ert Louis
Stevenson and his companions ransacked the stores of a certain
secluded stationer's shop in Edinburgh.

It was probably the success of the chapbook that encouraged the
editors of periodicals early in the nineteenth century to enliven
their pages with sensational fiction. The literary hack, who, if
he had lived a century earlier, would have been glad to turn a
Turkish tale for half-a-crown, now cheerfully furnished a
"fireside horror" for the Christmas number. In his search after
novelty he was often driven to wild and desperate expedients.
Leigh Hunt, who showed scant sympathy with Lewis's bleeding nun
and scoffed mercilessly at his "little grey men who sit munching
hearts," was bound to admit: "A man who does not contribute his
quota of grim story, now-a-days, seems hardly to be free of the
republic of letters." Accordingly, so that he too might wear a
death's head as part of his _insignia_, he included in _The
Indicator_ (1819-21) a supernatural story, entitled _A Tale for a
Chimney Corner_. Scorning to "measure talents with a leg of veal
or a German sausage," he unfortunately dismissed from his
imagination the nightmarish hordes of

"Haunting Old Women and Knocking Ghosts, and Solitary
Lean Hands, and Empusas on one leg, and Ladies growing
Longer and Longer, and Horrid Eyes meeting us through
Keyholes; and Plaintive Heads and Shrieking Statues and
Shocking Anomalies of Shape and Things, which, when
seen, drove people mad,"

and in their place he conjured up a placid, ladylike ghost from a
legend quoted in Sandys' commentary on Ovid. Leigh Hunt's story
has the air of having been written by one who cared for none of
these things; but there were others who wrote with more gusto.

Many of the tales in such collections as _The Story-Teller_
(1833) or _The Romancist and Novelist's Library_ (1839-42) show
the persistence of Gothic story. In these periodicals the grave
and the gay are intermingled, and when we are weary of dark
intrigues and impenetrable secrets we may turn to lighter
reading. Yet it is significant of the taste of our ancestors that
we cannot venture far without encountering a spectre of some
sort, or a villain with the baleful eye, disguised, it may be, as
a Spanish gipsy, a German necromancer or a Russian count. Many of
the stories are Gothic novels, reduced in size, but with room for
all the old machinery:

"A novel now is nothing more
Than an old cast