Gleanings from the _Short Notes_.--_Letter from Xo Ho._--The
Strawberry Hill Press.--Robinson the Printer.--Gray's _Odes_.--Other
Works.--_Catalogue of Royal and Noble Authors._--_Anecdotes
of Painting._--Humours of the Press.--_The Parish Register of
Twickenham._--Lady Fanny Shirley.--Fielding.--_The Castle of Otranto._
In order to take up the little-variegated thread of Walpole's life, we
must again resort to the _Short Notes_, in which, as already stated, he
has recorded what he considered to be its most important occurrences.
In 1754, he had been chosen member, in the new Parliament of that year,
for Castle Rising, in Norfolk. In March, 1755, he says, he was very
ill-used by his nephew, Lord Orford [_i. e._, the son of his eldest
brother, Robert], upon a contested election in the House of Commons,
'on which I wrote him a long letter, with an account of my own conduct
in politics.' This letter does not seem to have been preserved, and
it is difficult to conceive that its theme could have involved very
lengthy explanations. In February, 1757, he vacated his Castle Rising
seat for that of Lynn, and about the same time, he tells us, used his
best endeavours, although in vain, to save the unfortunate Admiral
Byng, who was executed, _pour encourager les autres_, in the following
March. But with the exception of his erection of a tablet to Theodore
of Corsica, and the dismissal, in 1759, of Mr. Müntz, with whom his
connection seems to have been exceptionally prolonged, his record for
the next decade, or until the publication of the _Castle of Otranto_,
is almost exclusively literary, and deals with the establishment of
his private printing press at Strawberry Hill, his publication thereat
of Gray's _Odes_ and other works, his _Catalogue of Royal and Noble
Authors_, his _Anecdotes of Painting_, and his above-mentioned romance.
This accidental absorption of his chronicle by literary production will
serve as a sufficient reason for devoting this chapter to those efforts
of his pen which, from the outset, were destined to the permanence of
type.
Already, as far back as March, 1751, he had begun the work afterwards
known as the _Memoires of the last Ten Years of the Reign of George
II._, to the progress of which there are scattered references in the
_Short Notes_. He had intended at first to confine them to the history
of one year, but they grew under his hand. His first definite literary
effort in 1757, however, was the clever little squib, after the model
of Montesquieu's _Lettres Persanes_, entitled _A Letter from Xo Ho,
a Chinese Philosopher at London, to his Friend Lien Chi, at Peking_,
in which he ingeniously satirizes the 'late political revolutions'
and the inconstant disposition of the English nation, not forgetting
to fire off a few sarcasms _à propos_ of the Byng tragedy. The piece,
he tells Mann, was written 'in an hour and a half' (there is always a
little of Oronte's _Je n'ai demeuré qu'un quart d'heure à le faire_
about Walpole's literary efforts), was sent to press next day, and ran
through five editions in a fortnight.[88] Mrs. Clive was of opinion
that the rash satirist would be sent to the Tower; but he himself
regarded it as 'perhaps the only political paper ever written, in which
no man of any party could dislike or deny a single fact;' and Henry
Fox, to whom he sent a copy, may be held to confirm this view, since
his only objection seems to have been that it did not hit some of the
_other_ side a little harder. It would be difficult now without long
notes to make it intelligible to modern readers; but the following
outburst of the Chinese philosopher respecting the variations of the
English climate has the merit of enduring applicability. 'The English
have no sun, no summer, as we have, at least their sun does not scorch
like ours. They content themselves with names: at a certain time of
the year they leave their capital, and that makes summer; they go out
of the city, and that makes the country. Their monarch, when he goes
into the country, passes in his calash[89] by a row of high trees, goes
along a gravel walk, crosses one of the chief streets, is driven by the
side of a canal between two rows of lamps, at the end of which he has a
small house [Kensington Palace], and then he is supposed to be in the
country. I saw this ceremony yesterday: as soon as he was gone the men
put on under vestments of white linen, and the women left off those
vast draperies, which they call _hoops_, and which I have described to
thee; and then all the men and all the women said _it was hot_. If thou
wilt believe me, I am now [in May] writing to thee before a fire.'[90]
[88] It may be observed that when Walpole's letter was published, it
was briefly noticed in the _Monthly Review_, where at this very date
Oliver Goldsmith was working as the hind of Griffiths and his wife.
