ything?"
This sentence might have served as a condemnation of Walpole himself, and
indeed he meant it so. Walpole, however, was an egoist of an opposite kind
to Montaigne. Walpole lived for his eyes, and saw the world as a masque of
bright and amusing creatures. Montaigne studied the map of himself rather
than the map of his neighbours' vanities. Walpole was a social being, and
not finally self-centred. His chief purpose in life was not to know
himself, but to give pleasure to his friends. If he was bored by
Montaigne, it was because he had little introspective curiosity. Like
Montaigne himself, however, he was much the servant of whim in his
literary tastes. That he was no sceptic but a disciple as regards
Shakespeare and Milton and Pope and Gray suggests, on the other hand, how
foolish it is to regard him as being critically a fashionable trifler.

Not that it is possible to represent him as a man with anything Dionysiac
in his temperament. The furthest that one can go is to say that he was a
man of sincere strong sentiment with quivering nerves. Capricious in
little things, he was faithful in great. His warmth of nature as a son, as
a friend, as a humanitarian, as a believer in tolerance and liberty, is so
unfailing that it is curious it should ever have been brought in question
by any reader of the letters. His quarrels are negligible when put beside
his ceaseless extravagance of good humour to his friends. His letters
alone were golden gifts, but we also find him offering his fortune to
Conway when the latter was in difficulties. "I have sense enough," he
wrote, "to have real pleasure in denying myself baubles, and in saving a
very good income to make a man happy for whom I have a just esteem and
most sincere friendship." "Blameable in ten thousand other respects," he
wrote to Conway seventeen years later, "may not I almost say I am perfect
with regard to you? Since I was fifteen have I not loved you unalterably?"
"I am," he claimed towards the end of his life, "very constant and sincere
to friends of above forty years." In his friendships he was more eager to
give than to receive. Madame du Deffand was only dissuaded from making him
her heir by his threat that if she did so he would never visit her again.
Ever since his boyhood he was noted for his love of giving pleasure and
for his thoughtfulness regarding those he loved. The earliest of his
published letters was until recently one written at the age of fourteen.