ilk to throw to
the squirrels in the garden.

Many people would be willing to admit, however, that Walpole was an
excitable creature where small things were concerned--a parroquet or the
prospect of being able to print original letters of Ninon de l'Enclos at
Strawberry, or the discovery of a poem by the brother of Anne Boleyn, or
Ranelagh, where "the floor is all of beaten princes." What is not
generally realized is that he was also a high-strung and eager spectator
of the greater things. I have already spoken of his enthusiasm for wild
nature as shown in his letters from the Alps. It is true he grew weary of
them. "Such uncouth rocks," he wrote, "and such uncomely inhabitants." "I
am as surfeited with mountains and inns as if I had eat them," he groaned
in a later letter. But the enthusiasm was at least as genuine as the
fatigue. His tergiversation of mood proves only that there were two
Walpoles, not that the Walpole of the romantic enthusiasms was insincere.
He was a devotee of romance, but it was romance under the control of the
comic spirit. He was always amused to have romance brought down to
reality, as when, writing of Mary Queen of Scots, he said: "I believe I
have told you that, in a very old trial of her, which I bought for Lord
Oxford's collection, it is said that she was a large lame woman. Take
sentiments out of their _pantaufles_, and reduce them to the infirmities
of mortality, what a falling off there is!" But see him in the
picture-gallery in his father's old house at Houghton, after an absence of
sixteen years, and the romantic mood is upper-most. "In one respect," he
writes, speaking of the pictures, "I am very young; I cannot satiate
myself with looking," and he adds, "Not a picture here but calls a
history; not one but I remember in Downing Street or Chelsea, where queens
and crowds admired them." And, if he could not "satiate himself with
looking" at the Italian and Flemish masters, he similarly preserved the
heat of youth in his enthusiasm for Shakespeare. "When," he wrote, during
his dispute with Voltaire on the point, "I think over all the great
authors of the Greeks, Romans, Italians, French and English (and I know no
other languages), I set Shakespeare first and alone and then begin anew."
One is astonished to find that he was contemptuous of Montaigne. "What
signifies what a man thought," he wrote, "who never thought of anything
but himself, and what signifies what a man did who never did an