It is also notable that the name of Xo Ho's correspondent, Lien Chi,
seems almost a foreshadowing of Goldsmith's Lien Chi Altangi. Can it
be possible that Walpole supplied Goldsmith with his first idea of the
_Citizen of the World_?
[89] A four-wheeled carriage with a movable hood. Cf. Prior's _Down
Hall_: 'Then answer'd Squire Morley: Pray get a _calash_, That in
summer may burn, and in winter may splash,' etc.
[90] _Works_, 1798, i. 208.
In the following June Walpole had betaken himself to the place he
'loved best of all,' and was amusing himself at Strawberry with his
pen. The next work which he records is the publication of a Catalogue
of the Collection of Pictures, etc., of [_i. e._, belonging to] Charles
the First, for which he prepared 'a little introduction.' This, and
the subsequent 'prefaces or advertisements' to the Catalogues of the
Collections of James the Second, and the Duke of Buckingham, are to be
found in vol. i., pp. 234-41, of his works. But the great event of 1757
is the establishment of the _Officina Arbuteana_, or private printing
press, of Strawberry Hill. 'Elzevir, Aldus, and Stephens,' he tells
Chute in July, 'are the freshest personages in his memory,' and he
jestingly threatens to assume as his motto (with a slight variation)
Pope's couplet:--
'Some have at first for wits, then poets pass'd;
Turn'd _printers_ next, and proved plain fools at last.'
'I am turned printer,' he writes somewhat later, 'and have converted a
little cottage into a printing-office. My abbey is a perfect college or
academy. I keep a painter [Müntz] in the house, and a printer,--not to
mention Mr. Bentley, who is an academy himself.' William Robinson, the
printer, an Irishman with noticeable eyes which Garrick envied ('they
are more Richard the Third's than Garrick's own,' says Walpole), must
have been a rather original personage, to judge by a copy of one of
his letters which his patron incloses to Mann. He says he found it in
a drawer where it had evidently been placed to attract his attention.
After telling his correspondent in bad blank verse that he dates from
the 'shady bowers, nodding groves, and amaranthine shades (?)' of
Twickenham,--'Richmond's near neighbour, where great George the King
resides,'--Robinson proceeds to describe his employer as 'the Hon.
Horatio Walpole, son to the late great Sir Robert Walpole, who is
very studious, and an admirer of all the liberal arts and sciences;
amongst the rest he admires printing. He has fitted out a complete
printing-house at this his country seat, and has done me the favour
to make me sole manager and operator (there being no one but myself).
All men of genius resorts his house, courts his company, and admires
his understanding: what with his own and their writings, I believe
I shall be pretty well employed. I have pleased him, and I hope to
continue so to do.' Then, after reference to the extreme heat,--a
heat by which fowls and quarters of lamb have been roasted in the
London Artillery grounds 'by the help of glasses,' so capricious was
the climate over which Walpole had made merry in May,--he proceeds to
describe Strawberry. 'The place I am now in is all my comfort from
the heat; the situation of it is close to the Thames, and is Richmond
Gardens (if you were ever in them) in miniature, surrounded by bowers,
groves, cascades, and ponds, and on a rising ground not very common in
this part of the country; the building elegant, and the furniture of
a peculiar taste, magnificent and superb.' At this date poor Robinson
seems to have been delighted with the place and the fastidious master
whom he hoped 'to continue to please.' But Walpole was nothing if not
mutable, and two years later he had found out that Robinson of the
remarkable eyes was 'a foolish Irishman who took himself for a genius,'
and they parted, with the result that the _Officina Arbuteana_ was
temporarily at a standstill.
