Horace Walpole

Walpole, Horace (English aristocrat, amateur architect, 1717-1797)

British aristocrat, author, and architectural connoisseur. He was an art historian, man of letters, antiquarian, and politician. Known for his design and construction of Strawberry Hill, his home in Twickenham, in southwest London; here he revived the Gothic style decades before the Victorians. He is also known for his Letters and his Gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto.

Biography:

Walpole, Horatio [Horace], fourth earl of Orford (1717–1797), author, politician, and patron of the arts, was born on 24 September 1717 at his father's house in Arlington Street, Piccadilly, Westminster. The father was Robert Walpole, first earl of Orford (1676–1745), already a leading whig politician and on his way to becoming Britain's longest-serving prime minister. Though not of noble lineage, the family was of long standing in Norfolk, with a squirearchical estate to match. Walpole's mother, Catherine, née Shorter (d. 1737), came of mercantile stock, and was the granddaughter of a lord mayor of London and the daughter of a dealer in the Baltic trade. The union of county and counting-house was appropriate for a whig dynasty in the making.

Early years, 1717–1739

Horace, named after his father's brother and close political associate ‘Old Horace’ [see Walpole, Horatio, first Baron Walpole of Wolterton], was the late and last child of his parents' marriage. There is a story that he was the product of a liaison between Catherine Walpole and Carr, Lord Hervey, though no contemporary evidence exists to substantiate it, let alone any suggestion that Horace himself questioned his parentage. The innuendo originated with a recollection of Lady Louisa Stuart in the 1830s, which apparently derived from her grandmother Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. Malice on either of their parts might explain it. Lady Louisa remembered Walpole as ‘my old ill-natured friend’ (J. A. Home, ed., Letters of Lady Louisa Stuart to Miss Louisa Clinton, 1901, 252).

The child was sickly and much cherished by his mother, whose domestic life was narrowed by her husband's absences with his mistress Maria Skerrett on his Norfolk estate at Houghton and in his hunting-lodge in Richmond Park. She dwelled mainly in Arlington Street, and during the summer at the family villa in Chelsea, where much of the young Horace's time was spent. Through his aunt Dorothy Walpole the family was allied to another Norfolk family, the Townshends of Rainham. Horace's early education was received among his Townshend cousins, whose tutor was Edward Weston, son of the bishop of Exeter.

In April 1727 the boy was sent to Eton College, his father's school. There the rough and tumble of a boarding-school apparently passed him by. Perhaps being the son of the prime minister protected him. In any event, his own experience contrasted with that of others at this time who recalled their schooldays at Eton as being more bruising. The mature Walpole's characteristic self-assurance was already well developed during these years, owing something, no doubt, to his insulated, cosseted upbringing under his mother's eye. He proved adept at forming protective affinities at school, mostly with boys of less favoured families. Of these the most notable was the so-called ‘quadruple alliance’, made up of Walpole, Thomas Gray, Thomas Ashton, and Richard West. Walpole's three associates were all impecunious, all had literary inclinations, and all joined in their fashionable friend's wistful musings and romantic evocations among Etonian shades and springs.

Other friends were made during these years, some of them long-lasting: Walpole's cousins Frances and Henry Seymour Conway, George Selwyn, later MP and colourful man about town, Charles Lyttelton, eventually bishop of Carlisle, the genial and indolent George Montagu, and William Cole, an enduring if unlikely friend as a tory clergyman and antiquarian.

Walpole left Eton in September 1734, and commenced at King's College, Cambridge, in March 1735, Gray and Ashton having preceded him by a few months. There he proved a poor mathematician but seems to have done better at other subjects. Among senior members of the university he met Conyers Middleton, whose heterodox writings had made him notorious even in a time and place of some theological latitude. It is often said that Walpole's lifelong religious scepticism owed something to this connection. There is no evidence that he read widely enough to ground it in his own studies.

The Cambridge years incidentally brought Walpole somewhat closer to his father. In the summer of 1736 he set foot in Sir Robert's palatial mansion recently completed at Houghton. Remarkably, this was Horace's first encounter with his Norfolk roots. In August 1737 Lady Walpole died, the severest personal loss that Horace had suffered or would ever suffer. His father displayed little emotion, and married his mistress Maria Skerrett soon after. But within a year of the first wife's death, the second died in childbirth, deeply afflicting Sir Robert and making any attention bestowed by his youngest son all the more welcome.

