Scorning to "measure talents with a leg of veal
or a German sausage," he unfortunately dismissed from his
imagination the nightmarish hordes of
"Haunting Old Women and Knocking Ghosts, and Solitary
Lean Hands, and Empusas on one leg, and Ladies growing
Longer and Longer, and Horrid Eyes meeting us through
Keyholes; and Plaintive Heads and Shrieking Statues and
Shocking Anomalies of Shape and Things, which, when
seen, drove people mad,"
and in their place he conjured up a placid, ladylike ghost from a
legend quoted in Sandys' commentary on Ovid. Leigh Hunt's story
has the air of having been written by one who cared for none of
these things; but there were others who wrote with more gusto.
Many of the tales in such collections as _The Story-Teller_
(1833) or _The Romancist and Novelist's Library_ (1839-42) show
the persistence of Gothic story. In these periodicals the grave
and the gay are intermingled, and when we are weary of dark
intrigues and impenetrable secrets we may turn to lighter
reading. Yet it is significant of the taste of our ancestors that
we cannot venture far without encountering a spectre of some
sort, or a villain with the baleful eye, disguised, it may be, as
a Spanish gipsy, a German necromancer or a Russian count.
Pages:
235
236
237
238
239
240
241
242
243
244
245
246
247
248
249
250
251
252
253
254
255
256
257
258
259