only lead to that
terrible corrective, Arbitrary Power--which cowards call out for as
protection, and knaves are so ready to grant.

Not that he feared mobs as he feared governments. He regarded them with an
aristocrat's scorn. The only mob that almost won his tolerance was that
which celebrated the acquittal of Admiral Keppel in 1779. It was of the
mob at this time that he wrote to the Countess of Ossory: "They were, as
George Montagu said of our earthquakes, _so tame you might have stroked
them_." When near the end of his life the September massacres broke out in
Paris, his mob-hatred revived again, and he denounced the French with the
hysterical violence with which many people to-day denounce the
Bolshevists. He called them "_inferno-human_ beings," "that atrocious and
detestable nation," and declared that "France must be abhorred to latest
posterity." His letters on the subject to "Holy Hannah," whatever else may
be said against them, are not those of a cold and dilettante gossip. They
are the letters of the same excitable Horace Walpole who, at an earlier
age, when a row had broken out between the manager and the audience in
Drury Lane Theatre, had not been able to restrain himself, but had cried
angrily from his box, "He is an impudent rascal!" But his politics never
got beyond an angry cry. His conduct in Drury Lane was characteristic of
him:

The whole pit huzzaed, and repeated the words. Only think of my
being a popular orator! But what was still better, while my shadow
of a person was dilating to the consistence of a hero, one of the
chief ringleaders of the riot, coming under the box where I sat,
and pulling off his hat, said, "Mr. Walpole, what would you please
to have us do next?" It is impossible to describe to you the
confusion into which this apostrophe threw me. I sank down into the
box, and have never since ventured to set my foot into the playhouse.

There you have the fable of Walpole's life. He always in the end sank down
into his box or clambered back to his mantelpiece. Other men might save
the situation. As for him, he had to look after his squirrels and his
friends.

This means no more than that he was not a statesman, but an artist. He was
a connoisseur of great actions, not a practicer of them. At Strawberry
Hill he could at least keep himself in sufficient health with the aid of
iced water and by not wearing a hat when out of doors to compose the
gr