of Newton, will be found in the Biographia Britannica, where the reader will also find particulars of the rude controversial encounters between this author and Hobbes on the subject of the quadrature of the circle. A list of Wallis' various writings will be found in Hutton's Philosophical Dictionary. His mathematical works were collected in 1697 by the curators of the Oxford university press, and published in Latin in 3 vols., folio, 1699. Dr. Wallis died on the 28th October, 1703.—(See his account of himself in the publisher's appendix to the preface of Hearne's edition of Peter Langtoft's Chronicle.)—R. H.
WALMESLEY, Charles, D.D., an English mathematician, was born in 1722, and died at Bath in 1797. He was a Benedictine monk, and became a Roman catholic bishop. He showed much skill in the mathematical theory of astronomy, to which he made a valuable contribution in 1749, by completing that part of it which relates to the motion of the moon's apsides.
WALPOLE, Horace, fourth earl of Orford, the prince of English letter-writers, third and youngest son of Sir Robert Walpole the statesman, by Catherine Shorter, his first wife, was born in Arlington Street, London, on the 5th of October, 1717. His father is said to have neglected him in childhood, while he was petted by his mother; but through life he displayed the greatest attachment to Sir Robert Walpole and his memory. At ten he was sent to Eton, where he formed a friendship with the poet Gray, which was strengthened by their intimacy at Cambridge, whither, to King's college, Walpole followed him in 1735. Four years before, his father intending him for the bar, he had been entered at Lincoln's inn, but "I never went thither," he says in his autobiographical "Short Notes of my Life," "not caring," he adds, "for the profession." He was early placed in easy circumstances by sinecures which his father bestowed on and bequeathed to him, and which yielded him an annual income of several thousands. In 1739, having bid farewell to the university, he set out on a continental tour of more than two years, with Gray for his companion; but before it was completed, as mentioned in the memoir of the poet (See Gray, Thomas), the pair separated. During this tour, chiefly in France and Italy, Walpole's natural taste for art and his love of collecting objects of virtu were cultivated and indulged; and at Florence he formed a friendship for Sir Horace Mann, the English resident, to whom he addressed during many years one of the most amusing and interesting sections of his correspondence. On his return to England in 1741 he took his seat in the house of commons as member for Callington. His father's long administration was tottering to its fall. Sir Robert himself was fiercely assailed both in and out of parliament, and it was in defence of his father that Horace delivered, 23rd March, 1742, his maiden speech, one spirited as well as filial, and which was praised by the elder Pitt, then a leading opponent of the minister. Although he watched, and in his correspondence recorded its proceedings with interest, he seldom took a prominent part in the debates of the house of commons, where he represented successively the boroughs of Callington, Castle Rising, and King's Lynn, finally retiring from it in 1768. Sir Robert Walpole was driven from power in February, 1742, and in the following summer Horace wrote a sermon on painting, which was preached by the chaplain before his father in his retirement at Houghton. Sir Robert died in 1745, leaving Horace the house in Arlington Street from which so many of his letters are dated, and to which he added by purchase, in 1747, the famous villa at Strawberry Hill, Twickenham, commanding a view of the Thames and of Richmond Park. The improvement of it gave Walpole an object—one indeed not very serious, but considerably more so than any other afforded him by his life of a wit, a gossip, and a man of society. What was originally a cottage became in his hands a Gothic mansion, and at Strawberry Hill he introduced, according to Lord Stanhope, "a new style of domestic architecture, which may be said to have recastellated the three kingdoms." He filled it with pictures, books, curiosities, and knicknacks of all kinds, and in 1757 he established at it a private printing-press. Before this, however, he had contributed some papers to the World, printed some jeu d'esprit, and published the "Ædes Walpolianæ," a description of his father's seat at Houghton, especially of its pictures. From the Strawberry Hill press he sent forth, among other works. Lord Herbert of Cherbury's curious autobiography; Paul Hentzner's interesting Travels in England in the reign of Elizabeth; the Odes of the poet Gray, who had been reconciled to him; and his own lively "Anecdotes of Paintings," 1761-71, like his