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-writer; 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.