The principal entertainment arising from the delineation of these consists in the exercise of the boisterous passions, which are provoked and kept alive, from one end of the Iliad to the other, by every imaginable scene of rage, revenge, and slaughter. In the other, together with these, the gentler and more humane affections are awakened in us by the most interesting displays of love and friendship; of love, elevated to its noblest heights; and of friendship, operating on the purest motives. The mere variety of these paintings is a relief to the reader, as well as writer. But their beauty, novelty, and pathos, give them a vast advantage, on the comparison.
So that, on the whole, though the spirit, passions, rapine, and violence, of the two sets of manners were equal, yet there was an elegance, a variety, a dignity in the feudal, which the other wanted.
As to RELIGIOUS MACHINERY, perhaps the popular system of each was equally remote from reason; yet the latter had something in it more amusing, as well as more awakening to the imagination.
The current popular tales of Elves and Fairies were even fitter to take the credulous mind, and charm it into a willing admiration of the specious miracles which wayward fancy delights in, than those of the old traditionary rabble of Pagan divinities. And then, for the more solemn fancies of witchcraft and incantation, the Gothic are above measure striking and terrible.
You will tell me, perhaps, that these fancies, as terrible as they were, are but of a piece with those of Pagan superstition; and that nothing can exceed what the classic writers have related or feigned of its magic and necromantic horrors.
To spare you the trouble of mustering up against me all that your extensive knowledge of antiquity would furnish, let me confess to you that many of the ancient poets have occasionally adorned this theme. If, among twenty others, I select only the names of Ovid, Seneca, and Lucan, it is, because these writers, by the character of their genius, were best qualified for the task, and have, besides, exerted their whole strength upon it. Lucan, especially, has drawn out all the pomp of his eloquence in celebrating those Thessalian Charms,
ficti quas nulla licentia monstri
Transierat, quarum, quicquid non creditur, ars est.
Yet STILL I pretend to shew you that all his prodigies, fall short of the Gothic: and you will come the less reluctantly into my sentiments, if you reflect, “That the thick and troubled stream of superstition, which flowed so plentifully in the classic ages, has been constantly deepening and darkening by the confluence of those supplies, which ignorance and corrupted religion have poured in upon it.”
First, you will call to mind that all the gloomy visions of dæmons and spirits, which sprung out of the Alexandrian or Platonic philosophy, were in the later ages of Paganism engrafted on the old stock of classic superstition. These portentous dreams, new hatched to the woful time, as Shakespear speaks, enabled Apuleius to outdo Lucan himself, in some of his magic scenes and exhibitions.
Next, you will observe that a fresh and exhaustless swarm of the direst superstitions took their birth in the frozen regions of the North, and were naturally enough conceived in the imaginations of a people involved in tenfold darkness; I mean, in the thickest shades of ignorance, as well as in the gloom of their comfortless woods and forests. I call these the direst superstitions; for though the South and East may have produced some that shew more wild and fantastic, yet those of the North have ever been of a more sombrous and horrid aspect, agreeably to the singular circumstances and situation of that savage and benighted people.