The phrase was rhetorical; but this and other similar pronouncements, scattered throughout Walpole’s letters and memoirs, sound the keynote of his long career. Walpole deliberately set himself to chronicle the social and political history of his age. For almost sixty years, from his early manhood up till his death in 1797, he carried on, with certain picked friends, a copious and remarkable correspondence; and the great series of letters from his pen provides a running commentary upon social, cultural and political activities, a record almost always interesting, at times vivid, of the society in which he moved.
