Horace Walpole was the youngest son of Sir Robert Walpole,
the great statesman, who died Earl of Orford. He was born in
1717, the year in which his father resigned office, remaining in
opposition for almost three years before his return to a long
tenure of power. Horace Walpole was educated at Eton, where
he formed a school friendship with Thomas Gray, who was but a few
months older. In 1739 Gray was travelling-companion with
Walpole in France and Italy until they differed and parted; but the
friendship was afterwards renewed, and remained firm to the
end. Horace Walpole went from Eton to King’s College,
Cambridge, and entered Parliament in 1741, the year before his
father’s final resignation and acceptance of an earldom. His
way of life was made easy to him. As Usher of the Exchequer,
Comptroller of the Pipe, and Clerk of the Estreats in the
Exchequer, he received nearly two thousand a year for doing
nothing, lived with his father, and amused himself.
Horace Walpole idled, and amused himself with the small life
of the fashionable world to which he was proud of belonging, though
he had a quick eye for its vanities. He had social wit, and
liked to put it to small uses. But he was not an empty idler,
and there were seasons when he could become a sharp judge of
himself. “I am sensible,” he wrote to his most intimate
friend, “I am sensible of having more follies and weaknesses and
fewer real good qualities than most men. I sometimes reflect
on this, though, I own, too seldom. I always want to begin
acting like a man, and a sensible one, which I think I might be if
I would.” He had deep home affections, and, under many polite
affectations, plenty of good sense.
Horace Walpole’s father died in 1745. The eldest son,
who succeeded to the earldom, died in 1751, and left a son, George,
who was for a time insane, and lived until 1791. As George
left no child, the title and estates passed to Horace Walpole, then
seventy-four years old, and the only uncle who survived.
Horace Walpole thus became Earl of Orford, during the last six
years of his life. As to the title, he said that he felt
himself being called names in his old age. He died unmarried,
in the year 1797, at the age of eighty.
He had turned his house at Strawberry Hill, by the Thames,
near Twickenham, into a Gothic villa—eighteenth-century Gothic—and
amused himself by spending freely upon its adornment with such
things as were then fashionable as objects of taste. But he
delighted also in his flowers and his trellises of roses, and the
quiet Thames. When confined by gout to his London house in
Arlington Street, flowers from Strawberry Hill and a bird were
necessary consolations. He set up also at Strawberry Hill a
private printing press, at which he printed his friend Gray’s
poems, also in 1758 his own “Catalogue of the Royal and Noble
Authors of England,” and five volumes of “Anecdotes of Painting in
England,” between 1762 and 1771.
Horace Walpole produced The Castle of
Otranto in 1765, at the mature age of
forty-eight. It was suggested by a dream from which he said
he waked one morning, and of which “all I could recover was, that I
had thought myself in an ancient castle (a very natural dream for a
head like mine, filled with Gothic story), and that on the
uppermost banister of a great staircase I saw a gigantic hand in
armour. In the evening I sat down and began to write, without
knowing in the least what I intended to say or relate.” So
began the tale which professed to be translated by “William
Marshal, gentleman, from the Italian of Onuphro Muralto, canon of
the Church of St. Nicholas, at Otranto.” It was written in
two months. Walpole’s friend Gray reported to him that at
Cambridge the book made “some of them cry a little, and all in
general afraid to go to bed o’ nights.” The
Castle of Otranto was, in its own way, an early
sign of the reaction towards romance in the latter part of the last
century. This gives it interest. But it has had many
followers, and the hardy modern reader, when he read’s Gray’s note
from Cambridge, needs to be reminded of its date.
H. M.
The following work was found in the library of an ancient
Catholic family in the north of England. It was printed at
Naples, in the black letter, in the year 1529. How much
sooner it was written does not appear. The principal
incidents are such as were believed in the darkest ages of
Christianity; but the language and conduct have nothing that
savours of barbarism. The style is the purest
Italian.
