The miseries of an existence, prolonged far beyond the allotted span, are depicted not only in stories of the elixir of life, but in the legends centring round the Wandering Jew.  Croly’s Salathiel (1829), like Eugene Sue’s lengthy romance, Le Juif Errant, won fame in its own day, but is now forgotten.  Some of Croly’s descriptions, such as that of the burning trireme, have a certain dazzling magnificence, but the colouring is often crude and startling.  The figure of the deathless Jew is apt to be lost amid the mazes of the author’s rhetoric.  The conception of a man doomed to wander eternally in expiation of a curse is in itself an arresting theme likely to attract a romantic writer, but the record of his adventures may easily become monotonous.

The “novel of terror” has found few more ardent admirers than the youthful Shelley, who saw in it a way of escape from the harsh realities and dull routine of ordinary existence.  From his childhood the world of ideas seems to have been at least as real and familiar to him as the material world.  The fabulous beings of whom he talked to his young sisters—­the Great Tortoise in Warnham Pond, the snake three hundred years old in the garden at Field Place, the grey-bearded alchemist in his garret[90]—­had probably for him as much meaning and interest as the living people around him.  Urged by a restless desire to evade the natural and encounter the supernatural, he wandered by night under the “perilous moonshine,” haunted graveyards in the hope of “high talk with the departed dead,” dabbled in chemical experiments and pored over ancient books of magic.  It was to be expected that an imagination reaching out so eagerly towards the unknown should find refuge from the uncongenial life of Sion House School in the soul-stirring region of romance.  Transported by sixpenny “blue books” and the many volumed novels in the Brentford circulating library, Shelley’s imagination fled joyously to that land of unlikelihood, where the earth yawns with bandits’ caverns inhabited by desperadoes with bloody daggers, where the air continually resounds with the shrieks and groans of melancholy spectres, and where the pale moon ever gleams on dark and dreadful deeds.  He had reached that stage of human development when fairies, elves, witches and dragons begin to lose their charm, when the gentle quiver of fear excited by an ogre, who is inevitably doomed to be slain at the last, no longer suffices.  At the approach of adolescence with its surging emotions and quickening intellectual life, there awakens a demand for more thrilling incidents, for wilder passions and more desperate crimes, and it is at this period that the “novel of terror” is likely to make its strongest appeal.  Youth, with its inexperience, is seldom tempted to bring fiction to the test of reality, or to scorn it on the ground of its improbability, and we may be sure that Shelley and his cousin, Medwin, as they hung spellbound over such treasures as The Midnight Groan,