inguished place in English
literature, and will prove of essential service to every succeeding writer
who may undertake to treat of the period which they embrace; but the
mantle of Hume is destined to fall on other shoulders.

Walpole's correspondence and memoirs, in many respects, are highly
valuable, and will always be referred to, as throwing much important light
on the parliamentary and court transactions of the middle of the
eighteenth century. They develope much that was known to no other man, at
least to no other with whose writings we are yet acquainted, who has left
any record of his information to future times. In this respect, his
memoirs are invaluable. It is astonishing how much information there is
afloat in the higher political circles, in every age, which is generally
known at the time to all who frequent them, which, on that very account,
perishes altogether with that generation. No one thinks of committing it
to paper any more than they do the stages to London, or the names of the
months in the year, or the usual forms of society--because every one knows
them. Thus the information, often of essential value to future
historians, perishes like the beauty of the women which has adorned the
age, unless some garrulous gossip, in his correspondence or memoirs, has
been trifling enough for his age, and wise enough for the next, to commit
it to paper. Horace Walpole was that garrulous gossip. His correspondence
with Sir H. Mann, embracing altogether a period of twenty years, which had
previously been published, and his _Memoirs of the Reign of George III._,
which have recently appeared, contain an account, tinged no doubt by
strong party feelings, but still an account of a very long and important
period of English history; and abound not only in curious facts,
interesting to the antiquary or the biographer, but contain many important
revelations of essential value to the national or general historian of the
period.

The praise of these volumes, however, must be taken with much alloy.
Horace Walpole was a man of the world and a courtier; he had quick natural
parts and much acquired discernment. He was a good scholar, was fond of
antiquities, and a passionate admirer of curiosities, which he collected
with indefatigable industry, and no small success, from every quarter. He
had lived too long in the political and the great world not to have
learned its selfishness and appreciated its heartlessness; not to have