ered his modern creed; and the mixture is not particularly edifying.
Still he undoubtedly found out that charming plaything which, in other
hands, has been elaborated and industriously constructed till it is all
but indistinguishable from the genuine article. We must hold, indeed,
that it is merely a plaything, when all has been said and done, and
maintain that when the root has once been severed, the tree can never
again be made to grow. Walpole is so far better than some of his
successors, that he did not make a religion out of these flimsy
materials. However that may be, Walpole's trifling was the first
forerunner of much that has occupied the minds of much greater artists
ever since. And thus his initiative in literature has been as fruitful
as his initiative in art. The 'Castle of Otranto' and the 'Mysterious
Mother' were the progenitors of Mrs. Radcliffe's romances, and probably
had a strong influence upon the author of 'Ivanhoe.' Frowning castles
and gloomy monasteries, knights in armour, and ladies in distress, and
monks and nuns and hermits, all the scenery and the characters that have
peopled the imagination of the romantic school, may be said to have had
their origin on the night when Walpole lay down to sleep, his head
crammed full of Wardour Street curiosities, and dreamt that he saw a
gigantic hand in armour resting on the banister of his staircase. In
three months from that time he had elaborated a story, the object of
which, as defined by himself, was to combine the charms of the old
romance and the modern novel, and which, to say the least, strikes us
now like an exaggerated caricature of the later school. Scott criticises
'The Castle of Otranto' seriously, and even Macaulay speaks of it with a
certain respect. Absurd as the burlesque seems, our ancestors found it
amusing, and, what is stranger, awe-inspiring. Excitable readers
shuddered when a helmet of more than gigantic size fell from the clouds,
in the first chapter, and crushed the young baron to atoms on the eve of
his wedding, as a trap smashes a mouse. This, however, was merely a
foretaste of a series of unprecedented phenomena. At one moment the
portrait of Manfred's grandfather, without the least premonitory
warning, utters a deep sigh, and heaves its breast, after which it
descends to the floor with a grave and melancholy air. Presently the
menials catch sight of a leg and foot in armour to match the helmet, and
apparently belonging to a ghost