Ossian and “The Castle of Otranto.”—­Two contemporary works proved a romantic influence out of all proportion to the worth of their subject matter.

Between 1760 and 1764 James Macpherson, a Highland schoolmaster, published a series of poems, which he claimed to have translated from an old manuscript, the work of Ossian, a Gaelic poet of the third century.  This so-called translation in prose may have been forged either in whole or in part; but the weirdness, strange imagery, melancholy, and “other-world talk of ghosts riding on the tempest at nightfall,” had a pronounced effect on romantic literature.

[Illustration:  HORACE WALPOLE.]

The Castle of Otranto:  A Gothic Romance (1765) by Horace Walpole (1717-1797) tells a story of a Gothic castle where mysterious labyrinths and trap doors lead to the strangest adventures.  The term “Gothic” had been contemptuously applied to whatever was medieval or out of date, whether in architecture, literature, or any form of art.  The unusual improbabilities of this Gothic romance were welcomed by readers weary of commonplace works where nothing ever happens.  The influence of The Castle of Otranto was even felt across the Atlantic, by Charles Brockden Brown (1771-1810), the early American novelist.  Some less pronounced traces of such influence are discernible also in the work of Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne.

Mrs. Anne Radcliffe (1764-1823) was a successor of Walpole in the field of Gothic romance.  Her stories, The Romance of the Forest and The Mysteries of Udolpho, have their castle and their thrilling, unnatural episodes.  Lack of portrayal of character and excess of supernatural incident were causing fiction to suffer severe deterioration.

Percy’s Reliques and Translation of Mallet’s Northern Antiquities.—­In 1765 Thomas Percy (1729-1811) published The Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, an epoch-making work in the history of the romantic movement.  The Reliques is a collection of old English ballads and songs, many of which have a romantic story to tell.  Scott drew inspiration from them, and Wordsworth acknowledged his indebtedness to their influence.  So important was this collection that it has been called “the Bible of the Romantic Reformation.”

In 1770 appeared Percy’s translation of Mallet’s Northern Antiquities.  For the first time the English world was given an easily accessible volume which disclosed the Norse mythology in all its strength and weirdness.  As classical mythology had become hackneyed, poets like Gray rejoiced that there was a new fountain to which they could turn.  Thor and his invincible hammer, the Frost Giants, Bifrost or the Rainbow Bridge, Odin, the Valkyries, Valhal, the sad story of Baldur, and the Twilight of the Gods, have appealed strongly to a race which takes pride in its own mythology, to a race which today loves to hear Wagner’s translation of these myths into the music of Die Walkuere, Siegfried, and Goetterdaemmerung.