The young Walpole attained his majority in 1738, the year in which he finally left Cambridge, after increasingly erratic appearances there. A legal career had been talked of, but his father saved him the trouble of acquiring a profession or finding a remunerated vocation. Three sinecure revenue offices that he was granted at this time he held for life: usher of the exchequer, comptroller of the pipe, and clerk of the estreates.

For a young man of means and no duties the continental tour beckoned. Walpole invited Gray to accompany him. Despite its closeness, their friendship was ill-adapted to a travelling companionship. Gray had no resources of his own and could not but feel the inequality. Moreover, his proneness to melancholy and propensity to criticize could be hard to bear. On the other hand, Walpole's already characteristic capacity to combine personal detachment with emotional exploitation could inflict hurt. Later in life he generously recalled, ‘We had not got to Calais before Gray was dissatisfied, for I was a boy, and he, though infinitely more a man, was not enough so to make allowances’ (Walpole, Corr., 28.114).

Grand tour, 1739–1741

Walpole and Gray left Dover at Easter 1739. Two months were spent in Paris, where they learned the first lesson of all grand tourists, that it was easier to pass time with other travellers than with the natives. Gray seems to have been the more adaptable, perhaps because he was more absorbed by what he observed than preoccupied with those he expected to meet. Even so, the variety of amusements and sights in Paris was such that neither could claim to be disappointed.

On retreating to Rheims to improve their French, Walpole and Gray found a quiet provincial city with little to detain them. They moved south in September, were charmed by the superior manners of Dijon and Lyons, and exhilarated by a foray into the Alps which included a visit to the Grande Chartreuse. ‘We stayed there two hours, rode back through this charming picture, wished for a painter, wished to be poets!’ Walpole reported to West (Walpole, Corr., 13.182).

After Lyons they expected to winter in the south of France, but Walpole's father encouraged them to move on to Italy, perhaps with a view to the worsening diplomatic climate. The travellers accordingly pressed on, enduring a disagreeable crossing of the Alps, pausing briefly in Turin (where they met one of Walpole's Etonian contacts, the earl of Lincoln), and making for Florence, where they arrived shortly before Christmas 1739. As elsewhere on their journeying, Gray relished the exposure to the legacies of Rome and the Renaissance more than his companion did. Walpole threw himself into the social life of Florence.

It might not have been so if Walpole had not had an ideal master of ceremonies. The British minister to the court of Tuscany, Horace Mann, was doubtless polite to the son of the prime minister, but at the age of thirty-eight might not have expected to strike up a close friendship with his young charges. Yet the three became genuinely close friends. In due course Mann was to be prominent in that tableau vivant of personal correspondents that Walpole constructed around himself when he returned to Britain. No less significant was his meeting with John Chute, a younger son who unexpectedly succeeded to the family estate at The Vyne in Hampshire, and was in due course to bring his artistic ability and interest in classical design to his new friend's aid.

From February to July 1740 Gray and Walpole were in Rome, to observe the eternal city in the throes of a papal election. This proved less engrossing than expected, though Walpole dutifully inspected classical sites, collected medals, and observed the activities of James Stuart (the Pretender) and his court, at a time when Jacobite hopes had been raised by the gathering clouds of a great European war. After tiring of Rome (in Walpole's case if not Gray's) the travellers returned to the routine they had established in Florence. Their friendship did not survive the tour. They left Florence together but parted company at Reggio in May 1741. The precise cause is obscure. Attempts to repair the breach, aided from a distance by Mann, failed and Gray made his own way home, assisted by clandestine grants from Walpole so that the source of the funds remained unknown. By then Walpole himself had come close to death at Reggio. He went down with a severe ‘quinsy’ which would have gone uncured but for the arrival of Lincoln and his tutor Joseph Spence, and the medical intervention they arranged. Walpole accompanied Lincoln's party to Venice, and thence via Genoa, Antibes (by sea), and Paris, arriving in London on 14 September 1741.

The emotional significance of the tour in Walpole's life has been much discussed, and not only in relation to Gray. Before Italy, Walpole had expressed a passing tenderness for his cousin Anne Conway. At Florence, in tune with local manners, he became cicisbeo to the wife of the Marchese Grifoni, Elisabetta Capponi. If he ever slept with any woman, it was the Grifoni. Walpole was to have a number of close but ambiguous relationships with women. Not only did he tend to avoid genuine commitment; he left considerable pain in his wake when he retreated. This was certainly the case with the Grifoni, who wept for him long after he had pretended to spare a thought for her. Even so, their relationship must have affected his understanding of his own feelings. Visiting aristocrats were accustomed to take advantage of the sexual permissiveness of Italian society. If Walpole did not avail himself of the opportunity, he was a less than typical English tourist.

