In looking closely at Horace Walpole's Correspondence, George E. Haggerty shows how these letters, when taken in aggregate, offer an astonishingly vivid account of the vagaries of eighteenth-century masculinity. Walpole talks about himself obsessively: his wants, his needs, his desires; hies physical and mental pain; his artistic appreciation and his critical responses. It is impossible to read these letters and not come away with a vivid impression of a complex personality from another age. Haggerty examines the ways in which Walpole presents himself as an eighteenth-century gentleman, and considers his personal relationships, his needs and aspirations, his emotionalism and his rationality - in short, his construction of himself - in order to see what it tells us about the age in general and more specifically, about masculinity in an era of social flux. This study of Walpole and his epistolary relations offers a unique window into both the history of masculinity in the eighteenth century and the codification of friendship as the preeminent value in western culture. Recent studies have tried to rewrite Walpole in a twenty-first century mold while this work looks at the writer and the ways in which he constructs himself and his relations, not in hopes of uncovering a lurid secret, but rather in pursuit of the figure that he created and that has fascinated generations of readers and writers since the eighteenth century.

"Hieroglyphic Tales" is a collection of enchanting stories written by the renowned author Horace Walpole. This book explores various cultures and eras with its six intriguing tales, including Arabian Nights, Chinese fairy tales, and Milesian tales. Each story is unique and captivating, full of imagination and fantasy. The book contains the following stories: A New Arabian Night's Entertainment - The King and his Three Daughters - The Dice-Box. A Fairy Tale - The Peach in Brandy. A Milesian Tale - Mi Li. A Chinese Fairy Tale - A True Love Story.

This informative volume provides a historical study of the library belonging to eighteenth-century man of letters Horace Walpole (1717-1797).

The tragic death of Walpole's cat and the Thomas Gray poem written in her honor: the true story of what happened, and a look at the lively social and cultural scene in the eighteenth century. This delightful compendium focuses on one of the best-loved poems in the English language, but in the process it takes the reader on an engaging romp through the literary, intellectual, and cultural world of the eighteenth century. It brings alive a host of engaging characters: Horace Walpole himself (one of the great letter writers of all time, wit, raconteur; the curmudgeonly Dr. Johnson (who nevertheless had “a very fine cat indeed”) and his sometimes recalcitrant biographer James Boswell; and a cast of “handsome cats,” including Selima and Zama. In February 1747, Selima the tabby fell into a Chinese blue and white porcelain tub in Walpole’s house in London’s Mayfair and never returned to dry land. The poem by Thomas Gray, “Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat, Drowned in a Tub of Gold-fishes,” was written as her mock epitaph. Here is the true history of the event, and a look at the sparkling social and cultural life of the period. It is beautifully illustrated with Richard Bentley’s original series of designs for the poem, William Blake’s wonderful watercolors of some fifty years later, and the unpublished color illustrations produced in the 1940s by the noted children’s book illustrator Kathleen Hale, of Orlando the Marmalade Cat fame.

A room-by-room tour of one of the wonders of the eighteenth-century architectural world