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]

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:—

'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.

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]

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]

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:

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.

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:—

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.

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]

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 moeurs,—especially in the matter of Gothic romance.