menced one founded on the
experiences of his early life. Poor Polidori had some terrible idea
about a skull-headed lady, who was so punished for peeping through a
key-hole--what to see I forget--something very shocking and wrong of
course; but when she was reduced to a worse condition than the renowned
Tom of Coventry, he did not know what to do with her, and was obliged to
dispatch her to the tomb of the Capulets, the only place for which she
was fitted. The illustrious poets also, annoyed by the platitude of
prose, speedily relinquished their uncongenial task.

"I busied myself _to think of a story_,--a story to rival those which
had excited us to this task. One which would speak to the mysterious
fears of our nature, and awaken thrilling horror--one to make the reader
dread to look around, to curdle the blood, and quicken the beatings of
the heart. If I did not accomplish these things, my ghost story would be
unworthy of its name. I thought and pondered--vainly. I felt that blank
incapability of invention which is the greatest misery of authorship,
when dull Nothing replies to our anxious invocations. _Have you thought
of a story?_ I was asked each morning, and each morning I was forced to
reply with a mortifying negative. Every thing must have a beginning, to
speak in Sanchean phrase; and that beginning must be linked to something
that went before. The Hindoos give the world an elephant to support it,
but they make the elephant stand upon a tortoise. Invention, it must be
humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void, but out of
chaos; the materials must, in the first place, be afforded: it can give
form to dark, shapeless substances, but cannot bring into being the
substance itself. In all matters of discovery and invention, even of
those that appertain to the imagination, we are continually reminded of
the story of Columbus and his egg. Invention consists in the capacity of
seizing on the capabilities of a subject, and in the power of moulding
and fashioning ideas suggested to it. Many and long were the
conversations between Lord Byron and Shelley, to which I was a devout
but nearly silent listener. During one of these, various philosophical
doctrines were discussed, and among others the nature of the principle
of life, and whether there was any probability of its ever being
discovered and communicated. They talked of the experiments of Dr.
Darwin (I speak not of what the Doctor really did, or said that