Eglinton Tournament of 1839 romanticism and praise of chivalric ideals. Walpole himself was one of the first in England to renovate his mansion into a mock-Gothic castle, Strawberry Hill (1749–1777). Medieval culture was widely admired as an antidote to the modern enlightenment and industrial age. Plays and theatrical works (such as "Ivanhoe", which in 1820 was playing in six different productions in London alone) perpetuated the romanticism of knights, castles, feasts and tournaments. Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840) of Germany painted magnificent Gothic ruins and spiritual allegories. Jane Austen (1775–1815) wrote her novel "Northanger Abbey" (written 1798, published 1817) as a satire on romantic affectation.
Northanger Abbey a portion of the novel's last sentence for the epigraph to Chapter 50 in his "Watership Down"; the reference to the General is felicitous, as the villain in "Watership Down" is also a General. The book, also, contains an early historical reference to baseball. It is found in the first chapter of the novel, describing the interest of the heroine : "...Catherine, who had by nature nothing heroic about her, should prefer cricket, baseball, riding on horseback, and running about the country...". It is not the earliest reference to the term, which is presently believed to be in a 1744