Horace Walpole and George Montagu

Abstract

Virginia Woolf made it difficult for anyone coming after her to review Horace Walpole’s letters, with her essay on the impossibility of doing justice to the vast Yale edition of them, now marching improbably on towards its completion. So much work has gone into it, such mountainous collections, photostats of everything extant in Horace Walpole’s hand — when there is not the original itself in the fortunate editor’s possession — a great deal of the library at Strawberry Hill, now reposing at Farmington in parallel places according to their old shelf-marks, the books Horace printed at his press in the garden, the furniture, the portraits and pictures he had around him, the Gothick lantern that shed its dim unreligious light upon the staircase and watched the ageing Horace’s gouty steps hobbling up and down.