“now that the scale is enlarged enough to satisfy my taste, who love gigantic ideas—­do not be afraid; I am not going to write a second part to The Castle of Otranto, nor another account of the Patagonians who inhabit the new Brobdingnag planet."[23]

These unstudied utterances reveal, perhaps more clearly than Walpole’s deliberate confessions about his book, the mood of irresponsible, light-hearted gaiety in which he started on his enterprise.  If we may rely on Walpole’s account of its composition, The Castle of Otranto was fashioned rapidly in a white heat of excitement, but the creation of the story probably cost him more effort than he would have us believe.  The result, at least, lacks spontaneity.  We never feel for a moment that we are living invisible amidst the characters, but we sit aloof like Puck, thinking:  “Lord, what fools these mortals be!” His supernatural machinery is as undignified as the pantomime properties of Jack the Giant-killer.  The huge body scattered piecemeal about the castle, the unwieldy sabre borne by a hundred men, the helmet “tempestuously agitated,” and even the “skeleton in a hermit’s cowl” are not only unalarming but mildly ridiculous.  Yet to the readers of his day the story was captivating and entrancing.  It satisfied a real craving for the romantic and marvellous.  The first edition of five hundred copies was sold out in two months, and others followed rapidly.  The story was dramatised by Robert Jephson and produced at Covent Garden Theatre under the title of The Count of Narbonne, with an epilogue by Malone.  It was staged again later in Dublin, Kemble playing the title role.  It was translated into French, German and Italian.  In England its success was immediate, though several years elapsed before it was imitated.  Gray, to whom the story was first attributed, wrote of it in March, 1765:  “It engages our attention here (at Cambridge), makes some of us cry a little, and all in general afraid to go to bed o’ nights.”  Mason praised it, and Walpole’s letters refer repeatedly to the vogue it enjoyed.  This widespread popularity is an indication of the eagerness with which readers of 1765 desired to escape from the present and to revel for a time in strange, bygone centuries.  Although Walpole regarded the composition of his Gothic story as a whim, his love of the past was shared by others of his generation.  Of this Macpherson’s Ossian (1760-3), Kurd’s Letters on Chivalry and Romance (1762), and Percy’s Reliques (1765), are, each in its fashion, a sufficient proof.  The half-century from 1760 to 1810 showed remarkably definite signs of a renewed interest in things written between 1100 and 1650, which had been neglected for a century or more. The Castle of Otranto, which was “an attempt to blend the marvellous of old story with the natural of modern novels” is an early symptom of this revulsion to the past; and it exercised a charm on Scott as well as on Mrs. Radcliffe and her school. The Castle of Otranto is significant, not because of its intrinsic merit, but because of its power in shaping the destiny of the novel.