"borrowed and again conveyed, From book to book, the shadows of a shade."
Ellen's adventures are sordid and gloomy, without a hint of the picturesque, her distresses horrible actualities, not the "air-drawn" fancies that torture the sensitive Angelinas of Gothic fiction:
"But not like them has she been laid
In ruined castle sore dismayed,
Where naughty man and ghostly sprite
Fill'd her pure mind with awe and dread,
Stalked round the room, put out the light
And shook the curtains round the bed.
No cruel uncle kept her land,
No tyrant father forced her hand;
She had no vixen virgin aunt
Without whose aid she could not eat
And yet who poisoned all her meat
With gibe and sneer and taunt."
Though Crabbe showed scant sympathy with the delicate sensibilities of girls who hung enraptured over the high-pitched heroics and miraculous escapes of Clementina and her kindred, he found pleasure in a robuster school of romance—the adventures of mighty Hickathrift, Jack the Giant-killer, and Robin Hood, as set forth and embellished in the chapbooks which cottagers treasured "on the deal shelf beside the cuckoo-clock."[110] And in his poem, Sir Eustace Grey, he presents with subtle art a mind tormented by terror.
CHAPTER VIII - SCOTT AND THE NOVEL OF TERROR.
In 1775 we find Miss Lydia Languish's maid ransacking the circulating libraries of Bath, and concealing under her cloak novels of sensibility and of fashionable scandal. Some twenty years later, in the self-same city, Catherine Morland is "lost from all worldly concerns of dressing or dinner over the pages of Udolpho," and Isabella Thorpe is collecting in her pocket-book the "horrid" titles of romances from the German. In 1814, apparently, the vogue of the sentimental, the scandalous, the mysterious, and the horrid still persisted. Scott, in the introductory chapter to Waverley, disrespectfully passes in review the modish novels, which, as it proved, were doomed to be supplanted by the series of romances he was then beginning:
"Had I announced in my frontispiece, 'Waverley, A Tale of Other Days,' must not every novel reader have anticipated a castle scarce less than that of Udolpho, of which the eastern wing has been long uninhabited, and the keys either lost or consigned to the care of some aged butler or housekeeper, whose trembling steps about the middle of the second volume were doomed to guide the hero or heroine to the ruinous precincts? Would not the owl have shrieked and the cricket cried in my very title page? and could it have been possible to me with a moderate attention to decorum to introduce any scene more lively than might be produced by the jocularity of a clownish but faithful valet or the garrulous narrative of the heroine's fille-de-chambre, when rehearsing the stories of blood and horror which she had heard in the servant's hall? Again, had my title borne 'Waverley, a Romance from the German,' what head so obtuse as not to image forth a profligate abbot, an oppressive duke, a secret and mysterious association of Rosycrucians and Illuminati, with all their properties of black cowls, caverns, daggers, electrical machines, trap-doors and dark lanterns? Or, if I had rather chosen to call my work, 'A Sentimental Tale,' would it not have been a sufficient presage of a heroine with a profusion of auburn hair, and a harp, the soft solace of her solitary hours, which she fortunately always finds means of transporting from castle to cottage, though she herself be sometimes obliged to jump out of a two-pair-of-stairs window and is more than once bewildered on her journey, alone and on foot, without any guide but a blowsy peasant girl, whose jargon she can scarcely understand? Or again, if my Waverley had been entitled 'A Tale of the Times,' wouldst thou not, gentle reader, have demanded from me a dashing sketch of the fashionable world, a few anecdotes of private scandal … a heroine from Grosvenor Square, and a hero from the Barouche Club or the Four in Hand, with a set of subordinate characters from the elegantes of Queen Anne Street, East, or the dashing heroes of the Bow Street Office?"
Yet Scott himself had once trodden in these well-worn paths of romance. In the general preface to the collected edition of 1829, wherein he seeks to "ravel out his weaved-up follies," he refers to "a tale of chivalry planned thirty years earlier in the style of The Castle of Otranto, with plenty of Border characters and supernatural incident." His outline of the plot and a fragment of the story, which was to be entitled Thomas the Rhymer, are printed as an appendix to the preface. Scott intended to base his story on an ancient legend, found in Reginald Scot's Discovery of Witchcraft, concerning the horn and sword of Thomas of Hercildoune. Cannobie Dick, a jolly horse-cowper, was led by a mysterious stranger through an opening in a hillside into a long range of stables. In every stall stood a coal-black horse, and by every horse lay a knight in coal-black armour, with a drawn sword in his hand. All were as still and silent as if hewn out of marble. At the far end of a gloomy hall, illuminated, like the halls of Eblis, only by torches, there lay, upon an ancient table, a horn and a sword. A voice bade Dick try his courage, warning him that much depended upon his first choosing either the horn or the sword. Dick, whose stout heart quailed before the supernatural terrors of the hall, attempted to blow the horn before unsheathing the sword. At the first feeble blast the warriors and their steeds started to life, the knights fiercely brandishing their weapons and clashing their armour. Dick made a fruitless attempt to snatch the sword. After a mysterious voice had pronounced his doom he was hurled out of the hall by a whirlwind of irresistible fury. He told his story to the shepherds, who found him dying on the cold hill side.
Regarding this legend as "an unhappy foundation for a prose story," Scott did not complete his fragment, which in style and treatment is not unlike the Gothic experiments of Mrs. Barbauld and Dr. Nathan Drake. Such a story as that of the magic horn and sword might have been told in the simple words that occur naturally to a shepherd, "warmed to courage over his third tumbler," like the old peasant to whom Stevenson entrusts the terrible tale of Thrawn Janet, or to Wandering Willie, who declared:
"I whiles mak a tale serve the turn among the country bodies, and I have some fearsome anes, that mak the auld carlines shake on the settle, and bits o' bairns skirl on their minnies out frae their beds."