nd harvesters serve largely
as a background for the reflection of her moods instead of their own.
The spring shower, the gusts sweeping over fields of corn, the sky
saddened with the gathering storm of snow, are the very fabric of his
verse. Unlike Wordsworth, Thomson had not sufficient genius to invest
Nature with an intelligent, loving, companionable soul; but his
pictures of her were sufficiently novel and attractive to cause such a
classicist and lover of the town as Dr. Samuel Johnson to say:--

"The reader of _The Seasons_ wonders that he never saw before what
Thomson shows him, and that he never yet has felt what Thomson
impresses."

Ossian and "The Castle of Otranto."--Two contemporary works proved a
romantic influence out of all proportion to the worth of their subject
matter.

Between 1760 and 1764 James Macpherson, a Highland schoolmaster,
published a series of poems, which he claimed to have translated from
an old manuscript, the work of Ossian, a Gaelic poet of the third
century. This so-called translation in prose may have been forged
either in whole or in part; but the weirdness, strange imagery,
melancholy, and "other-world talk of ghosts riding on the tempest at
nightfall," had a pronounced effect on romantic literature.

[Illustration: HORACE WALPOLE.]

_The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Romance_ (1765) by Horace Walpole
(1717-1797) tells a story of a Gothic castle where mysterious
labyrinths and trap doors lead to the strangest adventures. The term
"Gothic" had been contemptuously applied to whatever was medieval or
out of date, whether in architecture, literature, or any form of art.
The unusual improbabilities of this Gothic romance were welcomed by
readers weary of commonplace works where nothing ever happens. The
influence of _The Castle of Otranto_ was even felt across the
Atlantic, by Charles Brockden Brown (1771-1810), the early American
novelist. Some less pronounced traces of such influence are
discernible also in the work of Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel
Hawthorne.

Mrs. Anne Radcliffe (1764-1823) was a successor of Walpole in the
field of Gothic romance. Her stories, _The Romance of the Forest_ and
_The Mysteries of Udolpho_, have their castle and their thrilling,
unnatural episodes. Lack of portrayal of character and excess of
supernatural incident were causing fiction to suffer severe
deterioration.

Percy's Reliques and Translation of Mallet's Northern
Antiquities.--In 176