eniuses of our own and foreign countries," he
affirms, "such as Ariosto and Tasso in Italy, and Spenser and Milton in
England, were seduced by these barbarities of their forefathers; were
even charmed by the Gothic romances. Was this caprice and absurdity in
them? Or may there not be something in the Gothic Romance peculiarly
suited to the view of a genius and to the ends of poetry? And may not
the philosophic moderns have gone too far in their perpetual ridicule and
contempt of it?" After a preliminary discussion of the origin of
chivalry and knight-errantry and of the ideal knightly characteristics,
"Prowess, Generosity, Gallantry, and Religion," which he derives from the
military necessities of the feudal system, he proceeds to establish a
"remarkable correspondency between the manners of the old heroic times,
as painted by their romancer, Homer, and those which are represented to
us in the books of modern knight-errantry." He compares, _e.g._, the
Laestrygonians, Cyclopes_, _Circes, and Calypsos of Homer, with the
giants, paynims, sorceresses encountered by the champions of romance; the
Greek aoixoi with the minstrels; the Olympian games with tournaments; and
the exploits of Hercules and Theseus, in quelling dragons and other
monsters, with the similar enterprises of Lancelot and Amadis de Gaul.
The critic is daring enough to give the Gothic manners the preference
over the heroic. Homer, he says, if he could have known both, would have
chosen the former by reason of "the improved gallantry of the feudal
times, and the superior solemnity of their superstitions. The gallantry
which inspirited the feudal times was of a nature to furnish the poet
with finer scenes and subjects of description, in every view, than the
simple and uncontrolled barbarity of the Grecian. . . There was a
dignity, a magnificence, a variety in the feudal, which the other wanted."

An equal advantage, thinks Hurd, the romancers enjoyed over the pagan
poets in the point of supernatural machinery. "For the more solemn
fancies of witchcraft and incantation, the horrors of the Gothic were
above measure striking and terrible. The mummeries of the pagan priests
were childish, but the Gothic enchanters shook and alarmed all
nature. . . You would not compare the Canidia of Horace with the witches
in 'Macbeth.' And what are Virgil's myrtles, dropping blood, to Tasso's
enchanted forest?. . . The fancies of our modern bards are not only more
gal