But Walpole was quite aware of the difficulties that beset any writer who endeavours to relate the history of a very recent period, especially of that part to which his own lifetime belongs, and to pass judgments on the conduct or opinions of statesmen and writers who may be still living, or have only lately departed. Yet, as Lord Acton has said, the secrets of our own time cannot be learnt from books, but from men; and Walpole's social relations, his personal popularity, his familiarity with official business, and his literary culture, provided him with valuable opportunities for composing his last four volumes from direct impressions of his subject, for preserving the right atmosphere. His studies in biography show an aptitude for personal delineation; and in one of his earlier volumes there is a full-length portrait of Sir Robert Peel, executed with much skill and comprehension. Therein lay the artistic quality of his work; he aimed at the presentation of individual character and action; he laid stress on the influence of remarkable men on their country's fortunes; for true historical art is concerned with bringing prominent figures into formal relief, and with arranging a mass of disorderly facts under some scheme that produces a definite impression. Otherwise Walpole's style was clear, level, and straightforward; with no pretence to be ornamental. Perhaps the best example of his talent for well-ordered and compact narrative is found in two chapters of the fifth volume of the History, which contain an excellent summary of the rise and expansion of British dominion in India during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with a very correct appreciation of the causes and circumstances to which that memorable episode in the annals of the British Empire is due.
Walpole lived just long enough to bring his historical work, which occupied him for about thirty years, to the end which he had assigned to it. In traversing such an extensive and varied field of arduous labour some errors and shortcomings were inevitable, for the history of England in the nineteenth century is the history of the British Empire at its climacteric, of moral and material changes and developments more numerous and perhaps more important than in any former century. Nor did he limit his survey to the particular period that he had chosen; for his theory, as he has stated it, of the function of history, was that it shall not merely catalogue events but shall go back to an analysis of their causes, and of the general progress of the human family. He believed, with Lord Acton, that the recent past contained the key to the present time. It has been said that Walpole undertook to do for the nineteenth century what Lecky did for the eighteenth century: and we may agree that both historians have filled up, with distinguished merit and ability, large vacant spaces in the history of our country. Perhaps Lecky had more of the philosophic mind, while the distance of time that lay between that writer and his period enabled him to see men and things in their true proportion, and to judge of events by their outcome. Walpole, on the other hand, wrote under the disadvantages as well as the advantages of close proximity to the scenes which he described; and the conclusion of his history marks the fall of the curtain on a drama of which the final acts are still to be played out.