will probably awaken attention, is the first read, and he who laughs may grow wiser. of a series of six which the King of Prussia Satire, irony, humor, and wit, which spare has bespoken for Berlin; it is the Fall of neither follies nor vices, whether high or the Tower of Babel.' This work is not low, are the engines which this universal open in the slightest degree to the objec- artist has used for illustrating this poem of tions which have been urged against the all nations. His allusions, clear and pointearlier composition. It is simple in com- ed, have not been heard of, I fancy, without position and grand in simplicity. This some expostulation from the wincing (but, picture is to be painted in fresco-probably in Bavaria, the powerful) objects of his rethe new fresco of which the artists of Mu- mark. I am persuaded that when this work nich are so sanguine: its advantages are, is known in England, it will have that place that it will not require that mapping out of assigned to it which the few who have seen a part of the figure to be painted in a cer- specimens of it already universally award tain time while the wall is wet; it admits to it-it will at once be recognized as the of being altered and re-touched, before it masterpiece of a master-mind. The drawreceives a final glazing, which is to make ings are beautifully etched by Rahn, and it hard as a wall, and last forever. The by one of the most talented engravers in secret is not as yet divulged; but the pro- Germany, (a young man yet,) by name cess is said to have succeeded completely Schleich. in a trial to which it has for two years been subjected. The new Pinacothek is to have one of its exterior sides painted with this new fresco. Kaulbach has the commission. The subject is the history of Art in Germany the length will be about 300 feet.

I now pass from the sublime-not to the ridiculous, but to a work which is most strongly marked with a true feeling for the

ridiculous. I allude to the artist's series of illustrations to Reynard the Fox,' a few more of which he has yet to complete before it will be published. It is scarcely credible that they could have been produced by the same hand as the other works I have been speaking of. Kaulbach has displayed here an exquisite appreciation of low cunning, worldly pride, selfishness, and other mean passions, and expressed them with truth, power, and spirit, by means of the forms and character of animals. The poem, as you know, has found a mother country in every land, so that it is not now known which first gave it birth, or the exact time when it was born, being really an exposition of human character, which is the same every where and in every age. Kaulbach has grasped each idea, expounded the meaning of every incident, which he has stamped with such a marvellous perception of worldly wisdom-so exposed hypocrisy, and laughed at stolid duped ignorance, superstition, and at presumption in all its forms of priestcraft, kingcraft, and statescraft-he has so commented on the social vices, follies, and weaknesses, not unmindful of the forms they take at the present day; and all this in the spirit of the old allegorical poem, by the different individuals in the beast's family, that he who runs may

From the-London Quarterly Review.

WALPOLE'S MEMOIRS OF THE REIGN OF
GEORGE III.

Memoirs of the Reign of King George III.
By Horace Walpole, youngest son of Sir
Robert Walpole, Earl of Orford. Now
first published from the original MSS.
Edited with Notes by Sir Denis Le Mar-
chant, Bart. 4 vols. 8vo. London, 1845.
THESE Memoirs of the first ten years of
George III. will add certainly not more,
and we think less, to the reputation of
Horace Walpole or to English history than
those of the last ten years of George II.
They have the same occasional merit and
the same general and pervading faults. They
contain many traces of his peculiar wit, and
frequent touches of his graphic style-a few,
and but a few new facts and lights scattered
through a very intricate mass of political
intrigues-with an overbalancing propor-
tion of prejudice, partiality, misrepresenta-
tion, and inconsistency-trivial and variable,
but always rancorous, resentments—and a
general and constitutional proclivity to slan-
der and calumny. These, indeed, may be
said to be the essential characteristics of
his admired Letters; but the gossip and
scandal, which in a familiar letter are not
merely tolerated, but, as it were, expected
and welcomed, are grievous offences against
good taste as well as good faith when it is
attempted to array them in the grave and
responsible character of history. Many,
otherwise tolerably strict moralists, will not

