nthology,
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 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-wr