[In the following excerpt from his Memoirs, Grimm expresses a favorable opinion of The Castle of Otranto.]

I alluded, on a former occasion, to a romance, in the old Gothic style, written by Mr. Horace Walpole, son to the celebrated English minister, and author of the letter from the King of Prussia to Rousseau, which was made by the latter the foundation of his quarrel with Mr. Hume. Mr. Walpole is the author of many other things besides the romance in question; his works must not be judged as those of a man of letters by profession, but as amusements of the leisure hours of a man of quality. A translation of his Gothic romance, which is entitled, The Castle of Otranto, has just been published.¹ It is a series of supernatural appearances, put together under the most interesting form imaginable. Let one be ever so much of a philosopher, that enormous helmet, that monstrous sword, the portrait which starts from its frame and walks away, the skeleton of the hermit praying in the oratory, the vaults, the subterranean passages, the moonshine,—all these things make the hair of the sage stand on end, as much as that of the child and his nurse; so much are the sources of the marvellous the same to all men. It is true that nothing very important results at last from all these wonders, but the aim of the author was to amuse, and he certainly cannot be reproached with having missed his aim.…

Notes

¹Le Château d'Otrante, tr. Marc-Antoine Eidous, 1767. In his 'Short Notes' for March 1767, Walpole calls it a 'bad translation'.…