f Mrs.
Radcliffe. Although he sedulously avoids introducing the
supernatural, he hovers perilously on the threshold. The
publication of _The Castle of Otranto_ in 1764 was not so wild an
adventure as Walpole would have his readers believe. The age was
ripe for the reception of the marvellous.

The supernatural had, as we have seen, begun to find its way back
into poetry, in the work of Gray and Collins. In Macpherson's
_Ossian_, which was received with acclamation in 1760-3, the
mountains, heaths and lakes are haunted by shadowy, superstitious
fears. Dim-seen ghosts wail over the wastes. There is abundant
evidence that "authentic" stories of ghostly appearances were
heard with respect. Those who eagerly explored Walpole's Gothic
castle and who took pleasure in Miss Reeve's well-trained ghost,
had previously enjoyed the thrill of chimney corner legends. The
idea of the gigantic apparition was derived, no doubt, from the
old legend of the figure seen by Wallace on the field of battle.
The limbs, strewn carelessly about the staircase and the gallery
of the castle, belong to a giant, very like those who are worsted
by the heroes of popular story. Godwin, in an unusual flight of
fancy, amused himself by tracing a certain similitude between
_Caleb Williams_ and _Bluebeard_, between _Cloudesley_ and _The
Babes in the Wood_,[9] and planned a story, on the analogy of the
Sleeping Beauty, in which the hero was to have the faculty of
unexpectedly falling asleep for twenty, thirty, or a hundred
years.[10]

Mrs. Radcliffe, who, so far as we may judge, did not draw her
characters from the creatures of flesh and blood around her,
seems to have adopted some of the familiar figures of old story.
Emily's guardian, Montoni, in _The Mysteries of Udolpho_, like
the unscrupulous uncle in Godwin's _Cloudesley_, may well have
been descended from the wicked uncle of the folk tale. The cruel
stepmother is disguised as a haughty, scheming marchioness in
_The Sicilian Romance_. The ogre drops his club, assumes a veneer
of polite refinement and relies on the more gentlemanlike method
of the dagger and stiletto for gaining his ends. The banditti and
robbers who infest the countryside in Gothic fiction are time
honoured figures. Travellers in Thessaly in Apuleius' _Golden
Ass_, like the fugitives in Shelley's _Zastrozzi_ and _St.
Irvyne_, find themselves in robbers' caves. The Gothic castle,
suddenly encountered in a dark forest, is boldly trans