numerous tender points, he showed a genuine capacity for kindliness and even affection; and in his later years he mellowed down into an amiable purring old gentleman, responding with eager gratitude to the caresses of the charming Miss Berrys. Such a man, skinless and bilious, was ill qualified to join in the rough game of politics. He kept out of the arena where the hardest blows were given and taken, and confined his activity to lobbies and backstairs, where scandal was to be gathered and the hidden wires of intrigue to be delicately manipulated. He chuckles irrepressibly when he has confided a secret to a friend, who has let it out to a minister, who communicates it to a great personage, who explodes into inextinguishable wrath, and blows a whole elaborate plot into a thousand fragments. To expect deep and settled political principle from such a man would be to look for grapes from thorns and figs from thistles; but to do Walpole justice, we must add that it would be equally absurd to exact settled principle from any politician of that age. We are beginning to regard our ancestors with a strange mixture of contempt and envy. We despise them because they cared nothing for the thoughts which for the last century have been upheaving society into strange convulsions; we envy them because they enjoyed the delicious calm which was the product of that indifference. Wearied by the incessant tossing and boiling of the torrent which carries us away, we look back with fond regret to the little backwater so far above Niagara, where scarcely a ripple marks the approaching rapids. There is a charm in the great solid old eighteenth-century mansions, which London is so rapidly engulfing, and even about the old red brick churches with 'sleep-compelling' pews. We take imaginary naps amongst our grandfathers with no railways, no telegraphs, no mobs in Trafalgar Square, no discussions about ritualism or Dr. Colenso, and no reports of parliamentary debates. It is to our fancies an 'island valley of Avilion,' or, less magniloquently, a pleasant land of Cockaine, where we may sleep away the disturbance of battle, and even read through 'Clarissa Harlow.' We could put up with an occasional highwayman in Hyde Park, and perhaps do not think that our comfort would be seriously disturbed by a dozen executions in a morning at Tyburn. In such visionary glances through the centuries we have always the advantage of selecting our own position in life, and perhaps there are few that for such purposes we should prefer to Walpole's. We should lap ourselves against eating cares in the warm folds of a sinecure of 6,000_l._ a year bestowed because our father was a Prime Minister. There are many immaculate persons at the present day to whom truth would be truth even when seen through such a medium. There are--we have their own authority for believing it--men who would be republicans, though their niece was married to a royal duke. Walpole, we must admit, was not of the number.