Taken altogether, then, _Rasselas_ is a prose _Vanity of Human Wishes_, a disquisition on the limitations of life rather than a novel holding our attention by a sequence of events. How characteristic is the passage on the pyramids! Only Johnson, who kept his head among the Highland mountains, could have written as he does here, summing up, in these two sentences, his whole attitude towards happiness and material possessions: I consider this mighty structure as a monument of the insufficiency of human enjoyments. A king whose power is unlimited, and whose treasures surmount all real and imaginary wants, is compelled to solace, by the erection of a Pyramid, the satiety of dominion and tastelessness of pleasures, and to amuse the tediousness of declining life by seeing thousands labouring without end, and one stone, for no purpose, laid upon another. Surely that is magnificent prose, and no one else could have written with just that fine balance and that same elevation of mind--unless it was Browne, also pitying the builder of the pyramids in _Hydriotaphia_. To pass on to _The Castle of Otranto_ from _Rasselas_ is like going from the reality and reasonable order of Kew Gardens, with its noble lawns and splendidly cultivated trees, into some side-show of artificial medievalism, complete with ghosts in rattling armour, skeletons and knights, at the White City or the old Earl’s Court Exhibition. At a step we leave behind us the familiar light of day for a castle of uneasy spirits with the wind whining through its battlements. Otranto is such a castle, indeed, as never existed and its people were never anywhere but inside its walls. It is a Gothic “shocker” which is neither truly Gothic nor shocking; for its terror-apparatus has ceased to make us tremble and its chivalrous cant and heroical sentiments no longer quicken our heart. And yet there is something about this absurd tale that still holds our attention--a spark of genius perhaps that occasionally flashes out through the cracks in the rusty armour and the turret windows; and it is this that hurries it impetuously to its climax of furious bathos not altogether without the sweep of tragedy. Yet did one not know beforehand that the book was written in good faith, there would be every excuse for mistaking it for an uproarious parody of the old type of medieval romance.