There is nothing very startling in these conclusions.  Scholars like Percy, Tyrwhitt, and Ritson, who, as collectors and editors, rescued the fragments of ancient ministrelsy and gave the public access to concrete specimens of mediaeval poetry, performed a more useful service than mild clerical essayists, such as Beattie and Hurd, who amused their leisure with general speculations about the origin of romance and whether it came in the first instance from the troubadours or the Saracens or the Norsemen.  One more passage, however, may be transcribed from Beattie’s “Dissertation,” because it seems clearly a suggestion from “The Castle of Otranto.”  “The castles of the greater barons, reared in a rude but grand style of architecture, full of dark and winding passages, of secret apartments, of long uninhabited galleries, and of chambers supposed to be haunted with spirits, and undermined by subterraneous labyrinths as places of retreat in extreme danger; the howling of winds through the crevices of old walls and other dreary vacuities; the grating of heavy doors on rusty hinges of iron; the shrieking of bats and the screaming of owls and other creatures that resort to desolate or half-inhabited buildings; these and the like circumstances in the domestic life of the people I speak of, would multiply their superstitions and increase their credulity; and among warriors who set all danger at defiance, would encourage a passion for wild adventure and difficult enterprise.”

One of the books reviewed by Miss Reeve is worth mentioning, not for its intrinsic importance, but for its early date.  “Longsword, Earl of Salisbury, An Historical Romance,” in two volumes, and published two years before “The Castle of Otranto,” is probably the first fiction of the kind in English literature.  Its author was Thomas Leland, an Irish historian and doctor of divinity.[16] “The outlines of the following story,” begins the advertisement, “and some of the incidents and more minute circumstances, are to be found in some of the ancient English histories.”  The period of the action is the reign of Henry III.  The king is introduced in person, and when we hear him swearing “by my Halidome,” we rub our eyes and ask, “Can this be Scott?” But we are soon disabused, for the romance, in spite of the words of the advertisement, is very little historical, and the fashion of it is thinly wordy and sentimental.  The hero is the son of Henry II. and Fair Rosamond, but his speech is Grandisonian.  The adventures are of the usual kind:  the dramatis personae include gallant knights who go a-tilting with their ladies’ gloves upon their casques, usurpers, villains, pirates, a wicked monk who tries to poison the hero, an oppressed countess, a distressed damsel disguised as a page, a hermit who has a cave in a mountain side, etc.  The Gothic properties are few; though the frontispiece to the first volume represents a cowled monk raising from the ground the