tortures, offered her one of her young puppies, which she immediately fell a licking, and for the time seemed insensible of her own pain; on the removal she kept her eye fixed on it, and began a wailing sort of cry, which seemed rather to proceed from the loss of her young one than the sense of her own torments.' The horrible barbarity of the experiment almost overpowers our admiration of the maternal love, and we blush to contrast the cruelty of the man with the invincible affection of the dog. Whatever opinion may be formed of the sagacity of the dog on particular points, it is impossible to deny that he possesses faculties in addition to those which we ordinarily call instinct. We have no intention at present to plunge into the thorny discussion of the precise extent of his intellectual powers; but we feel assured that no one can follow the dog through the several phases of his history, and not acknowledge, in the words of Gaston Phoebus, which M. Blaze has taken for his motto, That he is the most noble, most reasonable, and most knowing beast that God ever made.' And, as all his rare endowments have been dedicated to man, there is no animal in creation that has a stronger claim upon our gratitude and love. M. Blaze, whose affectionate earnestness for the welfare of the dog is the great charm of his book, would extend his care beyond their lives, and erect monuments to their memory. A great poet, whose feelings are always warm and true, has supplied the answer in a tribute to a dog whose death he lamented, and whose 'name' he honoured :' 6 'Lie here, without a record of thy worth, Beneath a covering of the common earth! But, if we raise no stone, the epitaph of the dog has been written in many splendid eulogies. M. Blaze has added one more to the number, which we think is not unworthy to stand beside the best: : 'The dog,' he says, 'possesses, incontestably, all the qualities of a sensible man; and, I grieve to say it, man has not in general the noble qualities of the dog. We make a virtue of gratitude, which is nothing but a duty; this virtue, this duty, are inherent in the dog. We brand ingratitude, and yet all men are ungrateful. It is a vice which commences in the cradle, and grows with our growth; and, together with selfishness, becomes almost always the grand mover of human actions. The dog knows not the word virtue; that which we dignify by this title, and admire as a rare thing-and very rare it is in truth-constitutes his normal state. Where will you find a man always grateful, never ungrateful-always affectionate, never selfish-pushing the abnegation of self self to the utmost limits of possibility; without gain, devoted to death, without ambition, rendering every service-in short, forgetful of injuries, and only mindful of benefits received? Seek him not-it would be a useless task: but take the first dog you meet, and from the moment he adopts you for his master, you will find in him all these qualities. He will love you without calculation entering into his affections. His greatest happiness will be to be near you; and should you be reduced to beg your bread, not only will he aid you in this difficult trade, but he would not abandon you to follow even a king into his palace. Your friends will quit you in misfortune-your wife perhaps will forget her plighted troth; your dog will remain always near you-he will come and die at your feet; or, if you depart before him for the great voyage, he will accompany you to your last abode.' ART. VIII.-Letters of Horace Walpole, Earl of Orford, to Sir Horace Mann, His Britannic Majesty's Resident at the Court of Florence, from 1760 to 1785. Now first published from the original MSS. Concluding Series. 2 vols. London. 1843. THE literary fame of Horace Walpole has passed through 6 several phases-always on the increase-and we doubt whether it is even yet at its full. These volumes announce themselves on their title-pages as a concluding series;' but they are only the first half of the concluding series of the letters to Sir Horace Mann, and we have reason to suppose that even its two more promised volumes will not exhaust the store of manuscripts which Walpole left behind him for publication. And what a voluminous and important author this writer of light essays and gossiping letters has become! Soon after his death there were published five large quartos of his opuscula-he wrote nothing that in itself deserves a higher title-and since that time more than an equal bulk of his memoirs and correspondence has appeared; and much, though we know not exactly what, must still remain behind. His first attempts as an author were those of a man of fashion amusing himself with literary trifles in the intervals of still lighter frivolities. From these latter he was soon weaned by an instinctive love of the arts, and an almost instinctive zeal in politics; but the ambition of authorship, which he was for ever disclaiming, was, we are satisfied, his predominant passion. To it, fortunately for posterity, he contrived to make both politics and the arts subservient; and he has achieved a reputation not only, we believe, beyond all the aspirations of his vanity, but by means which at the outset 6 outset he could not have contemplated, and perhaps to the last did not very distinctly appreciate. It is not by his slight but lively sketch of Royal and Noble Authors,' or the Anecdotes of Painting,' of which he supplied little more than the gay strings that tied together the gatherings of Vertue; nor by his ingenious Historic Doubts;' nor by his romance of Otranto,' which founded the school to which Mrs. Radcliffe succeeded as head mistress; nor by his well-written, but unactable, and almost unreadable, tragedy-though, in Lord Byron's opinion, it possesses beauties of the highest order;-it is not, we say, by any of these that Horace Walpole will be known to posterity, but by his incomparable letters ;'-and not even by them as lettersmodels though they be of every variety of epistolary excellence. They will indeed be long read--as we for twenty years have been reading them for amusement: and their brilliancy-sparkling, but cold, like icicles in sunshine-will perhaps rival, in the coarser tastes of the generality of mankind, the sprightly and sensible causeries of Madame de Sévigné and the mingled pleasantry and pathos of poor Cowper: the only two letter-writers between whom and Walpole-magis pares quam similes—we can admit any propinquity of merit. But it is not, we say, for the mere merits of his style that Walpole's letters are, we think, destined, more surely perhaps than any other work of his or our age, to immortality; it is because these letters are in fact a chronicle-much more minute and particular than Hollinshed or Hall'-of