Excerpt from Walpole a Study in Politics An event soon happened which completely changed his plans. In 1698 his eldest surviving brother died, and he became expectant heir to the family estate of some two thousand a year. He at once resigned his scholarship and returned home, probably without taking a degree, to study his new position under the personal care of his father. The elder Walpole appears to have had peculiar notions upon the subject of practical education. It is said that if he felt himself inclined for a drinking bout he used to insist upon his son getting drunk first, in order that the youth might not be conscious of the paternal degrada tion. But perhaps his system hardly enjoyed a fair trial, for he himself died in the year 1700, leaving our Walpole the owner of the estate, subject to portions for his numerous brothers and sisters. Not long before his father's death Walpole had married Catherine Shorter, the heiress of a Lord Mayor of London, and the dowry which she brought him enabled the inheritor of Houghton to clear the estate and start with an unencumbered rent-roll. The portraits of Lady Walpole, if they do not flatter, prove her to have been a woman of great beauty, and Walpole, though he did not treat her particularly well, appears to have lived fairly happily with her during the thirty-seven years of their married life. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.