They are strange company these three books, but they are nevertheless infallible indexes to the taste of their time. The fact that _Rasselas_ in 1759 met with such enormous success and that _The Castle of Otranto_ four years later met with perhaps an equal success, indicates as plainly as anything could that although people had not lost their admiration for Johnson, they were already tiring of “good sense” and quite willing to give free play to those wilder impulses in their natures that Augustanism had sought to discipline. But this time the tide turned with a vengeance! The grave Wordsworth, a romantic himself, is found deploring the “frantic novels” of this time, although Shelley’s young and fiery imagination seized upon them with avidity, and, in _Zastrozzi_, he wrote an even more frantic one himself. But it was _The Castle of Otranto_, written in conscious reaction against the domesticities and sentiment of Richardson, with its plea that the material of the novel could be taken from anything _but_ the events of ordinary life, that opened the gates onto the land of Romance. And in its train came all the rest of the “Gothic” and “terror” novelists--Clara Reeve, Mrs. Radcliffe, “Monk” Lewis, Charles Maturin--to mention only those who are now chiefly remembered. _Vathek_, however, stands alone, without predecessors or immediate followers, belonging to a quite un-English tradition, although the Oriental tale in one shape or another had quite a vogue in the eighteenth century--if we may include such things as Collins’s _Persian Eclogues_ and Goldsmith’s Chinaman, or even _Rasselas_ itself, which, at least, has a nominal setting in the East.