There can be no doubt that Walpole's

scruple to enliven a conversation or a cor- tions and confirmations of our opinions afrespondence with circumstances which the forded by the work that we are about to exloosest conscience would not venture to re-amine. peat in judicial evidence. So it is that although many, most indeed, of the objection-wit, various and abundant as it was, had able topics of his two sets of Memoirs, had been already produced in his 'Letters,' 'Reminiscences,' and Walpoliana,' they have not there created the same disgust or indignation, and, we will add, tedium and nausea, which they do in their inspissated form; and there can be no doubt that Walpole's literary as well as moral character would have stood higher if these more solemn chronicles of libel and malignity had never been published.

always an ill-natured, selfish, and cynical turn; and under any circumstances we might have expected that Memoirs from his pen would have been tinged by the same greedy appetite for scandal and the same unscrupulous propensity to satire which are the characteristics of his letters; but it required additional and deeper influences to chain this lively and mercurial spirit to the daily labor of a chronicler, and to evolve a disregard of truth, a perversity of judgment, We considered it our duty to trace, in our and a rancour of feeling so intense, so account of the first set of Memoirs, the gloomy, and we must add so dull, as these real motive of Walpole's personal animosity Memoirs exhibit. These influences were to the leading political men of the period; principally two-one pecuniary and acciand again in our recent review of the second dental, and the other physical and constitulivraison of the 'Letters to Mann,' the tional. Walpole's sole income arose out of same task was forced upon us by the strange no less than five sinecure places or shares blunder of the editor of that publication, of places conferred on him by Sir Robertwho was so blind or so indiscreet as to seem amounting, he admits, when he first receivto question the justice of our opinion, even ed them, to about 3000l. a-year. They afwhile he or she reproduced the very docu- terwards more than doubled in value; but ments under Walpole's own hand which we at present take Walpole's own earliest establish the proof of corrupt jobbing and estimate. Of this sum nearly one-half was mercenary slander against him even more derived from a rider, as it was called, of flagrantly than we had originally stated it. 14007. on the patent office of Collector of If the peculiar temper and personal bias the Customs, of which his elder brother of the writer were important ingredients in Edward was the patentee, receiving only our consideration of the earlier Memoirs, about 400l. a-year of the present profits, they are much more so in the present work, but having the reversion of the whole 18002. which comes closer to our own time, and if he should survive Horace. It would be deals with persons and events better known useless to our present purpose to inquire and, on many accounts, more interesting. why Sir Robert made this distribution of Referring, therefore, to our former Num- the income of the office; but the result bers, and particularly to that for October, was that Horace was thereby placed, as he 1844, for the extraordinary details of the himself tells us, in the 'precarious' and influences under which Walpole acted and very unpleasant position of having so large wrote, during the period comprised in the a proportion of his income dependent on the first Memoirs,' we shall here repeat so life of a brother ten years older than himmuch of the general facts as may refresh self. But there was also another more powour reader's memory, and we shall after-erful though less prominent interest of the wards produce some remarkable elucida

It seems to be generally understood that the 'Advertisement' we allude to was not in fact written by the Editor, but supplied to him by Miss Berry, whose amiable partiality (if the paper was indeed hers) must have obscured either her memory on her judgment as to the real and indisputable facts of the case. The writer (whoever that was) forgot or did not observe that the facts which Walpole himself confessed for a narrow and temporary object, were irrefragable evidence for the larger and more permanent purpose to which we have applied them with a force that we venture to assert defies rational contradiction.

same nature constantly at work. Walpole, besides this precarious sinecure of 14001. a-year, had another office which grew up, under a cloak of almost menial humility, to an enormous income. He was Usher of the Exchequer—

and the duties of my office are to shut the gates of the Exchequer, and to furnish paper, pens, ink, wax, pencils, tape, penknives, scissors, parchment, and a great variety of other articles, to the Treasury, Exchequer, &c."Appendix to Letters to Mann, 1844, vol. iv. p. 330.

This office was performed by deputy, and produced a clear profit, as stated in 1780 by the Commissioners of accounts, of 42007. -though Walpole himself had made a return of only 18007., and it was to defend this erroneous return of his emoluments that he drew up the statement which has led to elucidations of his literary character which its author never thought of.

