The outline of the plot is worth recording for the sake of tracing ancestral likenesses when we reach the later romances.  The only son of Manfred—­the villain of the piece—­is discovered on his wedding morning dashed to pieces beneath an enormous helmet.  Determined that his line shall not become extinct, Manfred decides to divorce Hippolyta and marry Isabella, his son’s bride.  To escape from her pursuer, Isabella takes flight down a “subterraneous passage,” where she is succoured by a “peasant” Theodore, who bears a curious resemblance to a portrait of the “good Alfonso” in the gallery of the castle.  The servants of the castle are alarmed at intervals by the sudden appearance of massive pieces of armour in different parts of the building.  A clap of thunder, which shakes the castle to its foundations, heralds the culmination of the story.  A hundred men bear in a huge sabre; and an apparition of the illustrious Alfonso—­whose portrait in the gallery once walks straight out of its frame[24]—­appears, “dilated to an immense magnitude,"[25] and demands that Manfred shall surrender Otranto to the rightful heir, Theodore, who has been duly identified by the mark of a “bloody arrow.”  Alfonso, thus pacified, ascends into heaven, where he is received into glory by St. Nicholas.  As Matilda, who was beloved of Theodore, has incidentally been slain by her father, Theodore consoles himself with Isabella.  Manfred and his wife meekly retire to neighbouring convents.  With this anti-climax the story closes.  To present the “dry bones” of a romantic story is often misleading, but the method is perhaps justifiable in the case of The Castle of Otranto, because Walpole himself scorned embellishments and declared in his grandiloquent fashion: 

“If this air of the miraculous is excused, the reader will find nothing else unworthy of his perusal.  There is no bombast, no similes, flowers, digressions or unnecessary descriptions.  Everything tends directly to the catastrophe."[26]

But with all its faults The Castle of Otranto did not fall fruitless on the earth.  The characters are mere puppets, yet we meet the same types again and again in later Gothic romances.  Though Clara Reeve renounced such “obvious improbabilities” as a ghost in a hermit’s cowl and a walking picture, she was an acknowledged disciple of Walpole, and, like him, made an “interesting peasant” the hero of her story, The Old English Baron.  Jerome is the prototype of many a count disguised as father confessor, Bianca the pattern of many a chattering servant.  The imprisoned wife reappears in countless romances, including Mrs. Radcliffe’s Sicilian Romance (1790), and Mrs. Roche’s Children of the Abbey (1798).  The tyrannical father—­no new creation, however—­became so inevitable a figure in fiction that Jane Austen had to assure her readers that Mr. Morland “was not in the least addicted to locking up his daughters,” and Miss Martha Buskbody, the mantua-maker of Gandercleugh,