Some men had the power to hurt Walpole as women perhaps did not. Anne Conway's brother Henry Conway was one such, perhaps because he was a tangible link with his own mother (Conway's mother was her sister). Conway had been one of Walpole's circle after Eton, and was in France with him in 1740. Another young man whose Italian paths crossed Walpole's was the red-blooded young Lord Lincoln.

There is a temptation to suppose that men of more evident masculinity than Walpole figured in his sexual aspirations and perhaps activities. It has even been suggested that the whole of his purpose during his tour had been to engineer recurrent assignations with Lincoln as his lover (Mowl, chaps. 3–4). This theory requires much deception on behalf of a number of parties, not only Walpole but also Lincoln himself and his tutor Joseph Spence. It leaves unexplained why Walpole did not always linger where Lincoln was, for example in Turin in 1740. Above all it turns his sexual ambivalence, which must remain a matter for speculation, into a consummated passion for one highly heterosexual young man whose conduct did not suggest anything like a corresponding commitment. In these matters it is easy to be misled by Walpole's epistolary language, which was sometimes extravagant but not beyond the conventions of the day among the jeunesse dorée. Still less exceptional was the sexual banter common among aristocratic young men, especially those educated at public school.

Walpolian politics, 1741–1755

Walpole's return brought him close once more to his father. The two shared homes in Downing Street, Arlington Street, and the great mansion at Houghton. Horace spent three successive summers at Houghton, revelling in the grandeur that the scion of a family of squires had conjured into stone and plaster. He also tried out his analytical skills as a connoisseur on the collection of old masters that his father had assembled. In 1742 he composed a Sermon on Painting that was preached by his father's chaplain. A year later he completed his Aedes Walpolianae, a methodically constructed catalogue preceded by some extravagant and often dismissive judgements. It was later privately printed in 1747 and reissued in a revised edition in 1752.

In addition to making himself familiar with the contents of Houghton, Walpole seems to have enacted a passable imitation of a country gentleman, with expeditions to neighbouring establishments including, somewhat further afield, his uncle's home at Wolterton, and hare coursing in the country around. These last sojourns with his father brought him close to the manes Walpoliani and provided vivid memories to the end of his life. But he remained a town dweller whose rural retreats were never too far from St James's Square and carefully constructed to his own design.

In another of his father's ruling passions, politics, Horace did more than dabble. Even while making his way back to Britain in the summer of 1741 he had been elected MP for Callington in Cornwall. The seat was effectively owned by the Rolle family, into which his eldest brother had married, and though the new legislator sat for it until 1754, he never needed to pay his constituents a visit. Walpole's first session witnessed the last, tumultuous phase of his father's ministerial career, fought with characteristic tenacity against opponents who after many years of unavailing pursuit now smelled blood. Horace shared the strain of this struggle and helped provide solace when the premier retreated to Arlington Street. He also took pride in the latter's dignified retirement to the Lords, the continuing credit he enjoyed at court, and, especially after his death in 1745, a gathering public reaction in favour of a man whom his successors soon made it easy to recall with respect. These were turbulent years which witnessed growing discontent with the Hanoverian foreign policy of the new ministry, and in due course a revival of the Jacobite threat and the rising of 1745. Of all these things the son was a fascinated observer and astute narrator.

As a participant, Walpole was no more than moderately active. He appears to have spoken only once during his first two parliamentary sessions, on 23 March 1742, against a motion for a secret committee of inquiry into his father's administration. He spoke again on 18 January 1744 for government, seconding a motion on the employment of Hanoverian troops. It included a courtly Latin compliment on the valour of George II at Dettingen, and attracted ‘deserved applause from everybody’ (HoP, Commons, 1715–54, 2.511). But this was a set piece which he would have had ample time to prepare. The cut and thrust of daily debate required qualities which he did not possess. He lacked the presence, the voice, and the combative instinct that made for success in the eighteenth-century House of Commons. Its roughness, familiarity, and practical business-mindedness were all rather alien to him.