subsequent "Catalogue of Engravers," 1763, based on the papers of Vertue the engraver. In 1758 had appeared his "Catalogue of Royal and Noble Authors," a pleasant and anecdotical work. He essayed a higher flight in 1764, when he published, nominally as a translation from the Italian, the "Castle of Otranto," still read, and a classic in its way—"the first modern attempt," says Sir Walter Scott, "to found a tale of amusing fiction on the basis of the ancient romances of chivalry," and the parent of many similar enterprises. To 1768 belong his "Mysterious Mother," a tragedy of considerable power, but the interest of which, turning upon incest, has made its circle of readers a small one (at first only fifty copies of it were printed for private circulation by the author); and the better-known "Historic Doubts on the Life and Reign of Richard III.," an ingenious effort towards the "rehabilitation" of one of the monsters of English history. It was in 1769 that Chatterton opened a correspondence with him, offering to supply, for the "Anecdotes of Paintings," accounts of a succession of painters who, he said, had flourished in Bristol—accounts apocryphal of course. Walpole accepted the offer, but presently suspecting some deception, neglected to answer Chatterton's application for assistance, and received from the poet a plain-spoken letter demanding the return of his MSS. The request was complied with, and Walpole's next tidings of Chatterton were, that he had "perished in his pride." Sipping the foam of society, visiting and visited, gossiping, corresponding, memoir-writing, collecting curiosities, always retaining an eager interest in what was going on, Walpole had reached old age when, in 1791, by the death of his nephew he became earl of Orford; but he never took his seat in the house of lords, and rarely used the title. A martyr to the gout during his later years, he died at his house in Berkeley Square on the 2nd of March, 1797. "His figure," thus Miss Hawkins describes this celebrated man, "was not merely tall, but more properly long and slender to excess; his complexion, and particularly his hands, of a most unhealthy paleness. His eyes were remarkably bright and penetrating, very dark and lively; his voice was not strong, but his tones were extremely pleasant, and, if I may say so, highly gentlemanly." In 1798 was published an edition of his works which contained ,an instalment of his private correspondence. Other instalments have appeared at intervals during the first half of the present century. All of them are collected in the "Letters of Horace Walpole, edited by Peter Cunningham, now first chronologically arranged," 9 vols., London, 1857-59. This edition includes his "Short Notes of my Life," from his birth to 1779, and his lively "Reminiscences of the Courts of George I. and II.," written in 1788 for the amusement of the two sisters the Misses Berry, for whom in his closing years he conceived a strong, a pure, and a tender attachment. He left behind him memoirs of his own time for publication after a period prescribed. In 1822 were published his "Memoirs of the last ten years of the reign of George II.," and in 1845 his "Memoirs of the first twelve years of the reign of George III.," edited by Sir Denis Le Marchant, to which were added in 1859 his "Journals of the reign of King George III. from 1771 to 1783," now first published, edited by Dr. Dran. Walpole's was not a remarkable character. He reveals himself in almost every page of his letters and memoirs as a very clever, witty, polished man of the world, neither amiable nor unamiable, neither virtuous nor vicious, and in whom any capacity for depth of attachment, whether to persons or to principles, is only rarely and fitfully apparent. One of his most disagreeable traits is his combination of an evident desire for literary distinction with an affected scorn of "authorism," and a habit of sneering at all intellectual greatness which had not graduated at White's and been stamped in the mint of May fair. As a writer his merits and services are considerable. "No man," says Lord Macaulay, among whose essays is a severe one upon Horace Walpole, "no man who has written so much is so seldom tiresome." His "Memoirs," with all their faults of prejudice and prepossession, are unrivalled; and if he has no eye for real greatness, few men were so quick to see through its counterfeit. But it is as a letter-writer that he is and will be chiefly remembered. His sparkling, witty, and multifarious gossip is the perfection of "London correspondence," written by a man whose birth, gifts, and reputation admitted him everywhere, and whose curiosity made him familiar with everybody and everything. The social and much of the biographical and political history of England during his time, is photographed
