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very serious little work may be, they hardly give it a claim to a 
place in the catalogue of light literature. 
The “Vicar of Wakefield” was not the only novel published in 
1764, and there is a strange contrast between the circumstances of 
the authors and the fates of their books. Horace Walpole, 
wealthy man of letters, son of the great Sir Robert, and heir to an 
earldom, contemptuous of Grub-street, but anxious for literary 
fame, published his “Castle of Otranto” in the same year in which 
Goldsmith paid his rent out of the 460 which Johnson brought 
him from the bookseller as the price of his work. The “Castle of 
Otranto” is almost forgotten, and indeed it has no great claim to 
live. Walpole published it first anonymously, though, as appears 
from his correspondence, he made no secret of the matter with 
his friends. In the preface he pretends it is a translation from the 
Italian : “The following work was found in the library of an ancient 
Catholic family in the North of England. It was printed at 
Naples, in black letter, in the year 1529. ‘The style is the purest 
Italian”—and so forth. It is a dull story, in which the principal 
part is played by a gigantic helmet which has a habit of crushing 
out of existence those who come between the true heir of Alfonso 
and the inheritance of the Castle of Otranto. Mr. Leslie Stephen, 
the most accomplished living critic of the literature of the 18th 
century, says of it: “Scott criticizes the ‘Castle of Otranto’ seri- 
ously, and even Macaulay speaks of it with a certain respect. 
Absurd as the burlesque seems, our ancestors found it amusing, 
and what is stranger, awe-inspiring.” From which we may gather 
that it failed to amuse or awe Mr. Stephen. I remember reading 
it as a boy for the sake of the ghost ; but I doubt if any boys read 
it now. 
There was another and much more famous ghost-story-teller, 
whose novels Horace Walpole lived to read—and possibly to envy 
their superior popularity. Mrs. Radcliffe wrote the “Romance 
of the Forest,” the ‘Mysteries of Udolpho,” and several other 
romances, between the years 1790 and 1797. ‘They abound in 
huge castles, buried in pathless forests, honeycombed with mys- 
terious passages, owned by wicked barons, peopled by unscrupulous 