Walpole's politics were shaped by what he took to be the opinions of his father and those of his father's followers who had not been implicated in his downfall in 1742. The leader of these was Henry Fox, around whom there congregated a group of young whigs that included several on close social as well as political terms with Horace: George Selwyn, George James (‘Gilly’) Williams, Sir Charles Hanbury Williams, Richard Edgcumbe, and Richard Rigby. Between 1742 and 1746 struggles at court established Henry Pelham and his brother the duke of Newcastle in power and quelled those who had opposed the Walpole regime in the 1730s and briefly triumphed in 1742. Pelham was the obvious heir to Sir Robert Walpole, but the whigs closest to Horace showed signs of restlessness under Pelhamite rule. They believed that Newcastle had treacherously intrigued against their leader in 1742. They also found Henry Pelham's cultivation of the moderate tories objectionable. Walpole fully shared these convictions.

On his re-election to parliament in 1747 Walpole was still considered a friend of government. In reality he secretly supported the new opposition launched by Frederick, prince of Wales. He wrote a number of anonymous articles for the press. Two of these, masquerading as ‘speeches’ delivered in the Commons, arose from a political dispute in Buckinghamshire, where the Grenville family sought to disable their principal opponent in the county, Lord Chief Justice Willes, by seeking an act of parliament moving the assizes and with them much political power from Aylesbury to the Grenville stronghold at Buckingham. Walpole seems to have been moved solely by sympathy with Willes on account of the latter's long-standing friendship with Sir Robert Walpole. One unfortunate result was an unseemly altercation with his father's old friend the speaker, Arthur Onslow, for which Walpole was compelled to apologize.

A further excursion into print found Walpole attacking the Pelhams more directly, though again without revealing his identity. Delenda est Oxonia, defending Oxford against ministerial plans to remove the university's independence of the crown, was intercepted at the printer's before publication. This clandestine warfare did not prevent the author also wooing the Pelhams. On several occasions between 1751 and 1758 he sought to improve his income from the sinecure places that he and his brother enjoyed, all in vain. Throughout this period he was nominally a supporter in government. Yet his secret intrigues did not cease and included, in December 1752, an easily discredited depiction of the arrangements made for the education of the future George III as part of a plot to restore the Stuart government. In the pattern of politics that he had settled into on his father's death it is hard to see anything more than inherited prejudices and personal interest, combined with a tendency to mischievous intrigue.

Home and friends, 1745–1760

Walpole's inheritance from his father was the lease of the town house in Arlington Street, cash to the value of £5000, and revenues of approximately £1400 from the collectorship of the customs held by his brother Edward. These sums were additional to the sinecures that he held in his own right. His overall income from public sources was not less than £3000 per annum and was to increase over the years through no effort of his own. He never thought these perquisites incompatible with self-consciously high-minded whiggism, even fancied republicanism.

During the summer of 1746 Walpole found a congenial substitute for his escapes to Houghton in a small house at Windsor, close enough to the metropolis to ensure that the longueurs of rural life were never more than half a day's ride from town. In the following spring a more permanent solution was found when he bought the leasehold of a somewhat unpromising house in Twickenham with 5 acres of Thameside scenery. In due course the leasehold became freehold and the 5 acres became 14.

Strawberry Hill gave its name to a whole genre of Gothic revival that has had a variable press since Walpole's ‘committee of taste’ transformed it into a ‘little Gothic castle’ (Walpole, Corr., 20.111). The committee comprised, in addition to Walpole himself, his antiquarian friend John Chute and the dilettante Richard Bentley, son of Richard Bentley, the classical scholar and master of Trinity College, Cambridge. Bentley was valued by Walpole not only because, as he observed, ‘his drawings and architecture are admirable’, but also because he ‘to all the ornament of learning has the amiable turn of mind, disposition and wit’ (ibid., 16.25). He proved an at times irritating colleague, but his creativity was critical to the realization of Walpole's vision. Between 1750 and 1753, when Bentley withdrew to Jersey to protect himself from his creditors, the appearance of the house at Twickenham was transformed, though much of the early work was superficial rather than structural. Battlements and arched windows altered the appearance without radically affecting the overall layout. The one major exception at this stage was the newly designed staircase and hall, the latter monastically ‘decked with long saints in lean arched windows and with taper columns, which we call the Paraclete, in memory of Eloisa's cloister’ (ibid., 20.372).

Thereafter, in 1754 new rooms were added, the refectory or great parlour, and Strawberry Hill's most remarkable chamber, its library. It was begun by Bentley (who supplied Walpole with a deputy, the German painter John Henry Müntz), but completed by Walpole and Chute, and triumphantly finished with bookcases and a chimney-piece derived from medieval tombs in the original St Paul's, Westminster Abbey, and Canterbury Cathedral. Walpole's pride in his ancestry was displayed in a variety of details in the house, but nowhere so exuberantly as in the library, where the ceiling displayed the arms of the families with which he was allied.

