"A novel now is nothing more Than an old castle and a creaking door, A distant hovel, Clanking of chains, a gallery, a light, Old armor and a phantom all in white, And there's a novel." --_George Colman, "The Will."_ [23] Several of her romances were dramatized and translated into French. It is curious, by the way, to find that Goethe was not unaware of Walpole's story. See his quatrain "Die Burg von Otranto," first printed in 1837. "Sind die Zimmer saemmtlich besetzt der Burg von Otranto: Kommt, voll innigen Grimmes, der erste Riesenbesitzer Stuckweis an, and verdraengt die neuen falschen Bewohner. Wehe! den Fliehenden, weh! den Bleibenden also geschiet es." [24] Ossian. [25] See her "Journey through Holland," etc. (1795) [26] _cf._ Keats, "The Eve of Saint Agnes": "The arras rich with hunt and horse and hound Flattered in the besieging wind's uproar, And the long carpets rose along the gusty floor." [27] "Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne." [28] See Julia Kavanagh's "English Women of Letters." CHAPTER VIII. Percy and the Ballads. The regeneration of English poetic style at the close of the last century came from an unexpected quarter. What scholars and professional men of letters had sought to do by their imitations of Spenser and Milton, and their domestication of the Gothic and the Celtic muse, was much more effectually done by Percy and the ballad collectors. What they had sought to do was to recall British poetry to the walks of imagination and to older and better models than Dryden and Pope. But they could not jump off their own shadows: the eighteenth century was too much for them. While they anxiously cultivated wildness and simplicity, their diction remained polished, literary, academic to a degree. It is not, indeed, until we reach the boundaries of a new century that we encounter a Gulf Stream of emotional, creative impulse strong enough and hot enough to thaw the classical icebergs till not a floating spiculum of them is left.