Archdeacon Coxe; add his keen touches, and, as in the 'Castle of Otranto,' the portraits of our respectable old ancestors, which have been hanging in gloomy repose upon the wall, suddenly step from their frames, and, for some brief space, assume a spectral vitality. It is only according to rule that a writer who has been so useful should have been a good deal abused. No one is so amusing and so generally unpopular as a clever retailer of gossip. Yet it does seem rather hard that Walpole should have received such hard measure from Macaulay, through whose pages so much of his light has been transfused. The explanation, perhaps, is easy. Macaulay dearly loved the paradox that a man wrote admirably precisely because he was a fool, and applied it to the two greatest portrait painters of the times--Walpole and Boswell. There is something which hurts our best feelings in the success of a man whom we heartily despise. It seems to imply, which is intolerable, that our penetration has been at fault, or that merit--that is to say, our own conspicuous quality--is liable to be out-stripped in this world by imposture. It is consoling if we can wrap ourselves in the belief that good work can be extracted from bad brains, and that shallowness, affectation, and levity can, by some strange chemistry, be transmuted into a substitute for genius. Do we not all, if we have reached middle age, remember some idiot (of course he was an idiot!) at school or college who has somehow managed to slip past us in the race of life, and revenge ourselves by swearing that he is an idiot still, and that idiocy is a qualification for good fortune? Swift somewhere says that a paper-cutter does its work all the better when it is blunt, and converts the fact into an allegory of human affairs showing that decorous dulness is an over-match for genius. Macaulay was incapable, both in a good and bad sense, of Swift's trenchant misanthropy. His dislike to Walpole was founded not so such upon posthumous jealousy--though that passion is not so rare as absurd--as on the singular contrast between the character and intellect of the two men. The typical Englishman, with his rough, strong sense, passing at times into the narrowest insular prejudice, detested the Frenchified fine gentleman who minced his mother tongue and piqued himself on cosmopolitan indifference to patriotic sentiment: the ambitious historian was irritated by the contempt which the dilettante dabbler in literature affected for their common art; and the thoroughgoing Whig was scandalised by the man who, whilst claiming that sacred name, and living face to face with Chatham and Burke and the great Revolution families in all their glory, ventured to intimate his opinion that they, like other idols, had a fair share of clay and rubbish in their composition, and who, after professing a kind of sham republicanism, was frightened by the French Revolution into a paroxysm of ultra-Toryism.