Horace Walpole

It was sug­ges­ted by a dream from which he said he waked one morn­ing, and of which “all I could re­cover was, that I had thought my­self in an an­cient castle (a very nat­ural dream for a head like mine, filled with Gothic story), and that on the up­per­most ban­is­ter of a great stair­case I saw a gi­gantic hand in ar­mour. In the even­ing I sat down and began to write, without know­ing in the least what I in­ten­ded to say or re­late.”

ser­vant, who had not stayed long enough to have crossed the court to Con­rad’s apart­ment, came run­ning back breath­less, in a frantic man­ner, his eyes star­ing, and foam­ing at the mouth.

He was born in 1717,

Hor­ace Wal­pole’s father died in 1745