No cruel uncle kept her land,
No tyrant father forced her hand;
She had no vixen virgin aunt
Without whose aid she could not eat
And yet who poisoned all her meat
With gibe and sneer and taunt."
Though Crabbe showed scant sympathy with the delicate
sensibilities of girls who hung enraptured over the high-pitched
heroics and miraculous escapes of Clementina and her kindred, he
found pleasure in a robuster school of romance--the adventures of
mighty Hickathrift, Jack the Giant-killer, and Robin Hood, as set
forth and embellished in the chapbooks which cottagers treasured
"on the deal shelf beside the cuckoo-clock."[110] And in his
poem, _Sir Eustace Grey_, he presents with subtle art a mind
tormented by terror.
CHAPTER VIII - SCOTT AND THE NOVEL OF TERROR.
In 1775 we find Miss Lydia Languish's maid ransacking the
circulating libraries of Bath, and concealing under her cloak
novels of sensibility and of fashionable scandal. Some twenty
years later, in the self-same city, Catherine Morland is "lost
from all worldly concerns of dressing or dinner over the pages of
_Udolpho_," and Isabella Thorpe is collecting in her pocket-book
the "horrid" titles of romances from the German. In 1814,
apparently, the vogue of the sentimental, the scandalous, the
mysterious, and the horrid still persisted.
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