Note 207 — Chapter X

The full titles of these memoirs are Memoires of the last Ten Years of the Reign of King George II. Edited by Lord Holland. 2 vols. 4to., 1822; and Memoirs of the Reign of King George III. Edited, with Notes, by Sir Denis Le Marchant, Bart. 4 vols. 8vo., 1845. Both were reviewed, more suo, by Mr. Croker in the Quarterly, with the main intention of proving that all Walpole's pictures of his contemporaries were coloured and distorted by successive disappointments arising out of his solicitude concerning the patent places from which he derived his income,—in other words (Mr. Croker's words!), that 'the whole is "a copious polyglot of spleen."' Such an investigation was in the favourite line of the critic, and might be expected to result in a formidable indictment. But the best judges hold it to have been exaggerated, and to-day the method of Mr Croker is more or less discredited. Indeed, it is an instance of those quaint revenges of the whirligig of Time, that some of his utterances are really more applicable to himself than to Walpole. 'His [Walpole's] natural inclination [says Croker] was to grope an obscure way through mazes and souterrains rather than walk the high road by daylight. He is never satisfied with the plain and obvious cause of any effect, and is for ever striving after some tortuous solution.' This is precisely what unkind modern critics affirm of the Rt. Honourable John Wilson Croker.