" From his
early years Lytton seems to have been keenly interested in
supernatural manifestations. He was inspired by the deserted
rooms at the end of a long gallery in Knebworth House to set down
the story of the ghost, Jenny Spinner, who was said to haunt
them; and the concealed chamber in _The Haunted and the Haunters_
may have been a revived memory of the trap-door down which Lytton
as a boy had "peeped with bristling hair into the shadowy abysses
of hellhole." In _Glenallan_,[126] an early fragment, we find
promising material for a tale of mystery--a villain with a
"strange and sinister expression," a boy who, like the youthful
Shelley, steals forth by night to graveyards, hoping to attain to
fearful secrets, and an aged servant, a living chronicle of
horrors, who relates the doings of an Irish wizard, Morshed
Tyrone, of such awful power that the spirits of the earth, air
and ocean ministered to him. In _Godolphin_ (1833) there is an
astrologer with the furrowed brow and awful eye, so common among
the people of terror, and a strangely gifted girl, Lucilla, who
turns soothsayer. But when Bulwer Lytton attempts a supernatural
romance he leaves far behind him the sphere of Gothic terrors and
soars into rarefied, exalted regions that inspire awe rather than
horror.
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