154 Second Romantic Period of English Literature. 



over European poetry struck Scandinavia and Germany first, tlien 

 England, then Italy and France, but each in a manner which 

 forced it to be independent of the rest." But the wind-swept 

 area included more than the field of poetry. Blowing where it 

 listed, the wind struck the field of social life, and Rousseau and 

 the French Revolution were the outcome. It struck the field of 

 History, and Professor Mallet published in 1755 an Introduction 

 to the Historv of Denmark, which with a volume oh the mythology 

 of the Ancient Scandinavians, published a year later, at once 

 exercised a potent influence on the thought of the day. This 

 book, says Professor Macneill Dixon, marks the awakening of 

 the modem historic sense, the birth of European interest in 

 ancient and medieval history. It struck the field of fiction, and 

 in 1764 Horace Walpole witlh his Castle of Otranto began the 

 " reign of terror ' ' in fiction Avhich represented the features of 

 the revival in an exaggerated and not seldom grotesque form. 

 In 1794 Mrs Radcliffe published "The Mysteries of Udolpho," 

 and in the year following Lewis published his "Monk." The 

 exaggeration and grotesqueness of form is well described by 

 Scott. Speaking of the imitators of Mrs Radcliffe and " Monk " 

 Lewis, he says : — " We strolled through a variety of castle each 

 of which was regularly called 'II Castello;' met with as many 

 Captains of Condottieri ; heard various ejaculations of Sancta 

 Maria and Diabolo— the person, I presume, not the game — read 

 by a decaying lamp and in a tapestried chamber dozens of legends 

 as stupid as the main history; examined such suites of deserted 

 apartments as might fit up a reasonable barrack; and saw as 

 many glimmering lights as would make a respectable illumina- 

 tion." Yet they had their place in the movement, these novels 

 of terror. Looking back on them, viewing them in the per- 

 spective of a hundred years we can see that with the defects of 

 the movement they had its qualities. If they did not create the 

 literary taste for a love of the storied past — and I do not think 

 they did — the number in which they left the press showed that the 

 taste had come into existence; to use a hackneyed expression, they 

 supplied a felt want, they gratified that " longing for a shudder " 

 which is present in the poetry of the earlier years of the move- 

 ment. The wind of revolt, then had passed through the dry 

 woods of poetry, and had swept before it the withered leaves of 



