old pictures, tapestry, a spectre and creaking
hinges. Scott, writing in 1821, remarks:

"The apparition of the skeleton-hermit to the prince of
Vicenza was long accounted a masterpiece of the
horrible; but of late the valley of Jehosaphat could
hardly supply the dry bones necessary for the
exhibition of similar spectres."

But Cherubina, whose palate was jaded by a surfeit of the pungent
horrors of Walpole's successors, would probably have found _The
Castle of Otranto_ an insipid romance and would have lamented
that he did not make more effective use of his supernatural
machinery. His story offered hints and suggestions to those whose
greater gifts turned the materials he had marshalled to better
account, and he is to be honoured rather for what he instigated
others to perform than for what he actually accomplished himself.
_The Castle of Otranto_ was not intended as a serious
contribution to literature, but will always survive in literary
history as the ancestor of a thriving race of romances.

More than ten years before the publication of _The Castle of
Otranto_, Smollett, in his _Adventures of Ferdinand, Count
Fathom_, had chanced upon the devices employed later in the tale
of terror. The tremors of fear to which his rascally hero is
subjected lend the spice of alarm to what might have been but a
monotonous record of villainy. Smollett depicts skilfully the
imaginary terrors created by darkness and solitude. As the Count
travels through the forest:

"The darkness of the night, the silence and solitude of
the place, the indistinct images of the trees that
appeared on every side, stretching their extravagant
arms athwart the gloom, conspired, with the dejection
of spirits occasioned by his loss, to disturb his fancy
and raise strange phantoms in his imagination. Although
he was not naturally superstitious, his mind began to
be invaded with an awful horror that gradually
prevailed over all the consolations of reason and
philosophy; nor was his heart free from the terrors of
assassination. In order to dissipate these agreeable
reveries, he had recourse to the conversation of his
guide, by whom he was entertained with the history of
divers travellers who had been robbed and murdered by
ruffians, whose retreat was in the recesses of that
very wood."[27]

The sighing of the trees, thunder and sudden flashes of