grows breathless with horror and excitement.  The uncanny incident of the silver whistle that sounds from the dead man’s chamber is skilfully followed by a matter-of-fact account of Steenie’s dealings with the new laird.  The emotion culminates in the terror of the hall of ghastly revellers, whose wild shrieks “made Willie’s gudesire’s very nails grow blue and chilled the marrow in his banes.”  So lifelike is the scene, so full of colour and movement, that Steenie’s descendants might well believe that their gudesire, like Dante, had seen Hell.

The notes, introductions and appendices to Scott’s works are stored with material for novels of terror.  The notes to Marmion, for instance, contain references to a necromantic priest whose story “much resembles that of Ambrosio in the Monk,” to an “Elfin” warrior and to a chest of treasure jealously guarded for a century by the Devil in the likeness of a huntsman.  In The Lady of the Lake there is a note on the ancient legend of the Phantom Sire, in Rokeby there is an allusion to the Demon Frigate wandering under a curse from harbour to harbour.  To Scott “bogle-wark” was merely a diversion.  He did not choose to make it the mainspring either of his poems or his romances.  In The Lay of the Last Minstrel he had, indeed, intended to make the Goblin Page play a leading part, but the imp, as Scott remarked to Miss Seward, “by the natural baseness of his propensities contrived to slink downstairs into the kitchen.”  The White Lady of Avenel, who appears in The Monastery (1830)—­a boisterous creature who rides on horseback, splashes through streams and digs a grave—­was wisely withdrawn in the sequel, The Abbot.  In the Introduction Scott states: 

“The White Lady is scarcely supposed to have possessed either the power or the inclination to do more than inflict terror or create embarrassment, and is always subjected by those mortals who ... could assert superiority over her.”

The only apology Scott could offer to the critics who derided his wraith was that the readers “ought to allow for the capriccios of what is after all but a better sort of goblin.”  She was suggested by the Undine of De La Motte Fouque.  In his next novel, The Fortunes of Nigel, Scott formally renounced the mystic and the magical:  “Not a Cock Lane scratch—­not one bounce on the drum of Tedworth—­not so much as the poor tick of a solitary death-watch in the wainscot.”  But Scott cannot banish spectres so lightly from his imagination.  Apparitions—­such as the Bodach Glas who warns Fergus M’Ivor of his approaching death in Waverley, or the wraith of a Highlander in a white cockade who is seen on the battlefield in The Legend of Montrose—­had appeared in his earlier novels, and others appear again and again later.  In The Bride of Lammermoor—­the only one of Scott’s novels which might fitly be called a “tale of terror”—­the