really a mere postscript appended to the "Epistle" | more intelligible, though somewhat commonplace :itself, and therefore took no more notice of it. As to his never having read it, he leaves us in no doubt at all. In the Postscript, amidst many sneers at the king, there are these lines:

The king had then recently reviewed the fleet at of the Walpolean style.
Portsmouth, and the satirist pursues him on

the way,
Perchance to proud Spithead's imperial bay.
There should he see, as other folks have seen,
That ships have anchors and that seas are green,
Should own the tackling trim, the streamers fine-—i., 81.
With Sandwich prattle, and with Bradshaw dine;
And then sail back amidst the cannon's roar,
As safe, as sage, as when he left the shore ; &c.
After some more sneering of this kind, the writer
attempts a higher tone, and promises himself a
futurity of fame :-

Ye sons of freedom, ye to whom I pay,
Warm from the heart, this tributary lay;

How cleverly though coarsely he discriminates two royal characters, when he says that the letters in the Nuga Antiquæ

show clearly what a sad dog Queen Elizabeth was, and King James what a silly bitch!-i., 180.

When he was lamenting to his nephew's lawyer that the prodigality of that unhappy youth would That lay shall live, though Court and Grub Street ruin the family estate and alienate Houghton, the

of this passage; but he concludes with a menace it was, said Walpole, Italy in a green gown.

Of the perseverance of the ministry in attempting to reduce America, he says

Firmness retires where practicability finishes, and then obstinacy undertakes the business.-ii. 45.

Talking of Wraxall's vanity and presumption in forcing himself into every kind of notoriety, he adds

I fear he will come to an untimely beginning in the

House of Commons.-ii. 148.

When Lord Carlisle, then young and inexperienced in business, was appointed to treat with the Americans, who, Walpole was persuaded, would not treat, he says with, as the result showed, equal sagacity and wit

Lord Carlisle is named one of the commissioners, and is very fit to make a treaty that will not be made.

-i. 346.

"I wonder," said Lady Barrymore (to Walpole), why people only say as poor as Job, and never as rich, for in one part of his life he had great riches.' "Yes," said I," madam, but then they pronounce his name differently and call him Jobb."-ii. 231.

These few extracts will at least prove that Walpole would have done his pen injustice if he had been serious when he complained, in January, 1782, that his goose-quill had grown gray," (ii. 214). Indeed, it never grew gray. The letters of his later life are in general equal to any he ever wrote in vivacity-superior, perhaps, both in pleasantry and good sense; and if these to Mason are less agreeable, it is attributable to the unamiable and often repulsive character of the subjects which principally occupied the correspondents. There are also some social gossip and several passing notices and judgments of the publications of the day, which are not without amusement and interest, but they are, we may say, stifled in the heat and pressure of partisan politics.

places, one of which, humble in rank, but producing
above 4000l. a year, he wished to render what he
called "more independent;" and another of
14007., which, holding for his brother's life, he
wanted to have for his own.
These were very
natural wishes on his part, though it would have
been indecent on the part of any minister to have
granted them; but it is beyond all patience to see
the rancor generated by their rejection assuming so
impudent a mask of purity and patriotism. Of
Mason's motives we have no such direct evidence;
but enough appears to justify a suspicion that the
"vanity" and "ambition" which Gray early
remarked in him, having been stimulated by the
rapidity of his first preferments, (through the pat-
ronage of Lord Holderness,) he grew dissatisfied
with remaining for some years only Rector of
Aston and of Driffield, Canon and Precentor of
York, and King's Chaplain !—

A canon that 's a place too mean-
No, Doctor, you shall be a dean!
A dozen canons round your stall
And you the tyrant of them all.

satisfied Mason-for we find him very severe on
Nay, we doubt whether a deanery would have
the bench of bishops, and so indignant at the
appointment of Dr. Markham to the archbishopric
of York, in 1776, that he soon after preached a
sermon in that cathedral, in which he had the im-
pertinence to intimate that he would not accept a
bishopric, and this foolish bravado was accompanied
with so much intemperance and faction, that Wal-
pole, not over squeamish in such matters, persuaded
him to suppress it. No one can doubt that this
nolo episcopari may be well translated sour grapes.
When, by and by-as in the due course of such a
friendship was sure to happen-these associates
quarrelled, Walpole jeered Mason with his nolo
episcopari pledge, and hoped "his antipathy to a
bishopric had subsided;" while Mason-whether
slyly or simply we know not (for the letter itself is
not given)-condoled with Walpole on the loss of
one of those sinecures the tenure of which had been
so long the object of his solicitude. It was, we
suspect, some dissatisfaction with Lord Holderness
for not being sufficiently zealous in pushing him
still higher, that occasioned Mason's quarrel with
his early patron, to whom he dedicated the first
edition of his poems in a very fulsome panegyric,
but had subsequently become so hostile that he
abstained from frequenting Strawberry Hill, lest
he should be obliged to meet the peer, who had a
villa in the neighborhood, and whose face he
never wished to see again." Walpole reciprocates
this amiable feeling by giving him hopes that the
impediment was likely to be soon removed—

