"As an adult he was pale—so many people noted this, he must have been ghostly indeed. Very pale, very thin, with a bright, bright gaze. Average height. He had an effacing, gliding kind of walk that was either affectation (early life) or gout (later life). His voice was not strong but pleasant. His friends called him ‘Horry’—they gossiped about him, envied him, loved him, needled him. “He is now as much a curiousity to all foreigners as the tombs and lions,” wrote one. He was extremely charming, confident and buoyant in manner. He had one of those temperaments that sees the sadness in comedy, and the comedy in sadness, and so at the risk of tipping too far toward sadness, tips determinedly the other way. He seems to have had little appetite for food or alcohol. He never married."
— The Gothic novel turned 250 this year! I got to write about Horace Walpole—the amazing, funny, Gothic-castle-building man who wrote the first one — for Longreads.