fame, and he now stands, as he deserves, high on the vantage ground of original invention-a position in which there are few British rivals to jostle him. He has many faults-among which all must recognise a cumbrous splendour-a multiplicity of little parts in buildings of diminutive size-and a want of attention to interior detail; but the merit of an originality at once grand and poetic atones for all such deficiencies, and places him foremost amidst the architects of our latter times. He will ever be honoured as the only great original architect of the reign of Queen Anne and George the First; and his last comedy, The Journey to London, will satisfy all the world that, however the bad taste of his age may have poisoned his theatrical vein, he might, under other circumstances, have been a dramatical classic at once refined in art and blameless in morals.

GIBBS.

WALPOLE, in writing of Gibbs and Lord Burlington, ascribes natural genius to the latter, and mechanical knowledge to the former; he claimed for the peer that spirit of invention, which can create, combine, and execute; and assigned to the commoner that tameness of mind, which, like a child walking with a hold of its mother's gown, can never move out of the charmed circle of other men's works-avoiding faults, yet furnishing no beauties. In all things, however, save rank and fortune, the two men appear to me to have been much alike. The high descent of Boyle blinded the sagacious Walpole-he never forgot for a moment that he was writing of a peer, and was courtly, kind, and complimentary; Gibbs, on the other hand, having nothing but his merit, such as that was, to recommend him, met with much colder treatment; the aristocratic critic looked down on the humble adventurer from the north with no patronizing smile, and probably imagined he did him great honour in writing about him at all. Justice requires that these things should be noticed; but I am the last that would suffer such foibles to entice me into the too prevailing fashion of undervaluing Horace Walpole; he has preserved many valuable anecdotes of art, delivered