A reality more horrible than her imaginings awaits her.  A bleeding head is abruptly thrust into her arms by an assassin in the employ of a villainous and anonymous “duke.”  Fair Elenor retires to her bed and gives utterance to an outburst of similes in praise of her dead lord.  Thus encouraged, the bloody head of her murdered husband describes its lurid past, and warns Elenor to beware of the duke’s dark designs.  Elenor wisely avoids the machinations of the villain, and brings an end to the poem, by breathing her last.  Blake’s story is faintly reminiscent of the popular legend of Anne Boleyn, who, with her bleeding head in her lap, is said to ride down the avenue of Blickling Park once a year in a hearse drawn by horsemen and accompanied by attendants, all headless out of respect to their mistress.

Blake’s youthful excursion into the murky gloom of Gothic vaults resulted in a poem so crude that even “Monk” Lewis, who was no connoisseur, would have declined it regretfully as a contribution to his Tales of Terror, but Fair Elenor is worthy of remembrance as an early indication of Walpole’s influence, which was to become so potent on the history of Gothic romance.

The Gothic experiments of Dr. Nathan Drake, published in his Literary Hours (1798), are extremely instructive as indicating the critical standpoint of the time.  Drake, like Mrs. Barbauld and her brother, was deeply interested in the sources of the pleasure derived from tales of terror, and wrote his Gothic stories to confirm and illustrate the theories propounded in his essays.  He discusses gravely and learnedly the kinds of fictitious horror that excite agreeable sensations, and then proceeds to arrange carefully calculated effects, designed to alarm his readers, but not to outrage their sense of decorum.  He has none of the reckless daring of “Monk” Lewis, who flung restraint to the winds and raced in mad career through an orgy of horrors.  In his enchanted castles we are disturbed by an uneasy suspicion that the inhabitants are merely allegorical characters, and that the spectre of a moral lurks in some dim recess ready to spring out upon us suddenly.  Dr. Drake’s mind was as a house divided against itself:  he was a moralist, emulating the “sage and serious Spenser” in his desire to exalt virtue and abase vice, he was a critic working out, with calm detachment, practical illustrations of the theories he had formulated, and he was a romantic enthusiast, imbued with a vague but genuine admiration for the wild superstitions of a bygone age.  His stories exhibit painful evidence of the conflict which waged between the three sides of his nature.  In the essay prefixed to Henry Fitzowen, a Gothic Tale, he distinguishes between the two species of Gothic superstition, the gloomy and the sportive, and addresses an ode to the two goddesses of Superstition—­one the offspring of Fear and Midnight, the other of Hesper and the Moon.  In his story the spectres of darkness