lant, but . . . more sublime, more terrible, more alarming than those
of the classic fables. In a word, you will find that the manners they
paint, and the superstitions they adopt, are the more poetical for being
Gothic."

Evidently the despised "Gothick" of Addison--as Mr. Howells puts it--was
fast becoming the admired "Gothic" of Scott. This pronunciamento of very
advanced romantic doctrine came out several years before Percy's
"Reliques" and "The Castle of Otranto." It was only a few years later
than Thomas Warton's "Observations on the Faerie Queene" and Joseph's
"Essay on Pope," but its views were much more radical. Neither of the
Wartons would have ventured to pronounce the Gothic manners superior to
the Homeric, as materials for poetry, whatever, in his secret heart, he
might have thought.[1] To Johnson such an opinion must have seemed flat
blasphemy. Hurd accounts for the contempt into which the Gothic had
fallen on the ground that the feudal ages had never had the good fortune
to possess a great poet, like Homer, capable of giving adequate artistic
expression to their life and ideals. _Carent vate sacro_. Spenser and
Tasso, he thinks, "came too late, and it was impossible for them to paint
truly and perfectly what was no longer seen or believed. . . As it is,
we may take a guess of what the subject was capable of affording to real
genius from the rude sketches we have of it in the old romancers. . .
The ablest writers of Greece ennobled the system of heroic manners, while
it was fresh and flourishing; and their works being masterpieces of
composition, so fixed the credit of it in the opinion of the world, that
no revolution of time and taste could afterward shake it. Whereas the
Gothic, having been disgraced in their infancy by bad writers, and a new
set of manners springing up before there were any better to do them
justice, they could never be brought into vogue by the attempts of later
poets." Moreover, "the Gothic manners of chivalry, as springing out of
the feudal system, were as singular as that system itself; so that when
that political constitution vanished out of Europe, the manners that
belonged to it were no longer seen or understood. There was no example
of any such manners remaining on the face of the earth. And as they
never did subsist but once, and are never likely to subsist again, people
would be led of course to think and speak of them as romantic and
unnatural."

Even so, he th