'You wretched fribble!' exclaims Macaulay; 'you shallow scorner of all that is noble! You are nothing but a heap of silly whims and conceited airs! Strip off one mask of affectation from your mind, and we are still as far as ever from the real man. The very highest faculty that can be conceded to you is a keen eye for oddities, whether in old curiosity shops or in Parliament; and to that you owe whatever just reputation you have acquired.' Macaulay's fervour of rebuke is amusing, though, by righteous Nemesis, it includes a species of blindness as gross as any that he attributes to Walpole. The summary decision that the chief use of France is to interpret England to Europe, is a typical example of that insular arrogance for which Matthew Arnold popularised the name of Philistinism. Yet criticism of this one-sided kind has its value. At least it suggests a problem. What is the element left out of account? Folly is never the real secret of a literary reputation, or what noble harvests of genius we should produce! If we patiently take off all the masks we must come at last to the animating principle beneath. Even the great clothes philosophers did not hold that a mere Chinese puzzle of mask within mask could enclose sheer vacancy; there must be some kernel within, which may be discovered by sufficient patience. And in the first place, it may be asked, why did poor Walpole wear a mask at all? The answer seems to be obvious. The men of that age may be divided by a line which, to the philosophic eye, is of far more importance than that which separated Jacobites from loyal Whigs or Dissenters from High Churchmen. It separated the men who could drink two bottles of port after dinner from the men who could not. To men of delicate digestions the test imposed by the jovial party in ascendency must have been severer than those due to political or ecclesiastical bigotry. They had to choose between social disabilities on the one side, and on the other indigestion for themselves and gout for their descendants. Thackeray, in a truly pathetic passage, partly draws the veil from their sufferings. Almost all the wits of Queen Anne's reign, he observes, were fat: 'Swift was fat; Addison was fat; Gay and Thomson were preposterously fat; all that fuddling and punch-drinking, that club and coffee-house boosing, shortened the lives and enlarged the waistcoats of men of that age.' Think of the dinner described, though with intentional exaggeration, in Swift's 'Polite Conversation,' and compare the bill of fare with the _menu_ of a modern London dinner. The very report of such conviviality--before which Christopher North's performances in the 'Noctes Ambrosianae' sink into insignificance--is enough to produce nightmares in the men of our degenerate times, and may help us to understand the peevishness of feeble invalids such as Pope and Lord Hervey in the elder generation, or Walpole in that which was rising.