It was staged again later in Dublin,
Kemble playing the title role. It was translated into French,
German and Italian. In England its success was immediate, though
several years elapsed before it was imitated. Gray, to whom the
story was first attributed, wrote of it in March, 1765: "It
engages our attention here (at Cambridge), makes some of us cry a
little, and all in general afraid to go to bed o' nights." Mason
praised it, and Walpole's letters refer repeatedly to the vogue
it enjoyed. This widespread popularity is an indication of the
eagerness with which readers of 1765 desired to escape from the
present and to revel for a time in strange, bygone centuries.
Although Walpole regarded the composition of his Gothic story as
a whim, his love of the past was shared by others of his
generation. Of this Macpherson's _Ossian_ (1760-3), Kurd's
_Letters on Chivalry and Romance_ (1762), and Percy's _Reliques_
(1765), are, each in its fashion, a sufficient proof. The
half-century from 1760 to 1810 showed remarkably definite signs
of a renewed interest in things written between 1100 and 1650,
which had been neglected for a century or more. _The Castle of
Otranto_, which was "an attempt to blend the marvellous of old
story with the natural of modern novels" is an early symptom of
this revulsion to the past; and it exercised a charm on Scott as
well as on Mrs.
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