From an introduction about Horace Walpole written by Marvin Mudrick:

…in his old age he printed at Strawberry Hill six copies of his Hieroglyphic Tales; he called them "an attempt to vary the stale and beaten class of stories and novels which, though works of invention, are almost always devoid of imagination." He was nearing seventy, and still an innovator. The tales anticipate Dada, the surrealists, the absurdism of the recent French theater; their subject matter ranges through incest, cannibalism, excretion and flatulence, necrophily, blasphemy; their tone is unvaryingly cool, amused, judicious; moreover, two of them are miniature masterpieces.

"The King and His Three Daughters" concerns a king who insists on marrying off an eldest daughter who never took the trouble to be born.

''The Peach in Brandy" is an enormously complicated story about a king who abdicates in favor of his five-year-old daughter, only to have the kingdom perplexed by the subsequent birth to his wife of a stillborn son, whom some wise men regard as the rightful sovereign. The imperturbable crazy train of events culminates in the indigestion of an archbishop, who to ease his pain picks up something in the child-queen's room which "he took for a peach in brandy" and "he gulped it all down at once without saying grace, God forgive him!" The little queen thereupon cries out in consternation: "Mama, mama, the gentleman has eat my little brother!"