For the moment, however, things went smoothly enough. It had been
intended that the maiden effort of the Strawberry types should have
been a translation by Bentley of Paul Hentzner's curious account of
England in 1598. But Walpole suddenly became aware that Gray had
put the penultimate, if not the final, touches to his painfully
elaborated Pindaric Odes, the _Bard_ and the _Progress of Poesy_, and
he pounced upon them forthwith; Gray, as usual, half expostulating,
half overborne. 'You will dislike this as much as I do,'--he writes to
Mason,--'but there is no help.' 'You understand,' he adds, with the
air of one resigning himself to the inevitable, 'it is he that prints
them, not for me, but for Dodsley.' However, he persisted in refusing
Walpole's not entirely unreasonable request for notes. 'If a thing
cannot be understood without them,' he said characteristically, 'it
had better not be understood at all.' Consequently, while describing
them as 'Greek, Pindaric, sublime,' Walpole confesses under his breath
that they are a little obscure. Dodsley paid Gray forty guineas for
the book, which was a large, thin quarto, entitled _Odes by Mr. Gray;
Printed, at Strawberry Hill, for R. and J. Dodsley in Pall-Mall_.
It was published in August, and the price was a shilling. On the
title-page was a vignette of the Gothic castle at Twickenham. From a
letter of Walpole to Lyttelton it would seem that his apprehensions as
to the poems being 'understanded of the people' proved well founded.
'They [the age] have cast their eyes over them, found them obscure, and
looked no further; yet perhaps no compositions ever had more sublime
beauties than are in each,'--and he goes on to criticise them minutely
in a fashion which shows that his own appreciation of them was by no
means unqualified. But Warburton and Garrick and the 'word-picker' Hurd
were enthusiastic. Lyttelton and Shenstone followed more moderately.
Upon the whole, the success of the first venture was encouraging, and
the share in it of 'Elzevir Horace,' as Conway called his friend, was
not forgotten.
Gray's _Odes_ were succeeded by Hentzner's _Travels_, or, to speak more
accurately, by that portion of Hentzner's _Travels_ which refers to
England. In England Hentzner was little known, and the 220 copies which
Walpole printed in October, 1757, were prefaced by an Advertisement
from his pen, and a dedication to the Society of Antiquaries, of which
he was a member. After this came, in 1758, his _Catalogue of Royal and
Noble Authors_; a collection of _Fugitive Pieces_ (which included his
essays in the _World_), dedicated to Conway;[91] and seven hundred
copies of Lord Whitworth's _Account of Russia_. Then followed a book by
Joseph Spence, _the Parallel of Magliabecchi and Mr._ [Robert] _Hill_,
a learned tailor of Buckingham, the object of which was to benefit
Hill,--an end which must have been attained, as six out of seven
hundred copies were sold in a fortnight, and the book was reprinted in
London. Bentley's _Lucan_, a quarto of five hundred copies, succeeded
Spence, and then came three other quartos of _Anecdotes of Painting_,
by Walpole himself. The only other notable products of the press
during this period are the Autobiography of Lord Herbert of Cherbury,
quarto, 1764, and one hundred copies of the _Poems_ of Lady Temple.
This, however, is a very fair record for seven years' work, when it
is remembered that the Strawberry Hill staff never exceeded a man and
a boy. As already stated, the first printer, Robinson, was dismissed
in 1759. His place, after a short interval of 'occasional hands,' was
taken by Thomas Kirgate, whose name thenceforth appears on all the
Twickenham issues, with which it is indissolubly connected. Kirgate
continued, with greater good fortune than his predecessors, to perform
his duties until Walpole's death.
[91] These, though printed in 1758, were not circulated until 1759.
See, at end, 'Appendix of Books printed at the Strawberry Hill Press,'
which contains ample details of all these publications.
In the above list there are two volumes which, in these pages, deserve
a more extended notice than the rest. _The Catalague of Royal and
Noble Authors_ had at least the merit of novelty, and certainly a
better reason for existing than some of the works to which its author
refers in his preface. Even the performances of Pulteney, Earl of
Bath, and the English rondeaus of Charles of Orleans are more worthy
of a chronicler than the lives of physicians who had been poets, of
men who had died laughing, or of Frenchmen who had studied Hebrew.
