Horace Walpole's literary productions reflect an extraordinary range of talents and interests: author of the first and most influential Gothic novel in English and of the first example of Gothic drama, he was also a poet, an indefatigable letter writer, and a masterly historian of his time. Son of the great statesman and prime minister Sir Robert Walpole and for twenty-seven years a member of Parliament, he took pleasure all his life in writing. By the time of his death, he had produced a body of work that is remarkable for its extent: his posthumous works occupy five quarto volumes, his political memoirs fill nine volumes, octavo, and his famous letters number in the thousands. It is a canon that is also eccentrically diverse. For two years he busied himself transposing George Vertue's notes on art into his monumental Anecdotes of Painting in England (1762-1780), and then spent...