iter; 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 W