aloud that he uttered his dismal ejaculation:  “I wish to heaven I could get a skull and two crossbones”—­a whim that was speedily gratified.  He, too, like Lady Ratcliffe, had read Die Raeuber; and he translated Goethe’s Getz von Berlichingen.  He delighted in Lewis’s Tales of Wonder (1801) where the verse gallops through horrors so fearful that the “lights in the chamber burn blue,” and himself contributed to the collection.  He wrote “goblin dramas"[112] as terrific in intention, but not in performance, as Lewis’s Castle Spectre and Maturin’s Bertram.  His Latin call-thesis dealt with the kind of subject “Monk” Lewis or Harrison Ainsworth or Poe might have chosen—­the disposal of the dead bodies of persons legally executed.  Scott continually added to his store of quaint and grisly learning both from popular tradition and from a library of such works as Bovet’s Pandemonium, or the Devil’s Cloyster Opened, Sinclair’s Satan’s Invisible World Discovered, whence he borrowed the name of the jackanapes in Wandering Willie’s Tale, and the horse-shoe frown for the brow of the Redgauntlets, Heywood’s Hierarchy of the Blessed Angels, Joseph Taylor’s History of Apparitions, from which he quotes in Woodstock.  He was familiar with all the niceties of ghostly etiquette; he could distinguish at a glance the various ranks and orders of demons and spirits; he was versed in charms and spells; he knew exactly how a wizard ought to be dressed.  This lore not only stood him in good stead when he compiled his Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft (1830), but served to adorn his poems and novels.  There was nothing unhealthy in his attitude towards the spectral world.  At an inn he slept soundly in one bed of a double room, while a dead man occupied the other.  Twice in his life he confessed to having felt “eerie”—­once at Glamis Castle, which was said to be haunted by a Presence in a Secret Chamber, and once when he believed that he saw an apparition on his way home in the twilight; but he usually jests cheerfully when he speaks of the supernatural.  He was interested in tracing the sources of terror and in studying the mechanism of ghost stories.

The axioms which he lays down are sound and suggestive: 

“Ghosts should not appear too often or become too chatty.  The magician shall evoke no spirits, whom he is not capable of endowing with manners and language corresponding to their supernatural character.  Perhaps, to be circumstantial and abundant in minute detail and in one word ... to be somewhat prosy, is the secret mode of securing a certain necessary degree of credulity from the hearers of a ghost story...  The chord which vibrates and sounds at a touch remains in silent tension under continued pressure."[113]

Scott’s ghost story, The Tapestried Chamber, or the Lady in the Sacque[114] which he heard from Miss Anna Seward, who had an unexpected gift