took their realism sugared by a sentimentality that sent them home contented. But Lillo's work was not unheeded by the genius who in "Tom Jones" and "Amelia" gave literary greatness to a realistic study of manners and morals. The sentimentalizing and moralizing of the middle classes, which from the time of Southerne had threatened to have their say on the stage, found their spokesman in the author of "Clarissa Harlowe." In the last third of the century the various social, intellectual, and imaginative changes that make up the beginnings of the Romantic movement had their effect upon tragedy, but only in a partial and secondary fashion. The drama was already losing place to the novel in popularity, and showing signs of becoming a sort of literary by-product. Successful novels were made over into plays, and the various romantic tendencies to medievalism, melancholy, supernaturalism, and naturalism found expression in novel or verse rather than in play. The reawakening interest in the Elizabethan dramatists was represented by a revival of a number of the plays of Massinger and of Beaumont and Fletcher,[44] and imitations of Elizabethan diction became frequent. A more important departure was furnished by the so-called Terrific School of fiction. Medieval stories and scenes, and the various accessories of horror, ghosts, graveyards, dungeons, vaults, and the midnight bell had never been lacking in eighteenth century tragedy, but the novels of Walpole and his successors offered some novelties. Walpole's own unacted "Mysterious Mother" (1768), perhaps the most powerful of the Gothic tragedies, was the pioneer of the movement. Robert Jephson, whose "Braganza" (1775) was heralded as "His; no French tragedy,--tame, polish'd, dull by rule! Vigorous he comes, and warm from Shakespeare's school," produced in 1781 an adaptation of Walpole's "Castle of Otranto," called "The Count of Narbonne," which, as the epilogue boasts, "Midst the placid murmurings of Love Rolls the rough tide of Gothick force along." His "Julia" (1787), another popular play with his usual abundance of soliloquies, tells a story of Elizabethan villany; and there were a few other Gothic attempts, as Cumberland's "Carmelite" (1784), before Lewis's "Castle Spectre" (1797) carried the town by storm. The further history of the terrific tragedies belongs to the next chapter, as does that of the German importations which culminated in the craze for Kotzebue, but it may be noted here that "Werter," acted in 1785, and "Emilia Galotti," acted in 1794, were among the earlier indications of German influence on the stage.