s might
resort; and they are honey-combed all round as high as a pick-ax could
reach."[9] "Walpole," writes Leslie Stephen, "is almost the first modern
Englishman who found out that our old cathedrals were really beautiful.
He discovered that a most charming toy might be made of medievalism.
Strawberry Hill, with all its gimcracks, its pasteboard battlements and
stained-paper carvings, was the lineal ancestor of the new law-courts.
The restorers of churches, the manufacturers of stained glass, the modern
decorators and architects of all varieties, the Ritualists and the High
Church party, should think of him with kindness. . . That he was quite
conscious of the necessity for more serious study, appears in his
letters; in one of which, _e.g._, he proposes a systematic history of
Gothic architecture such as has since been often executed."[10] Mr.
Stephen adds that Walpole's friend Gray "shared his Gothic tastes, with
greatly superior knowledge."

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