Matthew John Caldwell Hodgart (1916–1996)

4208 Memoirs and Portraits, by Horace Walpole Edited by Matthew Hodgart (read 9 Sep 2006) The author is the youngest son of Sir Robert Walpole, prime minister of England from 1721 to 1742. The book is made up of extracts from Horace's diary from 1750 t0 1771. Horace was born in 1717 and died in 1797. The book is not reader-friendly, and could have been edited much better to make it more informative to today's reader. The diary was not published till long after Horace was dead, and his comments are often very critical. For instance, of Samuel Johnson (whose biography I read last month) he says: "His manners were sordid, supercilious, and brutal; his style ridiculously bombastic and vicious; and, in one word, with all the pedantry he had all the gigantic littleness of a country schoolmaster." Quite a different picture than the biography I read last month painted! I did not enjoy the reading of this book much since so much dealt with material and people I knew little of. Not a successful book for me.… (meer)