Horace Walpole Biography Quotes 22 Report mistakes

Early Life and Family
Horace Walpole (1717, 1797) was born into one of the most prominent political households in eighteenth-century England. He was the youngest son of Sir Robert Walpole, often regarded as Britain's first de facto prime minister, and Catherine Shorter. The atmosphere of his childhood was shaped by high Whig politics, diplomacy, and the arts, and he grew up amid conversations about government, culture, and taste. He retained a lifelong devotion to his father's reputation, and the Walpole name opened doors that allowed him to become both a man of letters and a collector of influence. He never married and had no children, a circumstance that left him free to devote his energies to writing, connoisseurship, and sociability.

Education and the Grand Tour
Walpole was educated at Eton College, where he formed lasting friendships with Thomas Gray, Richard West, and Thomas Ashton. From Eton he went to King's College, Cambridge. The classical training he received and the elegant standards of conversation cultivated at school helped form his voice as one of the most distinctive letter writers of the age. In 1739 he embarked on the Grand Tour with Thomas Gray, traveling in France and Italy. The two quarreled and parted for a time, a break that later healed; they eventually reconciled, and Walpole remained proud of Gray's poetry, especially the Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, which he helped shepherd to print when its circulation in manuscript risked piracy. The Tour confirmed his fascination with art and architecture and fostered connections with continental collectors and diplomats, notably Horace Mann, the British envoy at Florence, who became the chief recipient of his letters.

Parliament and Public Life
Walpole entered the House of Commons in 1741 and sat for several constituencies over the decades, aligning with the Whig interest associated with his family. Although he never sought ministerial power, he was observant and incisive about Westminster, court society, and the press. His political experience nourished his later Memoirs of the reigns of George II and George III, insider chronicles that blend anecdote with sharp commentary. Benefiting from hereditary and purchased offices secured by his father, he was financially independent enough to turn from careerism to culture. His friendships included figures across party and court lines, and he recorded their ambitions and foibles with a satirist's eye and a collector's relish for detail.

Strawberry Hill and the Gothic Revival
Walpole's fame as a tastemaker rests above all on Strawberry Hill, his villa at Twickenham, which he gradually transformed into a fanciful revival of medieval Gothic. Working with his circle, John Chute and the younger Richard Bentley, a designer and illustrator, he created what he called a little plaything house, but it became a landmark of taste. Turrets, battlements, traceried windows, and an interior decorated with heraldic motifs and painted glass gave the house the aura of a dreamlike antiquity. He catalogued its contents in A Description of the Villa of Horace Walpole at Strawberry Hill, and he opened the house to select visitors, turning private collecting into a semi-public cultural experience. The villa housed his private press, the Strawberry Hill Press, where he printed limited editions and fostered a bibliophilic ideal that blended rarity, design, and literary curiosity.

Author and Letter-Writer
Walpole's most famous literary work is The Castle of Otranto (1764), first issued anonymously as a supposed translation of an Italian manuscript and soon acknowledged as his own. Its mingling of the medieval, the uncanny, and the domestic became the template for the Gothic novel. He went on to write The Mysterious Mother (1768), a tragic drama whose themes were daring for its time. Yet his letters are his greatest monument. He wrote with wit and immediacy to Horace Mann in Florence, George Montagu, the antiquary William Cole, Lady Ossory (Anne FitzPatrick), and many others, offering a running commentary on politics, theater, scandals, architecture, and books. In a 1754 letter to Mann he coined the word serendipity, showcasing his nimble play with language. His correspondence, later edited and promoted by admirers including Mary Berry, secured his posthumous reputation as one of English literature's finest letter-writers.

Antiquarian and Historian of Art
A discerning collector, Walpole assembled portraits, prints, miniatures, curiosities, and manuscripts, and he wrote about them with a connoisseur's enthusiasm. He drew on the notebooks of the engraver and antiquary George Vertue to compile Anecdotes of Painting in England (1762, 1771), the first substantial history of English art, and he published A Catalogue of Royal and Noble Authors (1758), mapping a native literary lineage among the aristocracy. His Historic Doubts on the Life and Reign of King Richard III (1768) challenged received narratives and displayed his relish for controversy, source criticism, and the play of historical imagination. At Strawberry Hill he fostered a small academy of taste, advising friends and correspondents on architecture and ornament and helping to popularize Gothic motifs that would echo through later generations.

Circles, Friendships, and Influence
Walpole's social world was a vital part of his achievement. With John Chute and Richard Bentley he devised Strawberry Hill's aesthetic. With Thomas Gray he shared youthful travels and mature literary esteem. With Horace Mann he maintained a decades-long dialogue that tracked wars, elections, and fashions from London to Florence. He cherished his nieces and their families, notably Maria, later Duchess of Gloucester, whose prominence tied the Walpole legacy into the highest reaches of society. His enduring friendship with the sculptor Anne Seymour Damer, to whom he left Strawberry Hill for her lifetime, linked his taste to the exhibiting arts. Late in life he grew close to Mary Berry and her sister; Mary became a careful editor and advocate of his writings, helping shape the version of Walpole that posterity would know.

Later Years and Legacy
In 1791, on the death of a kinsman, Walpole succeeded as 4th Earl of Orford, moving from the Commons to the Lords but taking little part in politics. Age and gout confined him more often to his houses at Arlington Street and Berkeley Square or to the gardens of Strawberry Hill. He died in 1797, closing a life that had touched almost every facet of Georgian culture. After his death, Strawberry Hill passed according to his bequests, and the celebrated collection he had amassed was eventually dispersed in a vast nineteenth-century sale, even as the house itself endured as a touchstone of the Gothic Revival.

Walpole's varied achievements stand at a crossroads of literature, art history, and design. He helped invent a literary genre; he preserved and narrated the past of English painting; and he turned private letters into a major art form. Through the friendships he cultivated, Thomas Gray, Horace Mann, John Chute, Richard Bentley, Anne Seymour Damer, Mary Berry, and the institutions he shaped, from the Strawberry Hill Press to the very idea of Strawberry Hill as a museum-like home, he fashioned a public of taste that outlived him. His voice remains one of the keenest guides to the texture of eighteenth-century England, and his Gothic imagination has echoed through fiction and architecture ever since.

Our collection contains 22 quotes who is written by Horace, under the main topics: Witty One-Liners - Motivational - Ethics & Morality - Wisdom - Justice.

Other people realated to Horace: Laurence Sterne (Novelist), David Garrick (Actor), Elizabeth Montagu (Writer), Hannah More (Writer)