This hybrid new romance had been stumbled upon more than a decade before Fanny Burney in her turn stumbled upon the pure novel:  and most people know in what and by whom.  To this day it is by no means easy to be certain what Horace Walpole really meant to write, or thought he was writing, in The Castle of Otranto (1764).  His own references to his own writings are too much saturated with affectation and pose to make it safe to draw any conclusions from them; there is little or no external evidence; and the book itself is rather a puzzle.  Taking the Preface to the second edition with a very large allowance of salt—­the success of the first before this preface makes double salting advisable—­and accommodating it to the actual facts, one finds it hardly necessary to go beyond the obvious and almost commonplace solution that The Castle of Otranto was simply the castle of Strawberry Hill itself with paper for lath and ink for plaster—­in other words, an effort to imitate something which the imitator more than half misunderstood.  Of mediaeval literature proper, apart from chronicles and genealogies, Walpole knew nothing:  and for its more precious features he had the dislike which sometimes accompanies ignorance.  But he undoubtedly had positive literary genius—­flawed, alloyed, incomplete, uncritical of itself, but existing:  and this genius showed itself here.  His paper-and-ink “Strawberry” is quite another guess structure from his lath-and-plaster one.  For itself in itself—­for what it is—­the present writer, though he has striven earnestly and often for the sake of the great things that it did, has never been able to get up any affection or admiration.  It is preposterous, desultory, tedious, clumsy, dull.  But it made people (we know it on such excellent authority as Gray’s) shudder:  and the shudder was exactly what they wanted—­in every sense of the verb “to want.”  Moreover, quite independently of this shudder, it pointed the way to a wide, fertile, and delightful province of historical, social, literary, and other matter which had long been neglected, and which people had been assured was not worth exploring.  Blair was just using, or about to use, “any romance of chivalry” as a hyperbolical exemplification of the contemptible in literature.  Hume had been arguing against, and Voltaire was still sneering at, all sorts of superstition and supernaturalism.  The common cant of criticism for generations had been that “sense” and “reason” were to be the only criteria.  Walpole’s egregious helmet dropped from no one knew (or knows) where on all these Philistinisms:  and squelched them.  How it did this, why it did it, and so forth, one knows not much more than one knows why and how all the things happened in the novel itself. Apres coup, the author talked about “Shakespeare” (of whom, by the way, he was anything but a fervent or thorough admirer) and the like.  Shakespeare had, as Sir Walter Raleigh has well pointed out, uncommonly little to do with it.  But Shakespeare at least supplies us with an appropriate phrase for the occasion. The Castle of Otranto “lay in” Horace’s “way, and he found it.”  And with it, though hardly in it, he found the New Romance.