ving truth, or led our curiosity
onward through the labyrinth of political intrigue, parliamentary
struggle, and national vicissitude, with so light, and yet so leading a
hand? A part of this charm arises from the interest which he himself
took in his performance. He evidently delighted in the revival of those
scenes in which he had once figured, and the powerful portraiture which,
in his study, realized the characters of the eminent men whom he had
seen successively depart from the political world. In this lies the
spell which makes Walpole the favourite of all the higher order of
readers in our age, and will make him popular to the last hour of the
English language.

We read Gibbon like a task. We are astonished at his learned opulence,
his indefatigable labour, and his flood of rich and high-wrought
conception; but we grow as weary of him, as if we walked through an
Indian treasury, and rested the eye only on heaps of gold. With all our
great historical writers, the mind feels a sense of their toil, and,
however it may be endured for the sake of its knowledge, _our_ toil,
too, is inevitable, and the crop must be raised only by the sweat of our
own brow.

But the pages of Walpole give us the knowledge without the toil, and,
instead of bending to the tillage, we pluck the fruit from the tree as
we pass along. When he, too, is heavy, his failure arises simply from
his attempting to assume the style of his contemporaries. He is not made
for their harness, however it may be plated and embroidered. He cannot
move in their stately and measured pace. His genius is volatile and
vivid; he moves by bounds: and his display is always the most effective
when, abandoning the beaten tracks of authorship, he speeds his light
way across the field, and exhibits at once the agility of his powers and
the caprice of his will.

What infinite gratification have we lost, by the want of such a writer
in the days of classical antiquity! With what interest would the living
world follow a Greek or a Roman Walpole! With what delight should we
contemplate a Greek Council, with Pericles for its president, sketched
by the hand of a spectator, and shown in the brilliant contests,
intellectual intrigue, and ardent ambition of these sons of soul! What a
scene would such a writer make of Cicero confronting Catiline, with the
supremacy of Rome trembling in the scale, and the crowded senate-house
preparing to hear the sentence of life or death! We migh