Nothing could be more sentimental than Walpole’s language to and about these ladies, but his admiration and regard for them were rational enough. There was no dotage in the praises he lavished on their attractions and accomplishments. However much of their first social success may have been due to him, they proved able to perpetuate and extend it by their personal qualities alone, without the aid of large fortune or family connexion. And the tenor of his latest letters seems to show that this old man of the world derived benefit as well as amusement from their conversation. Their refinement and unpresuming moral worth were perhaps the highest influences to which his worn brain and heart were susceptible. One cannot help remarking that the respect with which he treats Mary Berry is a much stronger feeling than that which he displays for Hannah More. Though a good deal younger, Miss Berry had travelled more, and seen more of society, than the excellent schoolmistress from the West of England; and with this more varied experience came wider sympathies and larger toleration. Madam Hannah’s fervent desires for the improvement of her friends, though always manifest, were not always accompanied by skill to make her little homilies acceptable. Her letters to Walpole betray some consciousness of a deficiency in this respect, and her embarrassment was not lost upon “the pleasant Horace,” as she called her correspondent. He complained of the too great civility and cold complimentality of her style. The lady of Cowslip Green, who dedicated small poems to him, adorned her letters with literary allusions, and dropped occasional hints for his benefit, was always, in his eyes, a blue-stocking; and this the ladies of Cliveden never were. He was incessantly divided between his wish to treat the elder lady with deference, and a mischievous inclination to startle her notions of propriety. When he is tempted to transgress, he checks himself in some characteristic phrase: “I could titter _à plusieurs reprises_; but I am too old to be improper, and you are too modest to be _impropered_ to.” But the temptation presently returns. In short, Walpole subscribed to Miss More’s charities, echoed her denunciations of the slave-trade, applauded her Cheap Repository Tracts, and was ever Saint Hannah’s most sincere friend and humble servant; but he could not help indemnifying himself now and then by a smile at her effusive piety and bustling benevolence. On the other hand, the entire and unqualified respect which Lord Orford entertained for Miss Berry’s abilities and character was shown, not merely by the particular expressions of affection and esteem so profusely scattered through his letters to her, and by the whole tone of the correspondence between them, but still more decisively by the circumstance that he entrusted to her the care of preparing a posthumous edition of his works, and bequeathed to her charge all necessary papers for that purpose. This he did in fact, for