uble greatly about enemies of his own, but he never
could forgive the enemies of Sir Robert Walpole. His ridicule of the Duke
of Newcastle goes far beyond diversion. It is the baiting of a mean and
treacherous animal, whose teeth were "tumbling out," and whose mouth was
"tumbling in." He rejoices in the exposure of the dribbling indignity of
the Duke, as when he describes him going to Court on becoming Prime
Minister in 1754:

On Friday this august remnant of the Pelhams went to Court for the
first time. At the foot of the stairs he cried and sunk down; the
yeomen of the guard were forced to drag him up under the arms. When
the closet-door opened, he flung himself at his length at the
King's feet, sobbed, and cried, "God bless your Majesty! God
preserve your Majesty!" and lay there howling, embracing the King's
knees, with one foot so extended that my Lord Coventry, who was
_luckily_ in waiting, and begged the standers-by to retire, with,
"For God's sake, gentlemen, don't look at a great man in distress!"
endeavouring to shut the door, caught his grace's foot, and made
him roar with pain.

The caricature of the Duke is equally merciless in the description of
George II.'s funeral in the Abbey, in which the "burlesque Duke" is
introduced as comic relief into the solemn picture:

He fell into a fit of crying the moment he came into the chapel,
and flung himself back in a stall, the Archbishop hovering over him
with a smelling-bottle; but in two minutes his curiosity got the
better of his hypocrisy, and he ran about the chapel with his glass
to spy who was or was not there, spying with one hand and mopping
his eyes with the other. Then returned the fear of catching cold;
and the Duke of Cumberland, who was sinking with heat, felt himself
weighed down, and turning round found it was the Duke of Newcastle
standing upon his train to avoid the chill of the marble.

Walpole, indeed, broke through his habit of public decorum in his
persecution of the Duke; and he tells how on one occasion at a ball at
Bedford House he and Brand and George Selwyn plagued the pitiful old
creature, who "wriggled, and shuffled, and lisped, and winked, and spied"
his way through the company, with a conversation at his expense carried on
in stage whispers. There was never a more loyal son than Horace Walpole.
He offered up a Prime Minister daily as a sacrifice at Sir Rob