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Horace Walpole
Horace Walpole by Joshua Reynolds 1756 National Portrait Gallery, collection London .
Born	September 24, 1717(1717-09-24) London, England, UK
Died	March 2, 1797 (aged 79) Berkeley Square, London, England, UK
Occupation	Author, Politician
Parents	Robert Walpole and Catherine Shorter

Horace Walpole, 4th Earl of Orford (24 September 1717 – 2 March 1797), more commonly known as Horace Walpole, was a politician, writer, architectural innovator and cousin of Lord Nelson. His Letters are highly readable, and give a vivid picture of the more intellectual part of the aristocracy of his period.

Contents 1 Biography 2 Politics 3 Writings 4 Personal life 5 Formal styles from birth to death 6 Trivia 7 References 8 See also 9 External links

He was born in London, the youngest son of British Prime Minister Robert Walpole. He was educated at Eton College and King's College, Cambridge.

After university, Walpole went on the Grand Tour with the poet Thomas Gray, but they quarrelled, and Walpole returned to England in 1741 and entered Parliament. He was never politically ambitious, but remained an MP after the death of his father in 1745.

His lasting architectural creation is Strawberry Hill, the home he built in Twickenham, south-west London in which he revived the Gothic style many decades before his Victorian successors. This fanciful concoction of neo-Gothic began a new architectural trend.^[1]

Following his father's politics, he was a devotee of King George II and Queen Caroline, siding with them against their son, Frederick, Prince of Wales, about whom Walpole wrote spitefully in his memoirs.

Walpole was a frequent visitor to Boyle Farm, Thames Ditton, to meet both the Boyle-Walsinghams and Lord Hertford.

His father was created Earl of Orford in 1742. Horace's elder brother, the 2nd Earl of Orford (c.1701–1751), passed the title on to his son, the 3rd Earl of Orford (1730–1791). When the 3rd Earl died unmarried, Horace Walpole became the 4th Earl of Orford. When Horace Walpole died in 1797 the title became extinct.

Strawberry Hill had its own printing press which supported Horace Walpole's intensive literary activity.^[2]

In 1764, he published his Gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto, setting a literary trend to go with the architecture. From 1762 on, he published his Anecdotes of Painting in England, based on George Vertue's manuscript notes. His memoirs of the Georgian social and political scene, though heavily biased, are a useful primary source for historians.

In one of the numerous letters, from January 28, 1754, he coined the word serendipity which he said was derived from a "silly fairy tale" he had read, The Three Princes of Serendip. The oft-quoted epigram, "This world is a comedy to those that think, a tragedy to those that feel," is from a letter of Walpole's to Anne, Countess of Ossory, on 16 August, 1776. The original, fuller version was in what he wrote to Sir Horace Mann on 31 Dec., 1769: "I have often said, and oftener think, that this world is a comedy to those that think, a tragedy to those that feel – a solution of why Democritus laughed and Heraclitus wept."

The Orford Walpoles were not related to the popular Twentieth Century novelist, Hugh Walpole (1884–1941).

Walpole's sexual orientation has been the subject of speculation. He never married, engaging in a succession of unconsummated flirtations with unmarriageable women, and counted among his close friends a number of women such as Anne Seymour Damer and Mary Berry named by a number of sources as lesbian.^[3] Many contemporaries described him as effeminate (one political opponent called him "a hermaphrodite horse").^[4] The architectural historian Timothy Mowl, in his biography Horace Walpole: The Great Outsider offers the theory that Walpole was openly homosexual, and infers that he had an affair with Thomas Gray, dropping him during their Grand Tour in favour of Lord Lincoln (later the 2nd Duke of Newcastle-under-Lyne).^[5][6] Nevertheless, there is no explicit evidence despite Walpole's extensive correspondence, and previous biographers such as Lewis, Fothergill and Robert Wyndham Ketton-Cremer have interpreted him as asexual.^[7]

• Mr. Horace Walpole (1717-1741)
• Mr. Horace Walpole, MP (1741-1742)
• The Hon. Horace Walpole, MP (1742-1768)
• The Hon. Horace Walpole (1768-1791)
• The Rt. Hon. The Earl of Orford (1791-1797)

Trivia sections are discouraged under Wikipedia guidelines. The article could be improved by integrating relevant items and removing inappropriate ones.

When Walpole's cat Selma died, Thomas Gray wrote a poem Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat, Drowned in a Tub of Gold Fishes. Walpole lends his name to a boarding house (Also known as MNF) at his alma mater, Eton College

• Romanticism

• The Literary Encyclopedia.
• Works by Horace Walpole, 4th Earl of Orford at Project Gutenberg
  • The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1
  • The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2
  • The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 3
  • The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 4
  • Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume I
  • Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume II
  • The Castle of Otranto
• The Friends of Strawberry Hill
• The Twickenham Museum - Horace Walpole
• The Walpole Cabinet. Furniture. Victoria and Albert Museum. Retrieved on 2007-08-12.

Parliament of Great Britain
Preceded by Thomas Copleston Isaac le Heup	Member for Callington with Thomas Copleston 1741–1748, Edward Bacon 1748–1754 1741–1754	Succeeded by Sewallis Shirley John Sharpe
Preceded by The Lord Luxborough The Hon. Thomas Howard	Member for Castle Rising with The Hon. Thomas Howard 1754–1757	Succeeded by The Hon. Thomas Howard Charles Boone
Preceded by Sir John Turner, Bt Horatio Walpole	Member for Kings Lynn with Sir John Turner, Bt 1757–1768	Succeeded by Sir John Turner, Bt Thomas Walpole
Peerage of Great Britain
Preceded by George Walpole	Earl of Orford 1791–1797	Succeeded by Extinct
	Baron Walpole 1791–1797	Succeeded by Horatio Walpole