Although, during his stay in Italy, Walpole had neglected to accumulate the store of erudition which his friend Gray had been so industriously hiving for home consumption, he can scarcely be said to have learned nothing, especially at an age when much is learned unconsciously. His epistolary style, which, with its peculiar graces and pseudo-graces, had been already formed before he left England, had now acquired a fresh vivacity from his increased familiarity with the French and Italian languages; and he had carried on, however discursively, something more than a mere flirtation with antiquities. Dr. Conyers Middleton, whose once famous Life of Cicero was published early in 1741, and who was himself an antiquary of distinction, thought highly of Walpole's attainments in this way,[42] and indeed more than one passage in a poem written by Walpole to Ashton at this time could scarcely have been penned by any one not fairly familiar with (for example) the science of those 'medals' upon which Mr. Joseph Addison had discoursed so learnedly after his Italian tour:—

The poem from which these lines are taken—An Epistle from Florence. To Thomas Ashton, Esq., Tutor to the Earl of Plimouth—extends to some four hundred lines, and exhibits another side of Walpole's activity in Italy. 'You have seen'—says Gray to West in July, 1740—'an Epistle to Mr. Ashton, that seems to me full of spirit and thought, and a good deal of poetic fire.' Writing to him ten years later, Gray seems still to have retained his first impression. 'Satire'—he says—'will be heard, for all the audience are by nature her friends; especially when she appears in the spirit of Dryden, with his strength, and often with his versification, such as you have caught in those lines on the Royal Unction, on the Papal dominion, and Convents of both Sexes; on Henry VIII. and Charles II., for these are to me the shining parts of your Epistle. There are many lines I could wish corrected, and some blotted out, but beauties enough to atone for a thousand worse faults than these.'[44] Walpole has never been ranked among the poets; but Gray's praise, in which Middleton and others concurred, justifies a further quotation. This is the passage on the Royal Unction and the Papal Dominion:—

That the refined and fastidious Horace Walpole of later years should have begun as a passable imitator of Dryden is sufficiently piquant. But that the son of the great courtier Prime Minister should have distinguished himself by the vigour of his denunciations of kings and priests, especially when, as his biographers have not failed to remark, he was writing to one about to take orders, is more noticeable still. The poem was reprinted in his works, but he makes no mention of it in the Short Notes, nor of an Inscription for the Neglected Column in the Place of St. Mark at Florence, written at the same time, and characterized by the same anti-monarchical spirit.

His letters to Mann, his chief correspondent at this date, are greatly occupied, during the next few months, with the climax of the catastrophe recorded at the end of the preceding chapter,—the resignation of Sir Robert Walpole. The first of the long series was written on his way home in September, 1741, when he had for his fellow-passengers the Viscontina, Amorevoli, and other Italian singers, then engaged in invading England. He appears to have at once taken up his residence with his father in Downing Street. Into the network of circumstances which had conspired to array against the great peace Minister the formidable opposition of disaffected Whigs, Jacobites, Tories, and adherents of the Prince of Wales, it would here be impossible to enter. But there were already signs that Sir Robert was nodding to his fall; and that, although the old courage was as high as ever, the old buoyancy was beginning to flag. Failing health added its weight to the scale. In October Walpole tells his correspondent that he had 'been very near sealing his letter with black wax,' for his father had been in danger of his life, but was recovering, though he is no longer the Sir Robert that Mann once knew. He who formerly would snore before they had drawn his curtains, now never slept above an hour without waking; and 'he who at dinner always forgot that he was Minister,' now sat silent, with eyes fixed for an hour together. At the opening of Parliament, however, there was an ostensible majority of forty for the Court, and Walpole seems to have regarded this as encouraging. But one of the first motions was for an inquiry into the state of the nation, and this was followed by a division upon a Cornish petition which reduced the majority to seven,—a variation which sets the writer nervously jesting about apartments in the Tower. Seven days later, the opposition obtained a majority of four; and although Sir Robert, still sanguine in the remembrance of past successes, seemed less anxious than his family, matters were growing grave, and his youngest son was reconciling himself to the coming blow. It came practically on the 21st January, 1742, when Pulteney moved for a secret committee, which (in reality) was to be a committee of accusation against the Prime Minister. Walpole defeated this manoeuvre with his characteristic courage and address, but only by a narrow majority of three. So inconsiderable a victory upon so crucial a question was perilously close to a reverse; and when, in the succeeding case of the disputed Chippenham Election, the Government were defeated by one, he yielded to the counsels of his advisers, and decided to resign. He was thereupon raised to the peerage as Earl of Orford, with a pension of £4,000 a year,[46] while his daughter by his second wife, Miss Skerret, was created an Earl's daughter in her own right. His fall was mourned by no one more sincerely than by the master he had served so staunchly for so long; and when he went to kiss hands at St. James's upon taking leave, the old king fell upon his neck, embraced him, and broke into tears.

