tapestry”; the remote and gloomy guest chamber, which will be assigned her, with its ponderous chest and its portrait of a knight in armor:  the secret door, with massy bars and padlocks, that she will discover behind the arras, leading to a “small vaulted room,” and eventually to a “subterraneous communication between your apartment and the chapel of St. Anthony scarcely two miles off.”  Arrived at the abbey, she is disappointed at the modern appearance of her room, but contrives to find a secret drawer in an ancient ebony cabinet, and in this a roll of yellow manuscript which, on being deciphered, proves to be a washing bill.  She is convinced, notwithstanding, that a mysterious door at the end of a certain gallery conducts to a series of isolated chambers where General Tilney, who is supposed to be a widower, is keeping his unhappy wife immured and fed on bread and water.  When she finally gains admission to this Bluebeard’s chamber and finds it nothing but a suite of modern rooms, “the visions of romance were over. . .  Charming as were all Mrs. Radcliffe’s works, and charming even as were the works of all her imitators, it was not in them, perhaps, that human nature, at least in the midland counties of England was to be looked for.”

[1] But compare the passage last quoted with the one from Warton’s essay ante, p. 219.

[2] See ante, p. 49.

[3] Spectator, No. 62.

[4] See ante, p. 211.

[5] “Works of Richard Owen Cambridge,” pp. 198-99.  Cambridge was one of the Spenserian imitators.  See ante, p. 89, note.  In Lady Luxborough’s correspondence with Shenstone there is much mention of a Mr. Miller, a neighboring proprietor, who was devoted to Gothic.  On the appearance of “The Scribleriad,” she writes (January 28, 1751), “I imagine this poem is not calculated to please Mr. Miller and the rest of the Gothic gentlemen; for this Mr. Cambridge expresses a dislike to the introducing or reviving tastes and fashions that are inferior to the modern taste of our country.”

[6] “History of the Gothic Revival,” p. 43.

[7] “Works of Horace Walpole, Earl of Orford,” in five volumes, 1798.  “A Description of Strawberry Hill,” Vol.  II. pp. 395-516.

[8] Pugin’s “True Principles of Gothic Architecture” was published in 1841.

[9] “Sketches of Eminent Statesmen and Writers,” A. Hayward (1880).  In a note to “Marmion” (1808) Scott said that the ruins of Crichton Castle, remarkable for the richness and elegance of its stone carvings, were then used as a cattle-pen and a sheep-fold.

[10] “Hours in a Library,” Second Series:  article, “Horace Walpole.”

[11] Letter to Bentley, February 23, 1755.

[12] Five hundred copies, says Walpole, were struck off December 24, 1764.

[13] “The Mysterious Mother,” begun 1766, finished 1768.

[14] “The Castle of Otranto” was dramatized by Robert Jephson, under the title “The Count of Narbonne,” put on at Covent Garden Theater in 1781, and afterward printed, with a dedication to Walpole.