Strawberry Hill bears no resemblance to Houghton, but it was to Horace what Houghton had been to Sir Robert, with due allowance for their respective resources. It complemented an urban lifestyle, providing an outlet for energies that could not be released in town, and above all created a satisfying picture of the way Walpole wished to be perceived by others. In their different ways both Houghton and Strawberry Hill were daring and imaginative projects, designed to leave a permanent public monument to their owners.

This is not to say that Walpole lost his attachment to Houghton. In 1751, when his brother the second earl of Orford died, he did his best to engineer a marriage between the heir, his nephew George, and an heiress acquainted with his friend Chute, Margaret Nicoll. The plan was complicated by the intervention of Walpole's uncle ‘Old Horace’, who thought the match more appropriate for one of his own sons, and wrecked altogether when George himself rebelled on account of an unfavourable report of Miss Nicoll's looks and temper. The Horaces quarrelled bitterly and irretrievably, and the third earl of Orford retreated into a life of increasing eccentricity and, eventually, evident insanity.

Walpole's personal relationships gradually settled into a pattern during the years that followed his father's death. In November 1745 a lasting reconciliation with Gray took place, for reasons which remain obscure. West had died in June 1742. With Ashton, who plainly viewed their connection as a means of personal advancement, relations grew cooler until Horace irrevocably parted company in 1750. Some of the young politicians with whom he consorted became close associates as his ‘out-of-town party’ at Twickenham in the 1750s: Selwyn, Williams, and Edgcumbe.

As for women, the Grifoni was consigned to oblivion. There were hints in some verse that Walpole wrote in 1746—‘The Beauties’—of another female attachment, Elizabeth Evelyn. It must have been at most a passing affectation of sexual ambition. Four years later she married into the Bathurst family. On the other hand, Walpole gradually acquired a reputation as a collector of ladies whose friendship nobody could mistake for sexual attraction, though with them he was prone to employ a gently ironic language of gallantry that became highly characteristic. In some cases he appreciated them as living memoirs for the historian of recent times. Lady Suffolk, at Marble Hill, had been the mistress of George II and somewhat ineffectual opponent of Sir Robert Walpole and Queen Caroline. Lady Hervey, once, as Molly Leppell, the toast of St James's and now widow of Robert Walpole's confidant Lord Hervey, was herself another repository of anecdote about an era that fascinated Walpole. Others were women of influence and wit in the high society of the day: such were Etheldreda, Lady Townshend, and Anne Pitt, sister of William Pitt the elder.

Other exhibits in Walpole's feminine gallery were less likely, among them Kitty Clive, the actress he encountered as a neighbour in Twickenham and installed in a small house near Strawberry Hill. Her infectious gaiety and direct manner made her a surprising social asset as well as an engaging neighbour. Another incongruous friend was Lady Mary Coke, relict of an unconsummated marriage, and ridiculed for her pursuit of the royal duke of York. With her Walpole adopted a flirtatious manner that made some suspect that he was smitten with her. A further female connection that was to strengthen over the years and continue until Walpole's death was Anne Liddell, successively duchess of Grafton and, after her divorce in 1769, countess of Upper Ossory. Almost all of these women not only helped people his private correspondence but themselves became correspondents of his at one time or another.

The rhythm of Walpole's life was predictable as well as agreeable: winters in town, summers for the most part at Strawberry Hill, each with its own cast of players, sometimes overlapping. By the mid-1750s the range of his activities provided him with all that suited him and made an admirable substitute for the political career to which he might once have aspired. Aside from the gout that began to afflict him in the mid-1750s there was little to disrupt his chosen mode of life. In these years at least, its centre of human interest was in Arlington Street. ‘My jaunts to town will prevent my news from being quite provincial and marvellous’, he had written to Mann during his Windsor sojourn in 1746 and the pattern was the same once he had acquired Strawberry Hill (Walpole, Corr., 19.298). Balls and masquerades, opera and theatre, Ranelagh and Vauxhall, dinners, galas and routs, weddings and funerals, all appear with a vividness that could only come from the pen of an ironic spectator who also an enthusiastic participant. Anecdotes of ‘politesse anglaise’ abound, recording ‘excellent vulgarisms’, ‘terrible disgrazie’, and a vast diversity of social contretemps, all with malice enough to lend spice to the story but without sourness or more than a trace of detached superiority.

