Horace Walpole, protesting, I suppose, against Fielding and Smollett, had said that the 'great resources of fancy had been dammed up by a strict adherence to common life,' while the older romances were 'all imagination and improbability.' He had tried to combine the two in _The Castle of Otranto_, a book in which portraits sigh and step down from their canvases, dead hermits reappear as skeletons in sackcloth, and gigantic ghosts in armour rise to heaven in a clap of thunder. These eccentricities were efforts after the strangeness of all true romance, and their instant popularity showed how ready people were for mystery and ancient tale. Before Scott succeeded in doing what Walpole had attempted, in writing a tale that should be strange but sane, ancient but real, a crowd of novels, whose most attractive quality was their 'horridness,' had turned the heads of the young women who read them. Miss Thorpe, in _Northanger Abbey_, says: 'My dearest Catherine, what have you been doing with yourself all this morning? Have you gone on with _Udolpho_?' 'Yes, I have been reading it ever since I woke; and I am got to the black veil.' 'Are you indeed? How delightful! Oh! I would not tell you what is behind the black veil for the world! Are not you wild to know?' 'Oh! yes, quite; what can it be? But do not tell me: I would not be told upon any account. I know it must be a skeleton; I am sure it is Laurentina's skeleton. Oh! I am delighted with the book! I should like to spend my whole life in reading it, I assure you; if it had not been to meet you, I would not have come away from it for all the world.' 'Dear creature, how much I am obliged to you; and when you have finished _Udolpho_, we will read the Italian together; and I have made out a list of ten or twelve more of the same kind for you.' 'Have you indeed! How glad I am! What are they all?' 'I will read you their names directly; here they are in my pocket-book. _Castle of Wolfenbach_, _Clermont_, _Mysterious Warnings_, _Necromancer of the Black Forest_, _Midnight Bell_, _Orphan of the Rhine_, and _Horrid Mysteries_. These will last us some time.' 'Yes; pretty well; but are they all horrid? Are you sure they are all horrid?' 'Yes, quite sure, for a particular friend of mine, a Miss Andrews, a sweet girl, one of the sweetest creatures in the world, has read every one of them. I wish you knew Miss Andrews, you would be delighted with her. She is netting herself the sweetest cloak you can imagine.' [Percy, _Ossian_, and Chatterton.]