The taste for these delicious morsels has
lingered long. Dante Gabriel Rossetti delighted in _Brigand
Tales, Tales of Chivalry, Tales of Wonder, Legends of Terror_;
and it was in search of such booty, "a penny plain and twopence
coloured" that, more than fifty years later, Robert Louis
Stevenson and his companions ransacked the stores of a certain
secluded stationer's shop in Edinburgh.
It was probably the success of the chapbook that encouraged the
editors of periodicals early in the nineteenth century to enliven
their pages with sensational fiction. The literary hack, who, if
he had lived a century earlier, would have been glad to turn a
Turkish tale for half-a-crown, now cheerfully furnished a
"fireside horror" for the Christmas number. In his search after
novelty he was often driven to wild and desperate expedients.
Leigh Hunt, who showed scant sympathy with Lewis's bleeding nun
and scoffed mercilessly at his "little grey men who sit munching
hearts," was bound to admit: "A man who does not contribute his
quota of grim story, now-a-days, seems hardly to be free of the
republic of letters." Accordingly, so that he too might wear a
death's head as part of his _insignia_, he included in _The
Indicator_ (1819-21) a supernatural story, entitled _A Tale for a
Chimney Corner_.
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