years after that event, every new building was pinnacled and turreted on all sides, however little its situation, its size, or its uses might seem to fit it for such ornaments.  Then, as fashion is never constant for any great length of’ time, the taste of the public rushed at once upon castles; and loopholes, and battlements, and heavy arches, and buttresses appeared in every direction.  Now the fancy of the time has turned as madly to that bastard kind of architecture, possessing, however, many beauties, which compounded of the Gothic, Castellated, and Grecian or Roman, is called the Elizabethan, or Old English.  No villa, no country-house, no lodge in the outskirts of London, no box of a retired tradesman is now built, except in some modification of this style.  The most ludicrous situations and the most inappropriate destinations do not deter any one from pointing his gables, and squaring his bay-windows, in the most approved Elizabethan manner.  And this vulgarizing and lowering Of the Old English architecture, by over use, is sure, sooner or later, to lose its popularity, and to cause it to be contemned and neglected, like its predecessors.  All these different styles, if properly applied, have their peculiar merits.  In old English country-houses, which have formerly been conventual buildings, the gothic style may be, with great propriety, introduced.  On the height of Belvoir or in similar situations, nothing could be devised so appropriate as the castellated; and in additions to, or renovations of old manor-houses the Elizabethan may be, with equal advantage, adopted.  It is the injudicious application of all three which has been, and is sure to be, the occasion of their fall in public favour.

The next pursuit of Walpole, to -which it now becomes desirable to advert, are his literary labours, and the various publications with which, at different periods of his life, he favoured the world.  His first effort appears to have been a copy of verses, written at Cambridge.  His poetry is generally not of a very high order; lively, and with happy turns and expressions, but injured frequently by a sort of quaintness, and a somewhat inharmonious rhythm.  Its merits, however, exactly fitted it for the purpose which it was for the most part intended for; namely, as what are called vers de soci`et`e.” (37) Among the best of his verses may be mentioned those “On the neglected Column in the Place of St. Mark, at Florence,” which contains some fine lines; his “Twickenham Register;” and “The Three Vernons.”

In 1752 he published his “Edes Walpolianae,” or description of the family seat’ of Houghton Hall, in Norfolk, where his father had built a palace, and had made a fine collection of pictures, which were sold by his grandson George, third Earl of Orford, to the Empress Catherine of Russia.  This work, which is, in fact, a mere catalogue of pictures, first showed the peculiar talent of Horace Walpole for enlivening, by anecdote and lightness of style, a dry subject.