trated me with a visionary longing to be a monk in it. Though
my life has been passed in turbulent scenes, in pleasures or other
pastimes, and in much fashionable dissipation, still, books,
antiquity, and virtue kept hold of a corner of my heart: and since
necessity has forced me of late years to be a man of business, my
disposition tends to be a recluse for what remains--but it will
not be my lot; and though there is some excuse for the young doing
what they like, I doubt an old man should do nothing but what he
ought, and I hope doing one's duty is the best preparation for
death. Sitting with one's arms folded to think about it, is a very
long way for preparing for it. If Charles V. had resolved to make
some amends for his abominable ambition by doing good (his duty
as a king), there would have been infinitely more merit than going
to doze in a convent. One may avoid actual guilt in a sequestered
life, but the virtue of it is merely negative; the innocence is
beautiful."

There had been moments when Horace Walpole even expressed the
tenderest feelings for fame; and the following passage, written prior
to the preceding ones, gives no indication of that contempt for
literary fame, of which the close of this character will exhibit an
extraordinary instance.

This letter relates an affecting event--he had just returned from
seeing General Conway attacked by a paralytic stroke. Shocked by his
appearance, he writes--

"It is, perhaps, to vent my concern that I write. It has operated
such a revolution on my mind, as no time, at _my age_, can efface.
It has at once damped every pursuit which my spirits had even now
prevented me from being weaned from, I mean of virtu. It is like a
mortal distemper in myself; for can amusements amuse, if there is
but a glimpse, a vision of outliving one's friends? _I have had
dreams in which I thought I wished for fame--it was not certainly
posthumous fame at any distance; I feel, I feel it was confined to
the memory of those I love._ It seems to me impossible for a man
who has no friends to do anything for fame--and to me the first
position in friendship is, to intend one's friends should survive
one--but it is not reasonable to oppress you, who are suffering
gout, with my melancholy ideas. What I have said will tell you,
what I hope so many years have told you, that I am very constant
and sincere to friends of above forty years.