into the nature of his works.

His taste was highly polished; his vivacity attained to brilliancy;[32]
and his picturesque fancy, easily excited, was soon extinguished; his
playful wit and keen irony were perpetually exercised in his
observations on life, and his memory was stored with the most
amusing knowledge, but much too lively to be accurate; for his
studies were but his sports. But other qualities of genius must
distinguish the great author, and even him who would occupy that
leading rank in the literary republic our author aspired to fill. He
lived too much in that class of society which is little favourable to
genius; he exerted neither profound thinking, nor profound feeling;
and too volatile to attain to the pathetic, that higher quality of
genius, he was so imbued with the petty elegancies of society that
every impression of grandeur in the human character was deadened in
the breast of the polished cynic.

Horace Walpole was not a man of genius,--his most pleasing, if not his
great talent, lay in letter-writing; here he was without a rival;[33]
but he probably divined, when he condescended to become an author,
that something more was required than the talents he exactly
possessed. In his latter days he felt this more sensibly, which will
appear in those confessions which I have extracted from an unpublished
correspondence.

Conscious of possessing the talent which amuses, yet feeling his
deficient energies, he resolved to provide various substitutes for
genius itself; and to acquire reputation, if he could not grasp at
celebrity. He raised a printing-press at his Gothic castle, by which
means he rendered small editions of his works valuable from their
rarity, and much talked of, because seldom seen. That this is true,
appears from the following extract from his unpublished correspondence
with a literary friend. It alludes to his "Anecdotes of Painting in
England," of which the first edition only consisted of 300 copies.

"Of my new fourth volume I printed 600; but, as they can be had, I
believe not a third part is sold. This is a very plain lesson to me,
that my editions sell for their curiosity, and not for any merit in
them--and so they would if I printed Mother Goose's Tales, and but a
few. If I am humbled as an author, I may be vain as a printer; and
when one has nothing else to be vain of, it is certainly very little
worth while to be proud of that."

There is a distinction between the author of