ert's tomb.

At the same time, his aversions were not always assumed as part of a
family inheritance. He had by temperament a small opinion of men and women
outside the circle of his affections. It was his first instinct to
disparage. He even described his great friend Madame du Deffand, at the
first time of meeting her, as "an old blind debauchee of wit." His
comments on the men of genius of his time are almost all written in a vein
of satirical intolerance. He spoke ill of Sterne and Dr. Johnson, of
Fielding and Richardson, of Boswell and Goldsmith. Goldsmith he found
"silly"; he was "an idiot with once or twice a fit of parts." Boswell's
_Tour of the Hebrides_ was "the story of a mountebank and his zany."
Walpole felt doubly justified in disliking Johnson owing to the criticism
of Gray in the _Lives of the Poets_. He would not even, when Johnson
died, subscribe to a monument. A circular letter asking for a subscription
was sent to him, signed by Burke, Boswell, and Reynolds. "I would not
deign to write an answer," Walpole told the Miss Berrys, "but sent down
word by my footman, as I would have done to parish officers with a brief,
that I would not subscribe." Walpole does not appear in this incident the
"sweet-tempered creature" he had earlier claimed to be. His pose is that
of a schoolgirl in a cutting mood. At the same time his judgment of
Johnson has an element of truth in it. "Though he was good-natured at
bottom," he said of him, "he was very ill-natured at top." It has often
been said of Walpole that, in his attitude to contemporary men of genius,
he was influenced mainly by their position in Society--that he regarded an
author who was not a gentleman as being necessarily an inferior author.
This is hardly fair. The contemporary of whom he thought most highly was
Gray, the son of a money broker. He did not spare Lady Mary Wortley
Montagu any more than Richardson. If he found an author offensive, it was
more likely to be owing to a fastidious distaste for low life than to an
aristocratic distaste for low birth; and to him Bohemianism was the lowest
of low life. It was certainly Fielding's Bohemianism that disgusted him.
He relates how two of his friends called on Fielding one evening and found
him "banqueting with a blind man, a woman, and three Irishmen, on some
cold mutton and a bone of ham, both in one dish, and the dirtiest cloth."
Horace Walpole's daintiness recoiled from the spirit of an author who did
not