History tells us but too well the activity and malignity of the spirit of faction which disgraced the first twenty years of the reign of George III., but there is something peculiarly offensive when one is admitted to see the interior process of the dirty work. Lively as these satires may appear, and satisfactory as it is to know the truth as to the authors and their motives, it is painful to see such men prostituting such abilities on subjects so disreputable-which at the time they were afraid, and in their latter and better days ashamed, to avow. Here we have Walpole, the son of a most unscrupulous minister, and himself an enormous and scandalous instance of political jobbery, holding five lucrative state sinecures and Mason, a reverend pluralist, the creature of royal and aristocratical patronage, holding five ecclesiastical preferments (two of which were wholly, and two others nearly sinecure)-affecting a high strain of purity and public spirit, and conspiring to bring both church and state, the authority of the government, and even the person of the sovereign, into odium and contempt; and all with no other, or at least no better motive-on Walpole's part certainly, and we believe on Mason's-than their personal vexation at being disappointed of some additional favors, And the pious Mason congratulates himself that and frustrated in the accomplishment of some his quarrel with his "old friend" dispenses him additional jobs. from the "trouble which under former circumWe have heretofore proved from his own evi- stances would have fallen on him" of following dence, and the reports of the commissioners of him to the family vault-which he now sends his inquiry, that the clue to all the intricacies of Wal-curate to do, while he himself remains, he says, pole's political feelings lay in those five sinecure" contentedly"—where?-in the parsonage-house

Your old friend passes by me very often airing, and I am told looks ghastly and going.—i. 139.

When at last Lord Holderness goes, Walpole congratulates Mason that

The talisman is removed that prohibited your access to this part of the world.—i. 377.

It is evident that it was prior to the composition of the Heroic Epistle that Mason had received some serious discouragement in his professional ambition; for, in May, 1772, before he had seen Sir William Chambers' book, he writes to Walpole :

I hear (for I have not seen the paper) that it has been printed as a piece of news, that I have resigned my chaplainship, and a cause assigned for it, which I fear will offend Lord Hertford [Walpole's cousin, then lord chamberlain]. I could wish, therefore, if it came easily into conversation, that you would assure his lordship that my intention of resigning (for it is at present only intention) arises merely from my resolution of not aiming at any further ecclesiastical preferment, but to sit down uti conviva satur in a parsonage which I have built for that purpose. -vol. i., pp. 25, 26.

To this Walpole replies :—

which Lord Holderness' patronage had enabled him | ble all the bugbears with which greedy and to render an elegant and even luxurious residence! unprincipled factions succeeded, each for its season, (i. 375.) We doubt the content, but we can have in disordering the public intellect!-that England no doubt about the good feeling of the writer. was in danger of being subjugated by a standing army of Scotch Jacobites!-that " great Brunswick" was, if not a Jacobite, planning, and actually pursuing, a scheme of despotism more arbitrary and complete than James himself had contemplated!-that juries were to be suppressed! -parliaments abrogated-and what not?-Nay, the mania rose to such a height that the House of Commons was induced to pass the most flagrantly absurd and inconsistent vote-the merest Irish bull had increased, was increasing, and ought to be that ever was made-that "the power of the crown diminished;"-and this resolution was the crowning work of a period of faction during which the king might reasonably have trembled for his crown-when we know that he even contemplated the possibility of being forced to retire to his German dominions, when all his public acts were thwarted, his personal friends and servants proscribed, his private life ridiculed and insulted, and the influence and power which the crown had formerly derived from its American colonies not establishment, the triumph, of the anti-monarchical only lost, but lost through the prevalence, the and republican principle. The very act of passing such a resolution was the most notorious and indisputable proof of its utter falsehood. Little susceptible of shame as public assemblies are, the House that had passed this resolution in opposition and defiance to all their own former votes, seemed to feel its inconsistency, and in a few days after contritely passed new votes in opposition and defiance to it. Such are the effects of faction. In all that multitudinous clamor there was not we believe one really sincere opinion that the constitution was in danger, or that any, the wildest or infraction of it. It was a struggle on the part of most slavish courtier, contemplated the slightest the parliamentary gladiators to get into place; while their anonymous allies were-besides whatever party zeal they might feel-instigated by the keener spur of personal offence and private animosity. We confidently believe that so it was as to Junius; we long since knew it was so with Walpole-and we have now strong evidence that so it was with Mason.

