lucrative sinecures through his father’s influence.  He was an assiduous courtier, a keen and spiteful observer, a busy gossip and retailer of social tattle.  His feminine turn of mind made him a capital letter-writer; and his correspondence, particularly with Sir Horace Mann, English ambassador at Florence, is a running history of backstairs diplomacy, court intrigue, subterranean politics, and fashionable scandal during the reigns of the second and third Georges.  He also figures as an historian of an amateurish sort, by virtue of his “Catalogue of Royal and Noble Authors,” “Anecdotes of Painting,” and “Historic Doubts on Richard III.”  Our present concern with him, however, lies quite outside of these.

It was about 1750 that Walpole, who had bought a villa at Strawberry Hill, on the Thames near Windsor, which had formerly belonged to Mrs. Chenevix, the fashionable London toy-woman, began to turn his house into a miniature Gothic castle, in which he is said to have “outlived three sets of his own battlements.”  These architectural experiments went on for some twenty years.  They excited great interest and attracted many visitors, and Walpole may be regarded as having given a real impetus to the revival of pointed architecture.  He spoke of Strawberry Hill as a castle, but it was, in fact, an odd blend of ecclesiastical and castellated Gothic applied to domestic uses.  He had a cloister, a chapel, a round tower, a gallery, a “refectory,” a stair-turret with Gothic balustrade, stained windows, mural scutcheons, and Gothic paper-hangings.  Walpole’s mock-gothic became something of a laughing-stock, after the true principles of medieval architecture were better understood.  Since the time when Inigo Jones, court architect to James I., came back from Italy, where he had studied the works of Palladio; and especially since the time when his successor, Sir Christopher Wren, had rebuilt St. Paul’s in the Italian Renaissance style, after the great fire of London in 1664, Gothic had fallen more and more into disuse.  “If in the history of British art,” says Eastlake, “there is one period more distinguished than another for the neglect of Gothic, it was certainly the middle of the eighteenth century.”  But architecture had this advantage over other arts, it had left memorials more obvious and imposing.  Medieval literature was known only to the curious, to collectors of manuscript romances and black-letter ballads.  The study of medieval arts like tempera painting, illuminating, glass-staining, wood-carving, tapestry embroidery; of the science of blazonry, of the details of ancient armor and costumes, was the pursuit of specialists.  But Westminster Abbey, the Tower of London, Salisbury Cathedral, and York Minster, ruins such as Melrose and Fountain Abbeys, Crichton Castle, and a hundred others were impressive witnesses for the civilization that had built them and must, sooner or later, demand respectful attention.  Hence it is not strange that the Gothic revival went hand in hand with the romantic movement in literature, if indeed it did not give it its original impulse.