"Horace Walpole" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... know that Lord Grenville treated it with contempt. I know others now living who did so too, and I know that so stout a Whig as Sir P. Francis was clearly of that opinion, and he knew Lord Chatham personally. I had every ground to believe that Horace Walpole, a vile, malignant, and unnatural wretch, though a very clever writer of Letters, was nine-tenths of the Holland House authority for the tale. I knew that a baser man in character, or a meaner in capacity than the first Lord Holland existed not, even in those days of job and ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... which appears to have lost its primary meaning of concealment, apart from that of escape. Horace Walpole, however, uses it ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 233, April 15, 1854 • Various
... famous play "Les Precieuses Ridicules." This geographical tract appeared in the very "Recueil des Pieces Choisies," whose authors Magdelon, in the play, was expecting to entertain, when Mascarille made his appearance. There is a faculty which Horace Walpole named "serendipity,"—the luck of falling on just the literary document which one wants at the moment. All collectors of out of the way books know the pleasure of the exercise of serendipity, but they enjoy it in different ways. One man will go home hugging a volume of sermons, ...
— The Library • Andrew Lang
... on the Pentateuch, observed of Moses' two tables of stone that they were made of shittim wood. This is not unlike the title said to have been used for a useful little work—"Every man his own Washer- woman.'' Horace Walpole said that the best of all bulls was that of the man who, complaining of his nurse, said, "I hate that woman, for she changed me at nurse.'' But surely this one quoted by Mr. Hill Burton is far superior to Horace Walpole's; in fact, one of the best ever conceived. ...
— Literary Blunders • Henry B. Wheatley
... natural, and as much at their ease as the rest of the world. The Prince is of a lively temperament and a very cheerful aspect,—a young girl would call him "jolly" as well as "nice." I recall the story of "Mr. Pope" and his Prince of Wales, as told by Horace Walpole. "Mr. Pope, you don't love princes." "Sir, I beg your pardon." "Well, you don't love kings, then." "Sir, I own I love the lion best before his claws are grown." Certainly, nothing in Prince Albert Edward suggests any aggressive weapons ...
— Our Hundred Days in Europe • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... Swift's or Horace Walpole's letters I think it is mentioned that somebody, regretting the loss of a friend, was answered by an universal Pylades: "When I lose one, I go to the Saint James's Coffee-house, and take another." I recollect having heard an anecdote of the same kind.—Sir W.D. was a ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... indeed, but still a great genius and War Lord, who soon turned defeat into victory. It was the privilege of Franklin, here in the capital of the Empire, to share the exaltation engendered by those successive conquests that gave India and America to the little island kingdom, and made Englishmen, in Horace Walpole's phrase, "heirs apparent of the Romans." No Briton rejoiced more sincerely than this provincial American in the extension of the Empire. He labored with good will and good humor, and doubtless with good effect, to remove popular prejudice against his countrymen; and ...
— The Eve of the Revolution - A Chronicle of the Breach with England, Volume 11 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Carl Becker
... Horace Walpole, in one of his letters to Selwyn in 1785, mentions a fact which may stand for a page of narrative. "Young Wade," he says, "is reported to have lost one thousand guineas last night to that vulgarest ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... (whist was too many for him), his popularity could not be questioned. When he expired, all Hazelby mourned. The lamentation was general. The women of every degree (to borrow a phrase from that great phrase-monger, Horace Walpole) "cried quarts;" and the procession to the churchyard—that very churchyard to which he had himself attended so many of his patients—was now followed by all ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, No. - 288, Supplementary Number • Various
... exactions, and left to establish a rival salon of her own, aided by her devoted D'Alembert. His preference Madame du Deffand never forgave. Henceforth she opposed philosophy, and demanded from her devotees only stimulus and amusement. It was here that Horace Walpole found the "blind old woman" in her tub-like chair, and began the friendship and intellectual flirtation of fifteen years. It proved a great interest in her life, notwithstanding Walpole's dread of ridicule at a suggestion of ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... newspapers and magazines of the time, no mention of it in contemporary letters or diaries. The one man in England who took the trouble to record the ode for posterity was, as might be expected, Horace Walpole, who in his manuscript Books of Materials merely noted that the poem had been published in 1768 (Anecdotes of Painting ... Volume the Fifth, ed. Hilles and Daghlian, Yale University Press, 1937). When challenged to locate Walpole's copy of the ode, the greatest ...
— A Pindarick Ode on Painting - Addressed to Joshua Reynolds, Esq. • Thomas Morrison
... in 1760. Perhaps one of the most famous of the Moorfields booksellers was Thomas King, who published priced catalogues of books from 1780 to 1796, and who deserted Moorfields at about the latter date, to take premises in King Street, Covent Garden, as a book-auctioneer. Horace Walpole, referring to James West's sale in 1773, says: 'Mr. West's books are selling outrageously. His family will make a fortune by what he collected from stalls and Moorfields.' This sale, which occupied twenty-four days, included, as we have ...