The new Earl himself seems to have taken his reverses with his customary equanimity, and, like the shrewd 'old Parliamentary hand' that he was, to have at once devoted himself to the difficult task of breaking the force of the attack which he foresaw would be made upon himself by those in power. He contrived adroitly to foster dissension and disunion among the heterogeneous body of his opponents; he secured that the new Ministry should be mainly composed of his old party, the Whigs; and he managed to discredit his most formidable adversary, Pulteney. One of the first results of these precautionary measures was that a motion by Lord Limerick for a committee to examine into the conduct of the last twenty years was thrown out by a small majority. A fortnight later the motion was renewed in a fresh form, the scope of the examination being limited to the last ten years. Upon this occasion Horace Walpole made his maiden speech,—a graceful and modest, if not very forcible, effort on his father's side. In this instance, however, the Government were successful, and the Committee was appointed. Yet, despite the efforts to excite the public mind respecting Lord Orford, the case against him seems to have faded away in the hands of his accusers. The first report of the Committee, issued in May, contained nothing to criminate the person against whom the inquiry had been directly levelled; and despite the strenuous and even shameless efforts of the Government to obtain evidence inculpating the late Minister, the Committee were obliged to issue a second report in June, of which,—so far as the chief object was concerned,—the gross result was nil. By the middle of July, Walpole was able to tell Mann that the 'long session was over, and the Secret Committee already forgotten,'—as much forgotten, he says in a later letter, 'as if it had happened in the last reign.'

When Sir Robert Walpole had resigned, he had quitted his official residence in Downing Street (which ever since he first occupied it in 1735 has been the official residence of the First Lord of the Treasury), and moved to No. 5, Arlington Street, opposite to, but smaller than, the No. 17 in which his youngest son had been born, and upon the site of which William Kent built a larger house for Mr. Pelham. No. 5 is now distinguished by a tablet erected by the Society of Arts, proclaiming it to have been the house of the ex-Minister. From Arlington Street, or from the other home at Chelsea already mentioned, most of Walpole's letters were dated during the months which succeeded the crisis. But in August, when the House had risen, he migrated with the rest of the family to Houghton,—the great mansion in Norfolk which had now taken the place of the ancient seat of the Walpoles, where during the summer months his father had been accustomed in his free-handed manner to keep open house to all the county. Fond of hospitality, fond of field-sports, fond of gardening, and all out-door occupations, Lord Orford was at home among the flat expanses and Norfolk turnips. But the family seat had no such attractions to his son, fresh from the multi-coloured Continental life, and still bearing about him, in a certain frailty of physique and enervation of spirit, the tokens of a sickly childhood. 'Next post'—he says despairingly to Mann—'I shall not be able to write to you; and when I am there [at Houghton], shall scarce find materials to furnish a letter above every other post. I beg, however, that you will write constantly to me; it will be my only entertainment; for I neither hunt, brew, drink, nor reap.' 'Consider'—he says again—'I am in the barren land of Norfolk, where news grows as slow as anything green; and besides, I am in the house of a fallen minister!' Writing letters (in company with the little white dog 'Patapan'[47] which he had brought from Rome as a successor to the defunct Tory), walking, and playing comet with his sister Lady Mary or any chance visitors to the house, seem to have been his chief resources. A year later he pays a second visit to Houghton, and he is still unreconciled to his environment. 'Only imagine that I here every day see men, who are mountains of roast beef, and only just seem roughly hewn out into the outlines of human form, like the giant-rock at Pratolino! I shudder when I see them brandish their knives in act to carve, and look on them as savages that devour one another.' Then there are the enforced civilities to entirely uninteresting people,—the intolerable female relative, who is curious about her cousins to the fortieth remove. 'I have an Aunt here, a family piece of goods, an old remnant of inquisitive hospitality and economy, who, to all intents and purposes, is as beefy as her neighbours. She wore me so down yesterday with interrogatories that I dreamt all night she was at my ear with "who's" and "why's," and "when's" and "where's," till at last in my very sleep I cried out, "For heaven's sake, Madam, ask me no more questions."' And then, in his impatience of bores in general, he goes on to write a little essay upon that 'growth of English root,' that 'awful yawn, which sleep cannot abate,' as Byron calls it,—Ennui. 'I am so far from growing used to mankind [he means 'uncongenial mankind'] by living amongst them, that my natural ferocity and wildness does but every day grow worse. They tire me, they fatigue me; I don't know what to do with them; I don't know what to say to them; I fling open the windows, and fancy I want air; and when I get by myself, I undress myself, and seem to have had people in my pockets, in my plaits, and on my shoulders! I indeed find this fatigue worse in the country than in town, because one can avoid it there, and has more resources; but it is there too. I fear 'tis growing old; but I literally seem to have murdered a man whose name was Ennui, for his ghost is ever before me. They say there is no English word for ennui; I think you may translate it most literally by what is called "entertaining people" and "doing the honours:" that is, you sit an hour with somebody you don't know and don't care for, talk about the wind and the weather, and ask a thousand foolish questions, which all begin with, "I think you live a good deal in the country," or "I think you don't love this thing or that." Oh, 'tis dreadful!'[48]