I have told Lord Hertford of the injurious manner in which your thoughts of resigning the chaplainship have been represented in the newspapers, and of the obliging expressions you have used towards him in offering to give it up. For myself, I assure you, dear sir, that next to the pleasure I should have if it was in my power to do you service, the greatest satisfaction I can enjoy is to assist in delivering you from attendance on a court; a station below your sentiments and merit.-vol. i., p. 27.

And it happens singularly enough that the very next sentence of this letter is Walpole's announcement to Mason of Chambers' work :

I have read Chambers' book. It is more extravagant than the worst Chinese paper, and is written in wild revenge against Brown [Capability Brown]; the only surprising consequence is, that it is laughed at, and it is not likely to be adopted, as I expected; for nothing is so tempting to fools as advice to deprave

taste.-Ibid.

As to the resignation of the chaplaincy, the foregoing extract gives us a stronger impression of disappointed appetite, than of a conviva satur; and in the Walpoliana we find a much more probable explanation of that event, which we shall produce by and by.

But whether Mason resigned his chaplaincy from happy contentment as he writes, or from keen mortification as Walpole believed, thus much is certain, that within a month or two after the resignation he commenced his long series of bitter lampoons on the court.

We cannot without wonder and shame look back on the state of the public mind at that period, when Wilkes had brawled and Junius thundered, and Mason and Walpole squibbed (it is their own phrase) the whole nation into a ferment and we may say a frenzy of alarm for its liberties-which never had been in less danger-and of distrust against a sovereign who was not only by personal character unambitious and unenterprising, but from his lively appreciation of the very title by which he held his crown, and his scrupulous reverence for legality, was less inclined, we believe, than any prince that ever reigned, to encroach on the rights of his people. How flimsy, how false were all the pretences; how ridiculous, how contempti

Of Walpole's motives, touched on in a preceding page, we have given a detailed explanation in former numbers, and particularly in our review of his Memoirs of George III., to which we beg leave to refer any one who may wish to form an accurate estimate of the historical value of his testimony as to either the persons or the events of this reign; but as there is no part of his writings where his partiality and malevolence break out more strongly than in these letters to Mason, we think it our duty to bring again before our readers the extraordinary and, we repeat, morbid influence which the peculiar circumstances of his chief sinecures exercised on his whole political, and, indeed, private life. Believing as we do that Walpole is likely to be considered as the historian of his own times, it is especially necessary to show with how many-not grains but-bushels of allowance his evidence must be seasoned.

The income of his great place in the Exchequer, amounting latterly to at least 42001. a year, was made up of profits on the supply of a vast number of small articles, chiefly official stationery. The bills for these articles were always subject to ex

Your writings will outlive the laws of England-I scorn to say Britain, since it implies Scotland.-i. 155. Again :

Prithee leave England to its folly-to its ruin-to the Scotch. They have reduced her to a skeleton, and the bones will stick in their own throats.

Alarmed and shocked, as he affects to be-and as we believe in his sane moments he really was -at war in general, and at war with France especially, he is equally so at the prospect of a good understanding with her, which he thinks can only be a scheme to forward the project of the Scotch for enslaving England :

amination and check by the Treasury, and, even | readers some specimens of this patriotism. He when allowed, to delay in the payments. To free tells Mason:himself from this check, or at least to secure liberal and prompt payment, and thus make himself what he calls" independent," was the grand object of his policy ;-for it we find that he endeavored to propitiate every new minister (we believe without exception); and we know that in many instances, and we have reason to believe that in all, the failure of these unreasonable solicitations was followed by the most malignant antipathy to the reluctant parties. Even his near relation, and best, if not only, beloved friend, Conway, became the object of his disgust when, on coming into office, he declined to force from his colleagues the accomplishment of this job. On this point he broke with George Grenville and Lord Bute. When, in the beginning of the reign of George III., the reversion of this office was granted to Mr. Martin, which, though it could do him no possible injury, Lord Stormont is the negotiator, and Lord Manshe stomached it as an unpardonable injury and field, who has not courage even to be chancellor, has affront; and all his subsequent letters are full of courage and villany enough to assist him in enslaving sarcasms and sometimes calumnies against his un-us, as the chancellor [of France-Maupeou] has enfortunate reversioner-unfortunate in every way, slaved his own country.—i. 76. for Walpole not only traduced but out-lived him. So sharp was this enmity that Walpole was anxious that in a new edition of the Epistle Mason should find a niche for his expectant heir." other great sinecure place was in the Customs, admittedly of 14007. a year, but we suspect a good deal more; this, however, he held, as we have before said, only for his brother Edward's life, who was eleven years older than he. Walpole endeavored as early as Mr. Pelham's time to have his own life added to the patent, and, on being refused, broke with the Pelhams, and set about revenging himself on them by writing his calumnious As matters looked worse, there was amidst the Memoirs of George II.; but he still lived in hopes general gloom "one comfortable thought"—that of obtaining this addition, or at all events of hav-America had been ing the office regranted to him if his brother should

