In Horace’s case also, as in that of Frances, though the success was even more momentous, the successors were slow and doubtful, though not quite so slow.  In some dozen years Walpole read Miss Clara Reeve’s Old English Baron (1777), and as in another celebrated case “thought it a bore.”  It is rather a bore.  It has more consecutiveness than Otranto, and escapes the absurdities of the copiously but clumsily used supernatural by administering it in a very minute dose.  But there is not a spark of genius in it, whereas that spark, though sometimes curiously wrapped up in ashes, was always present (Heaven knows where he got it!) in Sir Robert’s youngest son.  And the contagion spread.  For general and epidemic purposes it had to wait till the Germans had carried it over the North Sea and sent it back again.  For particular ones, it found a new development in one of the most remarkable of all novels, twenty years younger than Otranto, and a few years older than the new outburst of the “Gothic” supernatural in the works of Anne Radcliffe and Mat Lewis.

Vathek (1786) stands alone—­almost independent even of its sponsors—­it would be awkward to say godfathers—­Hamilton and Voltaire; apart likewise from such work as it, no doubt, in turn partly suggested to Peacock and to Disraeli.  There is, perhaps, no one towards whom it is so tempting to play the idle game of retrospective Providence as towards the describer of Batalha and Alcobaca, the creator of Nouronnihar and the Hall of Eblis.  Fonthill has had too many vicissitudes since Beckford, and Cintra is a far cry; but though his associations with Bath are later, it is still possible, in that oddly enchanted city, to get something of the mixed atmosphere—­eighteenth century, nineteenth, and of centuries older and younger than either—­which, tamisee in a mysterious fashion, surrounds this extraordinary little masterpiece.  Take Beckford’s millions away; make him coin his wits to supply the want of them; and what would have been the result?  Perhaps more Vatheks; perhaps things even better than Vathek;[14] perhaps nothing at all.  On the whole, it is always wiser not to play Providence, in fact or fancy.  All that need be said is that Anthony Hamilton and Voltaire are certainly not by themselves—­good as they are, and admirable as the first is—­enough to account for Vathek.  Romance has passed there as well as persiflage and something like coionnerie; it is Romance that has given us the baleful beauty of that Queen of Evil, Nouronnihar, and the vision of the burning hearts that make their own wandering but eternal Hell.  The tendency of the novel had been on the whole, even in its best examples, to prose in feeling as well as in form.  It was Beckford who availed himself of the poetry which is almost inseparable from Romance.  But it was Horace Walpole who had opened the door to Romance herself.