The shadow-haunted landscapes of _Ossian_, the chaotic visions of William Blake, the grotesque witch-dances in Burns's _Tam O' Shanter_, the sinister daemonism of Coleridge's _Christabel_ and _Ancient Mariner_, the ghostly charm of James Hogg's _Kilmeny_, and the more restrained approaches to cosmic horror in _Lamia_ and many of Keats's other poems, are typical British illustrations of the advent of the weird to formal literature. Our Teutonic cousins of the continent were equally receptive to the rising flood, and Burger's _Wild Huntsman_ and the even more famous daemon-bridegroom ballad of _Lenore_--both imitated in English by Scott, whose respect for the supernatural was always great--are only a taste of the eerie wealth which German song had commenced to provide. Thomas Moore adapted from such sources the legend of the ghoulish statue-bride (later used by Prosper Merimee in _The Venus of Ille_, and traceable back to great antiquity) which echoes so shiveringly in his ballad of _The Ring_; whilst Goethe's deathless masterpiece _Faust_, crossing from mere balladry into the classic, cosmic tragedy of the ages, may be held as the ultimate height to which this German poetic impulse arose. But it remained for a very sprightly and worldly Englishman--none other than Horace Walpole himself--to give the growing impulse definite shape and become the actual founder of the literary horror-story as a permanent form. Fond of mediaeval romance and mystery as a dilettante's diversion, and with a quaintly imitated Gothic castle as his abode at Strawberry Hill, Walpole in 1764 published _The Castle of Otranto_, a tale of the supernatural which, though thoroughly unconvincing and mediocre in itself, was destined to exert an almost unparallelled influence on the literature of the weird. First venturing it only as a 'translation' by one "William Marshal, Gent." from the Italian of a mythical "Onuphrio Muralto," the author later acknowledged his connection with the book and took pleasure in its wide and instantaneous popularity--a popularity which extended to many editions, early dramatizations, and wholesale imitation both in England and in Germany.