Footnote 219:  Mrs. Radcliffe’s best work is the Mysteries of Udolpho.  This is the story of a tender heroine shut up in a gloomy castle.  Over her broods the terrible shadow of an ancestor’s crime.  There are the usual “goose-flesh” accompaniments of haunted rooms, secret doors, sliding panels, mysterious figures behind old pictures, and a subterranean passage leading to a vault, dark and creepy as a tomb.  Here the heroine finds a chest with blood-stained papers.  By the light of a flickering candle she reads, with chills and shivering, the record of long-buried crimes.  At the psychologic moment the little candle suddenly goes out.  Then out of the darkness a cold, clammy hand—­ugh!  Foolish as such stories seem to us now, they show, first, a wild reaction from the skepticism of the preceding age; and second, a development of the mediaeval romance of adventure; only the adventure is here inward rather than outward.  It faces a ghost instead of a dragon; and for this work a nun with her beads is better than a knight in armor.  So heroines abound, instead of heroes.  The age was too educated for medieval monsters and magic, but not educated enough to reject ghosts and other bogeys.

Footnote 220:  The Lyrical Ballads were better appreciated in America than in England.  The first edition was printed here in 1802.

Footnote 221:  The Prelude was not published till after Wordsworth’s death, nearly half a century later.

Footnote 222:  The Prelude, Book IV.

Footnote 223:  Dowden’s Selections from Wordsworth is the best of many such collections.  See Selections for Reading, and Bibliography, at the end of this chapter.

Footnote 224:  See “Christ’s Hospital Five and Thirty Years Ago,” in Essays of Elia.

Footnote 225:  See Scott’s criticism of his own work, in comparison with Jane Austen’s, p. 439.

Footnote 226:  Scott’s novels were not the first to have an historical basis.  For thirty years preceding the appearance of Waverley, historical romances were popular; but it was due to Scott’s genius that the historical novel became a permanent type of literature.  See Cross, The Development of the English Novel.

Footnote 227:  See Selections for Reading, and Bibliography, at the end of this chapter.

Footnote 228:  Shelley undoubtedly took his idea from a lost drama of Aeschylus, a sequel to Prometheus Bound, in which the great friend of mankind was unchained from a precipice, where he had been placed by the tyrant Zeus.

Footnote 229:  This idea is suppported by Shelley’s poem Adonais, and by Byron’s parody against the reviewers, beginning, “Who killed John Keats?  I, says the Quarterly.”

Footnote 230:  See “Christ’s Hospital Five and Thirty Years Ago,” in Essays of Elia.

Footnote 231:  See Essays of Elia, “The Superannuated Man.”