— The Book-Hunter in London - Historical and Other Studies of Collectors and Collecting • William Roberts
... who were such widely courted favorites, in the most intellectual society of the time of their ardent friend, Horace Walpole, dwelt together, for over eighty years, in entire and fervent affection: and they now sleep side by side in their ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... there be hunting; one's publisher, if there be a volume ready or money needed; or one's tailor occasionally, if a coat be required, a man is able to write. But what has a man to say to his friend,—or, for that matter, what has a woman? A Horace Walpole may write to a Mr. Mann about all things under the sun, London gossip or transcendental philosophy, and if the Horace Walpole of the occasion can write well and will labour diligently at that vocation, his letters may be worth reading by his Mr. Mann, and by others; ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope
... gained. It was right. Had General McClellan taken Richmond, how many of us would have listened to the military critics who should have been so kind as to show us how he ought to have taken it? Judging from some observations in Horace Walpole's "Correspondence," the English, though surfeited with victory, were much pleased with their Cuban conquest. Sir Joseph Yorke, writing on the 9th of October, ten days after the news had reached England, says,—"All the world is struck with the noble capture ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various
... to prove that Cellini was not inferior to the average morality of the Renaissance, and that we are justified in accepting his life as a valuable historical document.[346] To give a detailed account of a book pronounced by Horace Walpole "more amusing than any novel," received by Parini and Tiraboschi as the most delightful masterpiece of Italian prose, translated into German by Goethe, and placed upon his index of select works by Auguste Comte, may seem superfluous. Yet I cannot afford ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... Unfortunately I manage to act as if I had not. The result is that, having no foundation to build on, any information I do acquire is immediately swept away. People are constantly giving me books on special topics, such as Horace Walpole and his Friends, France in the Thirteenth Century, The Holland House Circle, or Memoires of Madame du Barry; but of what use can they be to me when I do not know, or at least have forgotten, even the salient facts of French and ...
— The "Goldfish" • Arthur Train
... may be regarded as the first great minister of the English people as distinguished from men like Thomas Cromwell, Stratford, or Clarendon, who strictly were ministers of the king. "It rains gold-boxes," Horace Walpole writes when, in April, 1757. Pitt was dismissed, and it was these tokens of his popularity with the merchants of England, not the recognition of his genius by the king, which led to his return to office in June. The events of the period ...
— The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain - Nineteenth Century Europe • J. A. Cramb
... "Thackeray's Extract". The true essence of the life that exhibits itself in fiction from Pamela and Joseph Andrews down to Pompey the Little and the Spiritual Quixote; in essay from the Tatler to the Mirror; in Lord Chesterfield and Lady Mary and Horace Walpole; in Pope and Young and Green and Churchill and Cowper, in Boswell and Wraxall, in Mrs. Delany and Madame d'Arblay, seems to me to deserve warrant of excise and guarantee of analysis as it lies in ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... and eighteenth centuries, the literary cream, in fact, of all the vast collection which filled the muniment room upstairs; books which had belonged to Addison, to Sir William Temple, to Swift, to Horace Walpole; the first four folios of Shakespeare, all perfect, and most of the quartos—everything that the heart of the English collector could most desire was there. And the charm of it was that only a small proportion of these precious things represented conscious and deliberate acquisition. The great ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... satire's keen and thin As the lithe blade of Saladin. Good letters are a gift apart, And his are gems of Flemish art, True offspring of the fireside Muse, Not a rag-gathering of news 70 Like a new hopfield which is all poles, But of one blood with Horace Walpole's. ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... until 1781. Darwin was a “votary to poetry,” a philosopher, and a clever though an eccentric man. He wrote “The Botanic Garden,” which Anna Seward pronounced to be “a string of poetic brilliants,” and in which book Horace Walpole noted a passage “the most sublime in any author or in any of the few languages with which I am acquainted.” He inserted in it, as his own work, some lines of Anna Seward’s,—which was ungallant, to say the least. Anna Seward’s mother repressed her early ...
— Anna Seward - and Classic Lichfield • Stapleton Martin
... we may add, that about 1767, when Bishop Percy printed these twenty-five sheets of poems of Lord Surrey and the Duke of Buckingham, it appears by a letter of the Bishop to Horace Walpole, that he presented a copy of them to Walpole, with a request for information about Lord Surrey. The Bishop never wrote the Life of Surrey; and in 1808 the whole impression was burnt, with the exception of a copy or two that the ...