Walpole took considerable pains in obtaining information, and his book
was exceedingly well received,--indeed, far more favourably than he
had any reason to expect. A second edition, which was not printed at
Strawberry Hill, speedily followed the first, with no diminution of
its prosperity. For an effort which made no pretensions to symmetry,
which is often meagre where it might have been expected to be full,
and is everywhere prejudiced by a sort of fine-gentleman disdain of
exactitude, this was certainly as much as he could anticipate. But he
seems to have been more than usually sensitive to criticism, and some
of the amplest of his _Short Notes_ are devoted to the discussion of
the adverse opinions which were expressed. From these we learn that
he was abused by the _Critical Review_ for disliking the Stuarts,
and by the _Monthly_ for liking his father. Further, that he found
an apologist in Dr. Hill (of the _Inspector_), whose gross adulation
was worse than abuse; and lastly, that he was seriously attacked
in a Pamphlet of _Remarks on Mr. Walpole's 'Catalogue of Royal and
Noble Authors'_ by a certain Carter, concerning whose antecedents his
irritation goes on to bring together all the scandals he can collect.
As the _Short Notes_ were written long after the events, it shows how
his soreness against his critics continued. What it was when still
fresh may be gathered from the following quotation from a letter to
Rev. Henry Zouch, to whom he was indebted for many new facts and
corrections, especially in the second edition, and who afterwards
helped him in the _Anecdotes of Painting_: 'I am sick of the character
of author; I am sick of the consequences of it; I am weary of seeing
my name in the newspapers; I am tired with reading foolish criticisms
on me, and as foolish defences of me; and I trust my friends will be
so good as to let the last abuse of me pass unanswered. It is called
"Remarks" on my Catalogue, asperses the Revolution more than it does my
book, and, in one word, is written by a non-juring preacher, who was a
dog-doctor. Of me, he knows so little that he thinks to punish me by
abusing King William!'[92]
[92] _Walpole to Zouch_, 14 May, 1759.
In a letter of a few months earlier to the same correspondent, he
refers to another task, upon which, in despite of the sentence just
quoted, he continued to employ himself. 'Last summer'--he says--'I
bought of Vertue's widow forty volumes of his MS. collections relating
to English painters, sculptors, gravers, and architects. He had
actually begun their lives: unluckily he had not gone far, and could
not write grammar. I propose to digest and complete this work.'[93]
The purchases referred to had been made subsequent to 1756, when
Mrs. Vertue applied to Walpole, as a connoisseur, to buy from her
the voluminous notes and memoranda which her husband had accumulated
with respect to art and artists in England. Walpole also acquired at
Vertue's sale in May, 1757, a number of copies from Holbein and two
or three other pictures. He seems to have almost immediately set about
arranging and digesting this unwieldy and chaotic heap of material,[94]
much of which, besides being illiterate, was also illegible. More than
once his patience gave way under the drudgery; but he nevertheless
persevered in a way that shows a tenacity of purpose foreign, in this
case at all events, to his assumption of dilettante indifference.
His progress is thus chronicled. He began in January, 1760, and
finished the first volume on 14 August. The second volume was begun in
September, and completed on the 23rd October. On the 4th January in
the following year he set about the third volume, but laid it aside
after the first day, not resuming it until the end of June. In August,
however, he finished it. Two volumes were published in 1762, and a
third, which is dated 1763, in 1764. As usual, he affected more or
less to undervalue his own share in the work; but he very justly laid
stress in his 'Preface' upon the fact that he was little more than the
arranger of data not collected by his own exertions. 'I would not,' he
said to Zouch, 'have the materials of forty years, which was Vertue's
case, depreciated in compliment to the work of four months, which is
almost my whole merit.' Here, again, the tone is a little in the Oronte
manner; but, upon the main point, the interest of the work, his friends
did not share his apprehensions, and Gray especially was 'violent
about it.' Nor did the public show themselves less appreciative, for
there was so much that was new in the dead engraver's memoranda, and
so much which was derived from private galleries or drawn from obscure
sources, that the work could scarcely have failed of readers even if
the style had been hopelessly corrupt, which, under Walpole's revision,
it certainly was not. In 1762, he began a _Catalogue of Engravers_,
which he finished in about six weeks as a supplementary volume, and in
1765, still from the Strawberry Press, he issued a second edition of
the whole.[95]
[93] _Walpole to Zouch_, 12 January, 1759.
