The literary power implied in these brilliant sketches is remarkable, and even if Walpole's style is more Gallicised than is evident to me, it must be confessed that with a few French idioms he has caught something of that unrivalled dexterity and neatness of touch in which the French are our undisputed masters. His literary character is of course marked by an affectation analogous to that which debases his politics. Walpole was always declaring with doubtful sincerity--(that is one of the matters in which a man is scarcely bound to be quite sincere)--that he has no ambition for literary fame, and that he utterly repudiates the title of 'learned gentleman.' There is too much truth in his disavowals to allow us to write them down as mere mock-modesty; but doubtless his principal motive was a dislike to entering the arena of open criticism. He has much of the feeling which drove Pope into paroxysms of unworthy fury on every mention of Grub Street. The anxiety of men in that day to disavow the character of professional authors must be taken with the fact that professional authors were then an unscrupulous, scurrilous, and venal race. Walpole feared collision with them as he feared collision with the 'mountains of roast beef.' Though literature was emerging from the back lanes and alleys, the two greatest potentates of the day, Johnson and Warburton, had both a decided cross of the bear in their composition. Walpole was nervously anxious to keep out of their jurisdiction, and to sit at the feet of such refined lawgivers as Mason and Gray, or the feebler critics of polite society. In such courts there naturally passes a good deal of very flimsy flattery between persons who are alternately at the bar or on the bench. We do not quite believe that Lady Di Beauclerk's drawings were unsurpassable by 'Salvator Rosa and Guido,' or that Lady Ailesbury's 'landscape in worsteds' was a work of high art; and we doubt whether Walpole believed it; nor do we fancy that he expected Sir Horace Mann to believe that when sitting in his room at Strawberry Hill, he was in the habit of apostrophising the setting sun in such terms as these: 'Look at yon sinking beams! His gaudy reign is over; but the silver moon above that elm succeeds to a tranquil horizon,' &c. Sweeping aside all this superficial rubbish, as a mere concession to the faded taste of the age of hoops and wigs, Walpole has something to say for himself. He has been condemned for the absurdity of his criticisms, and it is undeniable that he sometimes blunders strangely. It would, indeed, be easy to show, were it worth while, that he is by no means so silly in his contemporary verdicts as might be supposed from scattered passages in his letters. But what are we to say to a man who compares Dante to 'a Methodist parson in Bedlam'? The first answer is that, in this instance, Walpole was countenanced by greater men. Voltaire, with all his faults the most consummate literary artist