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Critical, Historical, and Miscellaneous Essays
Critical Historical and Miscellaneous Essays Author:Thomas Babington Macaulay Macaulay Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: HORACE WALPOLE.1 (Edinburgh Review, October, 1833.) We cannot transcribe this titlepage without strong feelings of regret. The editing of these volumes was... more » the last of the useful and modest services rendered to literature by a nobleman of amiable manners, of untarnished public and private character, and of cultivated mind. On this, as on other occasions, Lord Dover performed his part diligently, judiciously, and without the slightest ostentation. He had two merits which are rarely found together in a commentator. He was content to be merely a commentator, to keep in the background, and to leave the foreground to the author whom he had undertaken to illustrate. Yet, though willing to be an attendant, he was by no means a slave; nor did he consider it as part of his duty to see no faults in the writer to whom he faithfully and assiduously rendered the humblest literary offices. The faults of Horace Walpole's head and heart are indeed sufficiently glaring. His writings, it is true, rank as high among the delicacies of intellectual epicures as the Strasburg pies among the dishesdescribed in the Almanack des Gourmands. But as the pdtd-de-foie-gras owes its excellence to the diseases of the wretched animal which furnishes it, and would be good for nothing if it were not made of livers preternaturally swollen, so none but an unhealthy and lisorganised mind could have produced such literary luxuries as the works of Walpole. l Letters of Horace Walpole, Earl of Orford, to Sir Horace Mann, British Envoy at the Court of Tuscany. Now first published from the Originals in the Possession of the Earl of Waldgkave. Edited by Loud Doveb. 2 veils. 8vo. London: 1833. He was, unless we have formed a very erroneous judgment of his character, the most eccentric, the most artificial, the ...« less