66

The

Even when at last the war has broken out, and England is, he says, "disgraced and ruined, and can never again be what it has been," he has still one consolation left :—

Scotland will not triumph.-i. 349.

Dr. Franklin has triumphed over a Scot ambassador.

The victories of France will be over the Scots..

-i. 352.

And he urges his fellow-laborer to "pursue that idea" in some future libel on the court.

die. He himself tells us how these hopes were inspired to chastise the traitor Scots that attacked annihilated:

-

her. They have made a blessed harvest of their machinations.-If there is a drachm of sense under a crown, a Scot hereafter will be reckoned pestilential.

The place in the Customs held by my brother, but the far greater share of which had been bequeathedi. 39. to me by my father's will for my brother's life, was granted in reversion to Jenkinson, private secre- So, when he wishes to stigmatize the object of his tary to Lord Bute. I was, I confess, much provoked own peculiar vexation, he has no worse name to at this grant, and took occasion of fomenting the ill- call him by than Mac Jenkinson. In August, humor against the FAVORITE, who had thus excluded 1778, because Lord Mansfield was a Scot, Walme from the possibility of obtaining the continuance pole believes that the chief justice has drawn of that place to myself in case of my brother's death.-out, servilely copied, and recommended" for imiMemoirs of George III., vol. i., p. 265. tation, the successive steps of James II.; only doubting whether he has done so "in order that And as on his disappointment from Pelham he took the House of Hanover may be ruined" by such his revenge by writing his Memoirs of George II.," manœuvres"—or whether he really hopes to conso on this disappointment from Bute he set about solidate a despotism for them-and his Memoirs of George III. But, by a just

retribution, these two works exhibit the most in-flatters himself he could succeed where Jeffries and disputable proofs of the corruption and malignity the Jesuits failed.—ii. 18;

of the writer, and afford the best justification of the ministers he traduces.

in other words, as Mason versifies it, inculcates bonâ fide the doctrine

That rests on RIGHT DIVINE all regal claims,
And gives to George whate'er it gave to James.
Ep. to Shebbeare.

From these two affairs is to be dated Walpole's special rancor against the king, Lord Bute, and the whole court and government-his constant professions of terror at Scottish influence, long after Lord Bute's influence had vanished-his coalition with Mason, who, we have no doubt, at his instigation assumed for his satires the pseudonyme of As we have seen, in the first of the satires, Lord Malcolm Macgregor-and a degree of violence, acharnement, against Scotland and the Scotch which seems almost absolute insanity. As this is really the chief feature, and certainly the greatest Even in the Protestant riots of 1780, the disordered curiosity, of these volumes, we must give our imagination of Walpole sees a new popish plot

Mansfield will

Hang the knave without a jury.

fomented, if not devised, by the king, Lord Mans- | aggerate every failure, attenuate every advantage; field, and the ministers, for the purpose of getting they blazon every success, the smallest as well as rid of juries and parliaments, and establishing a the greatest, of the enemy; and when at last Rodmilitary tyranny on the ruins of the constitution:- ney's victory of the 12th of April, 1782, restored Anti-Catholicism seems not only to have had but our naval superiority, the only allusion to it in this little, but even only a momentary hand in the riots. Correspondence is an innuendo that if it had hapI am inclined to believe that a court plot was en- pened a little sooner it might have encouraged the grafted early on the prospect of tumults. So few and court to establish a Bastille, and that, as it is, it is such no-precautions were taken, that it is not very lucky that a fleet cannot be employed to get rid of a injurious to conclude that a necessity for calling the House of Commons! The gayety of their letters is army together to suppress an insurrection was no in direct proportion with the gloom of public affairs; very disagreeable opportunity. It has certainly and when to all our difficulties in America the war answered so roundly, that I do believe the machinist in India was superadded, the patriot Mason writes— [the king?] would forgive the imputation in consideration of the honor it would do his policy. Lord Mansfield [whose house and library had been burned] has risen like a phoenix from the flames, and vomits martial law, as if all law-books were burned as well as his own.

