The architecture of the castle, with its gallery, staircase and subterranean vaults, closely resembles that of Walpole’s Gothic structure.  The “enormous sabres” too are familiar to readers of The Castle of Otranto.  The gliding light, disquieting at the outset of the story but before the close familiar grown, is doomed to be the guide of many a distressed wanderer through the Gothic labyrinths of later romances.  Mrs. Barbauld chose her properties with admirable discretion, but lacked the art to use them cunningly.  A tolling bell, heard in the silence and darkness of a lonely moor, will quicken the beatings of the heart, but employed as a prompter’s signal to herald the advance of a group of black statues is only absurd.  After the grimly suggestive opening, the story gradually loses in power as it proceeds and the happy ending, which wings our thoughts back to the Sleeping Beauty of childhood, is wholly incongruous.  If the fragment had ended abruptly at the moment when the lady arises in her shroud from the coffin, Sir Bertrand would have been a more effective tale of terror.  From the historical point of view Mrs. Barbauld’s curious patchwork is full of interest.  She seems to be reaching out wistfully towards the mysterious and the unknown.  Genuinely anxious to awaken a thrill of excitement in the breast of her reader, she is hesitating and uncertain as to the best way of winning her effect.  She is but a pioneer in the art of freezing the blood and it were idle to expect that she should rush boldly into a forest of horrors.  Naturally she prefers to follow the tracks trodden by Walpole and Smollett; but with intuitive foresight she seems to have realised the limitations of Walpole’s marvellous machinery, and to have attempted to explore the regions of the fearful unknown.  Her opening scene works on that instinctive terror of the dark and the unseen, upon which Mrs. Radcliffe bases many of her most moving incidents.

Among the Poetical Sketches of Blake, written between 1768 and 1777, and published in 1783, there appears an extraordinary poem written in blank verse, but divided into quatrains, and entitled Fair Elenor.  This juvenile production seems to indicate that Blake was familiar with Walpole’s Gothic story.[32] The heroine, wandering disconsolately by night in the castle vaults—­a place of refuge first rendered fashionable by Isabella in The Castle of Otranto—­faints with horror, thinking that she beholds her husband’s ghost, but soon: 

  “Fancy returns, and now she thinks of bones
  And grinning skulls and corruptible death
  Wrapped in his shroud; and now fancies she hears
  Deep sighs and sees pale, sickly ghosts gliding.”