The particular literary vice which Addison strove to correct in these papers was that conceited style which infected a certain school of seventeenth-century poetry, running sometimes into such puerilities as anagrams, acrostics, echo-songs, rebuses, and verses in the shape of eggs, wings, hour-glasses, etc.  He names, as special representatives of this affectation, Herbert, Cowley, and Sylvester.  But it is significant that Addison should have described this fashion as Gothic.  It has in reality nothing in common with the sincere and loving art of the old builders.  He might just as well have called it classic; for, as he acknowledges, devices of the kind are to be found in the Greek anthology, and Ovid was a poet given to conceits.  Addison was a writer of pure taste, but the coldness and timidity of his imagination, and the maxims of the critical school to which he belonged, made him mistake for spurious decoration the efflorescence of that warm, creative fancy which ran riot in Gothic art.  The grotesque, which was one expression of this sappy vigor, was abhorrent to Addison.  The art and poetry of his time were tame, where Gothic art was wild; dead where Gothic was alive.  He could not sympathize with it, nor understand it.  “Vous ne pouvez pas le comprendre; vous avez toujours hai la vie.”

I have quoted Vicesimus Knox’s complaint that the antiquarian spirit was spreading from architecture and numismatics into literature.[4] We meet with satire upon antiquaries many years before this; in Pope, in Akenside’s Spenserian poem “The Virtuoso” (1737); in Richard Owen Cambridge’s “Scribleriad” (1751): 

    “See how her sons with generous ardor strive,
    Bid every long-lost Gothic art revive,. . . 
    Each Celtic character explain, or show
    How Britons ate a thousand years ago;
    On laws of jousts and tournaments declaim,
    Or shine, the rivals of the herald’s fame. 
    But chief that Saxon wisdom be your care,
    Preserve their idols and their fanes repair;
    And may their deep mythology be shown
    By Seater’s wheel and Thor’s tremendous throne."[5]

The most notable instance that we encounter of virtuosity invading the neighboring realm of literature is in the case of Strawberry Hill and “The Castle of Otranto.”  Horace Walpole, the son of the great prime minister, Robert Walpole, was a person of varied accomplishments and undoubted cleverness.  He was a man of fashion, a man of taste, and a man of letters; though, in the first of these characters, he entertained or affected a contempt for the last, not uncommon in dilettante authors and dandy artists, who belong to the beau monde or are otherwise socially of high place, teste Congreve, and even Byron, that “rhyming peer.”  Walpole, as we have seen, had been an Eton friend of Gray and had traveled—­and quarreled—­with him upon the Continent.  Returning home, he got a seat in Parliament, the entree at court, and various