to have been at one time rather diligently cultivated; though at present it seems to be mostly relinquished. . .  What should we think of a German critic that selected his specimens of British literature from ‘The Castle Specter,’ Mr. Lewis’ ‘Monk,’ or the ‘Mysteries of Udolpho,’ and ’Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus’?. . .  ‘Faust,’ for instance, passes with many of us for a mere tale of sorcery and art magic.  It would scarcely be more unwise to consider ‘Hamlet’ as depending for its main interest on the ghost that walks in it."[31]

Now for the works here named, as for the whole class of melodramas and melodramatic romances which swarmed in Germany during the last quarter of the century and made their way into English theaters and circulating libraries, in the shape of translations, adaptations, imitations, two plays were remotely responsible:  Goethe’s “Goetz” (1773), with its robber knights, secret tribunal, imperialist troopers, gypsies, and insurgent peasants; and Schiller’s “Die Raeuber” (1781), with its still more violent situations and more formidable dramatis personae.  True, this spawn of the Sturm- und Drangzeit, with its dealings in banditti, monks, inquisitors, confessionals, torture and poison, dungeon and rack, the haunted tower, the yelling ghost, and the solitary cell, had been anticipated in England by Walpole’s “Castle of Otranto” and “Mysterious Mother”; but this slender native stream was now quite overwhelmed in the turbid flood of sensational matter from the Black Forest and the Rhine.  Mrs. Radcliffe herself had drunk from foreign sources.  In 1794 she made the tour of the Rhine and published a narrative of her journey in the year following.  The knightly river had not yet become hackneyed; Brentano had not invented nor Heine sung the seductive charms of the Luerlei; nor Byron mused upon “the castled crag of Drachenfels.”  The French armies were not far off, and there were alarums and excursions all along the border.  But the fair traveler paused upon many a spot already sacred to legend and song:  the Mouse Tower and Rolandseck and the Seven Mountains.  She noted the peasants, in their picturesque costumes, carrying baskets of soil to the steep vineyard terraces:  the ruined keeps of robber barons on the heights, and the dark sweep of the romantic valleys, bringing in their tributary streams from north and south.

Lockhart says that Scott’s translations of “Goetz” should have been published ten years sooner to have had its full effect.  For the English public had already become sated with the melodramas and romances of Kotzebue and the other German Kraftmaenner; and the clever parody of “The Robbers,” under the title of “The Rovers,” which Canning and Ellis had published in the Anti-Jacobin, had covered the entire species with ridicule.  The vogue of this class of fiction, the chivalry romance, the feudal drama, the robber play and robber novel, the monkish tale and the ghost story (Ritterstueck,