mysterious figures behind old pictures, and a subterranean passage
leading to a vault, dark and creepy as a tomb. Here the heroine finds a
chest with blood-stained papers. By the light of a flickering candle she
reads, with chills and shivering, the record of long-buried crimes. At the
psychologic moment the little candle suddenly goes out. Then out of the
darkness a cold, clammy hand--ugh! Foolish as such stories seem to us now,
they show, first, a wild reaction from the skepticism of the preceding age;
and second, a development of the mediaeval romance of adventure; only the
adventure is here inward rather than outward. It faces a ghost instead of a
dragon; and for this work a nun with her beads is better than a knight in
armor. So heroines abound, instead of heroes. The age was too educated for
medieval monsters and magic, but not educated enough to reject ghosts and
other bogeys.

Footnote 220: The _Lyrical Ballads_ were better appreciated in America
than in England. The first edition was printed here in 1802.

Footnote 221: _The Prelude_ was not published till after Wordsworth's
death, nearly half a century later.

Footnote 222: _The Prelude_, Book IV.

Footnote 223: Dowden's _Selections from Wordsworth_ is the best of many
such collections. See Selections for Reading, and Bibliography, at the end
of this chapter.

Footnote 224: See "Christ's Hospital Five and Thirty Years Ago," in
_Essays of Elia_.

Footnote 225: See Scott's criticism of his own work, in comparison with
Jane Austen's, p. 439.

Footnote 226: Scott's novels were not the first to have an historical
basis. For thirty years preceding the appearance of _Waverley_, historical
romances were popular; but it was due to Scott's genius that the historical
novel became a permanent type of literature. See Cross, _The Development of
the English Novel_.

Footnote 227: See Selections for Reading, and Bibliography, at the end of
this chapter.

Footnote 228: Shelley undoubtedly took his idea from a lost drama of
Aeschylus, a sequel to _Prometheus Bound_, in which the great friend of
mankind was unchained from a precipice, where he had been placed by the
tyrant Zeus.

Footnote 229: This idea is suppported by Shelley's poem _Adonais_, and by
Byron's parody against the reviewers, beginning, "Who killed John Keats? I,
says the Quarterly."

Footnote 230: See "Christ's Hospital Five and Thirty Years Ago," in
_Essays of Elia_.

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