The letters of Horace Walpole cannot at all be regarded. as a picture of society in general. He has no distinct notion whatever of the habits of the middle classes. Society with him is divided into two great sections-the aristocracy and the mob. He was made by his times; and this is one of the remarkable features of his times.

With all his sympathy for literature, he has a decided hatred for authors that are out of the pale of fashion. Fielding, Johnson, Sterne, Goldsmith, the greatest names of his day, are with him ridiculous and contemptible. He cannot be regarded, therefore, as a representative of the literary classes of his times. As the son of a great minister he was petted and flattered till his father fell from his power; he says himself he had then enough of flattery. When he mixed among his equals in the political intrigues of the time, he displayed no talent for business or oratory. His feeble constitution compelled him to seek amusement

instead of dissipation; and his great amusement was to look upon the follies of his associates and to laugh at them. He was not at bottom an ill-natured man, or one without feeling. He affected that insensibility which is the exclusive privilege of high life-and long may it continne so. When Lord Mountford shot himself, and another Lord rejoiced that his friend's death would allow him to hire the best cook in England, the selfish indifference was probably more affected than real. Walpole himself takes off his own mask on one occasion. When he heard of Gray's death, in writing to Chute he apologises for the concern he feels, and adds, I thought that what I had seen of the world had hardened my heart; but I find that it had formed my language, not extinguished my tenderness." When he speaks of individuals we may occasionally think that the world had formed his language; he is too often spiteful and malicious: but when he describes a class he is not likely much to exaggerate. The esprit de corps would render him somewhat charitable: if he did not 'extennate' he would not set down in malice,' when he was holding up a mirror of himself and of the very people with whom he was corresponding.

In the early part of the last century London saw less of the wealth and splendour of the aristocracy than previous to the Revolution. The great political divisions of the kingdom kept many families away from the Court; and the habits of the first Elector of Hanover who walked into the ownership of St. James's, and of his son and successor, were not very likely to attract the proud and the discontented from the scenes of their own proper greatness. Walpole, writing from Newmarket in 1743, says, 'llow dismal, how solitary, how scrub does this town look; and yet it has actually a street of houses better than Parma or Modena! Nay, the houses cf the people of fashion, who come hither for the races, are palaces to what houses in London itself were fifteen years ago. People do begin to live again now; and I suppose in a term we shall revert to York Houses, Clarendon Houses, &c. But from that

grandeur all the nobility had contracted themselves to live in coops of a dining-room, a dark back room, with one eye in a corner, and a closet. Think what London would be if the chief houses were in it, as in the cities in other countries, and not dispersed like great rarity-plums in a vast pudding of country.' It was some time before the large houses of the nobility once more made London the magnificent capital which it subsequently became. In the meantime the lordly tenants of the coops' above described spent a vast deal of their time in places of public resort. Let us cast a rapid glance at the fashionable amusements of the second half of the last century.

The year 1741 presents to us a curious spectacle of the aristocracy and the people at issue, and almost in mortal conflict, not upon a question of corn or taxes, but whether the Italian school of music should prevail, or the AngloGerman. The opera is to be on the French system of dancers, scenes, and dresses. The directors have already laid out great sums. They talk of a mob to silence the operas, as they did the French players; but it will be more difficult, for here half the young noblemen in town are engaged, and they will not be so easily persuaded to humour the taste of the mobility: in short, they have already retained several eminent lawyers from the Bear Garden to plead their defence.'* The fight had been. going on for nearly twenty years. Everybody knows Swift's epigram,

Walpole naturally belonged to the party of his 'order.' Handel had produced his great work, the Messiah,' in 1741, at Covent Garden. Fashion was against him, though he was supported by the court, the mob, and the poet of

* Horace Walpole to Mann, Oct. 8, 1741.

common sense.

He went to Ireland; and the triumph of

the Italian faction was thus immortalised by Pope:

"O Cara! Cara! silence all that train:
Joy to great Chaos! let Division reign:
Chromatic tortures soon shall drive them hence,
Break all their nerves, and fritter all their sense:
One trill shall harmonise joy, grief, and rage,
Wake the dull Church, and lull the ranting Stage:
To the same notes thy sons shall hum, or snore,
And all thy yawning daughters cry encore.
Another Phoebus, thy own Phoebus reigns,
Joys in my jigs, and dances in my chains.
But soon, ah soon, Rebellion will commence,
If Music meanly borrows aid from Sense:
Strong in new arms, lo! giant Handel stands,
Like bold Briareus, with a hundred hands;
To stir, to rouse, to shake the soul he comes,
And Jove's own thunders follow Mars's drums.
Arrest him, empress, or you sleep no more-

She heard, and drove him to th' Hibernian shore.'*

Handel came back to London in 1742, and the tide then turned in his favour. Horace Walpole shows us how fashion tried to sneer him down; he is himself the oracle of the divinity. Handel has set up an oratorio against the operas, and succeeds. He has hired all the goddesses from farces, and the singers of Roast Beef from between the acts at both theatres, with a man with one note in his voice, and a girl without ever a one; and so they sing, and make brave hallelujahs; and the good company encore the recitative, if it happens to have any cadence like what they call a tune.'t The Italian Opera House in the Haymarket itself went out of fashion in a few years, and the nobility had their favourite house in Lincoln's Inn Fields. What the Court then patronised the aristocracy rejected. The late royalties went to the Haymarket, when it was the fashion to frequent the other opera in Lincoln's Inn Fields. Lord Chesterfield one night came into the latter, and was asked if he had been at the other house? "Yes,"

*Dunciad, Book IV. † Horace Walpole to Mann, Feb. 24, 1743.