Horace Walpole

The Castle of Otranto (Unabridged)


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a Grecian story: surely the Athenians were as competent judges of Grecian manners and of the propriety of introducing them, as the parterre of Paris. On the contrary, says Voltaire (and I cannot but admire his reasoning), there were but ten thousand citizens at Athens, and Paris has near eight hundred thousand inhabitants, among whom one may reckon thirty thousand judges of dramatic works.—Indeed! but, allowing so numerous a tribunal, I believe this is the only instance in which it was ever pretended, that thirty thousand persons, living near two thousand years after the era in question, were, upon the mere face of the poll, declared better judges than the Grecians themselves of what ought to be the manners of a tragedy written on a Grecian story.

      I will not enter into a discussion of the espece de simplicité, which the parterre of Paris demands, nor of the shackles with which the thirty thousand judges have cramped their poetry, the chief merit of which, as I gather from repeated passages in The New Commentary on Corneille, consists in vaulting in spite of those fetters; a merit which, if true, would reduce poetry, from the lofty effort of imagination, to a puerile and most contemptible labour—difficiles nugæ with a witness! I cannot, however, help mentioning a couplet, which, to my English ears, always sounded as the flattest and most trifling instance of circumstantial propriety: but which Voltaire, who has dealt so severely with nine parts in ten of Corneille’s works, has singled out to defend in Racine:

      De son appartement cette porte est prochaine,

       Et cette autre conduit dans celui de la reine.

      In English:

      To Cæsar’s closet through this door you come,

       And t’other leads to the queen’s drawing-room.

      Unhappy Shakespeare! hadst thou made Rosencrantz inform his compeer, Guildenstern, of the ichnography of the palace of Copenhagen, instead of presenting us with a moral dialogue between the Prince of Denmark and the grave-digger, the illuminated pit of Paris would have been instructed a second time to adore thy talents.

      The result of all I have said is, to shelter my own daring under the canon of the brightest genius this country, at least, has produced. I might have pleaded, that having created a new species of romance, I was at liberty to lay down what rules I thought fit for the conduct of it: but I should be more proud of having imitated, however faintly, weakly, and at a distance, so masterly a pattern, than to enjoy the entire merit of invention, unless I could have marked my work with genius as well as with originality. Such as it is, the public have honoured it sufficiently, whatever rank their suffrages allot to it.

      SONNET

       TO THE RIGHT HONOURABLE

       LADY MARY COKE

      The gentle maid, whose hapless tale

       These melancholy pages speak

       Say, gracious lady, shall she fail

       To draw the tear adown thy cheek?

      No; never was thy pitying breast

       Insensible to human woes;

       Tender, though firm, it melts distrest

       For weaknesses it never knows.

      Oh! guard the marvels I relate

       Of fell ambition scourg’d by fate,

       From reason’s peevish blame.

       Blest with thy smile, my dauntless sail

       I dare expand to fancy’s gale.

       For sure thy smiles are fame.

      H. W.

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