To Sir Walter Scott, however, Horace Walpole’s castle was anything but an occasion for mirth. Evidently writing against the general opinion of the book at that time, he says, in his chapter on Walpole in _The Lives of the Novelists_, that it is doing the author an injustice to suppose that his sole purpose was to terrorize his readers. Walpole’s intention was, he assures us, to depict the social life of the Middle Ages about the time of the first Crusade, although he admits that “by the too frequent recurrence of his prodigies, Mr. Walpole ran, perhaps, his greatest risk of awakening _la raison froide_, that cold common sense, which he justly deemed the greatest enemy of the effect which he hoped to produce.” But it does not require very much cold common sense to discern that, for all this supernatural paraphernalia, _The Castle of Otranto_, unlike Mrs. Radcliffe’s books, lacks atmosphere--the first essential in preparing the mind for legendary happenings. It is simply foolish to bring what purport to be supernatural phenomena into broad daylight and then to expect us to believe in their reality. But when Scott writes of “the gigantic and preposterous figures dimly visible in the defaced tapestry--the remote clang of the distant doors which divide him from living society--the deep darkness which involves the high and fretted roof of the apartment--the dimly-seen pictures of ancient knights, renowned for their valour, and perhaps for their crimes--the varied and indistinct sounds which disturb the silent desolation of a half-deserted mansion,” he at once awakes the imagination and creates an atmosphere pregnant with the foreboding of invisible presences that prepares the reader to believe almost anything. Scott can raise our hair in a sentence, but all Walpole’s bleeding statues and sighing pictures can only move us to a certain mild amusement. It is obvious, too, that in his generous tribute to Walpole, Scott was carried away by a conception of his own of what his predecessor _might_ have done. Moreover, he was anxious to own his debt to Walpole for introducing an element into the novel that he himself was to develop in a way that is still unsurpassed. For nowadays, although Walpole, and his immediate follower Clara Reeve, with her _Old English Baron_ (1777), actually introduced it, it is not of Walpole or Reeve that we think when the historical novel is mentioned, but of Scott. But being the first attempt of its kind on any serious scale, it is natural that Scott should have respected _The Castle of Otranto_, although we of to-day, having the whole varied wealth of Scott’s imagination behind us, as well as the work of his many followers, find it harder to give Walpole the just measure of praise that, in spite of attendant absurdities, is his due.