But even Houghton, with its endless 'doing the honours,' must have had its compensations. There was a library, and—what must have had even stronger attractions for Horace Walpole—that magnificent and almost unique collection of pictures which under a later member of the family, the third Earl of Orford, passed to Catherine of Russia. For years Lord Orford, with unwearied diligence and exceptional opportunities, had been accumulating these treasures. Mann in Florence, Vertue in England, and a host of industrious foragers had helped to bring together the priceless canvases which crowded the rooms of the Minister's house next the Treasury at Whitehall. And if he was inexperienced as a critic, he was far too acute a man to be deceived by the shiploads of 'Holy Families, Madonnas, and other dismal dark subjects, neither entertaining nor ornamental,' against which the one great native artist of his time,—the painter of the 'Rake's Progress,' so persistently inveighed. There was no doubt about the pedigrees of the Wouvermanns and Teniers, the Guidos and Rubens, the Vandykes and Murillos, which decorated the rooms at Downing Street and Chelsea and Richmond. From the few records which remain of prices, it would seem that, in addition to the merit of authenticity, many of the pictures must have had the attraction of being 'bargains.' In days when £4,000 or £5,000 is no extravagant price to be given for an old master, it is instructive to read that £750 was the largest sum ever given by Lord Orford for any one picture, and Walpole himself quotes this amount as £630. For four great Snyders, which Vertue bought for him, he only paid £428, and for a portrait of Clement IX. by Carlo Maratti no more than £200. Many of the other pictures in his gallery cost him still less, being donations—no doubt sometimes in gratitude for favours to come—from his friends and adherents. The Earl of Pembroke, Lord Waldegrave, the Duke of Montagu, Lord Tyrawley, were among these. But, upon the whole, the collection was gathered mainly from galleries like the Zambecari at Bologna, the Arnaldi Palace at Florence, the Pallavicini at Rome, and from the stores of noble collectors in England.

