n's benefit,
Walpole's new bedroom at Strawberry Hill as "in the best taste of
anything he has yet done, and in your own Gothic way"; and he advises his
correspondent as to the selection of patterns for staircases and arcade
work. There was evidently a great stir of curiosity concerning
Strawberry Hill in Gray's coterie, and a determination to be Gothic at
all hazards; and the poet felt obliged to warn his friends that zeal
should not outrun discretion. He writes to Wharton in 1754: "I rejoice
to find you at last settled to your heart's content, and delight to hear
you talk of giving your house some _Gothic ornaments_ already. If you
project anything, I hope it will be entirely within doors; and don't let
me (when I come gaping into Coleman Street) be directed to the gentlemen
at the ten pinnacles, or with the church porch at his door." Again, to
the same (1761): "It is mere pedantry in Gothicism to stick to nothing
but altars and tombs, and there is no end to it, if we are to sit upon
nothing but coronation chairs, nor drink out of nothing but chalices or
flagons." Writing to Mason in 1758 about certain incongruities in one of
the latter's odes, he gives the following Doresque illustration of his
point. "If you should lead me into a superb Gothic building, with a
thousand clustered pillars, each of them half a mile high, the walls all
covered with fret-work, and the windows full of red and blue saints that
had neither head nor tail, and I should find the Venus de Medici in
person perked up in a long niche over the high altar, as naked as she was
born, do you think it would raise or damp my devotions?"[41] He made it
a favorite occupation to visit and take drawings from celebrated ruins
and the great English cathedrals, particularly those in the Cambridge
fens, Ely and Peterboro'. These studies he utilized in a short essay on
Norman architecture, first published by Mitford in 1814, and incorrectly
entitled "Architectura Gothica."

Reverting to his early letters from abroad one is struck by the
anticipation of the modern attitude, in his description of a visit to the
Grande Chartreuse, which he calls "one of the most solemn, the most
romantic, and the most astonishing scenes."[42] "I do not remember to
have gone ten paces without an exclamation that there was no restraining.
Not a precipice, not a torrent, not a cliff, but is pregnant with
religion and poetry. . . One need not have a very fantastic imagination