Walpole did not arrive at his Gothicism by the gate of literature.  It was merely a specialized development of his tastes as a virtuoso and collector.  The museum of curiosities which he got together at Strawberry Hill included not only suits of armor, stained glass, and illuminated missals, but a miscellaneous treasure of china ware, enamels, faience, bronzes, paintings, engravings, books, coins, bric-a-brac, and memorabilia such as Cardinal Wolsey’s hat, Queen Elizabeth’s glove, and the spur that William III. wore at the Battle of the Boyne.  Walpole’s romanticism was a thin veneering; underneath it, he was a man of the eighteenth century.  His opinions on all subjects were, if not inconsistent, at any rate notoriously whimsical and ill-assorted.  Thus in spite of his admiration for Gray and his—­temporary—­interest in Ossian, Chatterton, and Percy’s ballads, he ridiculed Mallet’s and Gray’s Runic experiments, spoke contemptuously of Spenser, Thomson, and Akenside, compared Dante to “a Methodist parson in bedlam,” and pronounced “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” “forty times more nonsensical than the worst translation of any Italian opera-books."[11] He said that poetry died with Pope, whose measure and manner he employed in his own verses.  It has been observed that, in all his correspondence, he makes but a single mention of Froissart’s “Chronicle,” and that a sneer at Lady Pomfret for translating it.

Accordingly we find, on turning to “The Castle of Otranto,” that, just as Walpole’s Gothicism was an accidental “sport” from his general virtuosity; so his romanticism was a casual outgrowth of his architectural amusements.  Strawberry Hill begat “The Castle of Otranto,” whose title is fitly chosen, since it is the castle itself that is the hero of the book.  The human characters are naught.  “Shall I even confess to you,” he writes to the Rev. William Cole (March 9, 1765), “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 banister of a great staircase, I saw a gigantic hand in armor.  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. . .  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.”

“The Castle of Otranto, A Gothic Story,” was published in 1765.[12] According to the title page, it was translated from the original Italian of Onuphrio Muralto—­a sort of half-pun on the author’s surname—­by W. Marshall, Gent.  This mystification was kept up in the preface, which pretended that the book had been printed at Naples in black-letter in 1529, and was found in the