Walpole says these profits were made on the articles supplied by him, and that the time of payment of his bills and of course some previous inspection of them

'depends on the good will and pleasure of the First Lord of the Treasury;-and yet, though a mere tradesman in that respect, I believe no man will ever accuse me of having paid court to any First Lord of the Treasury.'

ib. 331.

We not only accuse, but shall convict him, on his own evidence, of having paid obsequious court to every First Lord in succession; he was in a constant fever of uneasy dependence on what he peevishly calls the First Lord's good will and pleasure,' and in a restless anxiety about the examination and discharge of these accounts, which, it appears from his correspondence with his deputy (Works, vol. ii. p. 381), were sometimes chargeable with gross abuse, and always liable to question.

and we have little doubt that if the whole truth could be discovered we should find that all his animosities were, in some way or other, connected with his great pecuniary stake, or perhaps now and then with some collateral interests of the same kind. Nothing but some such all-pervading infatuation could have blinded the keen sight and blunted the nice taste of such a man to the mass of inconsistency, contradiction, and, in fact, nonsense which his Memoirs present, and which on any other hypothesis must we suppose appear to every observant reader, as it does to us, quite inexplicable; but we may say as Pope did of another noble and eccentric wit-the Duke of Whar

ton

This clue, once found, unravels all the rest; The prospect clears, and Walpole stands confest.' If it be said that his animosity against the public men of his long day is too universal to be attributed to a single motive, it may be answered that in the corrupt and factious times of which he wrote there were so many changes of administration that-following up, as we shall see he did, on every change, this the first and most important object of his whole life-there was perhaps no minister or ministry from whom he did not receive the affront of a refusal. How many attempts of this sort he may have made we know notSuch precariousness and annoyances at- certainly not less than half a dozen; but it tached to so large a portion of his income is by mere accident that we have been able would have been a source of reasonable to trace so many. Such intrigues, especiuneasiness to any man, and would have jus- ally when they fail, and still more when the tified efforts to obtain a more secure posi-offended postulant takes refuge in patriottion. The attempts he made we do not ism, are generally carefully concealed by blame in themselves; but we blame, with both parties-by the jobber for his own sake some mixture of pity, the species of mono--by the minister from motives of personal mania under which Walpole, while pursuing honor, official duty, or political expediency. this natural, but certainly interested object, Old Sir Robert Walpole is said, we think was eternally protesting that 'disinterested- by Horace himself, to have declared that ness was the passion of his life'-that he no one but a minister could fully know the despised place and profit, and that it was turpitude of the human heart; and accordhis pride and glory to soar above all such ingly, except in a few rare cases of persons selfish influences. We are satisfied that blinded by personal vanity or resentment, Walpole's anxiety about his offices, com- we have had scanty revelations of this sortbining with the constitutional peculiari- and we should never have known any thing ties of his temper, became the primum of the secret motives of Walpole's malignity mobile of all his misanthropical feelings, but for that apology for his conduct which, and led him especially to calumniate by every with entirely other objects and a very dif indirect means, under every false pretence, ferent aim, he drew up in 1792, and which but with inveterate and indefatigable malig- Mr. Berry, not, we are satisfied, seeing their nity, every body whom he knew or fancied real meaning or full extent, had the indisto have interfered with his incessant endea-cretion-for historical truth a fortunate invors to place his income on a more perma- discretion-to publish in the great quarto nent footing. This was clearly the first and edition of Walpole's works, and which somethe chief motive of both sets of Memoirs; body had, as we have said, the still greater

tainly untrue; for we find that when Newcastle, after a short interregnum, again returned to the Treasury in 1758, Walpole made two attempts, both very corrupt, to sell this place to the Duke or his nominee.* This also fails; and yet Walpole has themay we not say-effrontery to declare in his first Memoirs that the Duke of Newcastle never gave him the most distant cause for dissatisfaction.'—(ii. 335.)