— Notes & Queries No. 29, Saturday, May 18, 1850 • Various
... People are bored with Marie Antoinette. I wish he'd taken another subject. And as to her beauty—how could she have been beautiful, with those staring eyes, and that lower lip! I say so to Arthur—and he raves—and quotes Horace Walpole—and all sorts of people. But one can see for one's self. People are much prettier now than they ever were then! We should think nothing of ...
— Fenwick's Career • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... between Gray and me," said Horace Walpole, "arose from his being too serious a companion." In my opinion, this was a good ground for cutting the connection. What right has any one to be ...
— The Atlantic Monthly , Volume 2, No. 14, December 1858 • Various
... which concealed his vices, or rather which gave them a false hue, has long since faded away. We now know Fox as he WAS. In the latest journals of Horace Walpole his inveterate gambling, his open profligacy, his utter want of honour, is disclosed by one of his own opinion. Corrupted ere yet he had left his home, whilst in age a boy, there is, however, the comfort of reflecting ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume I (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... and during the same period the shipping of London increased from 806 to 1550. In 1758, imports from the continental colonies into England stood at L648,683, and from the West Indies at L1,834,036. "The colonies," said the elder Horace Walpole, "are the source of all our riches"; for it was the colonies, and above all the West Indies,—that subterranean channel by which the silks and teas from Vera Cruz, and Peruvian gold from Puerto Bello, found their way into England,—which alone "preserve ...
— Beginnings of the American People • Carl Lotus Becker
... addition. Surely these are not on material subjects, and indicate anything but a worldly or sordid nature. In these famous Essays, so luminous with the gems of genius, we read not such worldly-wise exhortations as Lord Chesterfield impressed upon his son, not the gossiping frivolities of Horace Walpole, not the cynical wit of Montaigne, but those great certitudes which console in affliction, which kindle hope, which inspire lofty resolutions,—anchors of the soul, pillars of faith, sources of immeasurable joy, the glorious ideals ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VI • John Lord
... so powerful an engine as the Press should have attracted the combined attention of the learned and ingenious. Gentlemen have devoted much of their time to it. Among these may be mentioned Horace Walpole, who printed several of his favorite works at his seat, Strawberry Hill; Sir Egerton Brydges, at Lee Priory; and the late Earl Stanhope, at his family mansion, Chevening, Kent. To no one, probably, is the present advanced stage of Printing more indebted than to the last-named nobleman. ...
— The Author's Printing and Publishing Assistant • Frederick Saunders
... such a task being performed with much regard to accuracy or unique character. The "Letters," of which, the work is, in great part, composed, are especially ill adapted for such a purpose; since, many of them become interesting only from manner rather than importance of matter. Horace Walpole's Correspondence would make but a dull book cut in "little stars" in the letter style; and Lord Byron, as a letter writer, resembles Walpole more closely than any other writer of his time. His gay, anecdotical style is delightful—his ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 474 - Vol. XVII. No. 474., Supplementary Number • Various
... content, composed one of the fashionable spectacles. Young Mr Hogarth, the painter, was one of those who found occasion to visit Newgate to view the notorious murderess. He even painted her portrait. It is said that Sarah dressed specially for him in a red dress, but that copy—one which belonged to Horace Walpole—which is now in the National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh, shows her in a grey gown, with a white cap and apron. Seated to the left, she leans her folded hands on a table on which a rosary and ...
— She Stands Accused • Victor MacClure
... a description of the actual event as can be obtained is contained in a letter from Anthony Storer to his friend George Selwyn, a morbid cynic whose cruel and tasteless bon-mots were hailed as wit by Horace Walpole and his cronies. The execution was that of Dr. Dodd, the "macaroni parson", whose unfortunate vanity led him to forgery and Tyburn. The date—June 27, 1777—is considerably after the period of our book, but the description applies as ...
— Lives Of The Most Remarkable Criminals Who have been Condemned and Executed for Murder, the Highway, Housebreaking, Street Robberies, Coining or other offences • Arthur L. Hayward
... HORACE WALPOLE, on one occasion observed that there had existed the same indecision, irresolution, and want of system in the politics of Queen Anne, as at the time he spoke, under the reign of George the Third. "But," added he, "there is nothing ...
— The Jest Book - The Choicest Anecdotes and Sayings • Mark Lemon
... English friends were Hume, Garrick, Wilkes, Sterne, Gibbon, Horace Walpole, Adam Smith, Benjamin Franklin, Dr. Priestley, Lord Shelburne, Gen. Barr, Gen. Clark, Sir James MacDonald, Dr. Gem, Messrs. Stewart, Demster, Fordyce, Fitzmaurice, Foley, etc. Holbach addressed a letter to Hume in 1762, before making his acquaintance, ...
