this caprice and absurdity in them?  Or may there not be something in the Gothic Romance peculiarly suited to the view of a genius and to the ends of poetry?  And may not the philosophic moderns have gone too far in their perpetual ridicule and contempt of it?” After a preliminary discussion of the origin of chivalry and knight-errantry and of the ideal knightly characteristics, “Prowess, Generosity, Gallantry, and Religion,” which he derives from the military necessities of the feudal system, he proceeds to establish a “remarkable correspondency between the manners of the old heroic times, as painted by their romancer, Homer, and those which are represented to us in the books of modern knight-errantry.”  He compares, e.g., the Laestrygonians, Cyclopes_, Circes, and Calypsos of Homer, with the giants, paynims, sorceresses encountered by the champions of romance; the Greek aoixoi with the minstrels; the Olympian games with tournaments; and the exploits of Hercules and Theseus, in quelling dragons and other monsters, with the similar enterprises of Lancelot and Amadis de Gaul.  The critic is daring enough to give the Gothic manners the preference over the heroic.  Homer, he says, if he could have known both, would have chosen the former by reason of “the improved gallantry of the feudal times, and the superior solemnity of their superstitions.  The gallantry which inspirited the feudal times was of a nature to furnish the poet with finer scenes and subjects of description, in every view, than the simple and uncontrolled barbarity of the Grecian. . .  There was a dignity, a magnificence, a variety in the feudal, which the other wanted.”

An equal advantage, thinks Hurd, the romancers enjoyed over the pagan poets in the point of supernatural machinery.  “For the more solemn fancies of witchcraft and incantation, the horrors of the Gothic were above measure striking and terrible.  The mummeries of the pagan priests were childish, but the Gothic enchanters shook and alarmed all nature. . .  You would not compare the Canidia of Horace with the witches in ‘Macbeth.’  And what are Virgil’s myrtles, dropping blood, to Tasso’s enchanted forest?. . .  The fancies of our modern bards are not only more gallant, but . . . more sublime, more terrible, more alarming than those of the classic fables.  In a word, you will find that the manners they paint, and the superstitions they adopt, are the more poetical for being Gothic.”

Evidently the despised “Gothick” of Addison—­as Mr. Howells puts it—­was fast becoming the admired “Gothic” of Scott.  This pronunciamento of very advanced romantic doctrine came out several years before Percy’s “Reliques” and “The Castle of Otranto.”  It was only a few years later than Thomas Warton’s “Observations on the Faerie Queene” and Joseph’s “Essay on Pope,” but its views were much more radical.  Neither of the Wartons would have ventured to pronounce the Gothic manners superior to the Homeric, as materials for