en
anticipated in England by Walpole's "Castle of Otranto" and "Mysterious
Mother"; but this slender native stream was now quite overwhelmed in the
turbid flood of sensational matter from the Black Forest and the Rhine.
Mrs. Radcliffe herself had drunk from foreign sources. In 1794 she made
the tour of the Rhine and published a narrative of her journey in the
year following. The knightly river had not yet become hackneyed;
Brentano had not invented nor Heine sung the seductive charms of the
Luerlei; nor Byron mused upon "the castled crag of Drachenfels." The
French armies were not far off, and there were alarums and excursions all
along the border. But the fair traveler paused upon many a spot already
sacred to legend and song: the Mouse Tower and Rolandseck and the Seven
Mountains. She noted the peasants, in their picturesque costumes,
carrying baskets of soil to the steep vineyard terraces: the ruined keeps
of robber barons on the heights, and the dark sweep of the romantic
valleys, bringing in their tributary streams from north and south.

Lockhart says that Scott's translations of "Goetz" should have been
published ten years sooner to have had its full effect. For the English
public had already become sated with the melodramas and romances of
Kotzebue and the other German _Kraftmaenner_; and the clever parody of
"The Robbers," under the title of "The Rovers," which Canning and Ellis
had published in the _Anti-Jacobin_, had covered the entire species with
ridicule. The vogue of this class of fiction, the chivalry romance, the
feudal drama, the robber play and robber novel, the monkish tale and the
ghost story (_Ritterstueck, Ritteroman, Raeuberstuck, Raeuberroman,
Klostergeschichte, Gespensterlied_) both in Germany and England,
satisfied, however crudely, the longing of the time for freedom,
adventure, strong action, and emotion. As Lowell said of the
transcendental movement in New England, it was a breaking of windows to
get at the fresh air. Laughable as many of them seem today, with their
improbable plots and exaggerated characters, they met a need which had
not been met either by the rationalizing wits of the Augustan age or by
the romanticizing poets who followed them with their elegiac refinement,
and their unimpassioned strain of reflection and description. They
appeared, for the moment, to be the new avatar of the tragic muse whereof
Akenside and Collins and Warton had prophesied, the answer to their