own of the creature earlier, it should have
appeared in _The Castle of Otranto_.[22] "I have taken to
astronomy," he declares on another occasion,

"now that the scale is enlarged enough to satisfy my
taste, who love gigantic ideas--do not be afraid; I am
not going to write a second part to _The Castle of
Otranto_, nor another account of the Patagonians who
inhabit the new Brobdingnag planet."[23]

These unstudied utterances reveal, perhaps more clearly than
Walpole's deliberate confessions about his book, the mood of
irresponsible, light-hearted gaiety in which he started on his
enterprise. If we may rely on Walpole's account of its
composition, _The Castle of Otranto_ was fashioned rapidly in a
white heat of excitement, but the creation of the story probably
cost him more effort than he would have us believe. The result,
at least, lacks spontaneity. We never feel for a moment that we
are living invisible amidst the characters, but we sit aloof like
Puck, thinking: "Lord, what fools these mortals be!" His
supernatural machinery is as undignified as the pantomime
properties of Jack the Giant-killer. The huge body scattered
piecemeal about the castle, the unwieldy sabre borne by a hundred
men, the helmet "tempestuously agitated," and even the "skeleton
in a hermit's cowl" are not only unalarming but mildly
ridiculous. Yet to the readers of his day the story was
captivating and entrancing. It satisfied a real craving for the
romantic and marvellous. The first edition of five hundred copies
was sold out in two months, and others followed rapidly. The
story was dramatised by Robert Jephson and produced at Covent
Garden Theatre under the title of _The Count of Narbonne_, with
an epilogue by Malone. It was staged again later in Dublin,
Kemble playing the title role. It was translated into French,
German and Italian. In England its success was immediate, though
several years elapsed before it was imitated. Gray, to whom the
story was first attributed, wrote of it in March, 1765: "It
engages our attention here (at Cambridge), makes some of us cry a
little, and all in general afraid to go to bed o' nights." Mason
praised it, and Walpole's letters refer repeatedly to the vogue
it enjoyed. This widespread popularity is an indication of the
eagerness with which readers of 1765 desired to escape from the
present and to revel for a time in strange, bygone centuries.
Although Walpole regarded the composit