haps be discovered in Petronius' _Supper
of Trimalchio_. The descent of Bram Stoker's infamous vampire
Dracula may be traced back through centuries of legend.
Hobgoblins, demons, and witches mingle grotesquely with the
throng of beautiful princesses, queens in glittering raiment,
fairies and elves. Without these ugly figures, folk-tales would
soon lose their power to charm. All tale tellers know that fear
is a potent spell. The curiosity which drove Bluebeard's wife to
explore the hidden chamber lures us on to know the worst, and as
we listen to horrid stories, we snatch a fearful joy. Human
nature desires not only to be amused and entertained, but moved
to pity and fear. All can sympathise with the youth, who could
not shudder and who would fain acquire the gift.

From English literature we gain no more than brief, tantalising
glimpses of the vast treasury of folk-tales and ballads that
existed before literature became an art and that lived on side by
side with it, vitalising and enriching it continually. Yet here
and there we catch sudden gleams like the fragment in _King
Lear_:

"Childe Roland to the dark tower came.
His word was still Fie, Foh and Fum,
I smell the blood of a British man."

or Benedick's quotation from the _Robber Bridegroom_:

"It is not so, it was not so, but, indeed, God forbid that
it should be so."

which hint at the existence of a hoard as precious and
inexhaustible as that of the Nibelungs. The chord of terror is
touched in the eerie visit of the three dead sailor sons "in
earthly flesh and blood" to the wife of Usher's well, Sweet
William's Ghost, the rescue of Tarn Lin on Halloween, when
Fairyland pays a tiend to Hell, the return of clerk Saunders to
his mistress, True Thomas's ride to Fairyland, when:

"For forty days and forty nights,
He wade through red blood to the knee,
And he saw neither sun nor moon,
But heard the roaring of the sea."

The mediaeval romances of chivalry, which embody stories handed
down by oral tradition, are set in an atmosphere of supernatural
wonder and enchantment. In Malory's _Morte d'Arthur_, Sir
Lancelot goes by night into the Chapel Perilous, wherein there is
only a dim light burning, and steals from the corpse a sword and
a piece of silk to heal the wounds of a dying knight. Sir Galahad
sees a fiend leap out of a tomb amid a cloud of smoke; Gawaine's
ghost, with those of the knights and ladies for whom he has done
battle in lif