every occurrence and of every opinion which attracted or deserved public attention, either at home or abroad, during one of the busiest half-centuries of European history. The collection having come upon us in livraisons, and at considerable intervals of time--and indeed being, as we see, still dribbling out—the attention of ordinary readers has not been drawn to the vast extent of the correspondence, nor to the important period of time it covers, and the variety—or we should rather universality-of the matter it contains. It is, in fact, a perfect encyclopædia of information from the very best sources-politics from the fountain-head of parties-debates by the best of reporters -foreign affairs from an habitué of diplomatic society—sketches of public characters by their intimate acquaintance or associatethe gossip of fashionable life from a man of fashion—literature from a man of letters-the arts from a man of taste-the news of the town from a member of every club in St. James's Street; and all this retailed, day by day, and hour by hour, to a variety of correspondents-reddendo singula singulis—according to their various stations, characters, and tastes, by a pen whose vivacity and graphic power is equalled by nothing but the wonderful industry say and and perseverance with which it was plied through so long a series of years. Has it ever occurred to any one to compute how a man of fashion, of pleasure, of literary occupations-a close attendant in parliament for near thirty years, and an annual, if not perennial, victim to the gout-could find patience, or time, or even manual strength, to execute, with a delicate hand, and without a blot(the numerous letters, which we have happened to see, bear all the appearance of a neat, slow, and even laborious penmanship)— so voluminous a correspondence? In the quarto edition of his works, published in 1798 by Mr. Berry and his daughter, one of the five large volumes and part of another are occupied with portions (and it seems small ones) of his correspondence with West, Conway, Gray, Bentley, Lord Strafford, and some other friends, male and female. Another quarto volume of letters to Mr. George Montague followed, in 1818; and another, of his correspondence with Mr. Cole; and another, containing his very long and interesting despatches to Lord Hertford during the short period of his embassy at Paris, followed by a small collection of letters to Dr. Zouch; and then we had the first series of the letters to Sir Horace Mann, in three volumes octavo. All these, with the addition of some letters to the young friends of his old age, the Miss Berrys, were two or three years ago collected into six closely-printed volumes-containing above 1400 letters; and now we are presented with two additional volumes of letters to Sir Horace Mann, containing 260, with the promise of two more, of no doubt an equal size :-the whole amounting to little short of 2000 letters-not notes, but letters-most of them so long, and we believe so laboured, that most men— 'Such men as live in these degenerate days'— would think each of them a good morning's work. And these are only the series of his letters to regular correspondents which happen to have been preserved, and do not include probably a fifth of those that he wrote to Conway and Lord Hertford, nor any of a great number to Madame du Deffand, nor of the greater number. that he must have occasionally written to a large circle of friends and acquaintances; and they are also exclusive of letters of business which his offices, his public duties, his private affairs, and the ordinary intercourse of a man of rank and fortune with the world, must necessarily have required from him. We used to wonder at the ease and rapidity with which Madame de Sévigné laissait trotter sa plume; but Horace Walpole's goes full gallop, and scours the country round, every day and in all directions, with a rapidity and vigour quite, we believe, unexampled; and posterity will assuredly know more of the manners, fashions, feelings, factions, parties, politics, private anecdotes, and general history, of the latter half of the eighteenth century from Horace Walpole's letters than from any other source; or, indeed, we believe we may safely say, from all other sources together. They are the Annual Register-Hansard's Debates—the Gentleman's Magazine—the Critical Review--the Morning Post-the London Gazette-and even the Hue and Cry and the Newgate Calendar, all in one; but combined with so much taste and talent, enlivened by so much pleasantry, tempered with so much sense and shrewdness, that our children may learn in the pages of Walpole to know their great-grandfathers better than their great-grandfathers knew themselves. But this high commendation must be seasoned cum granoor rather, indeed, with a great many grains of caution. As posterity will certainly make large and frequent appeals to the authority of Walpole, it is necessary that we who have lived near his times, and who personally knew some of the people, and are traditionally acquainted with many of the transactions which he describes, should warn those who came after us that this spirited and rapid sketcher of scenes, manners, and characters is—as might indeed be expected, when one writes so much and so hastilysometimes very inaccurate. His most frequent and important inaccuracies, however, have not even the apology of haste-for his haste is never hurry-but, like all story-tellers and dealers in anecdotes, he is much more anxious for effect than truth-to amuse rather than inform. No painter was ever more ready to sacrifice the accuracy of details to a tone of colour than Walpole, and he carries this system of embellishment to a degree that diminishes, even in indifferent matters, our confidence in his veracity: the picture is fine, but we have no faith in its fidelity. In addition to the natural tendency of wit to be sarcastic, and of gossip to degenerate into scandal, he is justly chargeable with a still more serious offence. His individual prejudices, both personal and political, were so strong, so violent, as sometimes to amount, in our opinion—and we speak advisedly-to positive aberration of intellect. Wherever he once takes offence, he distorts facts, discolours motives, and disparages persons with the most ingenious and inveterate malignity. The Pelhams—for instance—the Yorkes, the Pulteneys, the Bolingbrokes, and above all, his own uncle and his family are, on every possible occasion, ridiculed, misrepresented, and calumniated. As such violent injustice could neither be denied or defended, nor indeed, at first sight, accounted for by any ordinary motives, it has been suggested, by way of palliation, that he was probably under the amiable influence of filial |