[94] 'Mr. Vertue's Manuscripts, in 28 vols.,' were sold at the Sale of
Rare Prints and Illustrated Works from the Strawberry Hill Collection
on Tuesday, 21 June, 1842, for £26 10_s._ Walpole says in the _Short
Notes_ that he paid £100. The Vertue MSS. are now in the British
Museum, which acquired them from the Dawson Turner collection.
[95] _The Anecdotes of Painting_ was enlarged by the Rev. James
Dallaway in 1826-8, and again revised, with additional notes, by Ralph
N Wornum in 1839. This last, in three volumes, 8vo is the accepted
edition.
After the appearance of the second edition of the _Anecdotes of
Painting_, a silence fell upon the _Officina Arbuteana_ for three
years, during the earlier part of which time Walpole was at Paris, as
will be narrated in the next chapter. His press, as may be guessed,
was one of the sights of his Gothic castle, and there are several
anecdotes showing how his ingenious fancy made it the vehicle of
adroit compliment. Once, not long after it had been established,
my Lady Rochford, Lady Townshend (the witty Ethelreda, or Audrey,
Harrison),[96] and Sir John Bland's sister were carried after dinner
into the printing-room to see Mr. Robinson at work. He immediately
struck off some verse which was already in type, and presented it to
Lady Townshend:--
THE PRESS SPEAKS:
From me wits and poets their glory obtain;
Without me their wit and their verses were vain.
Stop, Townshend, and let me but paint[97] what you say,
You, the fame I on others bestow, will repay.
[96] She was married to Charles, 3rd Viscount Townshend in 1723, and
was the mother of Charles Townshend, the statesman. She died in 1788.
There was an enamel of her by Zincke after Vanloo in the Tribune at
Strawberry Hill, which is engraved at p 150 of Cunningham's second
volume.
[97] _Sic. in orig._; but query 'print.'
The visitors then asked, as had been anticipated to see the actual
process of setting up; and Walpole ostensibly gave the printer four
lines out of Rowe's _Fair Penitent_. But, by what would now be styled a
clever feat of prestidigitation, the forewarned Robinson struck off the
following, this time to Lady Rochford:--
THE PRESS SPEAKS.
In vain from your properest name you have flown,
And exchanged lovely Cupid's for Hymen's dull throne;
By my art shall your beauties be constantly sung,
And in spite of yourself, you shall ever be _young_.
Lady Rochford's maiden name, it should be explained, was 'Young.' Such
were what their inventor call _les amusements des eaux de Straberri_ in
the month of August and the year of grace 1757.
Beyond the major efforts already mentioned, the _Short Notes_ contain
references to various fugitive pieces which Walpole composed, some of
which he printed, and some others of which have been published since
his death. One of these, _The Magpie and her Brood_, was a pleasant
little fable from the French of Bonaventure des Periers, rhymed for
Miss Hotham, the youthful niece of his neighbour Lady Suffolk; another,
a _Dialogue between two Great Ladies_. In 1761, he wrote a poem on
the King, entitled _The Garland_, which first saw the light in the
_Quarterly_ for 1852 [No. CLXXX.]. Besides these were several epigrams,
mock sermons, and occasional verses. But perhaps the most interesting
of his productions in this kind are the octosyllabics which he wrote in
August, 1759, and called _The Parish Register of Twickenham_. This is a
metrical list of all the remarkable persons who ever lived there, for
which reason a portion of it may find a place in these pages:--
'Where silver Thames round Twit'nam meads
His winding current sweetly leads;
Twit'nam, the Muses' fav'rite seat,
Twit'nam, the Graces' lov'd retreat;
There polish'd Essex wont to sport,
The pride and victim of a court!
There Bacon tun'd the grateful lyre
To soothe Eliza's haughty ire;
--Ah! happy had no meaner strain
Than friendship's dash'd his mighty vein!