This was the moment I have long dreaded. I had no doubt the court wished for insurrections. It was strong enough at home to suppress them, and the suppression would unite all the military and the militia, and all under one standard; and so I am persuaded it has already.... Lord Mansfield will have courage to coin what law he pleases while the House of Lords is guarded by dragoons; and the chancellor, whom all sides blindly concur in crying up to the skies, has spirit enough of his own to execute any enterprise to which he shall be commanded, and is as ready as Maupeou to annihilate parliaments, if timidity and cunning did not prefer voting despotism.-ii. 109, 110, 112.

This is stark Bedlam. Their strictly personal insults to George III. are equally numerous, and still more notoriously calumnious. Walpole says (March, 1773) that his ministers are as great rogues and fools as those of Charles or James II., but— for King James, I can find no parallel-he was sincere in his religion.-i. 61.

While the " Postscript to the Heroic Epistle" was on the stocks, Mason (i. 82) invites Walpole

to

send him a curious anecdote or two relating to that supreme pattern of fraternal affection

as he sneeringly calls the king, in allusion to his just and yet, as it turned out, placable vexation at the clandestine marriages of his two brothers.

In the midst of a high-flown tirade of morality and patriotism, Walpole expresses his contempt for that "paltry thing of ermine and velvet-a king!"-i. 147.

And he is delighted to think that the Heroic Epistle vexed his monarch personally, and he exhorts Mason to follow up the blow:

Point all your lightnings at that wretch Dalrymple, and yet make him but the footstool to the throne, as you made poor simple Chambers.-i. 75.

Sir John Dalrymple was, as Walpole himself admits, a wretch-only because he was a Scot and had the honesty to publish the evidence from the French archives of the profligate corruption of some of Walpole's whig saints; and Mason responds to these provocations with sundry lamentations on the degradation of England:

Since Scottish kingcraft reässumed the throne. Mr. Wilberforce said of the modern whigs, during the last French war, that they wished for as much public calamity as might bring themselves into power. This was still more true of Walpole and Mason, who rejoiced in the disasters of the American war, without any restriction; they ex

Was I to tell you that I drink to Hyder Ally's health every day in a glass of port, it might tempt you to pledge me in your glass of orange-juice; pray do so!-ii. 174.

They not only imagined the ruin of their country, but rejoiced in it; and it is an additional proof of the obstinate blindness which faction inflicts on men, otherwise the most clear-sighted, that at the very time that Walpole was venting all this calumnious nonsense, he could thus write to Sir Horace Mann of persons whose example he was following::

Last night I took up, to divert my thoughts, a volume of letters to Swift from Bolingbroke, Bathurst, and Gay; and what was there but lamentations on the ruin of England from wretches who thought their own want of power a proof that their country was undone.—Letter, 13 January, 1780.

He did not see that he and Mason were not only imitating, but surpassing, "the venomous railings of the mock patriots" (ib.) of the former generation.

The Memoirs of George III. and this Correspondence are, when examined by a discriminating eye, the fullest and most effective answers that could be made to the clamors of that day; they expose the futility of the pretences, the meanness of the intrigues, the inconsistencies, the selfishness of the pretended patriots; certainly, of all the personages that their prose or their verse, their satires or that, as to honesty, candor and truth, cut a worse their letters, exhibit to posterity, there are no two figure than Walpole and Mason themselves. Let more touches of their own. us allow them to complete the picture by a few

is ousted the patriots are in the cabinet. What Their party is at last triumphant-Lord North follows? The first circumstance we meet is a paltry affair-a mere straw to show the direction of the wind. Patriot Mason has a poor relation, a broken tradesman, to whom he makes an allowance; he, with a double good-nature for the poor man and for his own pocket, wishes to get him a certain little place under the crown. He loses no time, and, even before the new ministers are warm in their offices, applies to Walpole to exert his influence for his friend. Patriot Walpole, after saying that he had "for forty good years made it a rule not to ask any favor from any minister"-which rule we beg leave to add he invariably broke by asking favors for himself from every successive minister, from Mr. Pelham to Lord North, inclusive-Patriot Walpole, we say, consents to advocate the poor relation's job, and applies to the Duke of Richmond accordingly. All this might have been very natural, and in our opinion not at all reprehensible in any but just these men who had spent so many years in influencing the public mind against royal and minis terial patronage; and who had lately received with