In 1743, the majority of these had apparently been concentrated at Houghton, where there was special accommodation for them. 'My Lord,' says Horace, groaning over a fresh visit to Norfolk, 'has pressed me so much that I could not with decency refuse: he is going to furnish and hang his picture-gallery, and wants me.' But it is impossible to believe that he really objected to a duty so congenial to his tastes. In fact, he was really greatly interested in it. His letters contain frequent references to a new Domenichino, a Virgin and Child, which Mann is sending from Florence, and he comes up to London to meet this and other pictures, and is not seriously inconsolable to find that owing to the quarantine for the plague on the Continent, he is detained for some days in town. One of the best evidences of his solicitude in connection with the arrangements of the Houghton collection is, however, the discourse which he wrote in the summer of 1742, under the title of a Sermon on Painting, and which he himself tells us was actually preached by the Earl's chaplain in the gallery, and afterwards repeated at Stanno, his elder brother's house. The text was taken from Psalm CXV.: 'They have Mouths, but they speak not: Eyes have they, but they see not: neither is there any Breath in their Nostrils;' and the writer, illustrating his theme by reference to the pictures around his audience in the gallery, or dispersed through the building, manages to eulogize the painter's art with considerable skill. He touches upon the pernicious effect which the closely realized representation of popish miracles must have upon the illiterate spectator, and points out how much more commendable and serviceable is the portraiture of benignity, piety, and chastity,—how much more instructive the incidents of the Passion, where every 'touch of the pencil is a lesson of contrition, each figure an apostle to call you to repentance.' He lays stress, as Lessing and other writers have done, on the universal language of the brush, and indicates its abuse when restricted to the reproduction of inquisitors, visionaries, imaginary hermits, 'consecrated gluttons,' or 'noted concubines,' after which (as becomes his father's son) he does not fail to disclose its more fitting vocation, to perpetuate the likeness of William the Deliverer, and the benign, the honest house of Hanover. The Dives and Lazarus of Veronese and the Prodigal Son of Salvator Rosa, both on the walls, are pressed into his service, and the famous Usurers of Quentin Matsys also prompt their parable. Then, after adroitly dwelling upon the pictorial honours lavished upon mere asceticism to the prejudice of real heroes, taking Poussin's picture of Moses Striking the Rock for his text, he winds into what was probably the ultimate purpose of his discourse, a neatly veiled panegyric of Sir Robert Walpole under guise of the great lawgiver of the Israelites, which may be cited as a favourable sample of this curious oration:

'But it is not necessary to dive into profane history for examples of unregarded merit; the Scriptures themselves contain instances of the greatest patriots, who lie neglected, while new-fashioned bigots or noisy incendiaries are the reigning objects of public veneration. See the great Moses himself,—the lawgiver, the defender, the preserver of Israel! Peevish orators are more run after, and artful Jesuits more popular. Examine but the life of that slighted patriot, how boldly in his youth he understood the cause of liberty! Unknown, without interest, he stood against the face of Pharaoh! He saved his countrymen from the hand of tyranny, and from the dominion of an idolatrous king. How patiently did he bear for a series of years the clamours and cabals of a factious people, wandering after strange lusts, and exasperated by ambitious ringleaders! How oft did he intercede for their pardon, when injured himself! How tenderly deny them specious favours, which he knew must turn to their own destruction! See him lead them through opposition, through plots, through enemies, to the enjoyment of peace, and to the possession of a land flowing with milk and honey. Or with more surprise see him in the barren desert, where sands and wilds overspread the dreary scene, where no hopes of moisture, no prospect of undiscovered springs, could flatter their parching thirst; see how with a miraculous hand—

Whoever denies his praises to such evidences of merit, or with jealous look can scowl on such benefits, is like the senseless idol, that has a mouth that speaks not, and eyes that cannot see.'

If, in accordance with some perverse fashion of the day, the foregoing production had not been disguised as a sermon, and actually preached with the orthodox accompaniment of bands and doxology, there is no reason why it should not have been regarded as a harmless and not unaccomplished essay on Art. But the objectionable spirit of parody upon the ritual, engendered by the strife between 'high' and 'low' (Walpole himself wrote some Lessons for the Day, 1742, which are to be found in the works of Sir Charles Hanbury Williams), seems to have dictated the title of what in other respects is a serious Spectator, and needed no spice of irreverence to render it palatable. The Sermon had, however, one valuable result, namely, that it suggested to its author the expediency of preparing some record of the pictorial riches of Houghton upon the model of the famous Ædes Barberini and GiustinianÆ. As the dedication of the Ædes WalpolianÆ is dated 24 August, 1743, it must have been written before that date; but it was not actually published until 1747, and then only to give away. Another enlarged and more accurate edition was issued in 1752, and it was finally reprinted in the second volume of the Works of 1798, pp. 221-78, where it is followed by the Sermon on Painting. Professing to be more a catalogue of the pictures than a description of them, it nevertheless gives a good idea of a collection which (as its historian says) both in its extent and the condition of its treasures excelled most of the existing collections of Italy. In an 'Introduction,' the characteristics of the various artists are distinguished with much discrimination, although it is naturally more sympathetic than critical. Perhaps one of its happiest pages is the following excursus upon a poem of Prior: 'I cannot conclude this topic of the ancient painters without taking notice of an extreme pretty instance of Prior's taste, and which may make an example on that frequent subject, the resemblance between poetry and painting, and prove that taste in the one will influence in the other. Everybody has read his tale of Protogenes and Apelles. If they have read the story in Pliny they will recollect that by the latter's account it seemed to have been a trial between two Dutch performers. The Roman author tells you that when Apelles was to write his name on a board, to let Protogenes know who had been to inquire for him, he drew an exactly straight and slender line. Protogenes returned, and with his pencil and another colour, divided his competitor's. Apelles, on seeing the ingenious minuteness of the Rhodian master, took a third colour, and laid on a still finer and indivisible line. But the English poet, who could distinguish the emulation of genius from nice experiments about splitting hairs, took the story into his own hands, and in a less number of trials, and with bolder execution, comprehended the whole force of painting, and flung drawing, colouring, and the doctrine of light and shade into the noble contention of those two absolute masters. In Prior, the first wrote his name in a perfect design, and