Twit'nam, where Hyde, majestic sage,
Retir'd from folly's frantic stage,
While his vast soul was hung on tenters
To mend the world, and vex dissenters
Twit'nam, where frolic Wharton revel'd,
Where Montagu, with locks dishevel'd
(Conflict of dirt and warmth divine),
Invok'd--and scandaliz'd the Nine;
Where Pope in moral music spoke
To th' anguish'd soul of Bolingbroke,
And whisper'd, how true genius errs,
Preferring joys that pow'r confers;
Bliss, never to great minds arising
From ruling worlds, but from despising:
Where Fielding met his bunter Muse,
And, as they quaff'd the fiery juice,
Droll Nature stamp'd each lucky hit
With inimaginable wit:
Where Suffolk sought the peaceful scene,
Resigning Richmond to the queen,
And all the glory, all the teasing,
Of pleasing one not worth the pleasing:
Where Fanny, "ever-blooming fair,"
Ejaculates the graceful pray'r,
And 'scap'd from sense, with nonsense smit,
For Whitefield's cant leaves Stanhope's wit:
Amid this choir of sounding names
Of statesmen, bards, and beauteous dames,
Shall the last trifler of the throng
Enroll his own such names among?
--Oh! no--Enough if I consign
To lasting types their notes divine:
Enough, if Strawberry's humble hill
The title-page of fame shall fill.'[98]
[98] _Works_, 1798, vol. iv., pp. 382-3.
In 1784, Walpole added a few lines to celebrate a new resident and
a new favourite, Lady Di. Beauclerk, the widow of Johnson's famous
friend.[99] Most of the other names which occur in the _Twickenham
Register_ are easily identified. 'Fanny, "ever-blooming fair,"' was the
beautiful Lady Fanny Shirley of Phillips' ballad and Pope's epistle,
aunt of that fourth Earl Ferrers who in 1760 was hanged at Tyburn for
murdering his steward. Miss Hawkins remembered her as residing at a
house now called Heath Lane Lodge, with her mother, 'a very ancient
Countess Ferrers,' widow of the first Earl. Henry Fielding, to whom
Walpole gives a quatrain, the second couplet of which must excuse the
insolence of the first, had for some time lodgings in Back Lane, whence
was baptised in February, 1748, the elder of his sons by his second
wife, the William Fielding who, like his father, became a Westminster
magistrate. It is more likely that _Tom Jones_ was written at
Twickenham than at any of the dozen other places for which that honour
is claimed, since the author quitted Twickenham late in 1748, and his
great novel was published early in the following year. Walpole had only
been resident for a short time when Fielding left, but even had this
been otherwise, it is not likely that, between the master of the Comic
Epos (who was also Lady Mary's cousin!) and the dilettante proprietor
of Strawberry, there could ever have been much cordiality. Indeed, for
some of the robuster spirits of his age Walpole shows an extraordinary
distaste, which with him generally implies unsympathetic, if not
absolutely illiberal, comment. Almost the only important anecdote of
Fielding in his correspondence is one of which the distorting bias is
demonstrable;[100] and to Fielding's contemporary, Hogarth, although as
a connoisseur he was shrewd enough to collect his works, he scarcely
ever refers but to place him in a ridiculous aspect,--a course which
contrasts curiously with the extravagant praise he gives to Bentley,
Bunbury, Lady Di. Beauclerk, and some other of the very minor artistic
lights in his own circle.
[99] See chapter ix.
[100] Cf. chapter vi. of _Fielding_, by the present writer, in the _Men
of Letters_ series, 2nd edition, 1889, pp. 145-7.
It is, however, possible to write too long an excursus upon the
_Twickenham Parish Register_, and the last paragraphs of this chapter
belong of right to another and more important work,--_The Castle
of Otranto_. According to the _Short Notes_, this 'Gothic romance'
was begun in June, 1764, and finished on the 6th August following.
