ported from
fairyland and set down in Italy, Sicily or Spain. The chamber of
horrors, with its alarming array of scalps or skeletons, is
civilised beyond recognition and becomes the deserted wing of an
abbey, concealing nothing worse than one discarded wife,
emaciated and dispirited, but still alive. The ghost-story, which
Ludovico reads in the haunted chamber of Udolpho, is described by
Mrs. Radcliffe as a Provencal tale, but is in reality common to
the folklore of all countries. The restless ghost, who yearns for
the burial of his corpse, is as ubiquitous as the Wandering Jew.
In the _Iliad_ he appears as the shade of Patroclus, pleading
with Achilles for his funeral rites. According to a letter of the
younger Pliny,[11] he haunts a house in Athens, clanking his
chains. He is found in every land, in every age. His feminine
counterpart presented herself to Dickens' nurse requiring her
bones, which were under a glass-case, to be "interred with every
undertaking solemnity up to twenty-four pound ten, in another
particular place."[12] Melmoth the Wanderer, when he becomes the
wooer of Immalee, seems almost like a reincarnation of the Demon
Lover. The wandering ball of fire that illuminates the dusky
recesses of so many Gothic abbeys is but another manifestation of
the Fate-Moon, which shines, foreboding death, after Thorgunna's
funeral, in the Icelandic saga. The witchcraft and demonology
that attracted Scott and "Monk" Lewis, may be traced far beyond
Sinclair's _Satan's Invisible World Discovered_ (1685), Bovet's
_Pandemonium or the Devil's Cloyster Opened_ (1683), or Reginald
Scot's _Discovery of Witchcraft_ (1584) to Ulysses' invocation of
the spirits of the dead,[13] to the idylls of Theocritus and to
the Hebrew narrative of Saul's visit to the Cave of Endor. There
are incidents in _The Golden Ass_ as "horrid" as any of those
devised by the writers of Gothic romance. It would, indeed, be no
easy task to fashion scenes more terrifying than the mutilation
of Socrates in _The Golden Ass_, by the witch, who tears out his
heart and stops the wound with a sponge which falls out when he
stoops to drink at a river, or than the strange apparition of a
ragged, old woman who vanishes after leading the way to the room,
where the baker's corpse hangs behind the door. Though the title
assumes a special literary significance at the close of the
eighteenth century, the tale of terror appeals to deeply rooted
instincts, and belongs,