Let such men, then, glance over the pages of Walpole, and see how productive may be made the hours of obscurity; how vigorously the oblivion of one generation may be redeemed by the honours of another; and how effectively the humble man of genius may survive the glaring favourites of an ephemeral good fortune.
Walpole, in his lifetime, was either pitied as a disappointed official, or laughed at as a collector of cracked china; but who either pities or laughs at him now? Posterity delights in the products of his study, while the prosperous tribe of his parliamentary day are forgotten, or remembered only through those products of his study. The Pulteneys, Granvilles, Lyttletons, and Wyndhams, are extinguished, and their chief interest now arises from Walpole's fixing their names in his works; as an architect uses the busts and masks of antiquity to decorate the gates, or crowns the buttresses of his temple.
Lord Holland's preface contains the following brief statement relative to the present publication.
Among the papers found at Strawberry Hill, after the death of Lord Orford, was the following memorandum, wrapped in an envelope, on which was written, "Not to be opened till after my will."
"In my library, at Strawberry Hill, are two wainscot chests or boxes, the larger marked with an A, the lesser with a B. I desire that, as soon as I am dead, my executor and executrix will cord up strongly and seal the larger box marked A, and deliver it to the Honourable Hugh Conway Seymour; to be kept by him unopened and sealed, till the eldest son of Lady Waldegrave, or whichever of her sons, being Earl of Waldegrave, shall attain the age of twenty-five years, when the said chest, with whatever it contains, shall be delivered to him for his own."
The rest of the order refers simply to the keeping of the key in the interim. The date is August 19, 1796.
Lord Holland then argues, with a rather unnecessary waste of argument, that the history contained within this chest was intended for publication, which, of course, it must have been.
In his private correspondence, Walpole frequently alludes to his preparation of the present work. In a letter to Mr. Montague, in 1752, he tells him, that "his memoirs of last year are quite finished," but that he means to add some pages of notes, "that will not want anecdotes;" and in answer to Montague, who had ludicrously menaced him with a messenger from the Secretary's office, to seize his papers, he says, "I have buried the memoirs under the oak in my garden, where they are to be found a thousand years hence, and taken perhaps for a Runic history in rhyme."
In another part of his memoirs of 1758, he says, with reference to the different stages of his work, "During the former part, I lived in the centre of business, was intimately acquainted with many of the chief actors, was eager in politics, and indefatigable in heaping up materials for my work. Now, detached from those busy scenes, with many political connexions dropped or dissolved; indifferent to events, and indolent; I shall have fewer opportunities of informing myself or others." And in this supposed indolence and ignorance, he sits down to his work without delay, and fills his volumes with information, inaccessible to nine-tenths of the ablest and most active in his generation.
But it is not our purpose to give a consecutive view of the contents of those volumes. Their nature is the reverse of consecutive. They are as odd, irregular, and often as novel, as the changes of a kaleidoscope. Nothing can be less like a picture, with its background, and foreground, its middle tints and its chiaroscuro. Their best emblem perhaps would be the "Dissolving views," where a palace has scarcely met the eye, before it melts into an Italian lake; or the procession to a Romish shrine is metamorphosed into a charge of cavalry. The volumes are a melange of characters, anecdotes, and reflections. We shall open the pages at hazard, and take, as it comes first, in those "Sortes Walpolianæ," a Westminster election.