From another account we learn that it occupied eight nights of this
period from ten o'clock at night until two in the morning, to the
accompaniment of coffee. In a letter to Cole, the Cambridge antiquary,
with whom Walpole commenced to correspond in 1762, he gives some
further particulars, which, because they have been so often quoted,
can scarcely be omitted here: 'Shall I even confess to you what was
the origin of this romance? I waked one morning, in the beginning of
last June, from a dream, of which all I could recover was, that I
had thought myself in an ancient castle (a very natural dream for a
head filled, like mine, with Gothic story), and that on the uppermost
bannister of a great staircase I saw a gigantic hand in armour. In the
evening I sat down and began to write, without knowing in the least
what I intended to say or relate. The work grew on my hands, and I grew
fond of it,--add that I was very glad to think of anything, rather than
politics. In short, I was so engrossed with my tale, which I completed
in less than two months, that one evening I wrote from the time I had
drunk my tea, about six o'clock, till half an hour after one in the
morning, when my hand and fingers were so weary that I could not hold
the pen to finish the sentence, but left Matilda and Isabella talking,
in the middle of a paragraph.'[101]
[101] _Letter to Cole_, 9 March, 1765.
The work of which the origin is thus described was published in
a limited edition on the 24th December, 1764, with the title of
_The Castle of Otranto, a Story, translated by William Marshal,
Gent., from the original Italian of Onuphrio Muralto, Canon of the
Church of St. Nicholas at Otranto_. The name of the alleged Italian
author is sometimes described as an anagram from Horace Walpole,--a
misconception which is easily demonstrated by counting the letters. The
book was printed, not for Walpole, but for Lownds, of Fleet Street,
and it was prefaced by an introduction in which the author described
and criticised the supposed original, which he declared to be a
black-letter printed at Naples in 1529. Its success was considerable.
It seems at first to have excited no suspicion as to its authenticity,
and it is not clear that even Gray, to whom a copy was sent immediately
after publication, was in the secret. 'I have received the _Castle
of Otranto_,' he says, 'and return you my thanks for it. It engages
our attention here [at Cambridge], makes some of us cry a little, and
all in general afraid to go to bed o' nights.' In the second edition,
which followed in April, 1765, Walpole dropped the mask, disclosing
his authorship in a second preface of great ability, which, among
other things, contains a vindication of Shakespeare's mingling of
comedy and tragedy against the strictures of Voltaire,--a piece of
temerity which some of his French friends feared might prejudice him
with that formidable critic. But what is even more interesting is his
own account of what he had attempted. He had endeavoured to blend
ancient and modern romance,--to employ the old supernatural agencies
of Scudéry and La Calprenède as the background to the adventures of
personages modelled as closely upon ordinary life as the personages of
_Tom Jones_. These are not his actual illustrations, but they express
his meaning. 'The actions, sentiments, conversations, of the heroes and
heroines of ancient days were as unnatural as the machines employed to
put them in motion.' He would make his heroes and heroines natural in
all these things, only borrowing from the older school some of that
imagination, invention, and fancy which, in the literal reproduction of
life, he thought too much neglected.
His idea was novel, and the moment a favourable one for its
development. Fluently and lucidly written, the _Castle of Otranto_ set
a fashion in literature. But, like many other works produced under
similar conditions, it had its day. To the pioneer of a movement which
has exhausted itself, there comes often what is almost worse than
oblivion,--discredit and neglect. A generation like the present, for
whom fiction has unravelled so many intricate combinations, and whose
Gothicism and Mediævalism are better instructed than Walpole's, no
longer feels its soul harrowed up in the same way as did his hushed
and awe-struck readers of the days of the third George. To the critic
the book is interesting as the first of a school of romances which had
the honour of influencing even the mighty 'Wizard of the North,' who,
no doubt in gratitude, wrote for _Ballantyne's Novelist's Library_ a
most appreciative study of the story. But we doubt if that many-plumed
and monstrous helmet, which crashes through stone walls and cellars,
could now give a single shiver to the most timorous Cambridge don,
while we suspect that the majority of modern students would, like
the author, leave Matilda and Isabella talking, in the middle of a
paragraph, but from a different kind of weariness. _Autres temps,
autres mœurs_,--especially in the matter of Gothic romance.