Horace Walpole and W. S. Lewis

Extract

English literary history is full of the colorful individualists variously referred to as “characters,” “personalities,” or “eccentrics”; and the literary scene in eighteenth-century England had its full share of “originals,” to use Tobias Smollett's term. They ranged from the tendentious clergymen (Conyers Middleton, William Warburton, William Stukeley) to the Grub Street hacks (John Dennis, John Trenchard) to profligate rakehells (Charles Churchill, John Wilkes) and artistocratic dilettantes (the Duke of Chandos, the Earl of Eglinton, and scores more). Though some of these men wrote prodigious amounts — notably Middleton, Warburton, and Dennis — most of them are known today largely because they drew the anger of Alexander Pope and were amberized in The Dunciad or because Dr. Johnson dissected their opinions or because Boswell encountered them in his serendipitous career and recorded the fact in his Journals. A few of them, like Wilkes, were famous or infamous within political or social contexts; these have survived in historical works dealing with Georgian politics. For the most part, however, intellectual historians of the twentieth century are inclined to treat the Warburtons and the Monboddos as a rather bizarre species, now extinct: the overspecialized freaks thrown out by the current of ideological evolution.

For a very long time Horace Walpole has been viewed by many scholarly critics as a similar sort of oddity. His literary productions were so varied, so numerous, and so uneven in quality that he defied placement in a single area of interest. Walpole's own account of his writings in the Short Notes of his life provokes in the reader wonder at a mind at once interested in making Latin verses on the marriage of the Prince of Wales, parodies of Macbeth with political overtones, Fontainesque fables about little white dogs, catalogues of oil paintings, bagatelle verses, vehement periodical essays and pamphlets, scores of cenotaphs for deceased acquaintances, and Historic Doubts on Richard III.