Historian, author, and publisher, 1746–1764

Walpole saw himself as the historian of his own times, though he insisted in characteristically self-deprecating fashion that what he wrote were ‘casual memoirs’ for use by ‘my superiors the historians of Britain’ (Walpole, George II, xxxi). The letters to Mann, addressed to one who had been ‘absent long enough to read of your own country as history’ provided the obvious foundations for his work (Walpole, Corr., 21.403). Walpole later stated that he had begun his history in 1751 and certainly what is known to posterity as Memoirs of the Last Ten Years of the Reign of George II commenced in that year, but he had first asked Mann to return his letters in September 1748. Earlier still Gray was aware of a plan to compose ‘Mémoires’, assuring Walpole that ‘posterity will ever be glad to know the absurdity of their ancestors’ (ibid., 14.9, 13). A draft of this earlier attempt is extant, though unpublished.

Mann, who could be expected to take an interest in the doings of politicians but not necessarily in other matters, was not the only recipient of materials for the memoirs. George Montagu was regaled with London's social life, a role that was eventually taken over by the countess of Upper Ossory. Each was familiar with the class whose doings Walpole described but somewhat removed from immediate knowledge of them, the first because he rarely came to town, the second as a divorcee excluded from high society. Most of Walpole's major correspondents occupied a specialist niche in his personal gallery that provided a living and retrievable repository for his opinions, researches, and activities. Literary matters were discussed with Gray, and after his death, with William Mason. William Cole, whom Walpole had known at Eton, came to perform the same function for antiquarian topics. This pigeonholing of his friends and almost clinical replacing of them as they died or disappeared from his ken was essential to his personal project. As a contemporary historian, Walpole treated his own letters as his sourcebooks.

Walpole also engaged with the earlier history of his country. His grand tour did not give him a lasting interest in classical antiquity or indeed the Renaissance, notwithstanding the interest in high art that his father's collection had helped inculcate. By 1752 he could write, ‘I have done with virtu, and deal only with the Goths and Vandals’ (Walpole, Corr., 9.144). His patriotic instincts combined with the accessibility of the English past to lead him into the architectural highways and byways of medieval culture. (Its literary inheritance he was less learned in, with unfortunate results when he encountered Thomas Chatterton.) Initially, with Chute he conducted ‘Gothic pilgrimages’ that brought much information and insight. For one source he acquired a particular veneration. In Oxford he found ‘what remains of the true Gothic un-Gibbs'd’ and delighted in ‘the profusion of painted glass’ (ibid., 35.155). This is not to say that he venerated the residents. As he later told Lady Upper Ossory, his regard was for ‘the buildings, not the wretched oafs that inhabit it’ (ibid., 33.483).

Of his social connections Walpole took maximum advantage. His ‘Journals of country seats’, not published until the twentieth century, provide a meticulous record of his visits, which combined congenial company with close inspection of buildings and monuments. From not a few he came away with ornaments to decorate his own home. His spoliation of stained glass was unashamed and not excused by the fact that it took the form of authorized gifts or unauthorized sales. On the other hand he strongly opposed the destruction that occurred sometimes when ‘a spirit of restoration and decoration has taken place’, as when Wyatt's work on Salisbury Cathedral resulted in the demolition of its Beauchamp and Hungerford chapels (Walpole, Corr., 42.259).

In due course this antiquarian investment proved productive. In the meantime there were literary activities of various kinds. In 1748 some of Walpole's poems had been published in Dodsley's Collection of Poems. Two years later, having inadvertently permitted Gray's Elegy in a Country Churchyard to be pirated from a manuscript version that he had circulated among his friends, he undertook to see the authorized version through the press. He then persuaded Gray to allow publication of his remaining poems in an edition illustrated by Bentley. Managing the temperaments of author and illustrator was no small task, but in March 1753 the elegant, rococo result was Designs by Mr. R. Bentley, for Six Poems by Mr. T. Gray.

At the same time Walpole began publishing on his own account in a new essay periodical, The World, contributing a small number of well-regarded papers on diverse cultural and contemporary themes. Not the least interesting to posterity is an ironic essay on old women as satisfactory objects for love. More explicitly drawing on personal experience was his piece on the politeness of highwaymen, resulting from a brush in November 1749 with the celebrated James Maclaine