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.