ish for Bentley, who "carried a dozen
to town t'other day in a decanter." Walpole is similarly amused by the
spectacle of himself as a planter and gardener. "I have made great
progress," he boasts, "and talk very learnedly with the nursery-men,
except that now and then a lettuce runs to seed, overturns all my botany,
and I have more than once taken it for a curious West Indian flowering
shrub. Then the deliberation with which trees grow is extremely
inconvenient to my natural impatience." He goes on enviously to imagine
the discovery by posterity of a means of transplanting oaks of a hundred
and fifty years as easily as tulip-bulbs. This leads him to enlarge upon
the wonders that the Horace Walpole of posterity will be able to possess
when the miraculous discoveries have been made.

Then the delightfulness of having whole groves of humming-birds,
tatne tigers taught to fetch and carry, pocket spying-glasses to
see all that is doing in China, and a thousand other toys, which we
now look upon as impracticable, and which pert posterity would
laugh in our face for staring at.

Among the various creatures with which he loved to surround himself, it is
impossible to forget either the little black spaniel, Tony, that the wolf
carried off near a wood in the Alps during his first travels, or the more
imperious little dog, Tonton, which he has constantly to prevent from
biting people at Madame du Deffand's, but which with Madame du Deffand
herself "grows the greater favourite the more people he devours." "T'other
night," writes Walpole, to whom Madame du Deffand afterwards bequeathed
the dog in her will, "he flew at Lady Barrymore's face, and I thought
would have torn her eye out, but it ended in biting her finger. She was
terrified; she fell into tears. Madame du Deffand, who has too much parts
not to see everything in its true light, perceiving that she had not
beaten Tonton half enough, immediately told us a story of a lady whose dog
having bitten a piece out of a gentleman's leg, the tender dame, in a
great fright, cried out, 'Won't it make him sick?'" In the most attractive
accounts we possess of Walpole in his old age, we see him seated at the
breakfast-table, drinking tea out of "most rare and precious ancient
porcelain of Japan," and sharing the loaf and butter with Tonton (now
grown almost too fat to move, and spread on a sofa beside him), and
afterwards going to the window with a basin of bread and m