s "Arcadia" as in
those of Sylvanus Cobb. Alfonso, the former lord of Otranto, had been
poisoned in Palestine by his chamberlain Ricardo, who forged a will
making himself Alfonso's heir. To make his peace with God, the usurper
founded a church and two convents in honor of St. Nicholas, who "appeared
to him in a dream and promised that Ricardo's posterity should reign in
Otranto until the rightful owner should be grown too large to inhabit the
castle." When the story opens, this prophecy is about to be fulfilled.
The tyrant Manfred, grandson of the usurper, is on the point of
celebrating the marriage of his only son, when the youth is crushed to
death by a colossal helmet that drops, from nobody knows where, into the
courtyard of the castle. Gigantic armor haunts the castle piecemeal: a
monstrous gauntlet is laid upon the banister of the great staircase; a
mailed foot appears in one apartment; a sword is brought into the
courtyard on the shoulders of a hundred men. And finally the proprietor
of these fragmentary apparitions, in "the form of Alfonso, dilated to an
immense magnitude," throws down the walls of the castle, pronounces the
words "Behold in Theodore the true heir of Alfonso," and with a clap of
thunder ascends to heaven. Theodore is, of course, the young peasant,
grandson of the crusader by a fair Sicilian secretly espoused _en route_
for the Holy Land; and he is identified by the strawberry mark of old
romance, in this instance the figure of a bloody arrow impressed upon his
shoulder. There are other supernatural portents, such as a skeleton with
a cowl and a hollow voice, a portrait which descends from its panel, and
a statue that bleeds at the nose.

The novel feature in the "Castle of Otranto" was its Gothic setting; the
"wind whistling through the battlements"; the secret trap-door, with iron
ring, by which Isabella sought to make her escape. "An awful silence
reigned throughout those subterraneous regions, except now and then some
blasts of wind that shook the doors she had passed, and which, grating on
the rusty hinges, were re-echoed through that long labyrinth of darkness.
The wind extinguished her candle, but an imperfect ray of clouded
moonshine gleamed through a cranny in the roof of the vault and fell
directly on the spring of the trap-door." But Walpole's medievalism was
very thin. He took some pains with the description of the feudal
cavalcade entering the castle gate with the great swor