whom Jedediah Cleishbotham ingeniously called to his aid in writing the conclusion of Old Mortality, assured him, as the fruit of her experience in reading through the stock of three circulating libraries that, in a novel, young people may fall in love without the countenance of their parents, “because it is essential to the necessary intricacy of the story.”  But apart from his characters, who are so colourless that they hardly hold our attention, Walpole bequeathed to his successors a remarkable collection of useful “properties.”  The background of his story is a Gothic castle, singularly unenchanted it is true, but capable of being invested by Mrs. Radcliffe with mysterious grandeur.  Otranto contains underground vaults, ill-fitting doors with rusty hinges, easily extinguished lamps and a trap-door—­objects trivial and insignificant in Walpole’s hands, but fraught with terrible possibilities.  Otranto would have fulfilled admirably the requirements of Barrett’s Cherubina, who, when looking for lodgings demanded—­to the indignation of a maidservant, who came to the door—­old pictures, tapestry, a spectre and creaking hinges.  Scott, writing in 1821, remarks: 

“The apparition of the skeleton-hermit to the prince of Vicenza was long accounted a masterpiece of the horrible; but of late the valley of Jehosaphat could hardly supply the dry bones necessary for the exhibition of similar spectres.”

But Cherubina, whose palate was jaded by a surfeit of the pungent horrors of Walpole’s successors, would probably have found The Castle of Otranto an insipid romance and would have lamented that he did not make more effective use of his supernatural machinery.  His story offered hints and suggestions to those whose greater gifts turned the materials he had marshalled to better account, and he is to be honoured rather for what he instigated others to perform than for what he actually accomplished himself. The Castle of Otranto was not intended as a serious contribution to literature, but will always survive in literary history as the ancestor of a thriving race of romances.

More than ten years before the publication of The Castle of Otranto, Smollett, in his Adventures of Ferdinand, Count Fathom, had chanced upon the devices employed later in the tale of terror.  The tremors of fear to which his rascally hero is subjected lend the spice of alarm to what might have been but a monotonous record of villainy.  Smollett depicts skilfully the imaginary terrors created by darkness and solitude.  As the Count travels through the forest: 

“The darkness of the night, the silence and solitude of the place, the indistinct images of the trees that appeared on every side, stretching their extravagant arms athwart the gloom, conspired, with the dejection of spirits occasioned by his loss, to disturb his fancy and raise strange phantoms in his imagination.  Although he was not naturally superstitious, his mind began