoirs extends over a space of sixty-two years-from 1735 to 1797-and embraces every possible topic of politics, literature, and social life, drawn from the best sources of information, and detailed with such unwearied diligence, and such attractive vivacity, we grow every day more and more convinced of the serious importance of Horace Walpole as the historian of his time. Light and gossiping as the individual letters may seem, they constitute, taken altogether, a body of historical evidence to which no other age or country can afford anything like a parallel. But against those merits must be set off many concomitant and, as we may venture to call them, congenial defects. His politics are always under the strong influence of party and often of faction, and his details of social life and personal character are rendered more amusing indeed, but less trustworthy, by a strong seasoning of scandal, and occasionally of malice. It is not given to man to be at once of a party, and impartial-to be a gossip, and not censorious. We do not take the characters of Lord Wharton or Sir Robert Walpole from Swift, nor should we from Horace Walpole those of Bute or North.

But besides this natural and inevitable bias, Walpole had, no doubt, from his mother, and (if the scandal of the day was well founded) from his father too, a marked peculiarity of temper, which perhaps sharpened his sagacity and brightened his wit, but not unfrequently distorted his vision and deceived his judgment to an almost morbid degree. The result is, that no writer we know of requires to be read, when read historically, with more suspicion

Mr. Mitford talks, in one of his notes, of something that is to be seen in the Harcourt Correspondence; but he does not tell us what or where this Harcourt Corre spondence is. We conjecture that it may be Horace Walpole's letters to the two Lord Harcourts of his day; but surely this is a very vague way of citing an authority. At all events it seems to contradict the publisher's advertisement, that there are no more unpublished letters of Walpole.

See in Lord Wharncliffe's edition of Lady Mary Wortley's works Lady Louisa Stuart's statement that Horace was notoriously the son of Carr Lord Hervey. See also the biographical notice of John Lord Hervey, prefixed to his Memoirs, 1. xix.

-at

-at least, more caution-and a nicer investigation and comparison of all contemporary testimony. Even when run through for mere amusement, so much of the interest and of the pleasantry turns on circumstances and allusions which are every day becoming less familiar to ordinary readers, that there is hardly a page which would not be the better for some extraneous elucidation.

These considerations have induced us to give a closer and more continuous attention to the successive batches of Walpole's Correspondence and Memoirs than such apparently light reading might seem at first sight to deserve. They have also prompted the regret that we have been forced to express for the very unsatisfactory way in which most of those publications, and particularly the later ones, have been what is called 'edited.'

The respectable name of Mr. Mitford on this new title-page gave us better hopes. He has been long practised in the editorial office, and, from the course of his literary life, would have been, we should have thought, peculiarly qualified for such a task. But we have been altogether disappointed. This is undoubtedly the worst edited of the whole Walpolean series. The anonymous editor of the Letters to Mann did little, and did it ill; Mr. Vernon Smith did nothing-but Mr. Mitford has done worse than nothing. So far from elucidating what might be dark, he has sometimes confused what was clear, and in hardly any instance explains a real obscurity. Mr. Mitford is evidently aware that he has not done for us all that we might have reasonably expected. He says:

I have, where it seemed requisite, made a few observations in the notes, but from circumstances connected with my professional engagements, over which I had no control, that portion of the book is less perfect than I could have wished; in some cases, however, the readers will be able to supply themselves with original information; in others, they may derive assistance from the learned editors of works by Walpole previously published, and perhaps what they will find in these volumes may not be altogether without its use.'-Preface.

This, begging Mr. Mitford's pardon, seems to us a very insufficient apology. 'Engagements over which he had no control' might have curtailed his commentaries, but can hardly be pleaded for the laborious inanity of seventy or eighty whole pages of what he calls Illustrative Notes appended to his volumes—a much larger proportion than even the best (or least bad) of Walpole's editors had hitherto given us. We cannot understand why notes so apparently copious should contain so little illustration. For instance, Walpole says in December, 1773

'I have read a pretty little drama called Palladius and Irene, written by I know not whom.'-i. 110.

On

On this we find a note

'Palladius and Irene, a drama in three acts, 8vo. 1773. This is all that is given, without mentioning the author's name.'—i. 420.

The note is a mere echo, which leaves the matter just where it found it.

Again-Walpole says:—

'There is come out a Life of Garrick, in two volumes, by Davies, the bookseller, formerly a player. It is written naturally, simply, without pretensions. The work is entertaining,' &c.-ii. 86.

This seems plain enough; but the editor thinks it necessary to add an illustrative note:

"Memoirs of the Life of Garrick," interspersed with characters and anecdotes of his theatrical contemporaries, &c., by Thomas Davies. New Edition, 1808, 2 vols. A work of entertainment and information.'-ii. 391.

The note tells less than the text.

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Again: Walpole, after recommending a volume of French 'Letters,' adds, I do not recommend the boasted Siege of Calais (ii. 7); on which we find, 300 pages off, this illustrative note :

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Siege of Calais, a tragedy by Charles Denis, translated from the French of de Belloy, with historical notes, 1765. See Biog. Dramatica.'-ii. 404.

Few readers will have the Biographia Dramatica at hand, but we can console them by informing them that the said Biographia would have told them no more than the Illustrative Note, and that neither it nor the Note has any relation whatsoever to what Walpole was writing about-to wit, the original French play, which, as we find from the Collective Correspondence (vol. iv.), he had asked Lord Hertford, 25th March, 1765, to send him from Paris, and of which he writes to George Montague on the 5th April in the identical words used to Mason. The translation by Denis mentioned in the Biographia and the Note had not yet appeared, and probably Walpole never saw it; it seems to have fallen dead-born from the press.