— Baron d'Holbach - A Study of Eighteenth Century Radicalism in France • Max Pearson Cushing
... seldom understood. It is the reproach of M. l'Abbe when the Count (proprietor of the pretty Countess) made him eat partridge every day for a month; on which the Abbe says, "Alway partridge is too much of a good thing!" Upon this text the Count speaks. A correspondent mentions that it was told by Horace Walpole concerning the Confessor of a French King who reproved him for conjugal infidelities. The degraded French (for "toujours de la perdrix" or "des perdrix") suggests a foreign origin. Another friend refers me to No. x. of the "Cent Nouvelles ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... "The Kit-cat Club," says Horace Walpole, "though generally mentioned as a set of wits, were, in fact, the patriots who saved Britain." See, for the history of its origin and name, Addisoniana, i. 120; Ward's complete and humorous account of the ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson
... mademoiselle's room—a proceeding which soon led to a rupture between the two women and a breach between Mme. du Deffand and d'Alembert. The marquise was therefore left alone, blind, but too proud to tolerate pity, yet by her conversation retaining her power of fascination. It was about this time that Horace Walpole became connected with her life. Upon the death of Mme. Geoffrin, she, hearing of the imposing ceremonies and funeral orations, exclaimed: Voila bien du bruit pour une omelette au lard. [A great ado about a lard omelet!] Her latter years ...
— Women of Modern France - Woman In All Ages And In All Countries • Hugo P. Thieme
... The Whitehall Evening Journal, The St. James's Chronicle, and The Middlesex Journal received various sentences of fine and imprisonment, together with, in some cases, the indignity of the pillory. Prosecutions for libel abounded in those days. Horace Walpole says that, dating from Wilkes's famous No. 45, no less than two hundred informations had been laid, a much larger number than during the whole thirty-three years of the previous reign. But the great majority of these must have fallen to the ground, for, in 1791, the then attorney-general ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 6, No. 1, July, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... maps are numbered among the educational curios in which samplers are so prominent. The Yorkshire Philosophical Society own two unique specimens of sixteenth-century tapestry, formerly in the possession of Horace Walpole. They measure about 16 ft. by 12 ft., the sections including Herefordshire, Shropshire, Gloucestershire, Oxfordshire, and a part of Berkshire. These remarkable maps are vividly coloured and show excellent ...
— Chats on Household Curios • Fred W. Burgess
... addressed to Horace Walpole in September 1788, speaks of the "demoniacal mummeries" of Dr. Mainauduc, and says he was in a fair way of gaining a hundred thousand pounds by them, as Mesmer had done by his ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... many others. The unfortunate Lord William Russell and his wife Rachel are here, and over his portrait is the walking-stick which supported him to the scaffold, while hanging on the wall is a copy of his last address, printed within an hour after his execution. Of another of these old portraits Horace Walpole writes: "A pale Roman nose, a head of hair loaded with crowns and powdered with diamonds, a vast ruff and still vaster fardingale, and a bushel of pearls, are the features by which everybody knows ...
— England, Picturesque and Descriptive - A Reminiscence of Foreign Travel • Joel Cook
... the Writers in the North Briton?—The Athenaeum of Saturday, May 17, contains a very interesting article on the recently published Correspondence of Horace Walpole with Mason, in which certain very palpable hits are made as to the identity of Mason and Junius. In the course of the article the ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 82, May 24, 1851 • Various
... of Reynolds, as Macaulay said of Horace Walpole: "The conformation of his mind was such that whatever was little seemed to him great; and whatever was great, seemed to ...
— Something of Men I Have Known - With Some Papers of a General Nature, Political, Historical, and Retrospective • Adlai E. Stevenson
... with kite and key; Gibbon was writing his "Decline and Fall"; Fate was pitting the Pitts against Fox; Hume was challenging worshipers of a Fetish and supplying arguments still bright with use; Voltaire and Rousseau were preparing the way for Madame Guillotine; Horace Walpole was printing marvelous books at his private press at Strawberry Hill; Sheridan was writing autobiographical comedies; David Garrick was mimicking his way to immortality; Gainsborough was working the apotheosis of a hat; Reynolds, Lawrence, Romney, ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... Mr. Horace WALPOLE spoke next, to this purpose:—Sir, for the bill now before us I have no particular fondness, nor desire that it should be promoted by any other means than rational arguments, and ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 10. - Parlimentary Debates I. • Samuel Johnson
... to see the illustrious proscript, who complained of being made a daily show, "like Sancho Panza in his island of Barataria." During his short stay in the capital there was circulated an ironical letter purporting to come from the Great Frederick, but really written by Horace Walpole. This cruel, clumsy, and ill-timed joke angered Rousseau, who ascribed it to, Voltaire. A few sentences may ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau |
