of luxury and corruption. If in your agitations you could correct your Constitution by rendering the elections annual, by apportioning the right of representation in a manner more equal and more proportioned to the interests of those represented, you would gain from this revolution as much, perhaps, as America; for your liberty would remain to you, and with this and by this your other losses would be very speedily repaired.”[347] Reading such words, the heart throbs and the pulse beats. Government inspired by such a spirit would become divine, nations would live at peace together, and people everywhere be happy. HORACE WALPOLE, 1754, 1774, 1777, 1779. Most unlike Turgot in character, but with something of the same spirit of prophecy, and associated in time, was Horace Walpole, youngest son of England’s remarkable Prime Minister, Sir Robert Walpole. With the former, life was serious always, and human improvement the perpetual passion; with the latter, there was a constant desire for amusement, and the world was little more than a curious gimcrack. Horace Walpole was born 5th October, 1717, and died 2d March, 1797, being at his death Earl of Orford. According to his birth he was a man of fashion; for a time a member of Parliament; a man of letters always. To his various talents he added an aggregation of miscellaneous tastes, of which his house at Strawberry Hill was an illustration,--being an elegant “Old Curiosity Shop,” with pictures, books, manuscripts, prints, armor, china, historic relics, and art in all its forms, which he had collected at no small outlay of time and money. Though aristocratic in life, he boasted that his principles were not monarchical. On the two sides of his bed were hung engravings of Magna Charta and the Sentence of Charles the First, the latter with the inscription “_Major_ Charta.” Sleeping between two such memorials, he might be suspected of sympathy with America, although the aristocrat was never absent. His Memoirs, Journals, Anecdotes of Painting in England, and other works, are less famous than his multifarious correspondence, which is the best in English literature, and, according to French judgment, nearer than any other in our language to that of Madame de Sévigné, whom he never wearied in praising. It is free, easy, gossipy, historic, and spicy.