conceptions of them, or we cannot have any conceptions of them at all. He allows we ought to reason from earth, that we do know, to heaven which we not know; how can we do so but by that affinity which appears between one and the other? In vain, then, does my lord attempt to ridicule the warm but melancholy imagination of Mr. Wollaston in that fine soliloquy: "Must I then bid my last farewell to these walks when I close these lids, and yonder blue regions and all this scene darken upon me and go out? Must I then only serve to furnish dust to be mingled with the ashes of these herbs and plants, or with this dirt under my feet? Have I been set so far above them in life, only to be levelled with them in death?" No thinking head, no heart, that has the least sensibility, but must have made the same reflection; or at least must feel, not the beauty alone, but the truth of it when he hears it from the mouth of another. Now what reply will Lord Bolingbroke make to these questions which are put to him, not only by Wollaston, but by all mankind? He will tell you, that we, that is, the animals, vegetables, stones, and other clods of earth, are all connected in one immense design, that we are all dramatis persona, in different characters, and that we were not made for ourselves, but for the action: that it is foolish, presumptuous, impious, and profane to murmur against the Almighty Author of this drama, when we feel ourselves unavoidably unhappy. On the contrary, we ought to rest our head on the soft pillow of resignation, on the immovable rock of tranquillity; secure, that, if our pains and afflictions grow violent indeed, an immediate end will be put to our miserable being, and we shall be mingled with the dirt under our feet, a thing common to all the animal kind; and of which he who complains does not seem to have been set by his reason so far above them in life, as to deserve not to be mingled with them in death. Such is the consolation his philosophy gives us, and such the hope on which his tranquillity was founded. 1 "Religion of Nature Delineated," sec. 9, p. 209, quarto. HORACE WALPOLE, EARL OF ORFORD 1717-1797 Horace Walpole, the son of Sir Robert Walpole, the powerful minister of George I, was born in London in 1717, and educated at Eton, where his acquaintance with the poet Gray commenced. In 1734 he went to King's College, Cambridge, and careless of any literary distinction beyond the indulgence of his own tastes, left it without taking a degree. In 1739, after he had obtained by his father's patronage several lucrative appointments, which he retained through life, he went abroad, and travelled, for the most part in company with Gray, through France and Italy. On his return to England, in 1741, he entered Parliament, and sat as member for Callington, Castle Rising, and lastly for Lynn; but though he remained in Parliament till 1768, he appears, after the personal interests attaching to his father's administration had passed away, to have been rather a spectator than an actor in politics, and seldom took any part in debate. For many years he devoted much of his time to the building and embellishment of his Gothic villa at Strawberry Hill, where he accumulated a large collection of pictures, curiosities, and objets de vertu. Here also he established a private printing-press, from which most of his own writings and many literary and artistic works by other authors issued. In 1791 he succeeded his nephew as Earl of Orford, but never took his seat in the House of Lords. He died in 1797, in his eightieth year. Horace Walpole was the author of "The Castle of Otranto,” a very successful and popular romance; of a tragedy-" The Mysterious Mother," and of various pamphlets and essays which appeared in the periodicals of the day, as well as of several important catalogues of artists and artistic works; but it is by his "Letters" that he is best known to a later generation. In his "Letters" and "Essays" he appears as a man of the world, witty, ingenious, entertaining, and always graceful. His essay entitled "The Change of Style" was originally contributed to "The World." TH CHANGE OF STYLE HE great men who introduced the reformation 1 into these kingdoms were so sensible of the necessity of maintaining devotion in the minds of the vulgar by some external objects, by somewhat of ceremony and form, that they refrained from entirely ripping off all ornament from the drapery of religion. When they were purging the calendar of legions of visionary saints, they took due care to defend the niches of real martyrs from profanation. They preserved the holy festivals, which had been consecrated for many ages to the great luminaries of the Church, and at once laid proper observance to the memory of the good, and fell in with the popular humor, which loves to rejoice and mourn at the discretion of the almanac. In so enlightened an age as the present, I shall perhaps be ridiculed if I hint, as my opinion, that the observation of certain festivals is something more than a mere political institution. I cannot, however, help thinking that even nature itself concurs to confirm my sentiment. Philosophers and freethinkers tell us that a general system was laid down at first, and that no deviations have been made to accommodate it to any subsequent events, or to favor and authorize any human institutions. When the reformation of the calendar was in agitation, to the great disgust of many worthy persons, who urged how great the harmony was in the old establishment between the holidays and their attributes (if I may call them so), and what a confusion would follow, if Michaelmas Day, for instance, was not to be celebrated when stubble-geese are in their highest perfection; it was replied that such a propriety was merely imaginary, and would be lost of itself, even without any alteration of the calendar by authority: for if the errors in it were suffered to go on, they would in a certain number of years produce such a varia 1 The change of style was introduced that the fourth of September of that by act of Parliament in 1752, ordaining year should be reckoned the fourteenth. |