demand for something wild and primitive, for the return into poetry of
the _Naturton_, and the long-absent power of exciting the tragic
emotions, pity and terror. This spirit infected not merely the
department of the chivalry play and the Gothic romance, but prose fiction
in general. It is responsible for morbid and fantastic creations like
Beckford's "Vathek," Godwin's "St. Leon" and "Caleb Williams," Mrs.
Shelley's "Frankenstein," Shelley's "Zastrozzi" and "St. Irvine the
Rosicrucian," and the American Charles Brockden Brown's "Ormond" and
"Wieland," forerunners of Hawthorne and Poe; tales of sleep-walkers and
ventriloquists, of persons who are in pursuit of the _elixir vitae_, or
who have committed the unpardonable sin, or who manufacture monsters in
their laboratories, or who walk about in the Halls of Eblis, carrying
their burning hearts in their hands.

Lockhart, however, denies that "Goetz von Berlichingen" had anything in
common with the absurdities which Canning made fun of in the
_Anti-Jacobin_. He says that it was a "broad, bold, free, and most
picturesque delineation of real characters, manners, and events." He
thinks that in the robber barons of the Rhine, with "their forays upon
each other's domains, the besieged castles, the plundered herds, the
captive knights, the brow-beaten bishop and the baffled liege-lord,"
Scott found a likeness to the old life of the Scotch border, with its
moss-troopers, cattle raids, and private warfare; and that, as Percy's
"Reliques" prompted the "Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border," so "Goetz"
prompted the "Lay of the Last Minstrel" and "Marmion." He quotes the
passage from "Goetz" where Selbiss is borne in, wounded, by two troopers
who ascend a watch-tower and describe to their leader the further
progress of the battle; and he asks "who does not recognize in Goethe's
drama the true original of the death scene in 'Marmion' and the storm in
'Ivanhoe'?"

A singular figure now comes upon our stage, Matthew Gregory Lewis,
commonly nicknamed "Monk" Lewis, from the title of his famous romance.
It is a part of the irony of things that so robust a muse as Walter
Scott's should have been nursed in infancy by a little creature like
Lewis. His "Monk" had been published in 1795, when the author was only
twenty. In 1798 Scott's friend William Erskine meet Lewis in London.
The latter was collecting materials for his "Tales of Wonder," and when
Erskine showed him Scott's "William a