Our idea of the required form of the weird tale has come to be that of the modern artistic short-story; but all the elements of the type save form were present in England in the middle of the eighteenth century in the terror school started by Walpole's "Castle of Otranto." The author declared his work to be an attempt to blend the ancient romance and the modern novel. By modern novel he meant the stories of Richardson, Fielding, Smollet, and their less worthy contemporaries; by ancient romance he must have meant the Oriental wonder tale; for he has sliding panels, trap doors, subterranean passages, and a general extravagance in an attempt at magnificence. Indeed, in regard to the multiplicity of detail, this school is often called the Gothic. The difference between the narratives of the school of terror and the Oriental wonder tale is the difference of atmosphere. While the ancient tale is mysterious, it is seldom if ever morbid. Especially is the cheerfulness true of the stories of mediæval chivalry that later embodied the wonder tale. Enchantment there is, but it is airy; if there be any vaults, they are not damp. [The school of terror] But the "Castle of Otranto" by Walpole, the "Old English Baron" by Clara Reeve, the "Romance of the Forest," the "Mysteries of Udolpho," and the "Italian" by Mrs. Radcliffe, and "The Monk" by Matthew Lewis,--the six chief romances of the school of terror,--are all damp, dark, ghostly, and morbid. Mrs. Radcliffe, however, added an element of eighteenth-century rationalism in her attempt at explanation; inasmuch as she always refers her constant suggestions of the supernatural to ordinary causes. Moreover, she interspersed her work with excellent landscape description in harmony or contrast with her theme. The contributions, then, of the romances of the school of terror are (1) frightful mechanism, (2) a general tone of Gothic fantasticalness, (3) weird place-impressions that can be explained by natural causes, and (4) terror of physical or supernatural punishment and death. [Edgar Allen Poe] To point out how much Edgar Allan Poe on the mere material side is indebted to this set of writers, possibly through Charles Brockden Brown and the American school of terror, we need only to name over to ourselves two of his famous weird tales together with their grosser elements. "The Fall of the House of Usher" has general arabesqueness plus hollow groans, echoing footsteps, high pointed windows excluding light, a person imprisoned in a metal vault (the hero in the "Castle of Otranto" is imprisoned in a gigantic metal helmet), terror of death, consonant landscape description, natural causes for weird sounds. The "Pit and the Pendulum" has a dungeon of the Inquisition, horrible instrument of torture, brink over which to fall, bodily and mental fear of death (Lewis's monk is snatched by demons from the Inquisition and carried to a cliff of the Sierra Morena off which he is commanded to fling himself).