Protogenes knew the hand, and showed Apelles that his own knowledge of colouring was as great as the other's skill in drawing.

Apelles acknowledged his rival's merit, without jealously persisting to refine on the masterly reply:—

Among the other efforts of his pen at this time were some squibs in ridicule of the new Ministry. One was a parody of a scene in Macbeth; the other of a scene in Corneille's Cinna. He also wrote a paper against Lord Bath in the Old England Journal.

In the not very perplexed web of Horace Walpole's life, the next occurrence of importance is his father's death. When, as Sir Robert Walpole, he had ceased to be Prime Minister, he was sixty-five years of age; and though his equanimity and wonderful constitution still seemed to befriend him, he had personally little desire, even if the ways had been open, to recover his ancient power. 'I believe nothing could prevail on him to return to the Treasury,' writes his son to Mann in 1743. 'He says he will keep the 12th of February—the day he resigned—with his family as long as he lives.' He continued nevertheless, to assist his old master with his counsel, and more than one step of importance by which the King startled his new Ministry owed its origin to a confidential consultation with Lord Orford. When, in January, 1744, the old question of discontinuing the Hanoverian troops was revived with more than ordinary insistence, it was through Lord Orford's timely exertions, and his personal credit with his friends, that the motion was defeated by an overwhelming majority. On the other hand, a further attempt to harass him by another Committee of Secret Inquiry was wholly unsuccessful, and signs were not wanting that his old prestige had by no means departed. Towards the close of 1744, however, his son begins to chronicle a definite decline in his health. He is evidently suffering seriously from stone, and is forbidden to take the least exercise by the King's serjeant-surgeon, that famous Mr. Ranby who was the friend of Hogarth and Fielding.[51] In January of the next year, he is trying a famous specific for his complaint, Mrs. Stephens's medicine. Six weeks later, he has been alarmingly ill for about a month; and although reckoned out of absolute danger, is hardly ever conscious more than four hours out of the four-and-twenty, from the powerful opiates he takes in order to deaden pain. A month later, on the 18th March, 1745, he died at Arlington Street, in his sixty-ninth year. At first his son dares scarcely speak of his loss, but a fortnight afterwards he writes more fully. After showing that the state of his circumstances proved how little truth there had been in the charges of self-enrichment made against him, Walpole goes on to say: 'It is certain, he is dead very poor: his debts, with his legacies, which are trifling, amount to fifty thousand pounds. His estate, a nominal eight thousand a year, much mortgaged. In short, his fondness for Houghton has endangered him. If he had not so overdone it, he might have left such an estate to his family as might have secured the glory of the place for many years: another such debt must expose it to sale. If he had lived, his unbounded generosity and contempt of money would have run him into vast difficulties. However irreparable his personal loss may be to his friends, he certainly died critically well for himself: he had lived to stand the rudest trials with honour, to see his character universally cleared, his enemies brought to infamy for their ignorance or villainy, and the world allowing him to be the only man in England fit to be what he had been; and he died at a time when his age and infirmities prevented his again undertaking the support of a government, which engrossed his whole care, and which he foresaw was falling into the last confusion. In this I hope his judgment failed! His fortune attended him to the last, for he died of the most painful of all distempers, with little or no pain.'[52]

From the Short Notes we learn further: 'He [my father] left me the house in Arlington-street in which he died, £5000 in money, and £1000 a year from the Collector's place in the Custom-house, and the surplus to be divided between my brother Edward and me.'