Of so large a body of notes there are not, we believe, above a dozen that afford anything that can be fairly called illustration;— some are absolute blunders, while there are a hundred passages on which a really illustrative note would have been desirable. There is too much that we do not want, and too little of what we do.* And we demur altogether to the remedy that Mr. Mitford pro

*We must also notice the minor blunder of exiling, without even the help of a mark of reference, the note from the page it professes to illustrate-a mode sometimes necessary in long disquisitive commentaries, but as absurd as inconvenient in a case like this. poses―

poses-of 'the reader's supplying himself with original information,' or 'consulting the learned editors of all Walpole's previously published works.' It is rather hard on the purchaser of two costly volumes-which from the addition of the name of Mason may be supposed to be substantially of a separate class-to be forced to buy all the long series of Walpole's correspondence--(to say nothing of the Biographia Dramatica and the like)—and painfully to pick out from them what an editor ought to have already extracted for his use. In short, we have to say generally, and we shall by and by show more particularly, that, from whatever cause, Mr. Mitford has done his work less perfectly, to use his own too-indulgent phrase, than any editor that it has been yet our ill-fortune to meet.

In ordinary cases it is hardly worth while to notice mere errors of the press, but in these volumes they are so numerous, and in some instances such ludicrous perversions of 'the meaning, as to justify and indeed require special remark. The following instances will we think show that the Editor could not have read his own printed sheets. Walpole is made to say that Gray was easily disgusted with his conduct while on their travels;' but Walpole undoubtedly wrote early; for that was the fact, and accordingly in another letter he says 'I am sorry to find I disobliged Gray so very early.' (i. 106.) Walpole is made, in the very first page, to send Mason a 'volume of Engravings,' instead of his catalogue of Engravers. Then we read of Murphie's plagiarisms (i. 164), and, of course, thought of Arthur Murphy; but reading on, we found Macpherson was meant. Of a certain nolo Episcopari sermon which Mason had preached, and which Walpole advised him to suppress, he is made to say (i. 323) that 'it can be recalled '—when he certainly wrote 'it cannot be recalled.' Judge Persin (ii. 25) will puzzle legal chronologistsunless they have industry to discover that Mr. Baron Perryn may have been meant. We were startled (ii. 108) at finding that a certain circumstance is to make Mason, who hated Lord Rockingham, 'ever love' him,- Walpole really meaning that it might make Mason love even' him. We were for a moment at a loss to know who the Parnassus Poet' (ii. 298) might be, who was a channel of communication between his brother poets, Hayley and Mason; at last we discovered that 'the Parnassus Post' was meant. Walpole excuses the absurdity of a certain person's opinion by the suggestion that it was a general error- defendit numerus;' this is amazingly printed defend it Numerus, as if one Numerus was called upon to defend the obnoxious opinion. We were astonished in reading Mason's list of his preferments in the cathedral of York to find him appointed, in 1763, to the 'Primateship;' as we have never heard that he was Primate

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Primate of England, we conclude that the Precentorship may be a preferable lectio. In vol. ii. p. 314, Walpole is made to 'accept' an unseasonable visitor: Horace was seldom so complying, and accordingly he resolutely begged leave to except' him. In one of his towering bursts of patriotism, Walpole exclaims (i. 219), I am not corrupted; I am not a traitor. The printer has lowered the proud boast into 'I am not a tailor!' We may add that, throughout, sentences constantly begin and end where they ought not. It is almost incredible that any man of literary habits should have inspected the printed sheets; but our readers will find cause for more wonder of a like kind in the sequel.

While we feel ourselves obliged to complain that Mr. Mitford has so egregiously failed in editorial details, we willingly acknowledge the substantial value of the publication itself, and the special gratitude that we owe to him for having brought to light a correspondence which, though we are very far from thinking it, as he does, of as much general and greater literary interest than any other portion of Walpole's epistolary works,' does certainly fill up an important chasm in his correspondence, and throws additional light on an interesting and somewhat enigmatical portion of the literary and political history of both Mason and Walpole. It will also be found not unimportant to general history, and particularly to the elucidation of that violent struggle of parties that lasted from 1770 to the conclusion of the Rockingham administration.

'The letters of Mason, now first printed, formed part of the collection of manuscripts purchased of the Duke of Grafton, as executor of the late Earl of Waldegrave, and were entrusted to me for publication; and while I was lamenting the imperfect manner in which they would appear, from want of the answers of the correspondent, my friend, Archdeacon Burney, informed me that the corresponding letters of Walpole were carefully, and in their entire form, preserved at the Rectory House at Aston. The introduction which I obtained from him was most kindly received by Mr. Alderson, the present possessor of the place, and with a liberality for which my thanks are now to be paid, he allowed me the use of the volumes, that for more than half a century had been under the safe protection of his father and himself.'* -Preface, pp. vii. viii.

The editor says very truly that the two main points of interest in the correspondence are the explanation of Walpole's juvenile quarrel with Gray, and of his partnership with Mason in the celebrated Heroic Epistle.' On the first point, however, there

This gentleman, the present rector of Aston, is son to the Rev. Ch. Alderson, Mason's intimate friend and sole executor, who immediately succeeded the poet in that valuable living and beautiful parsonage.