[416] Ib. 6. 356.
[417] Madame Necker asserted that he was ‘as like Madame de Sévigné as two peas.’ Letters 10. 80. Horace Mann had noticed the similarity many years before. Ib. 2. 410.
[418] Letters 7. 137; 13 October 1767.
[419] Boswell’s Life 4. 102.
[420] Letters 8. 427; 23 February 1774.
[421] These letters he prepared for the press after they had been returned to him by Mann. In August 1784 he wrote: ‘I have been counting how many letters I have written to you since I landed in England in 1741: they amount—astonishing!—to above eight hundred; and we have not met in three-and-forty years! A correspondence of near half a century is, I suppose, not to be paralleled in the annals of the post office!’ Letters 13. 182.
[422] In sending to Mason the letters which Gray had written to him, Walpole wrote: ‘I need not say that there are several things you will find it necessary to omit.... It is much better to give them [the public] nothing, than what they do not comprehend and which they consequently misunderstand, because they will think they comprehend, and which, therefore, must mistake. I do not know whether it is not best that good writings should appear very late, for they who by being nearest in time are nearest to understanding them, are also nearest to misapprehending.’ Letters 8. 202; 19 September 1772.
[423] Letters 8. 376; 8 December 1773.
[424] Letters 9. 308; 21 December 1775.
[425] Roberts’s Memoirs of More 1. 51; cf. 1. 235.