blindness of republishing, the other day, as tiation through Mr. Fox for obtaining from if, instead of being the pièce de conviction, the Duke a grant of the Customs' place for it had been an honorable excuse. In that H. Walpole's life: that too failed-rejectpaper we found an account of his strange ed, says Walpole, because he would accept manœuvres with Mr. Pelham, and were no favor from that Duke,'-which is certhence led to the details of his enormous sinecure income, and the influence which his expectations and his disappointments with respect to them had on his conduct and on his writings. In the Memoirs now before us this influence appears in additional and growing force, and indeed so mingles itself with every page that not only are we bound for the sake of historical truth to expose it, but we really do not think we could give a better general idea of the work than by following this clue. But in order to present a full view of the case, we must mention (very shortly) his first attempts with Mr. Pelham and the Duke of Newcastle, which were more fully detailed in our article on the first Memoirs.

In 1751, at the outset of Horace Walpole's political life, his first thought was to procure the addition of his own life to that of his brother in the Customs' place; and he reckoned confidently on the Pelhamsold friends of his father who were then in power, and of whom he himself was a zealous supporter--to make this change. The ministers, though willing to oblige him, were either reluctant or afraid to grant an additional life in so great a place; but they offered to substitute Horace for Edward, if the latter would consent. This Horace protests he most indignantly rejected; and it may be true, for he knew very well that Edward was not of a disposition to sacrifice gratuitously his present third of the place, and the whole reversion.

Here open the new Memoirs, of which, as we have said, the most remarkable characteristics will be best developed by endeavoring to explain Walpole's statement of the motives of other men by what we know or have good reason to suspect of his

own.

The most prominent feature that strikes us at the outset, and all through the work, is the large and very unfavorable share of Walpole's notice engrossed by Lord Bute. From the first pages of the first volume, to the very closing lines of the last, Lord Bute is the object of the most indefatigable malevolence. Every body is ill-treated; most others, however, are dealt with as their names happen to occur in the course of the narrative; but Lord Bute, under the invidious title of The Favorite,' and with all the odious imputations and insinuations attached to that name, is introduced on every occasion-those even in which he could by no possibility have had any concern-and with, in a majority of instances, the most flagrant falsehood. Our readers will reImmediately on the failure of this nego- member that we expected something of this tiation, Horace, who had been up to that kind, but our worst expectations are exmoment the obsequious servant of the Pel- ceeded. In our review of the last collecham Ministry, turned short round-and tion of the Letters to Mann, we extracted commenced those false and scandalous Me- two passages from Walpole's autobiographimoirs of the last ten years of George II.-cal Notes,' one dated 18th August, 1766, in which, while not merely concealing, but stating that he then began the Memoirs of directly disclaiming, any personal motive, the Reign of George III.,' which, we added, and assuming

'a patriot's all-atoning name,'

were about to be published; the second, we said, 'looked trivial, but might turn out to be important,' viz. :

he libels, with the most inveterate rancor, 1761-16th July, wrote the "Garland," a every body whom we know, and many oth-poem on the King, and sent it to Lady Bute, ers whom we believe, to have had a share but not in my own hand, nor with my name; nor did ever own it.'-Letters to Mann, vol. iv. in his disappointment.

On Mr. Pelham's death, the Duke of Newcastle became Minister, and we find that in 1755 there was some kind of nego

p. 349.

*See Walpole's Works, vol. ii. p. 366; and Quarterly Review, vol. xxvii. p. 199.

'We know nothing of this piece, and should be glad if it were recovered. Il, as may be trigue of an unprincipled junto. If a ‘junpresumed, it was a panegyric, it would afford to be unprincipled, what shall we say of a curious contrast with Walpole's subsequent him who applauds its intrigues? If a 'Farancor against George III. and Lord Bute.-vorite' be so odious, what shall we say of We really have a curiosity to compare the Memoirs of George III. in 1766 [of which we then knew no more than the name] with the "Garland" of 1761.-Quart. Rev., vol. Ixxiv.