From effects so exquisitely wrought as these it seems almost profane to turn to the crude attempts of such poets as “Monk” Lewis or Southey to sound the note of terror.  Yet they too, in their fashion, played a part in the “Renascence of Wonder.”  Coleridge, fascinated by the spirit of “gramarye” in Buerger’s Lenore, etherealised and refined it.  Scott and Lewis gloried in the gruesome details and spirited rhythm of the ballad, and in their supernatural poems wish to startle and terrify, not to awe, their readers.  Those who revel in phosphorescent lights and in the rattle of the skeleton are apt to o’erleap themselves; and Scott’s Glenfinlas, Lewis’s Alonzo the Brave and the Fair Imogene and Southey’s Old Woman of Berkeley fall into the category of the grotesque.  Hogg intentionally mingles the comic and the terrible in his poem, The Witch of Fife, but his prose-stories reveal his power of creating an atmosphere of diablerie, undisturbed by intrusive mockery.  In the poem Kilmeny, he handles an uncanny theme with dreamy beauty.

From the earliest times to the present day, writers of fiction have realised the force of supernatural terror.  In the Babylonica of Iamblichus, the lovers evade their pursuers by passing as spectres; the scene of the romance is laid in tombs, caverns, and robbers’ dens, a setting remarkably like that of Gothic story.  Into the English novel of the first half of the eighteenth century, however, the ghost dares not venture.  The innate desire for the marvellous was met at this period not by the novel, but by oral tradition and by such works as Galland’s translation of The Arabian Nights, the Countess D’Aulnoy’s collection of fairy tales, Perrault’s Contes de ma Mere Oie.  Chapbooks setting forth mediaeval legends of “The Wandering Jew,” the “Demon Frigate,” or “Dr. Faustus,” and interspersed with anecdotes of freaks, monsters and murderers, satisfied the craving for excitement among humbler readers.[8] Smollett, who, in his Adventures of Ferdinand, Count Fathom (1753), seems to have been experimenting with new devices for keeping alive the interest of a picaresque novel, anticipates the methods of Mrs. Radcliffe.  Although he sedulously avoids introducing the supernatural, he hovers perilously on the threshold.  The publication of The Castle of Otranto in 1764 was not so wild an adventure as Walpole would have his readers believe.  The age was ripe for the reception of the marvellous.

The supernatural had, as we have seen, begun to find its way back into poetry, in the work of Gray and Collins.  In Macpherson’s Ossian, which was received with acclamation in 1760-3, the mountains, heaths and lakes are haunted by shadowy, superstitious fears.  Dim-seen ghosts wail over the wastes.  There is abundant evidence that “authentic” stories of ghostly appearances were heard with respect.  Those who eagerly explored Walpole’s Gothic