If the story was written near the time when it is supposed to
have happened, it must have been between 1095, the era of the first
Crusade, and 1243, the date of the last, or not long
afterwards. There is no other circumstance in the work that
can lead us to guess at the period in which the scene is laid: the
names of the actors are evidently fictitious, and probably
disguised on purpose: yet the Spanish names of the domestics seem
to indicate that this work was not composed until the establishment
of the Arragonian Kings in Naples had made Spanish appellations
familiar in that country. The beauty of the diction, and the
zeal of the author (moderated, however, by singular judgment)
concur to make me think that the date of the composition was little
antecedent to that of the impression. Letters were then in
their most flourishing state in Italy, and contributed to dispel
the empire of superstition, at that time so forcibly attacked by
the reformers. It is not unlikely that an artful priest might
endeavour to turn their own arms on the innovators, and might avail
himself of his abilities as an author to confirm the populace in
their ancient errors and superstitions. If this was his view,
he has certainly acted with signal address. Such a work as
the following would enslave a hundred vulgar minds beyond half the
books of controversy that have been written from the days of Luther
to the present hour.
This solution of the author’s motives is, however, offered as
a mere conjecture. Whatever his views were, or whatever
effects the execution of them might have, his work can only be laid
before the public at present as a matter of entertainment.
Even as such, some apology for it is necessary. Miracles,
visions, necromancy, dreams, and other preternatural events, are
exploded now even from romances. That was not the case when
our author wrote; much less when the story itself is supposed to
have happened. Belief in every kind of prodigy was so
established in those dark ages, that an author would not be
faithful to the manners of the times, who should omit all mention
of them. He is not bound to believe them himself, but he must
represent his actors as believing them.
If this air of the miraculous is excused, the reader will
find nothing else unworthy of his perusal. Allow the
possibility of the facts, and all the actors comport themselves as
persons would do in their situation. There is no bombast, no
similes, flowers, digressions, or unnecessary descriptions.
Everything tends directly to the catastrophe. Never is the
reader’s attention relaxed. The rules of the drama are almost
observed throughout the conduct of the piece. The characters
are well drawn, and still better maintained. Terror, the
author’s principal engine, prevents the story from ever
languishing; and it is so often contrasted by pity, that the mind
is kept up in a constant vicissitude of interesting
passions.
Some persons may perhaps think the characters of the
domestics too little serious for the general cast of the story; but
besides their opposition to the principal personages, the art of
the author is very observable in his conduct of the
subalterns. They discover many passages essential to the
story, which could not be well brought to light but by their
naïveté and simplicity. In
particular, the womanish terror and foibles of Bianca, in the last
chapter, conduce essentially towards advancing the
catastrophe.
It is natural for a translator to be prejudiced in favour of
his adopted work. More impartial readers may not be so much
struck with the beauties of this piece as I was. Yet I am not
blind to my author’s defects. I could wish he had grounded
his plan on a more useful moral than this: that “the sins of
fathers are visited on their children to the third and fourth
generation.” I doubt whether, in his time, any more than at
present, ambition curbed its appetite of dominion from the dread of
so remote a punishment. And yet this moral is weakened by
that less direct insinuation, that even such anathema may be
diverted by devotion to St. Nicholas. Here the interest of
the Monk plainly gets the better of the judgment of the
author. However, with all its faults, I have no doubt but the
English reader will be pleased with a sight of this
performance. The piety that reigns throughout, the lessons of
virtue that are inculcated, and the rigid purity of the sentiments,
exempt this work from the censure to which romances are but too
liable. Should it meet with the success I hope for, I may be
encouraged to reprint the original Italian, though it will tend to
depreciate my own labour. Our language falls far short of the
charms of the Italian, both for variety and harmony. The
latter is peculiarly excellent for simple narrative. It is
difficult in English to relate without falling too low or rising
too high; a fault obviously occasioned by the little care taken to
speak pure language in common conversation. Every Italian or
Frenchman of any rank piques himself on speaking his own tongue
correctly and with choice. I cannot flatter myself with
having done justice to my author in this respect: his style is as
elegant as his conduct of the passions is masterly. It is a
pity that he did not apply his talents to what they were evidently
proper for—the theatre.
I will detain the reader no longer, but to make one short
remark. Though the machinery is invention, and the names of
the actors imaginary, I cannot but believe that the groundwork of
the story is founded on truth. The scene is undoubtedly laid
in some real castle. The author seems frequently, without
design, to describe particular parts. “The chamber,” says he,
“on the right hand;” “the door on the left hand;” “the distance
from the chapel to Conrad’s apartment:” these and other passages
are strong presumptions that the author had some certain building
in his eye. Curious persons, who have leisure to employ in
such researches, may possibly discover in the Italian writers the
foundation on which our author has built. If a catastrophe,
at all resembling that which he describes, is believed to have
given rise to this work, it will contribute to interest the reader,
and will make the “Castle of Otranto” a still more moving
story.